Constructive feedback is welcome — Philo Sofer

I am sympathetic to your moral nihilism stance, but what would you think of a position that rejects a morality based on blame and culpability, but leaves intact a morality that aims at continuous development of insights into the perspectives of others unlike our selves? The o better explain. what I mean , your goal of peace of mind forces on emotions and feelings, but does t seem to connect those feelings to what is most responsible for the disruption of peace of mind; namely, our failure to relate to the behaviors of others. The sorts of day to day negative emotions that ruin peace of mind, such as anger and guilt, are bound up with our struggles to understand why others we care about let us down, violate our expectations or standards, or why we do the same to others. It seems to me, the , that the o my remains me way to achieve the kinds of emotions and feelings that promote peace of mind is via a stance of moral
nihilism with regard to blame and culpability, but a positive morality aimed at optimal perspective shifting.

n order to choose any goals or aims, one must be vital enough to choose. One must perform the basic actions entailed in survival; these are the minimum requirement — Vera Mont

You’re separating ‘raw’ vitality from the normative patterns of interaction that comprise what a living system actually does and is. I think this is an artificial separation , and makes living self-organization a secondary to a physicalistic notion of life.

That sounds to me like a hyperbolic description of a simple matter: be born, live, eat, eliminate, rest, want things, procreate (or not) die. There is no meaning to being what it is over time: it already is and has no choice about what it is — Vera Mont

It does have a choice every moment. That’s what it means to be a normative system with aims and purposes. The constraints and affordance of an environment for oganisms and psychological systems are defined in relation to the specifically directed patterns of their functioning. When a choice is made between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ option , it is not just the living system passively responding to what impinges on it from the world, or programmed into it, but the organism modifying its built niche according to aims which themselves are subtly refined in context of interaction with an outside. Conditioning is bi-directional, from world to living system and from living system to world.

The meaning of a living system isnt pre-given like a manufactured tool, it is continually re-established in subtly new ways through actual interaction with a world.

I'll add a top layer, to live ethically and morally - I think the two words mean the same thing, but both in case someone thinks they mean different things. A distinction that while the "lower" levels might be described as transactional, this top layer is not. — tim wood

It seems to me you’re splitting off a supposed
‘top layer’ of e and morality from everyday means-ends motivation , when in fact this top layer is embedded within and informs every motivated action we take, no matter how trivial. Every action we take in order to accomplish some aim understands that aim in relation to larger aims , and those larger aims are done for the sake of a self whose overall purposes are bound up with a core sense of one’s relation to others, how we see ourselves as mattering or others and how they matter to us, our sense of belonging and esteem. All of these features are bound together at the top, or superordinate level of our identity, and infuse the meaning and direction of all our actions.

The underlying necessity is the same: to keep living. The layer on top of that is: to live well. The first one is much the same for every being; the second diverges. The particular requirements for a good life differ from species to species; the desires we hope will improve our life* varies by individual.
So, there are root, long term, permanent aims that require small daily action to keep going, each one of which is proposed, planned and executed with purpose — Vera Mont

I think we need to make a distinction between ‘just living’ and perpetuating a particular way of living. Organisms don’t just live, they continually enact a specific normative pattern of interaction with an environment. It is this normative pattern that survives or perishes, not simply being alive as an abstract concept. If an organism is no longer able to maintain the dynamic consistency of its patterned exchanges with its niche, it is no longer that organism. To keep living as a body doesn’t capture what is relevant to the specific aims of a living system. It is these aims which are synonymous with what it means for it to continue to be what it is over time.

Applying this perspective to the normative psychological aims of humans, the motives that drive us aren’t the short term means to a long term end of merely staying alive as a body, these short term ‘in order to’s’ define the normative nature of the person as a psychological system. We live for the sake of our norms , not for the sake of an abstract notion of life.

The organism and the environment have memory, and the organism -- us -- can also reflect on those interactions, and develop some sense of how things are related, and the great variability of those relatings. There's a possibility there of coming to feel at home in the world, which can be very difficult for us. And in feeling at home, achieving freedom, which is also hard for us — Srap Tasmaner

We do indeed have memory, but is that memory a static archive, or does it reassemble the past on the basis of where we are going? Do we understand history from the past forward or from our future to what has been? Heidegger said that feeling at home in the world conceals from us the strangeness and uncanniness of being-in-the-world, and that we only gain freedom when we no longer feel at home in the world. I agree with both you and Heidegger: if our world is so familiar that we treat it as an unchanging given, then we achieve no freedom. But by the same token, if the world is so unintelligible
that we can’t make any sense of it at all, we are imprisonment by chaos.

That makes the issue of "being alive" a little tricky, because it's easy to say that this is the primary and overarching goal of a living organism, but it's also set apart, as that which enables any other goal. Is there something else set apart from such goals, perhaps also set apart from maintaining yourself as a living organism? I think there sort of is.

@unenlightened gives you the first bit: this kind of purposiveness is something that inheres in living, in acting, in being, not something outside it. Getting your ducks in a row is a row-ly way of behaving with ducks — Srap Tasmaner

I’m not sure that ‘being alive’ makes sense as a goal from a biological point of view. I think it’s sort of thinking is a throwback to the early days of Darwinism, when organisms were set off from a world, as if they were dropped into a separate environment and then subject to one-way selective pressure from that environment. But an organism isnt a an already determined thing, like a rock, surviving or not in a world. It is a system of interactions that maintains itself as a normative pattern of exchanges. It is not a living thing that survives, it is these patterns. And it is a misnomer to say that they survive. What they do is continually transform themselves, but in such a way that they maintain a relative self -consistency throughout these changes. I would not separate goal from purpose here. Any adjustment within the organism-environment system that maintains or strengthens the self-consistency of the specific manner of organismic functioning fulfills its goals and purposes, and modifications which fragment such integrity work against its purposes. Since the organism’s current normative patterns shape the possibilities of future changes to the organism, there can be no purpose that comes from on high, or from a causal below, entirely independent of the total style of its functioning.

Note that what I just said concerning the nature of functioning of living systems can be applied in a general sense to human psychological and cultural goals and purposes. Theories, faiths, schemes of understanding , value systems and worldviews function like living systems. The are normatively structured interactions with a human created niche (our linguistically formed technological and social world). The aim of such schemes, practices and worldviews is to maintain their ability to assimilate events without disintegrating into incoherence and unintelligibly .
To the extent that a system of ideas survives, it does so not by simply duplicating itself, but by changing itself constantly in subtle or not so subtle ways so as to keep
up with a constantly changing environment that it is instrumental in shaping.

In understanding the concept of purpose, both at the biological and psychological level, it is crucial to appreciate the reciprocal , reflexive nature of the person-world interaction. Persons aren’t dropped into a world with purposes any more than organisms are dropped into an environment with purposes. Purpose is a dynamically self-adjusting back and forth between self and world , remaking itself constantly both from the side of the organism and its environment. There can be no transcending purpose when the very notion of intention is not only responsive to but mutually shaped by an outside.

One of my favorite discussions of purpose is from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Here he argues that the history of a thing, an organism , a cultural tradition only appears to be explicable in the basin of a pre-given purpose, when in fact such teleological notions are post hoc:

But ‘purpose in law' is the last thing we should apply to the history of the emergence of law: on the contrary, there is no more important proposition for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach, – namely that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. So people think punishment has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.

The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts…

“The meaning of a sensation is something primary and biologically given. There is no need to interpret the feelings of hunger and thirst, for example. The meaning of a sensation is embedded in the sensation itself. It may be said that a sensation is its meaning. Primary feelings are genetically given, and constructed in the course of gestation just as organs are. They are “standard equipment” in every animal body.”

— Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics by Charles Pinter — Wayfarer

This doesnt seem right to me. Sensations from the eyes, ears, nose , skin and movement are massively intercorrelated on the basis of overarching normative patterns of interacting with a world. The purpose of perceptual sensation is to guide action , and it gets its meaning from such action. Action, furthermore, is anticipatory, and as such brings into play all of the sense modalities directly or indirectly. A kitten deprived from birth of interaction with its surrounding cannot see , despite having a normal visual system. Visually perceived objects have no meaning because such meaning must come from what we are intending to DO with objects, and our anticipation of the response of those objects to our actions. Even supposedly primal sensations like hunger are interpretive. My mother died from starvation as a result of advanced alzheimer’s. This is not uncommon. A person with dementia loses the ability to interpret the meaning of their hunger ‘sensations’ as these are interconnected with other sources of perception within a functional totality whose purposiveness becomes fragmented with the loss of a sense of time, place and identity.

This is a question I thought of surrounding the problem of other minds (Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds?) — TigerFan98

First of all, we only know what a mind or self or subject is in the first place because we already find ourselves immersed in a world that is ‘outside’. There are many spheres of outsideness. Our memories belong to the most intimate sphere of outsideness. our bodily sensations are a next closest sphere of the outside. A further outside comprise the inanimate objects we interact with, and the furthest outside belongs to intelligent creatures who behave i. ways that are unpredictable. If we have never encountered another mind, then we don’t yet have a concept of ourselves as a mind . We may view our ‘self’ instead in animistic terms.

But given that your question assumes that we understand the concept of a mind, determining that another has a mind involves distinguishing their behavior from that of an inanimate object or a programmed machine. is there any foolproof way of doing this? I would think not. All we have to go on is our pragmatic trial and error explorations of their unfolding responses to our interactions with them. And what are we looking for? I would assume here that what distinguishes a machine simulation from the behavior of a living system is that the actions of the former eventually form a predicable pattern. If we never reach the point in our dealings with an unknown entity where they cease to surprise us, then I would say that for all practical purposes we can say that they have a mind.

It is a flat out rejection of "the place" where these foundational ideas have their existence: metaphysics (in case you are interested, a great look at this comes from Heidegger's The Word of Nietzsche; God Is Dead, where he calls N a metaphysician because "will to power", he claims, is just a continuation of the "place" of metaphysics). To see the post modern move, think of metaphysics as a completely empty concept! As meaningless as 'ummgablgdt'. Just nothing at all. It is not only God and Christian platonism that goes down the drain, but the possibility itself of making sense of the context in which these occur. I am Rorty's opposite, really: loosely speaking, he says nothing is metaphysical. I say everything is metaphysical! — Astrophel

For Heidegger, overcoming metaphysics doesn't mean leaving it behind. Like Derrida, he recognizes that it is a matter of revealing what is left unsaid by metaphysics. Metaphysics is ontotheology, the twin features of the ontic, in the form of beings, and the theological, in the guise of the Being of beings, the manner of disclosure of beings as a whole. What metaphysics conceals is the establishment (and re-establishment) of the grounding of Beings as a whole in the uncanniness of the displacing transit of temporality. As long as there are beings there will
be metaphysics.

Said Tom Storm:

Most of my days are filled with joy despite my position that life is inherently without meaning. Perhaps it's because I've had practice? I've been a nihilist for close to 50 years. Of course, as meaning making creatures, we can't help but find or make meaning wherever we go. Those who can't do this probably have some survival deficits.
— Tom Storm

How do you counter? Especially on his point on "survival deficit"? — baker

If one is able to find joy in day to day experiences, then one is not finding these experiences to be meaningless in themselves, and thus one is not nihilistic about the continent flow of life. Only if one ties the value of those day to day events with some overarching or absolutist meaning of life, and rejects such an absolute, is one a nihilist about concrete experience.

We can reject the thoughts of others for sure. Ignore them to the best of our ability. But they're already memorised. Especially if they're of perosnal importance/implication, outrageous, shocking or otherwise emotive.

In some sense I would say there's no such thing as "selective hearing" only "selective listening" -ie the actionable consequence of registering what you heard. — Benj96

The computer metaphor of mind, where the mind inputs data , information from ann external world and then processes this raw data, only takes us so far. Whether we ‘want’ to experience an event or not, even at the perceptual level experience is already conceptually processed and filtered relative to our goals and expectations. Put differently, we may not ‘want’ to see or hear something, but when it knocks at the gates of consciousness, whether we allow it entry or not depends on its relevance and interest for us. This is where models of conditioning and brainwashing fall short. What other people expose us to only provides an opportunity for us to make something out of it. Whether in fact we do, and what exactly we make out of it, is up to us, not them.

However the question of intentionality in a general sense is not so easily disposed of, which is why it was used as a wedge by Franz Brentano, and which ultimately gave rise to phenomenology. And the issue of intentionality or at least goal-directedness is also responsible for something like a rehabilitation of Aristotle's 'final causation' which is starting to enjoy a comeback in philosophy of biology. (And really, all 'final causation' is, is 'why something happens', so it's forward-looking, rather than the backward-looking 'physical causation'.) — Wayfarer

If we trace the concept of intentionality from Brentano to the myriad fields he influenced, such as cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and phenomenology ( Freud, the Gestalt psychologists and Husserl were all students of his), my guess is we will uncover uses of the notion of intentionality that lie on the ‘other’ side of positivism than the one you would like to champion. We could call their versions of it ‘left’ intentionality as opposed to your ‘right’ intentionality. Whereas positivism rests on unexamined metaphysical presuppositions underlying their notion of objective causality, the ‘left’ intentionality of poststructuralism and enactivist cognitivism relies on the ecological holism of reciprocal causality.

The nature of causes is not pre-supposed beforehand but emerges from the context of interactions within a biological and social system. What gives intentionality its purposiveness is that biological and social systems organize themselves normatively, which means that they are anticipative. Sense making is guided by expectations emerging from patterns of interaction. What ‘right’ intentionality seems to have in common with positivism is the need to ground the normative purposiveness of intentional behavior in a metaphysical a priori.

. Sure, like Chimpanzees, there was likely occasional reactions to feelings which drove a human to act aggressively, and even kill. And while members of the group might alienate the "killer" this would have to have been an instinct or drive based on other feelings (which now we might label "disgust" "contempt" or "fear" based feelings — ENOAH

This thinking seems to follow an old set of assumptions concerning the difference between the rational and the affective. Supposedly, feeling is dumb, instinctive drive opposing itself to the ‘higher’ mental processes of rational cognition. Feeling is located in the ‘lower’ part of the brain dedicated to reflexive fight or flight, the limbic cortex, whereas rationality belongs to the more recently appearing neocortex. Have you read any Damasio? He helped usher in a revolution in thinking about feeling and emotion The ‘affective turn’ argues that feeling is the organizing basis of cognition, not as source of mindless reinforcement , but as intextricably intertwined with cognition.

Rationality is organized around norms on the basis of which creatures like us are motivated purposefully. Affect doesn’t determine the relevance and significance of those goals mindlessly, but by informing us about our relative success or failure in achieving our norm-driven goals. Dominance hierarchies in mammals arent the product of dumb instinctive feeling. Rather, cognitively determined norms of social interaction are guided and policed by feelings. Human moral systems can be traced back to those norm-based dominance hierarchies in animals. Language skills allow us to add layers of tremendous complexity to social structures, giving the impression that human morality is qualitatively different than social cooperation in animals. But even seemingly simple behaviors like play, a skill many higher animals possess, shows their use of a morality of action. How does a. dog at play know not to bite to kill its partner? Is that a dumb reflex or a moral capacity?

For you and many others on this forum, morality is linked to a world with objectively determinable features, even if our pursuit of those objective truths can only ever be asymptotically achieved. Since that path of intellectual progress is not open to other species, neither is moral improvement a coherent goal for them. For me, the progress of human cognition is the continual remaking of a niche, which is the only world we will ever know. This progress doesn’t get us closer and closer to the way things ‘really are’, it just gets us fresher and farther from who we used to be. And it also opens up increasingly intimate and peaceful ways of understanding each other that I believe will eventually allow us to jettison our blame-based moralisms. What separates our ‘moral’ sense from that of animals is our ability to constantly transform and complexify our niche, whereas other species must live out their entire life within a single niche with its normative moral dictates.

As a sidenote, Minoans in Crete were writing for over 500 years by that time. They were not Greek, but they were to the Greeks what the Greeks were to the Romans. — Lionino

The Minoans were an amazing culture. Their art had a lightness and playfulness that was almost modern in character.

↪L'éléphant You could easily look up that the first piece of writing in Greek predates the first in Chinese by some 200 years — Lionino

This is what I found. Does it jibe with your sources?

The oldest Greek writing, syllabic signs scratched with a stylus on sun-dried clay, is that of the Linear B tablets found in Knossos, Pylos, and Mycenae… some of which may date from as far back as 1400 bce (the date is disputed) and some of which certainly date to 1200 bce.

The earliest examples of writing date to 7,000 BCE when Neolithic Period humans in China and elsewhere began producing glyphs and ideographics—symbols representing objects and ideas. Markings which some archaeologists have identified as examples of proto-writing first appeared in China in approximately 6600 BCE, evidence of which has been discovered at the Jiǎhú archaeological site in Henan, China. Pictograms have also been found in China dating from the 5th century BCE. Despite these very early examples of proto-writing, it was not until 1400 BCE that a near-complete writing system was developed in China.

↪Joshs Can you say some more about how Deleuze, Derrida and Heidegger put consciousness into question alongside subjectivity and objectivity? Does this come out of their critique of the binary/emphasis of pluralities? — Tom Storm

They see consciousness as relying on the idea of a persisting self-identity. An object is something that is placed before and represented to itself by a subject.

Non-dualism represents the absence of a distinction that seperates reality into subject-object, appearance-thing in itself, becoming-being, nothingness-somethingness, necessity-contingency etc. In short, binary distinctions created by our langauges and thoughts dissappear — Sirius

This doesnt seem to accomplish an overthrow of the split between subject and object, being and becoming so much as it it represents the opposite pole with respect to external realism. The latter, like with Daniel Dennett, simply ignores the subjective in favor of the objective, whereas the non-dualism you describe throws everything into a subjectivist basket. Radical non-dualisms like that of Deleuze, Derrida and Heidegger put consciousness into question alongside subjectivity and objectivity, rather than elevating consciousness to supreme status.

Motion is. Motion cannot be tracked as moving, unless something endures long enough to be moved. So the thing is as well. But before we jump to ask “what is this thing” we can remember, if the thing “is”, it is also consumed by motion again — Fire Ologist

Are you getting this from Heidegger? One question :
If we use the motion of an object as a metaphor for becoming, then do we also keep the fact that the nature of the object doesn’t change through the course of its movement? For instance, we assume that a qualitative concept like a frisbee persists in its identity throughout the progress of its spatial displacement over time. The becoming of the movement is a quantitative change, and the persistent being of the frisbee is a qualitative enduring as the same thing.

And without identifying anything, nothing happens — Fire Ologist

‘Das nichts nichtet’. Heidegger’s famous line that the nothing nothings means that truth happens in the nothing, which is another name for transcendence. Happening, the in-between, event, occurring, transit, difference, becoming are prior to identity.

I wonder if we forget our place if we don't sometimes remind ourselves of the middle.
— Fire Ologist
Yes, we are 'beings-in-media-res'. I prefer Jasper's notion of 'Existenz' as conditioned, or grounded, by what he calls the encompassing¹ or even better, more concrete, Spinoza's/Deleuze's 'radical immanence' (i.e. eternal and infinite substance² — 180 Proof

I was going to mention Deleuze’s Rhizomatics.

The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.

And yet, here we are, existing out of context, notwithstanding the context of saying this. There is in this, some elusive and profound affirmation that has nothing do to with context, though as with all things, nothing stops it from being categorized — Astrophel

For Derrida an element of meaning, an ‘identity’, can only be what it is by relying on something absolutely foreign to it and outside of it. But this outside doesn’t sit alongside an inside of meaning but inhabits it , belongs to the inside itself.

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence.”

The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into
the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.” “Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

The repetition of this very slight difference dividing self-identity from itself produces a self and a world that returns to itself from its future the same differently, every moment. Is this what you mean by ‘existing out of context’?

Jacques Derrida, that annoying French deconstructionist that is so difficult to read, is intentionally annoying. He wants the reader to see, in his own way, this Taoist point in his analysis of the "difference and deference" of the structure of language and the basic idea is that language not only does not tell us "about" a world in any foundationally determinate way, but does not divide the world with its categories. The world is entirely "outside" of this, yet to say this at all obviously is an exercise in language — Astrophel

For Derrida language, understood in its broadest sense, is the text, and text means context. His famous dictum, there is nothing outside the text, doesnt mean nothing outside language understood as a formal symbol system, but nothing outside of some context or other. Put differently, there is no world outside language if we understand language as context.

Free will is a will that is free from determinants and constraints is the most accurate definition for free will — Truth Seeker

Would you say that free will is freedom to think what we want to think? If so , how do we make sense of this concept of wanting or desiring? We don’t usually think free will in terms of choosing that which we dont desire, but what makes what we desire such that freedom of will depends on it? I suggest that choosing what we desire is another way of talking about thoughts that come to us as recognizable , intelligible, useful, purposeful. Thoughts that come to us as arbitrary, nonsensical or confused are those we seem to consider not freely willed but those that impose themselves upon us randomly as alien to us . What’s interesting about this is that it is the chaotic thought which is truly free and random, oblivious to what we want, whereas the thought that seems purposeful and ‘chosen’ is the one that is constrained. Not by an outside agency, but constrained by our previous expectations and criteria of significance, relevance and meaningfulness. In other words, what we call free will is thoughts that are constrained by and consistent with our anticipations. Creativity wouldnt seem meaningful and valuable if this weren’t the case. It would be indistinguishable from incoherent and confused thinking. What we desire isn’t pure freedom, but a balance between constraint and novelty. Do we have this kind of freedom of will? I would say yes. In fact, this capability of innovating within normative patterns we share with all other living organisms.

give that the definition of the concept of IQ is itself fraught with contention
— Joshs

As much contention as there might, g-factor is still highly related to academic achievement — Lionino

My guess is they’re as much conflated as they are related. Intelligence tests are already achievement tests.

HD would be you sitting listening to facts and then being asked for your conclusion, and then you would offer up the reasons that you were pre-determined to offer and then you would offer your conclusion that was also pre-determined. This idea that you could have decided otherwise isn't part of HD. That's part of free will — Hanover

The presuppositions that guide HD and free-will advocates are not nearly as far apart as it might seem. In both cases a fundamentally arbitrary and socially non-relational basis of behavior is presumed. Each assume a way to determine correctness of action. The former ties it to scientific truth and the latter most often to divine moral truth.

↪Joshs How do you know that demons exist? — Truth Seeker

A demon is any arbitrary force or influence. Hard determinism is based on such demons.

We assign culpability to people who are not actually culpable.
— Truth Seeker

Why do we do that? — Hanover

Because there are many ways of understanding culpability. In its most general form, blame is pointing to the inner or outer demons capricously and arbitrarily pushing and pulling us in various, potentially nefarious directions. We blame these demons and seek to influence them in the aim of rehabilitating the person who has them, or to separate them from society. This form of culpability is perfectly compatible with hard determinism.

However, it seems problematic to say that truth is completely relativized, even vis-á-vis introspection —that people cannot look back on past events and say "that was a bad decision," with any more validity than their thoughts at that given moment. It's not moral relativism that is at stake when practical reason is reduced to emotional claims, but a thoroughgoing relativism for all claims. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The world ‘relativism’ is a kind of misnomer, isn’t it?
Relative doesn’t have to mean arbitrary. It clearly doesn’t mean this when we are navigating through the reciprocally integrated elements of a system of relations. Within the bounds of our understanding of the nature of the relations between the components of the system, relativism can imply intricacy, intimacy, coherence and intelligibility. It is only when we compare two systems and deem their relation to be incommensurable and arbitrary that relativism dissolves relate into incoherence.

One could argue that the good relativism of intimate correlation only becomes the bad relativism
of arbitrariness and incoherence when we prematurely halt the progress in our understanding of the relatedness of aspects of the human world by forcing them to conform to a true ground or origin. This is the moment when meaningful relation becomes the arbitrariness of the unconditioned absolute. Emotivism is one form of absolutizing, since it treats affectivity as arbitrary beginning. But affectivity doesn’t have to be understood this way. It can instead be linked directly to sense-making , as the expression of the relative success or failure of inteliigibility. Thus, , when we say something felt good or bad, we don’t mean that we were overcome by a fleeting, random bit of meaningless information, but that the events we have been attempting to make sense of either fit neatly into our expectations or were discordant with respect to them.

My view would be that conceptions of truth are prephilosophical. They show up when your mechanic fails to have fixed your car, or when your child claims they didn't throw a rock you just saw them throw, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To know whether the mechanic has fixed your car, you have to know how a car works, not necessarily the details of engine mechanics but how to operate it and the general
principles by which that machine runs. That relational system of knowledge belongs to a wider social network of functional relations that pertains not only to specific knowledge of the car , or motorized machines in general , but many other aspects of culture that ground the intelligibility of ecosystems within which we drive cars.
But this knowledge ecosystem is not its own ground. It is not arbitrary. It evolved from previous ecosystems and those from prior ecosystems of knowledge. The change from one to the next is neither arbitrary and random, nor is it fixed by conformity to pre-existing causal truths, which would be arbitrary also. Rather, the evolving changes in knowledge ecosystems are future oriented, aiming asymptotically at a kind of knowledge that sees all the elements of our world within intercorrelated
relations that are profoundly intimate. So the engine works or it doesn’t, but as our machines evolve with us , what it means to ‘work’ changes in ways that point towards this interconnectness. The capacity to understand the world in this way preceded us , but not the content. No pre-existing causal laws or substantive absolutes of any kind ground knowledge absolutely. This thinking would just keep us from arriving at the relational truths , which are neither invented out of whole cloth nor discovered as ready-made absolute grounds.

Understanding your child is like understanding your car. The superficially question is whether your child lied., but the evolving question is why he needed to lie, what breakdown in understanding made them feel they had to misrepresent their actions. They wanted to avoid punishment, and they will be punished because of a breakdown in the relationship. You make recourse to moral right and wrong, short-circuiting the relational possibilities of understanding by imposing an arbitrary truth.

↪Joshs IQ is between 57% and 73% heritable. What other vaguely defined concepts are vaguely heritable, and how vaguely heritable are they? — flannel jesus

If one begins with a concept that can be defined in different ways, such that there is no one I.Q. but myriad kinds on there is no overarching consensus, then what exactly it is that is being inherited is also going to suffer from lack of clarity.

That makes it more impressive. How many other vaguely-defined concepts do you know of that are very heritable? — flannel jesus

Only those that are vaguely heritable.

I do wonder what Nietzsche's impact will be going into the future. Will he be be like Plato or St. Augustine, a mainstay on introductory philosophy syllabi millennia later? Or will he be like Eriugena or Henry of Ghent, one of the "deep cuts" of an era, hardly lost to history, but also not a major name in the field? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If that becomes Nietzsche’s fate, then it will also be the fate of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault , Deleuze and others whose work is closely tied to Nietzsche. It assumes that Nietzsche’s ideas didnt stand out amongst his contemporaries as either the culmination of an era (Heidegger said he was the last Metaphysician) or the beginning of a new era.

That IQ is significantly inheritable is a frequently reproduced finding of psychology — which is remarkable for a field that has so much trouble reproducing. — Lionino

That may not be as impressive as it sounds, give that the definition of the concept of IQ is itself fraught with contention.

Personally, Emotivism is the only reasonable position and O'Connor has rightly landed on it. — AmadeusD

Why not Perspectivism? That would involvement linking emotional processes with the successes and failures of situational sense-making. By that thinking, the feelings of happiness and sadness give us information concerning the relative capability of our perspectival knowledge system with respect to anticipating events in a coherent manner. It agrees with O’Connor that happiness doesn’t tell us anything universal about the content , moral or otherwise, of the events that produce it. But it takes happy-sad out of the category of the merely arbitrary, subjective and irrational, and instead ties emotions to not only personal sense-making , but interpersonal processes of anticipatory cognition. If our emotions are expressions of individual development in terms of knowledge construction, and the latter is inextricably tied to reciprocal interaction within a larger social community, then there can be a kind of universal evolution of moral understanding.

We have existence, ready-to-hand, present-at-hand and being. The last of these is common to the other three
— Ludwig V

Not really. Had Kant said “being” (instead of existence) is not a real predicate, Heidegger may have agreed — Arne

It’s true that for Heidegger, Being (as opposed to ontic beings) is not a predicate. And yet, there is no existence, no present to hand or ready to hand without Being.

From where I sit, the universe is completely indifferent (not hostile, I grant you) to my desires and emotions. — Ludwig V

I think the criteria of successful construing of the universe is the inverse of the direct realist slogan that the ‘facts don't care about our feelings'. The arbiter of validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world, but affectivity, in the sense that empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. Validational evidence is just another way of describing the affectively felt assimilative coherence of the construed flow of events and therefore it is synonymous with feeling valence. Validated construing is neither a matter of forcing events into pre-determined cognitive slots, nor a matter of shaping our models of the world in conformity with the presumed independent facts of that world via the method of falsification. Rather, it is a matter of making and remaking a world; building, inhabiting, and being changed by our interactive relations with our constructed environment. It is our feelings which tell us whether we get it right or wrong, and by what criteria.

the way it "feels" to be conscious is a result of our delusional conscious perception. The accuracy that such a feeling has to convey information about what is truly happening inside is highly questionable. ie: accuracy of conscious perception should be treated with the same Kantian spectacles as with all other perceptions. This is the complaint against introspection on steroids — Malcolm Lett

Kant recognized that the fundamental organizing principles
making the material world intelligible to science are not located in materiality itself but are given beforehand. One can apply a Kantian approach to questions concerning the embodied nature of cognition and the organizing role of affectivity and subjective point of view in formulating empirical concepts about the world. Doing so leads to
the recognition that empirical knowledge of ‘materiality’ is inextricably tied to what ‘matters’ to an embodied organism
relative to its ways of interacting pragmatically in its physical and social environment. Subjective valuation and point of view cannot be split off from material facts; such ‘feeling’-based frames of reference define the qualitative meaning of our concepts. A fact, like a tool, is meaningless outside of what we want to do with it, what larger purposes and goals we are using it for. Every fact ( the definition of a point) can be understood within an indefinite array of potentially incommensurable accounts. Which account is true depends on what we are using the account for.

I’m not saying there are no real facts in the world. I’m saying that embodied human practices are crucial part of what it means to know the real world.

Welcome to red state and blue state America.
— Joshs
That rift was never about morality or justice. — Vera Mont

That rift is about, among other things, differing views of what is moral and just.

. The person who commits a wrongful act is subject to judgment by his society; it's not up to him to decide whether he's ill or damaged or evil or in error. — Vera Mont

We are all ill, damaged, evil and in error as judged by the perspective of those who are unable to relate the justifications of our actions, as seen from our own perspective, to their own perspective and form of life. If we are fortunate , after enduring enough ‘correction’, we can come to realize that our accusers don’t really belong to our own ‘society’ and we may join up with those who do relate to our way of thinking. Welcome to red state and blue state America.

It might be possible to approach harmful actions from a perspective other than assigning guilt. We might look at the person who committed a harmful act as damaged and in need of repair. Or we might consider whether that individual is able to make some kind of restitution and win forgiveness from the victim. We might look at justice from the First Nations' POV:
The purpose of a justice system in an Aboriginal society is to restore the peace and equilibrium within the community, and to reconcile the accused with his or her own conscience and with the individual or family who has been wronged. — Vera Mont

Concepts like forgiveness depend on the prior assessment of blame and guilt. Who says the person who does harm is ‘damaged’ and in need of ‘repair’? I’m guessing it’s not the person who committed the ‘wrongful’ act.