"According to the naturalist epistemological tradition, from Descartes through Locke and Hume, the term may designate any human or non-human agent who possesses continuous consciousness over time [...]"
continuous? 🤨
Charles Taylor, The Concept of a Person: "A person must be a being with his own point of view on things. The life-plan, the choices, the sense of self must be attributable to him as in some sense their point of origin. A person is a being who can be addressed, and who can reply."
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hmm, it’s not that a self is everything in a holistic sense, but a self is an “index” for everything
the Proustian smell of a childhood cookie is an example: the smell activates a certain self (or “selfoid”) which then launches a mood and outlook that encompasses the whole lifeworld
selves are like perspectives, like cameras with idiosyncratic filters and focusing tendencies, like origins that the world is organized around
@AskYatharth I wonder if “God” is a way of non-doing with larger scale intentions. Like, letting Jesus take the wheel. You don’t just trust your gut intuition, but attune to the wisdom of the universal conscience.
@AskYatharth In general I’m very curious how people manage to bring larger scale motivation, perception, direction into the present moment of non-coercive unfolding.
@AskYatharth Institutions are one way, I suppose: the social architecture aligns your daily actions with institutional frames. But that doesn’t seem sufficient.
For years I’ve been fascinated and confused by the issue of what I call “state ontology.” How do nation states exist, how do they affect the existence of other beings, what is their fundamental role? And how do people perceive the state’s being, beyond political opinions?
The pandemic has reinvigorated this question and provided an enormous clue for how to think about it.
Epidemiology, vaccination, border control all seem to show the ontology of the state, although I don’t know what to read to clarify this intuition.