'Playing a Game of Make-Believe?' | Q&A You and Your Profile

Dr. Hans-Georg Moeller answers questions about identity and existence.
#profilicity #existence #philosophy

To have a better understanding of the topic watch:
Existence in the 21st Century | You and Your Profile:

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Dr Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Program at the University of Macau.

[carefreewandering]

Thank you all for providing so many good feedback! We look forward to doing more Q&A like this if possible.

[tomburns]

This is such a herculean effort and really cool. Probably this kind of work has far greater outreach and impact than traditional academic publishing. Please keep going if you can!

[TallCrow]

I enjoy Tom Nicholas videos, but am disappointed to see that response. I think what happens among left-leaning political circles, at least online and in the US, is that terms like "wokism" seem to represent an aspect of the political divide between left and right. On the right, for example, "wokism" is frequently bemoaned as a cancerous plot to destroy civilization, so on the left the natural response is vitriolic. Critiquing ideas like "cancel culture" or "woke ideology" immediately triggers a filtering response within left-leaning people, because they are trained to recognize them as the talking points of their political opponents (which they often, but not always, are).

There also exists a paranoia that those presenting these ideas could be doing so in bad faith or with hidden political agenda. Indeed, when I first saw the thumbnail with the word wokism on it I was instantly alerted to the possibility of a right-wing reactionary response, and was concerned that a content creator that I generally trust and enjoy could be presenting information in a deliberately dishonest and politically charged way, the way, say, PragerU might. Of course, upon watching the video this was not the case, but that's exactly the problem: we develop intellectual shortcuts in order to sift through what we consider the bad ideas and good ideas to be at a more efficient pace, but at the cost of good faith critical engagement with the ideas. My guess would be that people who called the wokism video "nonsense" didn't watch it.

I wonder if this is a symptom of the abundant availability of information, like do we take in so much that we almost have to develop shortcuts like that?

[alexanderleuchte]

I remember in the 90's, living in a "historic town" in germany, the "second hand observation" culture of japanese tourist groups who were continuously looking through their cameras was considered just curious and weird. Now it's normal everywhere

[-gs]

Can we just take a moment to appreciate this man's patience?

Also, I actually liked the font from the Wokeism video.

[mairmatt]

Getting attacked by Tom Nicholas and his possy is sort of a badge of honor. The technical term for such behaviour is: Befindlichkeitssucht.

[ConfusedDom]

So Henry Rosemont is saying that under sincerity….people are like ogres???

[Bojoschannel]

That Tom Nicholas response shows everything that is wrong with "leftubers", the guy spent more time critiquing your fonts and such and rapidly jumping to stupid conclusions rather than an honest engagement with your arguments. Seems like it really messed up with his identity...

[ths]

That's a major L for Tom Nicholas.

I generally hate the way that the left on social media kind of forces you to conform to a very narrow set of rules. I'm very happy with you who dares to criticize wokeness, or a channel like Shark3ozero who dares to speak out on men's issues without paralyzing himself by the reputation that men's rights advocates have gotten. Contrapoints and Lindsay Ellis experienced a similar thing on Twitter where people take everything out of context, and no valuable discussion about certain topics (like transgenders) is allowed because people rather respond to the reputation of the act (the general peer) than what is actually said.

[leonardotavaresdardenne]

And today Hans Georg Moeller learned that people only listen to what they want to listen and he'll have to repeat his points about profilicity a thousand times more

[oskaraltman]

You say that you shouldn't lie about your identity in profilicity, but how do you even determine what is a lie in profilicity? That is, isn't the very act of lying a performance, which makes the lie a part of your identity?

edit: I now realize that you do distinguish between the "clearly fake" and the "perfomance", but how do you do this? That is how does one determine what is clearly fake if it is not with comparison to an authentic self or the natural roles of sincerity? You could say that what is fake would be obviously fake, but to me this is intuitive, but not clearly true.

[zroum]

We live a nervy, joyless churning mass of anxious and neurotic anticipation of confirmation or of non-confirmation. One major byproduct of a literally teeming society.

[CemeteryConfessions]

How are we defining 'inside' here, and more specifically it's delineation from the outside? My primary concern with profilicity is the reproduction of dichotomies like inside/outside and observer/observed. I think there is a greater ontological entanglement here, and in some ways profilicity seems a continuing of essentialism or epistemic representationalism, which you otherwise seem to be opposed to.

[nickscurvy]

Omg so both ogres and profiles are like onions???

[hannahdonovan]

This is a really interesting project.

In literary studies we often think about how language itself is a kind of performance. The linguist J.L.Austin wrote about performative utterance. As humans we speak truth into being no? Do Butler and her theories of the performative fit in here too I wonder?

Sidenote: Samuel Taylor Coleridge - an avid and early British reader of Kant - was writing in his notebooks about how his dreams were akin to the theatre - where we must suspend our disbelief to watch a story unfold.

A play is of course a fiction - but in some senses - a play is also presenting us with a kind of truth! Similarly, our dreams are of course “real” but … best not to “believe” what they tell you! They do however, tell us something about who we are!

Anyway, that was all very much related to my own thesis but I am enjoying watching this digital project unfold.

[shanihandel]

It is good that you have the theoretical skills to shield yourself from this bullying. For the rest of us it's really hard, this bullying can take a real toll on us regular people. You should have a support group for people who face these "woke mobs". Of course the right-wing is happy to have us, but we need an alternative.

[VVVHHHSSS]

My face is the front of shop
My face is the real shop front
My shop is the face I front
I'm real when I shop my face

Artificial bloom
Hydroponic skin
Chemical release
Synthesise the real
Plastic surgery
Social dialect
Positive results
Documents of life

[Dooman]

Could you make a video on your top 10 (less or more) book recommendations ?

[broken_abi]

I think that the main criticism people have of the Chinese social ranking system is not that it is a ranking system, but that it is the government running it. The Chinese government can very easily exploit this ranking system to go after political dissidents.

[mohammedraheef]

Eye opening stuff, thanks for sharing Prof.