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Friday, 12 January 2018



In desiring something, some X, it is not that I want this X to come about indifferently, but to come about for me; the X in 'I want X' is me enjoying X, and even something more. Desire is as much a form of cogito for the desirer as self-awareness is for the thinker, and the self-evidence of qualia for the perceiver or sufferer (of pain or truth or essence.) Each of these in its own way eludes functionalist reduction. In every case the apparent level of the enjoying subject is different, but since this personage is never present in any mode his defining difference does not share in the necessity. If anything is functional it may indeed be just this difference. What makes the desirer the desirer appears to be a kind of entitlement, not so much a spiritual as a moral error to be straightened out by a certain kind of therapy. And indeed other kinds of therapy, philosophical for example, have been suggested as a cure for the other kinds of subject as well. In this way it is recognised that what escapes functionalist reduction is always ready to make trouble, is always in excess in some way, is impossible to satisfy or to confine within a rule or ethos. Begin by asking whether the fire - this necessarily imprecise term emphasising its absolute absence of memory - activating each of these modes of the most ordinary experiences is one or many. 

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