>>1518i agree that i havent really made a case for the mind actually being this way, but its kinda difficult to make any case like that without going extreme into citing academic bullshit and trying to come up with a whole continuous framework or something
it's based on my reading on consciousness from neuroscientists and some more recent additions from psychologists/philosophers, and my own personal experiences with having a mind and exploring it and turning bits off and back on with drugs.
I think the most obvious and first/primal conclusion that most people who really get into this stuff is that there is no "I", it's all really a bunch of disparate functions that take inputs and give outputs to each other, and eventually your consciousness (for some reason). One great example is eyesight. You dont receive direct raw stimulus. You receive data that's been properly fucked with and distorted and added to by some function/s whose job is to do that. Your sense of textures, your peripheral vision, your sense of scale, etc. etc. are all made much more pronounced by additions from memoy and general knowledge. Sight is in huge part "hallucination". And then the thing that we feel/observe from gets the input. These two functions are separate though, the data molding part and the subjective part. So this is what i mean for machines/modules. We also have machiens that value. This value comes in the form of discriminations and desires. These desires can be hunger, tiredness, hornyness, etc. Discriminatory values choose what to listen to at any given moment. Sometimes you're hungry and tired and have to decide which to pursue. This is a base level value judgement.
I know it's probably sounding like stupid semantics or something at this point, because most people in a political mindset think of "value" as like a consciously held belief about like ought to do this or that, often applying it to other people, etc. But i see a continuum from the base level values up to the higher level, more conscious or articulable values. Another good thing to look into here is pareto's theory of residues and derivations. Often what we see and call "values" is more just a post-hoc rationalizing or setting-in-stone of something deeper and harder to access. This is one example of lower level values ascending through abstraction to become held beliefs.
But so here's what i mean when i critique a sort of vulgar hedonist egoism: there's nothing wrong with your desires, they're the wellspring of all good things and enjoyment. So im not saying "no its better to keep them in check." But by choosing to value more basal and honestly just loud desires (e.g. anger is more of a second tier emotion, but it's louder than the hurt/anxiety it's derived from) like hunger, lust, anger, you're putting in place a discriminatory system that favors those values over other values (e.g. long-term planning, or just other ways of maximizing pleasure). That same exact type of discrimination is what leads in the first place to your decision to implant that discriminating rule or machine. Why did you chose one and not the other? There's no transcendentally free individual will that just chose it - if something like that existed, it would be the biggest spook anyways, by having pre-made or opaque opinions and decrees that we just have to heed. So, another option (and what i think is the case) is that you chose it based on another basically horizontal but maybe well-entrenched valuing machine. In other words, a spook. If it's unacknowledged, it's not able to be brought down.
And this ties into my previous posts more, the point that: even if you did find and lay out all the valuing machines in your head, you wouldnt be able to do anything with them without giving in to one or another. The best we can do is bash the things against each other and see what breaks - i.e. what is inconsistent with another, stronger or more basal value. And here, honestly, im going to change my stance on what i said before: i dont think that you can leverage critique against itself. I've had a crisis of value before by doing too deep of a stirnoid cleaning, and all i did was try to find new more traditional values in the hopes that maybe something would stick. In the end what i was left with was that root of a tendency to critique values and things, and also weird trad aesthetic on top. I guess the only way to critique critique is to adopt conservative stances but those cant last anyways. Anyways my point is that your only ground to stand on when attacking ghosts is some value system, and you cant shovel out the ground under your feet. And if you somehow do manage to, the result is inability to act until some discrimination system is reinstated. How can you really think that something is below you when you're not able to do with it as you please? Even the option of one thing or another isnt really good enough i think. What you're left with is either a situation where you depose your king then elect him back in right after because everything starts crumbling, or you instate a party system maybe where yknow you can choose to have a few options for what values hold sway over you, but thats about all. Fundamentally we're shackled creatures, and this is fine. Put another way: if you think of yourself as a body without organs, those independent organs/machines are living in a very oppressive or maybe utopian society. They have no freedom. "You" are this society. When you identify fully with this whole organism/body, then you're in control, but in that case you're in control no matter what. Most people though identify with some part of their psyche, like e.g. they have some part (i think the idea of the superego fits well here) that they feel isnt of them, but is representative of the desires of a foreign power (a parent, religious teacher, school teacher, government, etc.), and they identify more or less with primal desires and the regulation of those desires. Lots of people see themselves as the controllers of desires. Most egoists i see identify more with the primal desires.
But all this probably doesnt really seem like too much of a disagreement to you i feel like? because your deal is also that a spook is just what's imposed from outside, and not what's internal or chosen. Personally i see this as total trash, i dont see a big destinction between me and my causes/impacts to my development and my surroundings. Stirner was really into this kind of stuff too it seems like. Maybe its time to re-read him though cause it's been a while. So yeah idk i'd usually guess it's a lib/leftoid holdover, the idea that it's internal vs external, but i dont wanna assume shit or be rude. Personally i see spooks as described by stirner as being what you dont let yourself examine, so it's a more simple conscept for a more religious context, and only really best applicable to higher level rationalizations, but obviously the same methods of critique and inspection can go as far as you want, and my point is that there's no cutoff between rationalizations and core values and basal discrimination and desiring systems.