Orwell notes the mischief-maker politicians are specifically the kinds of individuals NOT to worry about. Here he's specifically worried about those showing sympathy to, and influence of, Stalin and the Communist Party.

My point about Stalin's lists is Orwell likely presumed he was on one, and that by helping the British Government contain the Communist Party's expansion specifically--NOT the socialist movement or those whom he merely disagreed with--Orwell was acting in preservation of self and his own concept of free speech, which he believed his own Government at least pretended to preserve.

In hindsight, we might forget that the threat of Stalin conquering all of Europe, and even the UK, would have seemed very real.

Sure, Orwell has been misrepresented to excuse all kinds of awful, as Marx himself has been misused. Perhaps he meant for 1984 to be confused so as to avoid the kind of censorship he was familiar with. Here in Canada, where I went to school, Orwell was removed from my curriculum.

Actually, I find his story about shooting the Burmese elephant to be the most accurate description of power, when Orwell feels obliged by the crowd despite his own decision NOT to kill the animal.

>I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

Power is paradoxical, because to wield power is to succumb to it. If there's a better description of power, I'd love to read it.

Orwell includes "confusing public opinion about the nature of the puppet regimes in Eastern Europe" as "mischief"--presumably, because these so-called "cryptos" suggested such regimes were independent--which he attributes to stupidity rather than malice. He specifically cites such politicians as examples to be distinguished from the dishonest.

Further investigation by those coordinating anti-Communist Party propaganda would be expected; whereas McCarthyism was more assuming guilt by association than nuanced distinctions.

Likewise, fascism and Stalinism--despite their opposition--share a simplistic Us-versus-Them approach, which we ought not apply to Orwell, who (like most of us) is far more complicated. Especially during war, alliances shift, creating strange bedfellows. Presumably, Orwell offered this list to the British Government knowing that his own name was likely on one of Stalin's many lists.

We ought not abandon Orwell to the fascists and anti-socialists who claim him as their own. After all, Orwell is one of those writers banned on both sides of the so-called Cold War, and despite the original comment in this thread, his books were removed from the curriculum when I was in high school. The Orwellian lexicon was so ubiquitous, however, that I went out of my way to read 1984 and Animal Farm over the summer, and since then I've found few other works that have explained in such accurate detail the nature of power.

Orwell certainly said and did things that I CANNOT endorse--as was unfortunately common at the time and throughout history. Marx and Engel also made racially-problematic statements.

Still, Orwell's understanding of power comes from his proximity to it, as did his understanding of poverty--both in Wigan and Paris. His actions, good and bad, included taking a shot in the throat while fighting fascism in Spain.

He tried--not just with words, but with blood and sweat--to nudge the course of history towards the order he saw in Catalonia, but away from the order he had participated in in Burma as well as the Communist Party order he became disillusioned with.

The "mischief" he describes he believed served the totalitarianism he saw in Stalin and the Communist Party--though, the West has often exaggerated such authoritarianism while downplaying our own.

So-called intelligence work, as well as regular diplomacy, is fraught with guesses and inferences, but here Orwell is careful to acknowledge as much and urge further investigation. Again, the context here is considering candidates for producing anti-Communist Party propaganda, which Orwell held to be inappropriate for those sympathetic to the Communist Party.

The list is noteworthy, but should be taken in context.

Edit: I should add, if Winston represents Orwell, clearly he doesn't present himself as incorruptible.

As I understand it, that list--such as it is--was meant to preclude those individuals from being used as intelligence assets by the British because Orwell believed them to be sympathetic to Stalinism, and therefore unfit for this specific purpose.

>The important thing to do with these people – and it is extremely difficult, since one has only inferential evidence – is to sort them out and determine which of them is honest and which is not. There is, for instance, a whole group of M.P.s in the British Parliament (Pritt, Zilliacus, etc.) who are commonly nicknamed "the cryptos". They have undoubtedly done a great deal of mischief, especially in confusing public opinion about the nature of the puppet regimes in Eastern Europe; but one ought not hurriedly to assume that they all hold the same opinions. Probably some of them are actuated by nothing worse than stupidity.

As I said, Orwell's experience was conflicted; he did serve the Empire abroad, which presumes problematic values, and he participated actively in Government propaganda. Still, it's important to remember that 1984 is written about Orwell's experience as a censor in Britain--NOT the USSR.

u/emisneko provides important perspective, which I've even up-voted. I was adding Orwell's own words for more context.

George Orwell was certainly involved with propaganda and (so-called) intelligence operations, and disillusioned with the Communist Party, but in his own words:

"Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.

"Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and--this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism--generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything.

"Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite."

(The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 19 Feb 1941)

"The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic SOCIALISM, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity."

(Why I Write, 1946)

As for Winston, to me, he represents Orwell's own conflicted experience, and ultimately the part of each of us that both pierces the veil of totalitarianism, and yet remains susceptible to it.

>To clarify the nuance: only things that actually happened are experienced.

Then how do we explain the double slit experiment, where we experience observing the interference pattern as if what might have occurred--but we understand not to have occurred--causes the observed experience as if it had happened?

Further, when we observe which slit the particle does travel through, then the interference pattern disappears--hence, the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.

The implication being, observation causes change in the observed.

It's something like General Relativity, where mass bends space-time: observation shapes the observed because they are linked across some (meta)physical substrate--call it The Universe, The Quantum Potential, The Collective Soul, God... whatever metaphor works for you, it is mind itself.

Except, on the quantum level we abandon many of our physical and metaphysical presumptions and assumptions about causation itself.

We can no longer maintain that our experiences are limited to what actually happened, even within the rigorously empirical realm of science, never mind the less abstract realm of metaphysics upon which science must build.

>Objectivity definitely cannot follow from only one person's collection and mental comparison of their own subjective perspectives. And, indeed, we cannot prima facie reject any perception as experience, at all. But to say that the existence of objective perceptions and experiences and also their distinction from private delusions of having experienced things which never happened is 'tentative' leaves only two comprehensible positions: solipsism or insanity.

If we rely on other minds to establish objectivity, but we cannot ourselves establish the objectivity of our own experience of other minds, then objectivity is tentative.

My own sanity is not something I'm prepared to argue--nor is anyone. Sanity is a subjective designation of (limited use, but great misuse) made, as with that of objectivity, tentatively within a collection of perspectives.

>All conjectures are by definition tentative (presumptuous), this can be (logically) assumed. Based on that, logic (computational cognition) becomes, from that point on, useless, as it relies on further assumptions which are also tentative since they are conjectures which follow from more fundamental assumptions, each becoming more tentative from the previous.

But here we contemplate objectivity itself, not just any conjecture.

If objectivity merely exists as conjecture within the collection of perspectives we attribute to other minds, which we must experience from within our own subjective perspective, that is not reason to deny the status of experience to those perspectives which might disagree with such conjecture, because the perspective happened regardless of purportedly external stimulus.

The external stimulus is the unnecessary bit--unless we presupposed it.

>just because all conjectures are tentative does not mean that they are all equally tentative. So simply observing my conjecture is tentative neither requires it be unreliable nor suggests that it is untrue.

Hallucinations are experiences, even if they are not shared. Our task is to place those experiences along with our other experiences within our metaphysical framework to constantly puzzle out how they ALL fit together, with some given more weight than others depending on the context considered.

But if we reject as experiences the perspectives that fail to conform to our tentative notions of objectivity, then we will fail to recognize experiences that falsify our existing paradigm.

>Solipsism (indistinguishable except by abstract declaration from 'the brain in a jar conundrum') is undefeatable because it is unfalsifiable.

Metaphysics, however, is not bound by falsifiability--we should not abstract from questions just because we cannot test them with this specific method, which defines and therefore limits science, not metaphysics.

That's what "meta" means: left-over. Here, we examine what science cannot, so we can ground our science and other understanding on pillars of well-examined doubt, beyond other limited methods.

>Only if you first postulate, not just without evidence but contrary to all available evidence (and there is, despite denials by solipsists/idealists/panpsychists, a LOT of evidence) that your consciousness is independent of the body from which it emerges. Otherwise, postulating the existence of things which lack consciousness isn't necessary, one can directly observe an unlimited number of them.

We only have the experience of consciously experiencing something else "losing" consciousness, as we experience ourselves gaining and losing consciousness.

Just because our own consciousness and that we recognize in others ebbs and flows and changes mode, does not suppose that consciousness itself is absent anywhere.

Again, we cannot have an experience of lacking consciousness. That is beyond falsifiable. It is inconceivable.

>Disappointing as it must be, your philosophical perspective is only coherent if it is solipsistic. Otherwise, it is simply an incoherent hypothesis which fails to be rigorously philosophical. Or perhaps it is merely insanity. Do you actually believe paperclips are conscious? Are the pixels on the screen you are looking at conscious? Are the letters those pixels form conscious? Are the photons emitted by those pixels to present those letters to your eyes conscious? Are your eyes conscious independently of your own consciousness? (You may recognize this as the "combination problem", perhaps in inverse form, which everyone but panpsychists recognizes wrecks panpsychism.)

The combination problem, insofar as it is a problem, is largely a problem of combination itself, not just within interpretations of panpsychism. William James originally suggested there are no composite objects whatsoever. Is that the position that you take?

The problem arises from the illusion of fragmentation itself.

Where do the foothills end and the mountain begin? Nowhere. Mountains and foothills are metaphors we use to represent topographical relationships by postulating objects that are a function of our own perspective rather than some objective demarcation.

We choose ontological metaphors that fit our own perspective and the functional context at hand, much as we might choose to distinguish our current self from past selves, even though there is no clear demarcation of one self from the next, and in other ways we understand all our selves to be one person.

When we further remove the subject itself--because we can doubt the doubter but not the doubt--then we no longer have the subject-summing problem.

Much like the horizon is an artifact of our perspective--there is no such demarcation of the ground and sky, except as a function of our metaphors for the same--the subject is an artifact of our perspective.

Therefore, cosmopanpsychism does not suffer the combination problem.

When we choose to look for particles, then we see particles. When we choose to look for waves, then we see waves.

From our mundane perspective, we are discreet indivisible individuals, but when we look closer we see ourselves as constituted of many parts, and even particles, which observed in certain contexts display behaviour that we can recognize as consciousness--hence why we say electrons want to remain in stable orbits, even if the electron itself might otherwise be described as a probability matrix rather than a single object in space-time.

We fail to understand a certain mode of consciousness as consciousness the way we fail to see beyond the horizon. But if we travel beyond this horizon, we will not fall out of existence or discover a lack of consciousness--rather, we will discover new territory, new consciousness.

When I first learned about panpsychism, it was but a tiny paragraph in the textbook--barely a footnote. We were encouraged to discard the theory as nonsense, just as you have.

Over time, however, our tentative models of objectivity have given way, reluctantly, to this increasingly powerful paradigm.

The orthodoxy called Copernicus and Galileo insane, because they could not make sense of their paradigm shifting models.

Likewise, even Einstein rejected quantum mechanics, because, "God does not play dice with the universe." Rather, Einstein said, "I believe in Spinoza's God."

Turns out, based on our current understanding of quantum mechanics, that Spinoza's God plays dice with the universe.

Calling me insane is an ad hominem attack, which only betrays a lack of argument on your part.

As yet, we cannot decidedly doubt panpsychism--perhaps because it is an accurate model of the cosmos--and so mindless matter is not necessary. Your failure to take seriously this possibility only renders your metaphysics less serious for being unduly limited.

The hard problem of consciousness only arises when we try to explain the existence of mindless matter, which we can never experience.

Panpsychism avoids this problem by not postulating this unnecessary mindless matter.

If the strongest argument against panpsychism is that we cannot disprove it, then this seems like a good reason to at least include this metaphysical paradigm as one lens (of many) through which to examine our cosmos.

> Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

Thank you for your time as well. It always helps to share our perspectives in good faith.

> The issue is confusing. The wording can be adequately understood by looking at the entire context rather than seizing on a single instance of syntax. But given the nature of the subject, there will always be instances of confusing wording.

I agree completely. You noted concern about confusion, so I assumed you meant the non-categorical version, but sought clarification to be sure.

Likewise, we often use redundant phrases to clarify nuances or potentially confused concepts.

> Most subjective perceptions are based on objective stimuli, and are actually experiences. But this does not mean that everything someone imagines or falsely believes happened to them is something they actually experienced

We differ on the meaning of experience:

Your position is that experiences are only those subjective perspectives that are validated based on your conjecture of objectivity.

My position is that any conjecture of objectivity only ever tentatively postulates a network of subjective perspectives within a metaphysical framework.

If objectivity does not necessarily follow from the collection and comparison of various subjective perspectives, then we should not reject any perspective as experience based on that which we only tentatively hold.

> Your proclamations about such things become careless and ambiguous when you are not careful to identify just who this "we" is. From the remainder of the paragraph, I can only surmise you mean a single person somehow subjectively determining whether their personal sense perceptions are hallucinatory. This is a practical and theoretical impossibility, a misrepresentation of what the word "hallucination" refers to. One can suspect that one's perceptions are true or false, but one cannot determine whether it is so.

The ambiguity is careful. As you say, the single person cannot determine whether one's perceptions are objectively valid. Rather, WE rely on "other minds" to collect and compare various perspectives. Since we only ever perceive these "other minds" from within our own subjective perspective, however, we rely on our own metaphysical theories/assumptions about other minds to verify their "objectivity".

Confused and mistaken perspectives are still experienced--thankfully, because that's all we ever experience. To reject any such experiences based on a tentatively held conjecture nested within our own metaphysical theories about other minds, which themselves defy objective analysis, is to ignore experience in favour of conjecture.

We likely agree on the fuzzy nature of distinguishing between subjective and objective in various contexts, but we each emphasize one to dismiss (in some sense) the other.

You maintain that having purported to achieve objective validation through a collaborative process, we can go back and dismiss subjective perspectives that conflict with our agreed "objective" reality--something like Descartes's returning from perceiving God's perfection, and thereby rejecting the Evil Genius doubt.

But your conjecture of objectivity is, by definition, tentative.

I might conclude that the tree is really a person. And I might query if this person perceives another object as a tree or a person. But I can never be sure the first object is a person, so I cannot be sure about the new tree/person simply because the person I thought was a tree agrees with me.

Eventually, we might conclude that our concept of tree and person are themselves confused metaphors. Maybe a tree is a person--in some sense. Maybe it's all the same substance. Then we don't have to explain the emergence of consciousness--not to avoid a problem that requires solution, but--because there is no experience of an absence of consciousness.

> All experience is of perceptions by consciousness.

If consciousness is the experience of experiencing, then how is experience by consciousness not experience of consciousness?

Are we not experiencing the experience of experiencing experience?

Doubt exists necessarily, self-evidently--I have faith in nothing else.

Our language and our specific perspective, however, present confused notions that fragment our experience in ways (like subject/object) that are (in a given context) useful to us--and some which are less useful--but which always represent a different mode of the same substance--the unity of which, explains how we are able to agree on a conjecture of "objectivity" without "objective experience"--the latter you rightly reject.

I can make sense of querying your queries, not because we've exchanged perspectives through some objective intermediary--facilitated by some epistemic hand-shake of objectivity--but because your mind and my mind are different perspectives within the same mind. Our disagreements are similar to those with our previous selves: useful in their differences, but only possible by certain continuity.

Introducing new substances and discreet minds insulted from each other by mindless matter only compounds the confusion.

Postulating the existence of anything that lacks consciousness is extraneous; whereas perspective per se, confused as it must be, cannot be denied. Therefore, the burden of proof remains with those who would introduce such substances and discreet minds--of which, I am quite literally unaware.

>And I think we can all appreciate how badly it would go if I presented my perspective as objective rather than subjective.

Exactly!

>When I can do so without confusing people who assume otherwise, I reject the notion that perceptions which are "subjective" aren't experiences. We remember experiencing dreams, but we never experience them, we only experience "remembering" them.

Do you reject subjective perception as experience, or not? Did you mean: "I reject the notion that perceptions which are 'subjective' are (necessarily) experiences"?

The wording is confusing.

If so, then how do we explain lucid dreaming, where the dreamer has the experience of influencing their dreams as they happen?

Regardless, the framework through which we might categorize phenomena as objective or subjective is always derived from some metaphysical theory or assumption about our subjective experiences--such as those in your analysis of dreaming.

We distinguish hallucination from reality only by comparing various subjective experiences, from multiple perspectives, and then we use our theories and assumptions about such experiences (explicitly or implicitly) to reconstruct our own version of what we "objectively" experienced.

I see a person in the woods, but upon closer inspection, I recognize that the person is a tree. I could conclude that the person turned into a tree. Or, I could conclude that my previous perception was confused, but based on other subjective perspectives, I am now confident that I was always looking at a tree--whereby the possibility remains that further inspection might reveal that I was actually looking at a person in a rather convincing tree costume, and so on, without ever reaching definitive objective reality.

Objectivity, then, can only ever be surreal in that it provides a functional but ultimately tentative concept for how we process the subjective perspectives that are the only real experiences that we can have.

Descartes's mistake, likewise, is attributing to his subjective doubt an objective subject, "I", upon which he builds his positive arguments; whereas, he is only entitled to the doubt itself, NOT the doubter.

All experience is of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is not explaining how consciousness emerges from what lacks consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is explaining why anything ever lacks consciousness.

One need not be vexed by brains in jars when we understand that everything is mind.

>My perspective is that it isn't even different. Everything that is "subjective" objectively occurs, as neurological impulses in our brains that are in every (other) way equivalent to the objective (but non-subjective) things which also cause such impulses.

And yet, even in your comment you've couched your language in that of perspective. The objective reality that we assume exists, and which we claim to experience, we can only access through our subjective experience.

Therefore, everything that is "objective" occurs within subjective experience, where objectivity is assumed based on some metaphysical theory about the reliability of such subjective experiences.

We can't prove the accuracy of our subjective experiences because any standard upon which we might base this proof likewise derives from subjective experiences. There is no archimedean solid point from which to leverage objectivity.

> Every thought and feeling you have objectively occurs

Quite the contrary. Every thought and feeling we have occurs subjectively, as does any notion of objectivity.

The confusion of Descartes's cogito ergo sum is his assumption of the thinker as an objective entity based on a subjective doubt; whereas only the thought itself is beyond doubt--not the doubter--and this thought can only be experienced subjectively.

That is, cogito ergo sum is a subjective experience, not an object.