The Castle is one of the most painful book reading experiences in the best possible way. If that makes sense. Kafka creates confusion & paranoia without any real threat or danger in the story. It’s a labyrinth of insecurity & absurdity. It makes me uncomfortable just thinking about it. It’s unlike anything before or since.

There are a few of his works of fiction that come to mind. I’ll touch on just three of these with brief interpretations that, I think, will attend to his criticisms of capitalism.

“A Hunger Artist” - one’s artisanal work becomes something merely admired, but no longer valued as a capital good (in this case, allegorized by an artist whose skill is to starve themselves for intervals of time in a locked cage at a circus, eventually dying when the viewers stop caring and the supervisor no longer supports them). The hunger artist’s self-loathing and ironic sense of self-preservation through hunger (because they say that they could never find a food they liked) is funny, but might also speak to the sad reality of the determinism in system where money and capital are concentrated in the hands of owners and not the producers of the capital. Case in point, when the hunger artist finally expires, the supervisor—the owner of the circus—basically discards of his body immediately and moves on without a second thought. Very Marxist in its conception, imo. From Marx:

> In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him... Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

The Metamorphosis - how do you call in sick to work when your boss shows up to your house and bangs on your bedroom door ‘cause you’re a few hours late (lol)? But seriously, the story takes the idea of surveillance of employees, family debt, and the dispassion one feels for work that feels purposeless (in this case, it’s “insurance”) and asks how this system would respond if the worker entrenched in that system somehow became inutile. Gregor Samsa is economically exploited on so many fronts. First, his employer enters his home and demands he return to work, making spurious claims that he’s defrauded the company, but then threatening him with dismissal if he doesn’t show up. Second, his family doesn’t work because Gregor makes enough money to keep them satisfied to sit around and live a very modest existence without having to strain themselves while he pays their existing debts. Third, the family, needing to make money after Gregor’s metamorphosis, rents their rooms to three boarders who flee in disgust upon finding Gregor in his insect-form. In short: Gregor’s utility begins and ends with his ability, actively or passively, to produce wealth for someone else. In the end, having lived his whole life in complete service to the financial needs of others, he dies in the misguided belief that his life will no longer hold his family back from financial uncertainty as he’s become too much of a burden.

Selection from “The Rescue Will Begin In Its Own Time” - a hilarious story about a farmer who begins by asking for help, but ends up engaging in an obtuse business agreement with a man on a highway for help in fixing problems within the farmer’s family (he’s been quarrelling with his wife and his kids are lazy). The man on the highway (the narrator) who’s being asked to help slowly begins making demands that would qualify as payment for the consultation and counselling that he’s being asked to give. At first the demands are small, but the back and forth between the two men yields greater and more elaborate, mostly unwieldy, requirements. For example, the man asks for all of the same food and drink that the farmer consumes in the day—basically suggesting he become another mouth for the family to feed. He asks for a barrel of ale a week, and a whole bunch of other random shit. Finally, the he says:

> “[It’s] not so much,” I said, “and I’ve almost got to the end. I want oil for a lamp that is to be kept burning at my side all night. I have the lamp here, just a very little one that runs on next to nothing. It’s really hardly worth mentioning, and I just mentioned it for the sake of completeness, lest there be some subsequent dispute between us; I dislike such things when it comes to being paid. At all other times I am the mildest of men, but if terms once agreed upon are violated I cut up rough, remember that. If I am not given everything I have earned, down to the last detail, I am capable of setting fire to your house while you’re asleep. But you have no need to deny what we have clearly agreed upon, and then, especially if you make me the occasional present out of affection—it doesn’t have to be worth much, just the odd little trifle—I will be loyal and hardy and very useful to you in all manner of ways. And I shall want nothing beyond what I have told you just now, except on August 24th, my name day, a little barrel of two gallons of rum.”

In the end, the farmer is so aggravated and annoyed by the ludicrous demands that he dismisses the man and says he’ll just figure it out for himself. The story ends with the man on the highway saying: “So why the long negotiations?”

The story challenges so many conceptions of negotiation and binding of contracts, especially when the goods on trade are intangible. This line of interpretation suggests that all “skills” are somewhat imprecise in their “value” for purchase. The cost isn’t tied to any immediate input costs (of material or time), only the output or result for the consumer. So the provider can be as conniving as they want in dreaming up a fee.

But the inverse reading is more interesting, imo. The man on the highway is so careful in his analysis of the challenges and pains he’ll have to take on by consulting for the farmer that his exorbitant demands represent the true cost of his craft, and represent a perfectly calculated receipt of the work he’ll have to do without forgoing his own life:

> Did he [the farmer] suppose I could fix in a couple of hours what two people had done wrong over the course of their entire lives, and did he expect me at the end of those two hours to take a sack of dried peas, kiss his hand in gratitude, bundle myself up in my rags, and carry on down the icy road?

Thus, it’s working to a fair contract. But when it’s all laid out on the table for the farmer, it’s suddenly better for him to move on down the road and fix the problem himself. An even more likely scenario is that the farmer can now “shop” for a new consultant, and while this option isn’t even hinted at in the story, it’s suggestion is at least plausible in the fact that the story places equal on the task being done by either of the two men: one can do it for his own benefit while the other can do it pay.

I love kafka, recently read "the trial" what an extreme and amazing experience

You must be correct.

Oh

I'm not gonna lie, I read this as Kefka at first and was like ???????

Gotta drop this off

Relevant Home Movies

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No it does not. Its like saying eating sand has elements water.

If it’s a fallacy to argue for any non-regressive foundation of knowledge, isn’t it also odd to argue that scientism is a “best” path to knowledge? That is, the endpoint isn’t static, so there will be an infinite number of baselines to define what is the shortest or most accurate path. Scientism surely can’t always be the BEST path to a constantly moving target. And what are we saying about that degree of reliability if we agree that a discrete target doesn’t even exist until it’s observed?

I think it’s important to consider what knowledge really means when framing these arguments. Knowledge is mostly about utility, not possession of some singular truth. After all, we can’t prove that there’s any single truth of the state of reality, and what’s best for the owners of knowledge depends on their subjective and time-variant preferences. So it seems to me that all we can say is that Scientism is the most reliable path to a model of reality that’s eventually proven by accumulated verification. Anything further begs questions about the foundations against which we propose to measure this argument.

Sorry if I’m not making sense or committing some logical fallacy. I’m new, and I’m not a philosopher and barely a scientist. I do enjoy reading everyone’s ideas here, so thanks in advance for any help in following this conversation.

I think the point of the original article was that Maslow's goal of self actualization wasn't was something which almost nobody could reasonably be expected to achieve.

It went on to support the idea that something akin to a person's resilience may be a better measure for how successful their life has been.

Buddhism's goal of transcendence (or whatever the correct term is) is also something out of the question for most people, even if they haven't "been taught from birth and socially conditioned into limbic capitalism to be a worker and to desire and consume".

Like Malsow's Hierarchy, Buddhism has some valuable insights into the human condition. However (following the same logic which the article applied to Maslow's Hierarchy), many people may be better served by a different way of measuring their success.

Edit: wrong word in first sentence

I expected the author to reference or at least speak about Ivan Illich at some point.

We can totally think about education in other forms than school and I regret this article ignores it completely.

Maybe you’re using “discriminate” in the sense that it’s the active choice of a policy-making body to contrive things to create a certain outcome. Make laws, establish institutions and classist social structure, etc. And that’s indeed different than contriving things so as to create a non-discriminatory outcome. You see? We surely apply some discriminating practices that lead to both types of outcome. For example, laws are made to (supposedly) ensure that everyone has equal access to basic liberties. And of course any of those policy actions can simultaneously create discrimination in some areas while relieving it in others.

So it’s difficult to go anywhere useful with your argument. You’re proposing that an A should be done because it leads to so much obviously beneficial B outcome. Sort of like saying we should blot out the sun because that’ll save everyone from the discomfort of sunburn. (Sorry, I stretched for that analogy.) For me at least, it begs the question of what is the trade off. And that would surely be my first contention to your argument if I were trying to argue this like a real philosopher.

If that was indeed what you meant by discriminating, I wonder if you could reframe your proposition around the whole set of possible outcomes. As in, doing A leads to all these different Bs, and most of them are good, therefore we should do A. At least, that’s something I could sink my teeth into.

And maybe you only meant we should prevent discriminatory outcomes. But that gets us into even more of a tangle, it seems, because I’d quickly argue that it’s impossible to prevent any sort of outcome in society and commerce without imposing some sort of discretionary (discriminating) policy, law, or governance structure. And if there’s no practical consequence to the proposition, it’s not really an argument as much as it’s just wishful thinking.

Seconded.

You are begging the question. Whether we believe only truths if determinism is true is exactly what is in question. You have to show that Huemer's inference to this conclusion is invalid or that one of the premises is false, not simply stipulate that the conclusion is false.

Damn that video player is so broken. It stutters the whole way and then a couple minutes in paywalled me. Shame, I wanted to watch that.

Yes, that is a more succinct and precise rendering of what I initially tried to express in a circuitous and clumsy way. His father deemed artists (such as Kafka aspired to be) to be Ungeziefer sponging off the strong and self-reliant men of business who moreover got married and raised families - something Kafka longed to do yet felt unfit for - and Kafka certainly felt tortured by this as he couldn't help relying on his father for survival (physically and emotionally). This paradox of loving & needing someone (or some thing) who nonetheless tortures & humiliates you, or (to use another metaphor from his Notebooks) the dream-like contradiction of something being incommunicable yet demanding to be communicated, explains much of the underlying pathos (and bathos) in his work.

Thanks for the correction and the intelligent exposition.

The original premise 3 doesn't include an explanation of why S does A. Your reformulation of 3 doesn't just explicate the meaning of determinism, it changes the premise entirely. Huemer doesn't provide a definition of determinism in the text. But whatever determinism is, by his stipulation, if it's true, then at any given time you only ever have one thing that you can do (if S can do A, S does A).

You can define determinism through physical laws and prior states of the universe if you like, but that doesn't really impact the argument. How does the ability of beliefs to influence past states of the universe come into this at all? Huemer reasons that the premises entail that if determinism is true, then free will is true. This isn't meaningless, it's just taken to be a contradiction. Through reductio ad absurdum, he concludes that determism must therefore be false.

Why would you think Huemer interprets P1 in that way when he explicitly has the ought implies can principle as P2? Obviously, if you can't believe the truth about something (because you don't have access to information, for example), you can't be obliged to believe it. In the comments, Huemer is explicit that P1 is meant in the sense of "if P is false, then you should refrain from believing it."

That's an intermediate conclusion that Huemer makes, not a premise. You can't just dismiss an argument on the basis that you don't believe in the conclusion. I'm not sure Huemer's argument is sound, but it definitely doesn't depend on whether people who consider themselves determinists believe in the truth of the conclusion. The implausibility of the conclusion is exactly what makes the argument useful and philosophically interesting, because it is supposed to make the determinist position untenable!

Output layer, gives the probabilities of the outputs

Can you expand on that?

Which is the final layer?

Hidden layers like the ones that we have in our brains?

Sweet Heroine mèn, withdrawal symptoms, bugs, and feeling crushed

Experience always has a subconscious aspect