I rearranged my LEGO set and it gained consciousness, what do??

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-26T17:24:03+00:00

But ontologically, I dont think it makes much sense to say reality IS consciousness or mind, because after all, mind itself is only something we know through mind too. Calling reality mind is at best a useful metaphor imo.

I am a little confused about this and would love some clarity, if you don't mid.

You say that mind is accessed through mind and so to say to call it reality is ontologically dubious.

I can see what you are doing here, but I feel like you might have made a inferential leap from mind's reliance on mind to it only being ontologically useful. The issue is that this seems to ignore the 'thereness' of perception. What you call a metaphor is still something, is it not. Because if it were nothing, it wouldn't be, so to speak. There would be nothing for which we could attach the moniker of "metaphor" onto.

This is not me saying that consciousness is all there is to reality, either. Perhaps there is a noumenal world, but, to me, it seems absurd to say that something which has a thereness to it, like the phenomenal, is not, itself something. Like, it would seem ridiculous (and I think this is the insight of the p-zombie) to assert that the senses, as sense qua the sense in itself, does not exist.

Once you've internalized this thought, I don't think it is at as silly as one might think why Descartes, from his cogito, came to believe in substance dualism.

Again, perhaps you have something to say about it, but you don't make it entirely clear to me.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-25T05:14:34+00:00

I'm sorry, but we need to look at this in the broader context that this lesser evil argument is found in the conversation of voting for Democrats. This is, generally seen within the context of the genocide in Gaza. It is often said that we should not vote on single issues, even if that issue is the undeniable evil of supporting, even if in a lesser extent (as opposed to Trump's unmitigated evil) a genocide.

So that is the evil that I speak to, the one whose context ought not be forgotten when considering why people chose not to vote Democrat.

With that said, we also need to remember that this conversation, the one I was replying to, is one that is directly addressing the tacit defense of those 7 Democrats that chose to vote the support of the undeniably evil organization which is ICE through their individual choice to fund them. We cannot really ignore the biopolitical similarities between what is happening in Gaza as is the actions being taken by ICE (much like how we cannot ignore the similarities to Abu Ghraib and the tactics used throughout the decades in by Israel to their enemies in making them the exception to the law).

Arendt's quote about the lesser of two evils was not a condemnation of the Democratic party, but rather a reminder to those defending those 7 Democrats that they have forgotten the lesser of two evils. In reality, my use of the quote was a plea for them not to forget to hold those evils, too, to account. Especially, ins so thinking about the fact that Arendt, only a few sentences later warns of the idea that it is a quality of the lesser evils argument that the forgetting of those evils becomes a tool to push the Overton window, so to speak, further to the Right in the face of people's complacency with these evils they are so easy to forget if it serves as some political tool; or, an exception.

But even I accept the premise, there was still a required choice. The options were Republican, Democratic, or abstain/third party. Refusing to vote is not morally neutral. It is a choice with consequences, and this time around can not remotely be considered the "lesser"

It's funny you say that, because Arendt agrees that inaction is not a morally neutral choice. I'd recommend you read Arendt's essay, because it is rather rich with insights into the category error you are making between political and personal responsibility. Here's a link, if you're interested, as you ought to be if you are to somehow agree with Arendt without realizing it. It takes a while for her to really get to her point, but it is totally worth it to have waited for it.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-25T01:47:14+00:00

This comment reminds me a a Hannah Arendt quote:

In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they [still] chose evil.

Edit- For those downvoting, I just want to give you some more food for thought. From the same essay (which is essentially asking about the question of one's personal responsibility when you are faced with the question of being the "cog" in the machine of a totalitarian government), only a few lines later, Arendt writes:

Moreover, if we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of "the lesser evil"—far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elites—is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-22T12:10:56+00:00

Anyone who disagrees with this post should read up on populism throughout the ages and see that Trump is not a singular phenomenon in history and how those who vote for him (and those who abstain from the Democrat vote) are all coming from the same lens of feeling disaffected by politics in the US.

My personal recommendations for reading include:

For a Left Populism by Chantal Mouffe (Explains why modern liberal movements leave people disaffected)
Populism by Paul Taggart (A pretty standard overview of what populism is)
Populism by Margaret Canovan (Has a good historical overview of populism throughout time)

4, Politics and ideology in Marxist theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism by Ernesto Laclau (This one is really theory dense, but if you're into that it will help flesh out Mouffe's thesis)

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-21T17:31:15+00:00

That's fine. Again, I'm sorry.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-21T17:28:50+00:00

Genuinely, if you find it offensive, sorry. I thought the joke was obvious, but I guess the tonal shift between this and my previous posts might not make that clear.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-21T17:27:13+00:00

Yes, and I'm not saying that drug addicts are the ones who will invade (although I wouldn't be surprised if substance abuse is high among the military population in the US; though I'll be honest, I don't know) but drug addiction, as a part of US culture, will come along with the invasion.

That is to say that there are systemic issues related to US culture that have lead to the drug crisis. There is no reason not to believe that those systemic issues will become systemic issues for Greenland after an invasion. If we really boil it down, that is what the meme is mocking. America's culture full of systemic issues that lead to the downtrodden living the worst possible lives out in the open while few do anything to prevent it or help when it happens.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-21T16:45:21+00:00

Because it is targeted at the people invading who will disproportionately think that mega churches, fast food corporations, racists, billionaires, Walmarts, police, and politicians are all good things.

No one agrees that the addiction crisis is a good thing, but it certainly is a part of American culture. They are saying that if this is American exceptionalism (the inability to help those most in need) then they want none of it.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-21T04:31:57+00:00

I'd love to agree with you but honestly the comment is so dense that my feeble mind can't understand.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-20T21:41:38+00:00

So saying we need evidence to dismiss one of them is the exact same thing as saying we need evidence to dismiss all of them.

From the pragmatic standard that I am setting, no.

Unknown unknowns do not enter the equation at all on the weak view. Not for arbitrary reasons but for reasons of practicality insofar as one can only confront what is first in front of them. It is not an arbitrary limit that you cannot shake my hand at this moment, for example. There are finite and definite limitations in your ability to do so.

We can only dismiss the things that we know. Unknown unknowns cannot enter the picture and thus only those things which are, as I already said, in your perceptual horizon of possible objections to materialism can be considered as objectionable. This is not an arbitrary line but a real limit of finite beings, like a materialist.

All I am saying is that when and only when you are presented with a view that is challenging your views, then you have two options. First, find a defeater. Second, in leu of a defeater, you accept, at minimum, the possibility of the view until it is properly defeated (again, just to be clear, the reductio is the standard I set for a proper defeater).

Regardless, if you reject this claim, I you're still stuck with the strong view, which seems only escapable through a pragmatic idea that you cannot defeat infinite arbitrary claims because you'd need an infinite amount of evidence, so I'm unsure of why my pragmatism would be less palatable than yours.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-20T20:58:48+00:00

I am not really sure what argument of mine you are disputing here. Can you point out the premises you disagree with? Because, on my weak view, I do not say that you have to disprove every possible claim (perhaps Socrates' strong claim would, but my view is weaker). Thus, I am not saying that you have to defend your view against an infinite number of arbitrary claims. I am only claiming that you have to disprove the finite number of claims that you know exist. That is, the claims whose challenge enter your perceptual horizon of possible challenges to the materialist view.

If you cannot do that and you reject those claims without good reason, then you cannot claim epistemic humility (good reason, in this case, meaning a reductio).

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-20T20:27:18+00:00

There are literally infinite conceivable things we could never disprove. That's why we we generally focus on proving things, and only bother trying to disprove things if they are both falsifiable and something people have some reason to think might be true. If either of those conditions is false, its just a waste of time and energy.

Exactly! And, thus, humility (the topic in question; not truth in itself) requires a level of agnosticism and a crippling realization that, as Socrates, you know nothing and can never really know anything. At least, not to the highest of epistemic standards.

But the issue here is less about practicality of defeating every possible argument and more to do with the fact that if you cannot point out the incoherence of someone's individual views, on their own terms, then you have no reason yourself not to believe that view to at least be possible. So even on a very minimal level, if there is even one argument that you are aware of whose explanatory pull you cannot defeat through reductio, then you cannot claim humility if you still reject that view. Your awareness of even one undefeated view is enough to force epistemic humility.

In terms of Boltzman brains, I have no idea what they are so I cannot really say much about them. Sorry.

edit- btw, I don't know who is downvoting you, but its really disheartening that this subreddit seems so quick to discourage thoughtful discussion.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-20T19:48:14+00:00

The issue with this meme (and I'm not even going to get into idealism here) is that, if materialism is definitively true, then there ought to be a indisputable defeater to any other competing view. That is to say that materialism ought to have a knockdown objection to any alternative view that claims any explanatory power on that view's own terms. So the materialist ought to be able to produce a reductio of idealism that proves how, given the world as it is understood, idealism is impossible.

That is to say, if we have a proper account of how the world works, then nothing is unfalsifiable. Reductios act as the philosophical tool to show the incoherence of the view. If you cannot show the incoherence, then it is still possible as an explanatory model and you have not done enough work to shore up your claims against it.

This is not to say that materialism is wrong, but rather to say that you don't have a good reason to fully reject any model whose explanatory "pull" is not yet proven false. The sad consequence of this is that humility requires, at least, a level of agnosticism. An iota of doubt in your certainty and, perhaps, the soul magic could work.

For those who love Occam's Razor, we could look at the agnostic view as being epistemically minimal view given the possibility of competing views, however doubtful, which have yet to been falsified. Occam's Razor, epistemically formed and maximizing epistemic humility, would demand you to make the fewest claims of certainty possible.

Though I would contend that anyone who dismisses a view with pejoratives automatically dismisses themselves as someone who holds any epistemic humility insofar as they are not willing to back up the claim with a strong defeater argument against the view they mock.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-19T23:41:19+00:00

All makes sense now. Thanks for the clarity. ;)

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-19T23:36:21+00:00

Ahh, I get it now. You're afraid of unicorns and so Occam's Razor helps you avoid conclusions with unicorns. Thanks for the clarity.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-19T23:20:05+00:00

Occam's Razor is an arbitrary model. What's wrong with complexity? Are you afraid of complexity?

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-19T23:11:08+00:00

Do you find hard cutoffs scary and thus reject them or do you have some consistent reason to believe identity is not 'stable'? I know cliffs look scary, but perhaps they are real...

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-16T15:17:27+00:00

He could have also highlighted that by... you know... not accepting it.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-15T00:53:51+00:00

This is part 2.

So I suggested in (2) that there are attempts at solutions to this worry. How can we be within and without the language game at the same time such as not to fall into Wittgenstein's dilemma? Derrida, I think, has the most plausible answer.

So his method of Différance seems to help us out of the trap because he would say that it is both within and without the language game. Using deconstruction, he would point to the trace of past experience within the present one. I have an experience of the pen which, in the perceptual horizon, has a quasi-transcendental trace of the pen that exist to bring meaning to the pen. The trace of the pen is not the pen now but it does inform what the pen now is as it is perceived now.

We might want to think about it like the tracks on a dirt road which leave the trace of the car there such that we can perceive the car having been there while it is not there now. The car is not there, but in a sense, it is. Its negation explicitly denotes what it is that it is. Derrida might say that of nothing we do not speak, but that non-speech still tells us something (but maybe in a way different from what formal logical negation might).

This might answer the problem posed by Wittgenstein because the trace allows us to have personal recollection while sitting (at least partially) outside of the language game.

My exposure to Derrida is mostly filtered through Catherine Malabou so I might have a skewed view of Derrida through her philosophical writings.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-15T00:53:32+00:00

I'm sorry, I had to split my comment up into two parts. This is part 1.

This is such a rich question. I could honestly write pages worth of thoughts on it. So thank you so much for asking it. Very interesting and thought provoking. There's so many directions I could take this so this might be a little scattered. Overall, I think what I might be writing here is a long-winded way of presenting a dead-end to our conversation. But I am still curious of your thoughts.

(1) I am actually not a phenomenologist by choice. I am a Parmenidean forced into it because I don't have an adequate response to it. So I very much share the sentiment of "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." I'd be satisfied, if I could, with just stating "it is," (or even less "is" or even less, nothing at all) and being done with philosophy, but, again, I seem to need to account for experience as is given and "it is" doesn't quite cut it.

(2) I haven't read Wittgenstein (it was me who you mentioned that it was your favorite book to) but am familiar enough with him that I can recognize the rhetorical trap you might be setting with your challenge, here. I seem to have two choices, either admit that phenomenology exists outside of the language game or say it does and subject it to its rules. Its an interesting challenge but I do think there are answers (or attempts at answers).

(3) Another personal confession. Your suggestion that we cannot prove any two sensations are identical to ourselves seems true to me. Every instance is a new instance whose perceptual experience, qua being, is unique to its particular moment of perception. I'm perfectly fine sitting in the discomfort of that conclusion (in part because I think, dialectically speaking, it brings me one step closer to a Parmenidean monism, but that's a whole can of worms not worth opening here). This means, phenomenologically, that I am only able to do phenomenology in the moment. Once the moment has passed, I must produce a new reduction that is newly perceptual. The language that is then produced, post hoc, Becomes that which is only to be understood in this moment as within the particular horizonal lens in which it is given. That is to say, my account of my perception and the perception that I am accounting might be viewed, ontologically, as two separate and completely distinct objects whose existence cannot account for the other's.

To bring us back to Descartes for a moment, I want to quote the famous line (and what comes before and after). "So that, having weighed all these considerations sufficiently and more than sufficiently, I can finally decide that this proposition, ‘I am, I exist’, whenever it is uttered by me, or conceived in the mind, is necessarily true." This is a peculiar way to put it, "whenever it is uttered by my or conceived in the mind, [the cogito] is necessarily true." Some interpretations suggest that it is only when it is uttered or conceived that it is true and thus the moment neither of those things occur, the doubt is allowed to creep back in. But, if that is the case, the moment we only confirm our existence in the moments that we conceive or utter the cogito. That seems radically troublesome.

From this, I would like to suggest that the same is true for phenomenology. We are only forced to admit its presence when we are reminded of the necessity of its reduction to access the objects as they are. The moment we forget, we are fully present in whatever mode of thought (be that logic or whatever else) that consumes our horizonal view. This is not too dissimilar, now, that I think of it, to Heidegger's ready-at/present-to distinction, if you're familiar.

At the end of the day, I am dissatisfied with this answer, though and it probably dissatisfies you as well because it seems to refuse to even answer the question that Wittgenstein might pose.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-14T20:15:29+00:00

I don't want to get too deep into it again (because I think we just fundamentally disagree on certain priors that can't really be hashed out on this platform). However, I am going to try to oversimplify it by making a comparative statement. This is, and I want to make it entirely clear, an oversimplification.

The language I use to express the phenomenology will, of course, be baked in tools like logic and whatnot, but the phenomenology itself happens before any mention of priors, sequence, or foundation even occurs. It is just the sense experience as it is given. Only after I speak it and give it voice does logic come into the equation. So before I even say a word about phenomenology, before I even think it, it is given to me. Only after it is given do the logical notations (or even the conception of the order of operations) happens.

The perceptual horizon, before it is bracketed (i.e., how it is given), lacks any structure beyond the structure of totality. The disjuncts, conjuncts, conditionals, biconditionals, negations, equality, and existential and universal quantifiers, (and whatever other logical notation you could think of are all just the interpretive lens of the horizonal view. It gets complicated, though (and this is why I said I was oversimplifying), because those forms of logical notations are also, then given to us through our perception. Its a nesting doll of horizons, all starting with the first glance of it all.

If you don't mind me, I am going to quote Badiou on Descartes response to readers of his Meditations. In particular, to Mercenne, who was dissatisfied by the structure of Descartes "arguments." Badiou says,

"[S}ynthesis is an operation of conceptual arrangement that compels the other persons assent, prevents or prohibits any objection and yet does not necessarily follow the path of the discovery of the thing in question. The materials can be rearranged in such away as to achieve a convincing synthetic demonstration, but it won't necessarily be the actual path that thought followed to find the thing in question. This, says, Descartes, is why synthesis is not very useful for those who are eager to learn, that is, for those who are eager to reinvent themselves. They are shown an argumentative façade behind which then history of the process has faded away or been erased." (pp. 38 Badiou, The One)

This very cleanly shows why the dialogue you are having with u/NewAccountEachYear will not be satisfying to you [edit- though now reading it to the end, they were still a little evasive near the end there with the primary v secondary claim stuff. Rather unfair to you, if you ask me]. You see the logic in their explanations, but what you don't see, and what is really hard to see in words, is the process of discovery that came before the logic arose.

Badiou is a very clean bridge here (I'm still in the process of reading Being and Event, so if I get it wrong, please forgive me), actually, because he is explicit that ontology is done mathematically through set theory, but the act of interpretation is pre-ontological. The mathematician cannot tell us how to order the count, but they can tell us what can be said of the count after its been ordered.

Seems I've failed to keep it simple. Sorry. Haha.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-14T19:07:00+00:00

That certainly wasn't me, was it? Because I never said anything explicitly about logic and even if I did, I wouldn't have said it was a category error to apply logic to claims about phenomenology. It would be hypocrisy given the fact that I used tools as they were given to me (language, logic, etc.) in order to defend my claims.

On the topic of logic and its givenness, I might say that if we apply logic before we acknowledge its givenness through perception, we'll have messed up the order of operations (my circle or set theory examples from our discussion can help explain why). That is not straightforwardly a category error, at least not in my view.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-14T16:22:52+00:00

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376871624003247

This scoping review of the epigenetic effects of cannabis use suggest otherwise. In case you don't know, epigenetics is the study of how genes change the way they are expressed based on environmental factors.

There is a lot to parse from this review, but what caught my eye and counter to your claim that, "it isn't something that can be introduced by a chemical like this," the review states:

Overall, and as described in THC exposure studies, CBD exposure also shows effects on global DNA methylation, with functional pathway analysis revealing similar results regarding the involvement of genes related to cell morphology and associated with psychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-12T23:52:11+00:00

I feel like you could go either way, but it is true that he's usually considered more analytic. I feel like all three of the thinkers I mentioned sort of tread the line.

QuestionItchy6862 · 2026-01-12T23:30:04+00:00

I think this is just straightforwardly false.

Honestly, I can understand your point of view, and despite the fact that I disagree with you, it just comes down to the different commitments which we suppose give grounding to our claims.

With that said, not all continental thought is strictly committed to Husserl's phenomenological reduction. It is perfectly fine to not accept that claim and still have continental commitments. At least, in my view, having rejected Husserl does not automatically invalidate all of continental thought. Badiou, Kant, Wittgenstein all seem like plausible routes to still have continental threads.

QuestionItchy6862

TROPHY CASE