Too kitsch?

New start with old friends.

Just looked and your membership status is 'under review'.
Well you had a pretty good run...

A philosophy of language suggestion:
Reality without reference - Davidson.

It may look empty but it feels heavy, worst of both worlds.

I actually find it pretty freaky to look at, feels like a large disconnect between the image and me.

Nothing too serious, I have delayed sleep phase syndrome. My body naturally adapts to sleeping between ~4:30am and 12:30pm. Trying to work 9-5 for me is like a normal person living with a few hours of jetlag. After a couple weeks I start to become depressed and barely functional. With treatment I am now sleeping ~2am - 10am which is much better than before but I can't move my clock much earlier (there is some seasonal variation). It's not a problem for now as I'm back in uni and I can sleep fine when I don't need to get up early but afterwards it will be an issue again.

Also this is my brain.

Things can probably turn on the way that we are using sympathy or empathy. If it means a general concern with other, then I would agree. But when used in a strict sense, to my mind there is no single foundation for our moral motivations. Elements like, empathy, a sense of justice, a feeling of responsibility or may be a desire for social order - are in play. For instance if I see someone shoplifting from the supermarket I feel a desire to stop them or curse them or at least belittle them in my thoughts. I can't see how that would be related to empathy.
This mixes into the other thread in which I believe we can feel responsibility to stop a tragedy without being able to feeling empathy towards the people it effects.

That is to say if empathy goes we are not left with the a bunch of cold rational equations.

Well I expected it wouldn't be possible, but I always thought that it was a bit too easy to sign up and spout off in pf. Good posters tend to lurk a bit anyway. Open is good, but some kind of speed hump? Actually, needing approval would work - you give it every time, but they have to wait a bit. If it's flagged up in advance, most spammers won't bother to sign up. — unenlightened

One thing that PF had that I think was quite effective was the automatic text speak/spelling detection. When I first signed up I bashed out a reply to someone only to be automatically informed that I should fix up my post. At the time I thought you were a bunch of snobs who I couldn't be bothered with and left. I'm sure plenty of other newbies have had similar experiences.
It's great because it gives a poster information about the quality required without actually making it more difficult to get going. I doubt that's possible here but would be good to at least provide newbies with a condensed version of the posting guidelines when they sign up.
I would be really hesitant to make it harder for people to sign up or have a waiting period. Currently it will be difficult to get more members as we are not on google and even if we don't intend to be, we are in competition with the other forums.
For sure it's reasonable if we get bigger but for now I reckon we shouldn't put barriers in front of people joining.

In fact, there's good evidence to show that this kind of universalizing is what the least moral among us fall back on to fill the vacuum of their moral character. I've just been listening to an interview with a researcher who questioned prisoners diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder on their moral beliefs, and their answers tended to be very much in line with rule-based systems of morality, i.e. you shouldn't steal, you shouldn't swear, you shouldn't kill etc., but with a striking lack of gradation as if the interviewees were reeling off a shopping list of moral requirements without really engaging with them because their sense of morality was based much more on their understanding of the dictats of authority than any personal sense of sympathy with the victims of the stated transgressions. — Baden

This is really interesting. I have been thinking about moral rules in analogue with the way people teach chess. At first the beginner learns rules, 'develop knights before bishops; castle quickly...' later they learn more complicated rules 'place your rook on the seventh rank...', while the best players don't evaluate positions in terms of these rules at all. Rather they use their intuition from experience playing in many situations. Splitting the game up into rules is an oversimplification and while they may often be relevant they will also lead you a stray. So from that perspective it would make sense that the most morally out-of-touch would be the ones that are most reliant on the rules.

And I think sympathy must be at the core of morality, sympathy tempered by reason. You can't rely on reasons for action alone because then you are not really inhabiting morality as StreetlightX suggested above. — Baden

I'm not sure about this, I think that reasons for action include moral feelings i.e that we cannot separate the reason's to do something from the emotions attached to it. That's part of what is wrong with using rules they try to separate rationality from sentiments.

There's an interesting article called against empathy in which the author argues that in many ways empathy hinders our moral actions, with a bunch of philosophers writing responses to it.

I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system, choosing to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences. — Paul Bloom

Hey @Baden yeh I agree there is a problem with my view, because I would definitely feel responsibility to prevent a future famine if I was placed in a position of power over the situation. Part of it is that we think we are referring to future individuals but we aren't. And as mentioned above there's some tension because I don't actually think that there will be no real people in future generations rather that we can't feel empathy towards them. Empathy requires stories about individuals but these stories will be fictions. Not sure how to resolve it.

I think the problem with Putnam's argument is that whether or not the line traced in the sand depicts Churchill is not entirely (or even at all) determined by whether or not the ant intended it to be such a depiction, because it is at least partly dependent on the subjective evaluation of other creatures. Abstract art functions on pretty much exactly this possibility. — Aaron R

Hey AaronR, Putnams point is about reference. He thinks that there needs to be the correct causal connection between the picture and Churchill such that for the picture to refer to Churchill, Churchill's existence itself must have had some influence. A closer example to what we are talking about could be if I write a book with characters that were supposed to exist 100 years from now. In 105 years time Jason finds the book and thinks 'this is an exact description of my mate John'. He may present the book to John as a book about him, but after they check the author, shmik (2015) they'll likely conclude that the book can't be referring to John, because the author never knew (of) John i.e there was no causal connection between John's existence and the words in the book.
I'm sure as with your art examples there are some literary theories which would hold that the book is referring to John but I doubt any of them would hold that I, the author was referring to John when I wrote the book.

But I can both think about and direct my empathy toward fictional characters, can't I? Isn't that one of the very things that makes reading fictional stories so compelling? — Aaron R

The problem is not that these individuals in the future literally are fictional characters rather that we cannot refer to them. So when think we are talking about them (as individuals) we are really just talking about and feeling empathy towards fictional characters, as we fail to refer.

Hey
I actually agree with everything you wrote. In the OP the particularism section got a little long so I rushed the talk about practical reason. I didn't intend the meaning 'being practical' when I used the term 'practical reason'. I meant it in this way:

In classical philosophical terms, it is very important to distinguish three domains of human activity: theoretical reason, which investigates the truth of contingent events as well as necessary truths; practical reason, which determines whether a prospective course of action is worth pursuing; and productive or technical reason, which attempts to find the best means for a given end. — From Wiki

Really it's just another shot at traditional moral views. The point is the negative one, that we cannot isolate the moral aspects of a situation to assess which course of action we should take. Instead deciding what should be done (or worth pursuing) requires also taking into account other reasons and motivations which don't fall under the umbrella of morality. By the way these veiws don't necessarily go together and I'm sure many particularists disagree with the practical reason aspect.

Yeh it's a little weird because someone will exist but any individual that we think of won't, they must necessarily be a fiction. I'm kind of riffing off Putnam here:

An ant is crawling on a patch of sand. As it crawls, it traces a line in the sand. By pure chance the line that it traces curves and recrosses itself in such a way that it ends up looking like a recognizable caricature of Winston Churchill. Has the ant traced a picture of Winston Churchill, a picture that depicts Churchill?

Most people would say, on a little reflection, that it has not. The ant, after all, has never seen Churchill, Or even a picture of Churchill, arid it had no intention of depicting Churchill. It simply traced a line (and even that was unintentional), a line that we can 'see as' a picture of Churchill. — Putnam

Even if we imagine someone in a detailed way and build up a view of their lives, then someone who fits the exact description comes into existence 100 years later. Our thoughts can not have been referring to them and any empathy we have felt could not have been directed at them.

That really depends on the deontological rule. The rule might be "do not kill people", in which case turning on the stove is the wrong thing to do. It seems to be that whether or not some moral system is deontological or consequentialist depends on its phrasing. — Michael

In a way it doesn't make sense to have a duty never to accidentally cause anyone harm. I don't think it can be a duty and definitely not one that we could take seriously.
On a more practical note considering deontology doesn't claim to have only one rule. Any rules that it has will get in the way of maximizing consequences. Even if we made a list of 3 generalized principles, at some stage keeping them will mean not maximizing utility (unless they all are ways or paraphrasing 'you should maximize utility'.

Btw, I think the area where things get most blurred is rule-utilitarianism. Where utilitarians don't trust themselves to accurately assess individual situations on the fly, so they think it will result in more utility if we follow a set of rules than if we attempt to perform the hedonic calculus in each situation.

Kind of weird calling you that.
The problem is that there will be discrepancies in the way your mono-deontology (deontology with only one rule) and utilitarianism evaluate actions. Lets say I walk into a house which unbeknownst to me has a gas leak, I then turn on the stove incinerating everyone inside. From a utilitarian perspective we could say that turning on the stove was the wrong thing to do, but not from the deontological one.

This isn't just a wacky ad hoc means of getting around you, by the way. I am, in fact, very grateful for your objection, because it made me realize why people looked at me funny - they don't share my weird views about time. — Pneumenon

No worries. I think this also could have come about because the word 'action' is ambiguous. I meant to use it as referring to agency i.e an action is something an agent does. But I can just switch to using agency, its a better word for it.

When it comes to evaluation, deontology is very concerned with agency and utilitarianism is indifferent to it.
Take this random example:
You lie to me proclaiming 'my real name is Pneumenon!' Being somewhat alert I don't believe you.
From a utilitarian perspective nothings really happened, but from a deontological perspective you have been immoral.

I guess more to the point is:
From the perspective of the left the lines get closer between deontology and consequentialism, because the left place more weight on harm and justice and less on authority, purity loyalty etc. So it may seem like they are close but examples like 'it's immoral to have sex before marriage' just can't fit into a consequentialist framework unless one can show that its harmful.
I could probably just keep providing example after example of where they differ.

What the deontologist would not do is cause some kind of harm, justifying it as paying dividends down the line. Not short vs. long term consequences, but willingness to trade bad for good. — Pneumenon

I guess all the typical counter arguments against utilitarianism have the utilitarian doing some harm only to have it create better consequences. In almost all of the more realistic examples, its the deontologist that can advocate causing some harm and the utilitarian that is against it. This makes sense because all the utilitarian cares about is avoiding harm (or maximizing pleasure, maximizing preferences etc) while the deontologist cares about the proper way to act.
Let take euthanasia, stem cell research, gay marriage, telling white lies, its possible to have deontological views which are against these but not utilitarian ones. To the hardcore utilitarian nothing is taboo.

I voted no, but I guess it depends on how well we tell their story.
Any individuals who exist long into the future are fictions to us. We cannot actually refer to them (as beings), any image I create or story I make up remains just a story. We can care about them in the same way that we can care about the characters in Harry Potter.
So all that's left is the empathy caused by the fictions of my imagination or this idea of humanity. And I don't really have any major dreams for humanity.

Hey, Pneumenon.
I think the problem is equating Deontology with what is good in itself and mixing P1 and P2.
P1 is an action, P2, P3 ... are situations. For Deontology an action is good in itself while for consequentialism its a situation. Therefore when you say:

Is it because P2 is good in itself (Deontology?) — Pneumenon

you're not really describing deontology.

Perhaps we could cash this out in a kind of spectrum: one is deontic to the extent that one is unwilling to allow something bad to happen for the greater good, while one is consequentialist to the extent is willing to allow something bad to happen for the greater good. That is to say, the amount of harm you're willing to cause in order to pay future dividends is directly proportional to how consequentialist you are. — Pneumenon

So here you're framing it as short term consequences vs long term consequences. But, deontologist don't concentrate on either of these, rather is the action against the rules, distasteful etc.

Nietzsche Naturalism and Interpretation - Christoph Cox.
I'm having some difficulties understanding Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and I happened across this book while searching for an explanation of the way Nietzsche uses being and becoming.
Extremely clear and nicely argued.

Yeh I think the blog is a good idea. I do like it here, seems a breath of fresh air after years at pf, but it's currently tiny. There's a danger that if it doesn't grow people will just lose interest and leave. It would be good to know how pf managed to take off itself and how long that took.

I'm happy to help out writing some articles for the blog. Unlike Hanover my oppions are more appreciated inside the forum (I think) and may be seen as somewhat eccentric to the public, judging from the reactions of my friends. But, I can write about more pop issues such as evolution etc.

Hey Agustino, good to have you here. This all sounds very Nietzschean.

But, to say the point again, there are higher problems than all those of enjoyment, suffering, and pity, and every philosophy that leads only to these is something naive. — N

One of his ideas that I like is that there are 2 types of happiness. That of contentment, removing of suffering and this nice feeling in the stomach. In other words that of weakness, decline, passivity and stagnation. The other type comes from facing up to great challenges and overcoming them. To face up to great challenges is necessarily to struggle and suffer, so (at least a certain type of) suffering part of the good life.

Fair point. I was thinking of the 'how come' questions. I.e how come there are informative identities, how come sometimes I attempt but fail to refer to an object/person. Or, more generally what kind of connection is necessary for me to be able to refer to an object. There are things to be said about reference but they are not the pure 'how' questions as if there was a mechanism working inside of language.
That's all off topic though if we both agree that reference does not have ontological implications.

Ok I couldn't tell that it was a newly created account. Yeh I figure things will blow over pretty quick and return to normal there.

@Paul
If you look in deleted posts there's a banned person. That was my concern, there is no record of it.

We need some more "lower quality" posters. Many of the current members are made up of a selection of the better posters from pf. Conversing with them may not be the best entry way for new members. We need people who are worried about solipsism, scepticism, have weird ideas about God etc. We need more people whose views are incorrect in obvious ways.

The former does not define the latter. So there is no extra "metaphysical connection" which ties language to the states it talks about (language, itself, is that connection: it needs nothing else). Realism is, instead, necessary because a state talked about is a different in empirical terms to the state of language. Reference doesn't require an extra "metaphysical connection" (i.e. logical) outside language. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Maybe it doesn't require something outside of language but we still need an account of how language refers. If I asked how a car takes petrol and produces motion, it can't be answered by saying that it doesn't need anything out side of a car, it is something that the car does... Edit: Apart from this relatively minor point, I agree with your post.

I would make the case that both the causal theory of reference and the descriptivist theory do not depend on metaphysics. Lets call this world the medium-sized world, i.e the world which we share. Normally when dealing with metaphysics we are talking about a basis for this medium-sized world, what underlies it or what its made up of etc. When we use language to refer, we are referring to this medium sized world. The descriptivist theory state we are describing the medium sized world and the causal theory that there is a causal connection between what we say and this medium sized world.

If it wasn't like this there would be problems, we would need to say that the ancients failed to refer to objects at all because they didn't know they were constructed out of atoms. More generally it would follow that if there were people with differing metaphysical views, at least some of them would fail to refer to objects.

If I discovered I was in the matrix, it doesn't imply that this whole time I have been unable to refer to apples.

If you think that there is more to reference than this then you need to explain the origin and nature of whatever (meta)physical connection ties particular sounds or ideas to things which aren't these sounds and ideas (or experiences). If you can't then your claim that these other things are required for reference to work seems rather vacuous. — Yahadreas

I think this is a bit much, you're demanding more than you have supplied yourself. To say that language just refers does not provide any insight in to how it refers. As much as Sapientia needs to supply a theory of reference which shows that it depends on ontology you need to supply one that is independent of ontology.

It's got to take time and some wisdom to moderate well. Normally a poster is around for a while before they become a mod so they get a feel for the culture. It's possible to feel bad for superadmin here, he's acquired the site and immediately been thrown in over his head like a child-king trying to quell a rebellion.
I can't imagine he plans to take much of an active part in future moderation, if he does it could be a mild disaster.

Philosophy of religion is the most perfect sub- forum. Since an existing sub-forum is more perfect than a non existing sub-forum, it must necessarily exist!

Oh, and hi btw.