Because this won’t work for almost all of our uses of “objective”. It’s objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to describe this statement as a “bias shared among a normative community” -- of scientists, presumably? What would motivate us to call this a bias?

What we want in moral realism, then, is a sense of “objective” that at least resembles what we find in science – or daily life, for that matter. And those who deny moral facts are indeed saying that the best we can do is “biases more or less shared.” But I don’t think that’s a reasonable synonym for “objective.”
— J

Quite right and well said! :up: — Leontiskos

i agree that a moral realism should resemble the sense of “objective” we find in science. But neither realism nor objectivity are monolithic terms. Physicist Karen Barad belongs to the community of new materialists who consider themselves realists and naturalists (Philosopher of science writer Joseph Rouse adheres to her ‘agential realism’). Her account draws strongly from Bohr, but is more more radically interactive. Normativity is not foundational in this view, but a function of ‘how matter comes to matter’ within the different ways that interactions are configured, both between human beings and within material aspects of the world as a whole.

In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. Phenomena—the smallest material units (relational “atoms”)—come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity. “Matter” does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects; rather, “matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization.On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.”

“In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through specific intra-actions. Phenomena are real material beings. What is made manifest through technoscientific practices is an expression of the objective existence of particular material phenomena. This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices. But unlike in traditional conceptions of realism, ‘‘objectivity’’ is not preexistence (in the ontological sense) or the preexistent made manifest to the cognitive mind (in the epistemological sense). Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings….” ( Meeting the Universe Halfway)

I’m sure the above language is gobbledygook to you, but I think you should at least try and acquaint yourself with these ideas before you come to conclusions about what can or cannot be considered realism or objectivity.

Because this won’t work for almost all of our uses of “objective”. It’s objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to describe this statement as a “bias shared among a normative community” -- of scientists, presumably? What would motivate us to call this a bias? — J

Have you ever read Thomas Kuhn or Joseph Rouse?
Rouse is a philosopher of science who carries forward Kuhn’s insights:

“Realism is the view that science aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.”

By contrast, a postmodern view of science rejects “the dualism of scheme and content, or context and content, altogether. There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.

Getting back to what Joshs was saying about objectivity being intersubjective, hypothesize there being a reality which affects all coexistent psyches equally - this in principle at least - this irrespective of species of life or of the life addressed being earthbound. This I would term objective physical reality — javra

Could we say that the reality which comes into play in an intersubjective community is the reality of each participant’s interaction with the world and with each other? Parsing this reality more closely, each person interacts with phenomenona that give themselves to the person in terms of flowingly changing perspectives, which change in specific ways when that person moves with respect to that phenomena. The person over time constructs the idea of a spatial object which persists identically in time as itself, with fixed properties and attributes that endure over time, even though the person never actually sees such self-identicality in the changing phenomenon. The notion of a real spatial object , then, is an abstraction that turns what is only self-similar into the self-same for the purpose of convenience. This is the origin of the notion of the spatial object. The subjectively constituted object becomes the empirically scientific, objectively real spatial object when we compare our own idealization of the flowingly changing phenomena we call a spatial object with the idealizations that others form of it from their own vantage. The resulting abstraction, born out of intersubjective consensus then becomes the empirically real object, the identical one affecting all of us equally ( even though the phenomena we constitute into what we call the object is never given identically to all of us, nor to any one of us).

How do we find out that we are mislead? By other empirical observations. You have to trust some observations to conclude that you've been led astray in the first place.

↪Ciceronianus
Right, we could adopt the pragmatist view, which is that we can accept positions based on the benefit they grant to us. In this way, beliefs don't have to be justified by their truth status, but rather by the benefits that accrue from holding them. Hume didn't have access to this line of reasoning though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say that pragmatism isnt about turning our attention away from whether actual events validate our predictions, in order to satisfy subjective needs. On the contrary, pragmatism recognizes that the actual events which validate or invalidate our predictions are themselves the products of our value-oriented social and material practices. Thus we are continually having to pragmatically recalibrate our criteria of truth and falsity.

somehow, the term "objective" has morphed from being the opposite of "subjective," into meaning "in itself," "noumenal," or "true." But "objective" just means "the view with biases removed." It makes no sense to talk about objectivity in a context where subjectivity is impossible or irrelevant. An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why not say that ‘objective’ is the view with biases more or less shared among a normative community? That the shared moral objectivity with the group represents a bias is expressed by the terms it uses to refer to ‘out’ groups, alien communities that don’t share their norms.

I do think it would be a mistake to make no distinction between the retinotopic map of an object our consciousness accesses and the physicals object its self in the world. I would argue that science demands it by virtue of how it says visual perception works — Joshs

Evan Thompson deals with this issue in depth in his book ‘Mind in Life’. I believe the correspondence you are referring to above between a retinotopic map and perceived objects is what he calls ‘analytical isomorphism’,

“ the problematic assumption that the content of imageiy experience corresponds to the format of the under-lying representation. This type of assumption has been called analytical isomorphism (Pessoa, Thompson, and Noe 1998; Thompson, Noe, and Pessoa 1999). Analytical isomorphism is the idea that successful explanation requires there be an isomorphism (one-to-one correspondence) between the phenomenal content of subjective experience and the structure or format of the underlying neural representations. This idea involves conflating properties of what is represented (representational contents) with properties of the representings (representational vehicles).

I do think it would be a mistake to make no distinction between the retinotopic map of an object our consciousness accesses and the physicals object its self in the world. I would argue that science demands it by virtue of how it says visual perception works — Restitutor

Not all science of perception makes this assumption.
Francisco Varela contrasts the old representational realist model of perception with the enactivist approach, in which perceiving is not representing a pre-given world but guided action:

“According to the enactive approach, however,
the point of departure for understanding perception is the study of how the perceiver guides his actions in local situations. Since these local situations
constantly change as a result of the perceiver’s activity, the reference point for understanding perception is no longer a pre-given, perceiver-independent world,
but rather the sensorimotor structure of the cognitive agent, the way in which the nervous system links sensory and motor surfaces. It is this structure – the
manner in which the perceiver is embodied – and not some pre-given world, that determines how the perceiver can act and be modulated by environmental events. Thus
the overall concern of an enactive approach to perception is not to determine how some perceiver-independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather, to determine
the common principles or lawful linkages between sensory and motor systems that explain how action can be perceptually guided in a perceiver-dependent world.
In the enactive approach reality is not a given: it is perceiver­ dependent, not because the perceiver “constructs” it as he or she pleases, but because what counts as a relevant world is inseparable from the structure of the perceiver.”

As you might guess, I have some sympathy for this point of view. I think it's similar to the view that we're participants in the rest of the world and thereby part of the real and our lives are our interaction with it. — Ciceronianus

That’s an approach to the real I can get onboard with.
I would just add to that that the real is what is constantly changing with respect to itself.

Getting back to Hershel and the think in its self. I would suggest there is an ineffable world which exists and is sometimes called fundamental reality, sometimes called the quantum foam. As the word ineffable suggests we do not have direct access to this world. All we and other organisms can do is represent this world using different models of varying complexity. Humans have several very complex conjoined representative models which together make up a very large portion of what we call consciousness. This is epitomized the fact that we have a retinotopic map of objects in the world in our brains. — Restitutor

An important difference between Husserl’s phenomenological approach ( which strongly influenced enactivist 4EA theories) and the videos you link to is that Husserl doesn’t presume an ineffable world beyond our experience of it. There is no veil between the world and our experience of it. We are always in direct context with the world via some mode of givenness ( recollection, perception, etc). There is no original territory our constructions model or map.

Dan Zahavi connects the above thinking with a neo-Kantian metaphysics.

As Frith puts it, “My Perception Is Not of the World, But of My Brain's Model of the World" (2007: 132). Whatever we see, hear, touch, smell, etc. is all contained
in the brain, but projected outwards and externalized, such that we in normal life fail to recognize it as a
construct and mistake it for reality itself (Metzinger 2009: 6-7).

Given that we never have direct contact with external states of affairs – after all, the latter remains hidden behind the representational veil – we should reject all claims concerning the existence of a seamless tight coupling between mind and world. Hohwy speaks of the strict and absolute division between inner and outer and of the “evidentiary boundary” that secludes and separates the brain from everything beyond its boundary (Hohwy 2016)

For Husserl, the world that can appear to us – be it in perception, in our daily concerns or in our scientific analyses – is the only real world. To claim that there in addition to this world exists a world-behind-the-scene, which transcends every appearance, and every experiential and theoretical evidence, and to identify this world with true reality is, for Husserl, an empty and countersensical proposition…

For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition. Husserl embraces a this-worldly conception of objectivity and reality and thereby dismisses the kind of skepticism that would argue that the way the world appears to us is compatible with the world really being completely different.

Most also believe in a dualism between neutral physical stuff and subjective valuation.
— Joshs

What are you thinking of here — Tom Storm

The hard problem of subjective consciousness

Descartes isn't called the "Father of Modern Philosophy" for nothing. Descartes had, and in some respects still has, his followers. It seems to me that Kant, with his things-in-themselves, and any of those who accept dualism, the view that there is an external world, apart from us, the mind-body distinction; those that believe we can't be directly aware of the world, all participate in what seems to me to be an affectation. — Ciceronianus

Guilt by association is no argument. You don’t believe there’s an external world apart from us? Isn’t that the common sense view? If you don’t believe that the mind is divine and the body material, what about the distinction between emotion and rationality? Most still adhere to that kind of dualism. Most also believe in a dualism between neutral physical stuff and subjective valuation. This is the basis of the hard problem. Then there is the belief that the objectively real is to be determined by correctly representing what is out there by internally generated models. Are these views that most share not affectations?

If we "have to" there's something about it, or us, which requires or provides for its use. How/why is it appropriate to insist it's use must be justified if that's the case? What induces someone to claim that what we have to do by virtue of the fact we live is unwarranted? — Ciceronianus

So who is this mysterious ‘someone’? Specific examples from the last 200 years please. Perhaps a nice quote or two to buttress your argument.

According to Wallace Stevens, "Imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to the real." I think the same goes for philosophy — Ciceronianus

I wonder what ‘adhering to the real’ could possibly mean? Perhaps to the ever changing definitions of the real that have made their way into use over the past few millennia? I say we should all adhere to the mugwump, since that is about as clarifying.

:100:

Ask yourself when you last acted as if there were no other people, no things, no animals, i.e. nothing other than yourself. When did you last refrain from eating because you doubted the existence of food? When did you last believe, and treat, people you see across the street from you as if they were only, e.g., 6 inches tall because that's how they appeared to be when you saw them, and thought that they became 6 feet tall when they crossed the street to speak to you — Ciceronianus

I recognize shades of your critique of Descartes’ radical doubt here. Apart from your disagreement with Descartes, how pervasive a problem do you see this kind of thinking as being within the contemporary philosophical community as a whole , or the history of philosophy? It’s fine and dandy for all of us here to agree how silly and pointless it would be to reason in the manner you depicted above, especially given you made no effort to justify it or widen the context of its use. But without reference to concrete examples in philosophy ( preferably from someone other than Descartes), the O.P. seems to be tilting at windmills.

I make use a lot of information as noted in a more recent post which i regard as being what our minds are made up from. The part i would disagree with the last sentence. Scientists do represent biology mechanistically, this is what our understanding of biology is based on. I agree don't describe psychological phenomena mechanistically but i would suggest that this is for two reasons 1) Describing psychologically important concepts mechanistically is something most people find psychologically distressing 2) a failure of imagination regarding how to explain psychological phenomena mechanistically. The "different descriptive vocabulary", is in my opinion somewhat disingenuous people are just talking about there psychology's using different descriptive vocabulary, they are sometimes implicitly but mostly explicitly making ontological claims about the nature of the psychological phenomena. These ontological claims go the the core of how we think about and justify our beliefs about psychological phenomena so they are in no was incidental to the discussion. I am interested in how we should change the ontologies of psychological phenomena to make them consistent with a mechanistic universe and what the effects of doing this would be — Restitutor

I want to go in the opposite direction from you. Rather than accepting a handed down model of mechanism from the physical sciences and trying to force our understanding of human or animal behavior into it, we need to recognize that physics, which was the queen of the sciences a few centuries ago, is behind the curve right now. The concepts of causality and information you are borrowing from the physical sciences, which work so elegantly in constructing machine technologies, are disastrous when we try to apply them to so many aspects of human behavior, such as psychopathology and mood disorders, the nature of language and empathy, models of perception, emotion and intentionality. To translate my argument into more concrete terms, I am an advocate of 4EA models in the cognitive sciences, and of enactivism and autopoietic self-organizing systems approaches. I applaud the way that representatives of these approaches critique authors such as Metzinger and Dennett for their reductionism.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think it’s perfectly fine to strive to reduce higher mental processes to elementary ones, but I don’t think today’s physics is up to the job. It eventually will be though. Until then, it’s important to keep the conceptual vocabulary dealing with the most compact aspects of biological and psychological phenomena separate from that of physical mechanism.

Moral thinking differs, but there are commonalities rooted in emotions. And we do indeed attach morality to the fact that we have emotions. We do not say it is immoral to kill because there aren't any situations in which killing is considered a good action, we do it primarily from a primal limbic system response to the fact that being killed is an extremely negative action done onto us. It has a lot of pain attached to it and the denial of someone's existence requires a damn good argument for the continued existence of the killer for justifying that killing. — Christoffer

Can you envision a moral system build entirely of non-emotional values? If we were to turn everyone into Mr Spock, would we still have the same variety of moral stances we now see in human culture? If our moral
systems would be different, how would they change?

If values are distinct from -- not identical to -- desire then it would still be possible to articulate a relationship between desire and at least injustice under the presumption that injustice is the way we talk about competing values within our partisan bubble. So for example if desire is a lack, and injustice is an articulation of competing values, then I think I'd say that the two are distinct such that a relationship could be articulated since at least the articulation of competing values is not obviously desire-as-lack.

But if desire just is the basis of competing values then the question of desire would "settle" the question of justice, which is as I understand the Epicurean account to be committed to. — Moliere

I’ll go with the latter since I follow Nietzsche and Deleuze in not formulating desire as lack but as the power of affecting and being affected.

The fact that quantum physics appears to undemine the concept of objectivity
— Wayfarer
And how does it "appear to undermine" "objectivity"? With objective findings. Your argument(?), sir, is as self-refuting as a 'positivist' argument — 180 Proof

I would say that rather than undermining objectivity, approaches within science studies and physics( Rouse, Fine, Harraway, Barad) re-situate the basis of objectivity within intersubjectivity. Not just human intersubjectivity but the intra-agential relations within non-human nature.

Classical epistemological and ontological assumptions, such as the ones found to underlie Newtonian physics, include the existence of individual objects with determinate properties that are independent of our experimen­tal investigations of them. This accounts for the fact that the process of measurement is transparent and external to the discourse of Newtonian science. It is assumed that objects and observers occupy physically and conceptually separable positions. Objects are assumed to possess individu­ally determinate attributes, and it is the job of the scientist to cleverly discern these inherent characteristics by obtaining the values of the corresponding observation-independent variables through some benignly invasive mea­surement procedure. The reproducibility of measured values under the methodology of controlled experimentation is used to support the objectivist claim that what has been obtained is a representation of intrinsic properties that characterize the objects of an observation-independent reality. The transparency of the measurement process in Newtonian physics is a root cause of its value to, and prestige within, the Enlightenment culture of objectivism.

Bohr called into question two fundamental assumptions that support the notion of measurement transparency in Newtonian physics: (1) that the world is composed of individual objects with individually determinate boundaries and properties whose well-defined values can be represented by abstract universal concepts that have determinate meanings independent of the specifics of the experimental practice; and (2) that measurements involve continuous determinable interactions such that the values of the properties obtained can be properly assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects as separate from the agencies of observation. In other words, the assumptions entail a belief in representationalism (the independently deter­minate existence of words and things), the metaphysics of individualism (that the world is composed of individual entities with individually determi­nate boundaries and properties), and the intrinsic separability of knower and known (that measurements reveal the preexisting values of the proper­ties of independently existing objects as separate from the measuring agen­cies).
( Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway)

I always thought that injustice was just the way we talk about competing values from within our own partisan bubble.
— Joshs

If so -- does this way of talking reduce to desire, or are the competing values from within our partisan bubble distinct from desire? — Moliere

You mean desire in the sense of what our values lead us to desire?

The question is, when others fall short of our expectations of them in this way, is the failure in their intent or in our failure to separate their perspective from our own norms?
— Joshs

Allowing for another's perspective (and first of all, learning what it actually is), surely feels like lack of confidence on one's own part (for many people, at least). — baker

I would think the opposite is the case. The more confident one is in the usefulness and flexibility of one’s approach to understanding others, the less one is threatened by strange, alien values and perspectives. Thus, the confident person, instead of frantically erecting barriers around their viewpoint reifying it as the correct position, can boldly experiment and tinker with their outlook to make it even more flexible, expansive and inclusive.

Assessment of harmoniousness can also be described in terms of validation. We construct a template for predicting events, then when this events happen, they either validate our template by being inferentially ( which isn’t the same thing as logically) compatible with our expectations, or invalidate it by surprising us, appearing chaotic and random. This validating process is simultaneously affective and intellectual. What ever profoundly violates our expectations is signaled by anxiety, threat, anger and other negative emotions.
— Joshs

This quote has no substance or useful significance imo. — universeness

I think I understand now why you’re so concerned about lack of communication in the world.

It seems to me like plenty in physics, the life sciences, and complexity sciences are willing to take a broader view… It's all well and good to show that the dominant paradigm is shot through with error, but what do you teach if there is no one solid replacement? That's where it seems we are at. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree that the various domains of the sciences are willing to take a broader view, but my own bias is that the willingness is not equal across domains . Physics needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into ways of thinking about such things as temporality that are already familiar ground for many biologists and social scientists.

Can you say some more about what you have in mind regarding the anticipation of the other's moves being of benefit - perhaps an example? — Tom Storm

I asked universeness what are examples of persons holding viewpoints deemed to be irrational. He replied:

“How about such as:
I am/should be the King of the world.
God legislates and I/we as its prophet(s)/representative(s) dictate. Comply or be damned for eternity.
I/we are superior to all else.
All humans are equal but some humans are more equal than others.
I/we are prettier, richer, have a better skin colour, taller, faster, stronger, more intelligent, come from better people, follow the only 'true' religion and have better tech than you, so you deserve to be fully dominated by me/us.”

I’m sure you can see how each of these pronouncements could reflect a perspective rationally arrived at, and yet strongly at odds with own’s own beliefs.

Effecting some harmonious changes in the small part of the universe I interact with is a reasonable description of one person's goals. Do you have thoughts on how we assess whether a change is harmonious (apart from the obvious lack of visible conflict)? — Tom Storm

Assessment of harmoniousness can also be described in terms of validation. We construct a template for predicting events, then when this events happen, they either validate our template by being inferentially ( which isn’t the same thing as logically) compatible with our expectations, or invalidate it by surprising us, appearing chaotic and random. This validating process is simultaneously affective and intellectual. What ever profoundly violates our expectations is signaled by anxiety, threat, anger and other negative emotions.

What if someone is able to learn, calculative, intelligent, wilful, determined, of sound mind and they still do not learn and grow? Still don't try to excise their errors and expand their strengths across many domains they are in fact able to?

That looks like stupidity to me. A pervasive refusal to try to learn — fdrake

I agree. Stupidity is typically a blameful judgement of moral culpability we level against others (or ourselves) which supposes bad intent. Related terms of blame include laziness, stubbornness, self-indulgence, negligence, thoughtlessness, selfishness, inconsiderateness, greed. The question is, when others fall short of our expectations of them in this way, is the failure in their intent or in our failure to separate their perspective from our own norms?

There are more interesting ways of defining stupidity that take into account the irrationality grounding rationality. Deleuze, for instance, defines stupidity in terms of what produces the paradoxical gap between perspectives, both between and within persons.

I personally don't like most conceptions of libertarian free will I have come across. If our decisions aren't "determined by" the way we are, and the way the world is, then it seems like they are arbitrary, random, and thus not free. Plato and Hegel seem to have the best popular definition of freedom I am aware of: freedom as (relative) self-determination. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In his essay, The Question of Technology, Heidegger distinguishes between two modes of revealing: the related Greek notions of techne and poesis vs instrumentality, which is common to mathematical physics and technology. The form of revealing of poesis is bringing-forth, which, unlike instrumentality, explicitly sees itself as making use of all four causes:

For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and mat- ter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.

It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossomn into bloom, in itself (en heautõi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the bursting open blonging to bringing- forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or artist.

By contrast, mathematical physics and technology reveal by taking into account only one of the four causes:

“What is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong? A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But not only that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality… For a long time we have been accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. In this connection, to bring about means to obtain results, effects. The causa efficiens, but one among the four causes, sets the standard for all causality.

This does not however change my point regarding playing games and living real life or respecting the difference between talking about life in Gaza right now, simulating it to educate others or actually living through it. So Derrida and Wittgenstein may have had important messages they wanted to get across to others, and I respect that, but so do most of us. It's finding the common ground between the majority of us that I think the OP in this thread was suggesting overall, should remain our common goal. — universeness

A notable current in thinking about the origins and nature of justice and friendship draws from research on animal play For instance , Shaun Gallagher links justice with play. In his latest book, Action and Interaction, Gallagher(2020) writes

“… if Bekoff and Peirce are right that a sense of justice “seems to be an innate and universal tendency in humans” , and continuous with certain tendencies in some non-human animals, a more basic sense than the sense of fairness may be at stake—a sense, perhaps, of just being able to respond, or being able to join in the back-and-forth arrangement of responses.”

Gallagher distinguishes play from games:

I think that play (or what we might call free play) should be distinguished from games, where rules are pre-determined or already instituted. In free play there may be implicit taboos, but they do not emerge or get defined as rules until something goes wrong; and this gets signaled by pausing the play, or stopping it full stop, or transitioning into something that is no longer play. Play involves action and interaction and the ability or possibility of the participants to continue in play. It's defined by a set of interactive affordances. When one animal starts to dominate in playful interaction, closing off the other's affordance space (or eliminating the autonomy of the other), the interaction and the play stops. Self-handicapping (e.g., not biting as hard as the dog can) is a response to the other's vulnerability as the action develops, based on an immediate sense of, or an attunement to what would or would not cause pain rather than on a rule. Role-reversal (where the dominant animal makes itself more vulnerable) creates an immediate affordance for the continuance of play. If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution. Robert Solomon captures this idea at the right scale:

“Justice presumes a personal concern for others. It is first of all a sense, not a rational or social construction, and I want to argue that this sense is, in an important sense, natural.”

Science says humans are mechanisms and what we think and feel are products of that mechanism, most people do not believe this and vocabulary isn't the problem. I don't think the rest of what you said answered the question i posed.
— Restitutor

I think your question relies on confused assumptions.
Your split between ‘ineffable’ subjectivity and physical
mechanism harks back to older traditions in philosophy. There are newer ways of thinking about the relation between physical science and subjectivity which don’t get caught in this dualist trap of assuming subjectivity is something added onto or apart from the physical.

Evan Thompson writes:

We can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental).

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity of the human life-world.”

It seems to me that the deeper idea here is not that ethical homogeneity produces harmony, but rather that injustice is a consequence of unhappiness, and that if people were happy then the problem of injustice would solve itself. — Leontiskos

I always thought that injustice was just the way we talk about competing values from within our own partisan bubble.

Physic is mechanistic to the point we can shoot rockets across the solar system and know with extreme accuracy where they will end up. Even clockwork isn't' so precise. — Restitutor

Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it. We could have chosen a different way of modeling it , but so far this way is quite useful for us. It may not always be so. Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary.

What is the implication of this for the idea that computers are just too mechanical to be, conscious, to love, to generate or understand meaning, to have a self or to have free will? How would changing notions of consciousness, meaning, morality, free will and self to make them fit with bodies as mechanical as any robot change these psychologically important notions? — Restitutor

In order to create our mechanistic framework for modeling physics or building machines, we have to pretend as though subjectivity does not play a part in how our machines work or our descriptions the physical world. In other words, our computers are already interactions between human subjects and what we create, so the workings of computers reflect this subjective aspect within themselves even when we call them purely mechanical.

We have to find better ways to communicate with each other and find where we have majority common cause. We all need food, water, shelter, medical support, education, security, and purpose, for example, and these are far far more important and common to all of us, compared to personal beliefs, race, nationality, gender, age, colour, where you were born or who your parents are — universeness

What prevents us from finding common cause is assuming that rationality means finding a correct standard around which to base that communication rather respecting differing value and ethical systems and attempting to negotiate common cause based on that respect.

Sounds like you are shopping, entertaining or playing games, instead of talking about communicating with real people. — universeness

Playing games is the way a number of prominent philosophers describe the art of social communication (Derrida’s play, Wittgenstein’s language games).

The universe demonsrates no independent intent. — universeness

Every aspect of the non-living world expresses agency and intent in the sense that all events that take place among material entities occur within changing configurations of relations that define what these events, and entities are. Entities in the world don’t pre-exist these configurations. Rather, contingently changing configurations condition the nature of materiality just as configurations of ideas condition and define how we interpret the world.

. Any affect we have as a species, on anything, is currently very local indeed, and hardly goes beyond this tiny pale blue dot. Imo, this thread tries to focus thoughts, on the premise that we can improve the human experience, if we perhaps focus a little more on such as:

We have so many insights about human nature but yet we keep on using concepts that give us a completely unrealistic view of humans, and cause Weltschmerz whenever we try to learn more.
— universeness

You’re missing the point. The aim of knowledge is not to take an accurate picture of the universe (and the minds of other people) but to effect more and more harmonious changes within whatever small part of it we are interested in interacting with. Knowledge isnt about passively representing what things are in themselves, but about what we are trying to do with things in a pragmatic sense. The richer and more complex our uses of our surroundings, the more we come to know what our world is ‘in itself’. Since other human beings are the aspect of our surroundings we care the most about, it is this aspect of that world that we focus most of our energies on. Improving our understanding of others isnt about becoming more realistic, more rational, as if earlier ways of understanding each other were less real or weren’t already useful. It’s about trying on for size more and more open-ended and flexible ways of interacting with each other, aiming for a ‘dance’ in which each of us can optimally anticipate the others’ moves.

↪Joshs
I will join you on any rational road, numbered or otherwise. But let's stay within the universe/cosmos as there is no evidence of an 'outside' of the universe/cosmos. — universeness

We dont need any other cosmos, given that this one is constantly changing with respect to itself, and the questions we pose to it in the form of our scientific hypotheses, as well as our technologies, participate in and accelerate the pace of the changes in the universe. Our rationality is not a function of mirroring a static cosmos, but of anticipating the effects of the changes we make in the world. The universe is always reinventing itself, with our help, so the task of rationality is to steer it and ourselves into patterns that are more and more harmoniously anticipatable. Most forms of rationality believe it is only our accounts of the universe which are incomplete, but the world itself is also incomplete , and this includes the nature of its laws and forms.

↪Skalidris
A good thread with many good contributions imo. For me, the fact that discussions such as this one are alive and kicking and are developing and spreading, and are rational and based on the premise that we can do better, is the 'fresher air,' I think is so welcome. I am sooooooo sick of nihilists, pessimists and doomsters, when they offer almost nothing else. — universeness

.
Perhaps there is a third road that can be taken, one which is neither mired in pessimism, nihilism and doomsaying, nor tied to a notion of the ‘rational’ that grounds itself in the conformity of our representations to the furniture of the universe.
I’m a strong believer in both scientific and moral progress, but I don’t think that this should be understood as a rational progress if rationality is defined in the way that it most often is. This leads less to progress than to conformity to ready-made presuppositions. The evidence for this can be found by asking what constitutes the opposite of the rational. What are examples of persons holding viewpoints deemed to be irrational? Inevitably the answer leads us to nonconformists, not those failing to think ‘rationally’.

What I mean is that what we currently know, in more scientific fields, not personal opinions or cultural believes, is in contradiction with a lot of intuitive everyday concepts. I just don't understand why no one fixes it. — Skalidris

They do fix it, and then they have to unfix it. This is because a scientific theory is a sophisticated form of cultural belief. There is no binding consensus among the various social sciences and branches of psychology on any issue important to human flourishing. Science does not just contradict intuitive everyday concepts, it also
contradicts itself.

Thanks very much! :up:
Oh wait… you mean that quote was already dumbed down? :sweat: — 0 thru 9

Believe it or not.

Why don’t people change their expectations instead of being mad about human nature? Why isn’t there a discipline that aims to build concepts that are closer to reality? — Skalidris

Now there’s a depressing thought.

Ahh! I see. Excellent, thanks. :up:
By the way, where (what book) was that Derrida quote from? — 0 thru 9

It was from ‘Positions’, where Derrida responds to interviewers’ questions, the easiest way to read him.

Thanks for your reply. :smile:
I think I understand most of Derrida’s quote, and see a relationship to my quote.

But if you could expand on that a little (dumb it down a shade? :blush: ), it might sink into my mind even better. — 0 thru 9

So Derrida is saying that binary oppositions (male/female, white/black, hetero/homosexual) inevitably privilege one term over the other. Deconstruction overturns the hierarchy but doesn’t stop there. It then shows how each term of the binary depends on and overlaps with the other, so that they no longer can be said to simply oppose each other but to belong to each other.

Husserl and I share an ancestral connection: Karl Weierstrass. Husserl was temporally close the great mathematician, while I am one of about 35,000 descendants. Husserl may have been at a point in mathematics with little to no precedents while triggering the ideas of manifolds and categories in math. — jgill

Husserl’s early belief that the concept of cardinal number forms the foundation of general arithmetic was strongly influenced by Weieratrass. In a note from Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl wrote:

Weierstrass usually opened his epoch-making lectures on the theory of analytical functions with the sentences: "Pure arithmetic (or pure analysis) is a science based solely and only upon the concept of number [Zahl]. It requires no other presupposition whatsoever, no postulates or premises."