What is Dasein?

Why me?

You have books that you can freely consult … Aristotle, Socrates, Epicurus, Epictetus, etc. They discuss the question.

My feeble posts are little in comparison.

Yeah, that’s life. You can choose how much you want to do to prevent that person from feeling bad.

Ooops, I forgot that you’re a falling domino with not control over yourself. What is there to grapple with, in that case? You’re not “doing” anything in that case.

I’m not sure about lots of stuff and it really doesn’t matter that I’m not sure.

For example, If I’m playing a game of chess I’m not sure if I’m choosing the “optimum” move or not. Sometimes one can calculate the sequence of moves to a win or material or a win of the game, but that’s the minority of moves. I pick what I think is a good move, based on personal experience and principles of play that I learned from “the masters”. Looking back after the game( or during the game), I may realize that some moves were clearly dumb. I use that “analysis” in future games.

I don’t think that life, morality and ethics is much different.

I don’t have access to a “here and now” exchange with these gentlemen. But I sure as shit would be curious to know how folks here who embrace their philosophies today might imagine their answers to the question “how ought one to live?” By imagining in turn their reactions to the components of my own argument.

Given the answers that they would provide as it relates to an actual “self” embodying a set of value judgments that come into conflict with another out in a particular world where conflicting behaviors must eventally come to terms with who has the power to enforce one particular moral narrative and political agenda.

But how do we account for the manner in which “you” choose one thing rather than another? And the manner in which different people choose conflicting things? Is “I” here largely embedded existentially in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein above, or is there in fact a font [God, Reason, Nature etc.] able to resolve these conflicts such that all rational men and women are obligated to share it.

I don’t know if “in fact” I do or do not have access to some level of autonomy. Again, the arguments from both sides here can be both profoundly persuasive and profoundly problematic.

But one thing for sure: The objectivists among us are absolutely certain.

Go ahead, ask them.

Maybe, but there is still the distinction between those things we are uncertain about that can in fact be described/encompassed by others with a fair degree of certainty [mathematically, scientifically, logically, etc], and those things that appear instead rooted in the manner in which, among other things, I construe the meaning of dasein above.

Chess? A game in which there are fixed rules, with moves that any particular human brain either will or will not have the capacity to calculate better than another human brain. A game in which computers have been programmed to out “think” even the most sophisticated flesh and blood “masters”?

A game in which the is/ought world relates only to such things as “ought a parent push their children into spending all of their time learning the game?” or “ought we to pursue some form of affirmative action in order to encourage more women to pursue the game?”

Note to others:

What do you think? Are calculating the moves when conflicts erupt over such things as abortion and gun ownership the same thing as calculating moves in a chess match?

Or am I still missing a crucial component of his argument?

A distinction which is not helpful as I live my life, basically because I don’t have access to that knowledge. I’m always limited by my experiences and abilities.

For example, if I need to tie off a boat and I don’t know much about knots them I’m faced with uncertainty on how to do it. The fact that there are people who know how to do it, that there are effective knots and ineffective knots which have been scientifically verified does not help me in the least.

Sure, later I could research knots, practice and use them in the future. But I can do the same research with respect to ethics. If I was in situation that did not work out as I hoped, then I any number of “experts” who can give advice on how to improve the results. The quality of life of the expert and his/her ability to deal with particular situations, is evidence that the advice and techniques work.
I can certainly try it out in my life.

Not that uncertainly will go away. And if it does, then it may be replaced by hubris.

Yes, a game. I’m playing a game in a particular context … a personal state (tired, irritated, focused, distracted), an opponent that I probably did not select and who I may know nothing about. I have a certain knowledge and skill and so does my opponent. The existence of masters and computers able to precisely calculate the variations does enter into the game beyond what I and my opponent have learned from them prior to the start of the game.

What you seem to miss is that what you post is a looking back.
You’re not interested in “how ought one to live?”, you’re interested in “how ought one have lived?” … yesterday, last month, last year.
A lot of the things that you bring up are irrelevant while playing the game.

Okay, with respect to an ethical conflict that most here are likely to be familiar with, draw a comparison between the knots example above and the gap between your current value judgment regarding this conflict and the value judgments of those who are trained as ethicists to encompass an argument far more likely to secure the optimal “quality of life” for all those involved in the conflict.

What on earth are you actually arguing here? There clearly is a gap between those who know very little about knots and those who know practically everything about them.

But how would that gap be closed with respect to conflicting goods? For example, how would it be encompassed pertaining to, say, the construction of Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico? One can clearly imagine a huge gap between those who know little or nothing about building such a wall and those who are experts. But how about the gap between those who argue that it is wrong to build this wall and those who argue that it is right?

It seems we are more or less in sync about chess as a game embedded in a set of either/or rules long established; and in which individual minds will be more or less equipped to master them.

But what of the is/ought examples that I noted above? What is the equivalent here when we bring in our own “expert” ethicists to resolve these or other conflicting goods?

I don’t understand your point here. The past, present and future are just manifestations of the same human condition. How they are implicated in a chess game is one thing, how they are implicated in conflicting value judgments that may revolve around the game of chess something different.

Or so it certainly seems to me “here and now”.

Unless, of course, you or others are able to persuade me that “in reality” “as a matter of fact” they are not really all that much different at all.

You take what you’ve learned from the past about chess into the present such that in the future you will have learned all that much more. You play chess better.

Now, with respect to any particular moral conflict that might come along in playing the game, how do we determine in turn which frame of mind reflects the most rational assessment? You become a better ethicist.

I’m arguing that whether one is talking about knots or abortions, one is making a decision based on current experience, limited knowledge and uncertainty. That does not prevent people from deciding or learning. The existence of experts makes no difference to the decision that one is making in the present.

No. You don’t understand what I’m saying about it.

The past, present and future are not equivalent. The evaluations used in each is very different. It’s the difference between evaluating whether to should draw a card while playing a card game and evaluating whether you should have drawn a card after the game is over. Since in the latter case, you know the result of the game, the evaluation is not the same.

You keep asking the same thing over and over. And you ignore all the responses.

Funny thing. I don’t recall a single time when you understood something that I wrote. Did that ever happen? :-k

I’m growing weary of iambiguous and his problem.

If free will doesn’t exist, then it matters not to such a person, whether you discuss it or not. (Logical conclusion) when something doesn’t matter, people don’t discuss it.

The act of iambiguous discussing this, shows blatantly that he agrees freewill exists.

We will clearly have to agree to disagree about this then. There are decisions made by doctors who perform abortions that are predicated on the objective knowledge they must accumulate relating to human biology – knowledge pertaining to sex and pregnancy. Then knowledge pertaining to a particular set of learned skills that successfully brings an unwanted pregnancy to an end.

And the doctor performing it can be either a Communist or a fascist, a man or a woman, gay or straight, black or white, liberal or conservative, atheist or religious, American or Russian, short or tall, fat or thin.

I’m merely pointing out the obvious: that there is no equivalent of this once we shift gears from abortion as a medical procedure to abortion embedded morally/politically in conflicting goods.

The experience, knowledge and certainty that a doctor can acquire in order to in fact abort a pregnancy is there for all to see.

What experience, knowledge and certainty must an ethicist acquire in order to establish abortion as in fact either moral or immoral?

Does or does not the game of chess revolve around long-established rules regarding how the pieces either can or cannot to moved? Are these rules not applicable to all players? Are not some players able to move these pieces such that they either win or lose the game?

And yet in the film Searching For Bobby Fischerviewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2465377&hilit=Searching+for+Bobby+Fischer#p2465377 – the narrative focuses in turn on issues that revolve instead around the is/ought world. Ought the father have driven his son to focus so much of his time on the game? Ought the father have pushed the son into approaching the game as one in which winning and losing took precedence over love of the game itself?

Was the son’s decent, caring, compassionaite personality [defended fiercely by his mother] an obstacle that had to be yanked out of him in order to ruthlessly crush the competition. As, for example, Jonathan Poe had been taught?

Let’s focus the beam there.

That’s your distinction. Mine revolves more around the skills required to calculate choices in playing a game like poker and the skills required to calculate whether it is moral or immoral to gamble on a poker game.

The past, present and future are all involved in these calculations. But the success rate is there to be seen among the players. But what of the ethicists? How do we calculate their success rate?

Well, from my frame of mind, your frame of mind seems intent on convincing us that, when push comes to shove, there really is no difference between accumulating knowledge to play the game and accumulating knowledge to assess any moral conflicts that might arise as a result of playing the game.

It’s really as simple as that, right?

Just for the record…

To the best of my recollection, I recall instances on other threads when you rather handily explained my own point of view to others. In fact, I recall pointing that out to them.

You do seem to grasp more than others my own basic understanding of dasein out in the is/ought world. You’re just hell bent on reminding me again and again and again that never, ever, [b]ever[/b], will “I” as an existential contraption there be applicable to YOU. :wink:

Come on, how hard can that be?

Here I keep going back to dreams. I don’t know about the dreams of others, but in mine I am absolutely convinced “in the dream” that I am freely calling the shots. However preposterous the twists and turns, it’s all my own doing.

Now, sure, I wake up in the morning. And then I know for sure that I am really calling the shots. At least given the extent to which I can ever really understand the world around me; and in turn am willing to acknowledge that my options are often limited. Quite beyond my control at times.

But if mind is matter and matter immutably interacts per the laws of nature, how do I go about ascertaining for certain that “I” is not so much an existential contraption, as an existential mechanism?

Sure, some here will blatantly insist they grasp this going all the way back to how and why Existence itself came to be.

I’m just a bit more uncertain here myself.

Edit.

Or take the plot unfolding in the 4th episode of the second season of Westworld – “The Riddle Of the Sphinx” : www.ign.com/articles/2018/05/14/westwor … the-sphinx

Here there is an absorbing exploration of/examination into the matter of identity as, technologically, we get closer and closer to an increasingly more sophisticated AI world. One in which mind as matter and matter as mind become increasingly more blurred.

In particular the sequence revolving around James Delos.

You tell me what to make of it?

See. I didn’t write that. I wrote …

  • all thinking consists of contraptions.

  • I would call them tools rather than contraptions.

  • I have control over which ‘tools’ I use.

  • I try out ‘tools’ which appear to be effective.

  • I drop ‘tools’ which don’t work for me.

  • it doesn’t matter if ‘I’ is merely an existential contraption. I don’t dwell on that.

Iambiguous, I believe you DO NOT understand what ‘dasein’ proper is prior to inventing your own definition and version of ‘what is dasein’. Todate I have spent more than 2 months full time on Being and Time [still ongoing and need to spend more time], so I have a reasonable grasp of it.

In addition I don’t believe you understand what is ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ as well.

It is due to your ignorance of the above terms that you interpret them in your own version and thus ended in a mess down the inauthentic path and more so with an evil intent [subconsciously] to trap others into your hole.

Btw, can you give an idea of what is your understanding of what is dasein-proper as in Being and Time, plus the terms authentic and inauthentic. In addition, explain what is the difference between your own version of dasein and the original version in BT.

Why is killing even an ethical issue? Because people don’t want to be killed and they don’t want those that they care about to be killed. If it wasn’t upsetting then it wouldn’t even be part of morality.

But you don’t accept that as part of the knowledge and experience that an ethicist must have … knowledge of human nature and human needs which are fundamentally based in biology.

There are the rules and there are the psychological factors that players bring to the game … the human factors.
Just as in ethics, there is the physical/material context and the physiological.

How can we focus it there when we don’t even agree about how to approach and how to evaluate the situation?

I think there ways to approach it. But no matter what I say, you’re going to respond that it’s in my head, or I’m insisting that everyone think as I do, or someone thinks differently so that means that all approaches are equivalent, etc.

You deny that there is any measure of success.

People dying, people living. Tortured, not tortured. Suffering, not suffering. You don’t seem to consider these things as measures of a successful ethical society. Right?

Okay, you said it. There is really nothing more to discuss.

I expressed my point of view (over the span of many years). You’re not convinced. That would seem to end it.

If all outcomes are equivalent, then there is no basis for morality and ethics. Some outcomes must be considered better than others. Biological needs have to be the first level of that evaluation.

Sure, a contraption in the broadest sense. A contraption involving nature and nurture, genes and memes, words and worlds, logic, culture, personal experiences, childhood indoctrination, sense perception, cognition etc. etc.

But there is still the way in which each of us as individuals put all of those components together subjectively/subjunctively to experience particular thoughts relating to particular contexts.

Why, with respect to the objective world of math, science and empirical facts, does our thinking overlap so much more readily than our thinking relating to identity, value judgments and political prejudices?

And where are the conflicts far more likely to be prevalent?

Of course you don’t dwell on that!

Once you start in on speculating about your sense of self in the manner in which I do, well, there it is, the hole!

Therefore I think that you think yourself into believing that your understanding of and control over these “tools” is just enough to keep you out of it. Indeed, it kept me out of it for many, many years.

I merely suggest that this narrative is more a psychological component of the ego – a defense mechanism – allowing those able to sustain it to suckle on the comfort and consolation of having one or another font in which to reconfigure “I” into [b][u]I[/b][/u].

Still, I’ve never been able to quite grasp how you intertwine religion and philosophy into a frame of mind such that when you use these “tools” in engaging others in behaviors involving conflicting goods, you manage to convince yourself that you use them more reasonably than they do.

Other than in insisting that your “tools” have allowed you to grasp things like Communism such that those who fail to grasp it as you do are not using their own set of “tools” as effectively.

Really, what other way is there to interpret it?

[b]Prismatic,

This is more or less where we left off above:[/b]

Why on earth would I imagine that Barrett would construe the practical implications of “rival goods” in the same manner that I do?

And my intent [re dasein] is to grapple with the is/ought world given the assumption [mine] that we live in a No God world. How on earth do mere mortals arrive at the most or the only rational moral and political narrative/agenda when confronted with these rival goods?

How do you do it? Provide for us an existential trajectory that intertwines the experiences you had in your life and the knowledge/information/ideas you had access to such that you are not in the hole I’m in. In regard to a value judgment all your own.

How would Buddha – “the one who is awake” – have reacted to a context in his days in which different people embraced conflicting value judgments that precipitated conflicting behaviors.

What does being “awake” mean when confronted with any one of hundreds of moral and political conflagrations that have cleaved the human species over the centuries? Bring the knowledge/information/ideas provide here – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_ethics – to bear regarding a particular set of conflicting goods.

In other words, out in the world where behaviors are actually judged by others…where very really consequences can be meted out to those who behave in the “wrong” way.

BTW, I have responed to this point any number of times above. I keep waiting for you to bring your own understanding of Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein out into the world of actual conflicted behaviors derived from actual conflicted goods.

How about the points I raised above regarding the workman using a hammer on a nail and a Nazi soldier using a bullet on a Jew?

That aspect of Dasein. Differentiate the ontic from the ontological here.

Instead it’s just more of the same intellectual contraptions:

I challenge you [or anyone else] to bring this particular “world of words” out into the actual flesh and blood world of human interactions in conflict over conflicting goods.

Note to others:

Wouldn’t you deem this to be basically an “intellectual contraption” as it relates to your own conflicted behaviors with others?

If not, please explain why.
[/quote]

Then this:

Then this:

Try again to actually respond to the points that I raised in the post above.

Then we can [perhaps] resume our exchange. You know, substantively.

Maybe I don’t “use them more reasonably than they do”. I use what I got. I keep my eyes and ears open.

Of course, we don’t even agree on the meaning of “reasonable” … so this exchange can’t be anything more than babble. :laughing: