[PavlovsCat]

> As a consequence, we naturally expect truth and meaning to come from outside. That's why we look for confirmation from others.

Yes, we look for confirmation, just like we give it, but that's not all, we also decide how to weigh opinions based on our opinion of the people holding that opinion. I mean, how can others give you confirmation, if they in turn get their truth and meaning from the outside? That'd just be pointers going in a loop. By the same token "the outside" can tell you anything, you can tell "it" anything.

[usgroup]

Agrippa's trilemma, used as a reductio in your argument. Unfortunately, it applies to pretty much all claim to knowledge not just the case you're using it in.

[PavlovsCat]

I'm not "using" anything, I asked something.

> how can others give you confirmation, if they in turn get their truth and meaning from the outside?

When someone says something like "we get truth and meaning from the outside", I think it's a fair question.

[smhost]

That comes later. Our world would be nothing but confusion and trauma if we all came into the world as aware as we are now.

[PavlovsCat]

For some it never comes, that's the problem. edit: apart from "being aware" being kinda unrelated to anything I wrote, since you can still be unaware or aware as "your own person" or as someone who "gets meaning and truth from the outside".

> that's why we expect the people we fall in love with to give our life meaning

Surely that doesn't describe infants.

In that comment I just see things about either getting meaning from others, or trying to be different from others, which is claimed to be our main "limiting factor in life". "Imitating someone" and "trying to be different from someone" are two sides of the same coin, and while necessary for early development, not all there is. Come to think of it:

> The emergence of the stranger and his externalization stands in direct relationship to the degree of impairment of that which is most personal - namely, a person's identity. But how can inner development take place in children if everything that makes up their individuality is rejected and made foreign? Then identity is reduced to adaptation to those external circumstances that insure a child's psychic survival. Children do everything to fulfil their parents' expectations, and the way they do this is to identify with their parents, but then the child's individuality is replaced by a foreign element. That is why the 18th Century English poet Edward Young wrote: "We are born as originals, die as copies".

> An identity that develops in this manner is not oriented to its own needs but to the will of an authority.

[..]

> I want to emphasize that the "stranger" in us is bred by a culture that won't accept the spontaneous expression of children's aliveness and vitality. This aspect of a culture gives rise to violent behavior and is responsible for the development of deficient identities. Personalities formed by the processes producing the inner stranger were never able to develop trust as an underlying component of their personality. Instead, they take on a "false identity" that makes them idealize repressive authorities in the hope that they will be rescued by the very people who are their tormentors.

-- Arno Gruen, "The Need to Punish - The Political Consequences of Identifying with the Aggressor"

And that's what I hear when I read that "we" expect people we fall in love with to give our meaning life, as if it relieves us from the pain of pointlessly seeking to be different, which just limits us. As if uniqueness, unpredictability, wasn't what makes us human, but what keeps us from reaching our full potential.

I would never ever put that sort of onus on someone, much less someone I loved. I would not want to be with someone whose life had no meaning if I was run over by a bus, either.

[smhost]

i ultimately agree with your politics, but i don't think it's a matter of simply deciding to be somehow self-contained. you can decide to give yourself whatever meaning you want about yourself, but so long as society doesn't recognize your meaning and see you as you see yourself, that meaning has no meaning outside yourself. and there's also another problem with denouncing the other, which is that you close them off to the possibility of realizing themselves through you, and so they can never be a part of whatever society you decide to create for yourself.

[PavlovsCat]

> i don't think it's a matter of simply deciding to be somehow self-contained

Neither I nor Gruen said anything like that. I read the comment I responded to as claiming it's all from the outside, all from society, and I simply ask what IS society, when they all just get it from the outside. And I say there's not just the outside -- and the only way that can get heard is as me claiming "there's only the inside"? That's frustrating. It may may be "politics" to others, but to me it's simply a question of awareness, and Socrates-style question that are intended to be answered, not to make a point first and foremost..

You said making your own decisions "comes later", which as I pointed out doesn't fit the comment I replied to, since that was also talking about getting your meaning from others as an adult, e.g. falling in love. Also, Gruen and others mention the individuality of infants being suppressed -- so is there something to suppress, or does that "come later"?

What's the youngest age a human can approach or retract from a stimulus? I'd say then at the latest it becomes a two-way street, but it's probably one from the first cell division. If anything, that's what I'm arguing.

> so long as society doesn't recognize your meaning and see you as you see yourself, that meaning has no meaning outside yourself.

"Society" cannot do that anyway, since it's not an individual human being. We can use society as a shorthand for actually existing humans, but "society" as such is an abstraction, it doesn't really act or think or feel or understand or mean anything, like any group.

And yes, the meaning we have in life is for us only, but how is that a problem? What's the alternative? A "common" delusion, or people saying the same words as if that makes them the same inside?

> there's also another problem with denouncing the other, which is that you close them off to the possibility of realizing themselves through you, and so they can never be a part of whatever society you decide to create for yourself.

There's a poem I like, but I don't quite remember it, something about being "alone like a tree, and brotherly like a forest". I think true friendship, love, and/or a society of adult citizens, "achieves its full flower" with individuals who stand on firm inner ground, so to speak.

The closest two eggs can get is when their shells touch -- if you make omelette, they're no longer eggs in that sense, and to me that's not two eggs coming really close, but two eggs disappearing and being replaced by something that's less than each of them.

[smhost]

you're making a domain error when you conflate the forces of physical chemistry during first mitosis with higher level cognitive phenomenon of self-perception and identity. i hope you recognize that.

and you're entirely wrong about society being a fiction and therefore it not being real enough to matter. try telling black americans during the civil right era that society is just a fiction anyway and they just need to find meaning within themselves. it's a profane asymmetric insult for you to enjoy all the benefits of being recognized by the dominant fictions of society in the form of powerful institutions at every level of society, and then to deny that same recognition to people who are not you. meaning within fiction matters, "common delusion" matters, and it matters more and in more powerful ways than any individual can provide themselves.

[PavlovsCat]

> you're making a domain error when you conflate the forces of physical chemistry during first mitosis with higher level cognitive phenomenon of self-perception and identity. i hope you recognize that.

No, I'm using a figure of speech, and you're responding to nothing, certainly not the strongest possible interpretation.

> and you're entirely wrong about society being a fiction and therefore it not being real enough to matter.

You simply don't understand a word of what I say, as I say it.

The very first words of my first comment in this thread were

> Yes, we look for confirmation, just like we give it

Which makes it clear I don't "denounce others" or say "the outside is an illusion", or any of those plump distortions of my words, laced with big words, you offer. Apart from "I agree with your politics" which is like saying "I think it's fine you're beating your dog". I'm not beating my dog, I wasn't proposing politics, I disagreed with something. Initially by asking a question, to let the other person maybe elaborate on something I got wrong, etc. Well so much for that, I guess that boat sailed. Yet you are not OP and cannot answer my questions to them. As it turns out, you can't even give your own answers, because you distort what I say or ask before you even interact with it.

Simply because I disagree with one extreme, you put words about another extreme into my mouth. As far as I'm concerned, you haven't actually addressed any of what I said, and I'm done wasting my time.