Terrapin Station

The problem with this is what determines "what it makes sense to say" about x? That can't be limited to the way that x normally behaves. If we're sayi...

Non-reductionists are supposed to be saying that things are more than the stuff, relations and processes that are the "parts." That somehow there's so...

Sure. I'm not defending either side. It's more than seeing words "race" and "gender," but it's not much different than that. In any event, there's som...

"is possible" is important there, though, because it's not possible per what?

But that has nothing to do with what I was saying. I was talking about what the people using the phrase "identity politics" are probably referring to....

It doesn't exclude the interconnections between the parts if it includes relations and processes. And it doesn't reduce anything more than it can be r...

What happened to the "squeaky wheels who focus on things like race and gender essentially as a means of " part of the sentence?

Reductionists can say that relations and processes are parts that have to be accounted for.

What folks are probably referring to with "identity politics" are the squeaky wheels who focus on things like race and gender essentially as a means o...

??? That's some research you did. Postmodernism arose long before the late 1970s/early 1980s.

I'm not talking about universal versus particular. I'm talking about not being able to get on a bandstand and play "Giant Steps" when one doesn't even...

How does that follow in your view?

I'm talking about what morality is ontologically. Where it occurs, what it's a property of, etc. "All moral issues are about . . . " isn't focused on ...

By all accounts I'm a reductive physicalist. I call it phenomena.

Right, but just say that, then. "There is no mind a la ridiculous, confused notions such as it being nonphysical. There is mind, but it's physical, ju...

I don't. What I kept pointing out was that they're not identical, so we can't conflate the two. That was the whole point. If we're going to talk about...

If I say that I'm surprised that you're not bothering to try to explain it better, and that I'm surprised that you not bothering would come with an "a...

I don't think that's really what you want to ask me, because "interact cooperatively" is irrelevant to whether we're talking about hardware alone. I'l...

You aren't able to correctly/adequately identify moral stances, moral judgments, etc. if you're placing them outside of minds.

And thoughts and illusions, etc. So how does it make sense to say those processes don't exist?

Then you're hopelessly muddled regarding what the heck you're even talking about. You're not talking about concepts per se, you're not talking about i...

You're not going to ignore that other stuff if you're explaining them, sure, but we shouldn't move on to explaining them if we can't even identify wha...

No, I disagree because the processes aren't optional. You do need to worry about including everything. Philosophy doesn't work well half-assed. We nee...

Brains aren't dead, static things. They undergo processes. The processes that amount to moral judgments/preferences occur in brains, and only in brain...

But you said "There's no such thing as mind." There is if we're saying there are thoughts, awareness and illusions. Those are mental phenomena.

Thinking, awareness and illusions are mental phenomena.

Holy moly

I'm considering paying you if you'll post about another topic for awhile.

What in the world? You've got thinking, self-awareness and illusions but no mind?

"in a debate on whether capitalism or Marxism better leads to happiness." --seriously, that's what they were debating? How stupid.

This. It doesn't imply anything about significance.

If part of the phenomena we're looking at is emotional, then we shouldn't dispense with the emotional aspects, or we're not really doing science at al...

I would call that something we could imagine, rather than a concept. I reserve "concepts" for type/universal abstractions. In any event, so what we're...

What's true is that the author wrote the character to have that property.

Wait, we're supposed to be talking about "concepts turning into other concepts"?

in Well, you have to say what B is identical to (if we don't say what B is identical to then we're not actually referring to B, but something differen...

It has to be if we're trying to say that since A causes or is a cause of B, then A is the source of B. "The source of" is another way of saying "Where...

Then the analogy would simply be arbitrary. Yes. Anything moral is going to be. Saying that "x is moral," either as a judgment (contra immoral, for ex...

Then the analogy invoked makes no sense, because the idiom in question is only coherent due to a scientific reason that we can easily explain.

So what's your scientific explanation of why moral stances are a phenomenon that can't occur in brains?

You're not claiming that people's lives do not have a mental component, presumably. So how is this evidence of moral significance being extramental?

If it's extramentally morally significant, what's the evidence of that?

Behavior isn't just brain activity (it does require it, and brain activity is a part of it, but not the whole story). Whether any behavior is moral or...

I'd prefer that it would be, sure. "Shoulds" are our preferences with respect to how things could be contra alternatives.

I'm giving my opinion, based on my preferences.

Aren't there a number of people participating in threads here?

This is true, but there's no implication to it. It simply tells us a fact about what most people would say. How are you separating out the social aspe...

I'm not sure I understand this comment, but if we want to talk about something else, we should ask a more specific, precise question. Like maybe we wa...

But it's my whole point here. The source of morals is an ontological issue. Morals are only found in biology, because it's a phenomenon that doesn't o...

Morals have to be found in biology, because they can't occur elsewhere. To occur elsewhere, we'd need meaning, preferences, etc. to be able to occur e...