What’s your philosophy?

:yikes: LOL

Have you read Wittgenstein by any chance, Forrest? He really expunged the futility in trying to create a methodology in philosophy.

Reply to Wallows Would you like to do a summary of Wittgenstein’s answers to these questions for everyone’s edification? I’m not sure I’ve actually read much of him; I feel like there must have been some excerpts at least somewhere in some class but I can’t really place anything particular and I don’t feel like I have more than a passing familiarity with him.

Reply to Pfhorrest

I wish I could do that for you and for the field of philosophy. Give his Philosophical Investigations a try.

Reply to Pfhorrest Were's @Sam26?

We actually have a reading group here of his Tractatus and Investigations. Underappreciated content on this website.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4520/philosophical-investigations-reading-it-together/p1

Reply to Pfhorrest Great to see our ideas set out like that. I imagine there’s a library of footnotes in your head too!

I’ll be looking it over more closely when I get a chance. I think we can possibly assist each other with something that may be of common interest. :D

Reply to Pfhorrest

I’m from Ojai, California

That says it all. :razz: just kidding, I live in the same county.

Reply to Pfhorrest

This is an intriguing list, Pfhorrest, but holy cow, man. Each one of those questions deserves a book-long (at least) answer!


Quoting Wallows

expunged the futility in trying to create a methodology in philosophy.

I don't understand this sentence.

Quoting Artemis

I don't understand this sentence.

Wittgenstein showed that philosophy, yes in it's entirety, consists in language on being on holiday. And that's it really. It supposedly ends in quietism.

Reply to Wallows

Okay, I get it now. I think you either don't mean expunge or futility in that case.

Anywho, Wittgenstein had some okay ideas, but I think some of it comes down to word-play and an almost religiously-faith-based adherence to him and only him.

Reply to Artemis I’m sure books could be and have been written on each, but I’m just looking for a brief summary answer on each, not even whole essays like I’m working on.

Reply to Wallows Your comments only reinforce the superficial impression I already had of Wittgenstein that he’s one of those “shut up and just run with my unspoken assumptions as the natural default instead of making up a bunch of different stuff I don’t agree with” types. Like capitalists are regarding property rights. Mostly that impression comes from a quote about the proper method of philosophy being to speak only the propositions of the natural sciences... but Witty, what makes something a natural science or not, what do their propositions mean, how can we judge them, etc... also you’re telling me to do something, pretty sure imperatives are not propositions of natural sciences, how do I decide whether to obey such commands or not, etc... You can be a hardcore physicalist (as I am) and not tell everyone to shut up about all philosophy.

Reply to Pfhorrest

No, it's his life that amazes me more than his philosophy...

He makes Faust look like a peon.

Quoting Artemis

Anywho, Wittgenstein had some okay ideas, but I think some of it comes down to word-play and an almost religiously-faith-based adherence to him and only him.

I don't know. It's something that deeply connected with me. I was going through a mental breakdown and was pulling on the carpet I was standing on. I felt so lost, and it's like Wittgenstein found me. I don't know how to compare it to, maybe something like winning the lottery or something like that?

Here's John Maynard Keynes, whom as a pseudo-economist I almost entirely adhere to:

Keynes:God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.

It was that kind of effect he had on people.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

The philosophy that is most important is the effort we make to situate ourselves in the world, and judge whether where we are is good or not. some people do not think about these questions, because their questions have been answered by their other-worldly or their temporal ruler, or because they prefer not to think about such matters. Somebody has to get out and till the corn so that there will be food on the table. Be grateful that the corn was hoed.

Somebody has been thinking about these questions beginning perhaps 300,000 years ago. There is no accumulation of insight, because each person in each generation who asks these questions must find his or her own answers.

Now in the 21st Century, we are still asking these kinds of questions. Perhaps we are able to use more sophisticated language (or not) but the need to situate ourselves in our time and place is no less or more important. The answer does not usually come to us swiftly. We can spend decades rolling the question around in our heads without much result.

Reply to Pfhorrest
First off congratulations on putting together a comprehensive yet concise philosophy in your Codex Q. It is no easy task to achieve that and no doubt took a lot of time, energy and commitment.

So I am happy to discuss philosophy with you, and there is no better place to start than metaphilosophy.

Any and every philosophy is a paradigm. A well functioning philosophy will consist of a collection of self-consistent ideas and perhaps methods that attempt and perhaps succeed in describing the world. But there are more ways than one of putting a philosophy together. A philosophy cannot be constructed without making assumptions and every assumption defines a paradigm.

Do you agree?

Quoting Artemis

Wittgenstein had some okay ideas, but I think some of it comes down to word-play

Exactly wrong. That's what he throws out.

Reply to A Seagull

every assumption defines a paradigm

Interesting, just seeking elaboration on this?
In what manner does the assumption define a paradigm?
Do you mean that the process of justifying an assumption in particular defines it as a paradigm?

Reply to Yanni Nicolandos I think perhaps he just means that a paradigm is defined by its unspoken assumptions, which is the way Kuhn coined the term. In which case yeah I pretty much agree with that definition of a paradigm.

To clarify my intent with this thread though, I didn’t mean so much for us all to go through the questions one by one together and try to agree on a philosophical system. I’m just interested in hearing what other individual people’s complete philosophical systems are, phrased as answers to the same set of questions for comparison.

I have no such system.

Also, I'm not so sure that I'm even trying to build one.

There are a handful of questions I enjoy exploring. I especially enjoy going through ideas and thoughts with others insofar that I feel I can progress the dialogue.

Somewhere along the way philosophy seemed unfinished and boundless.

The attraction to systems diminished with that impression -- which is not to eschew systematic thinking, per se, but to be less concerned with the coherent end-product of a system of propositions.

Reply to Yanni Nicolandos
What I mean is that:

Philosophy requires assumptions, otherwise it goes nowhere.

An assumption does not need justification, indeed justification itself requires assumptions.

An assumption is like an axiom, it is true within the system for which it is an axiom/assumption. hence each assumption creates a different system or paradigm. Though this is not to say that one system cannot have many assumptions or axioms.
One can then explore that system to see what implications it has and whether they tally with one's experience of the world.

Too much of what passes for philosophy makes implicit, as opposed to explicit, assumptions. It then proceeds to explore that system in the mistaken belief that that system is objectively 'true' rather than merely a paradigm that is founded on assumptions.

Reply to Pfhorrest really excellent post, and you ought to be teaching the subject.

Me, I'm sixties person. Philosophy started for me with the Summer of Love and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I would have been 15 when that came out. I became fascinated by the idea of enlightenment. At the time, if you'd asked me, I wouldn't have understood anything about either philosophy or religion, but I felt this reality as a burning fact, as the most important thing anyone could understand. I was baffled that so few people seemed to get that.

So to me, the paradigmatic philosopher in my early formation was 'the Sage', who generally tended to be Hindu, later Buddhist. The point about The Sage, was to awaken you to the true nature of your being, which was something beyond all age, care, stress, anxiety, death or change. Really, the sage said, it wasn't difficult: just had to ask the question 'Who am I?'and the rest would follow.

But in my case, that question 'Who am I?' seem to have a different answer to the Sage. I took the question to heart, but I had to somehow make a living, be someone, and the rest. Plus deal with a lot of untidy and probably unwholesome habits and tendencies as a middle-class person. Nevertheless, something about what The Sage said rang true, in fact I retained the view that it was an ultimate truth. But I learned quickly that the cost of failing to make it as a sage amounts to drudgery.

So when I did enrol in university, having failed to become or a sage (or a guitar hero which would have been just as good) in my own right, I set out to follow the footprints of enlightenment through any of the disciplines in which they might be found. Philosophy was one (along with anthropology, history and psychology) but ultimately I found more of a home in comparative religion (emphatically NOT "divinity".)

That might have been the end of the story, but in mid-life I had a minor epiphany which revolved around the reality of number (epiphanies are always instantaneous and transient, by the way - like the glimpse of a distant vista in lightning.) The basic intuition was that numbers are real, but they are neither transient nor compound; they're not made from parts (later I realised this was only true of primes) and they don't come into or go out of existence. Ergo, they're real on a different level to things/particulars/material phenomena. That was my realisation of one of the fundamental truths of Platonism, and led me to understand that there are indeed levels or modes of being, which is precisely what, I maintain, modern philosophy had rubbed out, so as to arrive at the 'one-dimensional man' or 'flatland' of scientific materialism, with its abundance of fact and absolute absence of meaning.

So those are the fertile plains which I have since been tilling.

Quoting Banno

Exactly wrong. That's what he throws out.

That's what he claims to throw out. Irony at its best.

Quoting Wallows

Wittgenstein showed that philosophy, yes in it's entirety, consists in language on being on holiday. And that's it really. It supposedly ends in quietism.

He argued for that. But to what he extent he "showed" that to be true is another matter. There isn't consensus among philosophers that he was correct. Some agree and others have not. I don't believe what he argued rises to the level of proof. So it comes down to whether Witty's arguments make one's metaphysical itch go away.

Quoting Wayfarer

That might have been the end of the story, but in mid-life I had a minor epiphany which revolved around the reality of number (epiphanies are always instantaneous and transient, by the way - like the glimpse of a distant vista in lightning.) The basic intuition was that numbers are real, but they are neither transient nor compound; they're not made from parts (later I realised this was only true of primes) and they don't come into or go out of existence. Ergo, they're real on a different level to things/particulars/material phenomena. That was my realisation of one of the fundamental truths of Platonism, and led me to understand that there are indeed levels or modes of being, which is precisely what, I maintain, modern philosophy had rubbed out, so as to arrive at the 'one-dimensional man' or 'flatland' of scientific materialism, with its abundance of fact and absolute absence of meaning.

One of the critiques of Platonic idealism that I haven't seen is what is sustaining these entities in some dimension? Is it their function or are they exempt from thermodynamical laws? Or in even other words, is there any intersectionality between the higher realms, and their abstractions, and the lower realms, a la Max Tegmark?

EDIT: Sorry to hijack a thread, but I don't think this deserves a new thread, or I may be wrong?

Quoting Marchesk

He argued for that. But to what he extent he "showed" that to be true is another matter. There isn't consensus among philosophers that he was correct. Some agree and others have not. I don't believe what he argued rises to the level of proof. So it comes down to whether Witty's arguments make one's metaphysical itch go away.

In regards to the underlined. Well, we can't really say there is a consensus on an issue that would leave nothing more to consent over?

Quoting Wayfarer

modern philosophy had rubbed out, so as to arrive at the 'one-dimensional man' or 'flatland' of scientific materialism, with its abundance of fact and absolute absence of meaning.

We are all utterly saturated in meaning. Some just can't see it.

Reply to I like sushi Glad you like the idea. :smile: I look forward to seeing your answers.

Reply to praxis Cool to have another local on here. :cool:

Reply to Wallows I’m glad reading Wittgenstein was emotionally helpful to you, even if I end up not agreeing with his philosophy much. (I take pretty much the same attitude toward religious texts, for what that’s worth).

Reply to Moliere I’m not so much asking for people to put together a coherent systematic philosophy, as I am just wondering what people’s present answers (however un-thought-out they may be) to this range of questions are, both just out of curiosity to see how answers to one question relate to answers to others, and as kind of a learning exercise or guided meditation opportunity (so to speak) for those who maybe haven’t considered all of these questions, a chance for them to think about how answers to one question should relate to answers to others.

Reply to Wayfarer Thanks for the compliment, and for sharing your history. I’m curious to hear your answers to the full set of questions (if you feel like answering them), since I can only infer answers to a few of them from the history you’ve given.

Reply to Wallows I don’t mind a small digression into Platonism vs nominalism vs mathematicism, as a Tegmarkian mathematicist myself and yet also an anti-Platonist, who finds it weird that some consider mathematicism an extreme form of Platonism while I consider it more like the opposite. For analogy, if Platonism is like Cartesian dualism, mathematicism seems more like idealism to me, contrasted to both that and to nominalism/materialism. Anyway if this digression gets too long we can always fork it, and right now it’s no worse than the Wittgenstein digression (and more interesting to me).

Reply to Pfhorrest I was about to embark on that, bearing in mind I'm snatching opportunities whilst at Daily Grind.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields?

General truths, reflections on the human condition and the existential quandaries specific to human beings. I see the Platonic corpus, in particular, The Republic, and The Apology as being foundational to philosophy and indeed to Western culture proper.

Of course it is true that philosophy quite rapidly became desultory, wandering across topics, questions and subjects. But there is a constant undercurrent of questions, or a characteristic attitude, which animates it.

Pierre Hadot:: 'The goal of the ancient philosophies was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing. 1'

I find that a satisfactory definition. This definition is also quite agreeable from a Buddhist perspective.

What differentiates philosophy is its general nature. It is not concerned with techne or with politics as such, but first principles and ultimate ends.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?

The difficulty in this question is that modern culture and society has no ready equivalent for the kind of intellectual illumination which classical philosophy sought. Nowadays progress is nearly always judged in economic, technical or scientific terms - this is what has been criticized as the 'instrumentalisation of reason'. I suppose one attempt to answer the aim of philosophy in contemporary literature would be something like Eric Fromm's Man for Himself:

'In Man for Himself, Erich Fromm examines the confusion of modern women and men who, because they lack faith in any principle by which life ought to be guided, become the helpless prey of forces both within and without. From the broad, interdisciplinary perspective that marks Fromm's distinguished oeuvre, he shows that psychology cannot divorce itself from the problems of philosophy and ethics, and that human nature cannot be understood without understanding the values and moral conflicts that confront us all'.

Note that this is a psychology text, but I think there's an unbreakable connection between philosophy, psychology (in the broad sense understood by Fromm's) and cultural anthropology.

So the objects of philosophy need to be holistic, to provide an ethical compass, and to be rational in the sense of addressing all human needs, and not just those envisaged by materialist philosophy which invariably reduces mankind to a means rather than an end (i.e. a means by which the evolution executes its basically meaningless algorithm.)

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done?

The first and practically only rule is: know thyself. Anyone can say it, very few advance in it, hardly anyone masters it.

Quoting Wallows

One of the critiques of Platonic idealism that I haven't seen is what is sustaining these entities in some dimension?

Quoting Pfhorrest

I don’t mind a small digression into Platonism vs nominalism vs mathematicism

Numbers (etc) are not existent or phenomenal but inhere in the intelligible realm ergo represent a different mode or level of reality than material particulars. See Augustine on Intelligible Objects for a start. Also this paragraph in SEP.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I’m glad reading Wittgenstein was emotionally helpful to you, even if I end up not agreeing with his philosophy much. (I take pretty much the same attitude toward religious texts, for what that’s worth).

I get that some people might find him as a philosophical fanatic; but, he really changed the whole field of philosophy with not one but two works. Have you ever entertained the idea of the linguistic turn in philosophy?

https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/linguistic-turn/v-1

Use lib-gen or sci-hub and insert the DOI for the fulltext.

Yes I’m quite familiar with (and generally aligned with) the linguistic turn generally, and I’m not outright rejecting everything about Wittgenstein (as I said I’m only passingly familiar with the specifics of his work), just with the supposed conclusion of quietism. I think philosophy is still something with something to say, something worth doing, even if what you’re doing is mostly clarifying language and concepts and making clear what fundamentally doesn’t make sense to try to do in other endeavors. Just like I hold the sciences to ultimately be about ruling out possibilities and narrowing in on what is still possible, so too philosophy is largely about ruling out the ways of thinking and talking about various things that don’t work, but those are still both worthwhile endeavors. One might as well prescribe quietism about the natural sciences and say to stop investigating things and just accepted the world as it is; that would be absurd of course, but quietism about philosophy is equally absurd.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?

This begs the question. Before asking what the meaning of life is, it should first be asked whether there is a meaning to life.

Reply to darthbarracuda For all of these questions, if I’m asking “what is...” whatever and you think there is no whatever, “nothing” is an acceptable answer. Otherwise I’d have to double the questions by first asking “is there any...” and then “what is...”.

Quoting Pfhorrest

One might as well prescribe quietism about the natural sciences and say to stop investigating things and just accepted the world as it is; that would be absurd of course, but quietism about philosophy is equally absurd.

But, Wittgenstein postulated, that the majority of philosophy is language on holiday. We tend to find the answers we seek in a pragmatic method nowadays, and as someone who would rather lean towards pragmatism on issues that science can address, then all the better. Then, what remains are rather psychological issues, which the existentialists tried fiercely to address, yet end up mired in their own misery or satisfaction (if any can be attained from existentialist thought).

Reply to Pfhorrest Aighty. I suppose I'll pick out ones I can formulate an answer to then.

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

Because it is pleasurable.

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with?

We do not get people to care. This is not how care works. People care about what they care about -- and to know what they care about all you need to do is listen to them.

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place?

To the extent that one's desires are frustrated knowledge is important. Knowledge is a tool or a toy and nothing more.

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

There is no such thing as a proper state or governmental system. Any one state is relatively good to the extent that they help people -- and not just citizens -- satisfy their needs. If they fail in doing that they are relatively bad. It is not easy to describe or sum up the relative worth of a society -- there are relative goods and bads within every society that we have to judge individually. Not all needs are congruent or comparable. And the ones who should make the judgments are the one's effected by said judgments.

Reply to praxis
Meaning what?

Quoting Wayfarer

The first and practically only rule is: know thyself. Anyone can say it, very few advance in it, hardly anyone masters it.

Classic passive-patronising. So how would you know this (the bolded bit)? If the thing I'm supposed to be knowing is 'myself' and the thing doing the knowing is also 'myself' then how exactly do you know whether I've made any progress in it?

Reply to Wallows My problem with Wittgenstein's account (at least as you tell it, corroborated by the bits of him I've seen elsewhere) is that even if the thesis of one's philosophy is "just do natural science", there is still philosophy to be done there: why do natural science and not anything else, what makes something natural science and not something else, how do you do natural science, etc. A third of my set of questions in the OP (the ones under the heading Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality) are basically those questions, and my answers to them amount to "just do natural science", but they're still questions someone can ask and that deserve an answer, and giving them that answer is doing philosophy.

Even if we get those final answers concretely settled, we'll still have to teach them to every new person who comes along who doesn't already know them perfectly, give answers to all of those questions and justify those answers. That was the point of my comparison to a hypothetical quietism about the natural sciences. Suppose we eventually come up with a perfect theory of absolutely everything, and there are no more scientific discoveries to be made. All you need to do from that point on is just run with that perfect theory, right? No more need to do natural science anymore. Except... for all of the people who don't know that perfect theory perfectly yet, or who doubt or question it. You've got to answer their questions, show them the evidence, go back over all of the natural science and prove to them that your perfect theory is perfect... or perhaps, if their questions are particularly insightful, discover that it isn't. The same is true of philosophy: even if the perfect philosophical theory of everything is "just do natural science", you still have to answer everyone's questions as to why and how to do that, and possibly adjust for flaws in the theory discovered along the way. And that is doing philosophy.

But also, "just do natural science" doesn't even attempt to answer the last third of my set of questions, because the natural sciences are not in the business of prescribing at all, and so give no answers to questions about what prescriptions mean, how to judge them, etc. At best, saying "just do natural science" to that is merely saying they're meaningless and can't be judged, etc... which is just avoiding the question.

Reply to Isaac It's obviously not an objective matter. When I enrolled in Philosophy 101, the anecdote of Socrates and the oracle of Delphi, from which this is drawn, was discussed in one of the first classes. Considering what else I was going through at the time, it really a struck a chord. And I think it's still greatly under-appreciated.

Reply to Wayfarer

So if it's not objective, what prompted your conclusion that "very few advance in it"?

Reply to Isaac Read the thread title. It didn’t request a peer-reviewed paper, it asked ‘what is your philosophy?’

I consider myself lucky to have encountered people who understood and taught self-knowledge. There might be individual teachers who understand its importance in any school you go to, but then, there might not. The world today seems highly populated with un-self-aware individuals, even in high office. And it’s a hard kind of knowledge to come by.

Quoting Wayfarer

it asked ‘what is your philosophy?’

Yes, and I'm just asking you, personally, what factors have lead you to believe that some people have not progressed in obtaining knowledge of themselves. If they are both the location and the subject of the knowledge, where do you get in?

Okay, I'll buy passage on Neurath's cruise and sing for my supper! - though only one song per course, trusting that the dessert table or wine rack alone will be worth the price of my first-class ticket. :yum:

1.0

Quoting Pfhorrest

Metaphilosophy

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields?

1.1 Philosophy, as I understand it, consists in contemplating, critically exposing, and even shaming foolery (i.e. failing to learn from failure, due to 'answering' pseudo/irrelevant questions or 'solving' pseudo/irrelevant problems, because one doesn't know that one doesn't know what one needs to know in order to adaptively judge one's circumstances, which in the long(er) term tends to adversely affect either oneself or others).

1.11 Nonphilosophical fields (e.g. sciences, arts, politics), on the other hand, tend to be invested in applying domain-specific answers and solutions and not in reflecting on how or why questions and problems are framed (i.e. paradigmatic assumptions for posing questions and pragmatic implications from working out problems) and whether or not they are relevant questions to be asked or fecund problems to be tasked. Domain-specific fields tend to be specialized, or instrumental, to the point of being blind to foolery (which also includes normative misuses, or maladaptive practice, of domain-specific knowledge & techniques).

1.12 Philosophy critiques ignorance - illusions of knowledge - which persist due to (indoctrinated? ideological? expedient?) ignorance of ignorance, or what I mean by "foolery" "folly" "unwisdom" ...

1.13 Nonphilosophies, however, produce knowledge, techniques & applied practices in ways, more often than not, oblivious to the foolery with which these productions are (usually) framed.

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?[/quote]

1.2 Philosophy's horizon, at which it's always been aimed, is wisdom - habits of 'thinking well' (free mind) and 'living well' (free body) acquired through reflective inquiries & reflective practices. (By reflective I mean 'self-examining'.)

1.21 The criterion is internal to thinking & living since philosophizing - the exercise itself - is its product, unlike e.g. chemistry which produces new & improved formulas or industrial materials; or painting which produces new expressive styles & artworks; or politics which produces new movements & social arrangements. To the degree, at any moment, a philosophical discursive practice has filtered-out pseudo-questions & pseudo-problems as well as marginalized the irrelevant/trivial, this counts as "progress" of an evanescent kind, achieving topic-specific clarity.

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done?[/quote]

1.3 In Marx's or Dewey's sense of praxis:

1.31 (a) Reflective inquiry into concepts used in, or to construct, e.g. scientific, technical, artistic & political theories.

1.311 Taxonomy of questions: definitions for filtering out irrelevant, trivial & pseudo-questions.

1.32 (z) Reflective practice of applying e.g. sciences, technologies, arts & politics in ways useful to persons & communities for surviving and flourishing despite social conflicts, martial catastrophes or natural disasters.

1.321 Taxonomy of problems: (See 2.51, 2.511, 2.512, 2.513, 2.52)

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher?[/quote]

1.4 Courage. Sapere aude. Amor fati. Solitaire et solidaire. No doubt intellectual courage is needed, but only moral courage suffices for philosophizing with 'skin in the game' (i.e. fat's in the fire), or like Freddy says "with a hammer", and not just to sound out "hollow idols" but to build anew in (or bricole with) the rubble our hammering makes of (the last) old prisons. Otherwise, without courage, philosophers amount to little more than idly vacuous, tenured twats - either p0m0 scholastics of "wokeness" or think-tank rationalizers of the status quo ante.

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?[/quote]

1.5 Dead philosophers (via primary sources whenever possible and/or excellent translations): they alone "do philosophy". We living fools merely need to relate to - philosophize with - each other like children at play in the world's minefields precociously engaged in the most tragicomic of dialectics.

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?[/quote]

1.6 The same reason an alcoholic or drug addict goes to rehab and learns how to soberly live a 'life of recovery', I philosophize in order to rehab my own foolery and live as lucidly as a recovering fool can live, as they say, one day at a time

Next: 2.0

Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality

Quoting Pfhorrest

My problem with Wittgenstein's account (at least as you tell it, corroborated by the bits of him I've seen elsewhere) is that even if the thesis of one's philosophy is "just do natural science", there is still philosophy to be done there: why do natural science and not anything else, what makes something natural science and not something else, how do you do natural science, etc.

Then you haven't read much from the pragmatists', have you?

Reply to 180 Proof Thank you for that excellent reply! I mostly agree with your answers so far, and I look forward to the rest of them. :-)

Reply to Wallows I have, and from what I've seen they give generally excellent answers to those questions, doing philosophy well in the process. I don't see your point.

Reply to Pfhorrest


So, I'll readdress the following:

Quoting Pfhorrest

But also, "just do natural science" doesn't even attempt to answer the last third of my set of questions, because the natural sciences are not in the business of prescribing at all, and so give no answers to questions about what prescriptions mean, how to judge them, etc. At best, saying "just do natural science" to that is merely saying they're meaningless and can't be judged, etc... which is just avoiding the question.

Prescriptions of what exactly? This strikes me as the same effort made by Frege and Russell in the Principia Mathematica, as to prove in some foundationalist sense the meaning of some proposition, when in fact the meaning cannot be determined by the very method or attempt at the proof.

Quoting Wallows

Prescriptions of what exactly?

Any kind. Whenever someone says "this should be this way", including "you should do this", what exactly are they saying (I would paraphrase that question as "what is the function of that speech-act?" but you don't necessarily have to rely on speech-act theory for your answer), and how are you to decide whether or not to agree with that, whatever agreeing with that ends up meaning? (And who is to do the deciding? And why? Etc.) The answer doesn't necessarily have to be foundationalist in any sense, and there doesn't have to be one single answer -- you can say that there are different kinds of prescriptions that mean different things and are to be judged in different ways -- but the natural sciences generally are not in the business of making or evaluating "should" (or "ought") statements, just "is" statements, so "just do natural sciences" ignores that question entirely. Unless you want to try to equate "ought" statements to some subset of "is" statements and then say we can do natural science to that, but then you need to philosophically justify that position still, so you're still doing philosophy, and you still might be wrong. (I think you would be, but I'm not here to preach my philosophy).

FYI I've compiled a couple of the clarifications I've made throughout this thread into the OP.

Reply to Wayfarer I forgot to say thank you for your beginning of a set of answers, and I think I generally agree with much of what you have to say so far too, though I expect our agreement will diverge greatly as they go on. I expect to disagree with @180 Proof in due time too though, and it's all good.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Unless you want to try to equate "ought" statements to some subset of "is" statements and then say we can do natural science to that, but then you need to philosophically justify that position still, so you're still doing philosophy, and you still might be wrong. (I think you would be, but I'm not here to preach my philosophy).

Yes, give us your reasoning for deriving an is from an ought here if you would.

Regards.

I don’t derive “is” from “ought”, or vice versa. I was suggesting that maybe you (or Wittgenstein, or someone answering these questions) might want to do vice versa, and saying you’d need to try to justify that, and I personally think you’d fail, but in any case that would still be doing philosophy to try to justify it (and to counter-argue against that, etc).

Quoting A Seagull

Meaning what?

I suppose meaning that if you know what meaning is you can recognize its abundance. Unfortunately, it's uncommon to examine what meaning is or how a desire for it might best be approached.

Reply to praxis For most of my life I found the question of "what is the meaning of life?" paradoxically meaningless, in that I couldn't for the life of my figure out what exactly it was that people asking that wanted in an answer.

I eventually decided to translate "meaning" to "purpose" and "purpose" to "what something is good for", so asking "what is the meaning of life" is just asking what is good, so just an account of morality answers that already. People didn't seem satisfied with that (although most of those people also rejected that there could possibly be any account of morality, too).

More recently I've decided that the question such people are really asking actually is meaningless. It's a phantom question. People have non-rational feelings of meaningfulness or meaninglessness, and people asking "what is the meaning of life?" are just looking for someone to say something to assuage the uncomfortable feeling of meaninglessness. There isn't any actual philosophical answer to that "question" because it's not a question at all, it's just a feeling, and the correct response to it is to somehow assuage that feeling, and cultivate the opposite feeling instead. I'm not completely set on how to do that, but I've got some ideas.

Reply to praxis
I am not too sure what you mean by 'meaning', but for me the 'meaning' of an idea comes through being able to incorporate that idea into one's model of the world.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean?

The human condition is in some sense a predicament, in that, unlike creatures, humans are blessed/cursed with self-awareness (which is itself the condition for the possibility of folly. Animals generally are incapable of foolishness although the higher animals might display behaviours plausibly like it. But being able to be deceived is part and parcel of being an intelligent, self-aware being. ) Some ancient said, and I can't remember the exact quote, that were man not gifted with the possibility of transcendence, then he would be the most miserable of creatures. And this is because s/he is gifted with the knowledge of the transience of existence, that time devours all, that all we hold near and dear will fade and die.

I think the sense of this predicament is part of the emergence of human kind, a fundamental aspect of the human condition. It animates the quest for something which is not thus doomed to transience, death and decay - the quest for immortality or as Ernest Becker put it 'the denial of death'. That can be understood in a secular sense as the idea that after our death, we live on in our works and our progeny. But it can also be understood in the religious sense of identification with or as 'spirit' that transcends the vicissitudes of mortal existence. This is especially evident in Indian philosophy (e.g. Advaita Vedanta) where the individual is understood to be an incarnation or instantiation of the supreme being (which sounds heretical from a christian p.o.v.)

Going back to the Greek tradition, and Platonism in particular, key to these disciplines was the 'philosophical ascent' accomplished by metanoia, the 'transformation of perception'. This was subsequently incorporated into (some would say purloined by) Christian theologians, so for us moderns, it is all nowadays unacceptably near to religion, which is a great pity. The original ideal was always the quest for the imperishable behind the shifting sands of temporal existence but at the same time it was relentlessly rational (bearing in mind that traditional philosophical rationalism started with Parmenides and is far nearer to mysticism than modern empiricism.)

So in those forms of philosophy, the point was to dis-identify with the physical or material, and to realise an identity through spiritual or intellectual illumination (noesis, in Platonist tradition). And indeed it wasn't until the aspirant had achieved that state of being, that what was real was even known; up until then s/he had been living, according to Vedanta, in the illusory domain of m?y?. (I interpret that to mean that they misconstrue the meaning of things, not that the natural world is itself an illusion.)

So in such 'unitive' philosophies, discerning reality is a matter of 'seeing with new eyes' - not, as it is now, something which could be solely described in terms of mathematical hypotheses. In those schools, philosophy is always a kind of catharsis, a purification of the mind from the underlying ignorance embodied in the natural condition of 'self and other'; indeed a kind of spiritual awakening or meta-cognitive transformation.

The turning point in the advent of modern thought was the abandonment of any philosophy of 'union' (theosis, mok?a) because of the focus of Enlightenment rationalism on what is objectively the case and the tools and techniques which could be applied to the objective domain. And that in turn was partially as a reaction against the way that the mainstream Christian churches had appropriated the transcendental elements of pagan philosophy and made their acceptance conditional upon reciting the Nicene creed. This was also associated with the suppression of gnostic elements in the early tradition. (Incidentally there's also a very interesting stream of counter-cultural or underground scientific philosophy, such as Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and so on, which is generally not acknowledged by either science or mainstream religion.)

This understanding is in accordance with my understanding of philosophy as a spiritual or noetic discipline, rather than a utilitarian or instrumental skill.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What do mathematical claims, about numbers and geometric shapes and such, mean, and how do they relate to descriptive claims about reality?

My view is that number, logical laws and the like, are the constituents of the rational intellect, but that they are prior to, and transcend, the division of the nature of experience into the subjective and objective domain. So it's a gross error to believe that numbers are 'in the mind'. But they're also not 'in nature'. So 'where' are they? My inclination is to say that they inhere in the 'formal realm' which is the domain of laws, numbers, and principles which are ‘discerned by reason’. So they don't exist in the sense that particulars exist, however they are real. And this is what doesn't fit with most current naturalism, within which 'existence' has a univocal meaning. I suppose you could say that naturalism wants to insist that the domain of phenomena contains its own rationale, whereas traditional philosophy located the 'reason' (logos) for being on a level other than the sensory. But the mathematical-mystical tradition originating with Pythagoras (and perhaps originally from Egypt) was, as Russell notes, one of the factors that differentiated Western philosophical and scientific culture from the Orient - a factor which is barely appreciated, now that all such abilities are deprecated as mere adaptation.

Reply to Wayfarer Thanks for continuing your responses! I'm seeing an interesting kind of yin and yang between you and @180 Proof so far.

I notice that you skipped a few questions, the latter half of the Metaphilosophy section: Subjects, Institutes, and Importance of Philosophy. Were you planning on revisiting those later, or just don't feel like you have anything to say on them that wasn't covered already?

Also, I don't really see how this post answers what the meaning of descriptive claims is, so maybe you can elaborate on the connection between your answer and that question?

2.0

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean?

2.1 They stipulate, or assign, objects (their) predicates which lose warrant when they are inconsistent (e.g. mind without brain) or incoherent (e.g. colors hair bald).

[quote=Pfhorrest]Bonus question:
What do mathematical claims, about numbers and geometric shapes and such, mean, and how do they relate to descriptive claims about reaity?[/quote]

2.2 They track, or infer, patterns in logical space, which can, in some instances, be used as formal scaffolding for the constructing maps (of territory) or models (of e.g. physical transformations).

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Objects of Reality
What are the criteria by which to judge descriptive claims, ...[/quote]

2.3 LNC ...

[quote=Pfhorrest]... or what is it that makes something real?[/quote]

2.4 (a) Ineluctability. (b) Inexhaustable with respect to mapping or modeling. (c) Subject-perspective-agency, or language, or gauge invariant. (d) A necessary non-necessary state of affairs.

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Methods of Knowledge
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to believe, what descriptive claims to agree with?[/quote]

2.5 Evidence is - public, or pov-invariant - the truth-maker (territories, facts of the matter) of truth-claims (maps, models). Truth-claims consisting of inconsistencies, incoherence, invalid (or unsound) inferences and/or contradictions negate, or exclude, positive truth-values. And insufficient, or uncorroborating, evidence functions as grounds for doubt (i.e. positing variables with indeterminate, or undecidable, values).

2.51 Anything (i.e. woo, gossip, fiction) can be 'believed'; however, only true beliefs (or not-yet-falsified conjectures) are known:

2.511 • know-How (methods, practices) ...;

2.512 • know-That (determinate state of affairs, facts of the matter) ...; 

2.513 • know-What (explanatory theories) ...

2.52 Expectations based on knowledge, not mere belief or hope or prejudice, more often than not align - converge - with the real (see 2.4, also re: actuality), and thereby 'avoid, minimize or relieve' frustration (à la Buddhist dukkha, Epicurean/Stoic pathê, Spinozist bondage - also: see 3.1, 3.11).

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe?[/quote]

2.6 (where "nonmind" = brain+body+biosphere):

(a) Nonmind is mind-invariant.

(b) Mind is nonmind-dependent.

2.61 Mind is constituted by mind-mediated (i.e. self-reflexive) interactions with nonmind except for the blindspot, or gap, wherein 'mind's nonmind-dependency' happens (re: brain-behind-mind is blind to itself); therefore, filling this gap*, mind confabulates a self-serving/flattering mirror-image inversion of "nonmind's mind-dependency" (i.e. mind as if it is nonmind-independent/invariant (contrary to evidence of altered brain-states (e.g. drunk/stoned/tripping, addiction, love-attached/fixated, PTSD, efficacy of psychiatric medications, personality changes due to aging/injury-related neuropathology, etc))), thus projecting "(my) soul" ... "spirits" ... "g/G".

2.62 (c) Nonmind enables-constrains Agency, which is an agent's (i.e. mind's) "capacity" to judge and adapt to opportunities, adversities or hazards with which, through the mind-nonmind blindspot/gap*, nonmind constitutes (the oblivious) mind as mind correlationally • perspectivally • self-servingly interacts with nonmind (pace Kant).

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Institutes of Knowledge
What is the proper educational system, or who should be making those descriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?[/quote]

2.7 (See 3.7 re: stakeholder - counter-shareholder - education ... business, government, etc)

"Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger." ~Freddy Zarathustra

(variation - "I believe whatever doesn't kill you, simply makes you ... stranger." ~Joker, "The Dark Knight" :joke: )

Probably doesn't answer the question because I don't grok what you're asking. Maybe reformulate? :chin:

[quote=Pfhorrest]Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with?[/quote]

2.8 (Same as previous my answer.)

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place?[/quote]

2.9 It matters because we depend on the latter to make sense of ourselves, each other and our prospects, and ignoring the former, at least where I come from, usually is a shortcut to an early grave.

:death: :flower:

Next: 3.0

[quote=Pfhorrest]Philosophy of Justice and Morality[/quote]

Thanks for the continuing responses!

Quoting 180 Proof

2.3 LNC ...

I don't understand this acronym.

Quoting 180 Proof

Probably doesn't answer the question because I don't grok what you're asking. Maybe reformulate?

Basically how should the social endeavor of finding and spreading knowledge be "governed" so to speak. E.g. should everyone pursue knowledge entirely on their own and keep their findings secret, or should some elite subset of the population do all the knowledge-finding and everyone else should just believe what they tell them to, or should some elite subset of the population do all the knowledge-finding and keep it to themselves and only selectively let some people in on it, or should everyone pursue knowledge on entirely their own and share their findings with everyone else, or something else?

Quoting A Seagull

I am not too sure what you mean by 'meaning'

Meaning in the sense of belonging, purpose, narrative, transcendence, and the like. I don't think anyone would claim that such things are in short supply in this day and age, but some apparently believe that we are somehow unable to synthesize meaning from these for ourselves. The claim is that we need to be chained to a being (ultimate authority), usually referred to as the great chain of being. The enlightenment freed us from these chains.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind without another's guidance. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know! Have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
~Kant

Quoting Pfhorrest

I notice that you skipped a few questions, the latter half of the Metaphilosophy section: Subjects, Institutes, and Importance of Philosophy. Were you planning on revisiting those later, or just don't feel like you have anything to say on them that wasn't covered already?

My replies tend to be rather improvisational but it wasn't a conscious decision to omit those topics. I will come back later, I'm on the clock at the moment, time is short, but it's a very interesting thread and I intend to continue with it when time permits.

Reply to Wayfarer Sounds great, I look forward to it. :-)

My philosophy is only a set of concerns I am pretty sure I should be having.
There is an arbitrary quality to philosophical problems. If a person doesn't invest in them, they have no value.
So, it is odd to argue about a lot of stuff because the only thing thing that would make a certain line of inquiry interesting is if you are interested by it. It seems to me that many arguments about what is true or not are also appeals to interest people in a a problem.
Putting it that way, it might sound like I am proposing something that avoids that confusion.
I haven't gotten that far.

Reply to Valentinus The list of problems I have here were devised as the questions that are inevitably raised by any other kind of endeavor. As I frame it, every kind of work is using some tool to do some job, with technology and business being about the administration of such tools and jobs, engineering and entrepreneurship being about the creation of new tools and jobs, and the physical and (as I'd call them) ethical sciences being about discovering what tools and jobs there are naturally, from which / toward which engineers / entrepreneurs develop their new tools / jobs.

Knowing how to conduct those physical sciences requires understanding the nature of reality and knowledge, and how to conduct those ethical sciences requires understanding the nature of morality and justice. Investigating those topics ends up dredging up at least all of the topics I've listed under those headings here. And then similar questions can be asked about that act of inquiry into those topics -- philosophy -- itself, which are the topics I've listed under the heading of metaphilosophy.

So, I argue that whatever it is you're concerned with, if you dig deeply enough into it you're going to end up needing to concern yourself with these kinds of questions.

Reply to Pfhorrest
Fair enough.
One way to put it is how Hegel tried to frame how "people" were caught up in some kind of design regarding roles in a process.
The problem there is how to separate that kind of observation from others who would say how the world is.
Sure, my questions are concerned with those questions.
But taking a point of view that sees those things together is exactly what other people are not inclined to do.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Metaphilosophy

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields?

Philosophy is the thing outside or on existing borders of "usefull" categories/views.
Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?

Philosophy tries to enable the expaning of borders or creating of new categories. This is mainly done by clarifing unclear concepts by creating models that aproximate roughly what is being talked about.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done?

Creative thinking that consists of a sufficient degree of critical thinking and rigor.
Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher?

Whatever faculties enable the creative and critical thinking. Further one could add containing a certain productive element that consists either of theory builiding or precise and usefull criticism.
Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

Whoever wishs to do so. I don't think it's reasonable to suggest a specific way of relating to others. In general one might constrain it artificially by limiting based on max number due to philosophers being not short term productive for society and thus demanding a certain wealth of a society. However I think this is done rather automatically.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

It improves the long term development of civilizations. Like science it does not produce instant results and instead shifts the results to the future. One can imagine it this way we need food now/being active harvesting ect but improve overall foodproduction by allowing one member to be passive and think about food harvesting.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean?

Such claims try to express patterns or rather metapatterns that are sufficiently accurate and therefore applieable over a long time.
Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What do mathematical claims, about numbers and geometric shapes and such, mean, and how do they relate to descriptive claims about reaity?

Mathematical claims are claims over a specific abstracted attribute of reality that uses at least some sets. In math itself they are relational statements over properties of the abstracted attribute. Due to math containing of general relational statements these statements can be used more or less fitting to "real" sets.
Note that real is here used as percieved reality amd not as groundtruth. This is important since we f.e. could argue that every human is an individual not equal to any other human. But since our brain can abstract this individuality away and form a set "humans" with more then one entity in it we f.e. can start counting humans.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Reality
What are the criteria by which to judge descriptive claims, or what is it that makes something real?

Long term apropriate usability of the descriptiv claim. Therefore showing to be more or less apropriate. To make this a bit clearer compare it to science where a theory that lasts very long due to no one being able to find a better theory somehow shows a certain accuracy of the theory. Obviously it is not a purley time duration based (or only if you consider a new improved theory to be able to include all events explained by the previous theory + more). I excluded the range due to a theory or concept being possibly very stable locally. Not to overextend here but I think afterall the overall symbolsystem needs to fullfill this. There range matters but the issue is more complex.
Quoting Pfhorrest

The Methods of Knowledge
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to believe, what descriptive claims to agree with?

I am not convinced that we are able to applie those criteria at all. I rather hold the view that they playout over time. However I think that one can approximate it by considering consistency rigorosity, adaptivness, falsifieability and other simular estimators however they are highly dependant on the topic at hand.
Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe?

I think there are two key ways to view minds in generall. First of they are based on computational machines which creates a necessity for computability in reasonable time (due to the brain being a highmaintance organe) to do that Mind simplifies a complex continuous ground truth into a discrete space which is the basis for believes aswell as judgments over beliefs(binary thinking). Secondly there exists in general the usefull concepts of creative/dynamic vs static/conserving principles. Humams in general are something that tries to conserve itself this can be seen in the simularity of dna that results in children being rather simular to their parents physically speaking(both have 2 legs and arms ect) the brain and with it the mind entails the creative part such that the brain might be simular to the parents but the thoughts not as much. Furthermore the mind itself consists iteslf of the same process attributes there exist conservative structures that want to maintain usefull believes (even if sometimes wrong) and other process that want to include new believes or improve on believes. In general this is also a function of age and other factors. Depending on the specific case one might be tilted into one direction.
Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Knowledge
What is the proper educational system, or who should be making those descriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

A proper educational system should be learning based and not knowledgebased (learn how to learn). How to best teach that should be left to experts. How they socially relate is not very important. However students should also get to know based on the learning what a proper authority is and what not and how to assign justified authority to people. F.e. someone who repeatedly shows to have deep knowledge in a field should therefore be justifieably be seen as authority in said field however not necessary in others. While someone just claiming authoritie should be questioned to investigate it properly.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with?

I think people are per default interessted in educating especially young people. As I mentioned before the brain and it's creativity is a function of age aswell. F.e. A new born child has very few believes that are not stable(pretty new) so it per default wants to enrich it's mind with believes (thats why children are curious) however old people maybe have believes that are not uptodate but served them well over their entire life and thus are not likley to just "throw them out" for new beliefs where they do not know the worth.
Simular this is true for knowledge and reality. The reason for the self intrest is that it improves the succesrate and increases the longterm gain. Once you get older this gets less relevant.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place?

As mentioned above the succesrate is the important factor. However it is not as clear cut with truth as one might think. Imagine having poisones(eat=death) mushrooms and healthy mushrooms. In general the best case would be that we could distinguish exactly everytime we see a mushroom. F.e. All red mushrooms are poisones. However if this is not possible snd we accept that we make errord it might be beneficial to exclude healthy red mushrooms since the risk is not worth it. Furthermore lets assume we could always clearly find out how poisones a mushroom is but for red healthy ones we would have to invest a lot of time and brainpower into it. Both last mentioned cases illustrate that a less truthfull approach can be more beneficial due to minimizing risk or effort( where effort of finding out is higher the reward of eating the healthy mushroom and we could do other things in the same time) furthermore there might be addinional time constraints.
In general it isn't about truth and rather about best workable solution

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy of Justice and Morality

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean?

They are largescale statements about the best set of relationships to optimize a society. F.e. A society that kills all of it's infants wont propagate.
Or more suttle s to close border society risks of becoming to static and getting outperformed by a more dynamic system. A to inclusive society might lead to the lack/inability of establishing an overall framework and thus bursting in different parts and possibly a chaotic state.
Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?

Aestetic claims can either be viewed to represent a simularity regarding the combinig structure of creative/conservative and therefore are pleasing. (take the image of humans having a frequency and aesthetic objects having an own frequencies simular to the human one or one that has a special relationship to our frequency)
Or that aestethics represent/contain a lot of metapatterns that we have learned to be usefull. F.e. Simple and deep.
(note this isn't something im to intrested in so my views are a bit on the fence hence i listed both possibilities that seem plausible to me)

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral?

As I mentioned above the optimization of society. However this is a bit more to it. F.e. The subject at hand using morals is relevant to the appropriate framework based on the dimension it is looking at it. For example i consider the individual morality that is most beneficial to use a Kantian one. (Threat other humans as if they have inherent value) else one might up killing people for personal cain resulting in trauma. However if at a higher position f.e. as a military leader it quickly can become utilitarian if it is a given that people will die it is beneficial to minimize human cost and therefore giving orders that sactifice someone to save many (violating a kantian approach) however this applies only to non personal actions. In the daily interactions the military leader should still try to use a kantian view. Further the utilitarian domain should also be limited to a certain degree such that saving a individual or spending a large sum of money should always be decided in favor of the individual at that level. However at a higher level goverments would for example limit the ammount of money the miltary gets and thus enacting a broader utilitarian framework on said individuals life.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with?

What specific claims to agree with should be up to society and it's configuration to determine. However in general it is a optimization problem where we want to maximize the overall well being while simulatinously maximizing the individual well being of worst cases.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend?

I think the result is a result of culture and it's influence on the individual as well as inherent factor in individulas that ranges over a certain distribution. This is relevant due to it influencing what one wills at the first place. The will and it's strength also depends on the specific case and how one vies oneself (on what side of the maximization problem do I see myself).

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

A democracy, a combination of the public will and reflective processes in form of checks am balances that consider a broader framework then the voter might consider. They should relate to each other via discussion and a certain form of procedure to guarantee a safeguarding of both parts of the discussion (the active part/will of the people and the passive part/reflective mechanisms)

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with?

The caring about said points is given by default, since they are influences on each individuals life. Furthermore culture and education certainly influences these aspects. However simular to the case of the philosopher and scientist it shouldn't be viewed as every member of society needing to have a to strong intrest in governance. Else we get a to big overhead of passive elements in society. The handling of this is already build in to democracy where few people get chosen to focus on the passive aspects more strongly. Creating amore specialized and proper working system.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place?

The idea is that it is necessary for a certain ammount of trust/cooperation in a system wich overall increases the succesrate in a system if not overdone.
I like the example of teamsport. It is important for the players in a team to trust others which allows them to share responsibility (motivates passing the ball) this trust is to a certain degree given per default since the entire team wins and therefore each player and all get the price money. However if it is overdone and there is to few competition in a team this might lead to underperformace. Since there is also a necessity that people try to score and increase their individual value. Basically we also want people to try to score and in some instances refusing to pass further and take on individual risks and benefits. (Becoming man of the match ect) Societies can be viewed as teams where morals and laws function as trust building entities that allow to form better synergizing teams rather then just be a loosly connected group of individuals.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?

The meaning of life is taking local process oriented actions. Like the saying that the way is the goal.
However there is no real "the meaning of live". This can be shown by following thoughtexperiment:
Imagine god exists and you get to talk to him and you ask him this question and he says something like "to have children" or the famous "42" or any other final goal. The answer at least to me always seems unstatisfactory no matter what answer you come up with.
Furthermore any final goal (that is reachable) would implie that after reaching the goal you have per definiton nothing left to do. You did it now what?
However if it is a goal that is not reachable it basically is a description of a process you ought to be undertaking. Meaning you have local challenges, aspirations and orienting yourself based on them. This doesn't mean that the orocess should be unguided. This somehow implies that there is no real meaning of life and rather an insentive to taking meaningfull local steps that are directed in a beneficial direction.
I think imagining children might be usefull if you have a child that is drawing something it has a local goal creating a picture(which compared to pictures of professional artists isn't good) however it is learning while doing so improving it skills (long term benefits/rough direction) and the result has a lot of meaning to them or their parents.
If you want to view it evolutionary I would say creating a future that still consists of living entities furthering the overall succestory of life in general.

Ps. Obviously the answers are a) Personal views and b) drastically reduced in length and simplified to fit to your questions c) Sorry in advance for the spelling mistakes

If something is unclear or if you have disagreements feel free to respond.

Ps2 To what comes to my mind when you say "what is your philosphy" i was anticipating a question of roughly the form "how do you think reality is fundamentaly working and how would you describe it" that I spend a lot of time on felt like it was missing.

Reply to CaZaNOx Congratulations on being the first person to answer all questions! I hope you enjoyed writing that and it generates some interesting discussion.

Reply to Pfhorrest I did enjoy writing it. What are you having in mind when you say:Quoting Pfhorrest

it generates some interesting discussion.

?

Reply to CaZaNOx I was saying that I hope that it generates some interesting discussion. The point of this thread is for people to share their philosophies and discuss them. I'm trying not to judge / critique them all too much myself. I might have further comments on your later but it's bedtime now.

Quoting praxis

I don't think anyone would claim that such things are in short supply in this day and age, but some apparently believe that we are somehow unable to synthesize meaning from these for ourselves. The claim is that we need to be chained to a being (ultimate authority), usually referred to as the great chain of being. The enlightenment freed us from these chains.

I sometimes see a craving for homogeneous culture, perhaps with more tradition and even with less social mobility. I chalk this up to some degree to status anxiety (as Alain De Botton describes it.) While ultimate authorities are often a part of this desire, maybe they aren't its essence.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher?

I think, independence, intuition, reason, compassion, and a degree of innate intelligence.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

First and foremost, those drawn to it, and also who have received some form of endorsement from those already practicing. That would include, for example, lecturers and teachers in the subject.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

Again, it's the contemplation of 'what really matters'. There's any number of subjects, a practically uncountable number of facts to be discovered. But we are born human, we live our three score years and ten (hopefully), and then we die. Philosophers wonder about the meaning of that. I'm a believer in the principle that 'philosophy requires no apparatus'. Certainly today's technology and science can provide innumerable benefits and I never want to be thought of as being against them, for what they can do. But they can't solve the deepest questions of human life, as only humans can do that, in human form. (But, for example, medical science can help countless people to be physically cured to enable them to live to explore such questions which in times past wasn't possible. But I'm highly sceptical of trans-humanism or VR.) But philosophically, I think humans are in some basic sense the form that the Universe takes to discover itself or to fully realise its own reality. 'A physicist', said Bohr, 'is just an atom's way of looking at itself'; one of Bohr's apparently tongue-in-cheek remarks, but containing a profound insight. I regard many religious myths and metaphors as ways of expressing this idea, although unfortunately the meaning is often forgotten while the outward forms are clung to.

So I suppose one contemporary expression of that is Maslow's idea of 'self-actualisation', although it finds expression in many forms of the idea of 'self-realisation'. That is often associated with Indian spirituality, about which I will have more to say later.

Reply to Wayfarer Thank you for your continued responses!

I guess enough people have said enough about their philosophies that I can start offering my own answers to my questions (in shorter form than my entire book of course) here. I didn't want to do that right at the start because I didn't want this thread to be all about me; I'm more interested in seeing everyone share their diverse views and compare and critique each other.

I think I'll just start doing one question per post, and wait for someone else to post before I do the next one.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields?

Philosophy is the love of wisdom, where by "love of" I mean attraction toward, or pursuit of; and by "wisdom" I mean the ability to discern truth from falsehood and good from bad, or at least the ability to discern superior from inferior answers to questions about either reality or morality. It differs from the sciences in that it is not concerned with contingent, a posteriori facets of the experiential world, but more about how to process and react to those, the necessari, a priori, foundational questions about how to do those sciences; those sciences apply wisdom thus defined, and philosophy is the pursuit of that ability to do so. It also differs from more abstract fields like the arts and mathematics in that is is not entirely disconnected from practical applications and concerned just with structure for structure's sake (like math) or presentation for presentation's sake (like the arts), but rather uses those things, like logic and rhetoric, as tools to do its job of facilitating the sciences, both the well-known physical sciences and what I would call the ethical sciences, that I may elaborate on later. It's the glue between the abstract and the practical.

And lastly I'd argue that, properly speaking, it differs from religion in that it is critical, anti-fideistic, taking nothing as unquestionable. But it's also properly speaking anti-nihilistic, allowing free investigation of things with uncertain grounding rather than shutting all such discourse down as groundless and impossible from the outset. I would argue that both fideism and nihilism are rather "phobosophy", the fear of wisdom. But I recognize of course that fideistic and nihilistic elements are often included in what are commonly considered philosophical endeavors; I just argue that, to that extent, those endeavors are failing to really do philosophy per se.

Whatever you find harmful, do not do to anyone.

3.0

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy of Justice and Morality

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean?

3.1 At the very least, they are instructions for how and when to avoid, minimize or relieve harm.

3.11 To be afflicted by harmful conduct, via either action or inaction, tends to narrow - incapacitate - the Agency (i.e. capacity for judging whether or not to do harm, and consequently whether or not 'flourishing' happens) of the afflicted. (See 3.22)

[quote=Pfhorrest]Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?[/quote]

3.2 They are images of ordeals (of/about) avoiding, minimizing or relieving harm.

3.21 Like Zen koans which provoke a suspension of conceptual thinking, works of art in particular (and aesthetic experiences in general) prompt suspension of ego - what Iris Murdoch referred to as unselfing - by presenting sensationally or emotionally heightened encounters with the nonself which make it more likely than not for one to forget oneself for the moment (or longer).

3.22 Altruism - judging, by action or inaction, not to do harm to another - begins with learning and practicing techniques for forgetting oneself: unselfing: suspending ego. (Ecstatic techniques (e.g. making art.)) This is the moral benefit of art, but not its function.

3.23 The function of making art (along with morality & rationality (see 2.5)) is to help expand - develop - Agency, or to inversely limit its shadow: Foolery (see 1.1)

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral?[/quote]

3.3 Whether or not, or the degree to which, they are, ceteris paribus, effective as instructions for avoiding, minimizing or relieving harm.

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with?[/quote]

3.4 Apply criteria - any mode of judging - reflectively.
(See 1.32)

3.5 Pragmatic coherence* (for want of better phrase) and not consensus, or conformity (to custom/dogma/authority), seems more robust with respect to edge cases, etc.

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend?[/quote]

3.6 The "will" is weak (re: akrasia, cognitive biases), so habit seems key to reliable judgment. (See. 2.61)

3.61 Cultivating (a) intellectual habits via pedagogy & discipline* and (b) moral habits via social experience & civic/political engagé, I think, expands Agency, or the capacity for judgment (i.e. adaptive conduct (see 2.62)).

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?[/quote]

3.7 'Any social arrangement, or governing system, which makes it manifestly easier (safer, even compulsory) than more difficult (dangerous or prohibited) for non-shareholding stakeholders to fully participate in governing themselves and their communities  (e.g. economic democracy) ...' is a political-economic circumstance I'd call "proper".

[quote=Pfhorrest]Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with?[/quote]

3.8 People are animals, and governing is not as easy as being governed. Nature - entropy - biases (less pathological) animals to prefer paths of least resistance / effort, both in conduct & thinking; therefore, most prefer (consent) to be governed rather than take up the added time-consuming chore of governing themselves. Millennia ago Athenians had incisively tagged this 'human, all too human' trait: idi?t?s ...

[quote=Pfhorrest]The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place?[/quote]

3.9 It matters because we depend on the latter for labeling which conduct is or isn't harmful - bad or good - for us, each other and our shared prospects (i.e. commons, community), and ignoring the former tends to make it more difficult to live generously with each other and to resolve social or political conflicts without violence.


Next: 4.0


Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?

Reply to 180 Proof Thanks for the continuing replies! I'm surprised to find myself continuing to agree with you as much as I do; I expected our views to have diverged a lot more by this point.

I guess I can answer another of my own questions now...

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?

Philosophy aims for wisdom, in other words to discover or create a means of discerning truth from falsehood and good from bad, and it progresses in that endeavor by clarifying confused concepts about those scales of evaluation. The emergence of, loosely speaking, "the scientific method" is the greatest bit of philosophical progress in the history of the field, in my view, and though progress in moral investigations has been much slower, we're still slowly crawling there with increased emphasis on liberty, democracy, and material well-being, and less on things like ritual purity and obedience.

Reply to 180 Proof

You're obviously being brief and concise in your responses to the OP, as well as expressing your own values and beliefs to some extent. In this section of moral philosophy, you focus on harm, and neglect other moral dimensions such as fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. I was wondering if they were not mentioned for the sake of brevity or perhaps because you reason that care/harm trumps all other dimensions. If the latter is the case, would you share that reasoning?

Reply to praxis Hurray, discussion is being generated. :-)

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done?

Philosophy is done not so much by solving problems, but by dissolving them: showing apparent paradoxes and dilemmas that would seem to stand in the way of any route toward wisdom to actually be the result of confused thinking, conflated terms or ideas, etc. By teasing apart that confusion, differentiating conflated terms and ideas from each other, and so on, philosophy can progress toward wisdom by showing those apparent roadblocks to have actually been illusory all along. More generally, philosophy makes headway best when it analyzes concepts in light of the practical use we want to put them to, asking why do we need to know the answer to some question, in order to get at what we really want from an answer to that question, and so what an answer to it should look like, and how to go about identifying one.

In analyzing concepts and teasing them apart from each other, philosophy makes extensive use of the tools of mathematical logic. But in exhorting its audience to care to use one of those teased-apart concepts for some practical purpose, instead of endlessly seeking answers to the uselessly confused and so perpetually unanswerable question that they may be irrationally attached to as some kind of important cosmic enigma, philosophy must instead use the tools of the rhetorical arts. Thus philosophy uses the tools of the abstract disciplines, mathematics and the arts, to make progress in its job of enabling the more practical sciences to in turn do their jobs of expounding on the details of what is real and moral.

@Pfhorrest & @praxis

Glad for your interest. Thanks for reading. More to come soon. :smirk:

Reply to Pfhorrest I meant I liked the way the contents of the link are laid out. I doubt I could answer the questions you posed with any kind of precision because they beg more questions than answers and I’d have to offer several different answers for most of the questions because I don’t really know what exactly many/most/all of then are asking.

That should give you some idea of my regard for ‘philosophy’ ;)

Quoting Pfhorrest

And lastly I'd argue that, properly speaking, [philosophy] differs from religion in that it is critical, anti-fideistic, taking nothing as unquestionable. But it's also properly speaking anti-nihilistic, allowing free investigation of things with uncertain grounding rather than shutting all such discourse down as groundless and impossible from the outset. I would argue that both fideism and nihilism are rather "phobosophy", the fear of wisdom

Fair enough, but this grows out of the cultural dynamics of the West, in particular, due to the emphasis in Western culture on 'belief' as the defining element of religion. Consider that the term 'orthodoxy' is derived from ' ortho doxa', right belief or right worship.

But Plato himself constantly pointed to the reality of the 'invisible, intelligible realm' which he contrasted with the 'sensory domain'. In Platonic epistemology, knowledge of the intelligible realm was superior to sensory knowledge, in that the objects of reason - geometric, arithmetic and logical truths and the like - were directly grasped by nous rather than by the senses 'liable to error'; they were apodictic and immediately known. But dianoia, knowledge of arithmetical and geometric principles, though high, was not as high as noesis, knowledge of the forms. And these forms of 'higher knowledge' were distinguished from 'doxa' and 'pistis', which are translated as belief and (mere) opinion. This is spelled out in the analogy of the divided line, in the Republic.

As is well known, Christian theology was to absorb a great deal of Platonic philosophy, which provided the intellectual framework of Christian metaphysics (preserved in for example Thomas Aquinas as in many other great works of Christian Platonism). Subsequently the rejection of scholastic metaphysics resulted also in the abandonment of these elements of Greek thought which were in many other respects foundational to Western culture (for example, the whole notion of scientific taxonomy was basically derived from Aristotelianism, and Galileo's mathematization of physics owed a great deal to the neo-platonism of Italian renaissance humanism.)

So through these transformations, metaphysics itself became subordinated to, or identified with, belief or 'doxa’. And because of the association of metaphysics with religion, and also because of the rejection of metaphysics by many of the seminal figures of Protestantism, then the rejection of metaphysics along with religion is one of the main origins of modern naturalism. And that is also a phobia, which manifests as 'fear and hatred of the supernatural' - something like 'theophobia', which is strongly evidenced by many posters on this forum, most often for reasons that they themselves are not fully conscious of. (I'm looking at you, 180 ;-) )

Quoting Pfhorrest

I would argue that both fideism and nihilism are rather "phobosophy", the fear of wisdom.

:clap: :cool:

Quoting Wayfarer

[ ... ] 'fear and hatred of the supernatural' - something like 'theophobia', which is strongly evidenced by many posters on this forum, most often for reasons that they themselves are not fully conscious of. (I'm looking at you, 180 ;-) )

Moi?! Please elaborate on my 'subconscious', Herr Doktor Wayf. (More sciencey, of course; less to no woo.)

Reply to 180 Proof

You might need to look at some ink blots or something to help Wayfarer substantiate his claim.

Quoting I like sushi

I meant I liked the way the contents of the link are laid out.

Oh okay, thanks then.

Reply to Wayfarer Your historical account sounds accurate enough to me, but doesn't really say anything against what I was saying before, except inasmuch as you might want "religion" to mean something different than I mean by it. But inasmuch as religion is not fideistic as I've defined it, it doesn't really differ from any irreligious practices, and to that extent I have nothing against it, and don't consider it unphilosophical. Natural theology, for instance, is perfectly philosophical in my book, at least in the project it tries to undertake. But inasmuch as God is supposed to be a supernatural thing, I think it can't help but fail in that undertaking, because supernatural things by their very nature have no effect on the world that we experience (if they did, they would be natural), so we cannot tell anything about whether or not they are real, and so can only appeal to faith for claims about them.

That is different from my take on abstract objects, which I will get to later. For now...

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher?

I hold that all that is needed, strictly speaking, is personhood. Rather, I hold personhood to be defined as the possession of the faculty needed to conduct philosophy, which is sapience. "Sapience" literally means just "wisdom" in Latin, but I mean it in a more technical sense as a reflexivity of the mind and will; as self-awareness and self-control, the ability to have opinions about your opinions, to be aware of what you are thinking, to assess whether you are thinking the correct things, and if you deem that you are not, to cause yourself to think differently. This reflexivity allows you to look upon your thoughts in the third person as though they were someone else's thoughts that you were judging, allowing you to assess the validity of the inferences you make, and so to do logic, to tease apart the relations between your various ideas. That reflexivity also allows you to put yourself in the place of another person and imagine what influence it would have on them if you were to make an argument in one way or another, and so to do rhetoric, to package and deliver your ideas in a way to make them easy to accept.

I’m enjoying this thread - I have used the questions to try and order my own thoughts, but my answers are perhaps too lengthy and disjointed at this stage, so I’m going to try and offer some discussion instead.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy is the love of wisdom, where by "love of" I mean attraction toward, or pursuit of; and by "wisdom" I mean the ability to discern truth from falsehood and good from bad, or at least the ability to discern superior from inferior answers to questions about either reality or morality.

I think this definition invites a limited view of wisdom. What we discern as ‘falsehood’ or ‘bad’, ‘unreal’ or ‘immoral’ is as much a part of wisdom as what is ‘good’ or ‘real’. Determining how to effectively integrate predictions, imagination and ‘immoral’ thoughts or intentions as useful information is, in my view, as important to the pursuit of wisdom as reality or morality. I don’t think it’s as dichotomous as discerning truth from falsehood or ‘good’ from ‘bad’, but rather the capacity to structure and restructure our conceptual systems to integrate ALL information about the world, not just in relation to reality or morality, but in order to more completely understand ourselves and the universe.

Quoting Possibility

I’m enjoying this thread - I have used the questions to try and order my own thoughts,

I'm happy to hear that, that's exactly what I hoped for. :-)

Quoting Possibility

but my answers are perhaps too lengthy and disjointed at this stage, so I’m going to try and offer some discussion instead.

I look forward to seeing them when you feel they're worth sharing; meanwhile, discussion is great too.

Quoting Possibility

I think this definition invites a limited view of wisdom. What we discern as ‘falsehood’ or ‘bad’, ‘unreal’ or ‘immoral’ is as much a part of wisdom as what is ‘good’ or ‘real’. Determining how to effectively integrate predictions, imagination and ‘immoral’ thoughts or intentions as useful information is, in my view, as important to the pursuit of wisdom as reality or morality. I don’t think it’s as dichotomous as discerning truth from falsehood or ‘good’ from ‘bad’, but rather the capacity to structure and restructure our conceptual systems to integrate ALL information about the world, not just in relation to reality or morality, but in order to more completely understand ourselves and the universe.

I'm not sure I understand you, and that makes me wonder if perhaps you misunderstood me. I was trying to say that wisdom is basically being able to evaluate both descriptive and prescriptive claims: where descriptive claims are those about what is or isn't, what's true or false, what's real or unreal; and prescriptive claims are those about what ought or oughtn't be, what's good or bad, what's moral or immoral. It sounds like you're saying that figuring out what's false, bad, unreal, or immoral is just as important as figuring out what's true, good, real, and moral; and I meant that to be implied by what I said before. Wisdom is the ability to discern one from the other (in both dimensions), or at least to place ideas somewhere in relation to each other on each of those scales. For the purposes (as will be elaborated later) of telling both where we are and where to go, figuratively speaking, and thus how to get there from here.

Quoting Pfhorrest

2.3 LNC ...
— 180 Proof
I don't understand this acronym.

Law of Non-Contradiction. :wink:

Quoting praxis

?180 Proof

You're obviously being brief and concise in your responses to the OP, as well as expressing your own values and beliefs to some extent. In this section of moral philosophy, you focus on harm, and neglect other moral dimensions such as fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. I was wondering if they were not mentioned for the sake of brevity ...

Mostly brevity. Those "other moral dimensions", I think, belong to normative or applied ethics; the questions in the OP seem to have a more metaethical focus or I took them that way.

[quote=praxis] ... or perhaps because you reason that care/harm trumps all other dimensions. If the latter is the case, would you share that reasoning?[/quote]

For me care/harm grounds (i.e. roots = radix) "all other" normative questions (as per propositions 3.23, 3.5 & 3.61), but I wouldn't say "trumps" them. 

Quoting 180 Proof

Law of Non-Contradiction. :wink:

Thanks. So your only criteria for judging the truth is a description proposition is that it's not self-contradictory? Every self-consistent descriptive proposition is true?

Quoting 180 Proof

the questions in the OP seem to have a more metaethical focus or I took them that way.

I mean them to span both metaethics and normative ethics, but to have a generally metaethical framing, because I hold that normative ethics should be dissolved into metaethics on the one hand (which is all philosophy should be concerned with) and applied ethics on the other (which should be developed into a whole suite of contingent, a posteriori ethical sciences). But questions like the criteria for judging moral claims and the methods for applying that judgement are meant to yield what is effectively a normative ethical theory (e.g. if your criterion is maximizing pleasure and your method is just do whatever's descriptively most likely to do that, you end up a utilitarian; if your criterion is universalizability consistent with will and your method is always treating everyone as a means rather than an ends or something along those lines, you're a Kantian deontologist).

Quoting Pfhorrest

I’m just interested in hearing what other individual people’s complete philosophical systems are, phrased as answers to the same set of questions for comparison.

Does one's philosophy have the burden of following all of the conventional distinctions?

:brow:

Philosophy of justice and morality.

It’s interesting for me to find that I didn’t chose to focus on this, but that it’s more often than not the underlying theme behind most of my thoughts and discussions with people. I’ve always had an interest in anthropology and sociology and so my theories and ideas are generally based on these fields. Consequently one philosopher I’ve enjoyed reading and find to be very persuasive is Mary Midgley.

Edit: Consequently I have been involved in heated discussions where I have argued that morality is not subjective or relative.

Quoting creativesoul

Does one's philosophy have the burden of following all of the conventional distinctions?

:brow:

I'm not sure I understand this question. Can you elaborate?

Quoting Pfhorrest

So your only criteria for judging the truth is a description proposition is that it's not self-contradictory? Every self-consistent descriptive proposition is true?

No; just not necessarily false. (See propositions 2.3, 2.4 & 2.5, especially what I say (not clearly enough) about how we get to doubt). The LNC provides a handy prima facie filter for excluding "descriptive claims" not worth bothering with (i.e. when digging through piles of "descriptive" dung for gold nuggets); the rest are narrower criteria for fine-graining the sort of problematic conditions mentioned in the propositions referenced above. Process of elimination rather than 'justificatory' method (à la e.g Peirce, Popper, Feyerabend, Haack) which, defeasibly well-tested (see 3.5), provisionally concludes with Not False or Not Not-True, instead of with "truth" (or "the truth").

Reply to Pfhorrest

Sure...

Where is the category regarding human thought and belief?

Reply to 180 Proof Thanks for elaborating.

Reply to creativesoul The questions about reality and knowledge are all about that. Meaning asks what the content of a thought or belief is, Subjects asks what's doing the thinking and believing, Objects and Methods are about on what grounds and in what ways to go about deciding what to think and believe, Institutions is about how to arrange the social application of that process, and Importance is about, well, the importance of all that.

Reply to Pfhorrest

What if I'm having issues accepting the framework you're using?

Reply to creativesoul Given that this is a forum for discussions it would make sense to say why you feel that way and perhaps even offer up what you believe to be a ‘better’ framework.

Quoting I like sushi

Given that this is a forum for discussions it would make sense to say why you feel that way and perhaps even offer up what you believe to be a ‘better’ framework.

Step numero uno. Get human thought and belief right. That's the first thing I mentioned.

Reply to creativesoul Please go ahead and show us how.

All thought and belief statements consist of predication. All prediction is correlation. Not all correlation is predication. All thought and belief consists of correlations.

:brow:

Happy?

Reply to creativesoul How exactly are you distinguishing between ‘belief’ and ‘thought’, and what do you mean by ‘statement’ (do you mean that in a metaphorical sense or in an explicit sense of a ‘worded statement’?).

Then there is ‘predication’ and correlation. What is ‘predicated’ and what is ‘correlated’ in an ontological sense. If you’re not delving into the ontology of this then how/why are you justifying your reason for not doing so?

Essentially what I get from your post is ‘belief and thought statements are related’. I say related because you state that ‘correlation’ and ‘predication’ are the same thing by stating that All A is All B, so A and B are one and the same.

Please explain more if you can. Thanks

Reply to Pfhorrest

... I hold that normative ethics should be dissolved into metaethics on the one hand (which is all philosophy should be concerned with) ...

See 3.23. I prefer grounded/rooted to "dissolved". Is the difference merely semantic?

[quote=Pfhorrest]... and applied ethics on the other (which should be developed into a whole suite of contingent, a posteriori ethical sciences).[/quote]

Explain. Science informs ethics (i.e. all of philosophy) but conflating ethics with science neither follows nor makes sense. Maybe I'm missing your meaning.

[quote=Pfhorrest]But questions like the criteria for judging moral claims and the methods for applying that judgement are meant to yield what is effectively a normative ethical theory ...[/quote]

Yeah, well, I wanted to post my responses to your questions sooner rather than later and they had to be sketches outlines highlights fragments etc to do so. If the interest is there, I/we can flesh out the implications, etc of these speculations.

For discussion's sake here are some labels (to ponder now and (hopefully) unpack later):

• metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic (i.e. agent (habits, capabilities)-based/centered; where harm (i.e. the bad) = reflexive loss of (some/all) agency) Naturalism [NIEN]

• normative ethics - Negative Hedonic Utilitarianism (i.e. right (conduct/response) = to minimize harm; wrong (conduct/response) = to maximize harm) [NHU]

• applied ethics - Negative Preference Consequentialism (i.e. just (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = mitigates double-binds, hobson's choices, tragedy of the commons (i.e. unsustainable practices), burden-shifting, free-riding, scapegoating, etc;  unjust (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = generates double-binds, ... scapegoating, etc) [NPC]

Update: For edits go to this post.

Quoting I like sushi

Essentially what I get from your post is ‘belief and thought statements are related’.

Aww. That's too bad. There is so much more to enjoy.

They are identical at their core. All correlation. The separation only applies in situations where the creature is suspending judgment or speaking insincerely. Here one can be considering without assent, or deliberately misrepresenting their own thought and belief. All correlation.

Enough of this though. Not my thread...

I'm wondering where human thought and belief are delineated in the OP, by the OP?.

Quoting creativesoul

Enough of this though...

The thread has another aim.

Enough meaning you have nothing more to offer, you don’t know how to express it, it’s too complex to sum up and/or something else entirely? If you feel like you’ll derail the thread just start a new one in response to my questioning.

Quoting 180 Proof

3.21 Like Zen koans which provoke a suspension of conceptual thinking, works of art in particular (and aesthetic experiences in general) prompt suspension of ego - what Iris Murdoch referred to as unselfing - by presenting sensationally or emotionally heightened encounters with the nonself which make it more likely than not for one to forget oneself for the moment if not longer.

3.22 Altruism - judging, by action or inaction, not to do harm to another - begins with learning and practicing techniques for forgetting oneself: unselfing: suspending ego. (Ecstatic techniques (e.g. making art.)) This is the moral benefit of art, but not its function.

3.23 The function of making art (along with morality & rationality (see 2.5)) is to help expand - develop - Agency, or to inversely limit its shadow: Foolery (see 1.1)

Is it possible you could go a little more in depth here please? I find your view of Art, Aesthetics and Morality a possible point of interest for myself.

Especially in regard to the bold. I’m taking the reference back to 1.1 to be something akin to concepts involving ‘exploration’ and ‘chaos’. The whole interests me in how you relate ‘morality’ with ‘art’ in general (both the practice of producing ‘art’ and/or the act of ‘viewing’ art; not to mention how we delineate ‘art’ from other fields of human interest and action.

Thanks, no rush :)

Reply to creativesoul I don't completely understand what you're saying, but it sounds to me like that's all aiming to answer the question about the meaning of descriptive statements. So I'm still not sure what questions you think are lacking.

Quoting 180 Proof

I prefer grounded/rooted instead of "dissolved". Is the difference merely semantic?

(I'm not really arguing for the following position right now, but rather offering it as an explanation for why I chose the set of questions I did, and why they have a meta-ethical vibe to them but are still supposed to cover the important questions of normative ethics. I don't mean to specifically push this position as part of posing the questions, but rather I was deliberately unorthodox as to whether the questions were meta-ethical or normative so as to be inclusive of such a view).

When I say normative ethics should be "dissolved", I mean the demarcation of that as its own subfield of philosophy should be broken down, not anything about any of the questions it attempts to answer. I think that once you have answered questions about what prescriptive statements mean, the criteria by which to judge them, and the methods by which to apply those criteria -- basically the metaethical subfields of moral semantics, moral ontology, and moral epistemology, although I would dispute that those are technically "ontology" and "epistemology" because of the semantics I endorse -- the rest is applied ethics. Metaethical answers tell you how to judge good from bad, moral from immoral; actually making specific contingent a posteriori judgements of particular things as good, bad, moral, immoral, etc, is then applied ethics. So basically, there are no questions that normative ethics uniquely investigates, so it doesn't need to be its own field.

Quoting 180 Proof

Explain. Science informs ethics (all of philosophy) but conflating ethics with science neither follows nor makes sense. Maybe I'm missing your meaning.

Yeah. I don't mean the physical sciences, I mean an ethical analogue of the physical sciences. I'm very much against attempts to reduce ethical questions to physical-science questions, but I think there ought to be a prescriptive analogue of that descriptive endeavor. I'll just quote from my essay A Note On Ethics:

I am of the peculiar opinion that applied ethics is not properly speaking a branch of philosophy at all, but is rather the seed of an entire field of underdeveloped ethical sciences, parallel to the physical sciences, concerned not with building theories (descriptive models, complex beliefs) to satisfy all of our sensations or observations, but instead strategies (prescriptive models, complex intentions) to satisfy all of our appetites. Furthermore, I hold that the field of normative ethics is something of a mutt, and as such should be dissolved entirely into the two other sub-fields of ethics. On the one hand, I think something like a normative ethical model, a general and all-encompassing model of what is good, is what the most general and fundamental of the ethical sciences should aim to build, but based on the a posteriori phenomenal experience of our contingent appetites rather than a priori philosophizing, akin to how fundamental models of physics are built on a posteriori phenomenal experience of our contingent senses. That most general and fundamental subfield of the ethical sciences, playing the foundational role to them that physics plays to the physical sciences, is what I think deserves to be called "ethics" simpliciter. That field's task would be to catalogue the needs or ends, and the abilities or means, of different moral agents and patients, like how physics catalogues the functions of different particles.

Building atop that field, the ethical analogue of chemistry would be to catalogue the aggregate effects of many such agents interacting, as much of the field of economics already does, in the same way that chemical processes are the aggregate interactions between many physical particles. Atop that, the ethical analogue of biology would be to catalogue the types of organizations of such agents that arise, and the development and interaction of such organizations individually and en masse, like biology catalogues organisms. Lastly, atop that, the ethical analogue of psychology would be to catalogue the educational and governmental apparatuses of such organizations, which are like the self-awareness and self-control, the mind and will so to speak, of such organizations. Like the physical sciences naturally feed into engineering and technology, I propose that these ethical sciences naturally feed into entrepreneurship and business, as all of those endeavors are ultimately about value: things like wealth, power, and freedom all boil down ultimately to the ability to fulfill intentions, desires, or appetites, to avoid pain and suffering and obtain pleasure and flourishing. I hold that such ethical sciences — contingent, a posteriori applications of the philosophy of morality and justice — are the bridge to ever more useful businesses, in the same way that the physical sciences are the bridge from the philosophy of reality and knowledge — of which they are contingent, a posteriori applications — to ever more useful technologies. And just as those physical sciences have over time largely supplanted religious authority in the educational social role, so too I hold that these ethical sciences should in time supplant state authority in the governmental social role, as I will elaborate upon in my later essay on politics and governance.

Quoting 180 Proof

Yeah, well, I wanted to post my responses to your questions sooner rather than later and they had to be sketches outlines highlights fragments etc to do so.

Oh I wasn't complaining at all, I felt like you answered everything completely. I was just answering your question about whether the questions were meant to be meta-ethical or normative. My answer is "yes", because I think that a complete meta-ethics just gives you what would normally be called a normative ethics for free.

Reply to I like sushi :cool: I appreciate your interest. After I post a reply to the OP's last ("bonus" :sweat: ) question re: "the meaning of life", I'll come back to yours, sushi. Btw, the numbers (e.g. 1.1) refer to particular propositions in each section of my answers to Pfhorrest's question - 1.1 refers to section 1 proposition 1, which I refer back to my take on the function, or purpose, of philosophy (i.e. my metaphilosophy, such as it is). Your guess about "concepts involving 'exploration' & 'chaos'" is way off base from the intent of what I wrote. Apologies if the numbering confused you.

Reply to Pfhorrest :up: :up:

Reply to I like sushi

No thanks. Your questioning is chock full of groundless pretention. I'm not in the mood to indulge your rhetorical drivel.

Reply to creativesoul There wasn’t really any ‘rhetorical drivel’. You make a claim and I asked for clarification; you refuse with venom.

No problem. Good luck

Quoting Pfhorrest

I don't completely understand what you're saying, but it sounds to me like that's all aiming to answer the question about the meaning of descriptive statements. So I'm still not sure what questions you think are lacking.

All attribution of meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. I would not pursue a question about the meaning of descriptive statements.

According to the position you're arguing for and/or from, what does all human thought and belief consist of?

Quoting I like sushi

There wasn’t really any ‘rhetorical drivel’. You make a claim and I asked for clarification; you refuse with venom

As I said... groundless pretension.

Quoting creativesoul

All attribution of meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. I would not pursue a question about the meaning of descriptive statements.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. These two sentences to me sound like they're contradicting each other. In the first one you say what all meaning consists of. In the second you say you would not pursue a question about a particular kind of meaning. If it helps for me to clarify, the "descriptive" there is to distinguish it from the later question about prescriptive statements, because some people hold that those kinds of things mean different kinds of things. If you think they mean the same kind of things that's fine, you can give the same answer for both.

Quoting creativesoul

According to the position you're arguing for and/or from, what does all human thought and belief consist of?

I'm not arguing for or from any position in the OP, I'm asking what your (or anyone's) position is.

And that question, "what does belief consist of", sounds to me like it's either a question about what the contents of a belief are like, or what the process of believing is like, I'm not sure which you mean. But two of my questions are meant to ask those same things.

The question about what descriptive statements mean is meant to ask the same thing as what the content of a belief is like, because to believe something is to think that it is true or real, and a descriptive statement is asserting that something is true or real, so agreeing with a descriptive statement is the same thing as believing what is stated, and the meaning of the statement is the content of the belief. I think that's probably what you mean, because your answer sounds like an answer to that question, but again I'm not sure.

If you mean instead to ask what the process of believing is like, that's what the question about the mind is about: what is it that does the believing, and what exactly is that thing doing when it believes something? If you mean something else entirely, and not either of these things, you'll need to elaborate because I'm lost.

Quoting Pfhorrest

What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields?

It's always still trying to answer that question. For me it's the highest & most radical thinking. It's like religion is the sense of its authority or height. It's like science in its attachment to something like reason. It's theoretically open to those who will try. It doesn't speak of hidden doors. It stays within conceptuality. Roughly.

Quoting Pfhorrest

What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?

It's always still trying to answer that question. For me this is intimately related to the questions:
Who am I? Who are we? Who shall I become? Who shall we become?

Quoting Pfhorrest

How is philosophy to be done?

As the highest & most radical kind of thinking, this is one more question that philosophy is never done answering. It does feel natural though to keep it distinct from religion, which is not to say that a religious person can't also philosophize about their religious experience.

Quoting Pfhorrest

What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher?

One need only be able to speak/think. I suspect that everyone is at least a bad philosopher.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

That's another question for philosophy. Personally I think we are radically dependent on others. I'd be nothing without my books. We'd all be nothing without our lives in which we learned to survive and use language. The philosopher is primarily receptive. Unless I read or talk myself into the conversation, I am likely to come up with a inferior, accidental imitation of a system of thoughts that is centuries old. The individual is a place where different streams of influence mingle. The luckiest have the circumstances, strength, and creativity to fuse these influences into something that others won't willingly forget.

The kind of philosophy I prefer is the kind that we experience as vital to our senses of self. For this reason it's easy to hate those who refuse to recognize our positions as their own. On a practical level, wrestling with difference is nurturing a good life skill. But it's also of philosophical interest. How does one philosopher account for the refusal of another philosopher to recognize his system within that thereby threatened system? What additional stories do we tell when our initial story is met with disbelief or even ridicule? This forum that welcomes all, maniacs fresh off the park bench along with the well-read and respectable, is great place to study such collisions and attempted assimilations of the threatening other.

Quoting Pfhorrest

What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean?

I think we know well enough in a sub-theoretical sense. I don't claim to be Derrida scholar, but I am inspired by what I take as his notion of something like 'no pure meaning.' I can emit various sentences about what is real. I can even swear to you that in my head I know exactly what I mean. But that would be a lie. I don't know exactly what I mean even when the words feel righter than others. As I explore what I mean, I generate yet more sentences. The problem is amplified.

But the problem is primarily theoretical. We'd like (or so we think) to once and for all settle the issue, which is in some sense to kill language, turn it into bones. Our deadest language is (perhaps) mathematical. So perhaps the metaphysical fantasy is having concepts like 'real' so dead and fixed that we can build a castle of theorems, the one book of eternal truth, a divine spiderweb. It's a side issue, but I think the notion of the eternal is tangled up with the philosophical desire to conquer time or escape time. But time, some demon whispers, is language, is us. Hence 'learning how to die.'

Quoting Pfhorrest

Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

To me it's just spontaneous for human beings, or at least something like religion is spontaneous, and philosophy emerges from religion, I think. My own biased view (which I stole from a real philosopher) is that philosophy often steps in when religion fails the individual and/or their culture at large. Philosophy tells a story that answers all the questions you ask in the OP, giving a role (who are we?) to individuals and communities, thereby giving them a sense of being at home in the world, having a right to it --and often to a piece of it that currently belongs to others. It's also hugely important in political organization. Beneath the explicit laws are the unwritten 'laws' that a community doesn't even know it knows. I like (among other kinds) the kind of philosophy that drags this tacit 'knowledge' into the light of articulation.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Metaphilosophy

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields?

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done?

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher?

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

I’ll give ‘em a quick go ...

Meaning? Dunno. I guess it is more or less about dealing with items that evade demarcation and/or measurement in any accurate sense.

Objects? Dunno. I guess it’s more or less about opening up new/old perspectives and seeing what can be done with them separately and/or in combination.

Subjects? Dunno. I guess, very generally speaking, cognition of space and time (Kantian intuitions).

Institutes? Dunno. Doesn’t matter. People will or won’t do it regardless of my ideas of should, would or could as the most obtuse individuals will call anything ‘philosophy’ just as they’d call everything ‘art’. I guess this means the geniuses, idiots and insane are usually the primary movers - for good or bad!

Importance? I guess it’s importance comes into play by exploring questions - meaning how questions are useful and what their limitations are or are not.

Note: I’m not entirely sure what ‘metaphilosophy’ means in modern parse?

Oh! And of course it is certainly a means of flexing the Ego.

Reply to Eee Reply to I like sushi Thank you both for your responses!

Quoting I like sushi

Note: I’m not entirely sure what ‘metaphilosophy’ means in modern parse?

"Philosophy of philosophy", pretty much. (Some take it to mean a separate field which studies the field of philosophy, and some of those people argue that there is no such field as metaphilosophy, because the study of the field of philosophy is just philosophy itself. But I mean it in the "philosophy of philosophy" sense: the philosophical investigation of philosophy itself).

Quoting Pfhorrest

Thank you both for your responses!

My pleasure. It's a good thread. We all like to talk about 'our' (cobbled-together) philosophies, right?

Quoting Pfhorrest

What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean?

In practice this is straightforward. Do X and people will like you and help you. Do Y and people will dislike you and hinder you. We want to be liked and helped. Our dependence is extreme, and therefore hard for us to confess. Part of me would like to be radically independent, even self-created. A younger me held fast to positions that exaggerated the degree to which this is possible.

It does seem to me that most prescriptive claims manifest the best part of our nature. Good laws and traditions aren't bondage but rather the highest expression of our freedom even (another stolen though.) Younger people (or at least my own rebellious youth) tended to understand prohibitions as externally applied. Everyone was repressed. But with time it became clear that many prohibitions are simply successful self-sculpture. We live above such things. Humans take profound pleasure in denying themselves things, and this is great.

Quoting Pfhorrest

But inasmuch as God is supposed to be a supernatural thing, I think it can't help but fail in that undertaking, because supernatural things by their very nature have no effect on the world that we experience (if they did, they would be natural), so we cannot tell anything about whether or not they are real, and so can only appeal to faith for claims about them.

That says much about your presuppositions. I did peruse your very well-written and presented website with some of the essays about this same question, but I think the distinction you're making is quite artificial. After all, what is supernatural and what is not, are usually defined almost solely in terms of previous religious doctrines - which, as I said, is a matter of cultural dynamics as much as anything else. Many of the things the modern world takes for granted might seem supernatural to earlier ages (although that's a problematical claim also.) 'Supernatural' and 'metaphysical' are Latin and Greek synonyms, so in effect, to confine the scope of philosophy to natural philosophy, is to confine the scope of reason to what can be known by the natural senses and mathematical inferences therefrom (which is after all the implication of empiricism.)

But, transcendental arguments, often invoked by Kant, show that reason itselfdoes not have a natural explanation. You might say, well reason is an adaptation, it can be explained in evolutionary terms. But then you are advocating evolutionary naturalism, which I argue is not a philosophy at all - it's a biological theory, and the only ends it can conceive of, are those of procreation and survival.[sup] 2[/sup] This is why many moderns are in effect nihilist, even if they don't know what that word means, and have never thought about philosophy or meaning or anything of the kind. Because they view life as the consequence of chance, and mankind as a kind of fluke of nature, then there's no real prospect of a philosophical relationship with the Universe. Sure, they're related in the way that evolution says everything is related, namely, as creatures, but humans are more than creatures, and the burden of the self-awareness that comes with that, if it not given some kind of larger goal, often results in an acute sense of meaninglessness. So that is why the well-known 'argument from reason' purports to indicate a goal beyond the merely sensory domain.

[quote=Jacques Maritain]Every progress in evolution is dearly paid for; miscarried attempts, merciless struggle everywhere. The more detailed our knowledge of nature becomes, the more we see, together with the element of generosity and progression which radiates from being, the law of degradation, the powers of destruction and death, the implacable voracity which are also inherent in the world of matter. And when it comes to man, surrounded and invaded as he is by a host of warping forces, psychology and anthropology are but an account of the fact that, while being essentially superior to all of them, he is the most unfortunate of animals. So it is that when its vision of the world is enlightened by science, the intellect which religious faith perfects realises still better that nature, however good in its own order, does not suffice, and that if the deepest hopes of mankind are not destined to turn to mockery, it is because a God-given energy better than nature is at work in us.[/quote]

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe?

Here I have a principle which is rarely appreciated or even understood. It is based on an profound passage in the Brihadaranyaka Upani?ad. It has been paraphrased and commented on by a contemporary scholastic swami, as follows. This is a passage comprising a dialogue between a questioner and a Vedantic sage, Y?jñavalkya, regarding the nature of ?tman, the Upani?adic 'self of all':

[The questioner asks] "You have only told me, this is your inner Self in the same way as people would say, 'this is a cow, this is a horse', etc. That is not a real definition. Merely saying, 'this is that' is not a definition. I want an actual description of what this internal Self is. Please give that description and do not simply say, 'this is that'.

Y?jñavalkya replies: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ?tman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ?tman."

Source

There is a paper by the French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, It is never known but is the knower: consciousness and the blind spot of science which elaborates this point from a contemporary perspective.

So the crucial point about this is that we have to learn to see beyond the process of 'objectification'. Objectification is seeking understanding solely in terms of what is objectively knowable, quantifiable, measurable. The evolutionary account of mankind is, generally, objectively true; but humans are not only objects, they are subjects of experience, and subjecting philosophy to the procrustean bed of scientific naturalism conceals that about them which is completely inexplicable in naturalistic terms (also the source of the 'hard problem of consciousness' which, of course, evolutionary naturalists must deny exists.)

Of course objectivism has many strengths in the objective domain as 'methodological naturalism'. When it becomes metaphysical naturalism then it exceeds its warrant and becomes a form of dogmatic belief, strangely mirroring the dogmatic belief-system which it descended from.

---------
2. The subject of an excellent essay by contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion (pdf).

Quoting Eee

Do X and people will like you and help you. Do Y and people will dislike you and hinder you. We want to be liked and helped. Our dependence is extreme, and therefore hard for us to confess.

Sounds rather ... transactional. Manipulative. A narcissistic "dependency". At best, instrumental; not ethical in the least. Motivated "to be liked and helped" and "not disliked and hindered" rather than motivated to help and not to do harm. You "confess" a parody, Eee, or to arrested development - I can't tell which. So tell me what I'm missing. :confused:

Reply to 180 Proof
Ha. Well, it does look cynical as I reread it. Or cold. But try to see it from a alien point of view, without taking sides. And without dragging in more subjective words. What does a tribe punish or reward? Even an alien without human feelings could find patterns in that. For this you get a medal and a parade. For that you get a noose.

Obviously I could have given a more flowery version. As I said in another thread, the mature person embraces good laws as the highest expression of their freedom.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I'm not sure I understand you, and that makes me wonder if perhaps you misunderstood me. I was trying to say that wisdom is basically being able to evaluate both descriptive and prescriptive claims: where descriptive claims are those about what is or isn't, what's true or false, what's real or unreal; and prescriptive claims are those about what ought or oughtn't be, what's good or bad, what's moral or immoral. It sounds like you're saying that figuring out what's false, bad, unreal, or immoral is just as important as figuring out what's true, good, real, and moral; and I meant that to be implied by what I said before. Wisdom is the ability to discern one from the other (in both dimensions), or at least to place ideas somewhere in relation to each other on each of those scales. For the purposes (as will be elaborated later) of telling both where we are and where to go, figuratively speaking, and thus how to get there from here.

I don’t think I’ve misunderstood you - I’m talking about how we then relate to what is false or immoral or what we claim ‘oughtn’t be’. Wisdom is more than just evaluating claims - it includes determining and initiating action in relation to those claims. I think that wisdom breaks down, for instance, when we isolate, exclude or attack what is but oughtn’t be.

Reply to 180 Proof

Hey, 180. It was in the same post that I amplified that thought. The cynical intro (perhaps an unconscious rhetorical device to rope in the grumps and haters) is followed by a little birdsong about the better angels of our nature.

Quoting Eee

It does seem to me that most prescriptive claims manifest the best part of our nature. Good laws and traditions aren't bondage but rather the highest expression of our freedom even (another stolen though[t].)....[W]ith time it became clear [to me] that many prohibitions are simply successful self-sculpture. We live above such things. Humans take profound pleasure in denying themselves things, and this is great.

We deny ourselves lying and stealing as beneath us, for example. Or we scoff a gas-guzzling SUVs or fast food or sloppy thinking, and so on. We enjoy carving away what is vulgar, too easy. I do think narcissism is involved, even profoundly involved, but I suggest that this narcissism is a group narcissism even when the group is potential rather than actual.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral?

Roughly I think we try to make harmony out of cacophony of drives. While philosophers emit neat little systems of abstract nouns, artists give us flesh-out protagonists, showing rather than telling. Not always but quite often the virtuous protagonist is also physically beautiful. And even our poets (musicians these days) are as visual as they are sonic. We get the total package, an absolute art of virtuous flesh. Musicians offer us visceral attitudes that we can make our own. Not only the words, but also the clothes, the moves,... I'm a bit old to take video-musicians as my exemplars, but I think that many, many people get their philosophy viscerally-lyrically like this. Arguably the primary product is an entire personality. While the less bold imitate as well as they can, the bolder create their own fusions, which occasionally become famous/dominant and keep the game going.

Quoting Eee

?180 Proof
Ha. Well, it does look cynical as I reread it. Or cold. But try to see it from a[n] alien point of view, without taking sides.

Cynical I get. My only point is that you didn't answer the question. 'Ethics' is an urgent need because we are so species-defective.

Reply to Pfhorrest

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place?

I think you have to decide whether we are in a good place or not. If we’re in a good place it’s because of how we acted morally. Those morals formed societies that allowed us to evolve and develop, they’re behind what we regard as civilisation. Justice itself demonstrates the continued belief in those morals by acting on them.

That these morals are universal is proved by the commonality of successful societies.

4.0

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?

4.1 If there was ever a pseudo-question (see 1.311) it's this one: "What is the ...

4.11
• ... 'meaning' of life" to whom?
• ... 'meaning' of life" for what?
• ... ???

4.12 Substitutes for 'meaning': purpose, goal, function, direction, destination, value ...

4.2 To make this less 'pseudo', I drop 'meaning' and insert purpose reformulating the question this way:

4.21 Q -

What is the purpose - primary task - of life?

4.211 A(philo) -

In the grandest sense, the struggle against stupidity (i.e. FOOLERY, or 'denial of contingency' (e.g. Rosset's "doubling", Becker's "symbolic self", Zapffe/Camus' "absurd", Spinoza's "bondage"), THAT MALADAPTIVELY SELF HARMS AND/OR HARMS OTHERS) - an infinite, yet reflective, task which I propose uniquely belongs to philosophy (see 1.1, 1.12, 2.62, 2.9, 3.8).

"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."
~ F. S.

4.212 A(nonphilo) -

In a more technoscientific ( :wink: ) sense, in so far as inanimate matter (far-from-equilibrium entropy) has afforded animate matter (life) to emerge:

• life affords intelligence (i.e. optimization of adaptive error-correcting problem-solving) ...

• intelligence affords immortality ...

• immortality affords ephemeralization (i.e. yocto-compression of technoscience + matter & energy consumption: in effect, "doing more and more with less and less" ... until everything can be done with nothing)

:death: :flower:

4.3 Meaning presupposes context. Life is the context of the living. Context itself has no (wider) context; it is meaningless.

4.31 Life goes on without meaning. Yet the living demand - imagine - otherwise. Origin of art? music? dance? lovemaking (as opposed to merely fucking)? ... religion?

4.32 Each living thing means everything to herself as evidenced by her involuntary drive to survive and thrive. Eusociality emerges from shared recognition that each living member of a group means everything to herself. Thus, they are meaningful to one another through mutual recognition. Reinforced by natality and kinship bonds.

4.33 "The meaning of life" becomes manifest in common, as a commons, or soil of community-roots, cultivated and thereby reproduced through culture (i.e. forms of life --> language-games).

“Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence, in a word, entropy, the tendency of everything to become formless. Which is also to say that such music is a device for confronting and acknowledging the harsh fact that the human situation . . . is always awesome and all too often awful . . . But on the other hand, there is the frame of acceptance of the obvious fact that life is always a struggle against destructive forces." ~Albert Murray

4.4 "What's my philosophy?" Don't be a fool (or an asshole) - minimize frustrations by reflectively aligning expectations with the real - is the whole of philosophy; the rest, like the Rabbi says, is commentary. (See 2.52)

Thus Spoke 180 Proof.

:fire:

I haven't the slightest clue.

I never went to college, and I'm only beginning to understand just how little I know about anything.

But I think I'm somewhere trying to examine the differences between enlightenment and romantic thought that converged together to build fascistic philosophy so that I could maybe through some different experiences render it hypocritical and self-defeating.

...and I realized once again how little I understand about anything.

Quoting Possibility

I don’t think I’ve misunderstood you - I’m talking about how we then relate to what is false or immoral or what we claim ‘oughtn’t be’. Wisdom is more than just evaluating claims - it includes determining and initiating action in relation to those claims. I think that wisdom breaks down, for instance, when we isolate, exclude or attack what is but oughtn’t be.

I don't think we disagree in the end. As I frame it, all action is driven by a combination of what we think is and what we think ought to be, so the practical upshot of evaluating both of those kinds of claims is always in driving our actions. And it is precisely those differences in evaluation between the two scales, what is but oughtn't be, or ought to be but isn't, that are the primary drivers of such action, as we act always to eliminate that difference, and make what (we think) is into what (we think) ought to be.

Quoting 180 Proof

4.4 "What's my philosophy?" Don't be a fool (or an asshole) is the whole of philosophy; the rest, like the Rabbi says, is commentary.

That's a great summary. (And I enjoy that, being point 4.4, it is the fourest point in your response. I like fourest things, it's in my name; I was even born at 4:44 PM).

I've been so busy I've been falling behind on answering my own questions one per other response, so I'll do a couple more now:

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

The question is largely whether philosophy is a personal activity, or an institutional one. Given that I have just opined that the faculty needed to conduct philosophy is literally personhood itself, it should come as no surprise that I think that philosophy is for each and every person to do, to the best of their ability to do so. Nevertheless, institutions are made of people, and I do value the cooperation and collaboration that has arisen within philosophy in the contemporary era, so I don't mean at all to besmirch professional philosophy and the specialization that has come with it. I merely don't think that the specialized, professional philosophers warrant a monopoly on the discipline. It is good that there be people whose job it is to know philosophy better than laypeople, and that some of those people specialize even more deeply in particular subfields of philosophy. But it is important that laypeople continue to philosophize as well, and that the discourse of philosophy as a whole be continuous between those laypeople and the professionals, without a sharp divide into mutually exclusive castes of professional philosophers and non-philosophers. And it is also important that some philosophers keep abreast of the progress in all of those specialties and continue to integrate their findings together into more generalized philosophical systems.

(I feel like I weirdly straddle all those divides, having some degree of professional education in the field but not nearly deep enough to teach it professionally, and working on a generalized philosophical system that draws from the more contemporary findings of all those specialties).

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

On the one hand, doing philosophy is literally practice at being a person, exercising the very faculty that differentiates persons from non-persons. Doing philosophy literally helps develop you into a better person, increasing your self-awareness and self-control, improving your mind and your will, and helping you to find meaning in the world, both in the sense of descriptive understanding, and in the sense of prescriptive purpose.

But also, as I already elaborated upthread, I think philosophy is sort of the lynch pin of all human endeavors. All the many trades involve using some tool to do some job. Technology administers those tools, business administers those jobs; engineers make new tools, entrepreneurs make new jobs; the physical sciences find more "natural tools" for the engineers to work with, and the ethical sciences I propose would find more "natural jobs" (i.e. needs that people have) for the entrepreneurs to work toward. Both those physical and ethical sciences depend on philosophy for the tools they need to do their jobs. Philosophy in turn relies on the tools of language, mathematics, and the arts to do its job, and then reflexively also examines those topics, as well as itself.

I drew a picture:

Quoting 180 Proof

Cynical I get. My only point is that you didn't answer the question. 'Ethics' is an urgent need because we are so species-defective.

I think I'm slow to offer a particular ethics because it would feel like merely spouting preferences. I think that knowledge might even come, to some degree, at the cost of righteousness. If I cling to an identification with the good, that may force me block out an understanding of 'evil.' This connects to one image (among others) of the philosopher as a kind of alien.

Quoting 180 Proof

Don't be a fool (or an asshole) is the whole of philosophy; the rest, like the Rabbi says, is commentary.

I like this.

Quoting Wallows

Wittgenstein showed that philosophy, yes in it's entirety, consists in language on being on holiday. And that's it really. It supposedly ends in quietism.

It seems to me that only a certain kind of philosophy is subject to that accusation. Philosophy often seems to operate at the strategic level of human affairs. People wrestle with where we should be going, what kinds of arguments or people should be trusted, etc. It wrestles with whether 'I' should volunteer for the next war or have children or stop reading philosophy and learn to code. How is this more 'on holiday' than asking a bus-driver to pull over or telling a kid not too talk with her mouth full?

Strangely enough it's the philosophy just adjacent to Wittgenstein's (language-obsessed stuff) that seems most subject to the accusation. I love Wittgenstein, but still...

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean?

I hold to roughly the verificationist theory of meaning, but limited in domain to only descriptive propositions, those trying to say what is real. That is to say the such claims communicate an idea, a mental image (in more senses than just vision) of the world being some way, and an attitude toward that idea such that the idea is meant to fit the world: you should expect to find the world that way, and if you don’t, the idea is wrong, not the world.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields?

Philosophy is the seeking of wisdom - not simply knowledge, or even an understanding of the world. As such it permeates every field. To demarcate the seeking of wisdom from any field of endeavour is to claim that there is no wisdom to be found in that field. I think you showed this with your diagram.

Knowledge is an awareness of information; Understanding is the connection we make with the information we have about the world; and Wisdom is how we collaborate with that information. Wisdom ties in with knowledge and understanding in such a way that all three are inseparable. You can’t really understand something, even if you think you know as much as you can about it, until you can apply that knowledge in how you interact with the world. In the same way wisdom isn’t really wisdom if we ignore information or cannot (or will not) strive to understand all the information available to us.

Philosophy values all information, regardless of its current usefulness, and seeks to make effective use of all that we know and understand about the world - paying particular attention to what we don’t yet know, what we know but fail to understand, and what we know and understand but fail to integrate or apply to our interactions with the world.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?

Philosophy aims to structure and restructure our conceptual models of the world, to make the most effective use of all the information we have. Progress in philosophical endeavour, then, is achieved when we can account for anomalous data or experiences, when we can include and collaborate with alternative viewpoints, and when we can revive and integrate suppressed or forgotten knowledge into how we interact with the world.

Successful philosophical endeavour aims to integrate useful information from disparate sources for application to living well - ie. interacting with the world with less prediction error.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done?

All information is potentially useful, so the first step would be to reserve judgement on information in an objective sense.

We are, however, each progressively limited in our capacity to be aware, connect and collaborate with information by the five dimensions of our existence, and so we cannot always make use of information ourselves. We are equipped, all the same, with the means to share that information with those for whom it may prove much more useful.

Philosophy may sometimes involve, therefore, extracting incomplete information as raw experience from what has been integrated and reduced to suit these individual or cultural limitations any number of times. This may involve grafting the information onto our own experiences or other experiential accounts, or borrowing structural patterns as a guide to completing the experiential information. This type of speculative philosophy is fraught with error, but relying only on reducible information encourages us to be dismissive of the additional aspects available in information from subjective experience. Keeping track of where and how we depend on assumptions, concepts and modelling can be more important than avoiding them altogether.

Quoting Pfhorrest

All attribution of meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. I would not pursue a question about the meaning of descriptive statements.
— creativesoul
I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Did you understand the first claim?

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher?

Short version, I think self reflection and self evaluation are the key faculties for doing philosophy. The capacity to be aware of our conceptual systems, and be critical of the specific way that we interact with the world in relation to how the universe interacts with each other in its diversity, provides the potential for us to strive towards more accurate conceptual systems that minimise prediction error while maximising interaction.

I think an effective philosopher has a handle on critical and creative thinking, and employs an inclusive approach to knowledge. Courage, respect and curiosity also enable one to do philosophy without limitations.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

A closed mind cannot do philosophy. If you take the trouble to avoid making mistakes, then perhaps philosophy isn’t for you. History shows that philosophers can’t really avoid being mistaken about something. The best we can hope for is the rare gem of conceptual structure that leads us to new ways of thinking.

The mind isn’t structured temporally or spatially, but according to value. Reality, however, is ultimately structured according to meaning. So when we relate to each other, socially speaking, it should be with a focus on a shared value regardless of distance, space or time. But when we relate to what others experience, particularly the form in which they present it to us, it should be with a focus on reaching a shared sense of meaning regardless of value.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter?

When we interact with the world, we encounter new information. We either use that information in subsequent interactions with the world, or we don’t. If we do, then the way that we use it, our philosophy, matters. But it is also the information that we don’t use, and why - the value and significance we attribute to information - that structures this philosophy.

Evolutionary theory says that the most important thing we pass on to our descendants is our genetic information, but I disagree with this. The way I see it, the most important thing we pass on is the capacity to make effective use of new information. Without it, we’re not really living, are we?

Quoting Wayfarer

I think the distinction you're making is quite artificial. After all, what is supernatural and what is not, are usually defined almost solely in terms of previous religious doctrines

You'll note that in that essay (thank you for the praise BTW) I explicitly clarify what I mean by supernatural, and say that I'm not saying that any of the particular things that are called supernatural definitely don't exist -- just that if they exist, in any way that we can notice that their existence, then they are natural things. If some ghost hunters manage to actually capture incontrovertible evidence for ghosts, for example, I'm not going to say "that's supernatural so it doesn't count", I'm going to look forward to the amazing scientific discoveries that are sure to follow from this newly-confirmed unexplained phenomenon.

So if by "God" someone means something that has a noticeable effect on the universe, such that we could tell by looking at the universe whether or not such a being existed, then that's a natural phenomenon they're positing, and they're welcome to do science to it without any philosophical complaint from me -- but also vulnerable to science being done about it, perhaps to conclusions they don't like. Many people in modern ages therefore place their notion of God as something entirely beyond that kind of experiential import, which then puts it into the category of supernatural as I mean it, about which we can only believe one way or another on faith. (Look at all the agnostics and theists on this very forum who insist that atheism also be taken on faith, because God as they mean it is beyond the proof or disproof.)

Quoting Wayfarer

reason itself does not have a natural explanation

I'm not sure what you mean here. What exactly about reason is in need of an explanation? "How did humans come to be able to use reason?"? That is, as you say, not a philosophical question, but a biological one, and evolutionary explanations work just fine there. I suspect you mean something deeper and more philosophical than that though, or at least you want to mean that, but I'm not clear what it is exactly.

Reply to Possibility Thank you for your responses!

Quoting creativesoul

All attribution of meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. I would not pursue a question about the meaning of descriptive statements.
— creativesoul
I don't understand what you're trying to say. — Pfhorrest

Did you understand the first claim?

You'll have to tell me if I understand you right. That sounds to me like you're saying all meaning is of the type meant by expressions like "clouds mean rain" and "smoke means fire": one thing signifies another thing, because of the correlation between those things. Is that what you mean by that claim? If so, what do you take statements that purport to describe reality to signify, or correlate with -- what do they mean? Or if you somehow object to asking that question, can you explain why?

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What do mathematical claims, about numbers and geometric shapes and such, mean, and how do they relate to descriptive claims about reality?

Oh boy, this is a fun one.

Mathematical claims are ultimately claims about the logical implications of definitions — you state some axioms that define what rules the imaginary objects under discussion are defined to obey, and then explore in more details the logical implications of objects that have to obey those rules. In one sense this is completely detached from any claims about reality -- at least, about concrete reality, the world that we can experience. But as I will elaborate in my answer to the next question, the actual existent objects of that concrete reality aren't the sorts of things that we ordinarily think of as "real", things like rocks and trees and such. Rather, those are themselves abstractions aware from the more fundamentally, concretely real things, projected behind the concrete reality we have direct contact with as an explanation of that. More and more abstract, and recognizably mathematical, objects are projected behind those things, the objects of our theories of physics. All of those things are "real" in an instrumental sense, lying in the intersection of abstract and concrete things: they are abstract objects that are instrumental in explaining concrete reality, and so concretely real to that extent.

But behind all of those, we aim to construct a single mathematical object that is a 1:1 map of concrete reality, a theory of everything. Whatever mathematical object that will turn out to be just is concrete reality: "concrete" is indexical, it signifies only the mathematical structure of which we are also a part. Other mathematical objects are just like it, ontologically, except that we aren't a part of them; they are purely abstract, with no connection to the object of which we are a part. This is unlike Platonism in that it doesn't posit that there is the world we're familiar with and then separately some kind of Heaven full of Forms. In terms comparable to that, I'd say that there are only Forms, no Heaven in which they exist, and one of those Forms just is the concrete universe we're familiar with (which, like most mathematical objects, is constructed out of lots and lots of copies of simpler objects, which is why we see other "Forms" expressed within our concrete world).

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean?

When we attempt to describe what is real, we draw from our conceptual system: from what we assume exists, and from what we predict will occur. These conceptual systems have been developed from information gained through past interactions with the world, and evaluated whenever we encounter prediction error: when what assume or predict doesn’t match with the information coming in. This occurs more often as children, as our conceptual systems develop, and it’s expected that we encounter less new information or prediction error as adults - that the mark of a fully-formed adult is to know what is real. But the mark of a philosopher is to recognise that our conceptual systems are in a continual state of flux.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Reality
What are the criteria by which to judge descriptive claims, or what is it that makes something real?

Reality has a number of aspects that correspond initially to the dimensions with which we are familiar: one dimensional reality consists of a linear relationship between two points, two dimensional reality determines shape, and three dimensional reality determines a spatial aspect. The fourth dimension of reality determines a temporal aspect, and it is at this point that the way we talk about reality must take into account the role of the observer. As much as we can map and measure these first three dimensions objectively, we are far less certain of our own temporal positioning in the world.

To map two dimensions, the information must be obtained in relation to a three dimensional viewpoint - ie. from above. To map three dimensional reality, therefore, the viewpoint must be four-dimensional: measured in relation to a temporal aspect. We often forget that this external viewpoint even exists, pointing to an aspect of reality that is necessary to confirm what is real.

Here’s where it gets interesting. We know that the universe exists as a four-dimensional reality at minimum - and that we are four dimensional - because we can confirm a three dimensional aspect to reality. But in order to know anything about this four dimensional aspect, the information must be obtained in relation to a five-dimensional viewpoint: from a position beyond time.

It has been our naive attempts to blindly navigate this five dimensional aspect of reality that has enabled us to develop any understanding at all about time outside of our direct experience. What began as a recognition of elements of reality that transcend and connect our experiences to those of our ancestors and descendants, soon developed into concepts such as family, people, gods, eternity, infinity, space, energy, gravity, etc - enabling us to relate to and understand this reality that we know exists beyond our bodily or temporal experience.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Methods of Knowledge
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to believe, what descriptive claims to agree with?

So I know that a vision is real regardless of distance when I can get agreement from others on its relative shape in space. I know that an object is real regardless of shape when I can get agreement from others on its relative spatial aspects over time. I know that an event is real regardless of physical aspects when I can get agreement on its relative temporal aspects in others’ experiences. And I know that an experience is real regardless of its time or duration when I can get agreement on its relative significance or value in relation to what it means. But I cannot know if meaning is real (ie. if matter or anything is real) regardless of how I experience it.

When I can reliably assert that an event is real, I can then relate that event to a collection of spatial aspects in an agreed temporal duration. By doing this, I reduce the event to its relationship with real objects, further strengthening the concept in my mind.

Likewise, with an experience in which there is no agreement on temporal aspects, we obtain agreement from others on its value aspects or significance in relation to what that experience means. This conceptualised experience can then be reduced to certain real events in relation to their significance, which can be further reduced to real objects that are then imbued with the significance of the experience.

Quoting Pfhorrest

All attribution of meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. I would not pursue a question about the meaning of descriptive statements.
— creativesoul
I don't understand what you're trying to say. — Pfhorrest

Did you understand the first claim?
— creativesoul
You'll have to tell me if I understand you right. That sounds to me like you're saying all meaning is of the type meant by expressions like "clouds mean rain" and "smoke means fire": one thing signifies another thing, because of the correlation between those things. Is that what you mean by that claim? If so, what do you take statements that purport to describe reality to signify, or correlate with -- what do they mean? Or if you somehow object to asking that question, can you explain why?

Do you know what all attribution of meaning consists of?

Not one type.

Does that help?

Reply to Pfhorrest This is what drew me to your website. I was going to ask if you’d tried to show how these relate.

Hopefully we have a lot to discuss about how best to structure the current layout of philosophy in this ‘zoological’ manner :)

...one thing signifies another thing, because of the correlation between those things...

Sometimes.

If so, what do you take statements that purport to describe reality to signify, or correlate with -- what do they mean? Or if you somehow object to asking that question, can you explain why?

What do statements about the world and/or ourselves mean?

Does that work for you? Is that close enough to your questions?

Quoting Pfhorrest

What exactly about reason is in need of an explanation?

Everything. What is the minimum criterion that need be met prior to our assent that the candidate under consideration qualifies as a case of reason, or Reason, or...

What does all reason consist entirely of?

Quoting Pfhorrest

If some ghost hunters manage to actually capture incontrovertible evidence for ghosts, for example, I'm not going to say "that's supernatural so it doesn't count", I'm going to look forward to the amazing scientific discoveries that are sure to follow from this newly-confirmed unexplained phenomenon.

There's Jacalyn Duffyn's research into miraculous cures associated with Catholic saints. (Duffyn says she remains an atheist and that she hasn't been persuaded by this research to believe in God, but she does acknowledge that the evidence is incontrovertible that these cases lack a scientific explanation, and she's working off a large set of cases.)

Another class of evidence is that concerning children who recall their previous lives. One Ian Stevenson researched many thousands of cases of children who recalled their past lives; there's a recent editorial on him here. He wrote many books on his research including Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect which contains many cases where children were born with birthmarks and physical deformities that seemed to be associated with their manner of death from their recalled previous lives. And he too had a pretty large data set (~ 2,700 cases, not counting thousands more that had been rejected.)

Belief in rebirth is a cultural taboo, and most people will refuse to consider it, and I'm not saying anyone ought to believe it. But these cases exist, and there are many other cases of studies of paranormal phenomena that defy naturalistic explanation. Stevenson tried to approach the question empirically but overall he was maligned, not because of his methodology, but because of the subject matter. Philosophically, that is the main point.

And besides, what makes you think modern scientific method is universal? It rests on certain (often unstated) axioms, which rule in and out certain kinds of lines of research. After all modern naturalism was founded on the Enlightenment conviction that the Universe is basically dumb stuff, matter~energy developing in accordance with physical forces; what if it's not? What would the 'scientific evidence' be for that?

Quoting Pfhorrest

Many people in modern ages therefore place their notion of God as something entirely beyond that kind of experiential import, which then puts it into the category of supernatural as I mean it, about which we can only believe one way or another on faith. (Look at all the agnostics and theists on this very forum who insist that atheism also be taken on faith, because God as they mean it is beyond the proof or disproof.)

There is the evidence of kinds that can't be captured in peer-reviewed literature, especially in light of the above-mentioned convictions.

It is certainly true that God is beyond empirical evidence. Actually I am of the view that religious literalism, such as creationism and intelligent design, misunderstands this point, and so envisages God as a kind of 'uber architect'. Scientific atheists such as Dawkins make the opposite error of believing that the existence of God can be disproved by science - but in so doing, they're arguing for the non-existence of something which those who are not fundamentalists never believed in the first place (a 'straw god', so to speak).

How I see it is that scientific reason has a range, and there are domains beyond its range, also therefore beyond its methodological scope. (Actually, the nature of number is one of them.)

The crucial point is that the domain of phenomena, the domain which is amenable to empirical investigation, is what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in relation to. So, from the viewpoint of the empiricist, it is certainly true that 'nothing exists beyond what can be known by science', but that is, again, a methodological presumption, or a statement about this mode of understanding, rather than a statement about reality as a whole. To take is as the latter is, again, to cross over from methodological to metaphysical naturalism (which is near to positivism, in a general sense.)

Getting the idea of what 'the transcendent' means can be extraordinarily difficult (although it's not always). It appears to the sensory mind as mere nothing, but the mystics speak of 'luminous emptiness' or 'the nothing which is everything'. These expressions are widespread enough, being found in every culture and historical period, to indicate they have a real reference, although it's not a referent that can be known by science. (I don't expect you to accept that, but as someone sympathetic to mysticism I am obliged to point it out.)


Quoting Pfhorrest

reason itself does not have a natural explanation
— Wayfarer

I'm not sure what you mean here. What exactly about reason is in need of an explanation? "How did humans come to be able to use reason?"? That is, as you say, not a philosophical question, but a biological one, and evolutionary explanations work just fine there.

There is a very interesting and completely mainstream philosophical argument called 'the argument from reason'. I don't know if I will try and paraphrase it here, which would take at least 500-750 words. Maybe I'll create an OP, now you're around. It was recently revived by C S Lewis, and then by Victor Reppert. But rather than lay the whole argument out, I will make a couple of peremptory remarks.

The first is, that we can't explain reason, as 'reason is what explains'. I mean, from your remarks, you seem to think it's obvious that rationality can be understood as an adaptation. But the problem is, it sells reason short. How can I illustrate that? I have a really succinct quote from Descartes, to wit:

[quote=Rene Descartes]if there were machines that resembled our bodies and if they imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means for recognizing that, none the less, they are not genuinely human. The first is that they would never be able to use speech, or other signs composed by themselves, as we do to express our thoughts to others. For one could easily conceive of a machine that is made in such a way that it utters words, and even that it would utter some words in response to physical actions that cause a change in its organs - for example, if someone touched it in a particular place, it would ask what one wishes to say to it, or if it were touched somewhere else, it would cry out that it was being hurt, and so on. But it could not arrange words in different ways to reply to the meaning of everything that is said in its presence, as even the most unintelligent human beings can do. The second means is that, even if they did many things as well as or, possibly, better than anyone of us, they would infallibly fail in others. Thus one would discover that they did not act on the basis of knowledge, but merely as a result of the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need a specific disposition for every particular action.[/quote]

Bear in mind, that was written in 1630. And notwithstanding the huge progress in AI, this remains true. (As it happens, I worked in an AI startup for three months, as a tech writer, a year ago, and the capabilities of AI are still strictly mechanical. No AI system knows why it does anything, or really understands what it is outputting; it is not actually intelligence as such, but a vast interconnected network of devices. I have some amusing anecdotes which testify to this.)

I've already said too much, I sit down to write a brief reply and the next minute I've written a few hundred words. Thanks again for your input, by the way the diagram is excellent, although predictably I will say it's missing a piece, but we'll take that up again later. ;-)

Reply to Wayfarer I am winding down for bed so this will be brief but then I’ll be mostly away for a few days so I want to reply with something.

Mostly I think you’re reading too much of your impression of a materialist into my philosophy when those elements aren’t there. I’m not familiar with the evidence about the paranormal things you describe and I’m skeptical about claims regarding them but on philosophical principle I don’t object to claims about such things, since they are in principle amenable to investigation and it’s just a contingent question as to how that investigation will turn out. Paranormal is not the same as supernatural.

I agree that the physical sciences have a limited domain, but that domain is only limited to the description of reality. Other kinds of activities, like prescribing morality, are outside the dominant of physical science. But that’s because such science says nothing about them, so you’re not going to end up in conflict with science about them. But if you’re saying something is real, but in a sense that we cannot tell the difference between this world where it’s supposedly real and a world where it wasn’t — which is all I mean by empirical — then it seems to me you’re not actually saying anything about reality at all. Maybe you’re emoting? I’ve got no problem with theological noncognitivism so long as it’s self-aware and not confused with cognitive claims.

On which note, I don’t think mystical experiences like you describe really count as evidence for any kind of descriptive claim about reality, because I’ve been a frequent recipient of them, a profound feeling of empty meaningfulness, as in feeling meaningfulness but not about anything in particular or for any reason, just an overwhelming feeling of awe, oneness, connectedness, etc, accompanying an otherwise mundane experience. I think such experiences are very important in a meaning of life way I’ll get into later (or just read my final essay), but insofar as it matters for figuring out what’s real or not, I recognize them for just the feelings that they are, not as some kind of glimpse into a deeper reality. (I feel here kind of like a Tolkien elf telling mortals that magic isn’t real, while having just done something that those mortals call “magic”).

As for that Descartes quote, I’ll just say that it begs the question. I know that AI isn’t there yet still, but it’s presumptive to declare that it is in principle impossible. That’s something we could have a much longer argument about, maybe in another thread.

Quoting Wayfarer

There is a paper by the French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, It is never known but is the knower: consciousness and the blind spot of science which elaborates this point from a contemporary perspective.

Interesting read - a much better way of explaining what I’ve alluded to in my response to the ‘Objects of Reality’ question here.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I think you’re reading too much of your impression of a materialist into my philosophy when those elements aren’t there

It's not your philosophy in particular, but I do acknowledge that this style of criticism is my focus, so I apologize if it's annoying. But it's the zeitgeist I'm criticizing, the spirit of the age - what happens when you take God out of the picture, and interpret the world through the perspective of science, where science is the arbiter of what is real. And again, that is vastly preferable to theocracy, I would not like to live in a theocratic culture and firmly support the benefits of living in the secular state. But let's remember what 'secular' is - it is 'affairs of state'. It is making the trains run on time, providing public education, improving medicine and science, and other things, many of which are beneficial. I think your philosophy is a splendid example of what philosophy in the secular context should be, and I really think you should be teaching it. But those who are aware of a kind of spiritual lack (includes myself) are seeking something other than, or more than, what secular culture provides. And those who make of secularism a philosophy, are sometimes trying to make a religion out of it. (By way of footnote, Auguste Comte, founder of social science and positivism, started a 'religion of humanity', a secular religion, which today, oddly, only has any real presence in Brazil.)

Quoting Pfhorrest

I agree that the physical sciences have a limited domain, but that domain is only limited to the description of reality. Other kinds of activities, like prescribing morality, are outside the dominant of physical science.

Limited only to the description of physical reality, with the tacit assumption that reality is physical. Again, a splendid assumption to have - for scientists and engineers. But not necessarily any kind of final truth.

And again, don't take that as a criticism of you in particular - it's one of the quandaries of the time we live in. Because science has taken over that role of 'umpire of reality', and because the reality science assumes is devoid of meaning, then meaning is provided by the individual - hence subjectivism and relativism. This is the subject of one of the seminal texts of moral philosophy of our day, After Virtue, Alisdair McIntyre (which incidentally I learned of on a forum, although not this one.)

But the point reflects the division of quantity and quality, is and ought - Hume's 'is/ought' problem in a nutshell. And I maintain that one purpose of philosophy is to try to efface that division. In pre-modern philosophy, 'the sage' was always one with a vision of 'what is' that also implied 'what one ought to do'. You will find that in nearly all classical philosophy, east and west.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I don’t think mystical experiences like you describe really count as evidence for any kind of descriptive claim about reality

The mystics I'm thinking of, are the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist mystics. Probably out-of-scope for this forum.

Quoting Possibility

A much better way of explaining what I’ve alluded to in my response to the ‘Objects of Reality’ question

Still, yours is a very good analysis, and well-written. But Michel Bitbol (another person I was alerted to through forums, this one in this case) is a very interesting modern philosopher and well worth studying.

Quoting Wayfarer

'm criticizing, the spirit of the age - what happens when you take God out of the picture

You'll note that I don't say anything at all about whether God exists until the very last chapter of my book. It's an open question, and most of the book is about how to go about answering questions. My philosophy isn't built around an absence of God; rather, the conclusion that nothing that would count as God is likely to exist is a consequence that falls out of more general questions.

Quoting Wayfarer

Limited only to the description of physical reality, with the tacit assumption that reality is physical

Where by "physical" I mean "empirical" and by "empirical" I mean "you could tell the difference between a world where it's true and a world where it's not". Non-physical things, by such definition, make no noticeable difference. Conversely, anything that makes any noticeable difference in the world is empirical for that reason, and so counts as physical by this definition.

Quoting Wayfarer

because the reality science assumes is devoid of meaning, then meaning is provided by the individual - hence subjectivism and relativism [...] Hume's 'is/ought' problem in a nutshell

You'll note that I am very much against subjectivism and relativism too. I think we agree that that is a major fault in modern society, that assumes that "is" is the only kind of question that has objective answers, and "ought" is all sentiment. I agree with the is/ought distinction inasmuch as I don't think "oughts" are reducible to "is", but I think Hume is completely wrong about how to deal with "oughts", and that there is a completely analogous way to treat them as objective, grounded in phenomenal experience, open to criticism, but not destroyed by infinite regressions -- just like the physical sciences treat reality.

Quoting Wayfarer

The mystics I'm thinking of, are the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist mystics.

Me too.

Reply to Pfhorrest

What do statements about the world and/or ourselves mean???

That's a strange question. I mean, strange that one would not know this already, at a very early age without knowing that they do. That such a question is even given credence attests to the gross misunderstanding of human thought and belief at work in the background...

The meaning of any and all things meaningful consists entirely of the correlations being drawn. The meaning of any description depends upon the naming and subsequent descriptive practices. It depends upon what's being focused upon in addition to what's being said about that focal point. There is no one size fits all answer. It's not as if they all have the same meaning. They cannot unless they all draw correlations between the same things.

Does this satisfy your curiosity?

Reply to creativesoul That sound like an answer to my question about the meaning of descriptive statement, yes.

Reply to Wallows

Hey Wallows, just curious. You have almost 8000 posts. I read a few of them, and to be brief I quite liked them. Have you written something in print as well? Like a book or essays or stuff?

Reply to unforeseen

Apart from my shit you see here, not really.

If your looking for structural tendencies on my part have a look at the reading group threads to the left on the categories section. I quite enjoyed the Tractatus reading group I helped organize. Towards the end it was a delicacy following that thread.

Thanks, I'll remember to. Also would like chip in a friendly suggestion that you write something for print. See you around :)

Reply to unforeseen

Appreciated! :ok:

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe?

The mind is the structure of our conceptual systems, that enable us to make predictions about our interactions with the world. In my view, it is here that we have the capacity to interact with the world beyond time, whether we do so consciously or not.

What we believe is what information we can integrate into these conceptual systems - what enables us to reduce prediction error in how we interact with the world.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Knowledge
What is the proper educational system, or who should be making those descriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

The way I see it, there is no authority of knowledge among human beings, no elite group of knowledgeable. Our sources of knowledge, understanding and wisdom are and should be as diverse as possible. I think we can learn as much in this broad sense from a year spent listening to those in prison as from a year spent listening to those in lecture halls at university - when we value all information regardless of moral claims and can employ critical and creative thinking without judgement (ie. without dismissing information that contains falsehoods or immorality, for instance).

But not everyone is as open to knowledge, understanding and wisdom as we can be - and those who are certainly aren’t valued for that capacity.

Everyone should be pursuing not just knowledge, but understanding and wisdom - as much as they can. Not everyone will. Knowledge is an individual pursuit, but understanding requires one to recognise that we cannot know enough on our own - that expanding our capacity to know beyond the physical constraints of the brain involves connecting or developing ongoing relationships with others and, not so much trusting their knowledge, but being able to include it somehow.

Further expanding our capacity to know and understand the world requires us to develop still more relationships with others who not only possess knowledge but also understanding that we cannot grasp ourselves due to our personal limitations (including an unwillingness to engage in immoral behaviour or interact with an imaginary perspective of the world). Nurturing these relationships and understanding when and how we can draw on this knowledge, as well as when and how we should be sharing what we know and understand with others, IS wisdom.

It isn’t about authority or power in knowledge, but about relationships and meaning. Humility enables us to recognise our physical limitations in pursuing knowledge, and courage inspires us to transcend those limitations in how we relate to the world by developing complex networks of knowledge beyond our own minds.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with?

As adults, the simplest life is one in which we operate almost entirely from our conceptual systems, with little to no interaction with new information. But we still don’t know enough about reality yet - we still suffer from prediction error. There is an element of our social system that encourages us to strive towards attaining this error-free position: without the pain, loss, lack or humiliation that comes from having to interact with a reality that isn’t what we expect it to be.

Ideally, the more accurate our conceptual systems, the less suffering from prediction error as we interact with the world. But we often construe this as striving only to reduce suffering from prediction error (ie. less pain, lack, humiliation, etc) - which can be achieved by simply neglecting to evaluate or test predictions - rather than striving to improve our conceptual systems.

We then reduce this ‘ideal’ to certain evidence: education, wealth, popularity, intelligence, influence, authority, etc. - as if attaining these are what reduce prediction error.

We need to counteract the social system that idealises this external ‘evidence’ of success and favours reduced prediction error over increased interaction. We can do this by more diversely illustrating the difference between ignorance and knowledge, fantasy and reality, protection and education, fear and courage - and by valuing the latter in every instance, without avoiding interaction with the former as a source of information.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does it matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place?

Prediction error is a key source of suffering in the world. When our conceptual systems are inaccurate, we encounter more prediction error in our interactions, which can lead to anxiety or depression, as well as anger, hatred, violence, oppression, despair, etc. As a result, we tend to withdraw from or avoid interactions that may result in prediction error.

But the only effective way to reduce prediction error in our interactions is to be prepared to continually restructure our conceptual systems to integrate new information, and accept that we cannot know everything there is to know. It requires us to come to terms with experiencing a pervasive uncertainty in relation to what is real, and to improve our perception of reality through increased interaction and interdependence.

Quoting Pfhorrest

That sound like an answer to my question about the meaning of descriptive statement,

Ok. Good. Would you now answer my question?

What does all human thought and belief consist of, on your view?

Reply to creativesoul Sure.

Beliefs are a kind of thoughts, thoughts with descriptive content, thoughts about how the world is, in contrast to intentions which are thoughts with prescriptive content, about how the world ought to be.

Thoughts more generally are reflexive feelings, where feelings likewise have descriptive and prescriptive versions, perceptions and desires. A thought is a perception of a feeling coupled with a desire for that feeling to remain, or else whatever feeling is desired in its stead: basically, a thought is what you feel you ought to feel, the mental states you judge to be the correct ones.

A feeling in turn is an interpretation of an experience, where experiences also have descriptive and prescriptive versions, namely sensations and appetites. Experiences are the uninterpreted raw input from an interaction between one’s mind and the rest of the world.

A mind is just a function of a physical system — namely, this kind of function I’ve been describing. There is also a qualitative, what-it’s-like phenomenal experience of being a mind, but that’s not a special thing of minds: everything has such a first-person experience, but what that experience is like varies with the function of the thing just like its behavior does — the function is a map from experience to behavior — and it is only minds proper, with functionality like I’ve been describing, that have a first person experience similar to the kind that we human minds have.

A thing with similar enough functionality does not technically have to be human: other animals, aliens, AIs, etc, can all in principle have similar enough functionality too.

Reply to Pfhorrest

...And what do all those examples of thought and belief have in common such that having it is what makes them thoughts and beliefs instead of something else?

Do language less creatures form, have, and/or hold thought and belief? It seems to me that you cannot admit that without incoherence and/or special pleading. The notion of thought you've advocated for does not allow it, despite your suggestion at the end.

Reply to creativesoul I think I’ve already answered that question so if there is something to my answer I’ve left out you’ll need to specify.

And yes language-less creatures can have thoughts, including beliefs. Nothing I’ve said is to the contrary.

Reply to Pfhorrest

You've offered different descriptions regarding kinds of thought and belief. You've not offerd a universal criterion for what counts as thought and belief such that when we're assessing whether or not a candidate of our choosing counts as being a case of thought and belief it counts as such by virtue of satisfying that criterion.

Are you saying that language less creatures can form, have, and/or hold thought about how the world is and/or ought to be?

Reply to creativesoul Yes, I am saying that.

And I gave criteria for a thought to be a belief, and for a mental state to be a thought, and for what makes a state mental, so I’m not sure what further criteria you want.

Quoting Pfhorrest

A thought is a perception of a feeling coupled with a desire for that feeling to remain...

All thoughts?

Quoting Pfhorrest

A thought is a perception of a feeling coupled with a desire for that feeling to remain, or else whatever feeling is desired in its stead: basically, a thought is what you feel you ought to feel, the mental states you judge to be the correct ones.

Desiring for a feeling to remain is to know that they do not always. Knowing that feelings are fleeting requires being able to think about one's own thought. That requires naming and descriptive practices for one's own mental ongoings.

Language less creatures have none.

How do you reconcile this problem?

Why do you claim reflexive mental activity requires naming or other linguistic capability?

More to the point, where are you going with all this? I don’t mind so much explaining what my philosophy is like ahead of schedule but this all started with you objecting to the questions in the OP, and now you’re more or less asking me those same questions, so I don’t see your point in doing so.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Reality
What are the criteria by which to judge descriptive claims, or what is it that makes something real?

Commonality to all empirical experiences, or instrumentality toward explaining such. This means an empirical realism, or a physicalist phenomenalism, a kind of neutral monism, where all that exists are physical things, and physical things consist entirely of their phenomenal, experiential, empirical properties, which are in turn just the way that they interact with observers (who are in turn just other physical systems).

This means that the most concretely real of things are only the presently occurring "occasions of experience" (as Whitehead calls them), such as the "pixels" (so to speak) of whatever you're seeing at the moment. Concepts of quantity and quality ("universals" like shape and color) are abstractions useful for explaining patterns in those experiences, so things like shapes in your field of vision are abstractions away from those "pixels of vision", and real inasmuch as they're instrumental in explaining that. Things like rocks and trees existing in three-dimensional space even when you're not looking at them are further abstractions and real inasmuch as they're instrumental in explaining that.

In a sense "here" is more concretely real than "there" (we only infer the existence of "there" from things going on here; even if you can see "there" right now, it's via photons that are here now that you do so), but "there" is still real. Likewise time: the present is more concretely real than the past or the future (we only have records of the past and predictions of the future, all existing in the present), but the past and the future are still real. Likewise other possible worlds: the actual world is more concretely real than other possible worlds, but other possible worlds are still real. I actually hold that time is definable in terms of possible worlds, and space is definable in terms of time, so possible worlds are a more primitive abstraction than time or space.

Purely abstract objects like discussed in math are the least concrete things of all, finally leaving all concreteness behind, but are still real inasmuch as they're useful in explaining the concrete world, as merely one of those infinitely many abstract objects, the one of which we are a part.

Reply to Pfhorrest

You can disregard everything I write if you want. I'm very very critical. I'm of the well-considered opinion that you've followed philosophy proper down a mistaken path. I'm focusing upon that.

You've gotten human thought and belief wrong, and you're not alone. Like I said, you may ignore me if you like, or if you'd rather not get into it, then I'm good with that too.

Think about this either way...

If you are indeed mistaken about human thought and belief, then you are also mistaken - in some way or other - about everything ever thought, believed, spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered. The scope of rightful application could not be broader.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Why do you claim reflexive mental activity requires naming or other linguistic capability?

I did not claim that, nor did you offer that as a criterion for thought and belief.

I did argue against the criterion you did offer for thought and belief by first granting it and then explaining exactly how it fails to account for language less thought and belief.

I described thought as reflexive mental activity. If that wasn’t clear then I think you’re not understanding anything I’ve said. I think I would rather just discontinue our conversation, it seems pretty fruitless and proceeding sound frustrating unproductive. If you want to say what you think I’m wrong about and what’s right instead though, go right ahead, cause I'm lost on what you think the problem is.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I described thought as reflexive mental activity. If that wasn’t clear then I think you’re not understanding anything I’ve said.

I'm understanding just fine. You've described thought in all sorts of ways. You've named different kinds. You've made all sorts of comments. You've neglected a valid objection to something you have written, in lieu of talking about something I've not objecting to.

What you have yet to have done is offer a bare minimum criterion for what counts as thought and belief. Such a standard/criterion is the device we use to determine whether or not some situation counts as a case of thought and belief.

The above sums it up thus far for me. I would be happy to end it here, if you still want to do so after reading my last two posts.

Quoting creativesoul

What you have yet to have done is offer a bare minimum criterion for what counts as thought and belief. Such a standard/criterion is the device we use to determine whether or not some situation counts as a case of thought and belief.

But do we really use some device to understand 'thought' or 'belief' in ordinary language? What if an investigation of thought leads to the conclusion that no device constructed by this or that philosopher can ever get it just right?

After all, any investigation of the notions of thought or belief must already use these words and their naive meanings. We use the supposedly broken thing in order to fix it, proving that it wasn't so broken.

Quoting Eee

But do we really use some device to understand 'thought' or 'belief' in ordinary language?

Language is a device. Why quote the terms? I'm not talking about the language use. I'm using those two terms as a namesake for the same referent. That referent is prior to language. That referent is an integral element within all thought and belief, those existentially dependent upon language use notwithstanding.



Quoting Eee

What if an investigation of thought leads to the conclusion that no device constructed by this or that philosopher can ever get it just right?

Then we ask...

What counts as "just right"?

...and we comment...

My criterion for "just right" includes a basis borne of universal criteria.

After all, any investigation of the notions of thought or belief must already use these words and their naive meanings. We use the supposedly broken thing in order to fix it, proving that it wasn't so broken.

I guess. Who says it's broken? All sensible use of the terms must be accounted for, and this includes ordinary language. It seems to me that there is no way to avoid placing existential value upon ordinary use. If we are to develop an acceptable working theory of human thought and belief, it must be amenable to evolutionary progression. Human thought and belief must begin simply and accrue in it's complexity. History shows this nicely. There are arguments about the source of novelty, but that's not in question, nor does it matter. "God did it" doesn't work any more than "Aliens did it" any more than "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" did it...

What we need is knowledge of what all thought and belief consists of. Then, and only then, can we determine what the particular thought belief is about. This is too much a bit too fast, but hopefully you'll get a gist for the position I'm arguing for/from.

Yeah I've told you what I think belief consists of, and what I think thought consists of, and you haven't told me what you think either of them consist of, or what's wrong with my answers, or what any of this has to do with the OP, which was a series of questions and not any statements about anything, so at this point this subthread really just seems like a disruptive derailment to me and I'd rather not continue it.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Yeah... ...you haven't told me what you think either of them consist of...

First time for everything I guess...

:razz:

All thought and belief consists of mental correlations drawn between different things. The only difference between thought and belief regarding the ordinary everyday use of the terms is immediately discernable during a.)suspending agreement, assent, and/or judgment, and/or b.) deliberate misrepresentation of one's own thought and belief. Those thoughts are more complex beliefs, and as such the two cannot be interchanged in such circumstances without losing meaning. So, there is a distinction between thought and belief, but not at the pre-reflective level.

Quoting creativesoul

Why quote the terms?

I quote the words that we already know how to use. Quoting creativesoul

I'm using those two terms as a namesake for the same referent. That referent is prior to language. That referent is an integral element within all thought and belief, those existentially dependent upon language use notwithstanding.

OK. So the referent of 'thought' and 'belief' is prior to language, to words? That's plausible, but it depends on how one further specifies the nature of thought and belief. For obvious reasons it's difficult to talk about non-linguistic thought and belief. We can interpret actions as manifestations of belief.
But I'd be slow to drag 'thought' or 'belief' far from their ordinary usage.

Quoting creativesoul

"God did it" doesn't work any more than "Aliens did it" any more than "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" did it...

I think you are arguing against one of your own pet demons here. This has nothing to do with anything I've said.

Quoting creativesoul

What we need is knowledge of what all thought and belief consists of.

We already have it. We already are it. But I support the project of articulating our tacit know-how.

Quoting creativesoul

Then, and only then, can we determine what the particular thought belief is about.

I don't think this is obvious. Instead, I think it's more like the hermeneutic circle.

"One's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. "

And how can we generalize thought and belief without seeing what particular thoughts and beliefs ar about? We are already in life, in the world, successfully transplanting hands, planning trips to Mars, curing HIV. Philosophy is late on the scene, merely increase self-consciousness, allowing us to make clear to ourselves what we are already doing and already know. Or that's one approach.

Quoting creativesoul

All thought and belief consists of mental correlations drawn between different things.

The idea of the purely mental, however, is itself a product of language. It's a distinction within language. The notion of the mental depends on the useful fiction of the isolated ego. This supposedly isolated ego can speak to itself that 'I think therefore I am,' ignoring that its language is not its own.

To be clear, I understand what people mean by the mental and by meaning that can be translated. These concepts are useful but shouldn't perhaps be used as unquestioned foundations.

Quoting creativesoul

My criterion for "just right" includes a basis borne of universal criteria.

This is a theme I like. Universal criteria. And that's why the philosopher isn't exactly or simply the solitary ego. Whim or mere opinion is no interest, correct? Correct thinking isn't 'just me' thinking. It let's the thoughts evolve as they 'must.' I don't mean anything mystical. I'm just trying to analyze what we vaguely mean by universal criteria or being reasonable.

We already know how to be reasonable, so it's just a matter of bringing what we mean to a greater vividness, focusing.

Quoting Eee

I quote the words that we already know how to use.

Not a good start. I'll overlook it for now.

I like the avatar picture. Reminds me of an old forum long ago.

To be continued...

Quoting creativesoul

Not a good start. I'll overlook it for now.

Thank you, your majesty.

But in case it wasn't clear, you asked me why I quoted the words. And that's because I was referring to the words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction

(I'm sure you are aware of use/mention. Just giving you a little of your own condescension.)

But thanks for noting the picture. I like her face.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean?

Bonus question:
What do mathematical claims, about numbers and geometric shapes and such, mean, and how do they relate to descriptive claims about reality?

The Objects of Reality
What are the criteria by which to judge descriptive claims, or what is it that makes something real?

The Methods of Knowledge
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to believe, what descriptive claims to agree with?

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe?

The Institutes of Knowledge
What is the proper educational system, or who should be making those descriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with?

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place?

Meaning? I don’t understand the question. Sounds quite silly tbh.

Bonus: Mathematics? What does Mathematics mean? I can tell you roughly what it is and no more. It is a field of play from which we can create rules and problems that can be proven logically - I guess maths is ‘abstractly applied reason’, meaning numbers are real and so theories involving explicit numbers can be shown to be correct or incorrect (unlike in day to day language where the articles in play are not explicit - ‘real’ - enough to remain universal).

Note: Just trying to offer something from a question I find kind of meaningless.

Object of Reality? Okay, maybe a little easier. We simply must distinguish between items of cognition to cognitise. The set up is a false dichotomy yet a necessarily useful one by which we can establish ground for ‘difference’. Essentially the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘existent’ is usually held in terms of empirical value - how can I measure and how consistent can my measurements be?

There is too much to go into here to sum this up in several pages let alone a few paragraphs (to say some simple takes a damn long time I’ve found!)

I believe I’ve touched on both Subjects of Reality and Methods of Knowledge above.

To give some more about ‘knowledge’ my preferred line of attack is relatively simple. I view ‘knowledge’ in a negative sense - meaning I ‘know’ because there is room for questioning and explanation. Without ‘room to maneuver’ there is no ‘knowledge’ to be had about anything. Obviously I understand that people don’t usually use the term ‘knowledge’ in an absolute sense, yet I do see some people that get hoodwinked by this because they forget to examine what ‘knowledge’ means within specific areas and that it doesn’t have a universal application - although some items are more far reaching than others.

Educational Systems - something I feel strongly about. The ‘best’ way is the most impractical way. Education shouldn’t be about creating a system that has a ‘one size fits all’ mentality, nor should education encourage a ‘factory-like’ attitude - the industrial revolution has passed! Basically education works best when ‘students’ are left to explore their interests and it is down to ‘teachers’ to facilitate their exposure to different items so they have a better chance of finding something that gives them a sense of meaning.

Again, this is a very complex matter and not something I can sum up any better than that - too many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ that spring to mind against my own words here!

Bonus: People already do. It is more about nurturing our natural curiosity. It doesn’t need much encouragement just less of an authoritarian attitude made solely for the purpose of some imaginary scheme called ‘society’.

Importance of Knowledge? For starters we can’t talk about ‘importance’ without ideas of ‘true’ or ‘false’. Another rather silly question which is interesting because it is the inaccuracy of lingual exchanges that leads to a great many problems and mistakes (some good and some bad).

Quoting creativesoul

The meaning of any and all things meaningful consists entirely of the correlations being drawn.

What is the gong-tormented sea? Is there a clear distinction between the metaphorical and the literal? What part does sound play in meaning? Or feeling? The 'correlations' approach seems oversimplified. What exactly is a correlation in this context?

Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity'. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_Sraffa

Quoting Eee

...For obvious reasons it's difficult to talk about non-linguistic thought and belief.

Call me what you may, but I've not come across any reason worthy of being called "obvious".

I've begun clearing the path of debris. Something wrong with my approach?

All statements of thought and belief presuppose truth somewhere along the line. All statements of thought and belief are meaningful to the speaker.

Agree?

Quoting Eee

What is the gong-tormented sea? Is there a clear distinction between the metaphorical and the literal? What part does sound play in meaning? Or feeling? The 'correlations' approach seems oversimplified. What exactly is a correlation in this context?

All predication is correlation. That's more than adequate.

Perfectly simple.

"The gong tormented sea" is a linguistic device/characterization that could be sensibly and correctly used as a means to refer to any arbitrary situation or thing we like. Better ones(uses) would pick out common situations at sea. "The gong-tormented sea" can only be understood if one draws the same or similar enough correlations between it's use and something else as the user of the phrase.

"The metaphorical" and "the literal" are said to be kinds/types of meaning. Both consist of correlations drawn between different things.

The different things can and often include both feeling and sound, as well as all sorts of other stuff.

Quoting Eee

This is a theme I like. Universal criteria. And that's why the philosopher isn't exactly or simply the solitary ego. Whim or mere opinion is no interest, correct? Correct thinking isn't 'just me' thinking. It let's the thoughts evolve as they 'must.' I don't mean anything mystical. I'm just trying to analyze what we vaguely mean by universal criteria or being reasonable.

We already know how to be reasonable, so it's just a matter of bringing what we mean to a greater vividness, focusing.

Bein' reasonable is thinking about our own thought and belief, including but not limited to statements thereof. That's the best place to start looking. After-all, if our notion of belief is not amenable to evolutionary progression it can - and ought - be dismissed out of hand as soon as we realize that it's not. It must consist of that which is able to evolve into meaningful statements that presuppose truth somewhere along the line.

Correlations.

Quoting Eee

Just giving you a little of your own condescension.

Touche.

:razz:

Quoting Eee

"One's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. "

I've no issue with this at face value. I agree. What I take issue with is the idea that that somehow applies to thought and belief that does not involve understanding a text. We're talking about all thought and belief and what they have in common at a basic level such that that content is capable of evolutionary progression...

Correlations.

@StreetlightX or someone, would it be possible to split this conversation with creativesoul off into its own thread? I don't want to shut down that conversation but I still don't see what any of it has to do with the OP of this thread, and never have.

Meanwhile I'll continue slowly answering my own questions.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Methods of Knowledge
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to believe, what descriptive claims to agree with?

In a word, critically. By which I mean in the manner of critical rationalism, as opposed to justificationism. We should not start off by rejecting all beliefs, and then admitting only those that can be conclusively proven using the empirical criteria given above. We should instead start with whatever beliefs we feel like starting with, believing whatever seems true to each of us -- tentatively agreeing to disagree if different things seem true to different people -- and then, by examining the consistency of our own beliefs with each other, and of our own and others' beliefs with further empirical experiences, start ruling out possibilities, continuing to believe whatever seems true to us within the range of remaining possibilities. In this way we each get less and less wrong, and we come into further and further agreement. But we can never finish that process, never be absolutely certain about what one specific possibility is definitely real, and so never completely eliminate all room for disagreement. Within that range of possibilities, however narrow, we should pick whichever one requires the least information to describe the same set of empirical data, because that is the most useful to us, the easiest-to-use model that still fits within the narrowest range of possibilities we've settled on thus far.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I don't want to shut down that conversation but I still don't see what any of it has to do with the OP of this thread, and never have.

I'll defer continuing on that tangent until we find a better place.

@creativesoul
Perhaps we can continue on that old meaning thread you started long ago.

Reply to Pfhorrest

I'm more than happy to discontinue...

Be well.

:smile:

Reply to Eee

Sure. Pick any of them, as they are all related.

Thank you both.

Meanwhile ...

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe?

There are two things to consider about what people call "mind":

One of them is phenomenal consciousness, the topic of the so-called "hard problem of consciousness". This is basically just the having of a first-person experience at all. I consider that to be a triviality: I reject both eliminativism which says that there is no such thing at all, and strong emergentism which says that certain arrangements of things that have nothing like that at all can suddenly come to possess that in full, in favor of the view that everything has some degree of such phenomenal consciousness, varying according to the function of the thing.

The other is access consciousness, the topic of the so-called "easy problem of consciousness", which is about the functional ability of a mind to access information about itself; it is, basically, self-awareness. I hold that this is uncontroversially a functional property, held by anything that implements the proper reflexive function, whatever its substrate. I sketch out the necessary features of such a function as such: the system must first differentiate aspects of its experience into their relevance either for a model of the world as it is (a model made to fit the world), which I call sensations, and for a model of the world as it ought to be (a model made for the world to fit), which I call appetites; a function that I call sentience. It must then interpret those experiences into such models, forming what I call feelings, divided into perceptions on the one hand, and desires on the other hand; a function that I call intelligence. It must then reflexively form both perceptions and desires about those feelings, which reflexive states I call thoughts, divided into beliefs and intentions; a function that I call sapience. The descriptive (mind-to-fit-world) side of that sapience function is what I deem rightly deserves to be called "consciousness", as in access consciousness. (The prescriptive side of it will be the subject of my later answer about the will).

Reply to Pfhorrest re: knowledge, etc :up:
Reply to Pfhorrest meta (re: "wisdom") :up:
Reply to Pfhorrest meta (re: "dissolving problems") :up:

[quote=Pfhorrest][W]e aim to construct a single mathematical object ... [ToE] that will turn out to be just is concrete reality: "concrete" is indexical, it signifies only the mathematical structure of which we are also a part. Other mathematical objects are just like it, ontologically, except that we aren't a part of them; they are purely abstract, with no connection to the object of which we are a part. This is unlike Platonism in that it doesn't posit that there is the world we're familiar with and then separately some kind of Heaven full of Forms. In terms comparable to that, I'd say that there are only Forms, no Heaven in which they exist, and one of those Forms just is the concrete universe we're familiar with (which, like most mathematical objects, is constructed out of lots and lots of copies of simpler objects, which is why we see other "Forms" expressed within our concrete world).[/quote]

Mostly I agree with this (you & Tegmark :cool: ).

Reply to 180 Proof Thanks for the applause. :)

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Knowledge
What is the proper educational system, or who should be making those descriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

Freethinking proselytism is what I'm calling this, though I'm hesitant about that "proselytism" as a name for what I mean. I mean that education should be non-authoritarian, but it should also be non-secret; it should be collaborative, knowledge should be spread and shared, but it should not be forced on anyone. I think of this as the epistemic analogue of libertarian socialism, as this question is roughly the epistemic analogue of the question about governance; irreligious education is like stateless governance, and "proselytism" for lack of a better term, the sharing of knowledge and the lack of mystery about the truth, is like socialism inasmuch as that means roughly a kind of sharing of wealth, and there can be irreligious (freethinking) proselytism just like there can be stateless (libertarian) socialism.

Within such a freethinking educational structure, I think the system we already have in the western world, of primary research feeding into secondary peer-review journals and those into tertiary textbooks and encyclopedias is already the correct "legislative" branch of such "epistemic government". The analogues of the executive and judicial branches of government are teaching and testing, and I think that all three of those should be kept separate from each other just like the separation of powers in government: those who write the textbooks, those who teach their contents, and those who test students on their comprehension of them should be separate parties, so that no one party has epistemic authority to just tell the students what is true without anyone to check them. The testers should also, I think, fill a role like the religious role of a pastor, being a person to whom the student can come with questions to answer or disagreements to settle, and that should be the primary point of contact between common people and the educational system, through whom teachers and researchers are brought into the equation. In addition to private teachers, the "executive" role also has need for public educators, to speak up against widespread public falsehoods, and prevent the growth of "cults" of kooks, cranks, and quacks, in the absence of any epistemic authority, so that such groups do not grow and in time become epistemic authorities, i.e. full-blown religions, who would then undermine the very epistemic freedom that enabled their growth (in the same way that gangs and warlords spring out of the power vacuum in an insufficiently governed society, and then grow into new states).

Quoting Pfhorrest

Philosophy of Justice and Morality

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean?

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral?

The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with?

The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend?

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with?

The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place?


Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?

I can pretty much sum up my perspective on all these matters in a ‘simple’ way.

Any public, or even internal declaration is opposed to, and dependent upon social apparatus. Our worded thoughts declare an expression of communicated ideas and expressions and only partly hold a grain of ‘independence’ yet this is only possible due to the dichotic perspective we have an only talk of independence in light of interdependence.

Moralistically speaking if one wishes to hone their sense of morality they necessarily have to address themselves in different situations that cloud their moral judgement. When I speak, like I am now, I shouldn’t be fooled into thinking I’m being ‘genuine’ to the reader as each public declaration is a kind of performance fro both my sense of self and how I perceive myself to be perceived. To truly explore my ‘moral content’ I believe it best that I try to disassociate myself as much as possible from making a public declaration. This is by no means an ‘absolute’ solution as I am then left to struggle with the communicable language (my social apparatus) with necessarily holds many emotional parts.

You may think such an impossible task does no more than instill doubt and hesitation rather than honing a sense of morality and action. It depends on how far you push and what risks you’re willing to take.

From this approach I can only say that it has turned me more to thinking about my emotions and feelings toward others as being reflections of what I frame as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Meaning if I see ‘love’ I like it as it shows me I am capable of ‘love’ by recognising it. Likewise when I feel negatively about something I also know it as my possession - this is harder to stomach as it basically means when I state that such and such an act as ‘horrific’ I know it because I know I am capable of it.

What I am talking about here is something akin to ‘empathy’. The difference is the ‘feelings’ I am referring to are those we don’t wish to admit as our possessions. We don’t tend to see ourselves as the perpetrator of a murder or rape because we’re more inclined to associate the experience with the victim. The disgust we feel is ‘disgust’ because we know we are capable of being the one causing pain and hurt yet we’re never willing to take on that role in - for want of a better term - ‘mal-empathetic’ way. This is probably for the better in most circumstances because to take a long journey down that road is going to cause some damage without a serious attitude.

When we experience something beautiful it is because we see our own beauty, and when we experience something ugly it is because we see our own ugliness. We obviously lean more toward one than the other, yet to actively ignore one or the other doesn’t seem like a sensible course of action for any prolonged period of time.

The problem with this ‘declaration’ is that it is a declaration. So if everyone agreed with my point it would merely play into the ‘social apparatus’ and refute the inner sense of being. For me this is as ‘true’ as anything can be ‘true’. If I’m antagonised or frustrated by someone then it is because I know I am also antagonising and frustrating in my manner.

We necessarily operate within limits. Pushing ourselves to the point where the lines blur is where we can establish and/or destroy a better sense of selfhood. It’s dangerous and I doubt this thought should remain anywhere but on the periphery of conscious thought - and that is conveniently where it must lie as ‘worded thought’ tends to damped our sense of self by playing to certain social situations and further feeds the sense of ‘independent’ thought even though such worded language is an approximation of our experiential being.

Those that ‘disgust’ us the most represent that aspect of ourselves we least wish to explore, that part of ourselves we dread and fear within. To ‘think’ about being so ‘disgusting’ would fracture our sense of self and potentially our sense of ‘fortitude’ against becoming like that ‘disgusting’ person.

This is the ‘simple’ version. Something I have tried to highlight previously with an approach to the use of hypotheticals. The reactions given in those threads were interesting.

Reply to I like sushi Thanks for finishing off the questions! I can’t respond at length now but I hope that you enjoyed the answering and that others can give you some feedback before I get the time.

Quoting I like sushi

"3.21 Like Zen koans which provoke a suspension of conceptual thinking, works of art in particular (and aesthetic experiences in general) prompt suspension of ego - what Iris Murdoch referred to as unselfing - by presenting sensationally or emotionally heightened encounters with the nonself which make it more likely than not for one to forget oneself for the moment if not longer.

3.22 Altruism - judging, by action or inaction, not to do harm to another - begins with learning and practicing techniques for forgetting oneself: unselfing: suspending ego. (Ecstatic techniques (e.g. making art.)) This is the moral benefit of art, but not its function.

3.23 The function of making art (along with morality & rationality (see 2.5)) is to help expand - develop - Agency, or to inversely limit its shadow: Foolery (see 1.1)"
— 180 Proof

Is it possible you could go a little more in depth here please? I find your view of Art, Aesthetics and Morality a possible point of interest for myself.

Especially in regard to the bold.

3.21 says Aesthetics prepares us for Ethics and, in light of the preceding sections (statements 1.0-3.2), Ethics informs Aesthetics. E.g. Children begin learning 'right & wrong' through play and from bedtime stories (fables); Parents use games and storytelling to teach their children what's expected of them (good) and what they should avoid (bad). A dialectics, so to speak, of attention & intention.

3.22 says altruism can be learned and habituated by engaging in and making art because fully experiencing works of art (or nature in an aesthetic way) requires one to pay attention without intending to impose self-serving demands or whimsy of ego on the work (i.e. to move oneself out of one's own way, that is, to forget/immerse oneself); this 'attending without ego' is required in order to encounter an other as other, which is the sine qua non of altruistic judgment.

3.23 riffs off of 3.21 shifting the focus more explicitly to Agency the expansion of which is, I propose, the primary function of philosophy. To learn to reflectively inquire (e.g. making art) and reflectively practice (e.g. moral conduct) in tandem; to the degree these complementary exercises are habituated and optimized, Agency - capability for judging (see 3.11) - expands (and inversely foolery narrows (see 1.1, 1.12, 1.6)).

Any clearer? The references to other statements are included to help contextualize or build on earlier statements. Also, the highlit links embedded throughout making disparate implicit connections more explicit. I'm sure you'll tell me if that helps; I look forward to some elaboration on this "possible point of interest" of yours vis-à-vis my relation of aesthetics to ethics. My turn now to read your replies to the OP ...

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with?

I call this task, the inspiration of the mind to actively pursue the truth, the real, the knowable, or the state of the mind being (or the process it of becoming) fully conscious or self-aware, "enlightenment". We cannot enlighten someone just by telling them facts. We cannot simply tell them to operate their mind some way either. We must somehow inspire them to exercise their mind, show them opportunity and motive to think for themselves of their own accord. To do that we must show them that achieving truth is actually possible, and thus that there is hope for them if they try to do so themselves. But we must conversely be sparing in our direct help, lest they come to rely upon us, take our help for granted, and deem it unnecessary for them to try to learn themselves. Instead, we need to help people to help themselves, to require that they take initiative in trying to pursue their own truth, but to stand by and hold their hand while they get a bearing for it, to ensure that their early attempts are successful, and build in them the confidence and skill that they will need to continue pursuing truth on their own.

At the same time, we must also show them that achieving truth is not a foregone conclusion that someone else will always handle for them without any action on their own part, because if they thought that was the case they would have no motive to try to learn themselves. So to that end, we need to point out to them how any authorities on knowledge that they may be tempted to rely on are fallible, and that without their personal action such authorities may fail, not necessarily catastrophically or globally, but in any particular case, in which cases the individuals involved will need to be ready to pick up that slack and stand up to ignorance themselves.

But teaching not only oneself, but also others, can also help to cultivate that feeling of enlightenment, the feeling that achieving knowledge oneself is both possible and necessary. So more than merely helping people to learn themselves, we can also enlist them to help us teach other people to learn themselves, with the promise that doing so will in turn enlighten them, help them learn to learn themselves, and in doing so begin to build the groundwork for the kind of joint, mutual pursuit of truth necessary to underpin the kind of educations structure I've previously outlined.

Reply to 180 Proof I was more interested in the ‘how’ of these items in terms of how they function.

Basically more of an essay rather than bullet-point responses.

Feels like you’re teasing me :) would like to see more of your working/evidence if possible. Thanks

Reply to Pfhorrest
Didnt see this thread until now. Gonna add som oneline answers when I get the time, hopefully during the weekend(daytime worker on lunch break...) but I'll start quickly with the last one.

The meaning of life is to live and let live. As comfortably as possible giving everyone else as much comfort as possible.

Reply to Ansiktsburk Thanks, looking forward to it. :-)

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place?

All actions are driven by a combination of belief and intention, so no matter what you’re trying to do, half the battle of doing it successfully is having the correct beliefs to drive your actions.

Pfhorrest, I picked you to ask this as I see, you're quite involved! So, that you might know! Just how does one 'Newcomer' such as I, review and possibly 'Reedit' my posting in here? I at a loss here! Can you please advise?

P.S.: (In response to your post above) "Success, measured in terms of relationship of 'Belief's and Intentions', seem to me of 'Relative' terms. Concerning 'What exactly are these intentions, and beliefs'? That are 'Relative' to your actions-taken!" (?)

Reply to David Philo 3 In the lower left corner of your post you should see a ‘...’ and if you click that you should see several options including Edit.

I’m not sure I understand your second question.

Reply to Pfhorrest

The questions in the OP relate more to peoples opinions about philosophy rather than philosophy itself.

Reply to A Seagull Only the Metaphilosophy section. Did you not read past that? The rest of the questions are about ontology, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, mind, will, education, politics, etc.

Reply to Pfhorrest

Without a method for evaluating or generating a philosophy, all you have are opinions.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I’m just interested in hearing what other individual people’s complete philosophical systems are...

All complete philosophical systems are existentially dependent upon complex language use replete with metacognition(thinking about thought and belief). Such a system need not get thought and belief right in order to be called "complete". However, if one's notion, definition, and/or conception of thought and belief is wrong in some specific way, then so too is everything else resting upon the misconception, in some foundational way or another.

That's what my own comments here have to do with the OP.

Nowhere in your system have you clearly set out an exhaustive universal criterion for what counts as thought and belief...

Reply to A Seagull What method you use to generate answers to these questions is up to you. Part of the reason I asked this spread of questions was to see if there was any methodical or systemic pattern apparent in them, or if people had opinions on different topics that didn’t all fit together well.

Quoting creativesoul

Nowhere in your system have you clearly set out an exhaustive universal criterion for what counts as thought and belief...

I haven’t laid out a system of my own here. I’m asking other people about their systems. But I think I have answered your question for my part in our earlier discussion about it, so if you don’t think so then there’s some miscommunication between us happening. In any case, if you think that that’s an important thing to take into account in your answers to the questions I did ask, then by all means feel free to talk about it in your answers to them, if you feel like answering them.

Reply to Pfhorrest

There is indeed a misunderstanding or miscommunication at hand. This is shown by your latest reply. All the conventional categories of philosophy are based - in part - upon a gross misunderstanding of human thought and belief.

Perhaps I'll take a stab at incorporating this consideration into specific responses to some of your questions... That may make for a more fruitful exchange.

Quoting creativesoul

All the conventional categories of philosophy are based - in part - upon a gross misunderstanding of human thought and belief.

:chin:

[quote=creativesoul]Perhaps I'll take a stab at incorporating this consideration into specific responses to some of your questions...[/quote]

Please do.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe?

Satisfaction of that criterion requires a creature capable of thinking about it's own thought and belief.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean?

Prescriptive claims are non-descriptive, but cognitive; that is to say, they are not trying to assert anything about the way the world is, any facts about reality, but they are nevertheless capable of being correct or incorrect and therefore are truth-apt in their own sense. They are most akin to imperatives, or commands, that are capable of being objectively good or bad (in ways to be elaborated later); but whereas commands are always have the person being addressed as the subject of them ("you do this"), prescriptive claims can have anything as the subject ("[anything] do this", including "[anything] be this way"), making them in a sense more like optatives (a la "Saints be praised!, which is not a command to the saints, or to anyone in particular to praise them, but an exhortation for anyone and everyone to praise the saints). In technically language, I would say that they impress intentions, rather than express desires as expressivism would have it; in more common philosophical language that's roughly equivalent to saying the "assert moral beliefs", except that I don't think morality (being non-descriptive in character) is something you can rightly have a belief about, but rather that there is a moral analogue of belief, intention, that bears the same relationship to desire as belief bears to perception: perceptions and desires are feelings, while beliefs and intentions are thoughts, and each differs from the other in the direction of fit of their respective attitudes toward the same kind of ideas. And impression, or assertion, attempts to get someone else to hold the same opinion as you do, while expression merely demonstrates the opinion that you have.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?

To claim that something is beautiful is in essence to claim that it "feels right", where "right" might mean either "good" or "true". Comedy and tragedy are both different ways of framing something that is in one of those ways "wrong", either bad or false. Comedy treats the wrongness with levity, playing it off as frivolous, not a big deal, while tragedy treats the wrongness with gravity, playing it as a serious big deal. Each of these can in its own way contain a kind of beauty, as when comedy makes something bad not feel so bad anymore, making it feel more right, i.e. making it beautiful in a way; or when tragedy tells some painful truth about something that is bad, but the telling of that is still right inasmuch as it is true, and so beautiful in that way. Beauty can just stumbled upon in nature, or it can be presented specifically for an audience to provoke some kind of reaction to them, where it is called art.

Anything thus presented to an audience to provoke an emotional reaction is art, whether or not the intention is to convey beauty. Something is good art when it is successful at evoking the intended reaction, where "intended reaction" can vary between the artist, the audience, the surrounding society, or some broader moral standard. This all relates to prescriptive claims about morality in that this notion of "good as success" is a kind of prototypical morality in the same way that the abstract existence of mathematical objects is a kind of prototypical reality: most of the things we consider good, we consider good for their proficiency at bringing about something else that we consider good, and we rarely directly contemplate those ultimate ends in the same way that we rarely contemplate the most concrete elements of reality, the occasions of our experience, but instead deal in abstractions that are still nevertheless grounded in them. Just as mathematical "existence" is what you get when you deal in such abstractions completely ungrounded in concrete empirical reality, so too aesthetic "value" is what you get when you deal in pure proficiency completely ungrounded in those ultimate ends.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral?

The short answer is hedonism. The long answer requires an analogy to empiricism. When we're appealing empirical experience to judge what is real, we don't just poll people on their beliefs, or even on their perceptions, but rather we ourselves stand in the same circumstances that they report having sensed or observed something, and then see if we also experience those same senses there. Then, rather than taking those sensations to justify whatever perceptions or beliefs the first person who reported them had, we come up with some model that accounts for those sensations we've confirmed and also all of the other sensations that we've confirmed, which will probably not be what anybody initially perceived or believed, as the increasingly weirder and weirder (less intuitive) models science has produced shows.

Likewise, when we're appealing to hedonic experience to judge what is moral, we shouldn't just poll people on what they think ought to be, what I term their "intentions", or even on their desires, but rather we ourselves should stand in the same circumstances that they report having had those hedonic experiences, like pain, hunger, etc, that I term "appetites". Then, rather than taking those appetites to justify whatever desires or intentions the first person who reported them had, we should come up with some model that accounts for those appetites we've confirmed and also all of the other appetites that we've confirmed, which will probably not be what anybody initially desired or intended. This is very similar to the methodology called principled negotiation, which says to "focus on interests, not positions" (appetites not intentions, in my terminology) and most importantly "invent options for mutual gain".

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with?

The short answer is "deontologically", but all I mean by that is "not consequentially". Not exactly, at least. I think that the ends don't justify the means in exactly the same way that observation cannot confirm theory... but it can falsify it. Initially, any course of action is permissible, but negative consequences can rule out possible courses of action, yet still leaving infinitely many permissible ones, never positively justifying one particular course of action as the one that must be taken. Long story short, "do no harm". It may be really hard to figure out a course of action that is not ruled out by any negative consequences, but it's also really hard to find a theory that isn't ruled out by any observations: we've just got to deal with that difficulty if we want to try to do good.

Also, analogous to how logic forms sort of side-constraints on what is possible, just as a necessary consequences of the meaning of words, so too property rights form a kind of side-constraint on what is permissible as a necessary consequence of the ownership of property. But, just like the correct meaning of the words from which we derive logically necessary conclusions is itself contingent, so too the correct assignment of ownership from which we derive such rights and obligations is itself contingent. At the bottom both of them are socially constructed: words mean and people own whatever other people agree that they do. But I think that both are subject to continuity with previous agreement, barring a unanimous consensus to break with that continuity: one subset of a community can't decide to change the meaning of words or the assignment of ownership out from under others without their agreement, unless they can show that those others came to that state through similarly illegitimate non-unanimous action and they're just setting things right again.

This is a good thread and it may be dead but no harm in reviving it.

I'm in a strange place philosophically. I do have a philosophy degree but it's been like 6-7 years since I've graduated and my job just doesn't involve philosophy but I still find it popping up from time and time and I'm happy to engage it.

I'm gonna have to dig back in my brain a little but to give a quick run-down, I'm an meta-ethical realist but I don't subscribe to any particular normative theory. I have an interest in virtue ethics, but I could never quite make it work rationally (i.e. I couldn't make it work within my broader meta-physical framework.) I'm currently non-religious but I'm willing to entertain theistic arguments. I'm very open philosophically and willing to entertain a lot. Hume and Wittgenstein (Investigations-era) are some of my favorites. I loved reading Anscombe even though I'm not a Catholic, but she was incredibly bright.

I'm generally skeptical of people who get "married" to a train of thought, and I see this a lot of marxists and libertarians. I hold facts and practical application in enormously high regard - as well as experience- so I suppose I'm kind of an anti-philosopher in that sense? I am a bitcoiner so the whole cypherpunk and decentralization movements hold a special place in my heart, but that does not mean that I accept them unquestionably. I am skeptical of many of the dogmas I see today.

Reply to BitconnectCarlos It's not dead, it's just resting, but glad you woke it up anyway. :)

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend?

As with mind, I think there are two different things to consider when it comes to the will. One of them has to do with determinism or lack thereof, and like with phenomenal consciousness, I don't think this is a philosophically important topic, but technically everything has "free will" in this sense, because at least according to contemporary models of physics, everything is at the fundamental level nondeterministic. So an electron has "free will" in this sense, just as much as a human does, and none of that really matters for any other purposes.

What actually matters is the functional ability a person has to control their own behavior: to make judgements about themselves, and for those judgements to be causally effective on their future behavior. It is, basically, self-control. I sketch out the necessary features of such a function analogously to how I sketch out access conscioueness: the system must first differentiate aspects of its experience into their relevance either for a model of the world as it is (a model made to fit the world), which I call sensations, and for a model of the world as it ought to be (a model made for the world to fit), which I call appetites; a function that I call sentience. It must then interpret those experiences into such models, forming what I call feelings, divided into perceptions on the one hand, and desires on the other hand; a function that I call intelligence. It must then reflexively form both perceptions and desires about those feelings, which reflexive states I call thoughts, divided into beliefs and intentions; a function that I call sapience. The prescriptive (world-to-fit-mind) side of that sapience function is what I deem rightly deserves to be called "will", and the causal efficacy of such will upon a person's behavior constitutes their freedom of will.

In short, your will is free in the important sense when reflectively thinking that something is the best course of action for you to do causes you to do it. Which might be an entirely predictable process and could in principle be a fully deterministic one, but as it so happens, indeterminism does seem to be a fact of reality, not that it matters for these purposes.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking?

The short answer is anarchism, which doesn't mean no government, but no state. The anarchic government I envision is modeled after the educational system I previously described, with "law books" being compiled through a process of what is effectively peer review: primary sources publishing not their observations but their appetitive experiences, pains and pleasures and so on, in various circumstances, for others to stand on those circumstances too and replicate those findings; then secondary sources commenting on the notability and quality of that primary research; and finally tertiary sources assessing and documenting the current consensus of secondary sources. Those "legislators" would be separate from both judges and police, and in addition to reactive police patrols analogous to public educators, there would be more proactive life coaches / personal lawyers advising people on how to avoid doing things that will get them in trouble with someone else. People would hire judges directly as a kind of "conflict insurance" so to speak, someone standing by to step in an adjudicate disputes, hiring police/lawyers to help defend their clients as necessary, and tertiary legislators to compile the law books they use to do that job. If parties to a conflict appeal to different judges, and those judges cannot work out an agreement themselves, they in turn can appeal to their own higher authorities of the same structure, and so on until at some level the dispute is resolved.

For this to work requires a generally egalitarian economic structure, so anarchism requires socialism, which doesn't mean state redistribution of wealth, just somehow or another avoiding a class division into non-working owners and not-owning workers. My deontological principles encourage this through the invalidation of certain kinds of contracts most notably those of rent and interest, which I believe are the mechanism by which the egalitarian consequences one would naively expect of a free market get subverted giving rise to capitalism.

All of this is the ideal, but I also support the intermediate use of less-anarchic forms of governance to step in in case this form fails, to keep it from failing immediately to the absolute worst. So there should be a bare-bones democratic-socialist state standing by ready to keep society together and re-establish this anarchic state as need be, and possibly further layers or still-more-authoritarian government standing by in between that and the absolutism that would arise from the power vacuum should all government fail completely. From those, or from our present less-anarchic forms of governance, we should progress toward this anarchic ideal conservatively, that is to say making cautious change, but change nevertheless.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with?

I call this task, the inspiration of the will to actively pursue the good, the moral, the just, or the state of the will being (or the process it of becoming) fully free or self-controlled, "empowerment". We cannot empower someone just by telling them what is good. We cannot simply tell them to operate their will some way either. We must somehow inspire them to exercise their will, show them opportunity and motive to take action themselves of their own accord. To do that we must show them that achieving goods is actually possible, and thus that there is hope for them if they try to do so themselves. But we must conversely be sparing in our direct help, lest they come to rely upon us, take our help for granted, and deem it unnecessary for them to try to do things themselves. Instead, we need to help people to help themselves, to require that they take initiative in trying to pursue their own goods, but to stand by and hold their hand while they get a bearing for it, to ensure that their early attempts are successful, and build in them the confidence and skill that they will need to continue pursuing good on their own.

At the same time, we must also show them that achieving good is not a foregone conclusion that someone else will always handle for them without any action on their own part, because if they thought that was the case they would have no motive to try to learn themselves. So to that end, we need to point out to them how any authorities on knowledge that they may be tempted to rely on are fallible, and that without their personal action such authorities may fail, not necessarily catastrophically or globally, but in any particular case, in which cases the individuals involved will need to be ready to pick up that slack and stand up to injustice themselves.

But helping not only oneself, but also others, can also help to cultivate that feeling of empowerment, the feeling that achieving justice oneself is both possible and necessary. So more than merely helping people to help themselves, we can also enlist them to help us help other people to help themselves, with the promise that doing so will in turn empower them, help them learn to help themselves, and in doing so begin to build the groundwork for the kind of joint, mutual pursuit of good necessary to underpin the kind of governmental structure I've previously outlined.

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean?

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?

I'm a moral realist so I do believe moral claims express propositions; they can be true or false. In regard to an exact rational system to sort moral claims... I don't really know and I can't imagine we'll ever find one. It's kind of a mind-warp studying philosophy in college... nobody needs to explain to anyone in a different major or in a different walk of life that strangling babies is wrong. That kind of thing is understood without question, it's acknowledged in every culture, it's felt deep in the bones of the vast majority of the population. It's first felt and then it's justified. The justification part of it always seems post-hoc to me. At this point I'm sympathetic to some version of intuitonism I suppose, but I'm down to be questioned here and I could change my mind later.

I'm also an aesthetic realist and I believe beauty is both real thing (a property, I guess you could say) and that beauty is inherently valuable as a property and in turn ought to be preserved. Value ought to be preserved, but that's not to say it's always wrong to destroy a beautiful thing. I believe someone who can't grasp beautiful will have difficulty living a good, complete life. I do believe in the case of music that it can be learned (e.g. one often hears of someone slowly growing accustomed to, say, Bach or Mozart and growing to appreciate it.)

Anyway, I guess that's the bare bones of my thoughts. Anyone is welcome to challenge or comment on it.

Reply to Pfhorrest

Anything thus presented to an audience to provoke an emotional reaction is art, whether or not the intention is to convey beauty. Something is good art when it is successful at evoking the intended reaction, where "intended reaction" can vary between the artist, the audience, the surrounding society, or some broader moral standard.

After WWII American soldiers would take nearby German civilians on tours of concentration camps. I guess Auschwitz is art then.

Found art, sure. (It wasn’t made to be art, but it can be presented as such).

Thanks for your responses!

Reply to Pfhorrest

Okay, let me try a different example.

Lets say you're in an art museum and you go into one of the rooms there and a couple gallons of sewage water pours down from the ceiling with an overwhelming smell (lets say this event was orchestrated by an "artist.") This would elicit a greater emotional reaction out of a typical person than, say, viewing something by Picasso or Rembrandt. It would just seem to follow under your logic that whoever orchestrated the sewage dropping would be a greater artist than any of the painters of the past.

I'm not arguing with you here, I'm just trying to flush out your logic and making sure that I understand you correctly.

Reply to BitconnectCarlos That would count as art yes, and it would be highly successful from the artists POV, but not from the patrons POV, who did not intend to have that reaction invoked in them.

Reply to Wallows Today's Existential Comic reminded me of this old conversation:

Quoting Pfhorrest

The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place?

All actions are driven by a combination of belief and intention, so no matter what you’re trying to do, half the battle of doing it successfully is having the correct intentions to drive your actions.

Finally up to the last of my own set of questions from two months ago:

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?

"Meaning" in general means important or significance, so this question is asking what is important about one's life. That in turn depends entirely on how connected to the rest of the universe you are, which is to say how important a role your function plays in the overall function of the universe: if a lot of processes in the universe run through you, that makes you important to the universe, and makes your life meaningful. Those inputs can be in the form of being the beneficiary of goods, having the universe serve your ends; or in the form of learning, of gathering truths about the rest of the universe to guide your own behavior; and those outputs can be in the form of doing good for others, being important and so meaningful because of your influence on the rest of the universe; or for the truths that you compile and impart unto others, the teaching that you do. So the meaning of life is to "earn" and to learn, to help and to teach: to both receive and to spread both goods and truths.

There are also feelings of meaningfulness or meaninglessness, that can vary regardless of the actual meaningfulness of one's life. The feeling of meaninglessness, which I call ontophobia, is I hold the prompt of the question about the meaning of life, and when someone is feeling that way no answer will alleviate the feeling, giving a false impression of meaninglessness. The feeling of meaningfulness, ontophilia, is on the other hand the greatest feeling imaginable, a feeling of profound acceptance and understanding, like everything is intrinsically fine and makes intrinsic sense; and being in that state of mind is both enlightening and empowering, enhancing the function of the mind and will, increasing the ability to both receive and spread both goods and truths. Achieving and spreading such a state of mind is thus a reflexive, second-order meaning of life, which is both promoted by and promotes the first-order meaning of life.

@Pfhorrest :clap: Well done. Now you've got me reconsidering a summa of my own (which has been brewing for a decade or longer). Thanks for that and kicking-off this topic.

? Happy 2020 ?

Reply to 180 Proof Thanks! Happy New Year to you too, and best of luck on your own summa project.

Quoting 180 Proof

For discussion's sake here are some labels (to ponder now and (hopefully) unpack later):

[s]• metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic (i.e. agent (habits, capabilities)-based/centered; where harm (i.e. the bad) = reflexive loss of (some/all) agency) Naturalism [NIEN]

• normative ethics - Negative Hedonic Utilitarianism (i.e. right (conduct/response) = to minimize harm; wrong (conduct/response) = to maximize harm) [NHU]

• applied ethics - Negative Preference Consequentialism (i.e. just (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = mitigates double-binds, hobson's choices, tragedy of the commons (i.e. unsustainable practices), burden-shifting, free-riding, scapegoating, etc;  unjust (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = generates double-binds, ... scapegoating, etc) [NPC][/s]

UPDATE: I've edited the above for clarity's sake (I hope).

• metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic Naturalism (i.e. GOOD = optimal (adaptive-synergistic) agency; BAD = suboptimal (maladaptive) agency) [NIEN]

:point: Agency (i.e. ethos) consists in individual and collective capabilities (i.e. adaptive habits, skills, norms-conventions, commons-affordances) of agents to help others and themselves to prevent and reduce harm to others and themselves.

• normative ethics - Negative Hedonic Utilitarianism (i.e. RIGHT (conduct/response) = to minimize harm to agency; WRONG (conduct/response) = to fail to minimize harm to agency) [NHU]

• applied ethics - Negative Preference Consequentialism (i.e. JUST (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = to mitigate double-binds, hobson's choices, tragedy of the commons (i.e. unsustainable practices), burden-shifting, free-riding, scapegoating, etc;  UNJUST (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = to fail to be JUST, or mitigate double-binds, ... scapegoating, etc) [NPC]

:point: Morality (i.e. mores, norms) is the customary or systematic codification of 'right conduct' and 'just practices' (defined above) sufficient for optimizing Agency.

Quoting 180 Proof

metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic Naturalism

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "non-identity" here? That's the only part of this I didn't (think I) understand.

to the OP

Quoting Pfhorrest

metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic Naturalism
— 180 Proof

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "non-identity" here? That's the only part of this I didn't (think I) understand.

Let's start with my two main posts from the old "The ethical standing of future people" thread:

One. My use of the non-identity idea (Parfit, not Adorno) is sketched ... Two. Some clarifications & elaboration.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?

The bonus question only has bogus answers.


(The boogie man's main function is to get you. The boogie woman's main function is to dance all night long in her dancing shoes.)

Quoting god must be atheist

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?
— Pfhorrest

The bonus question only has bogus answers.

(The boogie man's main function is to get you. The boogie woman's main function is to dance all night long in her dancing shoes.)

:clap: :cool: