Neuroscience is so chill

>You can see consciousness from a different perspective through applied scientific inquiry
>guess that means all you philosophers were wrong about everything. :^)

What are you even getting at?

the idea that the process becomes the agent, the logical sequence of events becomes the acting body, that 'why' can be answered by 'how'

>you're only sad because a chemical is being released in your brain

I don't really have a problem with much of the heavily neuroscientific phil. of mind stuff, except for the fact that so many of them draw realist conclusions from it. I think Stephen Stich had it right (and Pat Churchland did too, at least as she's expressed it in some works)--if we accept the consequences of neuroscience as it stands today then we don't have very strong reason to believe that our mental representations are truth-tracking in a robust sense. It's things like this that make me think that the "debate" between materialism and idealism is somewhat manufactured. Strong scientistic materialism gets you to a more or less idealist position, and idealism a la Kant and his followers gets you to materialism. They're just different orientations within the same mental process.

Wisdom arrives when you realise Subject = Object

>muh meta cognition

>tfw pursuing biochemistry and planning to specialize in neuroscience
>tfw realizing you'll be stuck entirely with logical positivists rife with scientism
>tfw will be surrounded by the kind of people who constantly espouse meaningless platitudes and tautologies that do nothing but affirm science as being the only valid ontology
>tfw no work in philosophy

>For me it's all about ideology, capitalism, desire, politics
sounds like a tiresome wank, are you the guy posting long meandering tat who often refers to philosophers by their first initial?

Yes sir. Thou art that. I love love love nondualism and antiphilosophy these days. As Meister Eckhart says, theologians may disagree but the mystics all see the same things. Rene Guenon also.

Better than ideology though, no? Doesn't even prevent you from being ideological afterwards; it only prevents you from being naively so (and who is against that?). Metacognition is a good look.

I'm the kind of cunt who perversely requires ideology to do anything at all; and that's exactly why I'm falling hard for neuroscience, because I can at least sense that most of my desires and fantasies are fucking insane, solipsistic, and ridiculous.

Well said. Super fucking well-said, in fact. I agree. And I love the idea of a correspondence between materialism and idealism. For a great many reasons.

In psychoanalysis/continental land, which is where I come from, everything is anxiety, paranoia, paradox, etc. That shit has no end and infinite beginnings, quests for origins, and so on. In fact, the noblest injunctions come from Badiou and Lacan - keep going! - but beyond a certain horizon I think neuroscience is actually required so that we don't fucking kill ourselves or go insane in the process. Philosophy as antiphilosophy/therapy makes more sense to me atm than anything else.

I find it more than a little funny that I've become transparently recognizable on an anonymous Cambodian bucket-smuggling board. I am incapable of disguising myself.

I don't mean to be rude user but you're like a philosophical golden retriever. I bet you have a devoted girlfriend, loving parents who are still together, and are currently fulfilling all those 1st world middle class societal expectations. I don't know whether to love you or beat you with a stick.

Also a while back you made a thread about eastern thought, I recced you some stuff: garfield, huntington, hall and ames, maybe a couple more. Ever check any one it out?

youtu.be/mRFveea3khg

youtu.be/Q-B_ONJIEcE

>In psychoanalysis/continental land, which is where I come from, everything is anxiety, paranoia, paradox, etc. That shit has no end and infinite beginnings, quests for origins, and so on. In fact, the noblest injunctions come from Badiou and Lacan - keep going! - but beyond a certain horizon I think neuroscience is actually required so that we don't fucking kill ourselves or go insane in the process. Philosophy as antiphilosophy/therapy makes more sense to me atm than anything else.

Continentalland is no foreign nation to me. But I've always felt a conflict with the psychoanalytic inheritance that so much of the tradition has; I have no interest in therapeutic notions, I think the "human condition", "existential angst", etc. are all vapid notions that no one needs to or ever did need to talk about. I don't want to use thought to come to terms with the tragedy of consciousness/subjectivity, I want to use it to motivate the kind of projects that might disassemble and reassemble the subject to break down these kinds of limitations.

She doesn't say they don't matter. She's simply pointing at the mechanism.

The thought is kind (inasmuch as being compared to a dog can reasonably be expected to be) but you're marginally off: I have none of those things. My parents divorced when I was quite young and do not speak to each other. I've had my share of girlfriends, but I am a bachelor and am likely to remain that way. And I fulfil very few first-world middle-class expectations. I've done that and I will eventually be required to do so again. So I'll take the love and the stick.

I have copies of those books you recommended, but I've been pointlessly obsessed with the election and fake news since that thread and I haven't read them yet.

We're still just fancy meat computers. The "soul" being the brain is backed up by instances of brain damage impacting and changing the personality of the individual effected.

No, what's your point? By what mechanism do you mean to ascend?

The point of my post is that even people who say they don't believe in souls, still do, even though it's wrong.

I've never seen anybody on Veeky Forums say something that indicates that they truly do not believe in souls.

What is brain surgery?

No, just very specific things.

a sort of practice wherein one person cuts into the skull of another and meddles with its' insides. what's your point?

Ah, but it is sensory stimuli and your remembered feedback to similar stimuli that triggers the chemical application.

>Ah, but the dose shall make the poison

Well, at the end of the day there is only one truth. We're all just building off of what came before. We just have more accurate and efficient methods of fact checking these days.

When we think of a piano we think of the sound it makes and not how it achives this. Although it helps to know what to do when it goes out of tune.

Everyone likes the look of their own dick.

Shame for the both of us (I'm self-consciously quite fond of my dostoevskian psychologisms). I hope in the future we can chance a conversation on some of those books. Love, user. I choose love.

Scientology has you covered....

heh, clearly... heh

Well, part of that is that for whatever reason we all have a strong sense of self. I wonder if that's the fluke that lead to us being what we are. Compared to other mammals are brains aren't that much larger, there must be some quirk in it's structure that makes us so bored with just fucking and eating.

...

Understanding how we work is important if we don't want to fuck someone up.

>we all have a strong sense of self
But we don't. It's a sense of a "mover", and the mover can't originate from the body.

Ah but we are simply lucky animals. As are dolphins, to a much lesser extent.

I don't understand this reply.

You act as though our body is one simple object. It is not. Our body is made up of billions of micro organisms. We have about 4 pounds of bacteria in our gut that allow us to digest food. The mitocondria was it'self once bacteria. Why can't our brains also be a collective of moving parts that is forever tricking it'self into wholeness. Could you imagine the chaos of being able to percieve all of these parts as seprate from the self? It would be unbearable.

Scientology uses a bastardization of psychoanalysis and hypnotism as it's initiation/dirt-gathering ritual. It starts out as a sort of self-actualization gig and then gets into the aliens.

But I don't have much interest in hypnotism or psychoanalysis (as I said in the post you replied to) so how does scientology "have me covered"?

>You act as though our body is one simple object.
no

Our brains are much more interconnected than that of other species, so most likely that is the 'quirk', or at least a key part of it

Most neuroscientists are not advocates of scientism. Pointing out that our emotions, feelings and thought processes are products of neural activity does not necessarily mean that therefore neuroscience is the best or the only legitimate way to talk about them.

I personally think saying 'we are just our brains' is a huge oversimplification though. E.g. our enteric nervous system controlling our digestion consists of ~500 mil neurons, and can have a large influence on brain function (and therefore on cognition and behavior).

We are not just our brains, we are our bodies, what we eat, our habits, our interpersonal relationships, and probably a lot more. Our identities cannot be reduced to an organ, or even a set of organs, it is a category error.

>but I've been pointlessly obsessed with the election and fake news since that thread and I haven't read them yet.
anything interesting to read there? am working on something covering that area and I've found very little good reference material

The article speaks as though this is a settled issue and all that is left is to accept or realize this being just a brain thing. I want to point out there are coherent arguments against this point of view.

In this first link he discusses this attitude of materialists who say they are just facing the cold hard facts as opposed to others who are living in wishful thinking for comfort which is a notion I got from the article.

The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244016674515

scribd.com/doc/305856953/On-why-idealism-is-superior-to-physicalism-and-micropsychism

And to the user who said the soul being the brain is backed up by brain damage changing the personality consider this:
jcn.cognethic.org/jcnv4i3_Kastrup.pdf
jcn.cognethic.org/jcnv4i2_Kastrup.pdf

> this > philosophy

>What about the argument that you can follow chains of causality back to the beginning of the universe, so everything is predetermined?

>It’s metaphysical goofiness. The reason I just scratched my foot is because of that causal connection to the big bang? Get real.

>Even people who have largely come to terms with neuroscience find certain ideas troubling – particularly free will. Do we have it?

>Now, that’s as good as it gets, in my view. When we need to make a decision about something – whether to buy a new car, say – self-control mechanisms work in ways that we understand: we decide not to spend more than we can afford, to go with the more or less practical car. That is what free will is. But if you think that free will is creating the decision, with no causal background, there isn’t that.

Isn't this a contradiction? If shes saying that the universe is deterministic to the point we don't have free will then surely you can attribute every particle interaction to another one stretching all the way back to the Big Bang? If you really are controlled entirely by chemical reactions then yes, those reactions are part of a very long causal chain all the way back to the beginning.

I think because there are truly random processes (nuclear decay, tunnelling etc.) that are time asymmetric it's impossible to select this future from the possible futures that were available.

But it's still deterministic. There are strict laws governing the probabilistic evolution; I think that's her sentiment.

youtu.be/I6K10aif0tE

She's not saying anything new. Materialism existed well before the recent advancements in neuroscience.

I think she just doesn't care about that kind of philosophical inquiry.

I mean, philosophy *is* important. But in the absence of some kind of culture that actually displays an interest in debate, this is where I feel myself going as well. According to Badiou or Boris Groys, most of the philosophers I like fall into the category of antiphilosopher. And so the next step, to me, would be this idea of looking at antiphilosophy, and asking ourselves where we go from there. I do think that a stridently anti-philosophical is not only an unstable one, it is itself a contradiction in terms; people eventually wind up coming to believe in *something,* whether they want to or not. Even post-apocalyptic cultures organize around something.

I don't have much in the sense of a text that I could point you directly to. Anybody who is capable of understanding the present age in a term which goes beyond race, class and gender without doubling down on some form of cultural crusade is. Because that is the situation in America, as I see it; points of division so deeply inscribed on the postmodern consciousness that they come to define self-sufficient worldviews. Bannon is reacting to the left in the same way that the left was reacting against the Enlightenment. He's invoking a new victimhood, and we all know how powerful this can be. To my mind, the Anglo/Eurosphere hasn't seen anything like this since WW2, which is why it is so disruptive. Everybody is responding to capitalism, but what is lacking is some perspective which subordinates capital to a broader sense of human growth and development in a long-term and sustainable sense.

That article is super-interesting. The idea of there being a split between the intellectual needs for meaning among the elite v the average person on the street is really worth thinking about. Nobody wants to think of themselves as being among the 'intellectual working class,' after all; and it kind of connects for me with the need to foster something like a postindustrial society that also has a postindustrial way of thinking about society. It explains the temptation to foster holy lies for the sake of a greater and ineffable Good, as well...it's not crazy to say that intellectuals want to have a place in society, so they take up the cause of a form of social progress which ultimately winds up rejecting them or rendering themselves obsolete. Those disaffected intellectuals today gravitate to NRx...which requires them to adopt conservative anti-intellectual perspectives to be a part of the movement...everyone needs that sense of closure.

Thanks for those links, user.

A crime.

Saying you are just a brain provides NO explanation for anything and makes NO point. It is merely a rhetorical trick.

It is especially bothersome that intelligent people are fooled by the exact same sophistry that Socrates tore apart thousands of years ago.

>this article is generated by your monitor since it's no longer there if you punch your monitor and it breaks

Scientism is funnier than any deliberate forms of humor.

I understand where you are coming from, in part, but I think you're underestimating the value of this perspective. Here's where I'm coming from on this.

Speaking for myself, saying that you are 'just a brain' isn't intended to shut down arguments or silence anyone. It's there to establish a common ground and a frame of reference. We don't suffer today from a lack of explanations or 'points' but from an excess of them which are becoming increasingly reactive in increasingly destructive ways. From a philosophical standpoint, I would say the inability to distinguish philosophy from sophistry is itself a sign that something has gone far off the rails.

Bear in mind as well that Nietzsche considered Socrates to be, in fact, the sophist supreme. Now I will grant you that there is more than a little irony in that, given that the same might be ascribed to Nietzsche; certainly Heidegger thought so. Nietzsche's destruction of metaphysics inaugurates a whole new world. Again, speaking for myself, it looks like a very dark one, even catastrophic.

Neuroscience is hardly sophistry. I think its actual value is, a) restoring a sense of equilibrium between mind and body, so that we don't wild creating metaphysical dualism where it doesn't in fact exist, and b) actually allowing for a multiplicity of perspectives in the process, by coming to an understanding that a lot of these are going to be in some sense both inescapably materialist and idealist.

What I think would be the sign of a genuinely enlightened intellectual culture would be a kind of charity, an acknowledgement of the fact that, in a sense, we are all floating in space vis-a-vis others. This would hardly be a rhetorical trick. What is required is a sense that because it is going to be virtually impossible to distinguish 'truth' and 'falsehood,' what we need to do is distinguish between 'truth' and *deceit;* this is a Lacanian insight. And that is really only going to be possible within a framework for trust and sincerity. I can trust that you have a brain, and a body; that you are capable of articulating yourself; and that, as analysis is going to show, we don't always want what we think we want.

We like creating dualism where none in fact exists. What I would like to see is an awareness of the interconnectedness of things, so that we stop retreating into private mythologies of difference and identity on the basis of which anything can be justified.

I know that probably sounds crazy, but the alternative to this looks like a lot of stupid fuckhead wars between fuckhead people for fuckhead reasons. Materialism to me has jumped the shark but we can't go back to idealism either. We need something better.

I hope you aren't implying that nonlocal consciousness is outside of science. It's much closer to being testable than local models of consciousness.

How can you prove the existence of those laws though?

But idealism is literally the only correct position.

''metaphysical dualism where it doesn't in fact exist''

But it does.

Reminder that you are free to identify with your sensory experience and the miserable prison cell that provides it, just as you are to look beyond it.

>For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he

One thing all Spiritualists and Materialists agree on is the way of the flesh and its inevitable corruption, so I must confess I cannot interpret Materialism as anything other than a masochistic death cult.

So it's mentioned that the love a mother feels for her child is just chemicals in her brain. But what else could it be?

And just because it's chemicals doesn't mean it's not important. The chemicals cause the feelings but what causes the chemicals to create those feelings and how does the brain know which chemicals to send.

The problem with saying that idealism is the only correct position means that invariably there is going to be produced a clash of ideals and nothing under the sun is capable of regulating or legislating between these. Violence solves all problems in the end by simply negating one position or the other, or both. And there is - I am going to follow Girard very strictly here - no natural process at work on the planet Earth which is capable of regulating or keeping violence in check save, of course, religion. And we both know how complicated that gets.

Metaphysical dualism is going to exist *wherever you choose to think that it does,* and part of you being a free-thinking, free-acting human being means that you have a right to do this. Certainly I am required to grant you the right to not only say, but *think,* whatever you please. My concern is with ideology, the point at which your freedom to think in terms of metaphysical duality eventually comes to include me, *whether I like it or not.* This is why, to me, the great dangers are those posed by the universal modernist narratives: race, class, and gender, *whether we consider ourselves to be on the left or right sides of the spectrum.* Because when these things clash, they are going to clash *all the way.*

Clashes between axioms kill everyone. They don't produce winners. They only produce survivors. Wars don't decide who is right, only who had the most robust and impenetrable social-mobilization arguments. And to me those derive their robustness precisely through the creation of dualisms that work by convincing people that they are indistinguishable from the transcendent, the one, the all, the everything.

We are all a part of one big thing. We all have brains. We all have bodies. That should be enough for us to understand that metaphysical dualism is itself the problem. That is how I see things, because I follow Girard all the way on this: mimetic desire leads to violence, and that violence can all-too-easily become a necessary political component of a self-justifying ideological system.

I'm not saying radical pacifism is the way. I'm saying let's fight the things that are actually worth fighting against. And most of the time that means not fighting against other human beings because they think differently than we do. We need to be less fucking ignorant. We need something like Enlightenment 2.0 that doesn't follow from Descartes. I don't know who it follows from. Nietzsche would be a part of it, no doubt. But I cannot be persuaded that there is anything other than one ultimate species of earth-dwelling humans who are far more alike than different.

The point is that there is NOTHING to do with that information. If you let that fact seep into your philosophy, you are making the mistake of mixing the falsifiable with the unfalsifiable. The studies of the falsifiable and un- are both very important but when they seep into each other it is always a bad thing.

When the falsifiable seeps into the un-, you get Scientism and the treatment of science like a god or dogma.
When the un- seeps into the falsifiable, you end up with chakras and ghosts and "energies" and general paranormal nonsense.

>inb4 this thread gets deleted for not being about joyce and farts

I see no reason to believe anything exists outside of my consciousness. In the past, a scientist might have said all sensation arises from the skin. Now they say it's the brain. I don't see why that is any more believable.

My own personal belief, which has perhaps been addressed by someone I am not aware of, is that even from an empirical perspective, idealism is correct. If something can only be said to exist if it is observed, then without an observer nothing can be said to be exist.

I seriously hope you don't ascribe to a model that is disproven by The Problem of Other Minds.

Please elaborate friend.

Sure user, but who will be the man big enough to give up on his ideology first and taking the risk of losing the battle? Who's to say the others won't simply then establish themselves as the dominant ideology? Pacifism seems to me like an impossible ideal.

From my point of view, the scientism inspired ''muh chemicals'' is far more dangerous than dualism.

I wanted to put a bataille quote but I can't find it.

Not an argument

>I'm just going to wind up a boring utilitarian

You sure you've read the Neetch?

He'd curb stomp you for even entertaining the thought.

Fine. Here's my problem with that line of thinking, though: suppose I were to tell you that I saw no reason to believe that anything exists outside of my consciousness, except that I have also received message from a glass of lemonade telling me that I am the second coming of Mani. On behalf of this message I am completely empowered to think and do and act however I like.

This is an extreme, even comic example, but it's hardly out of place in the world today. Lots of people will believe that nothing exists outside of their consciousness; it's just that the horizons of that consciousness go a lot further than the insides of our own heads. And, in my opinion, it is the desire to delimit that consciousness, to create borders and lines and territories - which is what leads to politics.

Now of course this is necessary, even critical, to our survival. But sooner or later there's going to be friction. Conflict resolution can take violent and mutually destructive forms, but it's better when they take the form of mutual understanding. I am convinced that this understanding, and a kind of trans or super-national understanding of things is possible. Humans built world capitalism. That was the revolution that succeeded. Unfortunately, that system is also incredibly unstable and fragile. Particularly because there is very little to keep people from desiring more and more, infinitely.

I Got Mine is to me the omega point, the black hole that sucks in everything else. This is the contribution that analysis made to Western thought; that black hole, objet a, cannot be filled in. Consumer capitalism supplies everything, everything, except the relief from anxiety, which is an anxiety about the other. No ideology, and nothing short of what I would like to call a transformation of consciousness can do that, I would say.

I don't want to see the production of more political ubermenschen. I want to see the production of more artisanal ubermenschen, in a world which isn't so manifestly bent on destroying itself for reasons it doesn't even understand.

>Sure user, but who will be the man big enough to give up on his ideology first and taking the risk of losing the battle? Who's to say the others won't simply then establish themselves as the dominant ideology? Pacifism seems to me like an impossible ideal.

This guy.

>Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov was a Soviet Navy officer who is credited with casting the single vote that prevented a Soviet nuclear strike (and presumably all out nuclear war) during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

I've read him up and down and sideways. I fucking OD'd on Nietzsche. Who knows, maybe I wasn't supposed to be a part of that cult.

I think the point is that we need a new model concept of Nietzsche. Both Sloterdijk and Lacan (and Heidegger!) have all done some serious work in this regard. Sloterdijk's Nietzsche is an anthropotechnic process: we become who we are, we become artist-acrobats. This doesn't need always to be a political kind of thing; indeed, the political ubermensch is the worst of them. Lacan does clinical Nietzscheanism, to my mind. That's a longer thing tho.

The point is this: Nietzsche himself asks for *Good Europeans.* Remember that as much as he likes Cesare Borgia and Napoleon, it's *Goethe* who he also likes. And Goethe comes out of a very particular culture and mode of understanding, of which he is one of its finest and most illuminating products.

Nietzsche can make fun of me all he wants and call me the Last Man. There's no denying this. But there are far better ways, and I would say, far more necessary and psychologically healthy ways of channeling and interpreting Nietzsche today that don't involve a regress back to modernist thinking.

To me, Sloterdijk understands what modern Nietzschean philosophy is about: the anthropotechnic project. I support that 100%. I just want that project to have to do more than produce soldiers and ideologues. I'd prefer it to produce astronauts and doctors and artists too.

>tfw there will be two neuroscientists weary of logical positivism
>tfw i stroke kierkegaard every night before bed and thank him for saving me from nihilism

>I don't want to see the production of more political ubermenschen. I want to see the production of more artisanal ubermenschen, in a world which isn't so manifestly bent on destroying itself for reasons it doesn't even understand.

Because it's as varied as people are. There is no conclusion to reach, and once you reach that non-conclusive conclusion, you realize that everyone already made decisions without your input.
I think just from studying psychology everyone is supporting beliefs they learned from when they were young. The other extreme is rejecting those beliefs and finding new ones, but in the end you always serve some idea and force it on others.
Serving any idea is a constraint by nature. Thus, the only truth I came to respect is the truth of the human body, the one thing I cannot disprove or argue against.

I see both political/artistic types as an extension of the human body and the multitides of the mind. It's not that philosophy doesn't have a point, it's just that the point is moot before reality.

Thanks a lot for the links.

This woman is a neurotic mess, a Freudian case study.

youtube.com/watch?v=7a6ZaivvCnE

yeah but in reality it gets deleted because of neurons firing in the mod's brain

That was painful to listen to.

you can't, but a lot of evidence has been gathered for these ideas.
the apparent randomness could just come from ignorance of finer initial conditions - but it's unlikely.

dumb fucking analogy m8.