a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

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Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
Luke Dunne at the collector

Personal identity is a philosophical issue which spans a whole range of disciplines within philosophy, from the philosophy of mind, to metaphysics and epistemology, to ethics and political theory. There is no one problem of personal identity – they are rather a kind of philosophical problem that starts to emerge whenever we ask questions about what one ‘is’ most fundamentally.

But then, given all of the various “schools of thought” – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … philosophy – that one can subscribe to in assessing human identity philosophically, don’t expect there to be anything approaching a general consensus. I merely focus more on the greater gaps here pertaining to moral and political convictions. Concluding that the most reasonable manner in which construe identity here is from a “fractured and fragmented” perspective.

Problems of personal identity were first posed in something like the form they take today, but underlying issues of personal identity have been a feature of the Western philosophical tradition since its inception. Plato, writing near the dawn of philosophical enquiry, and Descartes writing at the dawn of modern philosophy, both had a theory of what we were most fundamentally – namely, that we are souls.

Souls? Well, that certainly puts one’s identity beyond the reach of…actual evidence? After all, since no one to my knowledge has ever actually located this soul using, say, the scientific method – experiential research, experimental methods that might be replicated – the soul can become pretty much anything you want it to be. Or need it to be. You merely “think up” the parameters of your own soul that best suits you. Make it an adjunct of God or of a Goddess. A deep down inside you manifestation of nature. Or a genetic component of your DNA that, given enough time, will actually be discovered.

And then passed on to clones of ourselves? Or to AI entities? Or perhaps reaching the point where we can create certain traits in the souls of the unborn?

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The Benjamin Button Syndrome on steroids?

An interesting article from the New York Times.

In part, it depicts my own account of dasein. In other words, how many here think of their identity as…rock solid? They know who they are, and they are damn well certain it is exactly who they should be.

Maybe the two men below felt the same…?

Switched at birth? Shades of Toto Le Hero? Only the real thing? Sure, that’s a rarity. But many of our own lives fold over and over again such that the smallest of things happens…snowballing into all manner of consequences. For me it was being born on March 23rd. Or the fluke encounter with Supannika. For you? Well, think about it.

nytimes.com/2023/08/02/worl … birth.html

[b]Richard Beauvais’s identity began unraveling two years ago, after one of his daughters became interested in his ancestry. She wanted to learn more about his Indigenous roots — she was even considering getting an Indigenous tattoo — and urged him to take an at-home DNA test. Mr. Beauvais, then 65, had spent a lifetime describing himself as “half French, half Indian,” or Métis, and he had grown up with his grandparents in a log house in a Métis settlement.

So when the test showed no Indigenous or French background but a mix of Ukrainian, Ashkenazi Jewish and Polish ancestry, he dismissed it as a mistake and went back to his life as a commercial fisherman and businessman in British Columbia.

But around the same time, in the province of Manitoba, an inquisitive young member of Eddy Ambrose’s extended family had shattered the man’s lifelong identity with the same genetic test. Mr. Ambrose had grown up listening to Ukrainian folk songs, attending Mass in Ukrainian and devouring pierogies, but, according to the test, he wasn’t of Ukrainian descent at all.

He was Métis.

And so, after a first contact through the test’s website, and months of emails, anguished phone calls and sleepless nights in both men’s families, Mr. Beauvais and Mr. Ambrose came to the conclusion two years ago that they had been switched at birth.

The mistake occurred 67 years ago inside a rural Canadian hospital where, born hours apart, Mr. Beauvais and Mr. Ambrose say they were sent home with the wrong parents.

For 65 years, each led the other’s life — for Mr. Beauvais, a difficult childhood made more traumatic by Canada’s brutal policies toward Indigenous people; for Mr. Ambrose, a happy, carefree upbringing steeped in the Ukrainian Catholic culture of his family and community, yet one divorced from his true heritage.

The revelations have forced the men to question who they really are, each trying to piece together a past that could have been his and to understand the implications.

“It’s like someone going into a house and stealing something from you,” Mr. Ambrose said. “It makes me feel I’ve been robbed of my identity. My whole past is gone. All I have now is the door I’m opening to my future, which I need to find.”

The first time the two men interacted, in what could have been an uncomfortable phone conversation, Mr. Beauvais broke the ice with a joke. The Beauvais parents, he said, “looked at the two babies, took the cute one and left the ugly one behind.” But as the two men began talking about serious matters, they confided in each other that they wished the truth had not emerged.[/b]

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Being as Onion: A Heideggerian Parable
Mark C. Watney watches Martin Heidegger’s kitchen encounter.

Tears seeped through the onion’s flaky skin as it sat in misery before Herr Heidegger. “I just cannot seem to find myself!” the wretched root cried out.

“What is it you wish to find?” Heidegger gently asked.

“The purpose of life!” whispered the vegetable.

“And where have you been looking?”

“Well, I’ve been peeling back the layers over the years…”

“And?”

“Layer after layer…”

“I see…”

“…After layer. After layer!”

“And?”

“And I found…”

“Yes?”

“I found…”

“Say it!”

The onion was in desolation on the couch, overcome at last by the deep sobs which shook his peeling bulb, a picture of ontic-centered misery: “Nothing! I found nothing!” he declared.

“Herr Onion,” Heidegger replied. “You have discovered an incredible truth!”

“What do you mean?”

“You ARE nothing – that is the truth. You have peeled yourself to the core and found no thing there. It is the greatest and hardest of truths, to discover our own fallenness and emptiness as ontic-roots. As individual bulbs, we are all quite meaningless.”

Is this Dasein come down out of the intellectual clouds? In other words, “I” ontically…historically, culturally? Our individual lives unfolding out in a particular world socially, politically, economically. Do we then all end up being basically the manner in which we have either been indoctrinated by others or by ourselves to believe that the existential layers themselves are in fact the Real Me?

And that, in fact, much of how we construe the world around us is derived from the Benjamin Button Syndrome. And that, in the absence of God, our individual lives are essentially meaningless? Prompting many to embrace one or another secular font in order to properly distinguish between rational and irrational, moral and immoral, authentic and inauthentic behaviors.

“Where then is meaning?”

Here I always cue Michael Novak:

“I recognize that I put structure into my world…There is no ‘real’ world out there, given, intact, full of significance. Consciousness is constituted by random, virtually infinite barrages of experience; these experiences are indistinguishably ‘inner’ and ‘outer’…Structure is put into experience by culture and self, and may also be pulled out again…The experience of nothingness is an experience beyond the limits of reason…it is terrifying. It makes all attempts at speaking of purpose, goals, aims, meaning, importance, conformity, harmony, unity----it makes all such attempts seem doubtful and spurious.” The Experience of Nothingness—Michael Novak

Only he blinked. He took his own existential leap of faith to Catholicism, to Capitalism. You tell me in which order.

“You must throw yourself, Herr Onion, into the finest pot of soup you can find. As an onion-in-the-soup, you will discover your true identity. As you care for the soup, as you fill the entire pot with the flavor of onion-ness, you will experience an incredible authenticity.”

In other words, if you were around when the fascists were coming to power in Germany, you might have chosen to be the onion in the Nazi soup. You might have found your true identity as “one of them”. And, ironically enough, this “true identity” no doubt will be derived existentially from your own unique experiences. As with Hitler, you come to acquire [ontically] a set of moral and political prejudices. But these subjective biases are easily subsumed in one or another of these “soups”:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r … traditions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p … ideologies
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … philosophy

“But… but… I just want to be me!”

“Ah, but it is in-the-soup, Herr Onion, that you will become your truest self. Out-of-the-soup you are an angst-riddled, wretched little root, of no value or purpose – an ontic-oddity.”

Indeed, check out the ingredients in this soup: knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

“But… but… the knife! The boiling water!”

“If you want authenticity, you must face your fears, Herr Onion. You must have, as Herr Tillich says, ‘The Courage To Be’!”

In other words, for some, the courage to subsume their own individual complexities into this or that “soup”? Think of all the objectivists chefs here with their own one size fits all recipes. It’s not what they believe in, it’s that there had better be something to believe in that allows them to anchor their Self to the Enlightened Path in order to transcend an essentially meaningless and purposeless No God world.

The courage to be…a Nazi?

How about a moral nihilist?

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duplicate

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Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
By Luke Dunne, The Collector

Personal identity is a philosophical issue which spans a whole range of disciplines within philosophy, from the philosophy of mind, to metaphysics and epistemology, to ethics and political theory.

Now all we need is a particular context in which to explore all of these many, many, many components of human interaction.

Actually, what we need is the capacity to grasp a definitive understanding of the existence of existence itself. Go ahead, take a wild ass guess regarding how and why the human species fits into that. Time to invent another God?

There is no one problem of personal identity – they are rather a kind of philosophical problem that starts to emerge whenever we ask questions about what one ‘is’ most fundamentally.

Again, however, for many, there is no “problem of personal identity”. Why? Because they simply take their own given identity for granted. In other words, they don’t pull back and ponder, “what if I was born in a different time and place? what if I was raised by different parents in a different situation to believe different things? what if I was able to fathom the existential consequences of the Benjamin Button Syndrome as others do?”

And of course: click.

Problems of personal identity were first posed in something like the form they take today, but underlying issues of personal identity have been a feature of the Western philosophical tradition since its inception.

Okay, but at its inception there was still going to be that crucial distinction between the biological self, the demographic self, the flesh and blood empirical self, etc., in the either/or world and the far, far, far more contentious self in regard to right and wrong or good and bad or rational and irrational behaviors.

Plato, writing near the dawn of philosophical enquiry, and Descartes writing at the dawn of modern philosophy, both had a theory of what we were most fundamentally – namely, that we are souls. This illustrates that it is very difficult to undertake any extensive philosophical enquiry without coming up against some problems of personal identity.

Yes, that’s certainly one direction in which to go…souls. Which for most are attributed to God and to religion. You take a leap of faith and all the stuff philosophers grapple with in regard to identity is simply subsumed in that. Only in this day and age that often becomes increasingly more problematic because there are just so many, many paths out there to take.

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Who am I? The Philosophy of Personal Identity
By Luke Dunne, The Collector

Personal Identity: A Variety of Questions, a Variety of Answers

Some of the usual answers to the question of personal identity – ‘I am a human being’ or ‘I am a person’ or even ‘I am a self’ – are sufficiently vague as to be worthy of further philosophical analysis.

Vague, perhaps, but to the extent you are, in fact, sufficiently capable of demonstrating what you claim to be…? You are a human being. You are a person. You are embodying a self from day to day to day.

Accepting of course that until proven otherwise you are not just a character in a sim world or in a dream world or in a Matrix contraption. You are not inhabiting [along with all the rest of us] your own solipsistic reality.

Some of the problems of personal identity involve trying to define terms like ‘human’ or ‘person’ or ‘self’. Others ask what the conditions are for the persistence of a human or a person or a self over time; in other words, what it takes for a person or a self to persist.

Actually, given our day to day interactions in what is presumed to be an autonomous universe, it is relatively easy to define ourselves biologically, demographically, circumstantially, empirically. Some things are either true about you or they are not. On the other hand, with human beings, what we “really are” can easily be hidden behind the personas we wish others to think that we are. And not just virtually.

And, given such things as psychological defense mechanisms, some even become adept at hiding things from themselves. And then all of the variables in our lives that we are neither fully cognizant of nor fully able to control.

As for what it takes to know “what the conditions are for the persistence of a human or a person or a self over time”, well, each one of us inhabits our own uniquely existential trajectory from the cradle to the grave. And beyond subsistence, the things we all must have in order to survive at all, our likes and dislikes, our wants, our desires are still entangled existentially in dasein.

Still, others ask what the ethical implications of these categories actually are, or whether what matters in an ethical sense has anything to do with what we are most fundamentally at all.

Choose 2:

1] Marx and Engels and their ilk
2] Freud and Jung and their ilk

Or maybe one of these guys:

List of religions and spiritual traditions

List of political ideologies

List of philosophies

If for no other reason then any number of them will assure you that who they fundamentally are is who you fundamentally are as well. Or else? The rest? That’s what, among other things, “final solutions” are for.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

If a tree became conscious so that it could prune itself, could it prune itself out of being a tree? Perhaps if it was still in the seed?

Too late for us, I suppose.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Does the self reside in the soul, in the body, or in some combination of both?

To the best of my current knowledge, I have no soul. I do have a body, however, and “I”, to the best of my current knowledge, “somehow” emanates from my brain. Unless, perhaps, that’s just an illusiory “I” created by the Matrix.

Pod reality?

It’s a question philosophers have long debated. However, one philosopher, John Locke, argued that the self resides in memory.

What’s the first thing that should tell us about the question itself? That if, after thousands of years, some of the world’s greatest minds have failed to answer it, how much stock can we put in one of us here having accomplished it?

As for it residing in memories, which particular memories of what particular experiences? Why your memories of it and not others? And pertaining to morality and meaning, human memories are, in my view, the embodiment of dasein out in particular worlds understood in particular ways…in a world that has itself been awash for centuries in conflicting goods.

In what follows I will give an overview of the arguments that led him to this conclusion, and consider some of the objections critics have raised against Locke’s account of the self, in particular his reducing the self to memory. I will conclude that Locke does not only reduce the self to memory, but to internal memory. In doing so, he puts himself on a slippery slope toward idealism, despite his general common-sense empiricism.

If you Google “internal memory” you are deluged with links regarding computer memory. And – so far? – that is little more than human memory. Thus, I would expect that in regard to meaning and morality, that sort of memory is no less conflicting in regard to good and evil, right and wrong.

Then the part where all of this may or may not be but inherent components of the only possible reality.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Identity Principles

Before delving into Locke’s position on personal identity, it will be helpful to consider his principles regarding the identity or sameness of things in general. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke offers us two main principles in determining the identity or unity of things. One is the time and location principle: at any given time, one thing can exist at one place only.

This is the point I keep making in regard to “here and now”. Depending on when you were born historically and on the culture able to fill your head with all manner of moral and political prejudices as a child, your identity is shaped and molded by things and by people that were often completely beyond your control.

Thus, many of the “principles” involved here are themselves no less rooted existentially in dasein.

On the other hand…

The same thing cannot possibly exist in two or more places at the same time. Suppose you see a chair in the front yard right at the moment. At the same time, you also see an identical chair five meters away. Despite looking identical, these two items being in different locations at the same time make you conclude that these are separate things.

Still, chairs of all shapes and sizes existed, exist and will no doubt continue to exist on into the future in all manner of locations down through the ages and in most cultures. But chairs aren’t people. Chairs don’t congregate in philosophy forums to explore their own existence. Their own nature. Their obligations and responsibilities around other chairs.

What’s tricky about the human Self/“self” is the part that revolves around dasein in a free will world.

[quote]However, if you happened to see only one chair in the front yard in the morning, and two hours later you saw an identical chair in the backyard, you could easily assume that it’s the same chair you’d seen in the front yard in the morning. Someone possibly moved it. Locke concludes:

“It being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place; or one and the same thing in different places. That therefore, that had one beginning, is the same thing; and that which had a different beginning in time and place from that, is not the same, but diverse.”[/quote]

And it all seems reasonable until you get to us…the human species. With the Benjamin Button Syndrome alone we can note just how awash human beings are in sets of circumstances that, embedded in conflicting goods, really are understood basically from subjective/intersubjective perspectives that have everything to do identity at the historical and cultural intersection of conflicting value judgments and political economy.

With people there are always going to be things that seem applicable to all of us. And that’s because for all practical purposes they are. Here and now or there and then. Instead, it is in regard to value judgements that “here and now” self can become very much at odds with other “there and then” selves.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

The second and equally important principle in determining the identity of things according to Locke, is the constituents that a thing is made of and is differentiated from other things.

Here the mystery truly deepens. Everything in the universe seems to be composed of much the same matter. And yet note all the ways in which these constituents – elements – can come together to create countless [and very, very different] “entities”.

Especially on planets like Earth where the human species takes matter and reconfigures it into, say, smart phones?

And, of course, all of this assumes the human species “somehow” acquired autonomy from the “heavy elements” that came to exist as a result of massive stars exploding. And, really, how close are we to actually explaining that?

For instance, non-living creatures are “the cohesion of particles any how united” and that is where their identity also lies in. For living creatures, however, it is not enough for its particles to be united in just any way: they must be united in a way that would nourish and sustain the creature throughout its existence,

Unless it actually does turn out that every single particle throughout the entire universe is exactly in the only place it ever could have been in.

Whatever that means, of course.

Thus, their identity resides “in the participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body". Due to this, it is very possible for living beings to continue existing even given the loss or change of their physical matter.

A little help, please. What on Earth for all practical purposes do you suppose this means? Especially given how, the older we get, the less organized all the parts become. Unless she means something entirely different.

We consider an oak growing from a sapling to a great tree still to be the same oak, and a colt grown up to a horse is all the while the same horse for us, despite in both cases there being many changes in the physical matter.

Yep, that’s how biological life works alright.

[quote]As living beings, humans are no exception to this rule. As Locke says:

“He that shall place the identity of man in anything else than like that of other animals, in one fitly organized body, taken in any one instant, and from thence continued, under one organization of life, in several successively fleeting particles of matter united to it, will find it hard to make an embryo, one of years, mad and sober, the same man, by any supposition that will not make it possible for Seth, Ismael, Socrates, etc to be the same man.”[/quote]

Basically, this seems to describe the scaffolding of biological life. But what unfolds inside that framework is ever and always evolving from the cradle to the grave. In particular, regarding our own species. But human identity also includes components that no other lifeform on Earth possesses. And the gap here in some respects is just mindboggling.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Identity of Man vs. Personal Identity

Personal identity is not the same as human identity, because for Locke, the man and the person are different things, despite our frequent interchanging of the terms. They are different because their constituents are different.

This is basically what I come around to here: a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

We are all the embodiment of the human species. As such there are going to be things that are applicable to all of us. Biological imperatives, social constructs or otherwise. And yet no two of us will live exactly the same life. Even among identical twins there are going to be the things that eventually make each of them unique.

Man, according to Locke, is made of two sorts of substance: the physical matter (ie the body) and the non- physical matter (ie the soul). A person, on the other hand, in addition to having physical substance and a soul, also possesses consciousness, which in a way unites soul and substance together while giving perception to the being.

And Locke’s own consciousness was able to substantiate the existence of a human soul…how? And he pinpointed the neurological and chemical interactions that demonstrate the unification of the body and the soul…how? Instead, as with most of us here, he did the best he could as a mere mortal in connecting the dots between words and worlds.

Still, it’s not like the philosophical and scientific communities today have come together to celebrate Locke for having come closest to understanding the interactions between “I” and “we” and “them” given particular social, political and economic contexts.

[quote]Specifically, a person is a thinking being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places. This he can do only through consciousness. Therefore, says Locke, personal identity or the continuing ‘sameness’ of a rational being consists in this alone.[/quote[

Click of course.

And given free will, yes, each of us sustains a sense of identity that goes wherever we go from the cradle to the grave. Unless, of course, we are afflicted with any number of conditions that seem able to take this consciousness of ours and twist it into any number of conditions that are “beyond our control”.

Substance cannot be the essence of our personal identity. The evidence for this lies in our very bodies. It is true that we feel our bodies as part of ourselves, for we feel when we are touched, and are affected by the good or harm that happens to them. But we do this only whilst all the particles of our bodies are vitally united to our thinking conscious self. This feeling of parts of our body gets lost the moment they’re disconnected from that body. A prime example Locke mentions are cut off limbs.

Again, given the extent to which you believe that you understand this, how is it applicable to your own life? You have a body and a conscious mind “somehow” intertwined in a Soul that encompasses…I?

And cut off limbs are one thing, brain tumors and mental illnesses that reconfigure “I” into any number of virtually unrecognizable “selves” another thing altogether.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

But the soul is not the place where personal identity resides, either.

No, really, you tell me: where does “I” manifest itself most convincingly for you?

For many, it’s all in the eyes. Though not of course for those like Maia. Others say it’s the mouth…the place where “I” comes out given the words choosen in which to convey itself.

Other than that? Well, the assumption sometimes is that somewhere in the brain resides the mind resides the self.

As for the soul, sure, an invention that pulls everything together. And then on top of that, it assures us that “I” will continue on, well, forever.

To prove this, Locke invites his reader to think of themselves as having a non-physical soul, and that soul as having previously belonged to someone from history, such as Socrates, Nestor. Then he asks them to reflect whether they have any consciousness of the soul they believe they’re carrying. If they do not remember any of their experiences from past lives, then it would be simply a mistake for these people to conceive themselves as the same person as the historical person whose soul they supposedly have.

More to the point, beyond the “anything goes” thought experiments, how exactly would someone go about actually demonstrating this past self? Or, perhaps, even more surreal, what if they actually could?

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

According to Locke, the past identity of a person reaches as far as their consciousness can be extended back to any past action or thought. Anything before that cannot be defined as the same person as long as they do not carry the consciousness of those periods.

All I can suggest yet again for those who believe they understand that point is this: let them explain how it all plays out in terms of their own interactions with others.

From the cradle to the grave, there will be any number of factors that come together biologically, historically, anthropologically, culturally, socially, psychologically, etc., such that certain aspects of one’s identity, while evolving over time, basically stay the same.

Our bodies eventually break down. But in so many crucial respects this is beyond our control. In fact, this reminds me of the observation that Lena made to Ray in the movie Dream Lover:

Lena: They say you replace every molecule in your body every seven years. I changed my name eight years ago. No more Thelma Sneeder.

Sure, if you want to think of it like that, even the biological components of our lives may over time completely reconfigure. But, come on, whose kidding whom? There are still many, many, many aspects of our identity that sustain a particular “self” out in a particular world understood in a particular way. Thelma may have reconfigured into Lena “in her head” in regard to how she views herself and others, but that doesn’t make all those other varaibles that come together to create a “sense of identity” in her over time go away.

Click, of course.

Put another way, I think of myself typing the draft of this essay yesterday as having been the same person I am at the present moment, because I have the memory of typing yesterday. Had I not any such memory, then I could not have any justification to assert my identity.

More to the point [mine] suppose something truly dramatic/traumatic had happened to Nurana Rajabova such that she found herself actually at odds with her own conclusions the day before. Or suppose she remembered things being in a particular way that others insist are not that way at all, Or, that they are, but should be another way instead.

In other words, in regard to memory, just because your own memory of something begins to dissolve over time, it’s not like the events that created the memory suddenly don’t matter anymore.

Then back to the part such that what you remember about something is one thing, demonstrating that all rational men and women are then obligated to remember it in the same way another thing altogether.

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Objections to Locke’s Account of the Self

Locke’s treatment of the nature of self was applauded in his time, and his views remain of interest to philosophers today. He has also received his share of criticism, in particular for reducing the self to memory. Many practical and ethical problems have been brought up against this view both by his contemporaries and by successors.

More to the point [mine] good luck trying to reduce the self down to, well, anything.

And memories of what? And how are the memories we have not in turn rooted historically, culturally, experientially in dasein? Then the part where memories themselves can only really be trusted up to a point.

Memeories, after all, for all practical purposes or not, may or may not be in sync with one or another actual reality.

How about this one:

One such problem was identified by Thomas Reid, who argued that Locke’s memory theory is paradoxical. Reid put forward his well-known ‘Brave Officer paradox’, in which he asks us to imagine a forty-year-old army officer stealing enemy food. At that moment the officer remembers being beaten for stealing apples from his neighbor’s orchard as a ten-year-old boy.

That’s how, by and large, it works though. From the cradle to the grave things happen to us all the time . And how we remember our past experiences can often have a profound impact on what we choose to do today or tomorrow. But, again, remembering something doesn’t necessarily make it true. Then those who remember it differently and insist it’s only their own memories that count in regard to meaning and morality. Then, if they acquire political power, the part where they insist that all social, political and economic interactions must revolve around their own assumptions. Their own memories accumulated existentially into one or another One True Path.

Then Reid imagines this officer as a retired General in his eighties, when he still recalls himself stealing enemy food as a forty-year old, but no longer has any memory of being beaten for stealing apples as a boy.

First of all, how on Earth would the memory of stealing food from an enemy not be reacted to in very different ways by very different people? Then the part where, come on, someone is stealing food from an enemy who is intent on killing them?

And, even here, is there or is there not a way in which, philosophically or otherwise, to pin down the most rational memory?

Applying Locke’s account of the self to this scenario, the middle-aged officer seems to be identical both to the ten-year-old boy because he remembers his action as the boy; to the eighty-year-old retired General, given that the General remembers stealing enemy food. However, also according to Locke’s account, the retired General cannot be identical to the ten-year-old boy, as he has no memory of the action he committed as a ten-year-old boy! Thus, Locke’s account of the self proves paradoxical, Reid argues, since the General is both identical with the boy and not identical with him.

You tell me.

This, from my frame of mind, is more or less just another example of a philosophical assessment that may or may not be far removed from how others construe their own self for all practical purposes.

The boy did what he did. The military officer did what he did. In other words, they accumulated their own subjective memories regarding what they did and why they did it.

But what doesn’t change here for me is the Benjamin Button Syndrome. The “butterfly effect” writ large pertaining to many, many, many personal experiences.

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Towards a response to epistemic nihilism
Jake Wright

Bullshit similarly rejects the value of truth, though for somewhat different reasons. Bullshit is essentially a claim that the speaker wishes their interlocutor to believe, though the speaker themselves has no regard for the claim’s truth value.

And how do the epistemic nihilists among us know that? Or, as with the God and religion folks, are they basically just taking their own existential leap of faith to something that “here and now” they happen to believe is true “in their head”?

Meanwhile, is it or is it not a fact that important distinctions need to be made between bullshit in the either/or world and bullshit pertaining to conflicting goods in the is/ought world?

For example, Donald Trump regularly claims that unflattering coverage such as reports regarding crowd size (Concha 2018; Dale 2019; Levine 2019; O’Neil 2019), his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic (Trump 2020c), and his reelection campaign (Trump 2020b) is ‘fake news".

So, you’re an epistemic nihilist. How would/should you react to things like this – politics? – when ultimately you’re convinced your very own claims knowledge are “either nonexistent or unattainable for human beings”?

As for where Trump fits into all of this, well, he bullshits us all the time, right? As someone once suggested: “how can you tell if Trump is bullshitting us, lying to us? He opens his mouth and says something.”

And the thing is, I suspect Trump must know it is bullshit. And his fanatical MAGA “base” must at least suspect that they are being lied to…over and over again. But that’s just how it all unfolds. Realpolitik, some call it. Cue Machiavelli others will suggest. The end – bringing America back to the 1950s – justifies any and all means. Or, perchance, is he really committed ideologically to his autocratic agenda?

As I have argued previously, Trump’s claims are bullshit precisely because of his aim in expressing them.

His aim was to get elected, and then reelected…by any means necessary.

Some cries of fake news are accurate, while others are not; Trump desires his audience to believe him not because they are true or false, but because they are unflattering. Unlike the lie, where truth matters, the truth value of the bullshitter’s claim is simply irrelevant.

On the other hand, out in the real world, who among us gets to say who the bullshitters are and what in fact is bullshit?

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John Locke & Personal Identity
Nurana Rajabova considers why, according to John Locke, you continue to be you.

Examining Locke’s views on personal identity, it becomes obvious that the only way to know where personal identity resides is to know what a person is. For Locke, a person is an intelligent being who has reason and reflection and can consider themself as themself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places. One can do this only through consciousness.

To know what a person is? And how is that not but another manifestation of dasein? In particular, given conflicting goods? And those all up and down the moral, political and religious spectrums consider themselves intelligent enough to have created any number of One True Paths.

In Locke’s view, without consciousness, there is no person, whatever substances there are. The identity of a person reaches as far as consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought. At the end of this memory, for Locke, the self ceases.

Okay, what have you yourself become conscious of over the course of your life? And doesn’t that revolve around your own uniquely personal experiences? And when you bump into others who insist that what you claim to be conscious of is not really the correct way in which to be conscious of it. What then if not for most of us, objectivism.

This reductive account of the self has been among the main drivers for various objections to Locke’s account, both at ethical and practical levels. Moreover, I contend that Locke reduces the self not only to memory, but to internal memory, and by doing so, he runs a risk of putting his own empiricist approach to philosophy on shaky grounds.

So, who or what do you reduce your own Self/Soul down to? As for the rest of it, you tell me. How, for all practical purposes, is it applicable to you?

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Heidegger’s Being and Time: Understanding Dasein and Temporality
Heidegger’s “Being and Time” explores Dasein and temporality, revealing how human existence is deeply intertwined with time and authenticity.

Viktoriya Sus at The Collector

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time transformed philosophy in the 20th century by attempting something huge: trying to understand what it means to exist. Or, as Heidegger puts it, to be Dasein.

Of course, any number of folks will link him to Hitler and the Nazis. So, in contemplating his philosophical assessment of what it means to exist, how exactly are we to go about dismissing that? Fascism and…authenticity?

On the other hand, others will insist that fascism actually is, in fact, the best of all possible worlds. Sieg Heil and all that.

And then this part:

My point here revolves around connecting the dots between Heidegger’s theoretical Dasein in Being and Time and the manner in which I construe the existential dasein out in the world of actual human interactions.

In other words, we are “thrown” adventitiously [at birth] out into a particular world historically, culturally and experientially. And then we are indoctrinated as children to construe an “authentic” life to be just what Mom and Dad and the ruling class tell us it is. And, perhaps, the ecclesiastics?

He asks: how do our experiences in the past and present, our hopes and fears for the future, shape our understanding of what it is to “be” at all? The result is a text that asks us many difficult questions, including whether we have understood anything he has said.

Which is why I point out that given how different and conflicting and contradictory our personal experiences can be, is it any wonder that communication breakdowns are so common? Just follow the news for a while if you want to see how common they are. I merely make that distinction between “I” in the either/or and in the is/ought world.

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Heidegger’s “Being and Time” explores Dasein and temporality, revealing how human existence is deeply intertwined with time and authenticity.Viktoriya Sus at The Collector

Martin Heidegger, a philosopher with difficult but important ideas, was influential in his field during the 20th century. He was born in Germany in 1889 and spent his life trying to understand what it means for something to exist. This made him one of the most important thinkers of his time.

On the other hand, what he shares with all of us as a “mere mortal in a No God universe” is The Gap between what he thinks he understands regarding human existence, and all there is to know about the existence of existence itself. Which then acknowledges Rumsfeld’s conjecture that in regard to the human condition [and not just pertaining to the war in Iraq] there are any number of things we don’t even know that we don’t even know yet.

In 1927, Martin Heidegger published Being and Time, which changed philosophy forever. It broke completely with how things had always been done. In this book, Heidegger introduces concepts like Dasein (often translated as “being-there”), saying we should think about humans’ place within the world they live in.

Being here historically, culturally and experientially and not there. Being here now and not then.

What, that’s not applicable to Heidegger?

Though, sure, if philosophers are able to finally establish the best of all possible worlds…? Still, what are the odds it accurately reflects the world we live in today? Then those hundreds and hundreds of men and women who insist they embody not just the best of all possible worlds, but the only One True Path to enlightenment that there is. And, for millions more, a belief that the best of all possible worlds includes immortality and salvation.

Instead of focusing only outward at objects around them, he suggests people also consider themselves—what does being here mean anyway? What is my experience right now? Am I living authentically or not so much?

Just out of curiosity, are there philosophers here who embrace the idea of living authentically as Heidegger and other existentialists encompass it? If so, let’s take these ideas out of the “hallowed halls of learning” and explore all of this [ironically enough] existentially.

Why your own set of assumptions here and not mine?

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Heidegger’s “Being and Time” explores Dasein and temporality, revealing how human existence is deeply intertwined with time and authenticity.
Viktoriya Sus at The Collector

However, there is also a negative aspect to Heidegger’s legacy. In the 1930s, he joined the Nazi Party, something that has since caused furious debate about his philosophy and morals.

The part I tend to focus on. In other words, there’s existentialism up in the philosophical clouds, and then there’s the “for all practical purposes” existentialism revolving around what you believe in your head about Being and Time and the actual behaviors that you choose.

Anyone here care to go there? There’s what you think you understand about Heidegger’s own set of assumptions in the book, and then how, personally, you react to the parts about fascism and Nazis and “final solutions”. The part I root existentially in dasein and in the Benjamin Button Syndrome. With respect to conflicting goods.

His thinking helped shape existentialism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism—influences echoed in the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among many others. When a thinker of this stature comes along, people have to pause for thought: What does existence mean anyway?

On the other hand, whose particular existence out in what particular world, understood in what particular way? It’s not like philosophers haven’t been debating this for millenia. And it’s not like an argument can be provided enabling all rational men and women to agree on the optimal understanding of it. And it’s not like Heidegger himself wasn’t confronted with both the gap and Rummy’s rule.

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Heidegger’s “Being and Time” explores Dasein and temporality, revealing how human existence is deeply intertwined with time and authenticity.Viktoriya Sus at The Collector

Heidegger’s Project: Reinterpreting Ontology
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger takes on the immense task of reinterpreting ontology, the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of being itself.

On the other hand, given this…

https://youtu.be/1oAbeFW5OyM?si=QAHMSkgIKHKcNkUJ
MSN MSN
https://youtu.be/3mnSDifDSxQ?si=sSEv3f4NKxjE7d34
https://youtu.be/h6XkY9fOS7g?si=82t3zujFKq6PA0jM
https://youtu.be/FwpEk-fhZjY?si=AXN_F1XyBX4Zlrsn

…what are the odds that any mere mortal here on planet Earth would/could claim to reinterpret the ontological nature of being itself?

With or without Nazis?

And what’s next, a philosopher claiming to have reinterpreted the teleological nature of existence itself?

Specifically, Heidegger grapples with one simple yet profound question: What does it mean to say something exists? And not just this-or-that kind of existence (like mine or yours), but rather the very concept of existence.

Ah, the concept of existence. In other words, something that can be explored, examined and interpreted up in the philosophical clouds. And, sure, I can certainly accept that this is perhaps the place to start.

But sooner or later the assessments and assumptions accumulated here will need to be connected to human social, political and economic interactions.

Or is this perhaps where philosophers leave all that existential “day to day” stuff up to the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and political scientists?

According to Heidegger, previous philosophical traditions have failed to address this question. Instead of focusing on the meaning of being itself, thinkers got sidetracked into considering particular beings.

On the other hand, of what practical use is philosophy if the dots are not connected between being itself and our individual interactions? After all, look at what Heidegger embraced himself existentially as an individual.

Sieg Heil?