> On 21 Jul 2020, at 19:40, PGC <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Tuesday, July 21, 2020 at 12:16:09 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> On 21 Jul 2020, at 10:13, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>> >> wrote: >> >> >> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-sense-of-the-self >> <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-sense-of-the-self> >> : >> ... >> Human beings, then, can have a vivid sense [though] of the self without >> having any sense of it as something that has either personality or long-term >> continuity. Does this improve the prospects for the claim that a sense of >> the self could be an accurate representation of something that actually >> exists – even if materialism is true? I think it does, although the full >> argument would require a careful statement of what it is to be a true >> materialist, further inquiry into the notion of a thing, and a challenge to >> the problematic distinction between things and processes. Perhaps the best >> account of the existence of the self is one that may be given by certain >> Buddhists. It allows that the self exists, at any given moment, while >> retaining all the essential Buddhist criticisms of the idea of the self. It >> gives no reassurance to those who believe in the soul, but it doesn’t leave >> us with nothing. It stops short of the view defended by many analytic >> philosophers, according to which the self is a myth insofar as it is thought >> to be different from the human being considered as a whole. It leaves us >> with what we have, at any given time – a self that is materially >> respectable, distinctively mental, and as real as a stone. > > > That makes sense with materialism if the soul is made into an actual infinite. > > That makes sense with Mechanism, if we abandon the idea that we have > ontologically existing bodies. In that case the selves comes from a unique > consciousness which bifurcate by scission, and fuse by amnesia. > > The machine have a 3p-self, which is their body representation, > and they have 1p-self (and of many different types) obeying to the laws of > extensional and intensional (modal) self-reference, which is a chapter of > mathematical logic/thepretical computer science. > > In my more ecologically tinged notes this notion of self is more like a > portal to a web/multiplicity of relations to an unknown reality. It is > membranous, not discreet, and the bifurcation/scission is a hallucination > with the same kind of delusional character that would separate say an ant > from its environment/histories/relations.
Keep in mind that the machine first person, in arithmetic, is related to the continuum. This follows precisely from the first person indeterminacy on all computations + all (Turing) Oracles. So, the need of some not discreet reality is not necessarily a symptom that Digital Mechanism is false. Depending on the way that continuum behave might determine if Mechanism his true or false. Today, the evidences are that it is true (which proves nothing, as in science, we never prove anything). > That hallucination, useful as it was for survival, promotes discourses of a > problematic kind of individualism, which, not unlike the caricature of an ant > or the simplification of humans in comics, entails otherness. Doesn't this > otherness enable and justify violence that further reinforces itself? Is this > inevitable? When said portal confuses itself with such notions of > individuality, doesn't it pursue the destruction/harm/deletion of perceived > others in some hope/delusion for self-preservation? The otherness makes love and hate possible. That is a general problem for *all* universal machines. They are stuck in between the attraction to security and the attraction to universality (freedom). That will give the choice, when collection of similar universal systems appear, between cooperating or not cooperating. By cooperating all the machine wins a lot of security, but lose their individuality, freedom and (practical) universality. It is a bit the doubt that cells have encountered a long time ago, as this is related to staying unicellular, or cooperating in a colony/multi-cellular. It can be related tp the difference between (strongly) typed lambda calculus (security, no more Turing universal) and untyped lambda calculus (Turing universal but totally insecure). > > Violence never succeeds in this style of discourse as the damage is never > isolated to the perceived delusional target but to the web/multiplicity of > relations. I thing that violence never succeeds, except when confronted to violence, in a defensive way. Only in legitimate defence can violence makes sense. > Every violence would therefore equate to self-harm and self-defense would > have no individualistic meaning; it would only have meaning as the absence of > violence towards the whole. This kind of common ecological conception of self > and individuals runs counter to reducing selves to their body representation. OK. > And while that hallucination of separation led us to war and science, an > ecological approach to these questions would still pursue whether the > violence entailed is absolutely necessary, and whether life could manage to > at least mitigate the damage by moving towards stronger equalities that would > stabilize the web/multiplicity and render the portion of it that we have some > control over more resilient. I believe that democracy + free market, and the rules of laws is the solution. The problem is that in the old democracies, the separation of power begin to leak, and the free-ness of the market disappear, like we have seen with prohibition of medication (an utter nonsense, except for the drug dealers…). > > Tl;dr ? > is that discreet selfhood, strong forms of individuality etc. are problematic > from pov of ecological, psychological, social, linguistic perspectives. PGC The problem is that when we succeed to cooperate for a long time, the possible gain of cheating grows, and soon or later, some individuality will try to exploit this. At least, in a democracy, we can change that, but it can be hard if we acquitte someone cheating. An example is Trump, who might have won the 2020 election the day that the Senate decided to not look at the first hand evidences, and to acquit him for cheating, and actually, to help him to do so, probably because they are themselves dishonest and feel protected by him. I think that the brain is already a result of cells practicing democracy. Democracy is a natural thing in neoplatonism, or in any system where the leaders are enlightened enough to know that they … don’t know (making them listening to each other). Bruno > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/88e8a8ab-bd47-4f62-bd67-dd29f5c1c7fao%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/88e8a8ab-bd47-4f62-bd67-dd29f5c1c7fao%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2AB213D8-EC0C-44E4-AB47-543179AF3014%40ulb.ac.be.
