[Wellsy]

Spoiler: show

Your interpretation of the state of nature in the context of an absolute individualism is false, the state of nature is merely the absence of a third-party monopolist over human affairs (what I understand to be the state.) Of course man is a social creature, but the essential nature of those social functions must best be understood in their natural light via a lack of arbitrary constraint.

Tigers mate differently in captivity than in the wild, how they mate in the wild is their natural state of reproduction.

Humans can be assessed in similar terms and without an appeal to an irrational conception of man as an isolated individual. That was not what I was arguing.
...
So lets discuss essentialism then.

Here is my argument: the essence of man is logically deducible from certain absolute axioms; from this essence, the performativity of gender as it correlates to sex can be inferred.

Thus, "Patriarchy" is inferable from certain undeniable axioms of logic thus implying other systems of gender function to be irrational (i.e. egalitarianism).

On Universals:

What of the laws of logic then? They are both abstract and concrete (inseparable from phenomena); however, they are not transient, they are absolute and immutable; the contrary claim leading to absurdity.

This being the case, if the essence of man can be logically derived from something undeniable (Axiomatic); then we can speak of a human essence, and even a sexual essence.

I think its time we discuss this.

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=174126&p=14950476#p14950476
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Indeed.

Though my epistemological position is ultimately inseparable from my metaphysical one. Indeed, as you will see, the axioms in both my metaphysical and ethical proofs are pretty close.

However, until I find the time to rewrite both arguments under a single combined axiom (Discursive Consciousness); suffice it for us now to discuss the inferable essence of the sexes from my moral argument; the epistemic limits of which, being better described under my argument for immaterialism as it sets the limits of what can be know about such an essence(s).

State of Nature and the State
Though I believe in the case of Rousseau, Spinoza and Hobbes discussed a state of nature in terms of individuals interacting with one another, you’re right in that it doesn’t require strictly a methodological individualism in that the state of nature. Which is acknowledged in the article I used earlier in being inclusive of family units within tribal society where there is certainly no need for a state or third party to intervene in communal life. Where the division of labor is based around one’s sex, age and relations within the family/kinship.

Though I would emphasize that the state arises historically along with the development of classes based on increases in production. Where the state is the organized violence and political tool of a ruling class. So we see it’s first form in the case of Slave societies with masters of the slaves as the ruling class. Then in Europe we get Feudal society, which extended the state’s function to that of self-defense and hence a warrior class that emerges as significant at this time. The class structure in feudal society is still tied to kinship and familial relations in it’s own way. Here the state was part of the kinship relations and doesn’t exist as something ‘above’ the people as the familial relations have significance within the difference classes. The serf doesn’t relate to the nobles in terms of family/kinship, but duty to one’s superior.
Then we get the merchant class developing during feudalism unregulated by the ethics of the time and preceding the economic development that made them a class powerful enough to challenge the old powers.1 Marx’s view of the capitalist state is that it is an illusion of the real community to be found in civil society, but it is real in the same way that abstract value and labour is real.2

The shared idea of dissolving the state seems agreeable between us, although I am suspect of your sense of how it is to be dissolve without the erasure of classes as defined by their relationship to production. It doesn’t seem an arbitrary association that the state emerges along with class distinctions and rule.


Tigers and Human Nature
A concrete universal (unity of particular and universal) would be what is true of tigers regardless of the environment, even if that nature is distorted in captivity just as it would be for humans.
In regards to Tigers in nature, I would think it better fits their nature being wild animals that they are.
I think I’ll drop the tiger analogy though for clarity in that humans aren’t comparable to Tigers in their nature in that they as wild animals are distinct from human beings.
There is a continuity between humans and animals in that we are natural beings, but we are also quite particularly different from other animals in a way that marks us as essentially human. Otherwise one hasn’t a concept of human nature in order to distinguish humans from any other animal. Where animals in general are driven by instincts, a ‘programme’ for their species, mankind inherits it in the activity one is raised into. 3

If one rejects the continuity of man from nature one ends up with idealist view which rejects the natural nature of man’s existence and the vulgar materialist (still prevalent today) sees man’s actions as only biologically without social distinction. 3

As such, this call for a return to nature for mankind I suspect goes further than you perhaps even expect in that for mankind to be like the tiger or other animals, one would have to essentially not be human. This idea of a family unit labouring for it’s self satisfaction still retains the basis of modern civilization and human nature in general. We aren’t simply driven by instincts, but have a consciousness which has split us from the immediacy of the natural world but allows us to act with greater purpose than an animal thanks to the history of labor and relations that have developed alongside production.


Logic, Empiricism and Essence
Marx’s sense of labor as the concrete universal to human nature is that it is found in any human society and is the basis for everything which has emerged within it. Labor isn’t identical to all it’s products but is the the absolute necessity for the existence of everything in tribal society all the way up to modern society. This is what distinguishes Marx’s universal in that it isn’t abstract identity of things in order to form a concept of a thing, excluded of the assumed inessential characteristics of a thing.


This is why I sometimes reference Ilyenkov’s summary of the concrete universal where he illustrates how the question of what is man (human nature) ends up the abstract identity and tautology of the first law of logic A = A or more specifically, man is man.
Where one doesn’t actually introduce understanding to what human nature is but leaves it unresolved.
Which I suspect is part of a criticism of formal logic that one can’t arrive at new knowledge through formal logic.


This is part of the problem with Kant’s universals, concepts which were posited as external to the empirical world as he considered form and content independent. We simply had concepts and schemata which we then perceived onto the external empirical reality. He didn’t have a sense of how concepts arose historically, and took them as pre-given in human nature.4

So the task isn’t to find something merely universal but something also particular and this is what Marx finds in the concept of labor as the basis of human nature. It is something particular to the nature of being human whilst also found universally in human society.
So in your sense, Marx’s idea of labor would be axiomatic but he didn’t discover this through formal logic but through anthropological study of human existence. Which served him well in regards to distinguishing capitalism as a particularly distinct mode of production where political economists considered labor historically the same as under capitalism rather than distinguishing it from labour power (commodification of labour potential), not seeing both continuity and discontinuity.

I don’t think you’d be able to determine human nature with formal logic because I worry that many rely on a scholastic method which indifferent to it’s truth in reality and that the empirical essence of human nature across time isn’t found in considering each human individual’s sameness (abstract universal).
Something which Hegel criticizes formal logic for, that it is overly concerned with form only.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slsubjec.htm#SL162_3

The Logic of the Notion is usually treated as a science of form only, and understood to deal with the form of notion, judgment, and syllogism as form, without in the least touching the question whether anything is true. The answer to that question is supposed to depend on the content only. If the logical forms of the notion were really dead and inert receptacles of conceptions and thoughts, careless of what they contained, knowledge about them would be an idle curiosity which the truth might dispense with. On the contrary they really are, as forms of the notion, the vital spirit of the actual world. That only is true of the actual which is true in virtue of these forms, through them and in them. As yet, however, the truth of these forms has never been considered or examined on their own account any more than their necessary interconnection.

Which I think is exemplified in your affinity for Hoppe’s argumentative ethics and your own approach in the link to Objective Morality thread. Hoppe made a response of how his argumentation ethics isn’t challenged by empirical facts, as he seems to treat form entirely independent from content much like Kant.
From Economics and Ethics of Private Property By Hans-Hermann Hoppe

My entire argument, then, claims to be an impossibility proof. It is not, as the mentioned critics seem to think, a proof that means to show the impossibility of certain empirical events so that it could be refuted by empirical evidence. Instead, it is a proof that it is impossible to justify non-libertarian property principles propositionally without falling into contradictions. Whatever such a thing is worth, it should be clear that empirical evidence has absolutely no bearing on it. So what if there is slavery, the gulag, taxation? The proof concerns the issue that claiming such institutions can be justified involves a performative contradiction. It is purely intellectual in nature, like logical, mathematical, or praxeological proofs. Its validity, like theirs, can be established independent of any contingent experiences. Nor is its validity in any way affected, as several critics—most notoriously Waters—seem to think, by whether or not people like, favor, understand, or come to a consensus regarding it, or whether or not they are actually engaged in argumentation.

In this method, truth is what fits to a certain concept (a priori axiom) instead of reality itself ie idealism. Hence the relating of axioms to other axioms with some ultimate axiom from which all others are derived on the sense that from the first axiom being absolutely true so to much that which logically follows. 5

And this is a problem in terms of methodology because I don’t think one is guided by the subject material but forces empirical content into one’s pre-existing concepts which may not accurately capture the nature of the subject. 6 This is an arbitrary approach I suspect, rather than one that follows a logical necessity to the subject matter. Which is characteristic of the approach in which abstract universals are posed against the empirical reality which holds no logical necessity that binds the concept to the reality and results in a nominalism that denies the knowability of things beyond certain facts.

The task is to investigate the empirical in order to find the the basic unit of analysis/concrete universal which one can then return to the empirical with the concept (concrete universal) in hand to investigate it more consciously and give the concrete universal more concrete determinations/content to it. Eventually ending up with many concepts that are related to one another, and also reflective of the relations in the real world (ie Marx’s definition of class, where in reality a capitalist class with an independent existence of a working class is nonsensical empirically). 7
Or to put it in it’s simple and short form, one proceeds:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/abstract-labour.htm

by the transition from the concrete to the abstract, and conversely by movement from the abstract to the concrete.

So I view your approach as problematic in it’s method and thus conclusions. It seems focused only on the form (words/signs) and their connection to one another independent of the reality which the concepts are derived from.

Footnotes

Spoiler: show

[url][/url]https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/t.htm#state

[url]http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith3.htm[/ur]

Marx showed how the state, among other institutions, exemplified the estrangement of social life, the antagonism between the interest of the individual and that of the community, which is actually more basic than that between classes.

The state is based on the contradiction between public and private life, on the contradiction between general interests and private interests. [MECW Vol 3, p 198] [The community] takes on an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life. ... On the other hand, too, the practical struggle of these particular interests, which constantly really run counter to the communal and illusory interests, makes practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory ‘general’ interest in the form of the State. [MECW Vol 5, p 46]

So the state is a form of community, but an illusory form, in contrast to the real, human community: ‘In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.’

3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling4.htm

s in every attempt to form an accurate notion of any phenomena, Marx and Engels had here to answer two related questions in establishing the essence of man. They had first to establish the continuity between man and the rest of the world (here Darwin’s work played the vital role) and at the same time they had to establish the difference, within this continuity, between man and the rest of the organic world. Like all living matter, man reacts with his environment, a reaction arising from man’s unity with organic nature and nature as a whole. But his reaction with nature is purposive, unlike that of the animal which remains purely instinctive. Man sets out to achieve definite goals and aims; these goals and aims do not arise, we must stress, from ‘free will’ but are determined by the whole of man’s past practice. And man’s ability to carry out his necessary struggle against nature at a level qualitatively higher than other animals arises essentially from the development of tools. Here lies man’s true uniqueness and it explains Marx’s respect for Franklin’s basically materialist conception.

In arriving at a conception of man which grasped, in the same concept, the unity of man with the animal world and at the same time his distinction from that world, Marx and Engels laid the basis for overcoming a one-sided (and therefore ultimately false) view of this problem. On the one hand, if one separates man metaphysically from the rest of nature one is forced ultimately to an idealist view of non-material forces as the ones which distinguish man. (Such views have, for example, taken the form of vitalism in biology.) On the other hand, equally one-sided would be the view that attempted to reduce the laws of social development to the level of biology. In other words, one cannot either separate absolutely the various forms of matter (the mistake in the first case); nor can one collapse the higher forms into the lower (as in the second case). In this last instance: social processes have certain specific features (‘peculiarities’) that are not inherent in biological phenomena as such, and no matter what biological forms of matter we may study we cannot deduce from them the laws of social phenomena, just as those biological processes cannot in turn be exhausted by the chemical and physical processes which they presuppose.

This latter viewpoint – the one that ignores the qualitative differences between material forms – (or rather tries to reduce more complex forms to simple ones) is a reflection of mechanism, the standpoint which dominated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialism. The seventeenth-century natural scientists picked out velocity, mass and volume as the simplest and most general aspects of all physical phenomena. (This was precisely the method of conceptualisation confined to ‘abstract identity’.) These aspects were in turn considered in a purely quantitative manner. The transformation of these aspects into unique, essential qualities of nature led these scientists to a denial of qualitative distinctions in nature, to a purely quantitative view of the world.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/mikhailov/works/riddle/riddle3b.htm

The point is that all animals without exception inherit the “programme” of their activity biologically. The process of the origin of their species is recorded in the morpho-physiological organisation of each individual of the given population. The animal’s bodily activity “demands” certain vital conditions and substances of nature and the animal seeks them actively and finds itself an environment, a habitat, peculiar to its species. The organism of the individual is the “instrument” of the adaptation of the species. But in so doing the animal inherits and “finds” in itself not only the programme of its life-activity but also the main, essential (and often sufficient) means of realising this programme: its own organs and the ready-made mode of using them.

In man, on the other hand, we encounter a diametrically opposite mode of inheritance. Man inherits part of the “species programme” of life-activity, but the greater part (and precisely the specifically human part) is geared into the “mechanisms” of his life by his mastering the objectified means of culture in intercourse with other people. He even develops his bodily needs and abilities in the process of mastering the historical ways and means of activity and intercourse, such as the need for communication, for prepared food, for “instruments” to consume it with, for objects that provide for the human functioning of his organs, creating the conditions for normal sleep, rest, labour, and so on. And, particularly important, the infinitely diverse and infinitely developing means of realising the inherited “programmes” of life-activity are acquired only in the form of the socially significant instruments of activity and intercourse created by the labour of previous generations.

Academician N. P. Dubinin writes: “The possibilities of human cultural growth are endless. This growth is not imprinted in the genes. It is quite obvious that if the children of contemporary parents were deprived from birth of the conditions of contemporary culture, they would remain at the level of our most remote ancestors who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Whereas the children of such “primitive people” placed in the conditions of contemporary culture would rise to the heights of contemporary man.” [2]

But this means that the very foundations of the life of man and that of the animals are diametrically opposed. In order to survive, the animal must carry in its body both its “programme” and the means of realising it. Man, on the other hand, must possess a human organic body capable of mastering as it goes along any historically developed “programme” and the means of its realisation. And for this reason the genetic fixation of any given mode of activity and intercourse (and biological evolution has no other means of ensuring survival of the species) would spell death for man.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.

4.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htm#Pill2

To examine this matter further, let us consider Kant’s position, a position which appears to be at the root of many misunderstandings about Capital. In an effort to vindicate scientific reason in the light of Hume’s rejection of causation and of knowledge of the external world, Kant argued that the mind is an instrument which, by its very construction, always apprehends isolated, individual facts in rational form. Kant realised that without categories, rational thought was impossible; but for him these categories have their basis in our thoughts, thought which is necessarily sundered from the material world. Sensation and the logical moments of knowledge do not on this view have a common basis – there is and can be no transition between the two. (Or as the Althusserian; would put it, ‘Our constructions and our arguments are in theoretical terms and they can only be evaluated in theoretical terms – in terms, that is to say, of their rigour and theoretical coherence. They cannot be refuted by any empiricist recourse to the supposed “facts” of history’ (Hindess and Hirst, 1975, p. 3).) Concepts, according to Kantianism, do not grow up and develop out of the sensed world but are already given before it, in the a priori categories of reasoning. These categories are supposed to grasp the multifarious material given in sensation, but themselves remain fixed and dead. ‘Sensation’ and ‘reason’ were counterposed to each other in thoroughly mechanical manner, with no connection between them. And the same was true of the content of knowledge and its forms.
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But let us note here that it was Hegel, on the basis of his criticism of Kantianism, who attempted to resolve the problem (of the connection between the ‘sensed’ and the ‘logical’, the ‘content’ and the ‘form’) by showing that thought is a dialectical process of movement, from thought of a lower grade to that of a higher grade.

According to Hegel, concepts developed by thought ceased to be dead, a priori products of the individual mind, but forms endowed with life, the life of the movement of thought itself. This is Lenin’s point when he says, ‘ What Hegel demands is a logic the forms of which would be forms with content, inseparably connected with that content’
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In this respect there can be no doubt whatsoever that Marx adopted Hegel’s position (against Kant). In stressing the historical and objective nature of concepts, Hegel prepared the way for introducing the role of practice into human thought, even though his conception of this practice remained too narrow. Marx followed Hegel’s lead in insisting that the movement from the ‘sensed’ to the ‘logical’ was a process in which social man penetrated ever more deeply through the appearance of phenomena, deeper and deeper into their essence. It was this social practice that lies at the very heart and foundation of the development of man’s conceptual thinking. The form taken by man’s knowledge, summarised in the concepts of science, represents an index, a resume, of his education and in particular the education of his senses.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm

In Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay3.htm

For what then, in that case, is it in general needed? Exclusively for checking the correctness of so-called analytical judgments, i.e. ultimately, acts of verbal exposition of ready-made ideas already present in the head, however unsound these ideas are in themselves, Kant stated in full agreement with Berkeley, Descartes, and Leibniz. The contradiction between a concept (i.e. a rigorously defined idea) and experience and the facts (their determinations) is a situation about which general logic has no right to say anything, because then it is a question already of an act of subsuming facts under the definition of a concept and not of disclosures of the sense that was previously contained in the concept. (For example, if I affirm that ‘all swans are white’, then, having seen a bird identical in all respects except colour with my idea of a swan, I shall be faced with a difficulty, which general logic cannot help me to resolve in any way. One thing is clear, that this bird will not be subsumed under my concept ‘swan’ without contradiction, and I shall be obliged to say: it is not a swan. If, all the same, I recognise it as a swan, then the contradiction between the concept and the fact will already be converted into a contradiction between the determinations of the concept, because the subject of the judgment (swan) will be defined through two mutually exclusive predicates (‘white’ and ‘not white’). And that is already inadmissible and equivalent to recognition that my initial concept was incorrectly defined, and that it must be altered, in order to eliminate the contradiction.)

So that every time the question arises of whether or not to subsume a given fact under a given concept, the appearance of a contradiction cannot be taken at all as an index of the accuracy or inaccuracy of a judgment. A judgment may prove to be true simply because the contradiction in the given case demolishes the initial concept, and reveals its contradictoriness, and hence its falsity. That is why one cannot apply the criteria of general logic unthinkingly where it is a matter of experimental judgments, of the acts of subsuming facts under the definition of a concept, of acts of concretising an initial concept through the facts of experience. For in such judgments the initial concept is not simply explained but has new determinations added to it. A synthesis takes place, a uniting of determinations, and not analysis, i.e. the breaking down of already existing determinations into details.

5. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling6.htm

The abstractions from which political economy began presupposed a concrete and definite form of society ‘Hence in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition’. It is important to keep this point always in mind, otherwise we can fall into the idealist illusion that concepts merely grow out of concepts, forgetting that all concepts presuppose and are rooted in a definite form of human practice. Just as the capitalist thinks that money breeds money and is uninterested in the material basis for this process so the professional ideologist tends always to see his knowledge as the beginning and the end of his life activity. This is the most basic prejudice of all idealisms.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htm

In general, we obtain the well-known program of Neopositivism with its utopian hopes of erecting a system of “rules” that provide procedures for going from language to facts that lie outside of language, and vice versa, where there must be no “contradictions” within language. This leads to the main principle of the Neopositivist solution – if you have verbalized certain known facts but have nevertheless obtained a contradiction within language, then it means that you have verbalized the facts “incorrectly” – not according to the rules. It means that you have “broken” some “rule of verbalization”.

You have crossed the boundary dividing the world of the verbalized from the world of the unverbalized, into some place that is forbidden (“by the rules”).

The Neopositivist program, with its accompanying “logic,” is therefore regressive in its very essence. It replaces the real problem of knowledge – as knowledge (cognition) of an object that exists not only outside of language but also independent of any self-organized language – by the problem of the verbal formation of verbally unformed material. Here the latter is thought of as the totally unformed chaos of “sense data,” as the passive material of “knowledge,” which can be formed verbally in one of two ways – either “correctly” or “incorrectly.” But here “correctly” means according to the rules of available language, i.e. such that it is forced to fit without contradiction into available language, into the available semantic–syntactic “framework,” into available “knowledge”.

The real problem of the cognition of the object has therefore been twisted around into a purely linguistic problem – the problem of first assimilating available language (“the language of science”) and then of assimilating “facts” in the forms of this (available) language. Naturally, this problem is solved by refining one’s linguistic ingenuity, allowing any “data” to be expressed in such a way that they work without a hitch, without contradiction, within the available “language framework,” within available “knowledge.”

This is precisely what Imre Lakatos had in mind when he rightly noted that the Neopositivist program, if realized, would mean the death of science – available knowledge would forever be “frozen” in the form of the available language of science. And the object would forever be doomed to the pathetic role of an object of linguistic manipulations and would not be present in the content of knowledge in any other form. It would not be allowed in – it would be held back at the entrance to “knowledge” by the filters of Neopositivistic “logic.”

And therefore, according to this logic, it is also not permitted to know the object (as something outside of and independent of language). We can know only “the language of a particular object region.” And the question of which “facts” are included in it (i.e. do not contradict it), and which are excluded from it (i.e. contradict it), depends on which “language” is assumed.

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/i/d.htm

Idealism can also be understood as the practice of understanding abstractions through other abstractions; where an abstraction is something that does not necessarily have basis nor relation to reality, but only exists in relation to other abstractions. The primary concern for the idealist is to create concepts that adequately explain (and change of viewpoint of) the world as we know it.
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For an example of idealism, what follows are the beliefs of three prominent idealist philosophers in regards to what is truth. While truth is an abstract, or ideal from reality; idealists understand such abstractions through equating them to other abstractions:
Descartes: "true are those things that are certain."
Husserl: "truth is doubt"
Hegel: "the element in which truth is found is the notion"

The materialist, on the other hand, understands abstractions by equating them to reality.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff2.htm

The essence of empiricism is that as a theory of knowledge it holds that sensory experience is the only source of knowledge and affirms that all knowledge is founded on experience and is obtained through experience. One reflection of this philosophical method is that it takes a series of facts as ‘given’ (by experience), that is, takes them uncritically, accepting them as fixed and natural phenomena and using them as the basis on which an analytical structure can be built. According to this conception, a general law – such as the law of value – is taken as given, as a point of departure. Such a general law, argues the empiricist, can be upheld only when it can be established as an immediately given principle under which all the facts being considered can be directly subsumed, without contradiction. The ‘general’ for the empiricist is mechanically constructed out of a series of ‘concrete’ experiences and in this way all dialectical relations are set aside, since the universal is merely analysed from the empirically concrete. Engels characterises this method – this starting with so-called ‘principles’ or ‘laws’ which are tested against ‘the facts’ as ideological – as a method which inverts the true process by which knowledge develops.

“The general results of the investigation of the world are obtained at the end of this investigation, hence are not principles, points of departure, but results, conclusions. To construct the latter in one’s head is ideology, an ideology which tainted every species of materialism hitherto existing. (Engels, Anti-Duhring)”

And Engels immediately points out the roots of this ideology: it rested on a lack of understanding of the origin of thought in definite historical-social conditions. ‘While in nature the relationship of thinking to being was certainly to some extent clear to materialism in history it was not, nor did materialism realise the dependence of all thought upon the historical material conditions obtaining at the particular time.’

This method of starting from principles (instead of abstracting them in the course of theoretical work) was essentially the same as starting from abstract definitions, into which the facts are then ‘fitted’. (An example of such a method would be that commonly used to ‘prove’ that the USSR is ‘capitalist’. A fixed definition of capitalism is erected – one involving wage labour and commodity production for instance. Certain ‘facts’ are then taken from the USSR – where undoubtedly wage labour and commodity production exist, and on this basis the USSR is ‘shown’ to be capitalist.)

6. https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm

In addressing the genesis of thought and language in human individuals, it would have been very tempting for an admirer of dialectics to seek a solution in some kind of reworking of Hegel’s genesis of the Notion in his Logic. But heeding Engels’ advice, Vygotsky utilised the dialectical method, and did so consistently materialistically. Whereas Hegel provided many insights in his analysis of the history of philosophy on the basis of the system of Logic, and his system continues to provide a valuable approach to the critique of philosophical method, the result of Vygotsky’s application of the dialectical method to the genesis of thought and language in the development of the individual human being is a series of concepts quite incommensurate with the stages of the Logical Idea which populate the pages of the Logic.

And so it should be! Hegel advises that: “... this progress in knowing is not something provisional, or problematical and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and its content”.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch08.htm

This is only giving a new twist to the old favourite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object, by logical deduction from the concept of the object, instead of from the object itself. First the concept of the object is fabricated from the object; then the spit is turned round, and the object is measured by its reflexion, the concept. The object is then to conform to the concept, not the concept to the object. With Herr Dühring the simplest elements, the ultimate abstractions he can reach, do service for the concept, which does not alter matters; these simplest elements are at best of a purely conceptual nature. The philosophy of reality, therefore, proves here again to be pure ideology, the deduction of reality not from itself but from a concept.

And when such an ideologist constructs morality and law from the concept, or the so-called simplest elements of “society”, instead of from the real social relations of the people round him, what material is then available for this construction? Material clearly of two kinds: first, the meagre residue of real content which may possibly survive in the abstractions from which he starts and, secondly, the content which our ideologist once more introduces from his own consciousness. And what does he find in his consciousness? For the most part, moral and juridical notions which are a more or less accurate expression (positive or negative, corroborative or antagonistic) of the social and political relations amidst which he lives; perhaps also ideas drawn from the literature on the subject; and, as a final possibility, some personal idiosyncrasies. Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day — an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.

7. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3

If I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#unit
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm

8. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/third.htm

To this enlightened political economy, which has discovered – within private property – the subjective essence of wealth, the adherents of the monetary and mercantile system, who look upon private property only as an objective substance confronting men, seem therefore to be fetishists, Catholics. Engels was therefore right to call Adam Smith the Luther of Political Economy [See Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy]. Just as Luther recognised religion – faith – as the substance of the external world and in consequence stood opposed to Catholic paganism – just as he superseded external religiosity by making religiosity the inner substance of man – just as he negated the priests outside the layman because he transplanted the priest into laymen's hearts, just so with wealth: wealth as something outside man and independent of him, and therefore as something to be maintained and asserted only in an external fashion, is done away with; that is, this external, mindless objectivity of wealth is done away with, with private property being incorporated in man himself and with man himself being recognised as its essence. But as a result man is brought within the orbit of private property, just as with Luther he is brought within the orbit of religion. Under the semblance of recognising man, the political economy whose principle is labour rather carries to its logical conclusion the denial of man, since man himself no longer stands in an external relation of tension to the external substance of private property, but has himself become this tense essence of private property. What was previously being external to oneself – man's actual externalisation – has merely become the act of externalising – the process of alienating. This political economy begins by seeming to acknowledge man (his independence, spontaneity, etc.); then, locating private property in man's own being, it can no longer be conditioned by the local, national or other characteristics of private property as of something existing outside itself.

Also, I am working on a quick response to the other thread/objective morality.

[B0ycey]

I can't believe I am doing this, but @RhetoricThug has the answer to this thread.

If we accept that Vernadsky is correct where cognitive thinking is the next step of the development of the world, then the Noosphere is an information loop (cognitive reality) which we all must adapt within and which we can also alter (the geosphere) of that reality with our interaction of that information that is provided to us from the transfer of energy [Newton's third law] to our senses. VS argument that consciousness cannot be proven as within our own consciousness we cannot observe someone elses consciousness - only we witness the movement of an individual instead. But we all know consciousness must exist by having our own consciousness in the first place. And if we as an individual can have a conscious then this is evidence enough that the possibility someone else could also have a conscious as well in our reality too. Although I will point out that this is not correlation but a possibility.

So to show correlation, Vernadsky and science now comes into play. Everything we know is information. The first stage of information is matter (Geosphere), the next stage is biosphere (life) and currently we are in the Noosphere (cognitive thinking). Within our metaphysical existence we have the ability to alter information. So if we begin with sight, light is information which interacts with matter in the biosphere. It creates our existence as we "see" it. When light interacts with our senses we interpret the reality within our consciousness. And how our cognitive thinking reacts to that information alters the noosphere. Same applies with our other senses. So if you want to prove other consciousness exists, according to Vernadsky (and science), all you need to do in monitor information and how that information interacts with each other (correlation). If another individual alters the noosphere, information (ie someone else moves something), has been transfered and the Noosphere has been altered. That is not to say Immaterialism doesn't exist (I suspect it does), but the existence of God is not required. All that is required to create our reality is matter (Geosphere), life (Biosphere) cognitive thinking (Noosphere) and the transfer of energy within the Noosphere (Newton's third law). All of which has much more supporting evidence (Occam) than an assumption that God must exist in a reality that reappears and disappears depending where we look.

[One Degree]

I can't believe I am doing this, but @RhetoricThug has the answer to this thread.

If we accept that Vernadsky is correct where cognitive thinking is the next step of the development of the world, then the Noosphere is an information loop (cognitive reality) which we all must adapt within and which we can also alter (the geosphere) of that reality with our interaction of that information that is provided to us from the transfer of energy [Newton's third law] to our senses. VS argument that consciousness cannot be proven as within our own consciousness we cannot observe someone elses consciousness - only we witness the movement of an individual instead. But we all know consciousness must exist by having our own consciousness in the first place. And if we as an individual can have a conscious then this is evidence enough that the possibility someone else could also have a conscious as well in our reality too. Although I will point out that this is not correlation but a possibility.

So to show correlation, Vernadsky and science now comes into play. Everything we know is information. The first stage of information is matter (Geosphere), the next stage is biosphere (life) and currently we are in the Noosphere (cognitive thinking). Within our metaphysical existence we have the ability to alter information. So if we begin with sight, light is information which interacts with matter in the biosphere. It creates our existence as we "see" it. When light interacts with our senses we interpret the reality within our consciousness. And how our cognitive thinking reacts to that information alters the noosphere. Same applies with our other senses. So if you want to prove other consciousness exists, according to Vernadsky (and science), all you need to do in monitor information and how that information interacts with each other (correlation). If another individual alters the noosphere, information (ie someone else moves something), has been transfered and the Noosphere has been altered. That is not to say Immaterialism doesn't exist (I suspect it does), but the existence of God is not required. All that is required to create our reality is matter (Geosphere), life (Biosphere) cognitive thinking (Noosphere) and the transfer of energy within the Noosphere (Newton's third law). All of which has much more supporting evidence (Occam) than an assumption that God must exist in a reality that reappears and disappears depending where we look.

You perhaps understand it better than I do, but my limited understanding doesn’t require knowing whether God exists or not. It is what it is, and that is we create reality from our thoughts (information).

[B0ycey]

You perhaps understand it better than I do, but my limited understanding doesn’t require knowing whether God exists or not. It is what it is, and that is we create reality from our thoughts (information).

God existence matters to VS though. He has taken a complete Berkeleyian approach to his argument which is solely based on a need for Gods perception. It has got to the point now that immaterialism isn't being rejected (so doesn't need defending) but why we need Gods existence as an axiomatic for its defence. If matter is information, then it doesn't exist as a physical form. And if it is information, then God is also not needed to believe in an immaterial reality either. Everything is within an information loop and it works using transfer of energy within the Noosphere which in turn reflects cognitive reaction. And as such RT's ramblings become very relevant and I feel they are more persuasive as an argument than VS's at this point when both are trying to explain our reality.

[Wellsy]

Think the social nature of consciousness is a good basis for explaining the possibility of self-consciousness and undermining the position of reflexive consciousness as consciousness in general as conscious is my relation to the environment in its simplest form. Other special grades of consciousness come later in the social development of human beings but now being present are seen as coming later in biological maturity.

Spoiler: show

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/les-treilles-talk.htm

Fichte asked: How does an ‘I’ become a free person? – and we can take Fichte’s idea of the ‘free person’ as synonymous with what I mean by ‘subject’. An ‘I’ can only find in its internal world, what it first finds in the external world, he claimed, but surely a person who is not already a free person will not be able to recognise a free person when it sees one, since it does not know freedom. Only when summoned, said Fichte, by another free person who recognises them as a free person, summoned to exercise their freedom, is there the possibility that the ‘I’ may recognise itself as a free person. A person’s recognition of themselves, their self-consciousness, therefore, comes from outside, from their recognition by others.

This is the origin of the concept of ‘recognition’, by means of which people get to know themselves as free agents, and acquire rights and obligations in society. The basic idea is that self-consciousness and free will is kindled from outside, from being recognised as a member of society, not from inside.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/consciousness.htm

Here, too, is the root of the question of another person’s “I”, i.e., of how I can know the mind of another person. The mechanism for knowing oneself (self-awareness) is the same as the mechanism for knowing others. Usual theories of our knowledge of another’s mind either proclaim forthwith its unknowability [34] or, by means of a variety of hypotheses, endeavour to construct a plausible mechanism that essentially is the same in a theory of sensations or a theory of analogy: we know others because we know ourselves; in getting to know the anger of someone else, I am reproducing my own anger [35].

Actually, it would be more correct to say just on the contrary. We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same as others in their relationship to us. I am aware of myself only to the extent that I am as another for myself, i.e., only to the extent that I can perceive anew my own reflexes as new irritants. Between the fact that I can repeat aloud a word spoken silently to myself and the fact that I can repeat a word spoken by another there is no essential difference, nor is there any principal difference in their mechanisms: both are reversible reflexes – irritants.

Therefore, a direct consequence of this hypothesis will be the “sociologising” of all consciousness, the recognition that the social moment of consciousness is primary in time and in fact. The individual aspect of consciousness is constructed as derived and secondary, based on the social and exactly according to its model. [36].

The excellent confirmation of this thought of the identity between the mechanism of consciousness and the mechanism of social contact and the idea that consciousness is, as it were, social contact with oneself, is the process of development of an awareness of speech in the deaf-mutes and partly by the development of tactile responses in the blind. The speech of the deaf-mutes usually does not develop but remains frozen at the stage of a reflex cry not because the speech centres are damaged, but because, owing to the loss of hearing, the possibility of reversible speech reflexes is paralysed. Speech cannot return as an irritant to the speaker himself. Because of this it remains unconscious and asocial. The deaf-mutes are usually limited to a conventional language of gestures that links them to the narrow circle of social experience of other deaf-mutes and develops consciousness in them by virtue of the fact that these reflexes revert back to the mute himself through his eyes.

The education of the deaf-mute from the psychological side entails restoring, or compensating for, the destroyed mechanism of reflex reversibility. The mutes learn to speak by reading articulatory movements of a speaker’s lips and learn to speak themselves by making use of the secondary kinaesthetic irritations occurring during speech motor reactions.[38]

What is most remarkable in all this is that conscious awareness of speech and social experience emerge simultaneously and completely parallel with one another. It is in some sense a specially arranged experiment of nature that confirms the main thesis of this article. In a special work I hope to demonstrate this more clearly and fully. The deaf-mute learns to be conscious of himself and his movements to the extent that he learns to be conscious of others. The identity of the two mechanisms is amazingly clear and almost obvious.

[B0ycey]

I think your second article explains the relationship of self awareness as a logical evaluation to deduce new forms of consciousness away from our own @Wellsy. Matter without consciousness will follow a linear pattern. If the pattern changes away from from the actions of our own consciousness and we are aware of this change, then the only logical conclusion is another consciousness away from our own must of initiated that change as matter follows objective laws within an ecosphere.

[One Degree]

So ‘free will’ is not an individual trait, but is held in common by humanity?

[Wellsy]

I think your second article explains the relationship of self awareness as a logical evaluation to deduce new forms of consciousness away from our own @Wellsy. Matter without consciousness will follow a linear pattern. If the pattern changes away from from the actions of our own consciousness and we are aware of this change, then the only logical conclusion is another consciousness away from our own must of initiated that change as matter follows objective laws within an ecosphere.

What the aeticle emphasizes is the social nature of consciousness and Vygotsky did brilliant work to illustrate the external forms that become internalized. The point here functions to displace the primacy of self consciousness.

And when it comes to another persons consciousness we mist infer it scientifically based on their behaviour. Other peoples consciousness can be considered matter in tje philsophical sense of that which exists outside my own consciousness. Because consciousness isn’t a directly observable phenemon and must be deduced from appearences.
Something like another person interferring in the material world would be one good inference although not a certainty in itself.


And yes free will is social and historically contingent rather than pre-given for all of human history just like the sovereign individual. It emerges at certain points in social development of human activity. But it becomes an individuals because it is social.

[B0ycey]

I think I am considering the Turing Test more in regards to evaluating others consciousness within the mechanism of conscious awareness. If within a social contract we interact with each other and the results are spontaneous in regards to the conditions of that contract (they are unpredictable) that means that it is the noosphere (cognitive) that must have created the results as they are not linear like what you would have found within the ecosphere. Self awareness just allows the individual to understand this and process the information within their own consciousness. In other words, the evidence of other people consciousness can only be understood by understanding your own consciousness and evaluating that from others actions within reality.

[RhetoricThug]

When RT came down from the mountain, he thanked forum image B0ycey for his time and attention.

Alas... After a whisper, RT retreated to the higher planes to contemplate ∞

[Wellsy]

I think I am considering the Turing Test more in regards to evaluating others consciousness within the mechanism of conscious awareness. If within a social contract we interact with each other and the results are spontaneous in regards to the conditions of that contract (they are unpredictable) that means that it is the noosphere (cognitive) that must have created the results as they are not linear like what you would have found within the ecosphere. Self awareness just allows the individual to understand this and process the information within their own consciousness. In other words, the evidence of other people consciousness can only be understood by understanding your own consciousness and evaluating that from others actions within reality.

You might've noted how Vygotsky wrote
"The mechanism for knowing oneself (self-awareness) is the same as the mechanism for knowing others.
...
the identity between the mechanism of consciousness and the mechanism of social contact and the idea that consciousness is, as it were, social contact with oneself"
But I do wish to emphasize that consciousness is social in origins rather than originating from the individual towards in the first instance.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm

In contradiction to Piaget’s conception of development as socialisation, Vygotsky says:

“The earliest speech of the child is ... essentially social. ... At a certain age the social speech of the child is quite sharply divided into egocentric and communicative speech ... Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behaviour to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions ... Egocentric speech, splintered off from general social speech, in time leads to inner speech, which serves both autistic and logical thinking. ... the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual.” [Thought and Language, Chapter 2]

Human thought develops NOT from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual! What a stunningly correct and dialectical conception! So much for the subjective idealist prejudice that all human beings begin as individuals, their development consisting of the cancellation of their essential, inner individuality!

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm

In the opinion of Marx, it is an error to assume that the primary psychological constitution of the individual can be distinguished from his socially acquired characteristics and that the latter, being a product of social existence, are in a sense artificial and secondary, since they are derivable from the former. The differentiation between what man owes to society and to his primary, true, and unchanging nature, can be disregarded as a pseudo-problem or a mere figment of speculation.

If one takes this to an extreme rather than a reflection of how it can work at present, then one may well obscure the origins and development of consciousness. This is why Vygotsky emphasizes that self-consciousness arises from comprehending another person's consciousness and the description from Fichte of free will as a social product, that one must be recognized in a certain way for their consciousness to develop a sense of having free will. If one is essentially treated as a thing, then ones consciousness is stunted from developing what we may take as a given in any and every individual.
You don't understand yourself first than others but others then yourself.

But yes, in regards to the spontaneity of someone else's actions one would more likely infer consciousness than of a mechanistic materialism of physical objects interacting with one another in nature.
Although not sure if it really touches upon a point you made, I would say that we tend to already know things before they arise in our own awareness. One must internalize the activity necessary for task before one can then consciously control it.
A distinction between things that happen automatically and the mediation of our conscious control over our body over those same mechanisms.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/dammassio.htm

Despite the eccentricity of ascribing ‘emotions’ to all organisms from the single cell upwards, I appreciate the distinction Dammassio makes between emotions – dispositions of the body which organisms adopt, more or less automatically, in response to stimuli which serve to promote restoration of homeostasis, and feelings – dispositions of the mind in which perceptions of emotions expressed in the body, in turn modify those same emotions, and for which mental events can also act as stimuli. This sets up the suggestive and useful idea of the ‘brain-body loop’, including the ‘as-if brain-body loop’ where the stimulus is mental.

This conception allows Dammassio to explain how the whole body participates in thinking, by mediating processes in the brain. A feeling causes a change in the body (e.g. a tightening of the stomach in response to some cause of anxiety) which in turn produces the sensation of that same emotion (e.g., you feel your stomach tighten, alerting you to your anxiety). This is a very useful idea, and needs in fact to be generalised. It would seem that the body is able to play this mediating role in brain activity of all kinds, not just feelings and emotions. Dammassio provides a strong argument for insistence on understanding the whole person, at least, as the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding thinking, not just the brain.

https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/determinism.pdf

The first element of Vygotsky’s theory of self-control is that “in voluntary action, we must differentiate two apparatus that are relatively independent of each other.”

(1) “a conditioned reflex is constructed” – an internal change in the subject’s nervous system, and then at a later time:
(2) “the actuating apparatus, that is, the functioning of the cerebral connection already formed in this way,” when the subject acts.

If we were to consider how an athlete or artist or mathematician achieves a particular feat, there are two phases: first a protracted process of training their bodies to respond to artificial stimuli in certain complex ways, and secondly the performance of the feat by the activation of the selfconstructed bodily apparatus. In this second phase, the various forms of action have been mastered and are executed with conscious control, but without conscious direction of the individual reactions. (‘Consciousness’ includes those processes which, while not part of conscious awareness, can move into conscious awareness in response to events.)

Hence why we must practice certain types of activity before we can then meaningfully control it.
And is also why freedom isn't freedom to do anything as it would be irrational, one must be in control of one's self before they can meaningfully direct their own actions consciously. And such a development arises through our initiation into social practices and regulation of our behaviour.

[One Degree]

Some rambling that perhaps someone can respond to.

It requires consciousness to recognize consciousness in others. No matter how early in our development you go, we still require consciousness of our own to react to others. Calling them different types of consciousness doesn’t really answer it imo. That is often a sleight of hand to avoid admitting you don’t have an answer.
The same would appear to be true of ‘free will’. You must possess some on your own as well as what the social creates.
Maybe the problem is in trying to separate the individual from the whole? If we are one thing, then we would inherently have some parts of the whole.

[Wellsy]

Some rambling that perhaps someone can respond to.

It requires consciousness to recognize consciousness in others. No matter how early in our development you go, we still require consciousness of our own to react to others. Calling them different types of consciousness doesn’t really answer it imo. That is often a sleight of hand to avoid admitting you don’t have an answer.
The same would appear to be true of ‘free will’. You must possess some on your own as well as what the social creates.
Maybe the problem is in trying to separate the individual from the whole? If we are one thing, then we would inherently have some parts of the whole.

Not sure how to respond as no one is denying that one requires consciousness to recognize it in others. Rather the point is about self consciousness, which perhaps in your haste you haven’t made a clear point about and so i am unsure whether to engage based on a point of it.

And what ever any indivudla possess is social in nature. Human beings biologically are largely the same as they have been for many years but our social development based on our activity has changed radically. Such that humans within modern society are significantly different than tribal peoples.

The concept and possibility of free will arises within particular circumstances just as the very concept of the individual subject comes at a certain point in history. Kants transcendant subject is thoroughly different than that for the ancient greeks which is a person only to the extent of their relationship to the polis/society.

The emergence of these concepts are reflective of their time and place as well as the development of humans. The first human are like us biologically but not in the content of their consciousness because of their different relation to the world.

[B0ycey]

You might've noted how Vygotsky wrote
"The mechanism for knowing oneself (self-awareness) is the same as the mechanism for knowing others.
...
the identity between the mechanism of consciousness and the mechanism of social contact and the idea that consciousness is, as it were, social contact with oneself"
But I do wish to emphasize that consciousness is social in origins rather than originating from the individual towards in the first instance.

I suspect the mechanisms of consciousness is interaction. But does that need to be social interaction? I have to research Vygotsky before I reach a conclusion. But I suspect his work might even compliment that of Vernadsky. The Noosphere is after all interaction of the ecosphere from cognitive thinking. Social interaction is also cognitive thinking. Using Turing and you might formulate proof of consciousness thought with reasoning. The answer is here I sense it. It just needs more research.

Although I think this statement has some foundation to it.

the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual.” [Thought and Language, Chapter 2]

Again this is something RT has brought up in his Amish thread. That is it is the superstructure that dictates thought (culture - base) and which will formulate change. By halting technogical advancement you will in turn stagnate thought (culture). Although your analysis....

Human thought develops NOT from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual! What a stunningly correct and dialectical conception! So much for the subjective idealist prejudice that all human beings begin as individuals, their development consisting of the cancellation of their essential, inner individuality!

...has merit too. And in terms of this thread is evidence that it is external information which brings forward conscious thought, which in turn will evolve the reality we live in - and as such cannot be something that is independent from ourselves. If that is the case, consciousness cannot be only mind dependent. The mind is only 50% of the story. The other 50% is information that interacts through our senses by the external reality which then is converted into a cognitive thought. Which brings me onto my final point. If you understand the cause of consciousness, that is the information interacting with our senses to create cognitive thought, you can test how that information interacts with other beings and correlate that information with results. You can then compare the results with what you can expect to find within the linear measurable ecosphere and then determine whether there has been conscious thought involved in altering the reality (Noosphere) you now witness in front of you.

In the opinion of Marx, it is an error to assume that the primary psychological constitution of the individual can be distinguished from his socially acquired characteristics and that the latter, being a product of social existence, are in a sense artificial and secondary, since they are derivable from the former. The differentiation between what man owes to society and to his primary, true, and unchanging nature, can be disregarded as a pseudo-problem or a mere figment of speculation.

Indeed. Although this is perhaps has more to do with behaviour rather than proof of consciousness itself. Although again this links well with Amish thread. And explains the mechanisms of Dialectical Materialism.

If one takes this to an extreme rather than a reflection of how it can work at present, then one may well obscure the origins and development of consciousness. This is why Vygotsky emphasizes that self-consciousness arises from comprehending another person's consciousness and the description from Fichte of free will as a social product, that one must be recognized in a certain way for their consciousness to develop a sense of having free will. If one is essentially treated as a thing, then ones consciousness is stunted from developing what we may take as a given in any and every individual.
You don't understand yourself first than others but others then yourself.

I suspect this is true. It sounds like the process of learning from nothing. We are born without knowledge but with instinct. To understand what consciousness is we must learn what it can be and what it is from the behavour of others. It reminds me of an Einstein thought experiment. That is if you are in an evelator in space, is it gravity that pushes you down to the bottom or the motion of the lift rising up? From inside the lift, we cannot know as the sensations are the same. Only from the outside is the answer discovered. The same is true with consciousness. We see an apple, how do we know that the information that creates the illusion exists externally and is not a thought process in our heads? Simple, by monitoring the behavior of others to the apple. If they can also interact with it, it is not something that is dependent on our thoughts alone.

But yes, in regards to the spontaneity of someone else's actions one would more likely infer consciousness than of a mechanistic materialism of physical objects interacting with one another in nature.
Although not sure if it really touches upon a point you made, I would say that we tend to already know things before they arise in our own awareness.

Indeed. But my point was ways to determine proof that there is consciousness interaction existing that is different from my own in this reality. That is, how do I know you have a conscious? The Ecosphere (matter) is linear in behaviour. Any deviance from that behavour is proof of information being altered in our reality (noosphere). If the correlation of that information changing leads back to actions you took and they correspond to my own cognitive reaction, then that is evidence that you are also conscious in regards to my learning within a social environment.

One must internalize the activity necessary for task before one can then consciously control it.
A distinction between things that happen automatically and the mediation of our conscious control over our body over those same mechanisms.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/dammassio.htm

I quite like this experiment. Although it does bring forward new ideas of consciousness behavour and how that alters reality (noosphere). That is, behavour that is involuntary. Nonetheless I think we are on the same wavelength. We have just reached the same conclusion using alternative paths.

[One Degree]

Not sure how to respond as no one is denying that one requires consciousness to recognize it in others. Rather the point is about self consciousness, which perhaps in your haste you haven’t made a clear point about and so i am unsure whether to engage based on a point of it.

And what ever any indivudla possess is social in nature. Human beings biologically are largely the same as they have been for many years but our social development based on our activity has changed radically. Such that humans within modern society are significantly different than tribal peoples.

The concept and possibility of free will arises within particular circumstances just as the very concept of the individual subject comes at a certain point in history. Kants transcendant subject is thoroughly different than that for the ancient greeks which is a person only to the extent of their relationship to the polis/society.

The emergence of these concepts are reflective of their time and place as well as the development of humans. The first human are like us biologically but not in the content of their consciousness because of their different relation to the world.

I guess my point is they can’t emerge through social contact without already existing in the individual, at least in a rudimentary or dormant state. You can’t create something without the components already being there.
If I understand you correctly, that we are ‘more conscious’ than our ancestors or other groups based upon our interactions, then I don’t buy it. If it ‘emerged’ then it was when we became Homo sapiens. The increase in knowledge is not the same as consciousness or self consciousness. Our ability to string nice sounding words together is more proof of our arrogance than it is increased understanding. We have no way at present of knowing if what we think we know means anything at all. We have what man has always had, a quest for understanding. You can run a very long way and still find out you were on the wrong road.
Apologies, if I misunderstood, but I felt the concept was being expanded beyond what it really means and being used to justify our current ‘superiority’.

[Victoribus Spolia]

I. The State of Nature.

Though I believe in the case of Rousseau, Spinoza and Hobbes discussed a state of nature in terms of individuals interacting with one another, you’re right in that it doesn’t require strictly a methodological individualism in that the state of nature. Which is acknowledged in the article I used earlier in being inclusive of family units within tribal society where there is certainly no need for a state or third party to intervene in communal life. Where the division of labor is based around one’s sex, age and relations within the family/kinship.

Agree, with gusto.

Though I would emphasize that the state arises historically along with the development of classes based on increases in production. Where the state is the organized violence and political tool of a ruling class. So we see it’s first form in the case of Slave societies with masters of the slaves as the ruling class.

I don't entirely disagree with Marx on this; however, that is part of my criticism that our modern system is not capitalism; true capitalism is anarcho-capitalism. The use of the state as a means of creating and protecting a certain class is not an argument against the existence of natural elites, just unnatural ones. Indeed, the state only protects what could not ordinarily protect itself; this being the case, statism bankrolls the unnatural and the unviable while continuing to grow itself. Such a situation will not require a revolution to overthrow, it will collapse under its own insolvency. Such is inevitable.

Then in Europe we get Feudal society, which extended the state’s function to that of self-defense and hence a warrior class that emerges as significant at this time. The class structure in feudal society is still tied to kinship and familial relations in it’s own way. Here the state was part of the kinship relations and doesn’t exist as something ‘above’ the people as the familial relations have significance within the difference classes. The serf doesn’t relate to the nobles in terms of family/kinship, but duty to one’s superior.

Feudalism is not an extension of the state; the feudal revolution occurred in the 11th century as a process of decentralization following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Likewise, the predecessors to this system, emerged out of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Feudalism is nothing more than the stratification of classes based on the means of retaining property (force) following the collapse of a state. Indeed, feudal arrangements decrease in proportion to the centralization of power around a king (the preconditions of the social contract yet to come).

Likewise, contra Marxism (especially Ancoms); hierarchy is not statism; states are third-party monopolists of coercion; nobles ruling their own privately owned lands by their own means of force is not an example of state.

Indeed, that orthodox Marxists did not want to include feudalism in the era of capitalism in their dialectic of history is (besides being arbitrary); quite telling, as it undermines the notion of private property requiring a state to exist.

The shared idea of dissolving the state seems agreeable between us, although I am suspect of your sense of how it is to be dissolve without the erasure of classes as defined by their relationship to production. It doesn’t seem an arbitrary association that the state emerges along with class distinctions and rule.

Except the class of the modern era that we would likewise find agreement in critiquing is state-dependnet for its power and existence. I have no problem with class based of natural elitism; I do not support the artificial elitism stemming from state protection. In a state of nature, class would exist, but it would not owe its existence to state protection, but to personal defense, thrift, competition, and even charity.

I do think this discussion though, would better fit in the Objective Morality thread; where my view of the state is more specifically inferred from certain axioms.


II. Essentialism Regarding Human Nature.

A concrete universal (unity of particular and universal) would be what is true of tigers regardless of the environment, even if that nature is distorted in captivity just as it would be for humans. In regards to Tigers in nature, I would think it better fits their nature being wild animals that they are.

My own philosophical background (before I became Berkeleyan); was in the Dooyweerdian school of Calvinist philosophy and its subset in Presuppositional Apologetics (which took this dooyweerdian perspective and synthesized it with ideas of Anglo-American idealism (neo Hegelianism) and American pragmatism).

In this school, the term "concrete universal" has a lot of use, and I have yet to see how your usage of the term fulfills the meaning of the definition.

Your are simply arguing that we should take our particularized observation ( a pure empiricism); and then (arbitrarily) ought to infer a universal presumption from this observation.

That is, given your argument, we should observe tigers "as they are now" (even in captivity); and from this observation of a particular set; we should then infer the "universal nature" of tigers.

How am I wrong in characterizing your argument?

For if this is the case, you are not advocating a concrete universal, you are merely looking at the concrete and saying it should also be universal.

Rather, a concrete universal is something that is both particular and universal in-and-of-itself.

For instance, a synthetic apriori statement could be a concrete universal; because its based on particularization (experience/the synthetic), but not dependent on such (apriori/analytic/universal).

The Axiom of Human Mentality in this thread and the Axiom of Human Argumentation in my objective morality thread would both be examples of something we might call a "concrete universal" as they are both synthetic-apriori statements.

There is a continuity between humans and animals in that we are natural beings, but we are also quite particularly different from other animals in a way that marks us as essentially human. Otherwise one hasn’t a concept of human nature in order to distinguish humans from any other animal. Where animals in general are driven by instincts, a ‘programme’ for their species, mankind inherits it in the activity one is raised into.

Agreed, obviously Aristotle's conception of man as a "rational animal" comes close; as a Christian the conception of man as Imago Dei is very informative and very similar to this notion as it exists in Aristotle; however, how we define man must have some logical basis (as well as empirical, no doubt); and I have done that in my argument from human mentality and argumentation; both in this thread and in my thread on objective morality.

As such, this call for a return to nature for mankind I suspect goes further than you perhaps even expect in that for mankind to be like the tiger or other animals, one would have to essentially not be human. This idea of a family unit labouring for it’s self satisfaction still retains the basis of modern civilization and human nature in general. We aren’t simply driven by instincts, but have a consciousness which has split us from the immediacy of the natural world but allows us to act with greater purpose than an animal thanks to the history of labor and relations that have developed alongside production.

This is all very interesting, but my argument as to the essence of human nature is based on logic, not conjecture; as discussed in my argument for objective morality; especially as it apexes around the points made around human sexuality.

III. Logic, Empiricism and Essence

Marx’s sense of labor as the concrete universal to human nature is that it is found in any human society and is the basis for everything which has emerged within it. Labor isn’t identical to all it’s products but is the the absolute necessity for the existence of everything in tribal society all the way up to modern society. This is what distinguishes Marx’s universal in that it isn’t abstract identity of things in order to form a concept of a thing, excluded of the assumed inessential characteristics of a thing. This is why I sometimes reference Ilyenkov’s summary of the concrete universal where he illustrates how the question of what is man (human nature) ends up the abstract identity and tautology of the first law of logic A = A or more specifically, man is man.Where one doesn’t actually introduce understanding to what human nature is but leaves it unresolved.Which I suspect is part of a criticism of formal logic that one can’t arrive at new knowledge through formal logic.This is part of the problem with Kant’s universals, concepts which were posited as external to the empirical world as he considered form and content independent. We simply had concepts and schemata which we then perceived onto the external empirical reality. He didn’t have a sense of how concepts arose historically, and took them as pre-given in human nature.4So the task isn’t to find something merely universal but something also particular and this is what Marx finds in the concept of labor as the basis of human nature. It is something particular to the nature of being human whilst also found universally in human society.So in your sense, Marx’s idea of labor would be axiomatic but he didn’t discover this through formal logic but through anthropological study of human existence. Which served him well in regards to distinguishing capitalism as a particularly distinct mode of production where political economists considered labor historically the same as under capitalism rather than distinguishing it from labour power (commodification of labour potential), not seeing both continuity and discontinuity. I don’t think you’d be able to determine human nature with formal logic because I worry that many rely on a scholastic method which indifferent to it’s truth in reality and that the empirical essence of human nature across time isn’t found in considering each human individual’s sameness (abstract universal).Something which Hegel criticizes formal logic for, that it is overly concerned with form only.

Labor as a concrete universal seems arbitrary ; human action is more basic and can have an apriori aspect as suitable for an axiomatic claim; otherwise, I see no reason why "labor" is a concrete universal. That is, on what basis should we infer from the observation of labor; that it is an absolute, logically speaking? Its seem reducible to more basic premises, in my opinion.

As for inferring human nature from formal logic, I have already done so. I don't understand your critique of the scholastic method, but it sounds an awful lot like a claim to polylogisms (which is preposterous).

Propositional reasoning is unassailable, and the use of it determines propositional claims as either true or false. definitions of human nature, if given in propositional form can therefore be analyzed as either true or false. I have done this work.

In this method, truth is what fits to a certain concept (a priori axiom) instead of reality itself ie idealism. Hence the relating of axioms to other axioms with some ultimate axiom from which all others are derived on the sense that from the first axiom being absolutely true so to much that which logically follows. 5And this is a problem in terms of methodology because I don’t think one is guided by the subject material but forces empirical content into one’s pre-existing concepts which may not accurately capture the nature of the subject. 6 This is an arbitrary approach I suspect, rather than one that follows a logical necessity to the subject matter. Which is characteristic of the approach in which abstract universals are posed against the empirical reality which holds no logical necessity that binds the concept to the reality and results in a nominalism that denies the knowability of things beyond certain facts.

Well, I am a nominalist.

However, this all being said; I think your critique here amounts to a dismissal.

Propositional reasoning is not a "method" it is the means. There are no other means by which to determine what is true and thus there is no other method.

Perhaps in your appeals to an "empirical approach" you mean the scientific method, but the scientific method is in reality, impotent to discover truth and is fallacious whenever it attempts to do so.

Likewise, Hoppe's critique that his argument requires no empirical data to validate it, is true; however, that is not the same as saying that his argument has no empirical basis whatsoever, which is neither true, nor is it the same claim as being made in the former statement.

The task is to investigate the empirical in order to find the the basic unit of analysis/concrete universal which one can then return to the empirical with the concept (concrete universal) in hand to investigate it more consciously and give the concrete universal more concrete determinations/content to it. Eventually ending up with many concepts that are related to one another, and also reflective of the relations in the real world (ie Marx’s definition of class, where in reality a capitalist class with an independent existence of a working class is nonsensical empirically). 7Or to put it in it’s simple and short form, one proceeds:

The problem is that your are identifying only the concrete and then proclaiming it to be universal; whereas, a genuine concrete-universal will have a synthetic basis, but will be ultimately apriori in its formulation. Otherwise, if you are inferring a universal nature from something observed in particular, you are engaging in fallacious reasoning, arguing from part-to-whole (the inductive fallacy).

So I view your approach as problematic in it’s method and thus conclusions. It seems focused only on the form (words/signs) and their connection to one another independent of the reality which the concepts are derived from.

Reality is only understood through reasoning and direct perception; hence any system that attempts a conclusion not based on such is actually the one which is disconnected from reality.

Likewise, what is "real" anyway?

I have defined such in my argument on this thread; which you have yet to address at all in spite of my frequent requests.

Without analyzing it specifically, you really have no grounds for dismissing my conclusions because you never really engaged my position as stated in its syllogistic form in the first place.

[RhetoricThug]

Now we're getting somewhere

Agree, with gusto.



I don't entirely disagree with Marx on this; however, that is part of my criticism that our modern system is not capitalism; true capitalism is anarcho-capitalism. The use of the state as a means of creating and protecting a certain class is not an argument against the existence of natural elites, just unnatural ones.

Yeah guys, there's only one capitalism and it's the TRUE kind of capitalism. I hate untrue capitalism. ANd did you know about the unnatural elite and natural elite? Wait till you hear about supernatural elite and the cyborg elite. Gonna gitmo freaky up-in-here.

The state only protects what could not ordinarily protect itself; this being the case, statism bankrolls the unnatural and the unviable while continuing to grow itself. Such a situation will not require a revolution to overthrow, it will collapse under its own insolvency. Such is inevitable.

That darn state, making natural things unnatural. I hate it when it protects stuff. Got answers, bro?

Feudalism is not an extension of the state; the feudal revolution occurred in the 11th century as a process of decentralization following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Likewise, the predecessors to this system, emerged out of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Feudalism is nothing more than the stratification of classes based on the means of retaining property (force) following the collapse of a state. Indeed, feudal arrangements decrease in proportion to the centralization of power around a king (the preconditions of the social contract yet to come).

Believe me, I was there when it happened. SHTF so I wrote everything down in a book. Read it, it'll blow your mind. DO you even study second-hand history, bro? Obviously not like ME-me-me-me-me-me.

Likewise, contra Marxism (especially Ancoms); hierarchy is not statism; states are third-party monopolists of coercion; nobles ruling their own privately owned lands by their own means of force is not an example of state.

This is not my definition of state. No sir. By golly, the nobles = NATURAL elite (math formula). Didn't you read what I said about the unnatural elite dat untrue capitalism protects? Jeez, it's like I'm the only guy here with text books in my lap. Undergrads.

Indeed, that orthodox Marxists did not want to include feudalism in the era of capitalism in their dialectic of history is (besides being arbitrary); quite telling, as it undermines the notion of private property requiring a state to exist.

Unorthodox arguments ruin everything. Keep your head in a text book. The text book is true knowledge, it passed the time trial (which is reasonably logical).

Except the class of the modern era that we would likewise find agreement in critiquing is state-dependnet for its power and existence. I have no problem with class based of natural elitism; I do not support the artificial elitism stemming from state protection. In a state of nature, class would exist, but it would not owe its existence to state protection, but to personal defense, thrift, competition, and even charity.

Why, I oughta... I draw lines in the sand, and you just crossed it, buddy.

II. Essentialism Regarding Human Nature.

My own philosophical background (before I became Berkeleyan); was in the Dooyweerdian school of Calvinist philosophy and its subset in Presuppositional Apologetics (which took this dooyweerdian perspective and synthesized it with ideas of Anglo-American idealism (neo Hegelianism) and American pragmatism).

Listen brother, I'm a copy, a clone, a simulacrum! Get it through your head. I'm ists-ians-isms-ics. True and natural authority figures (reasonably logical).

In this school, the term "concrete universal" has a lot of use, and I have yet to see how your usage of the term fulfills the meaning of the definition.

Don't make me grade your paper, fool! I run this school!

Your are simply arguing that we should take our particularized observation ( a pure empiricism); and then (arbitrarily) ought to infer a universal presumption from this observation.

HA! Simple-sin, my argumentation skill is complex, get on my level!

That is, given your argument, we should observe tigers "as they are now" (even in captivity); and from this observation of a particular set; we should then infer the "universal nature" of tigers.

What did I just say about unnatural and natural elite? GAAAAWD!

I guess I gotta write a super long explanation about my super-insights. Here we go. Pay attention.



For if this is the case, you are not advocating a concrete universal, you are merely looking at the concrete and saying it should also be universal.

Rather, a concrete universal is something that is both particular and universal in-and-of-itself.

For instance, a synthetic apriori statement could be a concrete universal; because its based on particularization (experience/the synthetic), but not dependent on such (apriori/analytic/universal).

The Axiom of Human Mentality in this thread and the Axiom of Human Argumentation in my objective morality thread would both be examples of something we might call a "concrete universal" as they are both synthetic-apriori statements.

Agreed, obviously Aristotle's conception of man as a "rational animal" comes close; as a Christian the conception of man as Imago Dei is very informative and very similar to this notion as it exists in Aristotle; however, how we define man must have some logical basis (as well as empirical, no doubt); and I have done that in my argument from human mentality and argumentation; both in this thread and in my thread on objective morality.

Wellsy, I know a thing or two, I stand on the shoulders of giant myths.

This is all very interesting, but my argument as to the essence of human nature is based on logic, not conjecture; as discussed in my argument for objective morality; especially as it apexes around the points made around human sexuality.

I'm a logical operator, go read my logical operations. It's all very logical. NOT CONJECTURE! Gaaaaawd.

Labor as a concrete universal seems arbitrary ; human action is more basic and can have an apriori aspect as suitable for an axiomatic claim; otherwise, I see no reason why "labor" is a concrete universal. That is, on what basis should we infer from the observation of labor; that it is an absolute, logically speaking? Its seem reducible to more basic premises, in my opinion.

I might be weighed down by words people put in my mouth, but it's my opinion.

As for inferring human nature from formal logic, I have already done so. I don't understand your critique of the scholastic method, but it sounds an awful lot like a claim to polylogisms (which is preposterous).

I want this thread to reach page 40. Please continue to disagree with me so we can carry on our rational discussion.

Propositional reasoning is unassailable, and the use of it determines propositional claims as either true or false. definitions of human nature, if given in propositional form can therefore be analyzed as either true or false. I have done this work.

Give it proper form, believe me I know what proper form looks like (lost my v-card years ago, just saying).

Well, I am a nominalist.

Well, I'm a thought program.

However, this all being said; I think your critique here amounts to a dismissal.

Class dismissed, headmaster in da house!

Propositional reasoning is not a "method" it is the means. There are no other means by which to determine what is true and thus there is no other method.

This is the box, stay in it so I can grade you!

Perhaps in your appeals to an "empirical approach" you mean the scientific method, but the scientific method is in reality, impotent to discover truth and is fallacious whenever it attempts to do so.

HA! I got you here, Wellsy. What are you going to do now. Unlike you, I know how to define true and untrue. Remember how I defined true capitalism and untruer capitalism, or did you forget, sucka!?

Likewise, Hoppe's critique that his argument requires no empirical data to validate it, is true; however, that is not the same as saying that his argument has no empirical basis whatsoever, which is neither true, nor is it the same claim as being made in the former statement.

A dead man may be right, but semantics may be wrong. Gaaawd!

The problem is that your are identifying only the concrete and then proclaiming it to be universal; whereas, a genuine concrete-universal will have a synthetic basis, but will be ultimately apriori in its formulation. Otherwise, if you are inferring a universal nature from something observed in particular, you are engaging in fallacious reasoning, arguing from part-to-whole (the inductive fallacy).

I point to the big board of "FALLACIES" it is my bib-bill.

Reality is only understood through reasoning and direct perception; hence any system that attempts a conclusion not based on such is actually the one which is disconnected from reality.

Oh gaaawd, you crossed a line in the sand, again!

Likewise, what is "real" anyway?

What are we to do?

I have defined such in my argument on this thread; which you have yet to address at all in spite of my frequent requests.

AS a rational person I need you to give me stimuli so I can feel rational. FOR THE LOVE OF god RESPOND!!!

Without analyzing it specifically, you really have no grounds for dismissing my conclusions because you never really engaged my position as stated in its syllogistic form in the first place.

I will naturally and truly bypass your unnatural untrue dismissal.



Final grade, F

By the way, my wall-o-text is more superior than your wall-o-text (build that wall, build that wall, build that wall, build that wall)

[Victoribus Spolia]

@RhetoricThug,

Given your posting history; I am forced to infer that you actually quite like this thread, so you should be thanking me for starting it and perpetuating it.

What else could you be doing with your time if not cleverly insulting posters in the midst of a philosophical conversation with your mundane esotericism? Masturbating to Buddha Statues while listening to Moby's greatest hits? Rock climbing in Northern Washington while eating a gluten-free organic dried berry mix? HMMMM??

[RhetoricThug]

What else could you be doing with your time if not cleverly insulting posters in the midst of a philosophical conversation with your penis out? Masturbating to Buddha Statues while listening to Moby's greatest hits? Rock climbing in Northern Washington while eating a gluten-free organic dried berry mix? HMMMM??

HMMMM... I'm well-beyond such activities. Unnatural sexual conditions favor masturbation. Masturbation is less likely to occur if a natural man and natural woman are present. While it's possible, I could be masturbating to Buddha right now, it's also improbable because I'm logically heterosexual (not an irrational-unnatural pansexual). Furthermore, Moby never recorded a hit song, so it's fallacious to state that I listen to Moby's greatest hits while masturbating to Buddha statues.

Why, do you wish to stereotype a forum image called RhetoricThug? Does it help solve some-kind of esoteric mental insolvency?

Look at the big board, thou shalt not commit logical fallacies.

It's a natural policy
true to self-idolatry
break the beat wit Tai chi
spit a few harakiri bars for the bard of boredom
Holla @ me dawg!

[Victoribus Spolia]

I'm well-beyond such activities. Unnatural sexual conditions favor masturbation. Masturbation is less likely to occur if a natural man and natural woman are present. While it's possible, I could be masturbating to Buddha right now, it's also improbable because I'm logically heterosexual (not an irrational-unnatural pansexual). Furthermore, Moby never recorded a hit song, so it's fallacious to state that I listen to Moby's greatest hits while masturbating to Buddha statues.

I see what you did there.


Well done.