Where are the objective moral judgments in their view? — Bob Ross

I wouldn't speak for @unenlightened, as I believe they've been making the case well. :D But I'll share my thoughts.

Any sort of moral realism which depends upon our nature, similar to your:

I do commit myself to the principle that I ought to fixate upon what is of my nature I fixate upon the objective, implicit moral judgments—so I act, in every day-to-day life, like a moral realist. — Bob Ross

will have to reconcile with some apparent difficulties like the naturalistic fallacy or the fact/value distinction. In so doing I think the classic picture of moral realism / moral nihilism is blurred, as you note. In a way what's being questioned are these old distinctions about objective morals or subjective choices and so forth.

I think the way I'm reading @unenlightened is the actuality of human realitionships require moral commitments to be shared overall in order for said set of human relationships to not deteriorate. And by and large I think there's some truth to that. And it makes for an interesting case where we are sort of combining values and facts together at once -- from the existential perspective we can always choose against some rule or value, and there are some who are smarter than others and can exploit the rules, but in actuality people are generally wise to who they can trust. If trust fades then relationships die, and trust is very important when it comes to keeping people together -- the very stuff of morality.

But it's in this blurry space where the objective/subjective divide doesn't fit so nicely.

I'm more coming at this from the continental side, where language-soup-as-reality isn't too far off (but put differently -- a reduction might put it the difference is between putting intension or pragmatics first)

But the notion of language is wider than English. It's sense-making. Perceptions of the world without words is thought to be a part of our overall meaningful experience -- so meaning, Big-L Language, is still a part of our cognitive apparatus just by the fact that we're able to discriminate at all. There are, after all, parts of the world we had to develop instruments to be able to discriminate. And those instruments get folded into Big-L Language and sense-making.

At least, that's where I'm thinking from.

Even if they don't have words to describe the colours, they nonetheless see them, just as I can distinguish between a variety of different smells despite not having words for each individual kind of smell. — Michael

I'm not so sure. It's not the sort of thing we can check, right? What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to not have language while we imagine that scenario with language?

On what grounds can we possibly say that the dress must either be Blue/Black or White/Gold as an external data point. Why cannot it be both? What fact do we know about the data points of the external world which we can use to say with certainty that they cannot be two colours at once? — Isaac

Yup.

The dress is black, white, gold, and blue. And we don't know what perception is like without language, due to our indoctrination into a linguistic culture.

In the categories I posited earlier, we're just looking at different parts of the surface of reality. And reality ends up being surprising.


*****

I feel like I'm approaching, in my stumbling way, Derrida's criticism of Husserl, as far as I understand it. (there's always this strange interplay between continental-analytic that I see. One of the reasons I doubt it's anything more than a historical category)

Though I think I have to add -- and that relationship is not identity, to address @RussellA

Nope.

PerceiverRPercipient was my thought. A relationship holds between sets. So there's the set of perceivers and the set of percipients, and the relationship between them is no more than 1.

Of course one can talk about apples and light and rods and signals and nerves and thalamus' and occiptial cortexes -- I'm not sure about the "sense data" bit, I'm usually suspicious of that. Also I'd push against conscious visual experience -- experience is bound together with all the senses, all the cognitive machinery, and so forth. Our focus can change, but experience is much wider than an organ by necessity -- they aren't possible to separate for us because we aren't cameras.

We know about the world we inhabit because we are able to access it. Mostly I was attempting a formal definition to see if that made things click. But I can see it doesn't.

The chains come later and depend upon us being able to access reality to be able to say

we know that there is an apple, that the apple reflects light, that the light stimulates the rods and cones in our eyes, that the rods and cones in our eyes send electrical signals along the optic nerve to the thalamus, and that the thalamus sends electrical signals to the occipital cortex, generating a conscious visual experience. — Michael

Which means what? What does it mean for a perception to be "directly connected" to the real? — Michael

"directly connected" I'd say means there is no more than one relationship between a perceiver and a percipient. The relation itself may exist, in the sense that consciousness is sometimes considered real, but there are no more relationships between the perceiver and the percipient than one. A relationship exists, but it's not a chain of relationships. The chains come later, and depend upon us being able to access reality to be able to check them. Then, upon putting ourselves into the scientific engine, we pick it apart -- but we must retain a direct relationship to reality to be able to assert that our experiences are indirect.

Ahh I thought there was a connection there then. I'll think more on the question.

Which means what? What does it mean for a perception to be "directly connected" to the real? All experience, whether veridical or hallucinatory or illusory or imaginary is a causal consequence of some real thing. — Michael

Exactly! That's what it means!

It's a metaphysical assertion rather than an explanation for error.

Only that our perceptions tell us about the real. They are directly connected to the real, in some relation. Because they are directly connected to the real we can utilize them to come to understand the real better.

I want to float an idea -- What if both experiences of the dress are Directly real? The direct realist is willing to sacrifice the old pedagogical explanation of the law of non-contradiction "Nothing can be black and white all over". Here we have a reason to believe that the dress is black, blue, white, and gold.

I like the idea of punk sages. Not the front men or the bands, but say a Pythagorean Punk.

We can think of reason as a network of semantic norms which is used on itself. Philosophy rationally articulates in an accumulating way what it means to be rational. Neurath's boat. We take most of these norms (meanings of concepts, legitimacy of inferences) for granted as we argue for exceptions and extensions to those same norms. — plaque flag

That's interesting! I think I'd say boats -- as a metaphor for a tradition. Then there are boat builders of various kinds.

I much prefer the maritime metaphor for terra incognita.

Well I think that is good rhetorical tactics; rather than get into an argument that China might be a more peaceful, internationalist, and socially responsible society, just suggest learning from the enemy because they are certainly learning from you. — unenlightened

Fair point.

Which is pretty much straightforward Kant. Lies need to be justified, and the truth does not. — unenlightened

There's a tension in Kant that's related to this -- the tension between the absoluteness of one's maxim, and the allowance of exceptions as a further maxim. This is where it gets kind of funny. You can technically write a maxim as specific as you want and it will remain universalizable -- any rational being like myself with these abilities and those resources and those ends in this situation would act in accordance with this maxim... :D

The reason why it works as a reductio, though, is because of the tension between reason and passion in early modern philosophy, especially. Since passion can't be appealed to and any free agent can will a maxim and act in accordance with it out of respect for it (I certainly respect myself) there's not a clear cut way to rule out super specific maxims.

But the tension is that Kant was such an absolutist about lying, as indicated by his correction of a contemporary enthusiast of his system that it was OK to lie to the axe murderer, so the spirit of the philosopher's own interpretation of morality seems to indicate that we shouldn't be able to get away with that.

So it seems, if universal objective categorical imperatives are real, we shouldn't be able to make exceptions. I think that might be some of confusion between yourself and @Bob Ross? Maybe? I'm just making a guess in the dark.

But I want to hasten to add that any attempt to argue for moral realism that I've seen and thought was right basically questions the objective/subjective, or the naturalistic fallacy, or synthetic-analytic -- there's a conceptual change purposefully being made to try and make the case. (As it would have to be done -- since if you simply accept that there's a difference between truth and goodness then it's pretty hard to put them back together again)

I'd say it feels like we need Platonic forms, but I'm not sure why I feel that. It's definitely a thought I've held at one point, but have come to let go of it somehow.

In terms of having a conversation, though, I'd say you have to have some kind of standard -- be it a Form or no -- that isn't just "yeah I like that" to count as a conversation in aesthetics. Not that sharing what one likes is bad or anything. Just different from what it takes to talk aesthetics.

. . . According to the video China contained AI, and somehow they are bad guys in the presentation while attaining what the researchers want. Worth noting when they want to build international organizations.


You've done a wonderful job of defending moral realism, from my perspective -- for what that's worth. I think for me I'm just more interested in anti-realist ethics. I live in a nihilistic culture, so they seem relevant.

Something of an afterthought on classifying myself as an anti-realist Direct Realist is that it seems to follow pretty easily from a denial of Kant's system while acknowledging the worth of his arguments. It's the transcendental structure part that's doubted, the noumenal realm as anything more than a locution given it having no relation to theoretical knowledge. And then if you read Kant's ethics in an anti-realist direction, where the moral law and action is important precisely because the kingdom of ends won't exist unless people actually follow the moral law, you have a reason to doubt the noumenal has a reality from the perspective of practical reason too.

:up:

I'd say you're onto something deep!

The appeal to reason works because it is appealing. (or doesn't because it fails to meet the standards of reason -- it is unappealing by the standard of reason)

The trick with aesthetics is to get it off the ground you have to, in some sense, be talking about more than what you individually like. And that's similar to the appeal to reason -- it's just appealing to another sensibility or standard.

But words and sentences are something else. The fact that the same sentence can be expressed by multiple utterances (a text engraved in stone vs a professor's quotation,) show this. — frank

Bold of you to assume that they're the same sentence. ;)

Something I cannot decide, not even with an aesthetic guess, whether it is or is not mind-independent is individuation. It's a phenomena which is understandable within both language and perception: Names-predicates, in the first case, and object-foreground in the latter. And it's understandable as a real phenomena, similar to the way I was talking about causation earlier -- perhaps we trip across individuation because it's a real phenomena rather than because it's our way of dividing up the world. How could you possibly tell the difference?

Not sure exactly what you mean. In case it helps, for me the lifeworld has birds and blunders that we can talk about. Such articulated entities are just there for us. A (mistaken or less advisable) deworlding approach plucks all the leaves away to find the real artichoke. We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves. — plaque flag

Language-as-organ puts it in a similar category to eyes-as-organ -- both organs of perception which compose a body. So rather than semantics as something which is distinct from our perceptions it puts them together in a phrase.

Saying the whole is not knowable seems to imply that there is that which is unknowable. If there were that which is unknowable, would it follow that it is real, or would you say the word "real" here would be misapplied? — Janus

I agree with your deductions.

I think I'd have to remain agnostic there. I can't know if it's misapplied because it's not known. And I'm not sure how I get to that, now that I think on it -- I was clarifying and answering, not arguing.

I take it that when you you say "knowable" you mean 'discursively knowable' and then you go on to wonder if there could be another way to "settle it". Would settling it, for you, imply some kind of non-discursive knowing or just arriving at a feeling of its being settled? — Janus

In a way it would have to be a feeling that it's settled, but I'm not sure if that would be discursive or non-discursive. Gets back to the first question -- "the whole" is what I'm thinking, but I'm not sure how to get there since it wasn't in the categories posited so far.

Do you think what is real to us is the whole of what is real? — Janus

Put like that -- I believe it to be the case, but I do not know it to be the case. And I suspect the whole is not knowable, so knowledge cannot settle whether there is more to the real than what is real to us.

So what does? That's something I still ask and wonder about.

Invokes or evokes? I'm guessing you think counting life as a mystery, as opposed to merely thinking it absurd, opens the door to mysticism and/or religion, and for that reason you don't favour the framing? — Janus

Yes.

Though I want to highlight that it's very much a for me thing. For me, since philosophy is at least fairly personal, it's just what it looks like to me if asked. I'm definitely skeptical of mysticism and religion, but in a way that's not meant to posit myself as somehow above it. I couldn't make a distinction between invokes/evokes logically, though my word choice indicates what I feel.

So just to be clear you think that what appears real to us is (necessarily the whole of) what is real per se? — Janus

Hrm this is sounding similar to my discussion with @RussellA now...

I'm getting stuck on the parenthetical comment since you're wanting clarity -- can you put the question without parentheses?

Yes, the idea that life is absurd, at least as Camus framed it, is that it cannot answer the questions most important to us, and I think in that sense it follows that life is a mystery. — Janus

Sounds about right to me. "Mystery" invokes more than I like, so I like to say "absurd", but I admit functional equivalence.

Heh. That's not a thought I want to dissolve. I'm admitting it's the weak point in my thinking! :) -- it's something I see as a serious problem if I were to take my posited categories as the real. I'm making up another set of categories to offer to solve one set of problems, but admitting that these are provisional [EDIT:and] are for a particular line of thinking rather than universal.

Yea. I don't think they're the type of thing that can be held. — frank

Sounds good to me.

I think we've known this for millennia, wine, and all that. My only point was that those who are claiming that thoughts reduce to bodily activities that can be read by others is wrong. Thoughts and feelings are there even while there are no voluntary muscle movements. — frank

I actually was wondering so I'm glad to have clarified.

I'm not so sure -- but it'd be nitpicky and off the beaten path, since I've already pointed out that this is basically the weirdest part of what I've said. I'm not sure how direct perception of other minds works -- it's a bit odd. There are prima facie reasons to believe it, but it's definitely against usual way of thinking of things and a hard case.

I don't think a thought is like a blob that dwells somewhere. Thoughts come and go, like little moments of reflection. Parcels of awareness or recognition. I think this is the conventional view. — frank

Sounds about right to me. So no need for a mind at all to hold them, right?

Whatever they are, they exist even though the body of the thinker is paralyzed. We know this because we regularly give neuromuscular blockade drugs that stop everything except autonomic activities. If we don't also give sedatives to put the mind asleep, the patient will hear everything that's said, and worse, feel everything that might be happening, like surgery.

So the notion that thinking is something the body does is just wrong. — frank

I think that "giving sedatives" would count as the body still. It's a molecule, right? Not a mental-thing?

The blood moves, the oxygen burns, the sugar gets converted -- there's a body there with molecules. DIfferent drugs have incredibly different effects on the body. Is that any wonder that what we like to call the mind would respond to the molecules of the world? It's part of it after all.

Language is the organ of perception. — plaque flag

That's a great phrase which highlights why I didn't feel comfortable with the original distinction between Semantic/Phenomenological direct realism.

Yes. But that's part of my amusement / frustration. One inherits a methodical pretense of isolation behind a screen as the given. The self, its language, its logical norms...all of these are taken for granted. — plaque flag

:up:

But I started in no better a place, and I don't pretend to be able to become unthrown, so (for me) it's a matter of more thoroughly appropriating the hermeneutical situation, getting clear on what I'm projecting unwittingly, on what metaphors might be controlling me without me seeing them. — plaque flag

I think that's a worthy pursuit. One might even go so far as to say that it's in the vein of knowing yourself. :)

In general, it's a question of the contingent being mistaken for the necessary, like a painted wall we don't think to push against and check. — plaque flag

Spot on. It's easier to fool oneself into thinking something which is contingent is necessary than it should be!

As I see, the whole shebang about subtratums (the 'Real' beneath 'Appearance' and 'Mentality') is an awkward response to the fact that we be mistaken, say something about the world that we later withdraw. — plaque flag

I think that's partially true, but also there's the whole Cartesian history up to Russell's neutral monism -- looking for the substance of everything is a question that's part of the tradition so it's sort of a question that keeps coming around due to it being part of the traditional readings.

But you still have a body, yes? So no need for a mind to hold the thoughts?

In my scheme so far, thoughts could be entities within time with their own kind of causality. We know how thoughts work because our bodies have thoughts all the time, and we see the thoughts of others as well. They are expressed through language, frequently, but then the usual notions about animal-thoughts will have to be considered, and I very much doubt that all thoughts must be linguistic -- else Hegel's reference to picture-thinking wouldn't make sense (as well as the picture theory of meaning)

What if it's just the thoughts that exist, and the mind that gets made up?

The same question. If both pain and the colour red are tied to the world, how does the Direct Realist know that the object of one perception, eg pain, doesn't exist outside the mind, but the object of another perception, eg red, does exist outside the mind. — RussellA

Pain clearly indicates something about the world -- a small part of the entirity, but the small part that I happen to care about most. It's the "outside of" and "the mind" locutions I'm questioning. I'm not my mind. I don't even know if minds exist. But I am a body, at least, and that includes all the senses -- not just sight. It includes pain. I'm within a world, and sometimes the world causes pain.

According to Realism, there is a real world out there that exists independently of the mind's perception of it. According to Idealism, there isn't a real world out there that exists independently of the mind's perception of it. — RussellA

Is it the mind's perception? Or a bodies perception?

In a sense, we can only see the surface, we can only see the red post-box, We cannot directly see the substratum beneath the surface, the thing outside our mind, the other side of our senses, the thing that caused us to see a red post-box. — RussellA

Right! And the reason, so I'm suggesting, that we cannot see the substratum is that it doesn't exist at all.

But post boxes do.

Do you doubt that what appears real to us, what can appear real to us, is not (or at least not necessarily or not the whole of) what is real per se? — Janus

Yes!

Or, at least, this line of thinking is going in that direction.

I don't have it all worked out, of course. I don't have much problem with illusions or total hallucinations being direct perceptions -- they are very clearly direct perceptions, because the perceptive apparatus is perceiving within its bounds as a body within the world in both cases: Like the blind spot in the middle of our vision, just because I don't see the end of my nose doesn't mean I don't see the computer screen, and total hallucinations are almost always explicable, by total number of them, by dreams or drugs.

The really weird case is other minds: direct realism turns the problem of other minds from "How do we know other minds exist?" in the sense that we don't know to the sense that we do know, and that's a bit odd in comparison to our usual intuitions about other minds.

Obviously it takes time to get to know someone, but we do get to know people too.

Of course the latter is not something we could ever discover, but is just a logical distinction between what appears to us and what is independently of us. I'd say it is of importance, because it reminds us that life is, fundamentally, a mystery. So I don't count it as a "little story" but as a realization that is central to human life.

Well now you had to go add more to it than a distinction between Direct and Indirect Realism. ;) -- in the context of the thread it felt like a small story of no consequence.

I'm not sure I agree that life is fundamentally a mystery. . . . mostly I'd prefer to say "absurd", but that's pretty close in functional terms, too.

But I think I could render life as mysterious whether I were a direct realist or an indirect realist, hence why I thought it was a little story.

How does the Direct Realist explain, given that all their knowledge of the world external to their senses comes through their senses, how the perceiver knows that one perception is not direct, eg, pain, but another perception is direct, eg, the colour red ? — RussellA

That one's easy -- pain is tied to the world. :D

Predicates are distinct from properties. Predicates are linguistic whilst properties are extralinguistic. Predicates are tied to particular languages, in that schwarz is tied to German as black is tied to English, but the property black is tied to neither. There is a real world out there and the things in it have properties whether or not there are any languages or language-users.

To my understanding, there are two types of Direct Realism, Phenomenological Direct Realism (PDR) and Semantic Direct Realism (SDR). PDR is an direct perception and direct cognition of the object "tree" as it really is in a mind-independent world. SDR is an indirect perception but direct cognition of the object "tree" as it really is in a mind-independent world. As PDR is extralinguistic and SDR is linguistic, properties exist in PDR whilst predicates exist in SDR.

I can perceive that an apple has the property of greenness even if I don't know the name of that particular shade of green, but I need the predicates within language in order to say that "the apple is green". — RussellA

So far I've said there are events, relations, time, the surface, entities -- and certainly relied upon the existence of language to say it. Going for a kind of minimalism I try to limit the number of entities and kinds introduced, and this is already a healthy selection of possibles. "Properties" seems to emphasize the visuality of causation and reality, which is a reification and so worth diminishing.

So where you say: "There is a real world out there and the things in it have properties" I would say "There is a real world" -- "out there" in particular is troublesome. Out where? What are we inside of, if not the real world? The imaginary world?

But that is exactly what the Direct Realists is saying. The Direct Realist is saying that they directly know the apple, not just how the apple seems, even though there is a causal chain through time from the apple to our perception of the apple.

The Direct Realist holds a contradictory position. First, that they cannot see through causal chains backwards through time and second that they can directly see the prior cause of a perception. — RussellA

That's interesting.

What if what we directly perceive is not causal chains? It's not like all of reality is composed of causal chains. It's also composed of entities, right? And there are other sorts of relations which exist.

Let's call it "weak Direct Realism" -- for the weak direct realist as long as there is some kind of total world which we have direct access to then Direct Realism holds. Without committing to a particular kind of weak Direct Realism, but just as a for instance: If we directly perceive entities, but we do not directly perceive causal chains, then this is still a form of direct realism. So we might say, in the case of the apple, we have direct access to language, time, entities, and relations -- but not causal chains. We infer causal chains, and because causal chains are real several cultures have inferred causal chains as well -- but upon comparison of the concepts of causal chains we can see that they don't all mean the same thing. So we deny the notion that causal chains are necessary to thinking: rather, while our perception does not have direct access to causal chains, our knowledge does -- and that knowledge is a social product, thereby explaining the differences. (knowledge as being-able)

In the absence of a Direct Realist arguing their case, I would have thought that your representation is the opposite of what a Direct Realist believes, in that it is surely the case that the Direct Realist believes that "we see reality as it is, that the substrate is real and we directly perceive it". — RussellA

That's where I was going with my notion of the surface: so there is a case rather than the positions in abstract.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHuX4huT1sc&ab_channel=StonedMeadowOfDoom

The AI selected a new one for me today so I share.

:) Thanks. That's nice to hear.

The way I've been saying we know cause-and-effect is that we learn it from our culture. We know of black holes because they fit within a wide body of knowledge used by several people. Observation is important to science, but it's a social process which produces knowledge rather than a methodology. The methods get developed along with the knowledge, and vary depending upon what we're interested in.