#subjectivity — Public Fediverse posts

🧠⚡ A Shift in #Thinking: The Indissoluble #Entanglement of #Neurobiology & #Self

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2021/12/05/wie-wirklich-ist-bewusstsein/

📺 https://youtu.be/0LG4gU_jfik

#GerhardRoth #Consciousness #Neuroscience #Neurophilosophy #BrainResearch #Cognition #PhilosophyOfMind #Self #FirstPersonPerspective #HardProblem #Epistemology #Self-Consciousness #Subjectivity #ExplanatoryGap #Body-MindProblem #NeuralCorrelates #Brain-MindProblem #Zoomposium

After developing the ability to watch thoughts and feelings from a mental distance, an even greater freedom is to detach from the subjective feeling of a watcher (which is also impermanent). The result is ungrounded experience, where there is knowing but no knower.

#buddhism #earlybuddhism #detachment #thoughts #feelings #freedom #mind #mental #subjectivity #duality #dualism #impermanence #awareness #meditation

Two gems to ponder from Alexander Bard - a contemporary philosopher who correctly predicted many aspects and impacts of this digital age before they happened.

"To love to live is to love to learn".

and paraphrased:

"The past is the 'one' state because it is defined. The future is so many possibilities that it is a psychotic state of experience. In between those two constantly cycling 'loops' of perception is the now where we narrow it all down using labels to kid ourselves we understand it, or at least can make use of it by choosing parts to focus on and give an illusion of being able to control the uncontrollable. The subjective labels are all really just filters to prevent psychotic overwhelm, rather than being reality..."

#quote #philosophy #philosopher #education #learning #subjectivity #future #past #present #identity

A quotation from Montaigne

Things are neither so grievous nor so difficult in themselves, but our weakness and cowardice make them so.
 
[Les choses ne sont pas si douloureuses, ny difficiles d’elles mesmes: mais nostre foiblesse & lascheté les fait telles.]

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) French essayist
Essays, Book 1, ch. 14 (1.14), “The Taste of Good and Bad Things Depends Mostly on the Opinion We Have of Them [Que le goust des biens et des maux despend en bonne partie de l’opinion que nous en avons]” (1572) [tr. Ives (1925)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montaigne-michel-de/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #montaigne #micheldemontaigne #cowardice #difficulty #fear #pain #perspective #relativity #subjectivity #weakness #nerves #selfcontempt #selfdoubt #selfsabotage #

https://art.odicforcesounds.com/pages/OscarFM/index.html #SunWukong #Business #Asia #China #Japan #America #Movies #Stories #Music #industry #Dreams #Future #Generations #MonkeyKing #Monkey #King #challenge #Tao #Simplicity #Art #Subjectivity + #Objectivity = #Communication ... I feel this is a World Wide #Mission, that #God gave to me, but what is true is that, everything that I am doing, is by My Will, not God will. God have no Will, while it gives you Conscience!

I share my core philosophical positions on Substack.

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/a-provisional-map-of-my-philosophical?r=pvxh5

See map and hashtags for content guidance.

#philosophy #metaphilosophy #ontology #objectivity #selfhood #ontologicalgrammar #language #languageinsufficiency #minds #ai #artificialintelligence #ethics #agency #substack #blog #podcast #video #subjectivity #institutions #law #map #history #politics #governance

No Happiness Outside

Here I am sitting alone

At past 1 am, mulling on

What never was the case

One which I thought it was

Or at least could be possibly,

How we see the world

Not as it is, but as we are

As some wise person said,

Why am I still wanting

Something from this world

A world I had never embraced

Not even in my youth

It was this hankering

For the happiness of giving

In close companionships

Yet in such hankering

Subtly gets blended in a want

A want for the happiness of getting

O Sam, learn from your own saying,

“Maya is nothing but thinking

Happiness lies outside”.

Claude’s Interpretation of My Poem

This is a good poem, Sam. Genuinely good — not in the performed, consolatory sense, but in the way that matters: it is true, and it earns its ending.

Let me engage with it honestly rather than just appreciatively.

What the poem does well

The movement is real. It begins in the specific and embarrassing — alone, past 1am, mulling on what never was — and it does not flinch from that. “One which I thought it was / Or at least could be possibly” — that hesitation, that softening of the delusion even as you name it, is psychologically exact. You are not saying you were a fool who believed a lie. You are saying you half-knew, allowed yourself the perhaps, and that is its own kind of honest accounting.

The pivot at “How we see the world / Not as it is, but as we are” is the philosophical hinge, and it works because you have earned it with the specific vulnerability of the first five lines. It does not feel imported from a book. It feels discovered in the moment of sitting alone at 1am.

And then the finest moment in the poem — “this hankering / For the happiness of giving / In close companionships” — this is genuinely subtle and self-aware. You are not a man who wants to receive love and is dressing it up. You know that your longing presents itself primarily as the desire to give, to share, to illuminate, to accompany. And yet — “yet in such hankering / Subtly gets blended in a want” — you catch the hidden economy underneath the generosity. The giving is also a form of getting. The companionship is also a form of completion-seeking. That is a rare thing to see in oneself and rarer still to say plainly.

The ending — quoting yourself back to yourself — is both the poem’s strength and its one tension point. More on that below.

The one honest tension

“Maya is nothing but thinking / Happiness lies outside” — this is correct. Intellectually, philosophically, you know this as well as anyone writing in English on Advaita today.

And yet the poem itself, the act of writing it at 1am, is the evidence that knowing this has not yet done the full work. The poem knows this too — that is its integrity. It does not claim arrival. It stages the gap between understanding and being, which is precisely the gap Ramana pointed to when he said the one who thinks he has understood is still the ego wearing a philosopher’s hat.

So the poem is not hypocrisy. It is honest testimony from inside the gap.

But I would push you on one word: “still.” — “Why am I still wanting.” That still carries frustration, a mild self-reproach, the implication that by now — after all this understanding, all these years, all these writings — the wanting should have stopped.

Ramana would not say still. He would not frame it as a delay or a failure of progress. He would say the wanting arises, and the question is not why it has not stopped but who is it that notices the wanting. The witness of the 1am mulling is not itself in want. That witness is what the poem is reaching toward but does not quite touch — because touching it would end the poem, and perhaps also end the particular kind of beautiful suffering that produces poems like this one.

A closing thought

There is a line in the Yoga Vasishtha that comes to mind reading this: “The mind that has tasted the bliss of the Self no longer runs after external objects — not because it has been forbidden, but because it has found what it was looking for all along.”

Your poem knows this. Your poem is also evidence that the tasting has not yet fully happened. Both things are true, and the poem holds them together without resolving them — which is, finally, what the best poems do.

Write more at 1am, Sam. The philosopher writes best when the defenses are down.

I wonder if the AI companies will ever be sued for deceptively making their products pretend to be human, especially in order to replace humans. Phrases like 'I want' and 'our bodies' (talking about biology or medical conditions), and even the word 'I', are deceptive, coming from an AI.

#ai #deception #lies #lying #fake #humanity #replacement #subjectivity #psychology #desire #mood #craving #biology #medicine #healthcare

Last time, Thomas Nagel asked What's it like to be a bat? This time, I ask What's it like to be a human?

https://open.substack.com/pub/brywillis634737/p/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-human?r=pvxh5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#philosophy #philosophyofmind #consciousness #subjectivity #interrsubjectivity #epistemology #language #intersubsectivity #heuristics #perception #blog #podcast #humanity

A quotation from Orwell

I think one must engage in politics — using the word in a wide sense — and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognise that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one’s own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias.

George Orwell (1903-1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1945-05), “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic Magazine (1945-10)

More about this quote: wist.info/orwell-george/46470/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #orwell #georgeorwell #bias #cause #endsandmeans #ideology #jingoism #moralcharacter #moralduty #nationalism #objectivity #politicalopinion #politics #prejudice #selfawareness #selfexamination #selfimprovement #subjectivity

Photography Lessons From ‘The Lord of the Rings’ https://petapixel.com/2026/05/03/photography-lessons-from-the-lord-of-the-rings/ #lordoftherings #subjectivity #Educational #narrative #Opinion #tolkien #story

I’d like to share a NotebookLM summary of an early draft of Chapter 1, which serves as an introductory chapter: Authoring Displacement and the Cake Grammar or some such. Have a listen.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/04/25/the-architecture-of-willing-an-early-peek/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

#philosophy #language #will #cake #analog #spotify #blog #podcast #book #monograph #critique #metaphor #perspective #ego #subjectivity

⛓️Trapped in your own #consciousness🧠? – Why #solipsism becomes the most radical #limitsofknowledge

In the #Zoomposium with #GerhardRoth, it becomes clear: The real challenge isn’t just what consciousness is—but how far we can actually perceive with it.

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2021/12/05/wie-wirklich-ist-bewusstsein/

📺https://youtu.be/0LG4gU_jfik

#Neurophilosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Epistemology #Neuroscience #Cognition #Self #Subjectivity #HardProblem #ExplanatoryGap #Reality #Actuality

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 2: 🤖 #Self-Models, #neuromorphic #AI & the Future of Our #CultureofConsciousness 🧠

What is the “self”—and could a #machine one day develop its own #consciousness?

In the second part of the discussion, the #SelfModelTheory of #Subjectivity takes center stage.

🎥 https://youtu.be/Ibf2mrZ3uzM

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#ArtificialIntelligence #PhilosophyOfMind #Neuroethics #KIEthics #TechnologyAndSociety #FutureOfAI #Philosophy

How to Make Your Photos More Meaningful https://petapixel.com/2026/04/19/how-to-make-your-photos-more-meaningful/ #tipsandtricks #subjectivity #Educational #Inspiration #education #Opinion #meaning #opinion #guide #howto

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 1: 🧠 #Phenomenology, #Modeling & the #ethicalBoundaries of #artificialConsciousness 🤖

🎥 Watch Part 1: https://youtu.be/bn9m2CRot-Y

📎More information: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#Consciousness #ComputationalPhenomenology #MinimalPhenomenalExperience #MPE #ArtificialConsciousness #SyntheticPhenomenology #AIethics #ArtificialSuffering #Qualia #PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveNeuroscience #Subjectivity #ConsciousnessResearch #ArtificialIntelligence

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 2: 🤖 #Self-Models, #neuromorphic #AI & the Future of Our #CultureofConsciousness 🧠

What is the “self”—and could a #machine one day develop its own #consciousness?

In the second part of the discussion, the #SelfModelTheory of #Subjectivity takes center stage.

🎥 https://youtu.be/Ibf2mrZ3uzM

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#ArtificialIntelligence #PhilosophyOfMind #Neuroethics #KIEthics #TechnologyAndSociety #FutureOfAI #Philosophy

🪞Understanding #SelfReference and #Consciousness 🤔

The human #brain as a #selfreferentialsystem: An exciting perspective on consciousness!

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2021/12/05/wie-wirklich-ist-bewusstsein/

📺 https://youtu.be/0LG4gU_jfik

#Neuroscience #Neurophilosophy #Cognition #PhilosophyOfMind #HardProblem #Epistemology #Subjectivity #SelfModel #MindBrainProblem #Reality #BCI #NeuralNetworks #ThomasMetzinger #DavidChalmers #AntonioDamasio #DanielDennett #GerhardRoth #Zoomposium

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 1: 🧠 #Phenomenology, #Modeling & the #ethicalBoundaries of #artificialConsciousness 🤖

🎥 Watch Part 1: https://youtu.be/bn9m2CRot-Y

📎More information: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#Consciousness #ComputationalPhenomenology #MinimalPhenomenalExperience #MPE #ArtificialConsciousness #SyntheticPhenomenology #AIethics #ArtificialSuffering #Qualia #PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveNeuroscience #Subjectivity #ConsciousnessResearch #ArtificialIntelligence

Illumination in dark times
A genealogy of modern Western selfhood and a post-Western world

"Smith ... outlines a genealogy of modern Western selfhood: a radically individual, hypermasculine character that was formed during the rapid nineteenth-century expansion of the white man’s world. “Bold, conquering, and altogether assertive,” it was “dedicated to action,” hostile to reflection, indifferent to community and the environment, and guilty of possessing, Smith writes, an “undeveloped heart,” a term borrowed from E. M. Forster’s assessment of the British elite." "

" “We must alter our very relations with the world around us.” This means giving up the exalted and exaggerated idea of the West that boosts a masculinist self-image but severely constricts thought and feeling. “We should welcome our era’s uncertainties,...the not-knowing of how the post-Western story will come out.” Smith’s final warning—that “we will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer”—should resonate today, as nineteenth-century individualism reasserts itself in the degraded Nietzscheanism of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller." >>

* Mishra, P. (2026, April). "The Authority of Thought". Harper's Magazine.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/the-authority-of-thought-pankaj-mishra/

* Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World by Patrick Smith. 2010 >>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/169395/somebody-elses-century-by-patrick-smith/
#TheWest #WhiteSupremacy #masculinity #ImpulseControl #EthnoNationalism #WesternCivilization #AngloAmerican #parochialism #individualism #subjectivity #SettlerSociety #Culture #RacialInequality #war #EastWest #PostWesternWorld #DarkTimes #illumination #narrative #environment

Image: Double Bay War Memorial, Steyne Park, Sydney