Guess what?! You might have been joking, but this is not very far off the mark.

There are a few things that need to be understood in order to make this clear.

Neuroses exist on a spectrum (not an on-off switch), and almost everyone exhibits neurotic behavior to some extent. Who exhibits observable neurosis and who does not is decided by the interplay of two factors: psychological resistance to neuroses (stress tolerance, established by both nature and nurture), and the amount of stress a person is dealing with.

So, for example, a person with an extremely high tolerance for stress can still become observably neurotic if placed in a horrific situation. Likewise, a person with a very low tolerance for stress can become apparently normal if placed in an extremely safe situation.

In psychology, the tendency to attribute a person's actions to their internal character rather than the situation they are in is called the primary attribution error. It's the most common mistake.

Almost everyone is crazy if the world is crazy enough to make them that way. But, yeah, there is a good ~15% who are resilient AF.

Not someone, everybody. Not X, goodness. And not me—I've already done my tests—you.

You are testing for a transcendental quality of being. It applies equally to everybody, just like gravity or thermal radiation.

So, alright, I'll design the first test for you. I won't full out define goodness, but the test itself will sort of reveal that.

You need to give up something valuable to you to someone who needs it.

An underlying idea here is that goodness requires sacrifice. Simply giving up something you don't value won't work. Another underlying idea is that need takes precedence over want. Giving someone else something that they want is nice, but not necessarily good.

What do people need? They need food, water, clothes and shelter. That's the bare minimum, so your best bet will be one of those things.

You have to do this because you recognize the value of the person you help.

An underlying idea here is goodness requires appreciation for otherness.

In the course of one full day (sure, I will risk putting a time limit on it, even if that's not the best policy, I can't imagine you doing the experiment otherwise), if you don't receive something of greater or equal value to what you sacrificed, it's a failed experiment.

An underlying idea here is that goodness isn't a one way street. It doesn't mean martyrdom. Reciprocity is also a quality of goodness.

However, the reward shouldn't come from the act itself (feeling good) or the person whom you help. The reward should come from something seemingly unrelated.

It needs to come from something seemingly unrelated because you are not looking for emergent local phenomena. You're looking for laws of nature.

Now, correlation doesn't prove causation, right, so you need to not only be able to repeat this test, but you also need to try to disprove other possible causes of the reward.

That means that, if the first test is a success, try doing the good deed and then isolating yourself. If the reward comes anyway, you might want to start looking deeper into what it means to be human and perhaps designing even more tests. If it doesn't work, at least you will have tested for the existence of a transcendental reciprocal goodness with a one day time limit.

Empirical testing means that hypotheses (predictions based on causal models) are confirmed or denied by carefully designed tests (the test design isolates causality).

The only reason you can't imagine such a test for, for example, the existence of goodness, is that you have already precluded the possibility. Your tautology doesn't allow it (because you treat your definitions as axiomatic, you can only arrive at conclusions that verify what you already belief).

But, if what you say is true, there either are no sufficient tests for the existence of goodness—and/or there are tests that would verify the relativity of goodness (i.e. we can confirm that we are free to create our own subjective evaluations independent of an objective reality, where free means that there would be no misunderstood or misrepresented causal relationships, the misrepresentation of which would become clear as the "real" world acts in a way that denies the validity of the evaluation).

I think you haven't even tried to test your idea.

So, I'm saying to you: Go out into the world and test it. Is goodness real, independently real, transcendentally real, objectively real, as real as sunshine or gravity? Don't base your conclusion on anecdotal evidence or axioms. Test it.

No. Plato > Aristotle.

People say "subjective" and imply relativity, but if a subjective viewpoint doesn't conform to reality the descriptive capacities it enables fail.

What is a subject if not a type of object? And, as an object in a world of objects, its representation of being to itself must approximate accuracy in order for it to function.

So, for example, someone says that the grotesque is beautiful. For them this may be a true experience while others don't experience it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that aesthetics are relative. What if existence itself is beautiful? Everything is beautiful? Beauty is not made up, but transcendental?

Do you see what I'm getting at? Subjectivity isn't necessarily relative. It's necessarily limited. These are very different.

Objectivity is also limited. After all, subjects are the types of objects capable of knowing, and objectivity is a type of knowing. And, I hope we can agree on this much, subjects are limited.

The difference between subjectivity and objectivity is not the amount of effort put into realizing and eliminating limits of perception, nor the methods of that effort, but the claim of totalization.

Certain circles reserve the right to totalization for objectivity, but my God this is absolutely opposed to the scientific project. Logically and historically we know that our scientific descriptions of the world are limited, imperfect, and provisional.

But, hey, look, they conform to reality well enough to make accurate predictions. That's what makes them objective. Now, what about subjectivity releases it from this demand to conform to reality? That is exactly what every theory of morality (or any other topic the author relegated to subjectivity) seeks to do. They make predictions, and they're either false or true.

The testing ground for moral systems is the same as the testing ground for scientific observations.

So, does goodness exist? Test it. Test if it exists independently of the mind. If you find that it does not exist, fine. That's not what my experiments resulted in, but now we can at least begin discussing truth instead of summarily dismissing the great majority of human thought and experience as relative.

Don't just listen to these people. Go out and see, as best as you can, whether ideals inflect real properties of existence or simply inflect some biological propensities tempered by society and projected over dumb and mute matter.

Memory only seems like narrative because that's the primary tool you're using describe it. Unlike narrative, however, memory doesn't necessarily exhibit a beginning, middle and end.

Memory exists in the hippocampus and dispersed across the pfc. It's a network, not a line. There is no beginning, middle or end in a network, just nodes with more less amounts of connection between them.

For a good example of memory that doesn't present as narrative, consider traumatic memory. Traumatic memory persists (by persists I mean the defining symptom is flashbacks) because it cannot be incorporated into the existing explanatory framework (the story of why things are the way they are) of an individual.

Now, the fact that traumatic memory presents as surface reality, as meaningless, would seem to reinforce the idea that memory requires narrative to have meaning, but traumatic memory is not the only type of memory that refuses to be incorporated into narrative.

People can also experience memories that don't present as narrative, but these memories involve an intense multiplication of meaning (as opposed to the other extreme, the closure of meaning). People sometimes refer to such experience as awe, sublime or transcendental.

In either case, the memories belong to the realm of the unspeakable. Their meaning cannot be articulated (brought into narrative), either because the meaning is too terrible to be absorbed by the psyche, or too great. In both cases, the zero day quality of the memories tends to become like a genius loci of a great many words (because they are never enough).

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As for the idea that "if they are giving a meaning that does not actually exist except in the mind they are all giving lies," my point is that the conditions they give are false, not that the meaning they have given is false. That is, the totality of phenomena involved in the production of meaning are not restricted to the mind.

(so, to look again at pain, pain indicates something about reality; its existence in the mind in no way invalidates its truth—we do not need to attribute "puncture" to a needle popping through the skin in order for the sensation to mean "puncture")

Meaning is not merely imposed on reality like a map over the territory. It is (should be?) the exact opposite. The territory demands that the map accommodates its nature, or the map becomes nonsense. The author of the essay and the German guy he wrote about both recognize this, but they do so while earlier insisting that the map gives the territory meaning. Surely, the territory gives the map meaning.

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As for objective meaning, I don't deal with the objective and subjective dichotomy in the normal way (i.e. the way it was hammered into me in college). A subject is just a subcategory of object, namely an object with a model of itself for itself. Subjective meaning is objective meaning; it's just an incomplete part (subcategory) of it.

The incompleteness of subjectivity precludes absolute truth (this is where the falseness comes into truth, the incompleteness of truth). Objective truth, essential truth, to the subject, only arrives in bits, or it overwhelms. I see through a mirror darkly.

"Stories, narratives, and myths give meaning to our reality."

No they don't. People endlessly repeat this vague claim without examining it. If anything "gives" reality meaning, that presumes meaning doesn't necessarily belong to reality. Sure, reality can create meaning, because stories are part of reality, but the meaning itself would not necessarily be a part of events themselves.

From this perspective, people attribute meaning to events post hoc—and it is implied that events do not have meaning in and of themselves. Meaning, from this perspective, only occurs in the mind. This comes to the fore later, when the writer states,

"As the world is in itself indifferent to human meaning, we need stories that connect contingent events to make sense of the reality we live in."

(side note, I more than mildly dislike when one persons speaks for all humanity in the first person plural)

Before I even get to why such claims stand on shaky ground at best, I want to address the people who will get totally hung up on how right they are about meaning only occurring in the mind. Stories and myths and narratives are not necessary for meaning even if you are one of those people who believe meaning only occurs in the mind.

Meaning, in the sense meant by people who take this stance, can still come from memory. It doesn't need a story. It doesn't need a narrative. It doesn't need a myth. Meaning, the most deeply felt intimate meaning, the meaning that a person lives, that they feel, which drives their actions, comes from memory, memory which doesn't need to be articulated, structured, made sense of or interpreted.

The mind and body know and "understand" pain, desire, etc., etc., without words. In fact, the ability to "understand" sensations without language makes language possible. Distress and pleasure don't need a representational medium to be important or meaningful. If anything, the relation would be the exact opposite.

I don't even believe this to be the case. I am only providing it for the people who are so entrenched in the hubris of materialist reductionism that they can only consider meaning as occurring in the mind (reserving the stance of ultimate truth teller for themselves while "discrediting" humanity as a whole).

It is obvious to me that meaning exists independently of the mind, and the mind gets closer or further from articulating that meaning through the life course. I won't argue this case. I will, however, point out how Blumenberg and the author use this sense of meaning when it suits them.

"The possibilities of constructing meaningful narratives from collective histories are indeed not infinite. At a certain point, stories and myths start misrepresenting or even abusing history. It is, therefore, important to determine when exactly myth becomes illusion."

He goes on to elaborate how myths become illusions when they lie, but if they are giving a meaning that does not actually exist except in the mind they are all giving lies. An underlying truthful meaning must exist, in reality itself, for there to be a distinction between illusory and true myths.

Do you not know that the truth, the simple materialist reductionist truth, the phenomenological truth, whatever takes your fancy, can be told in such a way as to give a false (illusory) meaning? After all, truth is never complete. People are not that smart. The very idea that I could even imagine such a truth is ridiculous. I can't even accurately imagine, in totality, what happens in a single city on any given night. Perhaps someone else has a brain that is that much more powerful than mine, but I haven't seen it.

Anyway, this is making my brain hurt. I've already done my eight hours of work today.