Okay, I apologize I went back and read your first post which said something like “the self doesn’t exist is a fun concept to play with” when I was pretty sure you had said just “the self doesnt exist.” I’m sitting here trying to find the thread that connects “the self doesn’t exist” with your seeming acknowledgement of every aspect of it.

I agree its useful to test “wrong conclusions” for the reasons you state. You end up constructing consistent logic justifying it, and can witness for yourself where the reasoning goes wrong, and can speculate as to why. I think it makes relating to people convinced by faulty logic and conclusions easier to relate to, as well as gives you a hint to where their reasoning is off and you cans start to argue against it

But what is experience, how can you find experience without a self doing the experiencing? I’m not trying to put it on you but it is consistent with your logic, as I understand it

I haven’t played them since they first came out, practically a lifetime ago. Actually now that I think about it my friend is really into halo lore I wonder if they saw the show.

It was hokey but I liked it. And yeah I thought it ended really strongly but there’s no plan for a 3rd season

I played the first two

Famously, Kant stripped away all his preconceptions and could prove only the subjective (I think therefore I am), whereas you seem to deny everyone their subjectivity, even your own. In any case since you’re interested in these questions, I assume then you’ll reach a better understanding of these questions, just keep studying and growing on your own terms (which is contradictory to your own thesis, but the whole is always defined by contradiction.)

I just watched the Halo series, thought it was corny but kinda awesome, and then discovered noone else thought it was awesome. Def had some problems, tried to shoehorn in a lot of stuff but by the finale I was super hooked

Well I disagree that “we can’t find it”. I think the inability to find the self is a result of the limitations of empiricism, whereas dialectical and materialist analysis has no problem locating the self within the changing relationships that define the individual, history and nature in context of each other.

And this is what empiricism really fails at: its great at defining an object, defining the parameters that constitute it, and isolating it as a subject of study, but absolutely falls short at being able to identify the relationships between “things” or the historic circumstances that give rise to them.

As observers, an over-reliance on one theory of knowledge, or epistemology, verges on the kind of ideological blindness usually associated with fringe fundamentalism. We wouldnt us a ratchet to hammer a nail, why would we insist that a single epistemic “tool” is the only one that is capable of determining truth?

Honestly I probably agreed with you more some years ago before reading Sam Harris’s Free Will, which was so bad it set me on a very different path of inquiry.

Crucial supporting NPCs in Monster Hunter

But the self can be shown to exist, unless you deny the existence of subjectivity. this leads to hard determinism, what you referred to as no free will.

The productive, creative process itself, the drive to learn and be curious, to investigate, all of this leads to the conclusion that 1. There is some kind of greater will guiding us or 2. Humans have the ability to make determinations based on their experiences, and choose certain actions based on those experiences.

I’ve seen the deterministic argument that free will is an illusion caused by a chain of circumstances, but I don’t buy it. I think that the view that free will is an illusion is itself a logical error: the result of a dependence of the tendency of dualism to try and turn everything into objects, rather than seeing each object within its relationships, coming together to form a totality. This tendency leads to vulgar empiricism and positivist views. These views always obscure social relationships, which are real, measurable and predictions can be made based on them.

The “I’m so deep I’m a nihilist” trope has got to go. Every TV show or movie where there is some supposedly hyper intelligent character, they always have the most vile, garbage philosophy.

The Book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnneman. Weird self help name, but its a book on biases, research which Kahnneman won the nobel prize. Once I started questioning my preconceptions it completely changed my whole perspective on the world. Its like that list of fallacies that you study in philo 101, but they’re not like dialogical fallacies they appear in our own thinking. And “experts” are more likely to get fooled in their own fields of research than laypeople when asked trick questions

Only if you look at things a certain way. There’s real danger to believing that you lack actual subjectivity, its like reverse solipsism, and is basically the worst version of doomerism.

If you look at things dialectically and Materialistically, subjectivity can’t be avoided

That would sound amazing

So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys

*more than

Oh is this a thing that academics predicted? Welcome to the 1840s, Guardian

Also blaming the billionaires for destabilizing the economy is only partially true. The system is unstable, but billionaires profit from “instability”, so sure they cause it as much as the system causes billionaires and millionaires.

The problem isn’t who owns gigantic companies like Walmart and amazon and google and apple, the problem is that they can be privately owned. The instability isn’t a bug so much as a feature. Its not the individuals, it’s the system. Individuals can make adjustments, sometimes very critical ones but the system doesn’t pick winners based on who does the best at adhering to externalized ideals, it picks winners based on who can create the most profit for owners, profit made of the immense amount of collected time and energy siphoned off of workers.

You can’t tell me you don’t understand why this is

Its Wednesday my dudes