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One of the more stimulating things I've read on SubStack. This and your piece on men and women. I will keep a close eye on your work. Keep it up!

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May 1, 2021Liked by Heliotroph

"Consciousness itself remains materially unexplained" is still creating a gap. In order to have a lived embodied experience, consciousness must be actualizable in living organisms. The commentators hint at this in their discussions of the rational and irrational souls, where the latter is contingent upon one or more incarnated instances. (I would also argue that a lot of what we individually think is our rational soul at work is still irrational, which is part of why climbing the steep upward path is so hard and why truly purifying philosophy is so necessary. It is the chariot upon which the charioteer stands while commanding the horses.) It's better not to play at that argument with materialists at all and, following from the mathematical Platonists, say that the en-forming of matter is top-down, not bottom up.

Otherwise, this was an interesting perspective — while you and I are not completely in agreement on how we make sense of modern society and politics, we do adhere to the same philosophical school, so we do recognize some of the same large-scale problems. From what you wrote about people born in the 1990s and later, are you Gen Z or a younger Millennial? It was difficult to tell if you meant "our" in an inclusive or exclusive sense. I was born in the 1980s and had a different childhood experience, as people were still more cohesive despite the political rifting, and there were no smartphones; additionally, outside of the coasts, the majority of people still self-structured into religious communities for social well-being because they have historically been the focal point of rural communities. Rural pagan communities like the one I was raised in mirrored that to some degree.

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