Old Web Revival Community

Here’s a post about Hard Problem of Consciousness, since @argumate​ and @foolishmeowing​ have talking about it lately:

I think it’s a mistake to view the Hard Problem as unique to materialism.  Idealism can’t answer it either, and generally doesn’t try to.  IMO, the problem is not really about matter, but about description or explanation.

(I also don’t think it’s unique to “formal” systems or approaches, except in a sense so broad that any philosophy that could ever be done is “formal,” because it involves strings of words and/or arguments.)

The Hard Problem is very similar to the problem of existence – “why is there something rather than nothing?”  Both of these are questions about what “animates” or “turns on” any given description – what makes a description (such as a formal system) more than “mere words on a page.”  This is a distinctive class of problem because any familiar kind of explanation would simply become part of the description, and thereby be subject to the exact same problem.

If you add some sort of “existence-maker” mechanism to your description of what exists, you’re still open to the objection that the entire description, existence-maker and all, could just as well be an inert logical structure, without the extra magic of existence.  This is a pretty familiar, standard point in the context of the existence question, but in discussions about consciousness, the analogous point tends to get buried under arguments about whether or not there is more of a problem for certain kinds of description – “material” or “formal” or “functional” ones, or whatever.

It seems to me that this is a problem for descriptions, period.  If you look at the various dualistic and idealistic systems that have been proposed, they tend to be, well … systems: descriptive accounts of what is supposed to exist (some or all of it mental/spiritual), along with some arguments about why we should assent to the description, but nothing inherent in them to light the flame and turn these descriptions necessarily into the realities they talk about.  These systems do claim that the flame is in fact lit, but they generally treat this as self-evident via Descartes’ cogito or similar.  At least one mind/spirit exists (by cogito), and here are some things it can conclude a priori about other existents – Leibniz’s various principles, McTaggart’s theory of determining correspondences, or whatever – and we’re off to the races.

These can be perfectly fine theories of what mind/spirit is, insofar as it exists, but they simply do not touch why/how it exists: you need the spark of a cogito to get things started, and the cogito doesn’t leave you any less in the dark about why there’s an existing mind (instead of there not being one).  It just convinces you that there is one.  And once you’ve decided to work within a frame where that is taken as given, you’ve given up on Hard Problems.  These theories only “explain” the ineluctable experiencey-ness of experience in the way that the observation “as a matter of fact, something exists” explains why there is something rather than nothing – which is to say, not at all.

It seems intuitively clear to me that these Hard Problems are unanswerable, because they ask for something that is incompatible with what we take to constitute an “answer” to a question.  They ask for an argument that some description is necessarily animated, that there’s no mystery about how it becomes more than words on a page because there is something impossible about the merely-words version of it.  But such an argument is either:

(1) An argument for purely logical necessity, i.e. necessity within the terms of the description, in which case the necessity property is just one more fact about the description and could be as “mere” as the rest, or

(2) An argument that the description gets necessarily lit up by the animating fire of something else that already has it, in which case we need some initial spark to start things up, one that is not explained within the terms of the description. Generally this spark is supposed to be “obvious” / a priori, but the fact that we have a priori knowledge of something doesn’t constitute an explanation of why we have that knowledge, so this doesn’t get the job done.

One of the Jacobin writers apparently found some 1856 articles about wealth inequality by Frederick Douglass that have never been republished before. They’re really incredible, and it’s fascinating to realize that Douglass appears to share the liberal socialist views of abolitionist Wendell Phillips, whom Douglass was friends with. According to the second article, he was a proto-Georgist too.

“The Accumulation of Wealth,” Frederick Douglass’s Paper, November 28, 1856:

…it is not wealth of itself that produces the dreaded effects, but its accumulation in the hands of a few — creating an aristocracy of wealth, ready to be the tool of an aggressive tyranny, or to become aggressive upon its own account. With an increase of wealth comes an increase of selfishness, devotion to private affairs, and a contempt of public — unless politics can be made to minister to the all absorbing selfishness of the individual…

We are ready to grant that the condition of man, cast as he is into the world naked, and surrounded by elements unfriendly to his continued existence, renders a degree of acquisitiveness necessary for the security of life; but is it just to plead this moderate degree of accumulation, indicated by nature, in justification of the unlimited hoarding of wealth, and monopolies of land, which has converted the entire civilized world into an abode of millionaires and beggars; which renders the enslavement of the peoples of the world possible, and shrouds the future of liberty with gloom?…

Wealth has ever been the tool of the tyrant, the readiest means by which liberty is overthrown. A nation starting with free institutions and customs, begins to increase in wealth, and that wealth to accumulate in the hands of a few, and here is the lever by which, eventually and certainly, the liberties gained in a simpler age will be overthrown.

Wealth is averse to agitation; it abhors revolutions; it calls for peace, at whatever sacrifice. A tyranny of an individual or a class may be winding its subtle meshes around the wealthy, depriving them of the right of unrestrained locomotion, the right of speech, the right of private judgment; but if it leaves them the privilege of grasping and accumulating gold, they are content — nay, will aid the tyranny to subject them who value their liberties enough to struggle for them; for the agitation might endanger their gains…

Louis Napoleon holds his seat today, and other tyrants with him, because they have enlisted the sympathies of capital, by professions of law and order; encouraging and increasing the facilities for growing rich. Say to one of these blinded instruments of tyranny, that personal liberty, the freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, is overthrown; and they will answer you, that commerce flourishes, manufactures increase, public securities are at par. The golden calf set up, they fall down and worship, and shut their eyes to the foul wrongs perpetrated every day on human rights.

Poverty, the natural consequence of wealth unduly accumulated, plays its part in the drama of national degradation. Wherever the palaces tower highest, and enclose within their walls the greatest accumulations of luxury and wealth, there does the peasant grovel lowest in ignorance and misery; there is tyranny most secure and freedom most hopeless…

From whence, in our own country, comes the danger to liberty? Who are the ready tools and apologists of slavery…? The plain answer is, the wealth and the poverty of the nation… We have the controllers of our commercial centres, blinding or buying the poverty-stricken, ignorant masses that fester in their alleys, to the unblushing support of the policy of slaveholding tyranny…

If such a statesman shall devise measures, which, while they will not hamper private enterprise, shall yet prevent the undue accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals or associations, he will have merited and secured a fame more lasting than has yet fallen to the lot of man. He will have founded a nation which, though subject to human vicissitudes, will yet possess elements of prosperity and permanence, such as no nation has yet enjoyed.

I am mere centimeters away from writing a full on essay about how the “goblins are inherently antisemitic” myth spawned by this website propagates misinformation, displays a huge misunderstanding of what folklore is and does, and contributes to an environment that distracts people from how antisemitism actually operates and the ways in which it’s dangerously on the rise in our current climate–something which, surprise surprise, has almost nothing to do with little green fairy men

OK but there’s another “critical” here, and it’s also getting confused with the others. Critical as in critical theory, critical consciousness, actually does mean “being able to see and point out all the ways in which a thing is Problematic”, and when that gets (combined/confused?) with literary criticism/critical thinking, you end up with “analyse(critical thinking) a fictional work(literary criticism) by looking for all the bad things(critical consciousness)” and interestingly enough that ends up being very similar to what would happen if you just went at it with a hammer

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

sound ON

This is the /an/ post that keeps on giving.

this also happens prospectively (as opposed to retrospectively) which may possibly be worse

Is anyone else forever frustrated that hearting a single post in a long and vicious argument on here means every previous iteration is hearted too and how will people know which side I’m rooting for? I dunno

Something I’m not 100% sure how to put into words b/c flu but nonetheless woke up thinking about is:

it’s so disappointing when fiction that purports to show the “villain’s side of the story” actually just flips the roles, making the original villain a precious cinnamon roll and the original hero 100% garbage. it’s such a lazy narrative and it makes me wonder if you’ve really thought about *why* you want to tell the story you’re telling.

and like – there’s nothing *wrong* with just writing a power fantasy wherein your villainous fave comes out on top. but it’s always kind of unnerving to me when fandom will jump on those narratives without fully thinking them through, and thus react just as vitriolically to the new villain as an older audience did to the original.

Maleficent has this problem, Orange Is the New Black has this problem, The Shape of Water to some degree has this problem (though concentrated in the fandom and not necessarily in del Toro’s narrative). it’s really bizarre to me how people will walk into a “villain redeemed” narrative and come out with their hatred intact, just shifted to a new, more “deserving” target. like, do you not see how recursive that is? and are you not just a little bit troubled by the knowledge that your sympathies are that easy to manipulate by a shift in narrator?

again, it’s fine if it’s just a power fantasy, but if you’re trying to make any kind of overarching point about villains and narratives and redemption, it’s at least *prudent* not to just switch the vantage points.

Responding to a pandemic in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation: