That is an easy question to answer. We have an innate moral conscience (and an innate moral sense) because it enabled our ancestors to solve cooperation problems in ways that increased their reproductive fitness.
However, I have no reason to believe that knowing the function of our moral sense - to solve cooperation problems - can answer questions about moral ends and moral values independent of cooperation strategies. — Mark S
That sounds merely like your preference.
We might also prefer that mind-independent moral theories be able to answer any ethical question. Again, there are no reasons I know of to believe that. — Mark S
No, I don’t see the problem. Maximizing durable happiness by maximizing satisfaction and minimizing suffering defines an end. It does not define a means. — Mark S
If we are going to effectively work toward achieving something, here a moral ‘end’, then we have to agree on what we are working to achieve – we have to define it. Sure, if you don’t care about achieving an end then you can leave it undefined. — Mark S
I don't agree and Schopenhauer wrote a complete philosophy on the basis of the blind will. The way I see it, it is the ever coming into being. Like you might cut your lawn on a summer's day it doesn't give up because every Saturday you cut it down, it keeps coming into being. — boagie
The whole idea is absurd. — boagie
When one states that there is free will, one needs to ask free will from what. The whole idea is absurd. — boagie
To be meaningful don't we have to define what is good as a state-of-affairs? — Mark S
Moral ‘ends’ (goals) are a state of affairs, or perhaps an idea about a state of affairs as unenlightened suggests. — Mark S
There is no count unless you know what you are counting. In response to the question "how many" is the question "how many what?" — Fooloso4
The question of free will then only applies when we come to that fork in the road. — invicta
You might look at it this way: there are some items we cannot see or touch in a dark room. How many items are there? Potentially there might be any number of things. — Fooloso4
There is a potential for "1" or "2" or any number of things only as long as you or someone else is able to count and there is something to be counted and those things are visible and each one distinguishable. Counting them actualizes the potential. — Fooloso4
Are you denying that discrete objects can be counted? Or continuous quantities measured? I am not sure what you are objecting to. — Dfpolis
Far from a simple pursuit of the truth for the sake of truth, philosophy is politics by other means. — Fooloso4
... in being aware of a physically determined role, because such awareness is impotent.
Which does not allow for any conclusion whatsoever.
— Heiko
On the contrary, it shows exactly what I said above: that consciousness, whatever its origin, cannot be selected unless it can do something that allows it to be selected. — Dfpolis
If you want to argue that it "could be an accident," you need to define "accident" and explain how an intentional effect can instantiate that definition when physics (the presumed source of the "accident") has no intentional effects. — Dfpolis
I don't see the necessity. My computer and the software it is running has no reflection on all the transistors that change state, yet those generate output on the screen which is the effect of those state-changes.Sadly, we know that it is not "a necessary side-result of 'biological computational.'" If it were, we would necessarily be conscious of all biological computation, and, as I showed in my article, we are not. — Dfpolis
We are left to conclude that actual numbers result from counting and measuring operations. — Dfpolis
Right here. What get's realized? Where are those potentials? Are they really there / do they exist? Are you sure about them?Further, as a rule, when an agent actualizes a potential, — Dfpolis
Logical scrutiny is of no avail if you have already abandoned logic. — Dfpolis
Don't you find abandoning logic irrational? There is no need to ditch excluded middle if we recognize that numbers are concepts and their "existence" is normally potential rather than actual. — Dfpolis
Yet what does he mean here by "abstract from"?? — KantDane21
This is not how evolution works. We can say that advantageous properties have a tendency to reproduce and hence become more common, but this does not mean that all surviving properties are advantageous.There is no adaptive advantage ...
Which does not allow for any conclusion whatsoever. The whole consciousness-thingy could be an accident and not a supreme telos. In fact, if conscious thought was a necessary side-result of "biological computational" activity leading to some behaviour the empiric observation would exactly be what it is.... in being aware of a physically determined role, because such awareness is impotent.
If no one is thinking them, they remain possible thoughts, but not actual thoughts -- and if they are number concepts, they are possible numbers, but not actual numbers. — Dfpolis
You know the difference between thinking of 7, as when you are thinking of the seven dwarfs or the seven days of the week, and not thinking of 7. That is what I mean by thinking of the number 7. Similarly, for all the other numbers. — Dfpolis
The existence of a number does not depend on our being able to imagine the corresponding number of objects. It depends on actively thinking the concept and knowing what the concept intends -- knowing how to recognize an instance were we to encounter one. "How" is by counting to 10^1000. Knowing this does not require actually counting to 10^1000. — Dfpolis
Numbers are actual only while being thought, because they are abstractions and so instruments of thought. — Dfpolis
If we are considering a string of digits, it would be the count represented by that string, even though we cannot imagine exactly that many objects. — Dfpolis
Well, not being able to judge the quality of such translations I am limited to saying I find his remarks interesting. Let me summarize and elaborate a little as I have taken some freedom of interpretation and application my self:Heidegger is an important figure in helping to shape our current understanding of Aristotle. He taught a generation of students how to do a close reading of an ancient text, paying careful attention to the original language rather than relying on Latin translations. — Fooloso4
And that is the point: mathematical "existence" is not actual existence, but a convenient shorthand for a certain kind of potential. — Dfpolis
If we are still talking about Aristotle then there is no natural number "X". An number is always a number of something, a number of what it is that is being counted. The shift to symbolic notation occurs later. — Fooloso4
The cause formalis is just one contribution to the "thing".What we call cause and the Romans call causa is called aition by the Greeks, that to which something else is indebted. The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.
The problem is confusing this kind of "existence," which has no ability to do anything, with metaphysical existence, which invariably can do something -- even if it can only make itself known. What does nothing is indistinguishable from nothing, and so is nothing. — Dfpolis
Nothing, however, is only, in fact, the true result, when taken as the nothing of what it comes from; it is thus itself a determinate nothing, and has a content.
When I say "For every natural number X there exists a number X+1", does such a number exist for every natural number of your choice? It is widely accepted that, it does of course, because it must exist per definition of the natural numbers itself.Concepts are beings of reason, existing only when actually thought — Dfpolis
This is not "designation," but ideogenesis, because the instance comes before the concept. — Dfpolis
This makes no sense to me "Truly free will creates it's only choice by it's decision". Choice is the cause, decision the effect. Are you saying that the decision determines the choice, as if the effect determines the cause.
Also, why would free will not be concerned with worldly affairs? You appear to put these things backward. The "need to decide" can only be a property of the capacity to decide. And as I said, I'd far prefer to have the capacity to decide, and the consequent "need to decide" because the world is forcing itself on me, then to be as a rock, where I would have no capacity to resist or manipulate what the world is forcing on me. — Metaphysician Undercover
Must be quite an A**hole to create humans that way just to make them suffer.
— Heiko
Actually I disagree. Suffering is caused by the same condition which allows for free will, the condition which produces the need to decide. I'd much rather have free will along with the associated suffering, than to live without feeling, like a stone. — Metaphysician Undercover
The perfect Being, God, does not do anything by chance, and the appearance that He does is only our own ignorance influencing how we apprehend things. And the materialist perspective, which denies the reality of the prior immaterial cause, insisting that anything real must perceptible to the senses, only reinforces this ignorance. — Metaphysician Undercover
We can observe that other creatures are conscious and presume that they too have minds, but the mind is never a direct object of perception. — Wayfarer
Wittgenstein says the meaning of something like 357x68 is the foundation of a language game, just as the statement ‘this is my hand’ is the foundation of a language game wherein it doesn’t occur to us to doubt the truth of the statement. One could then ask, how long does it take this thing to be my hand? The type of certainty that we accord the solution to the equation is what he calls a form of life. So the ‘time’ of the equation or ‘this being my hand’ is the time of its contextual use in a language game. It has no existence outside of the occasion of its use as a particular sense. — Joshs
So the second sentence supposes an identity that is not there? That's the wonder of logics. They are not dialectical in nature.Mathematics is a human activity. Humans do indeed exist “in” time (or, better, “as” time). — Xtrix