You still don't seem to understand the difference between two different values and two arbitrary emotional different values — Christoffer

This is a false distinction. All values are derived from subjects, therefore fundamentally subjective. There is no base difference here, that's why they are both called "values". Quantitative values, like 2, 4, 6, are no different in principle from moral values. The fact that quantitative values have a wider range of acceptability than most moral values is not sufficient to warrant a separate category. What would be arbitrary would be any proposed to principle of separation.

Just stop it. A falling rock has no arbitrary value of "good" or "bad". If the rock is falling on you, then you can describe that effect on you as "bad" or "negative. — Christoffer

Christoffer, nothing has any inherent value of good or bad, these are all judgements that we make. So this is irrelevant. What is relevant is that to judge something as neutral, and then also judge it as bad, is to contradict yourself.

I think I see the root of our misunderstanding, it is in the difference between the way that we each use the word "neutral". There is ambiguity here, and ambiguity supports equivocation, so I'm going to propose a way to avoid the ambiguity with a good clean definition of "neutral".

Let me explain the two different ways "neutral" seems to be being used. In the first sense, "neutral" is a judgement which implies that the thing judged, as neutral, can be neither good nor bad. In the second sense, the thing judged as "neutral" might be either good or bad, depending on the situation, or the person making the judgement, or something like that. For example, doing what you are told to do is sometimes bad, and sometimes good, so it's "neutral" in the second sense of potentially either good or bad, but not neutral in the first sense of neither good nor bad.

So to take your example of gravity, if we call it "neutral" in the first sense, then in whatever situation we find it, we say that it is neither good nor bad. And if gravity causes a rock to fall on your head, or some other bad thing to occur, we don't blame the rock falling as being bad, nor gravity as being bad, we might blame the person who set up the situation as bad, or even you yourself as being bad for getting yourself into that situation where you got hit on the head.

If gravity is "neutral" in the second sense though, we allow that gravity itself is either good or bad, depending on the judgement. Then when gravity causes the rock to fall on your head, you might say that gravity was bad in this situation, because the rock falling was bad, yet your enemy might say that gravity was good in this situation, because the rock falling was good..

Further, we can apply this distinction between the two senses of "neutral" to our judgements concerning bias. In the first sense of the word, bias is always neither bad nor good, no matter what the situation is. It is the type of thing which cannot be judged as bad or good. In the second sense of "neutral", we'd say that bias is sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the situation, and depending on the mode of judgement.

What I propose is that we restrict "neutral" to the first sense, as the true sense of neutral, meaning neither bad nor good, and always fulfilling that condition. The other sense, is a flimsy sense, and we ought not use "neutral" here, but some other words. We could say for example that whether the thing is bad or good is unclear, or contingent on context or other factors, or simply not objective. But this is not to say that the thing is "neutral", if we remove the ambiguity from "neutral", and restrict the definition.

Now, I'd like you to make a choice. What is the nature of "bias" in your mind? Is it "neutral" in the first sense, such that we can never judge bias as bad or good? We'd have to judge the actions of the person using the bias, as bad or good, but the bias itself would be truly neutral. We would never blame the bias, just like we would never blame gravity, we would blame the actions of the people involved with the biases instead Or do you think that bias is the type of thing which could be either bad or good, the judgement being contingent on context. This would mean that the same bias might be good in some situations but bad in other situations. And it might even be the case that the one bias, in one situation, might be good from one person's perspective, and bad from another's.

I want you to give proper consideration to these two possibilities, and choose what you truly believe. Then, I think we can make some progress in this discussion, by adhering to whatever characterization of "bias" you choose.

A falling rock in itself is not "bad", there's no such description of reality outside your emotional interpretation of it. — Christoffer

So this would be an example of the first sense, what I called the true sense of neutral. If we say a falling rock is neither good nor bad, and it could never be bad or good, no matter what it happens to do in this act, and so we have a true neutrality.

The bias effect on our cognition helps us navigate reality, but when doing critical thinking it produces an unbalanced understanding of a concept due to how it steers our thought process. This effect on our ability to conduct critical thinking can be described as bad for it. — Christoffer

This is an example of the second sense of "neutral", the flimsy sense. You are saying that bias sometimes has a good effect, and some times a bad effect. In your gravity example, this would be like saying gravity caused something bad, when the rock fell on your head, or your enemy would say that it caused something good. So you'd be saying that the effect of gravity, the rock falling is not truly neutral (#1), but neutral in the flimsy sense (#2), because sometimes the rock falling (or what the bias causes) is judged as good and sometimes it's judged as bad.

Positive and negative in this context have to do with what bias is as a function. For fast navigation through reality, avoiding dangers; being able to go down a street and not constantly getting hit by other people, or cars; or being able to reach a destination on that street because your mind summarizes information in a way that helps you find what you are looking for. For this, bias has a positive effect on your function as a human with cognition.

But when you are conducting critical thinking, that same bias process that helps you on the street will be negative on your ability to objectively reach conclusions that are valid outside of your subjective preferences (which is the entire point of critical thinking to reach past). Critical thinking requires you to not summarize information based on your unconscious preferences or pattern recognition systems. So for critical thinking to function, you need methods of bypassing biases in your conceptualization. It is the entire point of unbiased critical thinking. — Christoffer

And again, this is the flimsy sense (#2). You have now replaced "good" and "bad" with "positive" and "negative", but that makes no difference. If the effect of gravity (the rock falling) is sometimes positive and sometimes negative, then we cannot say that the gravity is truly neutral (#1) because whether gravity is good or bad in specific instances is contingent on how we judge its effects as good or bad. If gravity is truly neutral (#1) then the rock falling is always neither good nor bad, and only a person's actions relative to this event are judged as good or bad.

So, think about it please Christoffer, and let me know in which of these two senses do you think bias is neutral, the true sense, or the flimsy sense. I believe that this discussion is pointless unless you provide me with some clarity on this. Then we can proceed to look at what bias is, from that clarified perspective. Either bias is a truly neutral thing, neither bad nor good, like we might commonly say of gravity, and only the activities of human beings relative to the bias can be judged as bad or good, or bias is a type of thing, which in some situations is good, and others bad, like doing what you are told to do.

Well, Bob, this is how I see it:

If one only "knows" ideas because there are only ideas, and if ideas are properties of minds, and if each mind is an idea, then all minds are properties of each mind or, in effect, one mind. QED.
— immaterialism, ergo solipsism
This is just like pixels in a hologram each of which containing all of the information that constitutes the hologram (à la Leibniz's monads). — 180 Proof

This is exactly why dualism is called for. All is not one mind. My mind is separate from yours, as your ideas are separate from mine. So we need to assume a medium of separation, which is commonly called "matter". Matter does not exist within the mind because if it did the boundary between your mind and my mind would be dissolved and we would be one mind. Therefore matter is necessarily external to mind.

Since this is the defining feature of matter, that it is the boundary, divisor, or medium between individual minds, and it therefore cannot be within any mind, it is necessary to conclude that the mind is immaterial. Furthermore, since matter is necessarily outside the mind, it constitutes that part of reality which is unintelligible to us. Therefore to dismiss dualism is to allow in principle, that matter is within the mind, thereby creating the illusion that the unintelligible is intelligible. So allowing matter into the mind is to allow contradiction to penetrate (dialectical materialism for example). This act of denying dualism, which is to allow this principle, matter, into the mind, is to cultivate confusion and self-deception.

The problem I see is that he is defining the value of philosophy in terms of philosophy. That is, he explains, perhaps without realizing, not how philosophy is used as a tool on other disciplines, but how it internally works. — Hanover

This is similar to the problem which I see with Christoffer's approach to bias. Christoffer sees that critical thinking can be very effective for detecting biases which inhere within logical arguments. But then Christoffer has the audacity to insist that the effect which biases have on critical thinking is necessarily negative, without recognizing that this is itself, just a bias. So Christoffer shows an understanding of how critical thinking works, internally, but does not understand how it is applied toward understanding and judging the variety of biases which actually occur in practise. The critical point is that biases are judged relative to other biases, as the intrinsic of subjectivity of thinking cannot be annihilated.

Instead, Christoffer is swayed by that personal bias, that all biases are bad for critical thinking. And this is a misunderstanding of how critical thinking actually works in practise to pit one bias against another. So this leaves Christoffer with an undermined argument, because that bias which Cristoffer applies in the argument, the idea that all biases are negative for critical thinking, must also be bad, by that premise.

Time is faster here on Earth and slows as we ascend through the heavens. I would say do not think this means angels move faster — Varnaj42

To understand that angels must move faster, you need to consider the relative nature of motions in relation to your premise that time is slower at the higher levels of heaven.

Suppose we take an earthly one hour time period. Imagine a human being is driving (moving) 100 km in that one hour time period. Now, in the higher level, time is moving much slower, so let's suppose that the same hour that passes on earth, feels like a full day in the higher level. (Pay attention to the use of "feels like", because this is the only way that we have to relate a faster time to a slower time, with how the passage of time "feels" to an experiencing subject.) So within that full day, there is what feels like 24 hour for that high level angel to act, and it could move 100km in each of those hours, and have the very same feeling of moving as the human being.

Therefore, relative to one's own level of time passage, the angel and the human being are both moving at 100 km/hr. However, since the angel's passage of time is slower than the human being's passage of time, the angel in its temporal realm has moved 2400 km when the human being in its temporal realm has moved only 100km. So while the angel and human experience the exact same movement, 100km/hr., when "hr." is related to one's own level of temporal passage, since the temporal passage of the angel is slower than that of the human, the angel moves a lot further in that one hour.

I'm not seeing how that provides an answer to how free will is compatible with such a scenario. — wonderer1

The question was how is free will compatible with the all-knowing God of this scenario. The answer is that the all-knowing God in this scenario is completely outside the passage of time. Free will is something which occurs within the passing of time, it is a temporal phenomenon. So as time passes, the human being may choose from possibilities which are available due to the reality of spatial temporal existence. The angel, being at a higher level with slower time passing, is more capable of making decisions, because what feels like a split-second-decision to us, might feel like an hour for the angel. God encompasses all eternity, therefore He already knows the outcome of the decision.

Notice though, that such a God is incapable of interacting in the human level, because that God cannot have any temporal movement. This is known as the interaction problem. However, the angels in this scenario can interact, and this is why I am talking to Varnaj about the activities of the angels.

How often have we heard "if we have free will how is it that God knows in advance how we will choose?" — Varnaj42

So the short answer is that in the levels close to God, the beings move faster, or time moves slower. These angel beings are sort of like computers then, what takes a human years to do, they can do in a nano second. Therefore they are always one step (or a billion steps) ahead of us. As soon as we start to decide, as time passes, they've already seen the whole decision. And God is even at a higher level, so fast (or time so slow), that time doesn't even pass for God. Then God sees all time, all at once.

Seriously, now you're just acting stupid. A rock falling is a neutral thing, a rock falling on you is bad for you. — Christoffer

Clearly it's you who's acting stupid. Gravity is not "a rock falling". We might say gravity is the cause of the rock falling, but since it always causes the rock to fall down instead of falling up, it cannot be said to be neutral. A cause, since it affects an object in a specific way, and never in the opposite way, cannot be said to be neutral.

Your entire schtick relies on my concept being faulty in this neutral/bad logic, so you try to force this notion onto the discussion in order to be able to win the argument. — Christoffer

You do not even remember my argument now, or you're intentional avoiding it. I argued that if you premise that biases are bad, we must allow that some are good as well, or else we'd have to conclude that thinking is bad, since it employs biases as a base aspect. So you insisted that biases are neutral, to support your claim that bias is bad for critical thinking. I am only insisting that your position is incoherent by way of contradiction. You are the one insisting that biases are both neutral and bad, not me. I'm merely pointing out the obvious, that this is contradictory.

A phenomena can be neutral, how that phenomena affects a certain thing can be negative. — Christoffer

Obviously, it's you who is not following the principles of logic. If the effects of a phenomenon are said to be negative, then that phenomenon cannot be said to be neutral in relation to those effects, without contradiction.

So, if bias is said to have a negative effect on thinking, then in relation to thinking, bias cannot be said to be neutral, it must be negative.

What are you proposing Christoffer? Are you suggesting that we remove bias from the context of thinking, so that we can look at it as something neutral while its affect on thinking is looked at as bad? How could we do this? Are you Platonist? Do you suppose that we could assign independent existence to something like an idea, a belief, or a bias? Then we could look at the belief as existing independently from the human act of thinking, and say that as independent from thinking, the bias is neutral, but when it comes into the context of human thought, it's bad in that relation.

You are applying arbitrary values of good and bad (emotional human judgement) onto a thing that is neutral. Bias is neutral just as gravity, in that it does not inhabit any arbitrary human values in the form of "good" or "bad. A neutral force can have a negative or positive effect on something, and that is not the same thing as it inhabiting an arbitrary value of good or bad in itself. Your argument relies on there existing an objective good and bad value that exist outside of human values, and such a claim have a burden of proof to show what these values are, comes from and why they exist. How can this be confusing for you, I don't understand. It is pretty basic stuff. — Christoffer

You can insist that all judgements of good or bad are arbitrary human judgements, if you like, but as I said, so is the judgement of "neutral" then. And, it is obviously contradictory to judge the same thing as both neutral, "and bad, in the same respect. I'm not referring to any sense of "objective good" here, I am referring only to your judgement, that bias is a neutral part of thinking, yet it is also a bad part of thinking.

Do you agree that this is what you are arguing? You are saying that as a part of the act of thinking, bias is neutral, but also, as a part of the act of thinking, bias is bad. Why don't you see this as contradictory?

Your gravity analogy doesn't really work very well because we do not judge the acts of gravity as good or bad, as we do the acts of human beings. So in the case of gravity we have to place "neutral" in relation to a different pair of opposites. That's why I used up and down. Obviously gravity is not neutral because it always moves things downward.

No, physics are neutral, there's nothing arbitrary good or bad about them. I — Christoffer

Physics is a discipline, a field of study, therefore it is judged as good. No subjects of study are neutral or else a person would not be inclined to study them. They are studied because they are judged as good.

If you say that "neutral" is a human judgement of physics, then you need to explain how you define physical processes. If they are not neutral in the form of not having arbitrary values, then what are they? If you ignore to answer this you are ignoring a vital part in what holds together your reasoning. — Christoffer

Sorry, I can't understand what you are asking. As I said above, "neutral" in the context of physical processes would have to be defined by something other than good or bad, because we do not judge these activities in relation to good and bad. Therefore if a physical process is judged as "neutral", neutrality is defined by something other than good and bad, because good and bad are not even possibilities.

That is why your analogy fails. You take gravity, which is not judged as being good or bad, and you compare it to a human property, "bias" which you do judge as being bad. Then you try to say that bias is like gravity in the context of good, bad, and neutral. Obviously this doesn't work, because bias is a human disposition which can be judged as good, bad, or neutral, gravity is not. So the neutrality you assign to gravity is out of context, not neutral in the context of bad and good, and you argue by equivocation.

Preferable" means whatever is preferable in your psychology. You are biased towards liking hamburgers, so your thinking while planning dinner might be that you lean (gravitate) towards ordering hamburgers than the more objectively concluded healthy eating of a sallad. If you are unable to understand that this kind of pull towards preferable arbitrary and emotional values of your subjective and individual preferences has a negative effect on your critical thinking when you try to form an objective conclusions of a complex concept, then you simply are uneducated about what bias actually is in psychology, and don't know what it means in the context of critical thinking and also don't understand the importance of critical thinking in philosophy. Which seems obvious based on the incoherent and confused way you have structured premise-based arguments earlier. — Christoffer

This makes no sense logically. You provide no logical demonstration for why you think salad is more "objectively concluded healthy eating" than hamburgers. What you are arguing is to replace one bias (preference) "hamburgers" with another bias (preference) "salad", and you add some big words (objectively concluded healthy eating), to make it sound like one of the biases is having "a negative effect on your critical thinking", and the other bias is somehow exempt from being subjected to critical thinking, as somehow unbiased, or objective. I mean, you might say that "science" tells you that salad is more objectively healthy, but that's just a fallacious appeal to authority, unless you lay out the argument.

Bias is an always existing neutral psychological phenomena that is a core part of our human mind and cognition. This bias has a negative and bad effect on the ability to conduct critical thinking (which is not all that people do and therefore the value of "negative" or "bad" is applied to specifically how it affects critical thinking), often taking the shape and form of some error in thinking found in lists like the above. — Christoffer

The problem here, as I've already pointed out, is that you recognize bias as a "core", and therefore essential part of human cognition. This implies that it is a necessary aspect of all forms of thinking, and as a necessary aspect, it is "good" in that relation. Therefore we cannot say that there is any form of thinking in which bias is bad, as it is necessary to all forms.

What you fail to understand is that all forms of so-called "critical thinking" proceed from biases, and these biases are essential and therefore good for that critical thinking. So you propose this form of "critical thinking" which can produce an endless list of biases which are labeled as bad, for having a bad effect on other forms of critical thinking. This supports your claim that biases are bad for critical thinking. However, you don't even seem to realize that your form of "critical thinking" is based in your own bias, the bias that bias is bad for critical thinking. So your form of "critical thinking" is based in a bias which is necessarily just as bad as all those other biases, because all biases are bad in relation to critical thinking, by your own premise.

Your argument is self-refuting. Biases are natural as a core part of thinking. Your proposed form of "critical thinking", naturally has a core bias, therefore. Your core bias is that biases have a bad influence on critical thinking. Your core bias, that biases have a bad influence on critical thinking, by your own argument therefore, has a bad influence on your critical thinking.

Just checking as a non-philosopher here. Aren't biases generally like axioms or presuppositions, which provide a kind of foundation to one's thinking? — Tom Storm

That's what I was telling Christoffer, they are what we enter the logical process with, the premises.

Is a potential task of philosophy to question and perhaps dismantle axioms (beliefs, biases) one holds to find enhanced approaches to thinking and living? I can't help but find myself in a realm of 'good' biases and 'bad' biases and how this is determined strikes me as needing to be bias led. — Tom Storm

I suppose that's a fairly accurate description of skepticism, to dismantle fundamental beliefs, making a deeper analysis. But not all philosophers have this attitude. Some feel like they've come up with something significant, an important original idea, and so they work to put this idea across to others.

I believe there are two sides to philosophy, reading and writing, or taking information in, and putting information out. The reading is the skeptical side, because in doing so we are always considering new information, and how it relates to the beliefs we currently hold, all the while being skeptical of the information being read, as well as the information already held, and looking for consistency amongst all the other material we are familiar with. Writing on the other hand involves a different type of thinking because we feel a need to make sense to others. They are looking for " the point" of the passage, the principle, the idea, or belief which you are trying to put across. This "point" becomes the bias which you are demonstrating.

We could label these two ways of thinking as analysis and synthesis. Analysis is a divisive process (deconstruction for example) where we take apart ideas and beliefs, finding their constitutive elements, relating them to the ideas and beliefs we already hold (biases), to find inconsistencies and incoherencies. The goal is just to recognize where and how the consistencies and inconsistencies appear, because neither side of contradictory beliefs merits rejection just on the basis of contradicting the other side. Which of the two sides gets rejected is decided by the synthesis process. This is an effort to build a whole, by relating various ideas. So which of the two contradictory beliefs gets saved and which gets rejected depends on the whole which is being created. This is where intention plays its very important role. The purpose (Plato's "the good") defines the whole, so it provides the basis for rejection or maintaining the elements in synthesis.

You can see here how bias is fundamentally purpose based. We choose our premises, axioms, and presuppositions, based on the purpose we have in mind. There is a common tendency, which I would say is a significant misunderstanding, to portray the bias in a determinist way. This perspective would model the bias as a product of past learning, which gets reinforced over time like a habit, through experience, to produce its strength. But this completely ignores the basic and fundamental fact, that we can, and actually do, freely choose our biases. So the bias is misrepresented as produced by some underlying innate feature, rather than as freely chosen through intention. The reality is that we choose our biases according to our intentions, and a long lasting, deep seated bias is representative of a strongly held intention.

But I’m not sure what you’re getting at. — Jamal

Neither am I... but that's the way I roll. According to what is expressed above, not having any specific intention, or point to be made, is the essence of being unbiased. Now I'm showing my bias.

To say that biases are bad or negative for critical thinking is a fact about critical thinking. It does not mean that there are good and bad biases. You need to read up on the psychology behind this concept and how it relates to critical thinking. — Christoffer

You are not getting it Christoffer. You recognize that bias is a natural, inherent and essential part of any thinking, yet you insist that there is a type of thinking, "critical thinking", within which bias is bad. Since bias is an essential aspect of thinking, then to remove it from thinking would incapacitate and annihilate the thinking. Therefore we cannot say that it is bad for any type of thinking, because it supports that activity, "thinking", as a necessary part of it. So to remove bias from any type of thinking would make that activity impossible. Therefore to remove bias from critical thinking would actually be bad because as a form of thinking it relies on bias , and to remove the bias would make it impossible to perform that act of critical thinking. Therefore, since critical thinking is a form of thinking, and bias is a necessary and required aspect of all forms of thinking, bias must be good in relation to critical thinking, and it cannot be bad.

It seems to me, like your education allows you to recognize that bias is fundamentally a neutral aspect of thinking, yet you have a deep seated bias which tells you that bias is bad for critical thinking. Since you cling to this bias, you cannot draw the logical conclusion that since bias is a natural, neutral, and essential aspect of all thinking, it cannot be bad for any type of thinking. Instead, you continue to repeat your bias, holding it up as a "fact" about critical thinking.

Again, bias is a neutral phenomena that is bad for critical thinking. — Christoffer

Well, if you cannot understand how it is contradictory to say that a neutral phenomenon is bad, I don't see much point in continuing this discussion.

If you cannot understand how these two (neutral and bad) can exist together in this context, then you are either not capable of understanding... — Christoffer

That is the correct answer, I am not capable of understanding that because it is contradiction. Sorry if this disappoints you when it means your attempt to deceive me has failed.

It's a neutral physical force in terms of your usage of "good" and "bad" as values. When you say a "good" and "bad" bias, you are not talking about a plus and minus, larger and lower, maximum and minimum, higher and lower effect, you are talking about human value systems applied to a neutral force. The force itself does not have good or bad values. "Good" and "bad" are human concepts of arbitrary values, they aren't applicable to gravity as a force. The force itself does not have such values, but the effect of falling from a skyscraper is bad for you. Which is what I'm saying when I say that biases are a neutral psychological phenomena and that how they affect your critical thinking is bad for reasoning. — Christoffer

Clearly no force is neutral, as "force" means to exert power or effort, and "neutral" means to not be inclined toward movement in any direction. So your attempt to rationalize your contradiction in this way, fails miserably.

Yes, good and bad are human judgements, but so is "neutral" a human judgement as well. And you judge bias as bad for critical thinking, so you cannot also judge bias as neutral, without contradiction.

No, you don't understand simple english and the semantics of my argument. — Christoffer

I suppose you're referring to the semantics of deception here, also known in philosophy as sophistry.

So, with the textbook definition of "good" that you provided, how do you arrive at a conclusion that a bias have "right", "desired", "satisfactory", "adequate" qualities and not the opposite to those definitions? — Christoffer

By your own description of bias Christoffer. You said that a bias is a gravitation toward what is preferable. Doesn't "preferable" imply what is satisfactory or desired? Since this is the definition of "good", then we ought to conclude that biases are good. Where do you get this idea that biases are bad?

Interesting. I'm happy enough to agree that "the victory of what came to be Catholic orthodoxy was because it was much more politically expedient to organise belief, than the esoteric knowledge represented by gnosticism," but since my conception of history is much more materialist (in the Marxian sense) than yours, I don't accept your emphasis on the primacy of ideas. That's not to say, by the way, that I believe in a crude economic determinism or the one-way causal power of the mode of production, but it was no accident that the gnostic element wasn't admitted, and therefore I think that such a counterfactual history doesn't tell us much. — Jamal

I believe that you approach a very significant and important ontological subject here. If gnosticism turns one inward in a spiritual quest, this activity can only be a part of the overall process which produces enlightenment. That is because in the act of finding oneself through the inward process, one's true position in the environment, one's social context, cannot be revealed, being dependent on the reality of the changing circumstances of a spatial-temporal existence, the external surroundings. So the spiritual revelation derived from turning inward is only a halfway point in true enlightenment, because finding oneself also requires putting oneself into context through a return, or turning outward.

Understanding the nature of the turning back outward is the pivotal issue. This turning outward is represented in Plato's cave allegory as the philosopher's return to the cave after seeing the light. Notice I described it as "putting oneself into context". This is because we recognize that through the capacity of freedom of choice, we have the power to create our own social context. So one's place in the social environment need not be where the forces of nature have put that person, it may be a place which the person has prepared for oneself. The common representation could be "home".

The reason for my claim of ontological importance, is that this inward process, with the consequent turn around, alters one's perspective on social conformity. Without the inward adventure we tend to perceive the environment and social context as causing us to conform to the norms and conventions which have shaped our learning process. Causation is represented by external relations. Ontologically, this gets represented as the top-down formal causation of conformity.

However, with the inward journey of enlightenment, we approach the causal force of the will, and we can apprehend the true causal force of social conformity as coming from within, the will to conform. This justifies the materialist (Marxist) bottom-up type of causation as the true nature of the causal force which produces social conformity. What is required for the reality of the social contract is more than just a passive consent to be ruled over, but an active role in causation. In other word, we do not go through the gnostic journey to find oneself, arrive at the residual "will", and think now it's time to roll over and be flogged.

There's a difference between saying that biases are bad for rational and critical thinking, and saying there are "good and bad biases". — Christoffer

If you say that biases are bad for rational thinking, you are saying that biases are bad in that respect. I used that premise, that there are bad biases, to demonstrate that if there are bad biases, there must also be good biases. Therefore you position, that all biases are bad for rational thinking, is incoherent.

You need to demonstrate examples of good biases and how you deductively arrive at valuing them as good. — Christoffer

No I don't need to give any examples of good biases. I explained why already. I made the demonstration using the premise you provided, that there are bad biases. From that premise I was able to demonstrate that there must also be good biases.

You are still not recognizing that the problem is with your premise, that biases are bad. This is itself a bias which by that premise is bad. But since there are bad biases, there are also good biases, so all you need to do is replace that bias with a better one. However, you are firmly wedded to your bias, and you adhere to it as if you think it is a good bias, while all the while insisting that there is no such thing as a good bias, in a completely incoherent manner.

I pointed out that your argument requires you to unbiasedly show what is a good bias and what is a bad bias in order to conclude that nothing can be argued without bias. — Christoffer

I went through this already, biases are a natural and essential part of the human being. Therefore it is impossible for a human being to be unbiased. And, a person's biases are evident in the premises of one's arguments.

Why do you think I need to show what constitutes a good bias, in order to demonstrate that a human being cannot argue without bias? That makes no sense.

I pointed out that you break your own logic by saying that nothing can be argued without bias and then explains how we need an unbiased system to know what is good or bad. It is a never ending circular argument. — Christoffer

You keep making this assertion without demonstrating anything, where's the circular argument you keep mentioning. I explained why there is no circle. Good is proper to the process, logic, it is not proper to the bias. It is only your faulty premise that biases are bad, which forces the conclusion that there must be good biases.

See, you want to adopt the proper premise, that biases are natural, and fundamentally neutral. You keep saying this about biases, as if you understand the reality about them, but then you contradict yourself by insisting that biases are bad. Because you hold this bias, that biases are bad, I am required to communicate with you on your own terms, the terms you understand, therefore speaking about biases as if they could be bad or good, and so I am compelled to show you that your bias is a bad bias.

If you would give up that bias, that biases are bad, then we could proceed to talk about them as something neutral, and perhaps make some progress. But if you keep insisting that biases are bad for rational and critical thinking, when in reality biases are an essential part, as a natural part, of rational and critical thinking, then I'll have to keep showing you that there must also be good biases which actually support rational and critical thinking. Then your bias gets exposed as a bad bias. So give it up please, release that bias, then we can start talking about biases as a neutral part of rational and critical thinking.

Bias is neutral because it is a natural phenomena — Christoffer

OK, if "bias is neutral", as you say here, then will you rescind your claim stated above, that "biases are bad for rational and critical thinking". You cannot have it both ways. If they are bad for rational and critical thinking, then it is impossible that they are neutral.

If I describe how bias is bad for critical thinking then you need to understand what that means. The neutral phenomena of bias makes it hard for our mind to process complex concepts without conforming to presupposed groupings of information. This is the psychology of bias. The bias itself is neutral, the effect it has on critical thinking is bad. — Christoffer

I really can't believe that you cannot grasp the incoherency in this statement. Do you understand what "neutral" means? If the "phenomena of bias" affects critical thinking in the negative way which you describe, so that you can say that it is "bad" for critical thinking, then it is blatant contradiction to say that bias is "neutral". It is neutral in relation to what? Obviously not in relation to critical thinking, because you affirm that it is bad in relation to critical thinking. In what respect do you think that bias is neutral, when you describe it as bad?

Only if you adhere to false dichotomy about this. You are proposing a black & white error in reasoning by saying this is clearly wrong because you don't seem to understand the concept of unbiased reasoning and summarize it as trying to remove bias completely rather than it being a tool to spot and suppress bias. That you interpret me saying "reduce bias" with "remove bias" shows this false dichotomy in play here. — Christoffer

This is all nonsense. You recognize that true "unbiased reasoning" is impossible, yet you desire to retain your irrational goal of unbiased thinking, so you replace "remove bias" with "reduce bias" as an alternative to "unbiased". But bias is not a quantitative thing, so this really makes no sense. And all you are left with is replacing one bias (to be truly unbiased) with what you think is a better bias (to have a reduced quantity of biases), while you have no stated principle to say that one of these bad biases is better than the other.

You are basically describing my own theory of duality in mind for critical thinking, just in other form. — Christoffer

Right, because I am demonstrating the defects of your theory. I describe your theory in my own words, then show the faults.

So you are basically saying that we need critical thinking, which is unbiased in form, in order to evaluate what is a good or a bad bias? You describe a separation in which one part is evaluating the other through logic, which is the same as what I describe when talking about mentally stepping back and observing the automatic self at a distance, spotting its behavior of biases and categorizing them as blockages of the concept being formed. — Christoffer

And if you would continue with your "stepping back and observing the automatic self ", you would see that "the automatic self" is the problem, not the biases. Biases are inherent, essential, and integral to concept formation. They facilitate concept formation, they are not "blockages". The "automatic self" however does not deliberate, it does not exercise free will, and this is where the problem lies. An individual will have numerous biases, and if these act like gravity, then the problem is with your concept of the "automatic self", which does not resist the pull of gravity (the bias) through its capacity of free will.

Gravity is neutral, how do you interpret gravity as "an inclination to act"? I mean gravitation in its literal sense. — Christoffer

In no way can gravity be represented as "neutral". Neutral would be like something balanced, an equilibrium, but gravity is a force which pulls in one direction. A force is not "neutral".

Again,

Bias is a neutral process.

The negative effect that bias has on critical thinking makes bias bad for reaching valid conclusions. — Christoffer

How can you make such blatantly contradictory statements? Bias is a neutral process, with a negative effect. You really do not understand the meaning of "neutral", do you?

No, it's a failure of understanding my writing on your part. To once again explain my own writing in detail: — Christoffer

Obviously I cannot understand your writing. It's blatantly contradictory and incoherent.

You are talking about a universalized good and bad since you position them as foundational, so of course you have to define it. — Christoffer

You my friend, are the one who has positioned good and bad as foundational, by assigning "bad" to bias in relation to critical reasoning, when biases are foundational to reasoning. You see biases as having a foundational role in thinking, then you turn around and say that this role is bad. It is you who needs to define good and bad. You have even stated, "These psychological prejudices have the function of enabling us to act fast and not get stuck in cognitive loops whenever we try to do any type of basic task or problem solving in everyday life." And you want to say that this is bad for critical reasoning, when critical reasoning is necessary for many our basic tasks? By what definition of "bad" do you claim that the ability to act fast and not get caught in cognitive loops when assessing a situation, is something "bad"?

Demonstrate it, quote something or whatever, I want to see an example of this since it is over and over the core of what you write. — Christoffer

OED, good:"1. having the right or desired qualities; satisfactory, adequate. " See, a definition of good is highly possible.

The wave function collapse occurs due to the photon being affected by itself producing a collapse in different realities down to a single outcome, depending on schools of interpretation in quantum physics. — Christoffer

Right, the photon causes itself to have a wavefunction breakdown. Tell me another, buddy.

The mother takes care of the baby. There is no need for the baby to have a mental model of the world to survive.

. Because there's a faulty logic in claiming there to be good biases and bad biases when such claims are values that essentially requires a detachment from bias in the first place in order to reach a claim of what is good or bad. — Christoffer

As I explained, it was your premise that biases are bad, undesirable, or whatever words you used in your anti-bias rhetoric. From this premise I produce the logic to demonstrate that if some biases are bad, then some must also be good. If the logic was faulty, you'd be able to show why, instead of just repeatedly asserting that it is faulty. In reality, it is only the premise which you insist on, that biases are not desirable, which potentially makes the argument unsound.

Which means that the argument fails by its own logic and becomes circular reasoning. You claim there to be good and bad biases, but to reach those values you need to be unbiased and in doing so you are doing what I'm talking about, unbiased reasoning. — Christoffer

I already explained why what you propose is impossible.

Bias is neutral, there are no good or bad values. In human reasoning and cognition it is merely a description of how the we gravitate towards something based on our emotions or paths of least resistance in our thought processes. — Christoffer

You are being inconsistent. If you take an anti-bias position, as you do, then you imply that biases are bad. If biases were neutral, then there would be no need for an anti-bias position. However, your description of how we "gravitate toward something", along with the premise that the actions produced from such a gravitation may be judged as good or bad, produces the valid conclusion that biases may be judged as good or bad.

es, biases are natural, but they are not good or bad as you claim since such values are arbitrary. And if we are talking about knowledge biases, yes, everyone has biases and therefor it is the purpose of unbiased methods of reasoning to improve our ability to reach conclusions and truths that are objective or broad rather than the subjective truths of our stupid minds. Without methods like this we are simply just spitting out opinions that cannot be foundations for concepts that function in a broader context and society, they just become like any twitter thread: a long line of irrelevant noise biased towards each individual subject's beliefs. — Christoffer

So, just like some opinions may be judged as good, and some judged as bad, because they influence behaviour in this way, the same can be said for biases. The word "bias" being used to describe how we "gravitate", and such gravitation may be be judged as good or bad.

Philosophy focuses on unbiased reasoning in order to sometimes reach a praxis that we use in society. — Christoffer

Unbiased reasoning is impossible. I explained that to you already, and I think Mww did too. You are ignoring this very important fact. Premises are biases, and we cannot reason without premises. Notice the prefix, "pre" in the word "premise". The premise is what we enter the reasoning process with, as a preexisting assumption, a "prejudice". A skeptic might subject the premise to analysis, and a reasoning process, to judge for soundness, but that reasoning process would itself require premises, which would need the same skeptical treatment, and this would create the appearance of infinite regress. Since it is impossible to proceed through an infinity of premises for skeptical analysis, we must conclude that all reasoning is biased, due to the biased nature of the premises.

The goal of philosophy is to reduce bias in reasoning and arguments. — Christoffer

This is clearly wrong. Such a goal is logically impossible to obtain, therefore it is irrational to hold it as a goal. Any attempt to obtain what is demonstrably impossible, is an irrational attempt. When a proposed goal is known to be impossible, we need to dismiss it as a goal, and adopt something which is possible, as our goal.

Explain what this universal method of assessing biases is, because so far you are just saying that we need to arrive at good and bad biases, but what exactly is the process you propose? How do we arrive at such conclusions? How do you reach them? If you say that we cannot do anything without bias, then how do we reach an understanding of what are good and bad biases? It's just circular. — Christoffer

The method is logic itself. We use logic to assess biases. You need to allow a separation, in principle between the form (logical process) and the content (beliefs which constitute biases). With this separation we have in principle, i.e. in theory, a pure unbiased process, logic. However, such a pure unbiased process would be absolutely useless because it would not be applied, and application requires content. But inherent within the content is bias. You might talk about some pie-in-the-sky conclusions which are totally free of bias, but those would just be meaningless symbols with no content. If we give meaning to the symbols (content), then we add bias to the system.

No, I'm saying that biases are neutral forms of gravitation towards certain things... — Christoffer

This is where you show your inconsistency. You are speaking anti-bias, yet claiming biases are neutral. If you really believed that biases are neutral, then you'd need to jump over the fence to my position, and drop your anti-biased approach, because anti-bias would be unfounded. If biases are neutral, then you have no reason to be anti-bias, and your anti-bias attitude is irrational.

However, since you describe biases as a form of "gravitation", which implies an inclination to act, it is really the case that biases, according to this description are not neutral at all. These acts of gravitation can be judge as good or bad, and so the inclination toward them, produced by the biases, can also be judged in that way.

This is your inconsistency. You assert "biases are neutral", yet you describe them as something which can be judged for goodness or badness. If they are inclinations toward action, "gravitation", they can be judged in that way, therefore they are not neutral.

It's the process of arguing with bias that is bad, not that there are bad biases. — Christoffer

Your misunderstanding is clear here. You do not acknowledge the reality that it is impossible to argue without bias, that would be a content-free argument which is not an argument at all. Once you recognize this, as a fact, then you'll move on to see that a logically valid argument can still be bad, if it involves bad premises, and the bad premises are derived from bad biases. This is referred to as "unsound"

Bias is a natural and neutral manipulation of the ability to reason outside of your own beliefs. — Christoffer

This is an expression of your failure to separate the reasoning process (form) from the subject matter (content) being argued. If a person adheres to the proper reasoning process, bias does not manipulate the ability to reason. However, biases will influence the conclusion because the same bias which goes into the content of the premises will be reflected in the conclusions.

How do you arrive at good? You just claim us to arrive at that without explaining how we arrive at that? It's basically like saying, "once we have the concept of good acts, we can then form principles of morality that we can follow", and then argue about some ideals that still requires the "good" to be defined. You still don't seem to see that this argument is faulty, that it is a circular argument in which you describe a system that relies on axioms that needs to be argued for and proven absolute, before you propose how to use them. You are only describing how to use them... whenever we arrive at having such axioms. — Christoffer

There is no circular argument here, "good" is definable, and as such, that definition will provide a grounding, a base or foundation. That I have not defined it is irrelevant to my argument. There is no need to define it until you accept the reality that it has a purpose, and needs to be defined.

The important point here, is that it is possible to define "good", therefore it is possible to judge biases on the basis of this definition. To reason meaningfully without bias is impossible. So you need to drop your goal, as impossible, and I've proposed a replacement, a goal which is possible. The reason why your position is impossible, is because you approach from a bad bias, the idea that philosophy is anti-bias. It's an irrational position, which is not a true representation of philosophy, so I can say that it is bad, as false.

Prove the soul's existence. — Christoffer

You need to read some of the material I mentioned, or others. It's a lot of reading. Here's the simple form of the argument though. There's two basic premises. 1) A living body exists as an organized body. 2) When a body comes into existence it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else. Do you see that the necessity of 2) requires a cause? That a thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, requires a cause of the thing being the thing which it is. Without that cause there is no "thing", which is an ordered structure, only disordered randomness.

And the cause of a thing necessarily pre-exists, temporally, the material being of the thing. In the case of 1), the organized living body, the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul. Notice that the soul is necessarily non-bodily, or non-material, as necessarily prior to the being of the body. You can rebut by saying that there is no need to label that cause as "soul", but what's the point? We still need to recognize the reality of that cause, so taking its name away is not going to be helpful.

That is an extremely simplified rendition of an understanding of the soul, but if you show an attempt to understand, I will expound for you, if you have questions.

A photon is a real thing. It is measurable as both a wave and a particle in experiments like the wave function collapse in the double slit experiment. — Christoffer

This is wrong. A photon is not measurable as a wave. Hence the so-called wave function collapse whenever a measurement is attempted. This is analogous to the argument for the soul above. The particle, photon, or electron, is the ordered "thing", the body with material existence. Its existence, through wave function collapse, requires a cause. Without that cause there is no thing, and without the soul there is no living body.

It's a survival machine. In order to survive, it requires information; it must construct a mental model of its world. — Vera Mont

I think this opinion is wrong. The desire to believe, to know, and understand, is not based in what is needed to survive. Simple single-celled organism seem to survive very well, without that desire. Therefore it is incorrect to say that survival requires a mental model of the world. So, we must conclude that the desire to make a mental model of the world is driven by some other intention, rather than the will to survive.

Others have suggested that the intent involved here is the will to "flourish", and this implies growth. But this still does not account for the reality of a fundamental capacity of living things, which is the ability of self-movement. The desire to move, to go places, cannot be accounted for by the will to flourish, just like the desire to know cannot be accounted for by the will to survive. Furthermore, the desire to reproduce is distinct from all of these. So common evolutionary theories have a lot of problems to work out.

Of course, but then again, what is good? How can you guarantee that the good that your moral education teaches people actually creates a good bias? What if your moral education isn't forming the good that you thought it would and people are now having a bias that is instead morally questionable? — Christoffer

Yes, this is exactly the issue, how are we to determine good biases from bad. You were talking as if all biases are bad, but now you appear to accept that some might be good. So, on what bases are we going to distinguish good biases from bad biases?

Isn't it then better to have a neutral system of anti-bias so that good is always evaluated by not having a pre-existing belief bias? — Christoffer

No, like I explained, biases are a natural and essential part of being human. Therefore it is impossible to be bias-free, and any attempt at "not having a pre-existing belief bias" would be a completely unrealistic attempt due to that impossibility. Such an attempt would just turn into a matter of gravitating toward keeping the biases which one is comfortable with, and eliminating the others, because it is impossible to not have any bias. Then we end up still having biases and no principles for distinguishing which biases we ought to have and ought not have.

Our biases is us favoring certain knowledge over other. We favor those things out of our emotions, our craving for comfort. The comfortable "truth" is the one we defend and form our world-view on. This means we evaluate new knowledge not by their own merits, but by how they relate to the knowledge we favor, that we are comfortable with.

Therefore, detachment from bias makes us better at evaluating the knowledge we have and the knowledge we are confronted with. — Christoffer

Your proposed "detachment from bias" is unrealistic, impossible for a human being to achieve, analogous to a mind separated from its body. It is not the human condition, nor is it a possible condition for a human being, so forget about it, and move along to something more realistic.

Bias is an error in perfect understanding. — Christoffer

Do you accept as true, the proposition that "perfect understanding" is impossible for human beings to obtain. If so, then you ought to recognize that your goal of being bias-free is not a reasonable goal for a human being. This conclusion necessitates a completely different approach to biases. Instead of attempting to reject all biases as fundamentally unwanted, we need to accept that it is impossible to reject all biases, therefore we need some principles by which we can decide which to reject. Do you see that these "principles" cannot themselves be biases, but more of a versatile, or universal method for assessing biases.

You cannot conclude there to be good biases without first concluding an answer to what a good bias really is. And to form such an answer requires you to explore a moral realm without bias, since you would otherwise just apply your own bias of what you believe is good before concluding and applying it as a collective bias that others should follow. — Christoffer

This is not true. My demonstration that there are good biases came from your assumption that there are bad biases. So from your premise, that we ought to rid ourselves of biases, because they are bad, I demonstrated that if there are bad biases there is necessarily also good biases. So the conclusion is derived from your premise of bad biases, and there is no need for me to show what a good bias is..

Furthermore, all that is required to further this process, is a definition of what constitutes "good". Once we have that, we can judge biases as to whether or not they are consistent with, or have that quality. "Good" would be defined in such a way as to be a principle, to serve as a method for judging biases, without itself being a bias.

Again, how can you distinguish good biases from bad if you don't form arguments in a mental space where biases do not exist? How can you deconstruct something if it is essential to the human existence? That would imply that all of philosophy is circular reasoning, one bias following the next ad infinitum. — Christoffer

All that is required is to have a process for judging biases which is separate from the biases, a process being an activity, whereas a bias is a static belief. The process therefore cannot itself be a bias. This is why science is based in a method, "method" signifying a process.

And yes, it is part of the human condition to have biases, it's part of our human psyche, which is why acting against it, understand it and understanding its behavior has been the single greatest method for human advancement. We cannot question the status quo without acting against our biases, without detachment from them. — Christoffer

It appears like you have the idea here, when you talk about a "method". But it is not a matter of acting "against" biases, as you state. Nor is it a detachment from bias, as this is impossible. It is simply a way of acting which recognizes the reality of biases and the need to cope with them. To deny them, or pretend a detachment is self-deception.

Where I draw the line, however, is when specifics are boiled down to something similar to factual claims. If someone speaks of "soul" and actually means some ethereal part of the divine that's trapped in our flesh, and uses this as a factual premise in their arguments, that is an unsupported claim. It's this type of claim that I refer to as biased. It is a bias towards the preconceived belief of the soul as something actual, something part of physical reality or supernatural reality that in itself hasn't been supported either. It's arguments that functions on these biases that philosophy consequently dismantled, if not in the time they were formed (due to historically inadequate methods of actually knowing how the world worked), then in historical times after when more factual understandings emerged. — Christoffer

Let me take what you say here about the "soul" ad make an analogy. The concept of "soul" is a very difficult and complex subject in philosophy. It requires great study to understand the soul, Plato's "Phaedo" is a good start. But then there is Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and many others. So when a learned philosopher makes a claim about "the soul as something actual", I would assume that this philosopher has some understanding about that matter. That philosopher probably even understands that Aristotle defines the soul as actual, and explains the logical reasoning why the soul must be defined as "actual". Therefore we cannot say that such a claim is "unsupported".

But you could call that a bias if you like. Then however, when a learned physicist refers to a photon as something actual, we should assume that the definitions produced from observations of the photoelectric effect which incline the physicists to speak of a photon as an actual thing, constitute a bias in the very same way.

As to your question, ‘did they really believe?’ Belief and the desire to believe can be very dangerous, easily manipulated and exploited. — Wayfarer

So the answer to @Andrew4Handel 's question is more like one of the "or" options, such as social control, rather than an answer of whether or not they really believed. The actual beliefs which were behind the behaviour were hidden, and the behaviour of the adults in the scenario was intended manipulate.

The child is born with the "desire to believe", and this cannot be properly represented as the "tabula rasa" because something has to support this capacity the capacity to actually believe. If we represent the belief as what is learned, then the belief itself a type of capacity, as the potential to act in a certain way. But the innate aspect, what the child is born with, is also a capacity, therefore of the same category. That makes any type of theoretical separation of the belief from the underlying support of the belief very difficult, vague, and to a degree arbitrary.

The desire to believe therefore, is also the capacity to be manipulated, as teaching is an act of manipulation. The teaching process is very clearly a process of manipulation. What role does "Truth" play in this process? One might argue, that if the teacher is honest, and what is taught is a "true" representation of what the teacher believes, then there is truth within that process. However, I would argue that upon analysis this would be exposed as mere justification, and not really Truth at all because the teacher might still hold false beliefs which are being honestly, and justifiably the beliefs which are taught.

So I propose that we must turn to the position of the student in this process of teaching, to be able to find the real role of "Truth" here. This is the underlying capacity to learn, the "desire to believe", what the student is born with. The teacher brings to the table various capacities to act, which are that which will be taught, as beliefs, and these capacity are justified by the social environment, or context of the teaching act. The student brings to the table the capacity to learn, as a predisposition. Truth is within this predisposition, the "desire to believe". It is of the highest value to the teachers because without it their efforts will be fruitless. Whether or not it is of high value to the student is another question, because I have represented it as the capacity to be manipulated.

When I say "things gravitate towards a preferable reality," I'm referring to the interpretation of "reality" that makes us feel most comfortable. Such preferences can change, and we can gravitate towards different comfortable realities depending on how our beliefs evolve. — Christoffer

Now the point is that gravitating towards what is comfortable is not necessarily gravitating toward what is good. But people can be trained through good moral education to gravitate toward what is good and this is equally a "bias". In other words, biases can be good too. The issue though is that such training requires effort, and it is a special type of effort. It's the effort of the teacher, which is made for the good of the student, the effort we make to train our children. This effort doesn't bring any good to the one who makes the effort, it brings good to the one who receives the training.

So, we can allow our children to gravitate toward what is "comfortable", or we can make the effort to train them to gravitate toward what is good. In the sense that each is a tendency to "gravitate toward", they are both types of biases.

The reality we find most comfortable is one in which we have clear and comfortable interpretations, regardless of their validity. Such bias often arises from the anxiety of the unknown. We tend to eagerly embrace a narrative of reality that offers us the most comfortable existence. — Christoffer

I do not see how this is at all possible. Since our biases arise from our training, what we have been taught, they cannot at all be related to the unknown. Our biases are deeply seated in our knowledge, and anxiety toward the unknown is something completely different from bias.

And you even describe bias as providing a form of comfort, so how could this possibly arise from anxiety of the unknown? If there is anxiety of the unknown there is no comfort, and vise versa. Bias is related to the known, and if it exists as a sort of comfort, then it is a type of self-confidence in one's own knowledge which excludes one from such anxiety toward the unknown. But just like I explained above, bias does not necessarily direct one toward comfort, biases may direct us toward making an effort, which is clearly not a comfort. If the person is trained to have great respect for the unknown, and this would involve a certain amount of anxiety toward the unknown, then this sort of bias could certainly be good, as motivation toward scientific endeavours and such things which would help us obtain knowledge.

Point being, philosophy has still been about countering biases regardless of which time it was in, it's precisely why people like Thomas Aquinas are well known, due to his careful reasoning and keeping Greek philosophical traditions alive based on Augustines previous work. — Christoffer

So I think you have this completely wrong. Philosophy is not about countering biases. Biases are inevitable as a fundamental aspect of human existence. Philosophy is concerned with distinguishing good biases from bad, such that the good can be cultured. And, it may be argued that other disciplines like science and religion deal with culturing biases. Whether such biases are bad or good is a judgement for philosophy to make.

Bias is a broad term and it doesn't just mean a failure in an argument or deduction, but also how things gravitate towards a preferable reality. — Christoffer

I think you ought to distance yourself from this concept of "preferable", and take a look at the way you use it. The word is a relative term, so it only holds meaning in relation to an end, a goal, or a person's intention. So, whenever the word is used, we can ask, 'preferable for what purpose, or what reason?'.

Your phrase "things gravitate towards a preferable reality" doesn't make any sense. If we qualify "reality" with a way of looking at reality, perspective, or ontology, you'd be saying that things gravitate toward a preferred ontology. The problem though, is that it requires effort to achieve ends, goals intentions, so "gravitate" is not an appropriate word here, because it signifies a lack of effort, going with the flow or something like that.

Now your sloppy use of words has left us with a bifurcation in potential interpretations, each going in opposing directions. By "gravitate towards", do you mean a type of going with the flow, which would incline one to proceed toward any random end or goal, as a sort of laziness, or do you mean making a concerted effort toward an identified goal or end? As you can see, these two are completely different, and there is really no way to tell, from your use of "preferable" which you are talking about. Does "gravitate towards a preferable reality" refer to the lazy attitude of ill-defined goals and lack of ambition, or does it refer to the attitude of having specified goals and making effort to achieve them?

The Pythagoreans, also known as the Divine Brotherhood of Pythagoras, are another good example of a secret society. Plato drew a lot of material from the Pythagoreans, making these secrets public, but the material was published in the form of a critique.

Bloody well deserved, considering what they accomplished with no electric power — Wayfarer

This capacity, to create, to construct, through the application of mathematics and geometry is what gave the Freemasons a unique position in relation to the Church. The Church needed the masons for the construction of their earthly structures, so it also needed that mathematics based ideology held by the masons. The masons were allowed to maintain their parallel belief system, and any parts inconsistent with those of the Church were allowed to be held in secret. Therefore, so long as the beliefs were kept secret, the Church could turn a blind eye and not exercise persecution.

This element of secrecy has left the early history of this masonic guild, prior to themselves recording data, shrouded in mystery. But you can bet that this parallel belief system is as old, if not older than the Inquisition, which we know about through the documented history recorded by the Church. Evidence is to be found in the adoption of educational materials from Arabia, into the west, such as the "Arabic numerals".

Freemasonry describes itself as a "beautiful system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols".[38] The symbolism is mainly, but not exclusively, drawn from the tools of stonemasons – the square and compasses, the level and plumb rule, the trowel, the rough and smooth ashlars, among others. Moral lessons are attributed to each of these tools, although the assignment is by no means consistent. The meaning of the symbolism is taught and explored through ritual,[8] and in lectures and articles by individual Masons who offer their personal insights and opinions. — Wikipedia

Again, that esotericism is done is a long way from that it ought be done. — Banno

The more pertinent question is, 'do you see the usefulness of esotericism'? Whether or not the end is good or evil (relation to "ought") requires prejudice to answer.

Have you ever wondered about the example used by Wittgenstein at the beginning of the "Philosophical Investigations"? The example is derived directly from stonemasonry:

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them.

This book is loaded with esotericism, hidden meaning, and I think that's why Wittgenstein's philosophy is commonly called mysticism. To disregard, and pay no attention to this aspect, the hidden meaning, is to miss out on an important part of his philosophy. If you believe that "private language" is impossible because Wittgenstein produces a logical argument which proves that private language is impossible, while simultaneously demonstrating esoterically that "private language" is very real, then you've misunderstood Wittgenstein.

The issue being that the contrived definition of "private language" which lends itself to the logical proof is not consistent with how one would commonly understand "private language". So the logical proof just demonstrates the impossibility of an imaginary, fictional "private language". Meanwhile, real private language is true and happening, and demonstrated by Wittgenstein. This sort of logical proof (unsound or false definition) is what Socrates and Plato exposed as providing the rhetorical power of sophistry.

Esotericism is essential to philosophy proper, but it's culturally subversive and so, often concealed, as a hidden layer of meaning in the texts themselves. — Wayfarer

To openly speak against the Creed, or any firmly held dogma for that matter, can be compared to suicide (Socrates, Jesus for example). In the case of The Inquisition, it wasn't even necessary to "openly speak" out, to be punished. The Freemasons enjoyed a unique position.

Are you saying that happenings are not beings, and science only treats of beings?

Is internal intuition a false category when applied to objects that aren't animals? — schopenhauer1

Intuition is a feature of the subject, and I think it is the basis for one's ontology.

Accidents are obviously the source of actual outcomes, but we do not have a science for it. — Paine

Isn't statistics and probability the science of accidents? Or would you say that this does not qualify as "science"?

For Harman, there is a
fundamental gap between objects as they exist in and for themselves, and the external
relations into which these objects enter. — Shaviro 282

The important concept here, which is often overlooked, is the "gap". In order to understand objects as individuals, or to understand activities which involve relations, there is a need to assume a gap of separation, and this might be a boundary, or void space, or some such thing. You can refer to Kant's description of pure intuitions here, as the basis for this understanding. Notice that a distinction can be made between the pure intuition of the external (space for Kant), and the pure intuition of the internal (time for Kant).

If the gap is assumed to be spatial, we have external objects to work with, but if the gap is assumed to be temporal, we have internal conceptions, changing relations and associations, interactions and causation to deal with. Whether a person chooses one or the other, as the basis of one's ontology, depends on whether the person is looking outward (Kant's external intuition), or looking inward (Kant's internal intuition). So Harman, as you describe, looking outward, apprehends external, spatial relations, and Whitehead looking inward, apprehends internal, temporal relations.

There is a way to reconcile these two perspectives, and that is to see the person, the individual self, as the gap, or boundary which separates the internal from the external. In a way it is simplistic, as it plunges you back toward the basic Platonic dualism of the internal mind and the external body. But under the modern day terms provided by Kant, the separation, or gap, may be understood as a separation between space and time, where space is external and time is internal, and the gap (being the self) separates these two.

Fortunately, also, the argument relies on the fact that we can tell wrong from right. — Ludwig V

I don't see this. Right from wrong is a judgement made by reason. If reason is fallible so is that judgement.

Philosophy is like a swamp. Swamps are for staying out of, in the first place, and for getting out of if you can in the second. — unenlightened

If you happen to stumble into the swamp, beware of the lurking alligator who has no desire to leave the swamp.

Your own words 'will become' in the context you use them, contradicts your 'time flows into the past' claim, 'will become' has not happened yet. The expansion of the universe allows for 'future' to exist as more 'distance' is created, which creates more 'time' or 'spacetime'. So the flow into the future is constant but can be experienced at different relative speeds, depending on observer reference frame (time dilation). — universeness

The expansion of the universe cannot be discussed in terms of "speed", or as you say "relative speed", because this is not considered to be a motion at all, or even the cause of any relative motion. If it were motion, then there would be motions faster than the speed of light, and that would contradict the premises employed in the detection of such "expansion". So it is incorrect to say that 'distance' is created. And physicists have no principles whereby they could explain or describe how spacetime could actual expand. "Expansion" is just a term they use to refer to what is unknown or confusing to them, as other terms like "dark energy" and "dark matter" are used in the same way, to refer to things which escape the predictive capacity of the hypothesis.

So it is your idea which is contradictory. And since you use reference to the unknown in your attempt to justify the real existence of the future, this just serves to demonstrate how faulty your premise is. You are claiming that it must be real because you can put a name to it like "spatial expansion".

And, you haven't shown how my words are contradictory. We can readily talk about non-existent things, your idea that things in the future must exist because we can talk about them is unfounded, and proven untrue through your own demonstration.

Yes, the end of the previous cycle, NO intentionality required. — universeness

So this is your real explanation? One cycle begins at the end of the previous cycle. How do you propose to determine the point which marks the beginning and end, when each point on the circle is the same as equidistance from the centre? That's why circular motion is said to be eternal. Your cyclical model really provides no reality for a beginning or end, just an assertion that the beginning of one cycle was the end of the previous cycle.

We could say the same thing about the present moment, the beginning of one moment is the end of another moment. There's nothing wrong with saying that. But unless we can determine a real boundary between moments, such statements are meaningless. As is your statement about the beginning and ending of cycles, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's absolutely meaningless.

No, the cause is the expansion of spacetime and it happens during every time unit. — universeness

There you go, reference to the unknown "expansion of spacetime", and your contradictory explanation of it, in your attempt to argue that something is known. The "expansion of spacetime", "dark energy", "dark matter" and such names, just refer to anomalies which are observed as an effect of the application of theory. Instead of recognizing that the observational data which is inconsistent with the applied hypothesis indicates that the applied hypothesis is incorrect, as a good scientist adhering to the principles of the scientific method ought to do, you simply give the anomalies names and pretend that these are real things that you can talk about.

How is that different from assigning the name "God", and pretending that God is a real thing we can talk about. Well, in your case there is a multitude of fictional things (gods) to talk about, one for each place the hypothesis fails, and each failing hypothesis, but in the case of theism, there is only one, "God".

And of course, you apply the fictional and meaningless "time unit". Until the real boundary to the proposed "unit" is demonstrated, this is meaningless nonsense in any ontology.

Your conclusion fails imo, as it requires an 'intentionality,' which itself would need to be cyclical. — universeness

Intentionality isn't cyclical. That's the problem with the materialist/physicalist representation of it, it ends up being cyclical, when in reality there is nothing to indicate that it ought to be. Since the materialist representation shows time as flowing from past to future, instead of from future to past, the only way that it can accommodate intentionality which relies on a future to past flow of time for conception, is to allow for that looping aspect. This creates the cyclical representation of intention. In reality, time only flows one way, into the past. The future (May 13 for example) will become past as time flows into the past. So the materialist representation of time, which shows the past as prior to the future, and therefore things in the past as causing what will come to be in the future, is fundamentally wrong. And the only way that they can allow for the real flow of time to have an influence on the way that they understand and represent time, is through these loops, which inevitably become externalities, and infinite cycles.

The only path open to humans who exist 'within the notion of time,' is to suggest that the concept of 'eternal' has NO beginning in time. — universeness

The conventional Christian conception of "eternal" is "outside of time". Time is measured as it passes, so only past time is capable of having been measured (measurable), and the future is therefore outside of time. All real time, as measurable time, is in the past. But the true cause of what will be at the present, must be prior to the present, therefore in the future, so this cause must also be outside of time.

There is another way to apprehend this. Imagine that there is a beginning to time. At the moment when time began there was necessarily no past time, yet there was necessarily future. And for time to begin, there must be a cause. Therefore, this cause was necessarily in the future. For time to continue passing there must always be a cause, and this cause is always in the future.

My viewpoint in this makes me an atheist and my main challenge to your 'eternal intentionality,' is to either make it's existence and continuing presence/existence known, NOW, or else, I see no rational reason for YOU to maintain your position — universeness

So, that is the rational, explained above. As time passes, there must be cause of things being as they are, at each moment of passing time. Since time flows from the future to the past, the cause of things being as they are at the present must always be in the future in relation to what comes to be at the present. This is the cause which is always outside of time (eternal), as prior to time.

We experience this cause which is outside of time as intentionality. Whenever we want things to be in a specific way at a specific moment as time passes, we make an intentional act, and this causes the situation to come to be as we desired. The act of the will is prior to what comes to be from it. So intention is how we as human beings, partake in this eternal cause which is always prior to time.

The continued hiddenness of this eternal intentionality... — universeness

That the future is always hidden from us, and no part of it can ever be sensed by any of our senses, in no way indicates that it is not real. It is logically necessary to conclude that the future must be in some way real, or else time could not be passing. As explained above, the cause of time passing is always in the future in relation to the present.

mired in primal fear of taking FULL ownership and responsibility for our own existence — universeness

The idea that we ought to take full ownership and responsibility for our own existence is utterly ridiculous. Do you not allow that your parents are somewhat responsible for your existence, and that your schoolers are somewhat responsible for your ideology?

I might agree, but materialism has no concept of telos. There is no possibility of intentionality outside the intentional actions of agents. — Wayfarer

I think that the existence of intentionality is the pivotal issue to both philosophy and religion. Religion takes intentionality for granted, and sets up rules and conventions for the guidance of intentional acts, which become traditions. But natural philosophy, science, chews away at the underpinnings of what was taken for granted through understanding of "natural processes", and propositions of causation. This produces a shift in what is taken for granted, natural processes, rather than intentionality.

The two, natural processes and intentionality, show themselves to be incompatible because intention is based on a view toward the future, and causation is based on a view toward the past. So the two look at the activity of the passing of time at the present, in opposite directions.

The two perspectives can be characterized as free will toward future actions, and determinism from past reality. Social conventions shape which is taken for granted, such that we tend to view the other from the perspective which we take for granted, making the other a sort of illusion. The modern environment, of a society shaped by scientific development inclines us to see intentionality from the causation based perspective, such that the mainstream force, or flow of time from the past is primary. Then intention gets modeled as a looping, feedback activity, an eddy in the flow. This lends itself to the "cyclical" representation of intention.

if you want something with more scientific rigor behind it, then I vote for the conformal cyclic cosmology of Roger Penrose or > 3d superstring theory, or Mtheory with each universe being created by interacting 5D branes. These extra dimensions of the very small, that are 'wrapped around' every point in our 3d existence, are undetectable to us but are the reason why some posit nonsense such as 'something from nothing.' Quantum fluctuations are probably caused by these extra dimensions. The system is most likely (so for me, warrants a high credence level,) cyclical and eternal.
All of these similar 'cyclical and eternal' proposals are far far more likely and far far more rational that any theological posit (normally flavoured by some supernatural agency with intentionality) I have ever heard and any I am ever likely to hear about. — universeness

The "cyclical" model is probably best presented, in its most comprehensible form, by Aristotle, as the eternal circular motions of the planets. The cause of the eternal cycle is said to be an intentionality, the divine contemplation, a thinking, thinking on thinking. I have argued elsewhere that Aristotle dismisses this proposal, as untenable, though he is commonly cited as a proponent.

The important takeaway though is that such eternal cycles can only be comprehended as requiring a cause. Intention, being incorporated into the system as a looping feedback activity is the only thing available which is capable of producing such an eternal circle. This places intention as prior, in the absolute sense; prior as the cause of eternal cycles, and timeless balances like symmetry, and prior as the cause of semiotics.

It is this recognition, which hands priority to intention, as the view toward the future, rather than causal determinism, (the view toward the past), as the true guiding perspective. This inclines us toward religion. Then we come to understand that natural processes, as we apprehend them, really cannot be taken for granted, and the only thing which can really be taken for granted is the intention, the view toward the future, which when we turn around to see the past, has shaped us in our being at the present.

They are using the justice system to engage in lawfare, and the ease with which they can do it makes the system a bloody joke. — NOS4A2

Don't act surprised! The man with thousands of lawsuits under his belt. who lived his life engaging the legal system against others, with the greatest ease, anytime that it appeared to be profitable, has now had the tables turned on him. Could you expect anything other than this?

There are philosophers who are pragmatists and pragmatism(s) is(are) philosophical positions inside philosophy, so I don't accept the dichotomy implicit above. It seems possible you are conflating epistemology in philosophy with the correspondance theory of truth.
I was also reacting to what I think is overly binary in saying he 'deceived himself'. — Bylaw

Fair enough, I'll qualify my statement: "a certain type of philosopher seeks the truth". The one's who do not seek the truth, but seek some useful principles, pragmatists, might still be correctly called "philosophers" by common convention.

You're still going to need both and I was supporting what he had asserted around that. I am certainly not saying we can't be fooled by our senses, just as we can by reason. Unless you are a rationalist, there are going to be empirical facets to getting past illusions. You can absolutely decide that X, based on sense impressions, was false, but any demonstration of this will have empirical work around it. — Bylaw

The point though, is that reasoning is more reliable then mere sensation with memory. Furthermore, some types of reasoning are more reliable than others. The ones dependent on sensory input, like induction, have been demonstrated to be less reliable. So, the further we can get away from being dependent on sensation, the more certain we will be in our knowledge, and we can conclude that sensation tends to mislead us. When it's clear that sensation misleads us, and the further we get away from being dependent on it, the more certain our knowledge will be, how do you conclude that we will always need both?

Science is empirical. It is based on observations. — Bylaw

Yes, and this is obviously the weakness of science. It's the problem of induction which Hume pointed to. That is why the statement of the op is correct, science is irrelevant to the problem of consciousness. This is because we must get beyond the limitations of science to properly understand consciousness, and if we fall for the idea that empirical science is capable of providing such an understanding that would be a case of being deceived by your senses.

And, hey, that was a kind of slimy way to talk to me. I was not impolite to you so you didn't need to go ad hom. And before I am told I don't know what ad hom means, yes, you didn't make a formal ad hom fallacy, but it was definitely 'to the man.' And the first paragraph was also slimy though less direct. — Bylaw

I was referring to a particular instance, as an example, to demonstrate a general point. This is a common procedure. The example happened to be you. I thought perhaps a first hand example of how a person gets deceived by one's senses, might help to prove the point. If you took it as an insult, you shouldn't have because we all get deceived in this way. Anyway, it appears like you did take it as an insult, so I will apologize. I am sorry, no harm was intended.

Talk about senses in the sense of sense of oneself getting in the way of things. — Bylaw

Sorry, your personal example doesn't seem to work. I can't figure out what you're trying to say.

I believe a solution is possible, not that I have a solution. You'd probably have to reread a bunch of my posts to really understand. If we start with the premise that certain aspects of reality (like the temporal continuity discussed) appear to us a unintelligible, there are two principal ways to respond to this. One way is that we can conclude that such an aspect is itself inherently unintelligible. The other way is that we apprehend the appearance of unintelligibility as a product of our approach. In the latter case we reassess and analyze our approach. In the former case, we give up any effort to try and understand, as necessarily fruitless. The former is what I call unphilosophical. Check this post:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/802467

The fallibility of science is just a facet of the fallibility of human beings. I'm guessing, but I guess you are taking this line because you want to escape Hume's problem. — Ludwig V

Exactly, because Hume's method is to portray reason as infallible, then demonstrate the fallibility of our assumptions about causation, and induction in general, and conclude therefore that these types of reasoning are not properly called "reason". That is a problem, because it leaves these processes without any category, no means to understand them, therefore no means to address and rectify their problems. Instead, we ought to class them as forms of reasoning which are more fallible than some others, therefore these forms of reasoning have issues which need to be addressed.

So you put your faith in reason because a rational principle would resolve Hume's problem? — Ludwig V

Yes, look what I said early. Hume wanted to place such assumptions as based in some sort of custom or habit, and then not face the reality that reasoning is itself a habit or custom. This is a problem which inheres within Hume's approach to rationalism. He seems to want to give reason a sort of divine, infallible status, as if it were separate from a bodily function of human beings, but this is a mischaracterization of the human reasoning process. So my position is not as you say, to put my "faith in reason", it is to put my faith in the human capacity to adapt, change, and evolve reason in a way which is conducive toward truth.

One facet is the theorems and deductions, which give transcendent certainty. — Ludwig V

This is exactly Hume's mistake, to portray "reason" in this divine way, as something which produces "transcendent certainty". This means that we have to create a divide, a separation within the category of "reason", such that some forms of reasoning produce divine certainty, while others do not. That creates an inconsistency within the category, because what is necessary to some types, the declared "certainty" is not necessary to other types. So Hume's solution is to remove those types which do not create certainty, from the category, leaving only the divine forms, which produce transcendent certainty as qualifying for the category of "reason".

But this is a mistake. There is no such divine form of reasoning which produces transcendent certainty. All forms of reasoning suffer from some degree of fallibility, as activities of fallible human beings, so all forms of reasoning, including deductive, inductive, abductive, etc., ought to be classed together, and they can be judged according to their degree of reliability or fallibility.

When things go wrong, we cannot blame the rules which are by definition immune to mistakes and error. So we blame ourselves instead. In other words, reason has success logic. — Ludwig V

The issue here, is that we, the human beings, are the ones who created the rules for the logic. These rules are just "customs", therefore they are not immune to mistake, and yes we can blame them, when we can demonstrate the faults which inhere within them.

This is where there is a need to differentiate "custom" from "habit". A "habit" is a property of an individual, while a "custom" is attributed to a group of people. There is a difference because all customs are habits, but not all habits are customs. We tend to judge habits as good or bad, and when a habit is a custom, simply being a custom does not ensure that the habit is a good habit. We can say that "correct", and "right" are descriptions based in custom, such that rules and laws which conform to customs provide us for judgement of correct, and right, in our judgements of habits which conform to customs. If you act according to custom you act correctly. But since there is always inconsistency between one culture and another concerning some customs, we must allow a higher standard of judgement (good for example), whereby we can judge some customs which produce correct and right acts according to one culture, as actually not good.

You can trust reason in the abstract sense, but human attempts to apply it are not immune from mistake. When you think you have the rational solution, you may be mistaken. I think of reasoning as a human activity, rather than an abstract structure, so perhaps I have a slightly different perspective from you. — Ludwig V

So the mistake is evident here when you say "reason in the abstract sense". If you maintain your principle, "reasoning as a human activity", this principle itself is an abstract principle. It states a general process, as an abstraction "reasoning", or we could call it "reason". But what it says of this process, as what is essential or necessary to the process, is that it is a human activity. If we look at human activities as fallible, such that this is necessary, or essential to all human activities, then we can conclude that reasoning, or "reason" is necessarily fallible, through deductive logic.

Now we have excluded what you call "reason in the abstract sense" from our category of reasoning, such that it is just a fiction, imaginary, and not an abstraction at all, because it is not supported by any logic. We simply have this name, "reason in the abstract sense", which is really oxymoronic, because it is supposed to point to some sort of abstract reasoning, but it is not supported by any type of abstraction. If instead, we allow some sort of reality to this form of "reason in the abstract sense", we'd have to make up all sorts of fictional ideals, "transcendent certainty" etc., as defining features of it, and what would be the point of that?

. Hypotheses and theories are critically important, but when theory and data conflict, it is theory that needs to be changed. — Ludwig V

But I'm arguing the fallibility of science in general, because of its reliance on sense data, so this is just circular.

I thought you were against Hume's thesis. — Jacques

I agree with Hume's criticism of induction, as indicated. I just don't agree with how he proceeds from there. That the problem exists is really quite evident, but I think that Hume moves in the wrong direction, toward portraying it as unresolvable rather than toward finding principles to resolve it.

Are you happy to doubt that you are reading this? — Banno

Where doubt enters this scenario, is with the question of what does it mean to be "reading this". Then we may consider the statement of the op:

I made a thread about skepticism and said that we cannot coherently deny that language transmits meaning because by understanding this sentence you have proven that language transmits meaning. — Andrew4Handel

That meaning actually transmits from you to me, in the act of me reading what you wrote, is highly doubtful. This would require that I understand "reading this" in the same way that you do. Otherwise I cannot assume that I got the meaning you intended to give me, and meaning did not transmit. Discussions here at TPF demonstrate that you and I do not understand words in a similar way. Therefore I can conclude that meaning does not transmit, and I most likely understand "reading this" in a way other than you intend. Since you wrote "reading this" and you are proposing that someone else is the one doing the reading in the way that you intend by "reading", and it is likely that the person is reading in a way other than what you intend by that word, doubt is clearly justified.

It decieved him in a context that is almost completely useless to most of us most of the time. So, yes, if one wants to understand the motions of the solar system parts, his assessment is off, in nearly every other human context, he's got a perfect fine interpretation. And one that can be useful.
And reason can also deceive. But since he goes ahead and advocates for using both, I'm not sure what the overhanding problem is. — Bylaw

That is the difference between pragmatics and truth as providing the guiding principle. For reasons unknown, the philosopher seeks the truth. Some people feel comfortable with pragmaticism, and accept without doubt, the principles which currently serve them. The philosopher always wants to move ahead and proceed toward the truth.

Seems to miss the point. We don't have to give up either. Reason is pretty useless without the senses, at least to any empiricist. IOW the senses are, for example, the foundation of science: in observations. — Bylaw

Reread my post, I said "when the two disagree". It seems like you misunderstand the nature of science. The senses are not the foundation of science, science is based in hypotheses, theory. Your empiricist theory has misled you, another example of how human beings allow their senses to deceive them.

The cues that normally allow us to know when we are moving are missing, just as they are missing in an aeroplane. — Ludwig V

This is exactly why it's correct to say that the senses deceive. When the sensible "cues" are missing, we draw the wrong conclusion. You say: "The sun does go up and down, from the point of view of the surface of the earth. It could not be otherwise." Obviously, it could be otherwise. It could be that the surface of the earth is spinning in a circle, and the sun is staying put. And if you wrongly assume that you, on the surface of the earth are staying put, because the "cues" of moving are missing, you would wrongly conclude that the sun goes up and down from the point of view of the surface of the earth. Therefore, you failed to account for the motion of the earth in your assumption, and allowed your sensed to deceive you.

Senses and reason are both capable of misleading us and are our only resources for finding the truth. Junking one in favour of the other is incomprehensible to me.

I have a feeling that the conditions are not such as to provide a basis for progress in this debate. Do you? — Ludwig V

If you do not see that reason is far more reliable than sense, and when the two disagree it is far more reasonable to accept reason over sense, then I think you're right when you say further progress is impossible.

If consciousness does not arise from the physical properties we know, and it does not arise from something like panprotopsychism (and I'm sure many here do not believe it does), then what? — Patterner

Hi Patterner, welcome to the forum. I'll answer this question with a simple "stay tuned..."

But I am sure that the senses do not systematically deceive us. — Ludwig V

Why do you think that the sun appears to come up and go down, when this has been proven to be false? And why does it look like we see the full range of electromagnetic waves as the colours of the rainbow, when this is just a small portion? If this is not a 'systematic deception' than what is it? And how would you describe hallucination if not a form of deception?

I'm also sure that simplicity is not an option, but a necessity. — Ludwig V

That is the essence of deception, it is dome because it is deemed to be a "necessity". Plato also exposed this feature. Are you familiar with what is commonly referred to as the royal lie? Over simplification of something extremely complex, for the person's own good, is deception.

If we had senses that perceived everything that's going on at the level of electrons, we would be unable to grasp the bigger picture that we need. It's not about deception; it's about pragmatics. — Ludwig V

This is a faulty conclusion. There is nothing to prevent an intelligent mind from understanding both big picture and small picture at the same time. What is more likely the case, is that the physical sensing apparatus evolves much slower than the mind, because the brain must allow for vast possibility and rapid changes in thinking patterns, even over the lifespan of one individual. This allows the conscious mind to evolve much quicker than the physical sensing system. So the senses are suited to a less capable consciousness, which human beings had prior to the rapid advancements of the mind, in the last few thousand years. Therefore the senses are presenting very simplistic, over simplified, and underdeveloped images to the mind because the physical aspects of the human sense apparatus were developed when the mind was much less advanced, and the body cannot change fast enough to keep pace with the rapid advancements and evolution of the mind. In other words, the human body still has essentially the same physical sensing apparatus as it had thousands of years ago, but it's mental capacity has greatly advanced. Therefore the ends or purpose of the "pragmatics" you refer to, are greatly outdated, and this is analogous to continuing with a story about Santa Clause when the person is a grown adult, it's nothing but deception.

This is a classic example of what I mean. There's a story - I don't know if it's true - that someone observed to Wittgenstein that it is easy to understand why the ancients thought that the sun goes round the earth, because that's the way it looks. To which Wittgenstein replied "How would it look if it looked as if the earth was spinning?" The answer is, exactly the same. — Ludwig V

I did not use the word "look", I intentionally said "feel", to avoid this objection. Do you know what it feels like to be spun around? And when you are being spun, isn't it very obvious that the things in your field of vision are not moving around you, but you are being spun? Your example provides no bearing on the issue.

There is a reason why we have a multitude of different senses, different sense organs directed toward different aspects of the world. Each one, is in itself, by itself, very deceptive. Through comparison of what the different senses provide for us, the mind can reduce the deception. But reduction is not elimination.

As to electrons, we are simply not equipped to perceive electrons directly. I'm cautious about pronouncing on the sub-atomic world; I don't understand the physics well enough. I am clear that our senses give us the information they are equipped to gather. By paying attention to our perceptions more closely, we work out that physical objects are very different at small scale. Our perceptions did not deceive us, any more than a normal microscope deceives us when it does not reveal electrons. We misinterpreted them, but now have a better understanding because we paid closer attention to the information they give us. — Ludwig V

What you say here is a direct indication of the point I am making. There is a whole "sub-atomic" world which our senses are hiding from us. But you misrepresent, or misinterpret the actual problem. You say the senses are "not equipped" to provide us with information about this sub-atomic world. That is clearly false, because it is exactly the case that this is the type of information which the senses are providing us with. The sense of smell for instance, is providing us with information about the interaction of atoms at a molecular level, and this is exactly an interaction of electrons and sub-atomic particles. The sense of sight is providing us with information about the interaction of light (photons) with the electron structure of the various different molecules. And the sense of hearing is providing us with information about the vibrations of the massive parts of atoms.

So it is clearly the case that we are equipped to sense the activities of the sub-atomic world that's exactly what the senses do. However, the problem is that in the relation between the senses and the brain, the information provided through the sense organs is interpreted and represented by the brain, with the principal purpose of remembering, in a very basic and simplistic way. The human being's capacity for memory is very limited so this huge amount of data rolling in at an incredibly high speed must be vastly simplified. This simplification is essentially false memory, created by a very deficient memory system which requires that the sense data be overly simplified, and when the conscious mind looks at the memory as "true" it is deceived. When the conscious mind visits the memory, it is deceived into thinking that the memory is giving an accurate account which it is not. Furthermore, the conscious mind's experience of "the present" is nothing other than what the brain is submitting to memory, limited further by attention, so this is equally faulty and deceptive.

However, the conscious mind in its totality goes far beyond simple experience of the present, and memory, it has anticipations, intentions, desires, will, and judgement to deal with as well. These other aspects, intention and the desire to know, (philosophy), have led the conscious mind to a position high above what the physical body provides for it. That is why we have produced all sorts of instruments for analyzing different aspects of the world, which go far beyond the limitations of the underdeveloped physical system of the human body, like the electron microscope you mentioned. The simple fact of the matter is that the relatively primitive physical body of the human being has not been able to keep up with the rapid development of the conscious mind and its understanding. Therefore to fall back onto the observational capacities of the human body, asserting superiority and "truth" to sensation, rather than moving forward into the realm of what logic dictates, even though this may appear contradictory to sense data, is to fall for that deception.

Your conclusion has a certain paradoxical appeal. I agree that sometimes we draw the wrong conclusions from what our senses tell us (that's a bit over-simplified, but it will do for now); but surely we sometimes get it right. Similarly, reality is partially intelligible to us and partly not, and we work hard to understand the latter part. You seem very fond of comprehensive statements, but the truth is more mundane than that. For example, you say:- — Ludwig V

i see things in the opposite way to this. You say the truth is mundane. I believe that the truth is not mundane at all, and is way more complicated than any of us can possibly imagine. Quantum physics gives us the tip of this iceberg of complexity. I think our bodily systems greatly simplify a very complex reality, so that we sense extremely complex things as very simple. We've evolved this way, we must start from the bottom up in our understanding as evolving beings, so things must be put into the most simple form possible, to begin our understanding.

Look, we see the sun as rising and setting, when logic tells us the earth is really spinning. There's also supposed to be some sort of spinning motion with electrons around atoms. Do you think that living beings are incapable of 'feeling' that the planet they are on is spinning? Or, do you think it's more likely that all these spinning motions that logic tells us are occurring around us, and within us, are completely compensated for within the living system, to give us a seemingly stable position from which to observe? I think all these complex motions are hidden from the conscious mind, not sensed, because the senses have evolved so as to hide all these complexities from us because they are just too difficult. All that our senses bring to our conscious minds are some very simplistic motions, to begin us on our task of understanding.

And I say "Don't we also say things like "between t1 and t2 this process was going on?" — Ludwig V

Sure, but think about how we describe and understand processes, it always comes down to a matter of one state changing to another. We can name a process, even provide a brief description of it, but what really provides meaning and understanding is how the process takes us from A to B. A is the cause, B is the effect. This is why the truth about the passage of time is not mundane at all, it's actually very complex. We like to think of it as mundane, because this facilitates 'the simple life". In reality life is not simple, so all we're doing with this type of notion is facilitating the deception.

I agree with the first quotation, but not with the second and, although I accept that we often get things wrong, I'm not at all sure that it is because our sensations deceive us; it may be that they neither deceive nor reveal. The problem may like in our interpretations. — Ludwig V

In the first passage, I describe how my understanding of what we get from sensation differs from Hume's. There is a problem though with my perspective, and that is that for logical purposes, we describe things in terms of static states, in the same way that Hume describes sensation gives us. We say things like "this was the situation at time1, and this was the situation at time2. So the reason I believe Hume's position is incorrect, is because I think these static states are produced by us, by our minds, for the purpose of applying logic, and it is incorrect to say that this is what sensation gives to the mind. What sensation gives to the mind is a temporal continuity, and the mind breals the continuity into distinct states, in a variety of different ways, depending on the intended purposes. That is why I argued earlier that all the breaks in the continuity which constitute the divisions between t1 and t2, and such, are subjective, imposed for various purposes.

There is a fundamental incompatibility between the perception of reality as a persistently changing continuity, and as a succession of separate but contiguous discrete instances. This is an incommensurability which mathematicians have not been able to resolve. Therefore, one of the ways of representing the world must be wrong, either the way of sensation, as a continuity, or the way of logic, as a succession of discrete instances.

The inclination (intuition) is to accept the sense representation as the correct representation, and conclude that the way we use logic to represent reality is just a model, and this model is incapable of providing a true representation. But this renders that part of reality, the procession of time, as fundamentally, and necessarily unintelligible. However, as I explained in that post there is a potential way around this problem. It is completely possible that the way that our senses present the world to us is "deceptive", as explained by Plato. And from this perspective we can say that it is absolutely possible that the procession of time is truly intelligible to the human mind as a succession of discrete instances, and we just need to identify those breaks in time which constitutes the separate moments.

So, you say that the problem may lie in our interpretation. This is consistent with what I've argued. if reality is as I've said above, consisting of discrete moments, then the faulty interpretation is the assumption that how the senses present reality to us, as a continuity, is completely consistent with the way that reality actually is. If, on the other hand, we assume that the approach of our logic is incorrect, or inconsistent with the way that reality is, then we assume that reality is necessarily unintelligible. So to allow for the possibility that reality is intelligible to us, we must assume that this other assumption, that 'how the senses present reality to us is completely consistent with the way that reality actually is' is the faulty premise of interpretation. So to allow for the possibility that reality is intelligible to us, we must assume that the senses deceive us.

The difficulty is to see exactly what "how" means and to understand that asking such a question means rejecting Hume's idea of atomistic idea of experience (which analytic philosophy largely inherited from Hume). — Ludwig V

Yes, this I believe is the root of the problem. Hume described the experience of sensing as a series of static states which may change as time passes. This implies a break, a divide between each state. Then he moves to address the problem of how the mind relates one state to another. The distinct states being what sensation gives us. But i think that in reality, sensation is an experience of continuous activity, which we produce breaks in through withdrawing our attention, either intentionally or unintentionally.

This is a substantial difference because on the one hand we have the perspective of sensation providing images of natural states with implied natural divisions between them (Hume), and on the other hand we have the position that sensation provides natural continuous activity, with the sensing being imposing artificial divisions onto that continuity. So from the Humean perspective, it appears necessary for the observing mind to understand the natural relation between natural distinct states, in order to understand the natural progression of these states, and this is what he thinks of as causation. But if the other perspective is right, then sensation does not provide us with any naturally distinct states, and no natural separations. So any description of causation by this means would be to describe the relations between completely artificial separations.

But from the other perspective, these separations are apprehended as completely artificial, so they may even be totally arbitrary, or at best the separations are imposed in different ways for different purposes, (analogous to Wittgenstein's boundaries in meaning). So the difference manifests as Hume looking for an independent, objective relation between cause and effect, a relation which creates a unity through a natural form of synthesis, while the other perspective looks for the subjective principles of analysis whereby we divide what is present as a natural continuity.

I'm afraid I disagree with both of you. You misunderstand Hume. His position is that scepticism is right if it recommends careful and judicious examination of the facts and judicious decisions based on them, wrong if it is applied excessively. I think that's about right. It's not a case of radical scepticism (Pyrrhonism according to Hume) or nothing. — Ludwig V

I definitely wasn't saying that Hume is anti-skeptic. I see all philosophy as fundamentally skeptical. Even the anti-skeptic would be skeptical of skepticism. if one was just stating certainties, that would not be philosophy. The issue of course is the way that a philosopher places limits to one's own skepticism. No philosopher, not even Socrates, ever seems to be skeptical in an absolute sense, they always seem to believe that they get to the bottom somehow (In the skeptical form of analysis), and here they claim to find some sort of self-evident truth, something to take for granted (eg, Descartes' "I think therefore I am."). It may be the case that the best philosophers are the ones who never seem to get to the bottom, never finding any self-evident truth, and always remaining skeptical, open minded.

Hume's position is that even though our inferences are not well grounded, we will continue to make them, as a result of what he calls "custom or habit". He then makes a sequence of moves, as I outlined in an earlier post, to arrive at a non-sceptical position that "uniform experience" is proof. One may or may not think that's legitimate; it's certaintly dubious. There is also the problem that experience is not uniform, unless we select among our experiences. Which, as you are indicating, we do, and in the process notice differences as well as similarities. — Ludwig V

So the point I make above, is that this proposed "uniform experience" is not an inference, a custom or a habit at all. It is simply a statement of description of the sense experience, an observation. Therefore there is no need to inquire about the mental activity which creates this uniformity, it is not within the realm of conscious thought, and cannot be described as habit or custom.. However, since we are prone, (by habit), in our mental activity to impose divisions on this given uniformity, and we do seek truth, we ought to inquire whether there is any true, natural separations, upon which such divisions could be based.

This requires a deeper form of skepticism. We must cast doubt on what the senses provide for us, in the way of Plato, who teaches us that the senses deceive. From this perspective we can apprehend the continuity which is given by sensation as manufactured, created by the apparatus which produces the sense experience, and therefore there is the potential that this is not a true representation. Now we would have the proper platform for inquiring into the possibility of true divisions, the true separations in time, which the experience of sensation, as a continuity, hides from us in its deceptive ways.

That is, the very concept of being free to say whatever you want without reprisal (the tenure system basically) is being misued to only allow those club members in that pass a certain belief litmus test. — Hanover

Life at the university, conform or be cast out. Option number three, pretend until you're tenured. But how are the deceptive bastards who get in through pretense treated? The real pretense is that this system is supposed to support diversity.