@PfhorrestWhat if the barber is a woman? A prerequisite for the paradox is that the barber must have a beard; only then does the paradox enter the picture. no man, no beard and no beard, no paradox.

Yes, your comment is an equivocation, though an innocent one. :smile: — JerseyFlight

Equivocation? How so? Was God, despite how things turned out between him and Adam and Eve, not pleased with his creation? Again, I could be mistaken about this but don't inventors draw a great deal of satisfaction from their inventions?

No, instead, the mere existence of computers is used to belittle the human mind — JerseyFlight

I maybe completely off the mark on this one but I get the distinct feeling that parents love it when their kids are smart and simply go bonkers when they're smarter.

Drugs — Pfhorrest

I suppose you're right but from the little experience I've had not all drugs come in the form of pills, syrups, injectables, inhalants. You know what I mean, right?

I'm OK working with however you choose to define your terms - but you gotta pick a usage/definition and stick to it. When you use the word objects? Are you including thoughts & photons in your usage/definition? — EricH

Yes. What's wrong with that?

Using people to get to this far off better place, which may never actually be anyways, is not moral. Yet not procreating a new person does harm to no one. So this would not be a viable alternative, if you indeed didn't want to do things like use people or not cause unnecessary harm (for whatever reasons, even if it comes from the best of intentions). — schopenhauer1

I'm tired of repeating myself so I won't. While there's the expression, "preaching to the choir", that suggests I do the opposite and argue with you, there's also the phrase, "a leopard can't change its spots". So, I'd like to take this opportunity to bow out of this discussion, not because I didn't benefit from it but because I have nothing more to offer you. Thanks and good luck.

Sorry fir the snide thumbs up. I think you're great, Fool. — Aleph Numbers

No problem.

You say that abiding by the consensus of the majority is fallacious and then claim that something is true because a rule that proposes something is objective because more people report it to be true is true. :up: I didn't claim that the moral view is objective, but rather that it provides an objective standard by which to measure any human's behavior. — Aleph Numbers

I agree and the probabilistic model for moral objectivity you propose is true to the way all matters of objectivity are handled in other areas - the more people reporting an observation, the greater the odds of it being true. :up:

Hi,

I've always been interested in 'certainty' and our existence.

Now, if we can't be certain about anything, even our own existence, then how does probability help support that we exist?

Surely I am as likely to exist as I am not to exist?

If we cannot prove certainty, how does probability come into play? How am I more likely to exist than not? — Tom343

I was tempted to say that deductive logic ensures certainty for it's a truth-preserving system in the sense that if we inject a set of true propositions, the premises, into it, it'll always spit out a proposition that has to be true, the conclusion. However the next thought I had was the Munchhausen Trilemma which basically states that we only have three choices when arguing a position: 1) Infinite regress of arguments each argument aimed at proving a proposition in another argument or 2) Circularity, the premises proving the conclusion and the conclusion proving the premises or 3) Assume a proposition is true without proof. None of the three choices are acceptable if we really want to ensure quality in our arguments and yet we must choose one of them.

You should check out Descartes' cogito ergo sum. It's the only argument I know of that's sound and the Munchhausen Trilemma problem doesn't undermine it because thinking is something that's immediately and directly knowable. The very act of looking for proof that we're thinking is proof that we're thinking.

I've struggled with the idea of morality being subjective for quite some time now; I really want some things to be objectively moral - or to at least avoid cultural relativism. I think a good start for moral axioms is to recognize what most people most of the time would consider moral or immoral behavior (I've heard something like this before but I can't remember who said it). This avoids many of the pitfalls of cultural relativism because the "most people most of the time" bit transcends many, if not most cultural barriers. For instance, premeditated killing is condemned in the majority of cultures. One could expand the group of those that believe that one should not engage in premeditated killing to include people in every culture that have this belief and make it the numerator in a ratio. if one then makes the denominator the total number of people in humanity, given the ratio is greater than 0.5, relative to humanity, murder is wrong. Thus, cultural relativism is avoided. Is there a flaw in my thinking? The same thing would apply for determining whether or not something is immoral: the ratio would have to be less than 0.5. — Aleph Numbers

Isn't this the fallacy of appeal to the majority? That more people have a certain belief doesn't make that belief true. There was a time when almost everyone believed the earth was flat. We now know the earth isn't flat.

That said, the very notions of subjectivity and objectivity seem tied to your approach to morality, a probabilistic approach. Although, to me, there's something deeply flawed in how probability is used in making the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity I will simply regurgitate the official position which is that the probability that something is objective increases with the number of people reporting that something. This view fits perfectly with your probabilistic model of objective morality in that if the ratio of number of people believing a certain moral claim as true to the total number of people is greater than 0.5 then this moral claim is objective. :chin:

there isn't an attribute that each and every object in the universe possesses. — TheMadFool

Perhaps I'm totally misunderstanding what you're saying, but given your definition of object don't all objects posses the physical attribute of having rest mass (among other properties) — EricH

Thoughts don't have mass. Radio waves don't have mass. Photons don't have mass.

I mean an idea not yet expressed in words, or to try and be more precise, the germ of an idea in that part of our mental world that lays beyond the language sphere. — Olivier5

Oh! Fantastic!

How about we work backward with your conception of intuition. It doesn't matter that we, when we intuit something, can't express it in words. What matters is that unless an intuition is expressed in words at some point, invariably later, it can't be distinguished from confusion. The only evidence for an intuition is our ability to find the words to construct a decent proposition for it after the fact.

Do you agree with “forcing people into painful and deadly situations is wrong”? — Zn0n

Yes, I agree but that doesn't yet make me an antinatalist because to agree here doesn't necessarily mean we immediately recommend nonexistence as the solution. There are other ways to go about dealing with this issue. We could work toward making the world a better place, a place where pain needn't be a part of our lives at all.

You are constantly referring to how “happiness” has to be taken into account.
Being deprived of “happiness” is suffering, as you certainly wouldn’t want a life without any “happiness”, so the experience of “happiness” is the release of the suffering of the painful craving of happiness. — Zn0n

Can you provide a complete, accurate, description of our world without including happiness? No, right? For antinatlists to make their case they have to demonstrate, prove, that every waking moment of our existence is a living hell. That, as of yet, isn't the case. Sorry.

Why do you think it were a good idea, to create and multiply the problem of craving happiness, especially if the absence of creating the problem solves it as perfectly as it could possibly be solved? — Zn0n

You're not factoring in the dynamic nature of the world - things change, we will, and in this potential for change there's the possibility, no matter how small, that the future won't be simply a perpetuation of the dismal conditions, antinatalists are so eager to point out, that characterize our past and future.

Also, what of the nature of pain I took a lot of effort explaining to you? I'll reiterate it below for your consideration:

Antinatalist: There is suffering in existence. Ergo, the antinatlist says, we shouldn't exist.

Me: We don't want to suffer because we don't want not to exist. So, to say that we shouldn't exist doesn't make sense for the reason that suffering implies that we don't want not to exist. Antinatalism is a contradiction: We don't want not to exist (that's the reason we suffer). We shouldn't exist

Not really. Mathematics are also a language. The feeling is the same to me — Olivier5

Before we proceed any further, what exactly do you mean by intuition?

To apply this line of thinking:
Brutal group-rape is bad but serves a function, namely the release of the urge to brutally rape of the multiple rapists. (Also there is only one victim.) So brutal-group-rape is now a good thing. — Zn0n

You're making a mistake here. The pleasure of raping is not the same as the pain of being raped. You should be, like a good antinatalist, focusing on the suffering of the rape victim, no? The suffering experienced by the victim being raped is good because it informs the victim that something horrible is happening. Without this suffering, n one would know if they're being raped, no? Is this the preferable situation, to not know you're being raped?

I refer you now to the argument I made previously about what the function of pain/suffering is. The more fallacious than twisted, but both, logic of antinatalists would have us all be raped because being raped is painful. We suffer in life ergo, we should all prefer not to live proclaims antinatalists but they fail to see that we suffer precisely because we don't want not to exist. By the same token then antinatalists should be moving mountains to ensure that everyone gets raped.

An antinatalist on life:

We suffer in existence. Ergo, we shouldn't want to exist.

BUT...we suffer in existence precisely because we don't want to not exist. Suffering is unequivocal proof that we don't want to not exist. That means the antinatalist argument is a contradiction viz. We don't want to not exist (that's why we suffer). Ergo, we should not exist.. Said differently, we should do exactly that which we don't want to do This last statement is important for what follows.

By the same logic,

We suffer in being raped. Ergo, the antinatalist should say, we should all get raped. After all, we should do exactly that which we don't want to do

But this gut-feeling also happens in mathematics. Once a math teacher asked me: ‘Okay so you can derive expression A from expression B and vice versa, mechanically combining the symbols, but do you understand intuitively that they both mean the same thing? — Olivier5

This is another example of the Wittgensteinian problem we're discussing. The gut-feeling in math is different from the gut-feeling you get when you hear/read the word "good". The former, if I'm correct, is just a matter of speed processing information but the latter, I think, involves using words based on OR type definitions or some other less rigorous process.

I'm not talking of definitions proper, but of something much more basic: the intuitive meaning of the word.

There is a common meaning at the core of "good", which everyone gets intuitively. That's how we usually manage to understand the new usages of a word, by going back to its core meaning and trying to figure the connection with new usage.

The important (and obvious) point to remember is that usage is linked to meaning but is NOT meaning. If words had no meaning, nobody would use them....

Symbolic languages are used to convey information through symbols. If those symbols convey no information, why are you talking? — Olivier5

I meant to offer a possible mechanism why you're under the impression that good is an intuition. The gut-feeling you get when someone uses the word "good" - the "intuiton" you speak of - dovetails nicely into OR type definitions. OR type definitions, because of their flexibility, permit intuitive (read lack of rigor) understanding of concepts.

"Dividing by zero" is a major error in mathematics. You are trying to color my statement that comes down to empty void doesn't crave "happiness" (the release of suffering) as such an error, while you are the one actually doing it — Zn0n

I acknowledged the existence of suffering in the world and also that, comparatively speaking, it's greater in severity than any happiness that can possibly experienced by any one of us. Please keep this in mind as it'll become important later on.

The best argument antinatalists have to offer is one that proceeds from the statement that suffering is far in excess of happiness and I've admitted that this is a fact.

At this point let's put suffering under the microscope. It's, all said and done, the cornerstone of the statement that there's more suffering than happiness in the world, the key premise in the best antinatalist argument.

Suffering comes in two varieties, physical pain and mental anguish (depression). Physical pain, as all antinatalists will agree, is an unavoidable part of living but why stop the inquiry into pain there? It's a convenient spot to close the investigation, convenient for antinatalists that is. I insist that we reopen this case and make further inquiries into suffering, physcial and mental.

First question to ask is this: What is the function of pain, what purpose does it serve?

Physiologists will be more than willing to inform antinatalists that pain is an unpleasant sensation which serves the purpose of letting a person know that the body has been injured and requires attention to prevent it snowballing out of control and leading to death. Also note how we we reflexively pull away when we touch something hot. The principle at work here is prevention is better than cure and a stitch in time saves nine. The bottom line is that our physical pain sensory apparatus is an alarm system that's designed to alert us to minor and major injuries that might lead to catastrophic failure (death) if not attended to.

Mental anguish too has the same function - it raises the alarm when there's a threat of, or actual, harm to our mental well-being with the specter of death looming ominously over the one who is so suffering.

All in all, suffering, whether physical pain or mental anguish, are simply warnings of impending death and that's exactly the reason why it's unpleasant and people avoid it.

If a person were a king then, suffering is a messenger who brings bad tidings, news of a coming disaster, death. The purpose of the messenger's bad news (suffering) is to provide an opportunity for the monarch to put in place measures to avoid the disaster, death. For the ruler to then decide to let the disaster, death, happen (antinatalism) because the messenger conveyed bad news (suffering) is to miss the point of the bad-news-delivering messenger's purpose (as a warning mechanism) entirely. Oddly, it reminds me of Jesus - the savior who was branded a rabble-rousing heretic by Jews and their overlords, the Romans.

:ok:

the only avoidance of all kinds of sufferings is not to be forced to exist — Zn0n

Don't forget happiness in your equation unless you want to end up dividing by zero, mathematically speaking.

The post was to present a scenario where one wouldn't wake up from sleep again but still avoid suffering, even though you claimed nobody would do that — Zn0n

Whatever scenario an antinatalist will invent, it always boils down to life is suffering and so, you know what. Old wine in a new bottle, mate.

Sorry, I couldn't read through your post in entirety but I'll offer you one argument that should settle the issue once and for all. I don't deny that there's suffering in life but, you also can't deny that there's happiness in life too. Now, you'll have to bring up the matter of asymmetry - specifically Benatar's asymmetry - suffering exceeds happiness and so, antinatalism is the way to go. At this point, we need to understand what suffering is, essentially its purpose. Notice that all forms of suffering are like canaries in coal mines - they serve to warn us of impending...wait for it...death. Cut your finger and it hurts; the cut is like an alarm going off warning of the possibility of infection, followed by septicemia, followed by...wait for it...death. The same logic applies to mental anguish - it's again an alarm set off by,...wait for it...impending death but this time in the psychological domain. In short suffering, whether physical or mental, are all unpleasant because they presage...wait for it...death. Antinatalists have misunderstood the meaning of pain - it's a harbinger of death and that's why we find it unpleasant and that's why to recommend nonexistence because of pain is like recommending weight gain (death) to a person who avoids high calorie diets (pain) because it makes him fat (death).

Yet when people say things like: ‘that’s no good’, we know what they mean, by and large. A certain threshold of efficacy hasn’t been met. When they say: ‘the best is the enemy of the good’, you and I know that they mean something that connects to notions of ‘good enough’, of ‘optimum’, to the idea that ‘good’ is relative to a project, an intention that one can fail to achieve by trying too hard.

Rest assured that the concept of ‘good’ has an intuitive meaning, and that it’s by and large the same for everyone aware of the concept. — Olivier5

It appears that definitions can be of two types:

1. AND definitions. An example of this type of definition is mammals. I'm going to rely on my rudimentary knowledge of biology to define a mammal as a living organism that has fur AND gives birth to live young AND provides milk to its offspring. In AND definitions, all the essential features listed in the definiens must be present in a living organism to qualify as a mammal. A cat has all the listed features of a mammal, so does a dog and therefore both are mammals.

2. OR definitions. An example of this type of definition is good. Good is when you give to charity OR believe in equal opportunity for all OR value other people's property OR value the lives of other people, etc. In OR definitions, its' not necessary that all features listed in the definiens be present. A person may give to charity but think that giving people equal opportunity is nonsense but this person still deserves to be called good. Another person may value people's lives and outright reject committing murder but still steal and this person too is good, so and so forth.

Technically, AND definitions are the type that matters in logic and so, in philosophy too. With AND definitions there's no Wittgensteinian problem of the family resemblance kind. A thing, if it is to be referred with a given word, must possess all features as listed in the definiens and that's that. An essence will always exist in AND definitions.

OR definitions are problematic in logic and philosophy because they cause the Wittgensteinian problem. Since it's not mandatory that all features listed in the definiens be present in things referred to with words that have OR definitions, it becomes possible that no feature common to all these things exists in these objects.

The definition of good is an OR definition.

Could you clarify how you are using the word object here.

E.g., Are you referring to physical objects - chairs, planets? Are you going more granular down to atoms, electrons, sub-atomic particles? Photons? etc. — EricH

Yes, I'm referring to objects at the human scale - things we can, well, bump into.

Interesting that you should bring up atoms but at that scale too there's no single unifying attribute. In my humble opinion, if there's a word that has as its extension all that the universe contains, it's the word "thing". Everything is a thing. Try to define "thing" and all you get is a sentence that says a "thing" is anything that can possess an attribute and we're back to square one for the reason that all attributes come in pairs of opposites.

wtf? — JerseyFlight

Like a dog — Josef K

Plato says that philosophy is a preparation for death — bccampello

There's something odd about Plato's, and it seems even Socrates', idea that philosophy is some kind of preparatory process for death. Well, for sure it's true that the philosophical quest for truth must involve knowledge of death for death is part of our reality. However, Plato and Socrates taking great pains to emphasize the preeminent position of death in, in Socratic terms, living and living well is suggestive - either these two Greek dudes were no different from any other person dead or living and were in fear of death or, most intriguingly, they were onto something in that they understood the true nature of death. Who knows, right?

Let's suppose, given their stature, given their almost god-like wisdom, that Plato and Socrates had, in fact, grasped the true nature of death and realized that life is simply a prep school you attend for morte. This interpretation leads to only one conclusion - how we live life plays a big role when we meet our end. We're preparing for death, remember?

Some might think that life, doing philosophy, viewed in this Platonic-Socratic, death-oriented, fashion has something to do with a concern for one's legacy - the sum total of our actions outlive us in terms of consequences. No one would want to leave a trail of destruction in their wake and death takes away all opportunities to make amends.

Others might believe Plato and Socrates uttered those words from a perspective that includes the possibility of an after-life, our actions in life determining the quality of our after-life.

Still others might come to the conclusion that Plato and Socrates meant that death is the biggest unsolved mystery of all time and that philosophy's task is to prepare for it like job candidates prepare for an interview - be ready with the right answers and, most importantly, the right questions, practice the correct frame of mind if this matters at all, etc. All so that we're not caught with our pants down when we join the club of the dear departed.

The only other possibility I can think of has to do with the first "sentence" of this post: "there's something odd about...is some kind of preparatory process for death". Let's shift our attention to criminals to make this point clear. The worst criminals of all, murderers, mass-murderers, even rapists on occasion, are given the death sentence i.e. death is a punishment and those who commit heinous crimes are thought to deserve capital punishment. That means, since we're all going to die one day, we're all, well, no better, in a penal sense, than the last mass-murderer executed for his/her crimes against humanity. In this case, living life doing philosophy is just one heck of a long shrift.

So even if your literally impossible claim were actually correct, it’s still completely irrelevant, because craving an impossible paradise is suffering in itself – and that befalls only the living, not empty void obviously. — Zn0n

Your words ring true, my friend, but only in the past and the present. I'd like to ask you why utopia - the secular version of paradise - is impossible? Is there an inconsistency lurking in the shadows that must, as of necessity, exist in every thought, idea, concept humans are capable of?

induction — Zn0n

I can add little to what the experts have already said about the matter of induction, it's problem is a well known embarrassment to science.

And why do you think you have the right to throw others in suffering because you believe in something that allegedly will happen at some point.
How many victims is throwing down the meat-grinder to achieve something that is a) impossible and b) completely unnecessary justified? Is that number bigger than 0 for you? If so why? — Zn0n

Nobody is in control here. You speak as if there's someone who's behind all of this, someone who dispatches souls into the world to, among other things, suffer in unimaginable ways. The universe, for better or worse, like it or not, seems completely autonomous. That being the case, we need to come to terms with the fact that the knight in shining armor will not come. Godot will not arrive. We need to fix our own problems and I won't deny, in fact I can't deny, that suffering is, well, a big, big issue. However, suffering is just one side of the story, right? Could I, for example, travel to another universe and, by way of describing our universe to the denizens of this new universe only mention our suffering? Would I have given them an accurate picture of our universe?

So if someone were at the end of their life, and had to choose between 1) getting their foot cut off and dying and 2) sleeping during this time instead and then dying, people wouldn't want to avoid the suffering, even if they don't wake up from it? — Zn0n

First thing to be clear about is that people don't want to, everyone, without exception, loathes, suffering. A certainty there's no point arguing about. The OP wants to make a case for antinatalism on the basis of how people prefer to sleep rather than be awak engaging in dull and boring activities. and the parallel being drawn is crystal clear - sleep is nonexistence and being awake is existence. If one prefers to sleep then, this argument concludes, one must prefer death.

So far so good.

The scenario you describe puts us in the position of having to make a choice: Either have your foot cut off and meet your end OR sleep and meet your maker. I presume what you really want to offer as choices are: be awake and suffer OR sleep and don't suffer. It's quite obvious that the latter is a preferable alternative but, the catch is, for that choice to be always the best, to be awake must always involve suffering, not just suffering but intolerable suffering.

Is this an accurate description of reality?

Is our every waking moment a living hell? This may not be clear to you or maybe it is, who knows? I think it'll become clearer if I copycat your technique by offering you choices of my own and mind you, there's nothing unrealistic about them.

Here are my choices: 1)awake and having the time of your life OR 2) asleep and dead to the world? My scenario, if it does anything, should blow the lid of clear off the antinatalist agenda. The choices available to us aren't limited to live and suffer or die and not. Antinatalists forget that we can live and be happy and if this wasn't true in the past and even if it isn't true in the present, the future is unpredictable - tables may turn, unexpected things may happen.

Well as far as I'm aware there are countless sucessful suicides every few seconds. — Zn0n

You're correct of course and I won't, can't, deny this truth but don't forget how many don't take their own lives.

I’m not confused - this is where we disagree. Don’t get me wrong - I do agree that any supposedly moral system should aim to be axiomatic, eternally viable and perfectly complete. But I disagree that morality refers to a pre-existing body of ‘knowledge’ waiting to be discovered. Rather, it’s an inter-subjective value system we are in the process of constructing and refining from our collective human experience of the unfolding universe. Over the centuries and millennia it has been re-defined by changes, big and small, results of new understanding, etc - and if it were truly ‘objective’ then it wouldn’t necessarily exist. Because any system of relating to the world objectively would not advocate exclusion, isolation or ignorance on the grounds of value. — Possibility

If what you say is true then, as I said, morality is, well, man-made in the sense it's just one of those systems of rules we build to make living easier. By that logic slavery or murder or rape aren't actually immoral - they're just agreed upon to fall in the category of bad deeds. Yet, moral systems, all of them, use a happiness/suffering paradigm, and we know for certain slavery, murder, and rape, all, induce suffering in the victims and their loved ones. In other words, morality is objective to the extent it's based on a hedonistic metric and being so must count as a discovered item.

I'm going to provide an unorthodox argument for the case of never being born being optimal — schopenhauer1

Would you rather be sleeping?" argument (WYRBS for short) — schopenhauer1

I don't think your WYRBS argument works for the simple reason that sleep is known to be a temporary state of unconsciousness. People prefer to sleep rather than doing something dull and boring only because they know they'll get up from it.

The correct formulation of an antinatalist question is: Would You Rather be Dead? I don't think there'll be many takers to this generous offer.

Stuff has to get done. You have to do it or externalities will get you. Survival. You feel an itch, you feel cold, you feel bored, you feel dirty, you feel you need an extra item you are missing. Comfort. You are lonely, your mind needs something active. You need to be more "mindful", you need to exercise, you need to go on a vacation, you need to, you need to, you need to. Entertainment. It isn't going away.

I call of this "dealing with". Many people unthinkingly resent much of this but can't make the connection to being born itself. It's just too global. They have been enculturated to think just right near their noses. Hard-nosed realists, pragmatists, etc. But the problem is global. It is getting people to see that it is the problem with life itself. It is existential, not situational. Not circumstantial. It's whack-a-mole. You think you fix the problem, but it is unceasing. It is part of the structure. AND now add all the contingent suffering I mentioned. — schopenhauer1

I don't think it's as bad or impossible-to-deal-with as you make it out to be. For you to be correct suffering, that which we don't like, even hate, should be a necessary aspect of life.

Is suffering really an unavoidable fact of life? In the past and in the present, certainly "yes". This within the context of present realities like the design of our bodies and the nature of our minds. The future needn't be the way things were and the way things are though. You, and others who think like you, are missing a crucial element of reality viz. the future.

To drive the point home imagine the situation is reversed from the way it is now - there was/is no suffering and the world was/is paradisaical. What, in your opinion, is the right way to deal with this? Should we say to ourselves that our past has been wonderful, so is our present, and therefore there's no reason to worry about the future - nothing's going to change, happiness is guaranteed - and then assume a complacent, self-satisfied attitude? Or is it advisable to develop a plan for the future to ensure that paradise remains a paradise?

Clearly, if you think we should do the latter - plan to keep paradise a happy place - then you recognize the importance of the future, specifically the fact that it's possible for the situation to be completely reversed. In this realization is the key that unlocks a refutation of antinatalism. Antinatalists are assuming, erroneously, the future will be no different from the present or the past. The Problem Of Induction

Yes, meta-ethics is where I’m headed, but I would argue that human experience is the foundation of morality - that it’s constructed as part of our conceptual systems, from a vague interoception of affect. All Adam and Eve could discern was a negative feeling, where there wasn’t one before. You’re assuming that ‘moral knowledge’ was out there to be ‘revealed/discovered’, but my view is that it’s a condition of our inter-subjective relation to the world, to be hypothesised, tested, refined and corrected over time - a work in progress as we speak. — Possibility

I think you're confusing learning morality with knowledge of morality- the difference between the two being that the former is dynamic - morphs over time - and that the latter is static - unalterable. The learning process is characterized by changes, big and small, results of new understanding and this appears to us as if we're building a moral edifice from scratch, so much so that it might even seem that we're inventing morality as we go along. This isn't true.

First understand that morality, if it has a rationale, should resemble an axiomatic system with a few basic postulates that underpin a body of do's and don't's of a moral nature. Morality sits there, complete and whole, in, what some might even say, the Platonic world of forms, perfect in every way, waiting to be discovered.

Were this not true, morality would be a subjective affair - people would invent rules and issue injunctions of any kind, their whims and fancies ruling the roost. This is clearly not how people view morality - they see it as consisting of truths based on some rational foundation i.e. people think of morality as objective.

It’s not so much the point of no return, but the point beyond which our efforts to understand appear to threaten our own relative [moral] position. — Possibility

Kindly explain.

It demands effort and attention, yes - but it needn’t be something to avoid. Do you see science giving up on understanding black holes? There is a path to be negotiated between fascination and fear, between increasing awareness, connection and collaboration and seeking refuge in exclusion, isolation or ignorance. I’m not suggesting we do away with clothing, that we march straight into the coal mine alone - only that we stop denying our own vulnerability by sacrificing canaries... — Possibility

But the canary is there precisely because we recognize our vulnerability.

Plotinus says that the One is "beyond all attributes". Therefore, it contains something that is seen as an attribute and is the attribute. Quoting Plotinus: "We ought not even to say that he will see, but he will be that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the two are one." What attribute is this, that can be seer and seen, is beyond our contemporary metaphysical knowledge - if by chance, the One exists -. — Gus Lamarch

Plotinus, if you're reporting his views accurately and I'm sure you are, seems to be attempting to describe something beyond the reach of ordinary language. To be fair it must be pointed out that we're all familiar with ineffables with, that have, "attributes" - emotions. Emotions are felt and have distinct qualities to them which may be construed to be their attributes but a quick glance of the dictionary reveals that these distinct qualities ("attributes") don't figure in their definitions at all - that lexicographers are beating around the bush in their attempts to define emotions is patently clear. Could it be then that Plotinus' One has more to do with our emotional, limbic system rather than our rational, prefrontal cortex? All this reminds me of qualia and its significance to consciousness.

Another thing is the universe taken as a whole exhibits an odd behavior when we look at its attributes. Remember that it contains everything there is and if so, attribute-wise, it's a certain color and also not that color, it's in a certain physical state and also not in that state, etc. which should immediately make you think of yin-yang. Every attribute that the universe can be thought to possess, the universe also possesses the exact opposite attribute. These pairs of opposite attributes cancel each other out to the point that no attribute that can be ascribed to the universe remains and, drumroll please ( :joke: ) , we end up with a universe that is, as Plotinus said, "beyond all attributes".

Further, Wittgenstein's language game theory seems germane to Plotinus' One. Imagine I'm looking for an attribute that unifies all objects in the universe. I choose the attribute solid and then I begin to run the thread of solidness through objects in the universe - car, stone, bone, etc. - but the moment I encounter a liquid or a gas, I'd have to stop and choose another attribute but the same thing will happen with this attribute too. To make the long story short, there isn't an attribute that each and every object in the universe possesses. Any attempt to define the universe in terms of attributes is doomed to fail ergo, the One, the universe, is "beyond all attributes".

It must contain something, however, in the act of trying to abstract this "something beyond all attributes" we - according to Plotinus - have already introduced defects, simply because we are in and with existence. — Gus Lamarch

Read above.

And nothing wrong with that! The trick is to keep in mind what one is doing. Good sense can come from gazing at the ineffable; Kant showed that. The Greeks showed that. Even the Egyptians to some degree showed that. It seems that all sensible peoples arrive at that. The problem with most - all? - western religions is that they take the first and every spur line in to the dead-ends of the supernatural and ultimately the absurd and the ridiculous - and that's a shame because it need not be that way, and should not be that way — tim wood

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I'm not following that TMF, what do you mean by none?

Early Christian thinkers such as Plotinus proclaimed that God is infinite, and that they were primarily concerned to demonstrate that he is not limited in any way.

in our quest for ultimate answers it is hard not to be drawn in one way or another to the infinite. Whether it's an infinite tower of turtles , and infinity of parallel worlds, an infinite set of mathematical propositions, or an infinite creator, physical existence surely cannot be rooted in anything finite. Otherwise how do things-in-themselves exist? — 3017amen

My remarks pertain to one specific idea, the so-called One of Plotinus. The absence of any attribute is the very definition of nothing. The One is, if it is, as claimed, devoid of any and all attributes, identical in that sense to nothing. If Plotinus has a something else on his mind when he provides this description of the One, he needs to show how the One isn't nothing.

The problem in the pursuit of the ineffable is that eventually one has to say, "I don't know." (If he could know, then it wouldn't be ineffable!) The wise man at this point - if not earlier - here turns out to attend his fields. weed his garden, keep his roof in good repair. The fool loudly proclaims, "Because I don't know, therefore I know!." And usually insists on telling us, and often expects to be paid for his "wisdom." — tim wood

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On a serious note, I've always been drawn to the ineffable. I'm one of those people who enjoy looking up at the night sky filled with twinkling stars, green forests shrouded in mist, the sandy landscape of deserts, the ebb and flow of the tides on the shores, and so on. These experiences, in a manner of speaking, get my juices flowing. I feel the same emotions when I'm face to face with the ineffable although I must confess most occasions that involved someone trying to, as someone once put it, eff the ineffable have, on the whole, been instances of beating around the bush - what else can be done? Nonetheless, sometimes, and such times are rare, I find myself catching fleeting, nebulose glimpses of what I suppose are inexpressibles, ineffables. Quite possibly this has more to do with the merits of beating around the bush than anything substantive about so-called ineffables.

:up: :ok: Thanks.

I thought the absolute one represented infinity? — 3017amen

Infinity has an attribute - boundlessness. Plotinus' One has none.

What puzzles me is that if the One possesses no attributes at all, what is it then? After all, a basic requirement for comprehension is attributes of some kind, right? Plotinus' One is verging on Zero (nothingness), the only thing keeping us from thinking that is Plotinus' insistence that the One is. All said and done, Plotinus' concept of the One is self-contradictory - it has no attributes at all, that's nothing, and yet it's talked about as if it's something.

Reminds me of Taoism - the Tao that can be named is not the Tao.

Sorry to hound you like this but I desperately need someone to give me a well thought out response to what I believe raises an important issue regarding the three attitudes toward reality viz. 1) Pessimist, 2) Optimist, and 3) Realist.

You really hit the bulls eye when you brought up entropy and the mediocrity principle - they makes pessimism the most reasonable attitude to adopt to life. It's as if to be realist one has to be a pessimist. I also give a thumbs-up to your idea of constant courage and existential defiance in the face of such mediocre odds we have.

One thing though. There's the small matter of, well, the devil. Not that I believe in him but as the archetypical anarchist, el diablo wishes, hopes, for chaos to prevail i.e. maximum entropy figures at the top of the devil's wishlist. I daresay there are quite a number of people with diabolical inclinations out there who would like nothing better than to see our most elaborate plans fail pathetically. The devil, such people, form a category of their own, a category that desires higher entropic states and as odd as it sounds, to them success is failure.

Doesn't this mean that the devil and those who wish chaos in the world are favored by chance? After all, entropy is always going to be on their side and since increased entropy is what the devil and such folks desire, they have much to look forward to. Mathematically, the probability of disappointment for the devil and anarchists is going to be so negligible that they might as well engage in celebratory revelry 24/7. In other words, the devil and people whom I've labeled anarchists are fully justified to be optimists.

However, there seems to be a sense in which this is wrong. Optimism and pessimism aren't attitudes per se, attitudes that can be picked up or thrown away simply on the basis of what one thinks of as desirable or not. Au contraire, optimism is the belief that things in general will tend toward the good and pessimism, being the opposite, is the belief that outcomes, on balance, will usually be bad. Good and bad are ideas that are fixed and unalterable - no change in attitude is ever going to affect their meaning in ways that good could be bad and vice versa. In other words, optimism and pessimism are about the fixed, non-negotiable, nature of the outcomes themselves, specifically whether they're good or bad and I use "good" and "bad" in a moral sense, inclusive of all subsequent meanings associated with the good and the bad.

In summary, yes, the devil and his anarchist band of followers will find it nigh impossible to remember a day when they were disappointed but the "positive" attitude of always having their expectations pan out that develops out of this track record isn't optimism.

What say you?

I reject "optimism". Courage is my preferred adaptive conduct (rehearsed-reinforced daily via sisyphusian reflective, cognitive, ethical & existential acts of defiance). Epicurus-Epictetus, Spinoza, Zapffe-Camus, Albert Murray et al are some (varied) exemplars. — 180 Proof

:up: I feel like I committed a fallacy when I said I could become an optimist by not caring what happens.

Can you spot it?

Are optimism and pessimism subjective enough to allow that much freedom? Can I switch from one to the other merely by changing my preferences?

If you haven't already, read Tears and Saints by E.M. Cioran. — 180 Proof

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