Back to the beginning. I realized a place we may be talking past each other where I can be clearer.
Contraptions
Two otters approach a river.
Otter A looks both ways, just a quick check for predators, then enters the water.
Otter B looks both ways, back up into the bushes, looks both ways again, then spins in a circle before entering the water.
Why the difference?
Otter A has instinctive caution in open spaces, but beyond that nothing.
Otter B has been attacked several times before entering water by predators. Not only does this make Otter B more nervous than Otter A, but Otter B also, early after the second attack he went through, spun in a circle before entering the water. He has not been attacked since that time. He associates spinning around with making himself safe. (to see how this can happen in animials and also then humans see the experiment described here…
io9.gizmodo.com/how-pigeons-get … us-5746904
)
I think it might be useful to call Otter B’s ritual/activity a contraption, as a metaphor.
I think it would not be useful to call Otter A’s behavior a contraption.
This does not mean that Otter A’s process is correct. Perhaps otters like B will survive and those like otter A will be selected out. Or perhaps Otter B type otters are nicer and God loves them more and one day it will be shown that God wants otters to have that ritual.
I black box all value judgments about the two behaviors.
However, I think in one case we have an extra behavior which has been arrived at through the combination of Otter B’s innate tendencies - perhaps towards caution or something else - and dasein.
Of course, Otter A’s behavior is also a result of the same thing, however there is nothing extra. There is no, for example, behavior caused by conceiving and understanding of pragmatism in Otter A’s behavior. He has less contraptions - barring other exceptions - than Otter B.
So when I encounter you in a discussion and I lack an interest in, say, working out whether determinism is the case, this does not mean I have a contraption you do not have. THAT MIGHT BE THE CASE.
But it also could be the case that your temperment + dasein has led you to believe that seeking the answer is necessary. And I think we can agree that seeking the answer to the issue of determinism/free will is an extra activity. It goes beyond the basic activities we need to engage in.
Now, I do not know if you are like Otter B on this issue and I am like Otter A.
But it seems completely off the table that you might have EXTRA CONTRAPTIONS that make it seem obvious that one would try to figure out determinism/free will, and that one must try to find the solution to conflicting goods.
I suspect that latter is based on a contraption coming out of the very moralistic memes that most of us in the West have been exposed to via the Abrahamic religions. That one must know the good. And if one doesn’t then, even if one doubts it exists, still do all one can to find it.
Obviously I could be wrong about this.
I am not making an issue here of trying to prove my point that you have the extra contraption that shapes your focus, a focus I do not have.
I am trying to create a frame where you would see how this is possible AND that this is the basis of my saying ‘No, I lack a contraption on that issue.’
When I say this you respond as if I have said ‘My approach is better and your should have it.’ Or ‘I am free from the influence of dasein and innate temperment.’
Nope.
The extreme example of a schizophrenic who thinks he must get permission from a door before opening it or the OCD suffering who thinks he must wash his hands 20 times after dinner or he will suffer something terrible are examples where most of us would think it
at least possible
that extra contraptions are involved
and that someone not doing these things could say ‘I lack a contraption that says I must ask the door permission before opening it and I lack a contraption that I have to clean my hands more than once after dinner’
is not saying they are free of dasein or innate tempermental tendencies. (or free from determinism for that matter)
You have tended to drop, recently, adding in that my contraption is one that gives me comfort. And I appreciate that. It’s a ridiculous assumption, since perhaps your engaging in these issues is giving you comfort. But more fundamentallly, it is a mere assumption, based on yourself as the norm.
If you have a different focus than I do, you have that because you need some delusion that gives you comfort because I am suffering this issue.
That is making a universal judgment based on your own temperment and psychology, which are in turn based on your genetics AND your dasein, which are very specific.
Just mull that over in the spirit of charitable reading.
I am going to stay away from you for a while, because I think I have done the best I can without me changing quite a bit in approaching you. I wish you had someone in your corporeal life who could read over your shoulder and give their take.
I certainly have extra contraptions. I see those a combination of dasein and my inborn temperment - not that it is easy to separate out which is the cause in many instances. I am married. In any marriage that works when it works I would guess, but certainly in mine, the fact that we have different extra contraptions and then different lacks of contraptions allows us to respond to each other when these contraptions get hold of us, the negative ones that is. Extra contraptions can be great. I mean, I have worked in the theater and had to develop all kinds of contraptions to make me a decent actor. I chose to learn those, to have them. Some make us feel bad. Some make us feel bad but are useful - as far as I can tell. Like, yes, eating a lot of food after an argument can feel sort of good and facing the feelings that came up can feel bad, but the contraption that I might appreciate not comfort eating the food - a response that is itself a contraption based on dasein and temperment. And I have appreciated such contraptions, some of them leading to the dissovling of the pattern that was not helping me and in th e long run made for more pain, and then itself.
In your world there are just contraptions and there is no way to know which is right.
In my world I feel better overall without extras in many areas and I think I can tell the difference which ones for me, I do not want. Not infallibly. LOL. It is a human skill.
I think that when you focus on what everyone should have as contraptions, you close a door on figuring out which ones you want for yourself, which make your life feel better. When you try to figure out what will make the poeple in Huntsville love eachother, you haven’t even started to find out how to feel OK about yourself. I could be wrong, but I smell a lot of guilt in your incredulity that someone would nto focus on finding the perfect argument that all rational people will listen to and end conflicting goods. That seems like a cross to bear and that seems to me to come from Xiantity, however much you are not a theist.
That cross is a contraption.
Unless you are doing something else here, and it is all a front for being a gadfly to fuck with the objectivists. Well, OK.
I used to think that was the case. That really your approach was rage based, sticking it to them.
If that is the case - and I don’t assume it is either/or or that you would know it - then it’s all fine and dandy, because then on some level you are having a grand time.
But if the OCD guy comes to you and says you have a contraption that means you don’t spend half your day cleaning your hands and you have this contraption to comfort you…
you iambiguous may think - sure, I have a contraption.
Me, I find no gain in hallucinating that I have a contraption in that discussion of the OCD guy.