Dasein/dasein

For all things philosophical.

Moderators: AMod, iMod

User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one?
My point here is well known.

We all ask these questions of ourselves as individuals. Individuals who have lived different lives in various places around the globe, born and raised at different times, indoctrinated as children in different ways, and having accumulated different experiences precipitating, at times, very different understandings of the world around us.

So, given this what are philosophers able to establish about human identity that might be thought of as applicable to all of us?

Thus...
Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us.
But here I muddy the waters all the more by making a distinction between the either/or world Self and the is/ought world "self". The essential biological, demographic, empirical, circumstantial Self vs. the existential "self" espousing widely distinctive moral and political and spiritual value judgments regarding human interactions that come into conflict.
Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.
Thus, here, Socrates and governments are no less confronted with this distinction. It's one thing to correctly understand yourself in regard to your "biological, demographic, empirical, circumstantial" reality, and another thing altogether to understand yourself in regard to the many, many "conflicting goods" that divide us in any given community.

Right?

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories.
Sure, start there.

But what is "psychological continuity" without a mind attached to a brain attached to the rest of the body?

Clearly, the place to start in regard to the essential conditions of the self are with those things each and every one of us must have if "I" is going to survive at all: subsistence itself.

I need food. I need water. I need protection from the elements.

And, in needing those things, how much pertaining to your self is going to revolve around attaining them? Yes, that can either be on your own isolated from others or in one or another community with others. But it's not for nothing that two of the most influential thinkers there have ever been are Karl Marx and Adam Smith.

Identity and political economy. The bottom line as it were.
Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness.
Only here the plot thickens. For all we know, the brain, the mind and the rest of the body are all wholly in sync with the laws of matter...just like all the other "stuff" in the universe.
John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness.
Nope, not if the prince's body is perfectly healthy and the cobbler's body is riddled with stage 4 cancer. See how quickly the prince's consciousness adjusts to that.
Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. (Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.
And then there's my own assessment here: the "psychology of objectivism". Only the "container" is infused through and through given the existential parameters of dasein. Particularly when one's thoughts and feelings come to revolve around sets of moral and political value judgments.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Belinda
Posts: 8030
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

iambiguous wrote: Wed Jun 29, 2022 3:55 pm You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories.
Sure, start there.

But what is "psychological continuity" without a mind attached to a brain attached to the rest of the body?

Clearly, the place to start in regard to the essential conditions of the self are with those things each and every one of us must have if "I" is going to survive at all: subsistence itself.

I need food. I need water. I need protection from the elements.

And, in needing those things, how much pertaining to your self is going to revolve around attaining them? Yes, that can either be on your own isolated from others or in one or another community with others. But it's not for nothing that two of the most influential thinkers there have ever been are Karl Marx and Adam Smith.

Identity and political economy. The bottom line as it were.
Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness.
Only here the plot thickens. For all we know, the brain, the mind and the rest of the body are all wholly in sync with the laws of matter...just like all the other "stuff" in the universe.
John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness.
Nope, not if the prince's body is perfectly healthy and the cobbler's body is riddled with stage 4 cancer. See how quickly the prince's consciousness adjusts to that.
Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. (Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.
And then there's my own assessment here: the "psychology of objectivism". Only the "container" is infused through and through given the existential parameters of dasein. Particularly when one's thoughts and feelings come to revolve around sets of moral and political value judgments.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
You and I also need memory if are to survive as intelligent animals, which we are. Memory is both extension and thought. The extension aspect of memory is located mostly in the cranium. Brains lack feedback nerves. Cancer is also potentially lethal. However cancer , although not the concept of cancer, is not always located in the cranium so the thought aspect of cancer does not apply. (Apart from the theory of mind over matter).

A Dasein that lacks memory , is demented, is a moribund Dasein.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
All these approaches [above] reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity.
Exactly. We all come into the world able to sustain one or another manifestation of this "psychological continuity". Ours as a species is just significantly more complex -- and thus problematic -- than any other species. Our psychological self is rooted far more in historical and cultural and interpersonal "memetic" parameters that other species know nothing of at all.

What one person may grasp in regard to a "personal consciousness" another may have little or no understanding of at all. So what does it really mean then to speak of this "psychological continuity" when the psychological self itself can construe the world around it in so many profoundly different ways?

In other words, the need to make that crucial distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world. There are things that all of us are able to establish as true regardless of our differing psychological trajectories and things that we cannot.
Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.
Exactly my point. The elements that, by and large, encompass my own assessment of dasein.

Thus, the task for philosophers in my view is to confront that. If these truly problematic components of "I" are all around us, what then can we conclude reflects the "wisest" course of action in regard to moral obligations? Can there really be any obligations at all in a No God World?

Is deontology itself subject to the same critique?

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Belinda
Posts: 8030
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

iambiguous wrote: Fri Jul 08, 2022 8:23 pm You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
All these approaches [above] reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity.
Exactly. We all come into the world able to sustain one or another manifestation of this "psychological continuity". Ours as a species is just significantly more complex -- and thus problematic -- than any other species. Our psychological self is rooted far more in historical and cultural and interpersonal "memetic" parameters that other species know nothing of at all.

What one person may grasp in regard to a "personal consciousness" another may have little or no understanding of at all. So what does it really mean then to speak of this "psychological continuity" when the psychological self itself can construe the world around it in so many profoundly different ways?

In other words, the need to make that crucial distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world. There are things that all of us are able to establish as true regardless of our differing psychological trajectories and things that we cannot.
Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.
Exactly my point. The elements that, by and large, encompass my own assessment of dasein.

Thus, the task for philosophers in my view is to confront that. If these truly problematic components of "I" are all around us, what then can we conclude reflects the "wisest" course of action in regard to moral obligations? Can there really be any obligations at all in a No God World?

Is deontology itself subject to the same critique?

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Yes, but on two conditions.
One: God= nature

Two: we know what 'human nature' is.

The first condition is not insuperable but the second condition seems impossible to accomplish.
The story of the Expulsion from Eden in Genesis illustrates this condition. Eden is a 'place' where all creation is as it should be and thrives as it should thrive. In Eden, man was like the other creatures and was in no doubt what his nature was i.e. what he ought to be. Expelled from Eden, man had to rediscover himself . Man is always engaged on the quest of discovering himself, what he is and what he ought to be.

The state of Dasein (self + its environents) is necessary for man to learn and try to progress. This is because unless a man be Dasein he has no basis for comparison with other Daseins who are the most important aspects of his environment.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is.
The main point being that we might think of our personal identity in an overall sense, but there are really all of these many, many components to it coming from different directions. Only some of which are we able to even fully control. Yet how many of us ever really sit down and "think through" all of this? Philosophically or otherwise. We tote ourselves around from situation to situation thinking, feeling, saying and doing things as though it is simply who we are. It's who we have become, and only when confronting something truly extra-ordinary might it trigger us to reevaluate all of the components that do go into making us who we think we are.

The part where we seriously consider, "what if I wasn't this, what if I was that, instead? What if this hadn't happened to me, what if that had happened to me instead?"
What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self.
My point being that the complexity of the self -- "I" in the is/ought world -- becomes such that these "philosophical assessments" are hopelessly inadequate when taking into account how the hundreds of existential variables in our lives can reconfigure into countless new permutations. What most do of course is to hammer these changes into the familiar, comfortable Self. It's only when the changes are extra-ordinary enough, that this will no longer be possible.
The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.
Next up: the "network self" and...dasein?

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
How do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics.
This part is always tricky. These are facets of your acquired identity over the years out in a particular world. You might pull back and think, "well, I am these things but they were largely beyond my control. They are in fact a part of who I am and how others react to me...but how much weight should I give them? To what extent are they merely stereotypes and to what extent are they more than just that? "

In other words, like it or not, there is no getting around the politics of identity. You can insist that others not think of you as they have been indoctrinated by others to compartmentalize you -- by others to judge you -- but out in the real world that is always going to be problematic.

Then the truly existential factors...
You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.
Again, these are all empirical/demographic/circumstantial facts about you that may or may not play a significant role in the behaviors that you choose. The important point is that there are so many of them. And the more there are, the more problematic it will be that you can collate them into, what, the most reasonable rendition of Who I Am?

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
User avatar
Harbal
Posts: 9452
Joined: Thu Jun 20, 2013 10:03 pm
Location: Yorkshire
Contact:

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Harbal »

iambiguous wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 3:25 pm
But here I muddy the waters
How inconsiderate, spare a thought for the frogs.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

Harbal wrote: Tue Jul 26, 2022 9:51 pm
iambiguous wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 3:25 pm
But here I muddy the waters
How inconsiderate, spare a thought for the frogs.
As the Philosophy Now forum slowly disintegrates into this: https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php

Pick one:
:shock:
:cry:
:oops:
:wink:
Belinda
Posts: 8030
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

iambiguous wrote: Sat Jul 30, 2022 7:08 pm
Harbal wrote: Tue Jul 26, 2022 9:51 pm
iambiguous wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 3:25 pm
But here I muddy the waters
How inconsiderate, spare a thought for the frogs.
As the Philosophy Now forum slowly disintegrates into this: https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php

Pick one:
:shock:
:cry:
:oops:
:wink:
Me, I never find pure facetiousness entertaining. The only occasions when facetiousness is entertaining is when the joke is a reflection on some aspect of the human condition i.e. satire.

BTW Harbal I read a story by Barbara Pym. She is a master of satire and her understanding of her characters is so complete it's compassionate.
User avatar
Harbal
Posts: 9452
Joined: Thu Jun 20, 2013 10:03 pm
Location: Yorkshire
Contact:

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Harbal »

Belinda wrote: Sun Jul 31, 2022 9:40 am
BTW Harbal I read a story by Barbara Pym. She is a master of satire and her understanding of her characters is so complete it's compassionate.
Will you read any more? I've almost read everything, and now all that's left are a few short stories. She's really got the measure of men, hasn't she? :)
Belinda
Posts: 8030
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

Harbal wrote: Sun Jul 31, 2022 9:48 am
Belinda wrote: Sun Jul 31, 2022 9:40 am
BTW Harbal I read a story by Barbara Pym. She is a master of satire and her understanding of her characters is so complete it's compassionate.
Will you read any more? I've almost read everything, and now all that's left are a few short stories. She's really got the measure of men, hasn't she? :)
Yes, I think her special talent is her style is so light -hearted that she can describe heart felt feelings without the reader noticing. I will read more as I thoroughly enjoyed The Sweet Dove Died

Thanks for the recommendation. I can see why you would like Pym.
Last edited by Belinda on Sun Jul 31, 2022 9:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Harbal
Posts: 9452
Joined: Thu Jun 20, 2013 10:03 pm
Location: Yorkshire
Contact:

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Harbal »

Belinda wrote: Sun Jul 31, 2022 9:52 am
Yes, I think her special talent is her style is so light -hearted that she can describe heart felt feelings without the reader noticing. I will read more as I thoroughly enjoyed The Sweet Dove Died
I hope you will let me know what you think when you've read some more.
User avatar
iambiguous
Posts: 7106
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:23 pm

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by iambiguous »

You are a network
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Kathleen Wallace at aeon website
Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities.
Of course it's the same for each of us. We all come to embody different [sometimes very different] components intertwined in our own complex demographic, circumstantial networks. It's just that some of us acknowledge how in a world of contingency, chance and change it is all but impossible to put all of these pieces together in order to grasp anything even approximating the "real me". Others, however, either brainwashed as children to put all the pieces together and then taking that indoctrinated identity to the grave or coming up with their own more "autonomous" "real me" as adults, live with the assumption that they grasp not only their own singular reality, but the reality that all others are obligated to grasp as well. Call it the Ayn Rand Syndrome. But we've got more than our own fair share of fulminating fanatic objectivists here, right?
Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.
This is just "intellectual speak" for...for what exactly? You tell me how it is applicable to your own sense of identity. Again, I merely make what I construe to be that crucial distinction between the self in the either/or world and the "self" in the is/ought world.

Traits that almost no one will deny is true about you. And then how these traits come together in choosing one set of behaviors rather than another. Your traits, my traits. Your network as you understand it, my network as I understand it. Your behaviors, my behaviors.

Then the moral and political and spiritual wars that follow.

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Belinda
Posts: 8030
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Dasein/dasein

Post by Belinda »

Iambiguous, "fulminating fanatical objectivists" like the rest of us cannot know who they are until the moment of death. Even then each man will have forgotten so much that at the moment of his death he still cannot know who he is.

Absolute knowledge pertains to 'where' all other absolutes are.
Post Reply