"Is true relative to the person expressing it" means nothing more than "is the opinion of that person", — Pfhorrest

As I said, I don't hold with individual subjectivism so this is not something I'm going to get into.

What remains is the question of whether there's any resolution of that disagreement to be had; whether either of them is right in their opinion, in a sense other than the trivial sense of "agrees with their own opinion". You can refuse to consider that question if you want, you can claim that there's no way to answer that or no sense to make of it, but then you are just bowing out of the conversation between people who are trying to figure out the answer to it. — Pfhorrest

You've not made your case beyond just asserting it here. Why is the only way to resolve differences to decide that one view is objectively right?

They're acting like they each think they are actually correct, and it needs to be settled which of them is; like they can't just have their separate opinions neither being in any way better than the other. — Pfhorrest

Again, this is just asserted. Why does it need to be settled which of them actually is right?

If I think Xing is morally bad it means I don't want people to X. In what way does that lead to the conversation about X not being worth having? It's the conversation in which I express that Xing is wrong. — Isaac


In which case you're acting in a universalist fashion, not a relativist one. — Pfhorrest

Not at all. I'd also prefer a world in which no-one liked Justin Bieber, doesn't mean I think it's objectively wrong to do so, it would just be a better place to live.

What you're saying then is "Xing is disliked in our tribe". That moves the focus of disagreement from Alice and Bob to some Alician tribe and a Bobian tribe. The Alicians disapprove of some kind of action, and the Bobians think it's fine. Do they just tell each other "alright you do you, it's not like either of us is actually right about this", or do they act like the other is actually wrong -- do the Alicians act like the Bobians are letting people get away with moral atrocities, and the Bobians act like the Alicians are being tyrants for not permitting something harmless? If they act in the latter way, they're acting like universalists, like there is such a thing as correct in a sense other than just "our opinion" and there is a disagreement about what that is. — Pfhorrest

You've just totally misunderstood relativism, despite having it clearly set out by the SEP quote. Nowhere in the definition of relativism does it specify that people with different opinions about what's right must be allowed to get on with it by people who think it's wrong. Relativism says nothing whatsoever about how we should act. I could (as above) start a campaign to rid the world of all Justin Bieber records, to ban him from the airwaves and make it illegal for him to sing. None of that would have any bearing on whether I think other people are 'wrong' to like his music. It's just a reflection of how strongly I don't like his music.

You're not talking about reasons to support or oppose some kind of action or state of affairs, but just about the fact that someone or another does support or oppose them and there will be consequences for you if you act contrary to their opinions. — Pfhorrest

That there will be consequences for you is a reason to support or oppose some kind of action.

where do you draw the line around a "tribe"? Is California my tribe? Ventura County? The Ojai Valley? My block? My household? Or in the other direction, the United States? The world? The whole universe? And how many of the people in whatever unit you pick have to be in agreement for that to be the thing that is "actually right or wrong relative to that unit"? — Pfhorrest

It depends on the language game in question, who you are talking to and what they're likely to understand by 'right' and 'wrong'.

Why can't I just call the half that thinks what I want to think "my tribe" and then claim that I am right by that definition? — Pfhorrest

You can if you want to. But if you seriously can just decide like that what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' like that, then you need psychiatric help, not a philosophy discussion.

Why can't I keep doing that until it's just me identifying myself as my own tribe and claiming that since I agree with myself (of course) that I am right, and anyone who disagrees can fuck off because it's not like there's any better standard than the one I'm appealing to (the standard of "I agree with it") by which they can call me wrong. — Pfhorrest

Private Language Argument. 'Wrong' wouldn't make any sense if only you knew the definition of it.

Unless you say that a larger consensus within a larger group is "more right", in which case the "most right" would be universal unanimity. — Pfhorrest

Nope. Again it's about the Private Language Argument. There needs to be (potentially) a community of language speakers for a word to have a meaning. One person is not sufficient. From a technical standpoint, two people is sufficient, but from a pragmatic one we need a substantial group to consider it anything more than an ephemeral meaning. Once that threshold has been met however, there's nothing more to be gained by increasing the number of users.

You did catch that I'm an anarchist, right? — Pfhorrest

Yeah, right!

Then you act like a universalist with regards to Nazis. — Pfhorrest

Again, you've just misunderstood relativism. I'll quote again from the SEP

moral relativism is the view that moral judgments, beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, not only vary greatly across time and contexts, but that their correctness is dependent on or relative to individual or cultural perspectives and frameworks. — SEP

I've bolded the relevant section this time. Relativism states that the correctness of a moral statement is relative to the person issuing it. Not that there is no such thing as correctness as you keep assuming.

If one Nazi said to the other "shoot the Spaniard, not the Italian", and the second Nazi shot the person that the first Nazi meant for him to shoot, but in fact both of the people in question were from Italy, does that prove something about the definition of "Italian" and "Spaniard" in the Nazi's language-game? Of course not, it only shows that both Nazis thought that one of the two people they were discussing was Spanish, but they were both incorrect about that. — Pfhorrest

That's not analogous to the example I gave. In my example the Nazis concerned did not make an error of understanding. They both knew what 'right' meant and carried out the action which was 'right'. No amount of subsequent information (like a passport, in your example) would change their understanding of what action was being demanded. They understood the word 'right' to mean something like protecting the fatherland against the communist menace by any means. That's unequivocal evidence that that's what 'right' means for them. So when they ask "was that 'right'?" the answer will be "yes". If you want to claim they made an error in categorising that action as 'right' you'd have to explain how it is that they understood each other when using the word, and, more challengingly, from where words get their meaning if not from people using them and understanding each other in doing so.

What I'm saying is that, surveying the different kinds of views that people have had as thoroughly as I could, I couldn't find any views that weren't clearly wrong -- in ways that someone else was usually pointing out too, though they in turn were clearly wrong in ways that still others were pointing out -- so I had to come up with new ones. — Pfhorrest

Yep, as I say, nothing unusual there, that's how I feel too, and probably most people who post here.

I would have expected people to have a tendency to come up with unique original views of their own in light of this situation — Pfhorrest

They invariably have. It's your prejudice that sees them as "the same old tired positions I've already brilliantly refuted". As I said, you'll not find my particular combination of semantic relativism and active inference of affect states in any philosophy textbook either. If you derisively zoom right out and say "Oh that's just re-hashed relativism" then of course it's going to look old and tired, but at the same zoomed out scale your position looks like re-hashed hedonism. If you refuse to consider the details, anything's going to look re-hashed. If I'm wrong and you've already heard my detailed position before then quote me a few passages from the author you're thinking of.

That doesn't go any way toward analysing a person's web of beliefs. — Isaac


We were talking about formal scientific models, not natural, folksy webs of belief. — Pfhorrest

No, you were saying that people's moral beliefs could be analysed for complexity using Kolmogorov. You've yet to even begin to explain how.

agriculture enabled an exploration of moral ideas that previously would not have been possible to explore, because in a pre-agricultural society only very narrow ways of living are even possible in practice. Once it was possible in practice to explore those different ways of living, we as a species explored some really shitty options, and have since then slowly been learning why not to do things that way, even though we can. — Pfhorrest

Give me some examples of moral activity which was not possible (even in kind) in hunter-gatherer communities that agriculture made possible.

When we're children and live with our parents our lives are more strictly regulated, and there's a lot of things we simply can't do, even if we wanted to, because our parents won't allow us to do them, or just because we lack the practical means, the power, to do them. When we become adults we're suddenly free from those restrictions and are able to do a bunch of things we couldn't do before -- including a bunch of awful things that we really shouldn't do. In time we learn why we shouldn't do those things, even though we can, and begin to self-impose restrictions and regulations on ourselves. The transition from restricted childhood to wild-and-crazy early adulthood wasn't some kind of negative learning. We didn't know not to do those things before, and we didn't need know that to because we were prevented from doing them anyway. It's not until we were able to do them that we needed to learn why not to. — Pfhorrest

I'm sure you don't mean it, but as a warning shot you do realise how massively insulting this narrative is to modern day tribal people's? They lead alternative lifestyles, not backwards or underdeveloped ones. The path of human development is not at all like one from children to mature adults. It's just one of a number of possible choices, most modern societies took that path, some didn't. You need to choose analogies that avoid making those that didn't sound like they're backward.

On my account you can't ever positively show that anything is morally obligatory, just like you can't show that any belief is definitely true. You can only show that something is morally forbidden, just like you can only show that a belief is false. That's why consequentialism is the parallel to confirmationism. "This plan would lead to good consequences, therefore this is a good plan" is just as invalid as "this theory has true implications, therefore this theory is true". Affirming the consequent either way. — Pfhorrest

From the SEP again...

In actual usage, the term “consequentialism” seems to be used as a family resemblance term to refer to any descendant of classic utilitarianism that remains close enough to its ancestor in the important respects. Of course, different philosophers see different respects as the important ones. Hence, there is no agreement on which theories count as consequentialist under this definition.

A definition solely in terms of consequences might seem too broad, because it includes absurd theories such as the theory that an act is morally right if it increases the number of goats in Texas. Of course, such theories are implausible. Still, it is not implausible to call them consequentialist, since they do look only at consequences. — SEP

Nothing in the definition of consequentialism specifies that it derive a moral requirements as opposed to a moral proscriptions, and negative utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_consequentialism

We were discussing the criteria by which to judge something better or worse, not the uncertainty in applying those criteria. — Pfhorrest

I know. The argument you keep failing to address is that when we have a choice about what criteria to use (which we do), dealing with the uncertainty in applying those criteria is one of the merits we should consider. You want to just ignore how practical your chosen criteria are to apply, for some reason. It's just daft to say we're going to choose the criteria first regardless of any pragmatic implications, then deal with the pragmatic implication of applying them later. Why would we do that?

If retributive justice would make everyone suffer forever, then I don't think anyone would be for it, because people do care about some suffering, especially their own. But if retributive justice isn't particularly effective at reducing suffering (of future victims), there are people who will nevertheless be for it anyway, because there are some people (the criminals) who they think deserve to suffer, not because of any instrumental reason, but just intrinsically. — Pfhorrest

Again, you'd have to provide some citation for this. The reason I mentioned universal suffering is that it's one way to tease out the reasons people think criminal should suffer intrinsically. If you want to just play at philosophical word games, that's fine, it can be fun, but I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that you seriously think your arguments could, and should, apply to the actual real world. If that's the case then your opposition is what people actually really think, not just what they say they think because they haven't thought it through properly. A person who wants retributive justice despite the negative consequences on human suffering truly does value retribution higher than suffering, a person who just says that retribution is instrumental but would not go so far as to pursue it to the detriment of suffering just hasn't thought about their reasons that much and probably values retribution because their peer group do, but when push comes to shove would take the option that minimised suffering if clearly offered.

To be clear, if you want your moral theory to be actually applied in the real world you need to deal with the fact that what people say they believe and what people actually believe are not the same thing. You can argue against what they say they believe in an academic game, but if you want to apply it to the real world you have to deal with what they actually believe.

People simply do not arrive at their beliefs and actions by a process of rational consideration. — Isaac


Therefore there's no point in trying to have any rational discourse about such things? Then you really are just giving up like I say all relativism is tantamount to. — Pfhorrest

Why would rational discourse be the only way that doesn't constitute giving up?

No more than I want science decided by the rich. What I really want is for there not to be rich and poor at all, but given that there are, of course it's only people with at least a certain baseline of material stability in their lives who are going to have the bandwidth to do heavy thinking. — Pfhorrest

Right. So a consequence of your proposed system is that the rich get to decide what's moral. Saying you don't want that to be a consequence isn't sufficient.

Quoting partial sentences for cheap rhetorical points? Really does say it all. — Pfhorrest

Very well. You claimed not to be interested only in predictable consequences (undeniably dominated by the short-term ones) and then said "I'm just advocating that we consider what gains we're able to predict" How is that not a direct contradiction?

once you know some god exists, it becomes pretty important to find out what its plans are for you and whether you're in its good graces. — RogueAI

Not until you've got some reason to believe it has plans for you, that it has good graces, that you can do anything about either of those things, that you'd have any way of finding out what you should do, how you would trust that instruction to be correct in any other context than the one in which it was given. Notwithstanding the question of whether you'd change anyway, whether you're going to act differently because the creator of the universe told you to.

Sounds to me like doing the 'right' thing would be just as much of a crapshoot in a world with a proven God as it is in a world without one.

a claim that Alice thinks X and she's right to do so, while Bob thinks not-X and he's right to do so, which just amounts to saying that both X and not-X. — Pfhorrest

Only if you've already begged the question of whether the X in question is objective. If the X in question is true relative to the person expressing it, then Alice thinks X and she's right to do so, while Bob thinks not-X and he's right to do so is not the same as saying both X and not-X, because a statement X without the context of a person stating it would not make sense. As I said earlier 'correct' has no meaning without a person to think it. It's a judgement and judging is a activity brains do.

if Alice says "X is wrong" and Bob says "no it's not" and then they argue about it, like they think they can't both be true (in a universalist sense, though specifying this every time really shouldn't be necessary) at the same time, then it's clear that they're not just expressing their feelings about things, because they're acting as though it's not possible that what they respectively think can both be true at the same time. — Pfhorrest

Of course they're acting as if what they respectively think can't both be true at the same time, it can't - for Alice, or for Bob. For Alice, Bob is wrong and Alice can't do anything but argue as Alice so she's going to argue as if Bob is wrong, because Bob is wrong for her and she can't argue as if she weren't her (or at least it would no longer be a moral argument if she did).

Moral relativism denies that the latter kind of conversation is ever had, or at least that it's worth having. — Pfhorrest

It does no such thing. If I think Xing is morally bad it means I don't want people to X. In what way does that lead to the conversation about X not being worth having? It's the conversation in which I express that Xing is wrong.

From a cultural perspective, I'm saying "in our tribe Xing is wrong, so if you don't want to be ostracised, you'd better not do X". That's not only an argument worth having, but for a social species it's an incredibly powerful one.

the grounds on which an object of aesthetic consideration would be objectively of aesthetic value would be the same grounds on which a matter of moral consideration would be objectively morally right. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, sounds about right - only a few years into your reign before your favourite music becomes mandatory because your panel of experts deemed it to actually be the best and anyone thinking it isn't is just factually wrong. Ever spoken to a Pink Floyd fan?

So if a German in 1945 said "Hitler hat nichts falsch gemacht", that would be true? — Pfhorrest

I can't say it would. As I've tried to explain, the 'truth' of moral statements is context dependant, and for me, Hitler did do something morally wrong. Asking whether it's 'true' without context is already assuming objective morality. I could pretend to be a Nazi, and say, "no Hitler didn't do anything wrong", I expect that's what a Nazi would say, but why would I care what a Nazi would say, I'm not a Nazi.

if they said so in their language, that would be true, because that's just how "falsch" (wrong) was used then and there? — Pfhorrest

Yes (although with the caveat that I'm referring to language games, which are smaller units than actual language, but we'll skip over than and assume that rather than German, we're talking about the specific language game within German that Nazis were engaged in). If a Nazi said to another Nazi "don't do the wrong thing, you must do the right thing" the second Nazi would understand that as meaning 'shoot the communist' (or whatever atrocity we're thinking of). This is unequivocal proof that 'wrong' and 'right' meant those things to those people. If they didn't then they wouldn't have understood each other.

I found a bunch of alternatives that all seemed only half-right, and no clear consensus on any of them being completely right, everyone insisting that the other side is completely wrong. So I started trying to figure out what would it look like if I took to heart all of the arguments of every side against each other, what alternatives were there in the wake of that. What I'm trying to "sell", as you put it, is just another alternative that I haven't seen presented before — Pfhorrest

You know literally everyone feels this way, right? There's not a person in the world whose web of beliefs is identical to another's. We all think our own model is the most accurate, that it differs from other in ways where those other models are flawed. It's nothing unique to you, it's human nature.

it's not really addressing the novel big picture that makes any of this worth stating at all, it's just addressing the old pieces with old arguments that have already been tread to death. I don't find those old arguments about the same old things that interesting, and it's just a chore to tread over them again and again in a way that no new ideas are being exchanged, it's just banging the same heads against the same walls as have been done a thousand times. Meanwhile, the actual new bits, the interesting things that make any of this worth talking about, are ignored, just because they're connected to the same old bits it's not even worth arguing about anymore. — Pfhorrest

Again, this is obviously how it seems from your perspective. What's odd is how you can't see that this is how your ideas look from the perspective of those you engage with. What seems new and interesting to you is the old arguments that have already been trod to death to others, and what you see as the old arguments that have already been trod to death are, to those espousing them, new an interesting takes on them.

You can always see ideas as being either derivative or new depending on the scale at which you examine them (I have a recent conversation with Fdrake to thank for that insight). Your ideas are just re-hashed hedonism. But if you look closely, you see all the nuances that make them new. My ideas might be re-hashed relativism, but they're based on a psychological approach which was only demonstrated in the early 2010s so categorically cannot be old arguments that have already been trod to death, at that scale.

Any mathematical model of data is basically a compression algorithm. A formula for a curve takes less information to state than all of the points of that curve separately. A simpler (smaller, shorter, lower-information) formula that more closely matches more data points compresses that data more efficiently. — Pfhorrest

That doesn't go any way toward analysing a person's web of beliefs.

Nomadic hunter-gatherers, from all I've read, had generally pretty good moral standards for the most part, largely because one couldn't survive well with poor morals. The advent of agriculture then enabled hierarchical and authoritarian civilizations and a lot of really evil shit became possible and even advantageous for the ones who did it. Then, slowly and haphazardly over the ages since then, we've begun identifying the worst of those things and building consensus that they are wrong (and thus social resistance to the implementation of them), with things like (as I mentioned) liberty, democracy, equality, etc, becoming increasingly normal standards we try to hold ourselves to, whereas once they would have been seen as loony impossible dreams doomed to fail. — Pfhorrest

Right. But what you've quite specifically said there is that agriculture caused a change in human morality (or at least the expression of it). So you've undermined your model of morality growing through the exchange of ideas. It appears morality was perfectly adequate without that, agriculture just fucked things up. Maybe an exchange of ideas has occurred since then, but not a necessary one, clearly.

And that's why I'm not a consequentialist. — Pfhorrest

So something other than the foreseeable consequences of your actions makes them morally right? What would that be?

Not all religious moral views say that the pleasure or pain expected in the afterlife is the reason why doing something is morally good or bad, — Pfhorrest

No, some claim that God knows best. Either way it's still a way of dealing with the uncertainty about what is 'best'.

there are plenty of people who think certain parts of humanity suffering is straight-up good irrespective of its consequences; see again retributive justice for its own sake. — Pfhorrest

You're just straw-manning. You need to provide a quote from someone in support of retributive justice claiming that it is morally right even if it leads to horrific consequences over all timescales.

Find a neo-Nazi, for instance, and pose to him a hypothetical post-scarcity technological utopia where not only all white people but all Jews and black people and so on all get their happily-ever-afters equally, and ask if he thinks that that's as good a scenario as one where only the whites get that. — Pfhorrest

Actually I think most neo-Nazis would agree. Much white supremacist ideology is about the segregation of 'lesser races' and is phrased as either being better for both races (ie the lesser ones would be less hassled if they knew their place). Original racism was couched as the "white man's burden" to civilise the savages (for their own good). Later 'master race' concepts were all about the dilution of the whole of humanity by mixing of higher with lower races. Obviously an entire humanity of lesser hybrids is worse overall than one which at least contains some 'supreme beings'. Again, if you want to avoid straw-manning, you'd have to provide some quotes to that effect.

We're back to the same argument about post hoc rationalisation. People simply do not arrive at their beliefs and actions by a process of rational consideration. Not now, not ever. If you ask a neo-Nazi the question you posed, you will not get such an obviously irrational answer as the one you suggest, unless perhaps their friends are listening and they're afraid of sounding weak in front of them. If you demand of them (or they demand of themselves) a rational explanation for their beliefs they will provide one that seems to make sense (coherent, correspondent with reality) depending on their skill at doing so. None of which has any bearing whatsoever on why they hold that belief. as you said yourself...

I expect the reason why they’d think only whites getting it is better would boil down to retribution anyway: they think the Jews et al are evil and trying to tear down the righteous whites, and therefore deserve to suffer for their wrongs — Pfhorrest

... is a world in which evil people are allowed to do their thing without fear of punishment a better world? No. so their actions are still rationalised in terms of making an overall better world. The evil people have to suffer to stop them from doing their evil things, to benefit the rest of us. At no point in time is is couched in terms of the Jew being fine, no character flaws or evil plans, but we're just going to get rid of them 'cause we don't like them. the whole rhetoric is still about creating the 'best of all worlds'.

Are you familiar with spoon theory? In this context "the best" I refer to are people with "a lot of spoons". — Pfhorrest

I am, we refer to it as bandwidth in cognitive sciences. The trouble is that it is not a character trait, not under any of the psychological tests for it that have been published. It is entirely circumstantial, so there'd be a different set of 'bests' on a day-to-day, or even minute-by-minute basis. Plus also, incidentally, the poor would come out bottom of that list every time. Is that really what you want, ethics decided by the rich?

All you're really advocating is that we consider short-term, easy to predict gains — Isaac

Not at all. I'm just advocating that we consider what gains we're able to predict — Pfhorrest

...says it all.

It seems a little wacky to me too. But perhaps our florist is happy. Then I'd classify it as more of the usual human vanity. — j0e

I would too.

The woman probably obeys traffic rules and is nice to babies. It's only when you get her started on flowers that she's harmlessly mad. — j0e

Not in my experience (the 'probably' bit). Most delusions cause some contingent problems for the people who suffer from them. The 'harmless belief in fairies' is of the less common kind by quite a long way.

The trouble with delusions is that they have to be tied in in some way to ones general web of beliefs and if they are delusions (ie difficult to marry with the rest of reality) then there's only really two ways to do that without suffering the pain of cognitive dissonance. One is to have the delusion gradually eroded until is sit somewhere with as few threads as possible connecting it to reality (fairies exists but we can't see then, hear them, smell them or detect them in any way and they don't cause anything, nor are they affected by anything...), or they can go the other way, infecting all the threads they touch by altering the neighbouring belief to fit better with the delusion. This just has more and more of an impact on the person's life as the condition progresses.

Your florist may well start of harmlessly mad, but there's a strong chance that if here delusions ore not dealt with they'll creep into areas of her life that would be much better governed by the reality of the physical world than by a belief in the transcendent power of roses.

I think this connect to the OP. It's as if people are doing some ritual of claiming to believe. Did the average Trump voter really believe the election was stolen? I like the pragmatist idea that belief is enacted. A Catholic can show up and mouth the Apostolic creed, put a tithe in the basket, try to be nice. The ritual actions have a low cost. — j0e

Yes, this is much more like it. Certain beliefs are used as membership criteria for certain clubs, they're not really beliefs in the sense of tendencies to act as if... but merely part of a word game (or ritual enaction) that is played to create a sense of mutual belonging (and of course, exclusion of the other - the dark side).

The problem is, that these otherwise harmless tribal rituals are triggers for more vulnerable people to start the infection of reasonable beliefs that I described above as the course delusion often takes. The suicide bomber is usually someone who is sufficiently low in self-confidence that even the sharing of ritual behaviour and belief-talk is not enough to make them feel they belong to the group. Rather than abandoning the project, they seek to 'turn up the volume' on ritual behaviour and belief-talk, in the expectation that perhaps a louder version might finally do the job. It usually ends in disaster, of course, because the 'volume' of the ritual behaviour and belief-talk was not the reason they were feeling ostracised.

A single madman is a joke. A few is a cult. Many are a religion. At the same time there's the sublimation (or neutralization) of a religion that makes it relatively harmless, in the short run at least. — j0e

Yes. The vast majority of religious practice is just social-bonding ritual and as harmless as a knitting club on a societal scale, but then so's the alternative.

Survival for its own sake is a justification..concept, not will. — schopenhauer1

How do you come to know this? Do your thoughts carry identifiers - 'Justification', 'Concept', 'Will'?

Say I really wanted my species to survive (or thrive, even), everything I did was motivated by that desire. How would I know that what I had there was not a will that the species should survive but rather a justification (and for what exactly)?

The German 'will' is ambiguous as it translates almost to the English 'want' both ways, but it's fairly uncontested that Schopenhauer was referring to desires of some description. So if wanting the species to survive is just such a desire then why would you question why someone had such a desire, as if they arrived at desires by a process of reasoned thought?

What model of 'desire' are you using whereby a rational answer could be given to the question "Why do you have that desire?"

do you know how to make a case without interjections... — schopenhauer1

Absolutely not, no. I'm afraid I have no idea how I would partake in a discussion, in this format, if my writing a post is considered an 'interjection'. I mean, one presumes that when you click 'Post Comment' you've finished that particular contribution and other can respond at that point. Are we, rather, to wait a polite amount of time to see if you've anything else to say first?

...condescension? — schopenhauer1

Who'd have though 'crickey' would raise such an eyebrow. and there was I thinking it charmingly old-fashioned. If putting 'crickey' at the beginning of sentence is comparable to putting 'dipshit' at the end then I've spent much of adult life being incredibly rude. One wonders how I've managed to make it this far without being ostracised entirely.

what is it about humanity that you want to survive, besides survival itself? — schopenhauer1

Crickey, your own namesake answered that one.

A man can do what he will, but not will as he will

We already fixed this

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6895/what-it-is-like-to-experience-x

I'm trying to give a context for approaching religion, a context that tries to make sure that one's involvement with religion isn't going to become something ill. — baker

I can sort of see that. Just not sure why you're doing it in reply to my posts.

That's where one's self-confidence comes in and intuitively deciding that some claims aren't worth one's time, or are otherwise none of one's business.
One will simply crash and burn if one wishes to give all claims a "fair hearing" or approach them scientifically, testing them or requesting evidence for them. — baker

Are they really the only options you see? Either a gut feeling guess or a full blown scientific investigation? What about a rough, informed-but-not-expert, examination of the general picture?

in religion/spirituality, "you" are the object of your investigation.
Noone can do that for you, nor can you do it for anyone else. — baker

Yes, no one can do it for, you nor can you do it for anyone else. Absolutely right.

But neither of those negations have any bearing on the matter of whether you can do it for you. Maybe you can't do it for you either, maybe no one can do it for anyone.

How are you supporting that assertion? — Isaac


here — frank

That doesn't support your assertion. All such illusions have the same properties I described above. What I'm trying to get across is that there are numerous pathways which may lead to behaviours indicating we think images (or parts of them) are red. An actual strawberry may take one route, a greyscale picture of a strawberry may take another, and a greyscale abstract image a third.

Remembering how things looked is a kind of experience. — frank

I didn't say 'remembering how things looked' I said 'appeared red in retrospect', they're not the same thing. One implies that some mental event happened 'the strawberries looked red' which we then recall. There's no evidence for that. The other describes the construction of a narrative, post hoc, to explain the circumstances we find ourselves in.

That's a good example. I think intuitively we'd all want to say that the woman in question was suffering from some mental health issues and would possibly benefit from psychiatric help.

There's been a tendency to exempt religions on the grounds of numbers (that many people can't all be mad). I'm inclined to go along with that approach, but in doing so we've pinned religious acceptance to empirical claims (the question of how many people share the feeling) and that takes us away from what people like @Wayfarer want to say about religious investigations, I think.

But yeah, personally, I don't really see any other way out of it. There's no denying the difference between some lunatic believing in their own fantasy world and a religious claim is the number of people ho go along with it, and that does make claims about the success of religious practice empirical, otherwise the lunatic gets their fair shake too.

What I think neither side want is for my claim that one should rub trifle in their hair every day to achieve enlightenment, to sit alongside the claim that one should attend church, meditate, wear a hijab or whatever. And it's not the degree of justificatory narrative around the claim. Anyone who thinks I couldn't come up with whole libraries of justificatory narrative for the trifle rubbing clearly hasn't read enough Terry Pratchett.

These are universalist claims about particular peoples and the things they say and do and think, and as such they are uncontroversial, as they do not constitute relativism. — Pfhorrest

I've literally just cited the standard definition of relativism which says almost exactly that. 'What is 'correct' is relative to the particular people doing the judging.

What would be relativist is to say that there is nothing more to something being permissible than Alice or Bob or whoever's opinions about it. — Pfhorrest

Yep. That's right. Alice think X is correct = X is correct (if you're Alice). Still not getting to 'there is no 'correct'', which is your claim.

Say you're judging someone else, in the third person, and trying to decide if they are forming their opinions in the proper way; if the things that they think are the correct things to think. Is the only standard you would ever appeal to that of whether or not you think likewise? Or whether a particular someone(s) else (specified how exactly?) thinks likewise? — Pfhorrest

Depends on the subject.

If so, is that the case for ordinary descriptive facts as well? I know already you're going to say no, for those you can appeal to the standard of objective reality, which you know exists because you can't help but think that it exists, while there's no such thing as objective morality because you can (or because many do) doubt that there is, therefore there isn't. — Pfhorrest

Yep. Just like if Alice said "Vaughan Williams is terrible", I've no reason at all to think she's making a statement about some objective fact where she might be correct or otherwise. Yet if she said "Vaughan Williams was a man" I would not say "Non, c'était un homme". It would have been right for her to use the word 'man' to English speakers.

it doesn't matter philosophically what how many people do or don't think. It's logically possible to doubt the objectivity of reality, as well as morality: at the extremes, solipsism and egotism are both well-known things in philosophy. — Pfhorrest

True, and both are nothing but sophistry. But regardless, it's not clear what you're arguing here. You seem to separate out ethical facts from aesthetic facts purely on the grounds that people do not seem to act as if aesthetic facts were universal, and then you say that what people do or do not think as no bearing on the matter.

The fact is you can't escape being you, you're own perspective. So if you say Xing is morally wrong, even in a culture that thinks it isn't, you're still just saying that in your language game, Xing is the sort of thinng we use the word 'wrong' for. You're not playing the other culture's language game so obviously you're not going to use their word meanings. there is a difference between talking about another culture and talking in the same language games as another culture. If I say "French is a really beautiful language" I'm using English to talk about French. That's not the same as talking in French.

Likewise if I say "what that culture over there is doing is wrong" I'm talking about that culture, not in that culture, so 'wrong' still has the same meaning (wrong in the context of my culture).

I was explaining why it seemed like a plausible thing worth considering, not trying to give a proof of it. — Pfhorrest

Well no, because unlike the swans example, you're obviously aware that there are many, many philosophical theories which obviously fit the data sufficiently to satisfy perfectly intelligent and knowledgeable people. So 'it seems to fit the data' seems massively insufficient in a way that it wouldn't were you not aware of the countless alternatives.

You don't respond to every argument I give you either — Pfhorrest

No, but I'm not selling anything.

You surely don't doubt that the complexity of a mathematical scientific model of reality could be measured in such a way — Pfhorrest

I absolutely do doubt that. How would you even begin?

only a much looser folksier notion of "complexity" would in practice be applied to looser, folksier kinds of beliefs. — Pfhorrest

Exactly. And within that 'looseness' you find find all the disagreement there is amongst intelligent rational folk. Thus achieving nothing by way of reducing the field. How do I know this? Because intelligent rational folk have been trying to reduce the field of such ideas for millennia and have failed to do so thus far. That a thing has been tried several thousand times and failed is pretty solid evidence it's not possible.

I admit that progress has been much more slow and haphazard in the moral subdomain — Pfhorrest

Which undermines your argument.

there is still evidence of some progress over time: concepts like liberty, equality, democracy, etc, getting much more recognition now than thousands of years ago, as well as the secularization of society and a focus more on material well-being than some abstract spiritual purity or such. — Pfhorrest

You'll have to give me an example more than just your hand-waiving claim. Take a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe and talk me through the progress you think they've made by gradual elimination of nonsense ideas to, say, modern America.

I'm not saying that every single person should be trying to exhaustively think through all of the consequences of all of their actions on the entire universe, present and future. If everyone did that, the consequences of their subsequent (in)actions would probably be worse for the entire universe, present and future. I'm just saying that the measure of judging whether an action is better or worse doesn't have any hard limit where you've considered "enough" people and the rest "don't matter". Consider however many you can handle considering. The others still matter, and if you could handle considering them, that would be better. But if the best you can do is just considering the one person you're interacting with right now, then that's the best you can do, so do that. If you can do better, do better, but if you can't, then you can't. That doesn't mean that better isn't better, just that it's too hard to do... for you, right now. But if you or someone else can manage to do better, then that's still better, and better is always worth doing, if you can do it.

That's the core principles as they apply to every day life. — Pfhorrest

Right. But that's basically all moral theories. As, literally everyone is currently telling you on the hedonism thread, seeing the wider sense of pleasure/pain is not the problem ethical theories have, it is this exact problem of what to do with the uncertainty generated by being unable to judge all the consequences all the time. Most (non-looney) normative moral theories are about dealing with that uncertainty.

You've even, on that thread, acknowledged that getting to an afterlife would be hedonistic. So that's all religious moral theories brought into this fold too.

Basically, we all want what's best for us, our family/tribe/country, and everyone else - in that order, usually. What we struggle with is how to work out whats best in the long run...

Just do whatever you like and it will all work out, do whatever God says (he knows best), do whatever your parents did, imagine as many consequences as possible and do your best, do whatever a virtuous person would do, do whatever you could at the same time wish were a universal law... and so on.

If we knew for a fact that some action would lead to masses of suffering for the rest of humanity do you really think any ethicist anywhere would argue that we should nonetheless do it?

No, obviously not. So their various ethical theories obviously only exist in the gap, the uncertainty about that future.

I do also advocate that we should try to have an organized social effort to get the best of us together to do the best that they can for the best of everyone, like we have an organized effort to investigate reality in the form of scientific peer review, not just leaving everything up to isolated individuals. — Pfhorrest

This begs the question because you couldn't know who constituted 'the best'. In science we have universal repeatability as our goal. It's fairly easy to test for and so fairly easy to tell who's good at it. You couldn't even start with the problem of judging long-term consequences in the face of massive uncertainty because the goal is to have good long-term consequences. Something we won't know until long after the decisions have been made by the experts we chose.

All you're really advocating is that we consider short-term, easy to predict gains over longer-term, more uncertain ones.

That's not the explanation for the grey strawberries illusion (if it was meant to be.) Your brain is actually generating the experience of redness without any red light. — frank

How are you supporting that assertion?

- To clarify. All you've got by way of self report is that they appeared red in retrospect. By third party all we have is that the person selected the word 'red'. If we look at fMRI we'll see activity in v4...

...none of which amounts to 'the experience of red'.

What do you mean when you agree that the strawberries look red? — frank

What it means is only that I've conceded that 'Red' is the correct word to use for the strawberries. Why I conceded that might be different in different contexts. some times it might be traceable back to the fact that some 700mn photons hit my retina, other times it might be traceable back to a memory of the colour of the objects matching that shape. There needn't be one cause. We have thousands of neural streams happening concurrently and the system is designed to only fire (move on to the next node) when there's sufficient triggers, so invariably there'll be more than one reason why it did so.

What does it mean for a thing to have an appearance? — frank

Same issue. A thing's having an appearance means only that I can recall to mind an image of it to describe the details of. I could mange that recall in any one of a hundred different ways, it could be triggered by any combination of hundreds of preceding neural events.

But the point about the scientific perspective is that it is third-person by design. It is what any observer will see, all things being equal. It presumes the subject-object relationship i.e. ‘I see it’. — Wayfarer

I agree with this.

If I were to say that ‘neuroscience cannot account for consciousness’ I would not be taking issue with the neuroscientist with regards to her domain of knowledge, but making a philosophical point about the brain-mind relationship which might be outside the domain of neuroscience as such. — Wayfarer

True.

I don’t think neuroscience claims to understand the philosophical question of brain-mind relationship as it is not necessarily a scientific question. — Wayfarer

I think it does to an extent. Several neuroscientists think they'll be able to understand consciousness as a result of their studies. I can see, however, that this might well be more properly considered a philosophical question, so, with caveats, we're still broadly in agreement...

...until here.

The point about the perspective of a spiritual practitioner is that it is not objective in the sense that science is. Let’s say it involves a shift in perspective from the ego-logical to an other-oriented perspective. There might be a cathartic experience of seeing through or beyond oneself that is profoundly life-altering but not necessarily scientifically verifiable — Wayfarer

Now you seem to abandon the approach you took to scientific questions. Why cannot an outsider address the philosophical question of whether a spiritual practitioner does indeed "involve a shift in perspective from the ego-logical to an other-oriented perspective.", whether it could possibly have "a cathartic experience of seeing through or beyond oneself that is profoundly life-altering but not necessarily scientifically verifiable".

Both those question are philosophical ones, just like the question about whether neuroscience does or does not address consciousness is. Both can be asked without engaging in the actual practice itself, just by assessing the methods, what they bracket out, how they assess results etc. Just like we did to conclude that neuroscience takes a third-party approach and so can't deliver first person values.

Basically, I'm not (as I'm often mistakenly assumed to be) advocating that science can answer all of life's questions, I'm merely making the point that it's failure to do so does not lead to a conclusion that the non-science alternatives must therefore be the ones to do so. They may fail too. Their success or failure is completely independent of science's.

it's being made from a 'third-party' perspective. In other words, you're making a judgement about what you think are the deficiencies of 'religious practices', based on your knowledge or belief about the shortcomings of other people's endeavours to practice them. — Wayfarer

Absolutely, I recognise that, but my point is that it's no less true then for science. A neuroscientist possessed of the expansive and detailed knowledge of his subject might feel he's accounted for human consciousness. You, a non-practicing neuroscientist, then say "neuroscience cannot account for human consciousness" based only on your third party knowledge of other people's endeavours to practice neuroscience.

I don't see what's different that allows you to make claims about the understanding neuroscience can/cannot acquire as an outsider, but I couldn't make similar claims about the understanding religious practice can/cannot acquire without actually doing it.

My argument is that it's transparently incoherent. Being correct only relative to a perspective or framework is just the same thing as being thought correct by those who hold such perspective or framework. — Pfhorrest

No it isn't. One can think something correct only to find out later that it was not correct, all without consulting any outside reference at all. But as I said, I'm not taken with individual subjectivism for other reasons, so lets stick with cultural subjectivism. Is it 'correct' that 'Green' is the word for the colour of grass? It is if you're English. Not if you're French. It's clearly not only possible, but common, to have different answers constitute 'correct' for different languages in different contexts.

Everyone's views are correct according to what they think; the question is whether what they think is correct, regardless of whether or not they think so. — Pfhorrest

Who, then would hold that 'correctness' in their mind without it being "correct according to what they think". Where are we going to put this 'correct' world-to-mind notion - in a computer? All the while it's in someone's mind it is, by definition, 'correct according to what they think'.

'Correct' is a meaningless term without someone to think it.

The underdeteminism of data for models is quite a widely established principle now, you'll have a hard time convincing people otherwise. — Isaac


Good thing I'm not trying to. — Pfhorrest

You have literally done exactly that. The only argument you've given for your approach is that the data (philosophical theories) fits your theory ("pops-out"). I could come up with a bookshelf-full of theories which fit the data (the whole point of underdetermining, which you claim not to be disputing). So why should we choose your, what are it's other advantages notwithstanding the easy 'qualifying round' of its actually fitting the data.

Oh and since you seem interested in my motives for posting, this is another. You keep dropping off counter-arguments only for me to find they've been resurrected later.

You claimed earlier that complexity of belief systems was an objective measure that could be analysed by Kolmogorov complexity. I asked for an example, but you've abandoned that.

You claimed earlier that

the changes of worldview are largely unpredictable and unstructured, but by constantly weeding out the untenable extremes, the chaotic swinging between ever-less-extreme opposites still tends generally toward some limit over time. — Pfhorrest

I asked for evidence, you proffered 'science', I suggested that if it were that case it would be the only such example... You seem to have dropped that too.

You also claimed earlier that "we should do our best to follow [your methods] even if we're doomed to do so somewhat imperfectly". I argued that it's not always the case, gave several reasons why one would not want to follow a theoretically perfect, but pragmatically unachievable method. You seem to have dropped that.

I don't mind if you just don't want to talk about these issues anymore, but what I find disingenuous is when I read them raised them again, as if they were fresh ideas, with other people, or in other posts. It just gives the impression that, as Sophisticat said, we're talking to a telemarketer, not a discussion partner. If you're interested in those notions, that entails an interest in their counter-positions, especially when they constitute quite bold, and clearly demonstrable claims, such as that entire belief networks can be analysed with Kolmogorov complexity. That's an astonishing claim supporting an absolutely key component of your theory. It's worrying that you've no interest in further supporting it.

Yep. Sometimes grey strawberries look red. — frank

Right.

We're still no closer to the way in which my description of a route from retinal ganglia to speech production was "wrong", which is, obviously, the bit I'm most interested in.

By having confidence in yourself, believing that you exist for a reason, that you're a worthy person, and so on. Yes, cheap self-help slogans, I know. But I'm earnest about this. It's a contextual reply to your question.
A philosophical quest for the truth, for "knowing how things really are" can sometimes turn into a self-perpetuating obsession that makes one's life miserable. It can start off out of a poor self-image, or it can result in one (and then further perpetuate it and itself). — baker

I've no idea how this addresses what I said. Perhaps you could expand.

this is trivially true. Science does not account for, say, the meaning of life the way religion does, nor the way economics or art theory do. — baker

I don't believe that's the case, so what justification do you have for saying it's 'trivially true'. I don't think it's even true, let alone trivially so. Are you sure you're not confusing 'addressing' with 'accounting for'?

That confusion is literally the entire point all of my posts here are making (clearly to no effect whatsoever). All I'm saying is...

That religion claims to account for the meaning of life is not an indication that it actually does account for the meaning of life. It tells us the subject matter of it's investigation, not the success of the outcome.

That science does not account for the meaning of life has no bearing whatsoever on whether non-scientific endeavours do account for the meaning of life. It tells us only what science doesn't do. It remains possible that all other endeavours don't do it either.

If non-scientists can claim that science does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices, then the non-religious can claim that religion does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices.

That religion being a body of knowing-how and science being a body of knowing-that, only makes any difference if religious claims are limited to what the 'how' is ("the correct way to conduct liturgy is..."), but they are not. They include the word 'truth' which is used in the normal context (wherein there's a truth-maker) about matters like the meaning of life.

The grey strawberries illusion shows that ”red” doesn't line up with some portion of the em spectrum. — frank

How does it do that? I mean, I can see how it shows that ”red” doesn't always line up with some portion of the em spectrum, but that's a different claim altogether.

That's some insightful stuff, but Karen Armstrong promised religious 'truth'. How are we to understand a meaning of 'truth' which doesn't have a truthmaker?

What? So you're just going to leave me hanging with regards to the right process? Come on man, don't be such a tease. Cite me a paper at least...

It could be that human brains just have insurmountable flaws in their ability to be completely rational, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if they did, but that doesn't change the nature of what a rational process is, or that we should do our best to follow it even if we're doomed to do so somewhat imperfectly. — Pfhorrest

See I think it does. It's too simplistic to say that trying to do what's best is the only sensible option. If 'what's best' is too hard, then trying can be demoralising, time-consuming, error-prone, fractious... there's all sorts of reasons why we should not select methods which are beyond our capabilities even if they seem like they're headed in the right direction.

But it goes beyond this pragmatism too. You talk as if both rationality and suffering were something outside of the brain that our poor, flawed, brains have to work out a way of achieving/minimising. But both rationality and suffering are a product of those same flawed brains, they wouldn't exist without them. All the biases, self-deception, cultural mores, power struggles and linguistic muddles do not stand outside of these noble quests, only to hinder them, they're right there in the scrum with the rest of human ideas.

Your idea of what is ideal has been derived using exactly the flawed process you think we should try to get around to reach a 'rational' solution - as has that thought.

The sense you're using doesn't even appear there; the closest technical term I'm aware of to the thing you seem to mean is "situational ethics", although that's a more specific, particularly Christian ethical view. I've sometimes seen people use "consequentialism" as though it means that (as though it's the antonym to absolutism), but that's not technically accurate. I am familiar with lay people using "relativism" in the way you are, but not of any professional philosophical source. — Pfhorrest

The sense in which I'm using 'relativism'

Briefly stated, moral relativism is the view that moral judgments, beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, not only vary greatly across time and contexts, but that their correctness is dependent on or relative to individual or cultural perspectives and frameworks. — SEP

Note it specifically states that 'correctness' is relative to the perspective, not that there is no correct.

What I disagree with is the position that:
- if you think that you helping that lady cross that street there right then is the correct thing to do,
- and someone else thinks that you helping that lady cross that street there right then is an incorrect thing to do
- then you're both right relative to yourselves, or relative to your cultures (say the other person is on the far side of the world hearing about your situation), or something like that. — Pfhorrest

Yes, that is the view I'm espousing as 'relativism' (the one you say you disagree with). It seems to chime perfectly with the description from the SEP. It's still false to claim there are no 'correct' answers by this method. Both the SEP and you yourself have used the term 'correct' to describe the answer arrived at by the relativist.

if one held that two people could disagree on their judgements of the exact same event and neither of them would be incorrect, that would mean also that one held there to not be a correct judgement of that event; that there's no particular right or wrong way to judge that situation, just different ways, none of them right or wrong. — Pfhorrest

As can be seen from the SEP summary, this is just wrong (in the universal sense, of course!). One can have a solution that is 'correct' relative to their framework, and so it is not the case that "that there's no particular right or wrong way to judge that situation". There definitely and demonstrably is a right or wrong way to judge the situation because a person can consider themselves to have judged it wrongly. they can't have done that if there exists no wrong way. I think it would be 'correct' for me to help the old lady across the road (without necessarily thinking it would be correct for anyone else in my exact position). I can't think that if there's no such thing as the 'correct' thing to do.

I'm not an individual relativist. For various reasons I don't think it's a coherent position, but the above works for cultures, specifically language groups, which are the units at which I think moral statements are correct or not.

that just pops out clear as day as soon as you formulate the problem right, that's hardly reason to call the whole project a fool's errand. — Pfhorrest

The underdeteminism of data for models is quite a widely established principle now, you'll have a hard time convincing people otherwise.

Exactly the point I raised earlier about triviality. If we extend hedonism to all and any future pleasures/sufferings, and then we add to it the pleasure/suffering one gets from other people's pleasure/suffering... no actual real moral dilemma is helped in any way by such an analysis. We could still follow anything, from classical utilitarianism (my pleasure derives from knowing I've maximised all pleasures - utility monster included!), to Divine Command Theory (God invented pleasure so probably knows best how to maximise it).

It's an approach which restricts only those with insufficient imagination to re-frame their narrative in new terms, anyone else has five minutes of mental gymnastics to do before they can carry on with exactly the solution they had in the first place but now with the benefit of a whole fresh post hoc justification.

To me that's just myth, literature, the freethinking study of famous religious texts. Life is definitely more (I agree) than biology and physics -- and more than enacting the scientist or even the philosopher. — j0e

Yeah. This is the point, I think. If the Mythos idea were as presented then reading The Lord of the Rings would be no less spiritual than reading The Bible, lying on top of a tor watching the clouds scud by no less enlightening than guided meditation.

@Joshs
(Still not being notified of certain posts - I only found this one by chance)

What differentiates naturalism is its presupposition that the person holding a meaning can define it as ‘information’, which presumes that the person holding it “ does. to have much impact on it “. — Joshs

It's not just a presumption though is it? It works. I presume that in seeing a 'tree' and studying it, I'm not having much impact on the social construction 'tree', but I'd be absolutely right about that, the social construction changes very slowly in response to thousands of small changes and even then the very basics (form, colour, physical relation) barely change at all over millennia. I get that it's an assumption, but not one is made lightly, nor without good cause.

This is clearly not the case with phenomenology (as colloquially defined - I note your different technical specification). Here we have descriptions of 'experience' change with the wind, from minute-to-minute sometimes, and notoriously well affected by mood, cultural milieu, and recent history.

I do have a good deal of sympathy for the reduction of the binary you describe. I think metaphysically you're right. But pragmatically, there's such a wide gulf in the degree to which we expect the subject to 'form' the object between, say, physics and religious experience, that if we were to be more careful about our language we'd be doing little more than changing the names. A peppercorn royalty paid to to Husserl but otherwise business as usual.

As far as ‘ anchor of fit to world, surprisingly , a reciprocal anchor of fit extending from subject tot world and world to subject can actually be a more pragmatically useful sort of anchor of fit than the representational realist version. — Joshs

I'd like to hear about some examples of this.

If I send you a box of Oreos, will you read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception? If after reading it you still feel the same about phenomenology at least you’ll have a better sense of what’s being compared here — Joshs

I don't know what Oreos really are (some kind of biscuit, I think), but I will add it to the reading list.

A person could (I don't) take the view that it's impossible to tell from the outside if someone is 'saved' (in touch with the Ecstasy or 'transconceptual gnosis' or enlightenment, etc.) The toddler falls off the bike. The believer can keep saying the words, which might sound absurd to us, and the believer can explain that we are locked out (of course it may be that the believer is just as much locked in.) — j0e

I get what you're saying (I think) but would that not be surmountable by personal report? If a hundred people attend Catholic liturgy and one of them is thus transported (and reports as much), the other 99 gain nothing (and report that), then does that not demonstrate that the Catholic liturgy is not teaching what it thinks it's teaching?

The one person who achieved rapture obviously did so by some practice, but it clearly wasn't simply the instructions of the priest otherwise all would have. so if rapture is the objective (and I'm obviously just using it as an example), all currently religions are demonstrably wrong in their ideas about what practices lead to it. They are either missing something, or missing everything.

This is what I loved so much about @Wayfarer's initial talk of the Mythos. It had this wonderful fallible sense of us all trying to grasp at the ungraspable, to express in myth the experience we have of life which, let's face it, presents to us as so much more than just the biology or physics of it.

But religious practice is diametrically opposed to that. It defines far more as 'wrong' than it does as 'right', Papal edicts ban a hundred times as many things as they prescribe. Nine out of the ten commandments start with "Thou shalt not...", etc.

Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

Yet another example of the deception I brought up on the other thread. Look at what's been written here. The opening sentence talks very explicitly about the religious 'truth' - ie whether a religious matter is the case or not. This doesn't change meaning when turned into practical rather than propositional knowledge. The toddler does not have the practical knowledge of how to ride a bike all the while they keep falling off, practical knowledge still has a truth-maker.

So Armstrong starts by making explicit reference to this truth-maker. But by the end of the passage what do we find we're talking about - the methodology. We cannot hope to understand what religious practice is trying to do without practice "Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.". I agree entirely with her argument. But despite the clear deception at the start that she was going to make an argument about the 'truth' of the matter (which would be whether these practices actually did result in success at their objective), what we have by the end is an argument which says "you won't know if it works unless you try it" Fine. I completely agree that for some practices I won't know if they work unless I try them. But that's not an argument that they do in fact work once you try them. It's not, as clearly claimed, an argument for the 'truth' of religious practice.

For that, plenty of people have 'tried them' and found nothing at all, or even become worse people. So unless you just beg the question (they obviously weren't doing it right, because it definitely works!), the evidence we have thus far seems to be that it either fails as a exercise in practical knowledge, or the teachers don't actually know what it is they're teaching - ie the success it appears to have in the few, is not, in fact, the result of the practice they think it is.

I have no objection to the idea you put forward about the mythos. I really like that approach.

the mythical re-telling of human existence, encompassing suffering, redemption, mystery, and many other felt realities which can't be incorporated by logos. — Wayfarer

... is brilliant, really nicely put.

But then Armstrong spoils that beautiful sense of shared experience by saying

When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life

And in one sentence all that beautiful shared humanity is tossed way in favour of religious doctrine. Now some (and only some) narratives produce the 'truth' ("I've seen the light!") whilst others obviously don't (there'd be no meaning to 'truth' without falsity). Religious apologetics again. What a disappointment from such a genuinely positive start.

This is wrong btw, — frank

Well, there's no point in me pursuing it if it's wrong. What's the latest thinking on the relationship between the ventral stream and language?

Sure we cannot be culture-less or language-less, but that doesn't mean we cannot change culture or language, just by "doing culture" / "doing language" differently ourselves, even if that doesn't change the culture and language of everyone around us. We have these unquestioned things that we start from, but we can in principle question them and change what we think about them.

This sounds very similar to the debate about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. No doubt that what language we've given shapes our thoughts, but that's a far stretch from saying it necessarily constrains them; because language (and culture more generally) is something we make up, and we can make up new ones and discard old ones if we find we need to. — Pfhorrest

The sorts of culturally embedded beliefs we're talking about here run deeper than the aspects of culture which change. It's more like Anscombe's derivation of 'ought's - limits on what a culture can believe placed upon by the kind of thing a culture is, just like there are limits resulting from the kind of thing a brain is (though ultimately one reduces to the other - I agree with you about strong emergence). Basically , the part you're missing in the paragraph you took the above from, is the part about brains. We believe using brains, we doubt using brains, we rationalise using brains, we run Kolmogorov complexity calculations using brains...

You can't ignore the issue of how these brains work and the way in which that limits the things they can do, and the nature of the results they provide.

That sounds like it clearly falls on the "nothing is actually correct" side of things, if in thinking it feels right to you (and so is right, but only to you) you're not objecting to someone else thinking it (the same event) feels wrong to them (and so is wrong, but only to them).

My "universalism" is basically the position that if two people disagree about something -- the exact same specific thing, full context included -- at least one (but possibly both) of them is wrong; and my "relativism" is conversely the negation of that. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, I get that, but you're not raising any argument against relativism, you're just appropriating terms to make your position sound stronger (or rather the other position sound weaker). To a relativist (in the sense I'm using it), there is a 'correct' answer. I could either help the old lady across the road or not, one of them is the correct answer. You stealing away the word 'correct' for use only when two people disagree doesn't actually constitute an argument that their position results in 'nothing being correct'. You've done nothing more than say it does on the grounds that you've changed the meaning of the word 'correct' so they can't use it in that circumstance.

I'm just starting with rules that say nothing about direction of fit one way or the other, and then applying those rules equally to questions with opposite directions of fit. — Pfhorrest

Why? Having established that there are two directions of fit that are incommensurably different, why would the first thing you do be to assume (against all the evidence from our behaviour) that the rule applying to them would be (should be?) the same. Seems a really odd move.

I'm talking about the overall belief system, not any one particular belief in it. And there are objective measures of informational efficiency; compressibility, or something like Kolmogorov complexity. — Pfhorrest

If you can give an example of such an analysis I'd be amazed. Belief systems don't have variables which are amenable to Kolmogorov complexity calculation.

She just needs to associate the word with something. What do you think that something is? — frank

This (massively oversimplified) model...

A certain wavelength of light excites the retinal ganglia, which fires a part of the v4 region, which fires parts of Broca's associated with the word 'red', which creates a steeper action potential in the neurons that would make the mouth say the word red (but not enough to fire them)

Meanwhile a desire to make the right sound (to please mummy) fires some neurons which also create a steep action potential in the neurons that make the mouth say (or imagines saying) the word red.

Those neurons now fire (having two dendrites excited), the word 'red' is spoken.

The child is aware of a desire to say the right word, will generally do so in response to a certain wavelength, but no 'experience' of red is necessary.

The relation between 'red' and the word is carried by the ventral stream, the toddler's intent is only to say the right word. Only signals from both streams will be enough to get the word said.

They need to associate the word with something. — frank

Yes, I agree, but why an 'experience', was my question.

How is the kid aware of this firing? — frank

Do they need to be?

If the toddler sees someone point to an apple and hears them say "red", doesn't the child need to have an experience if redness to associate with the word? — frank

Why 'experience'? I can see why you'd need something to happen in the brain to attach the word 'red' to for next time, but why need this be an 'experience' (by which I assume you mean conscious)? Surely it could be any brain activity at all. The firing of some neuron in the v4 region would be sufficient.

Here I'm assuming you're talking about what is usually understood as "scientific study", and the topic are personal/private experiences. — baker

No. I was referring to any non-scientific investigation.

As with all studies, one interested in a particular field of study has to play by the rules of said field.
This is true whether we're talking about the field of what is usually understood as "scientific study" or whether we're talking about what is usually understood as "spiritual study".
Staying within the domain of one field, one will not see the merit of other fields, nor be able to study them. — baker

I think that's true to an extent. My comments here were aimed at non-scientists (in the main), so the critique would still apply. If one needs to be embedded in Buddhist practice to be able to judge what it can and cannot discover, then we should expect to hear about the limits of neuroscience only from actual neuroscientists. Alternatively, if layman can say what neuroscience can't account for it seems one-sided to say the least to claim that I'd have to practice religion to be able to comment on what it can't account for.

This is an inescapable problem that applies to every field of study when observed by an outsider. — baker

Yep. This is basically the point I was making. "science doesn't account for..." can either be treated as a lay claim (in which case we can make no lesser claim of any other field without full knowledge of it's content), or it can be treated as an expert claim, in which case it should only come from someone who is an expert in the field concerned.

As such, the claim here, oft repeated, that science does not account for X in the way that religion/phenomenology/woo does, can only come from a Buddhist neuroscientist!

You've literally just repeated, for the third time now, the exact deception I originally posted about. That entire post demonstrates (quite admirably) how science does not account for certain qualitative values.

It does nothing whatsoever toward demonstrating that any alternative study does account for those values. (As opposed to it simply claiming to do so).

If the claim of scientism (that science does indeed account for them) is dismissed, then a claim alone is clearly insufficient ground to believe any study does so satisfactorily.

is there a difference in the subjective experience of the believer who tends to believe in true beliefs, versus one who tends to believe in false beliefs? — Pantagruel

Presumably you're talking about one who believes false beliefs which turn out to be true? Otherwise I'd have thought the difference was obvious - the believer in false beliefs will far more frequently find things do not turn out as they expect.

Is someone who believes in false beliefs guilty of the sin of bad-faith, that is of believing something which he knows at some level to be not worthy of belief? In that case, it would seem rather that he has not even really achieved belief at all, but merely the attitude of "wanting to believe." — Pantagruel

It depends what kind of thing you hold a belief to be. To me a belief is just a tendency to act as if, to to say "X believes that Y", just means "X has a tendency to act as if Y". By that definition wanting to believe Z rather than Y (as one currently does) is not bad faith, it's just a recognition of behaviour one wants to change - "I keep acting as if Y, but I think I'd get on better if I acted as if Z"

one's own experience is all that a person has, and all that is or can be relevant to a person. — baker

True, but again 'all we have' is not sufficient to demonstrate that a study has a corpus of usefully shareable information either.

Not sure how you can study yourself looking out the window unless it means reflecting on your subjective experience of your experience (sorry for the gratuitous repetition). Introspection, I guess. — Tom Storm

Yeah, I think that's true. But the data you have to hand is always only your recollection of the experience, not the experience itself, and that recollection will be pre-filtered by what you expect it to be, which in turn will be influenced by the type of analysis you believe in. so you're not really gathering data so much as fabricating it in the form you expect from scraps.

Not the point at issue. Nobody disputes that modern engineering is a marvellous thing, but it’s applicability to the problems of philosophy is another matter. — Wayfarer

Perfect example. Engineering is not applicable to the problems of philosophy. No-one's going to disagree there. Nothing in that means that alternative approaches are applicable. You can't support the applicability of any branch or approach in philosophy by saying that alternatives to it are not applicable.