I’ve always said this

As a young man, just out of high school, I read Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape & The Human Zoo. Both books were enjoyable & they strongly reinforced my fledgling wariness of reason.
I accept we are creatures who evolved over billions of years & sometime in the recent past we began to develop language & civilizations. We are animals with evolved abilities like all creatures on this planet. Reason is an evolved ability that did not somehow leap past biological barriers & provide us with a god-like tool to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Sure we have honed this skill, language & mathematics have stretched its reach & scientific methods of repetition & peer checking have lessened many of the personal idiosyncrasies that have tainted research in the past.
However the faculty, that a lion uses to figure out when prey are most likely to be at the watering hole, is still the faculty that we are using. The lion could be said to be using the faculty in a simplistic manner while we are using it in a far more complex way. Okay, I can accept that. Still … despite the scientific findings & the technological marvels we have created, how does this faculty, when used properly, become limitless in its reach?
Reason can give us plausibility in our perceptual world. The lion has increased the probability of killing a prey animal by being near the watering hole at a certain time, but it is an increased probability not a truth: there is simply a higher plausibility of prey. Evolution has a high plausibility - I use my belief in this plausibility in my argument. There are myriad observations & experimental models to support this highly plausible theory. I step back from saying evolution is true; I stick with evolution is highly plausible. And I would add: Evolution is highly plausible "within our perceptual world." Same with the atomic theory or quantum mechanics - they are plausible within our perceptual world. Atomic bombs are very convincing.
When a person reaches the sophistication to philosophize, they have been nurtured, indoctrinated, trained, taught, practiced, & accepted by the societal measures used to gauge success academically. What constitutes correct reasoning & proper of language has been inured in us long before personal logic or philosophy of language concerns arise. We are primed to accept reason & put on a pedestal. It is very difficult to use the approved societal, scientific, or philosophical reasoning & language to knock reason off that pedestal.
As animals we sense; as animals we digest nourishment & expel waste; as animals we think to assist survival of the species. Somehow we've detached the latter ability from its roots. We are animals. With limited evolved abilities. We are in the present world situation partly because we deny our evolved limitations. We are a lion starving to death at the water hole because plausibility is not certainty.

Cool thanks!!

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Same I’ve read the same, the Oxford world classic edition.

I also liked the comic that came out - https://books.google.com/books/about/Tales_from_the_Upanishads.html?id=fnI-DgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&ovdme=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

We are all being constantly polices for our beliefs and penalized for not conforming. Then when a figure is put in the spot light, subjected to the court of public opinion and sent to spend the rest of their days with this giant black spot following them. After which they seem to be discarded from society. Forgotten about and never to be spoken of again.

My 9-year-old daughter told me the other day that the thumb isn’t a finger. I was floored, naturally. Apparently the situation Is more complicated as far the thumb/finger but there is the anti-finger school of thought.

But I care about the general moral. Which is- or could be- that I can be mistaken about a seemingly really basic aspect of a concept in that way.

This is well-trod territory post-kripke, but it is only hitting home for me now.

Of course many people found it disconcerting when the authorities concluded that Pluto wasn’t a planet. In retrospect the remarkable thing about that development is that it …

I researched the Pluto thing for 5 seconds and saw that the international astronomical union decided that Pluto is a dwarf planet. That’s still a planet, right? Short people are still people. So I don’t know what is the deal with Pluto.

Anyway, I think the fact about the thumb that is disconcerting is epistemological. I was brought up to think of philosophy as conceptual analysis. One could discern the nature of knowledge by learning which things one would apply the concept to (and which not). But my classification of things apparently can be dramatically wrong as a result of how other people are using that concept. (Or I guess what is the same concept.)

Some questions. Could the authorities conclude that green isn’t a color? Suppose physicists announced that. I think I want to say they could be wrong. The fact that the authorities announce a classification doesn’t make it automatically right. But could it be right?

I suppose the issue is internalize/externalism about. I don’t feel like I have very good evidence to rule out that there are authoritative communities saying that temporal passage is whatever or properties are such and so. But maybe I don’t need evidence. Maybe as long as I believe whatever about my concepts on the basis of reliable mechanisms and there in fact are not such groups out there then I know.

Memory only seems like narrative because that's the primary tool you're using describe it. Unlike narrative, however, memory doesn't necessarily exhibit a beginning, middle and end.

Memory exists in the hippocampus and dispersed across the pfc. It's a network, not a line. There is no beginning, middle or end in a network, just nodes with more less amounts of connection between them.

For a good example of memory that doesn't present as narrative, consider traumatic memory. Traumatic memory persists (by persists I mean the defining symptom is flashbacks) because it cannot be incorporated into the existing explanatory framework (the story of why things are the way they are) of an individual.

Now, the fact that traumatic memory presents as surface reality, as meaningless, would seem to reinforce the idea that memory requires narrative to have meaning, but traumatic memory is not the only type of memory that refuses to be incorporated into narrative.

People can also experience memories that don't present as narrative, but these memories involve an intense multiplication of meaning (as opposed to the other extreme, the closure of meaning). People sometimes refer to such experience as awe, sublime or transcendental.

In either case, the memories belong to the realm of the unspeakable. Their meaning cannot be articulated (brought into narrative), either because the meaning is too terrible to be absorbed by the psyche, or too great. In both cases, the zero day quality of the memories tends to become like a genius loci of a great many words (because they are never enough).

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As for the idea that "if they are giving a meaning that does not actually exist except in the mind they are all giving lies," my point is that the conditions they give are false, not that the meaning they have given is false. That is, the totality of phenomena involved in the production of meaning are not restricted to the mind.

(so, to look again at pain, pain indicates something about reality; its existence in the mind in no way invalidates its truth—we do not need to attribute "puncture" to a needle popping through the skin in order for the sensation to mean "puncture")

Meaning is not merely imposed on reality like a map over the territory. It is (should be?) the exact opposite. The territory demands that the map accommodates its nature, or the map becomes nonsense. The author of the essay and the German guy he wrote about both recognize this, but they do so while earlier insisting that the map gives the territory meaning. Surely, the territory gives the map meaning.

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As for objective meaning, I don't deal with the objective and subjective dichotomy in the normal way (i.e. the way it was hammered into me in college). A subject is just a subcategory of object, namely an object with a model of itself for itself. Subjective meaning is objective meaning; it's just an incomplete part (subcategory) of it.

The incompleteness of subjectivity precludes absolute truth (this is where the falseness comes into truth, the incompleteness of truth). Objective truth, essential truth, to the subject, only arrives in bits, or it overwhelms. I see through a mirror darkly.

I would love something like that! I am way better with a computer than I am with a forklift! Where can I learn more?

I don’t get it…

Egalitarian what?

What behavioral issues?

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If you don't like that there is also remote data entry jobs it's kinda monotonous but there are ways to automate it, where you'll just have to check the end result

Security and police are different. Security isn't supposed to intervene they're supposed to "observe and report" at least that's what my friend in security told me. Might be different because we live in a city not a rural place.

Check this out

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Oh, you right.

>influencing people by representation is counter to the idea of representation

the people that my representative is influencing through representation are the other politicians whose votes will be needed to pass any given legislation.

that is how anything gets done in a representative democracy.

Is it possible that behaviour is heavily influenced by the gut biome and other nerves/receptors that would otherwise be imperceptible?

How does that affect the concept of free will?

Could recent behavioral issues and seemingly increased neurodivergence be related to what's in the food stocks we eat?

influencing people by representation is counter to the idea of representation. Working to change what people want when your job is to advocate for it, is in my opinion, corrupt. You are not representing people you are doing what you want. Useing metaphors to manipulate people in this way is very questionable in imo. I'm of the opinion that politicians are not thought leaders though. Although I could hear an argument about the president seeing as he is less of a representative and more of a leader so to speak.

a politician is a salesperson; their job is to influence people via representation.

i expect a politician who shares my values to express those values in a positive light. i also expect a politician who doesn't share my values to state their own opinions in a positive light (because they, too, represent a constituency.) those are stories being told for the purpose of having me understand the issues and the available opinions/options on those issues.

the author of this essay is suggesting that "better stories" (one's that adhere to an objective truth while acknowledging divergent values) are the nexus of understanding and acceptance among divergent political factions.

obviously we have politicians lying big-time right now. according to the author's stated values those politicians could be telling better stories (as defined) instead of lying. and if they did so our political divisions would be less of an issue.

Such things don't exist in base nature, they only exist within human culture.

Also, there's more involved than just evidence, there is also the element of trust. If I believe myself to have reason to not trust a person or an organization, it will modify how I consider "the" evidence - the point of the quotation marks being that what is often referred to as "the" evidence is usually only a subset of all evidence, and typically seems to not take into consideration that what evidence exists is a function of what evidence was looked for, or discarded.

This is with regards to the very interesting question at the very end: I think philosophy and literature are able to approach a specific topic from different angles and the philosophers you mentioned must have noticed that. (I really enjoyed the passage of OP’s essay where he explained that Maugham enabled him to better access certain topics of Spinoza.) You could also make the argument that philosophy and literature are not as different as mainly philosophers like to think. With the exception of formal logic, philosophy relies on the very unreliable medium of language to relate some sort of truth knowledge. If you read for example Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, you cannot deny that they use literary devices to bring their point across, that their language is downright poetic sometimes.