You're conflating the distinctions between the two different types of "fideism" and "skepticism" above. What you're saying here is an argument for "liberalism" over "cynicism", and I agree with it. That's different from an argument for "criticism" over "dogmatism". Correct, we cannot (and even if we could, must not) actively doubt to the point of rejection everything all at once, so we must hold some beliefs without having proven them from the ground up. That's "liberalism" over "cynicism". But we can (and must) remain open to the possibilities of each particular belief being wrong, not holding them above questioning. That's "criticism" over "dogmatism". — Pfhorrest

That's still the opposite of what I'm saying despite your specific meanings (noted - thanks). Wittgenstein and Ramsey aren't simply saying we can't hold everything in doubt at once, they're saying there are matters that we simply cannot doubt. we are human beings and when we doubt we do so with a machine (a brain) and embedded in a culture and a language which we cannot shake (we cannot be culture-less). So rather than your "we needn't doubt everything but should be ready to", it's "we cannot doubt some things but we can be aware of that when relying on them".

There are several different senses of "moral relativism", and the usual one in meta-ethics is (surprise) meta-ethical relativism, which very much is just the negation of universalism. Saying that what is right varies with context and circumstance isn't relativism in that usual sense and isn't anything I'm arguing against. — Pfhorrest

So your 'relativism' is the opposite of 'there is such a thing as a correct opinion, in a sense beyond mere subjective agreement' ie, that there is no such thing as a correct opinion other than mere subjective agreement? So where does just thinking one is correct fall? You seem to have divided the options into either thinking one is correct (and therefore everyone who disagrees is wrong), or thinking there is no correct (just more or fewer people agreeing with one). That seems to miss out entirely any form of ethics where one can be morally right in neither of those senses. If I feel it is right for me to refrain from punching you, I can feel that way without it being because I think it's 'correct for everyone', nor just that 'most people agree with me'. I can think it's right because it feels right to me.

There are questions about those things, but they can be analyzed into some combinations of those big two, because there are only four possible directions of fit — Pfhorrest

I don't see how the concept of direction of fit covers this. I'm not super familiar with Searle's version, but I am familiar with Anscombe's proto-version and it doesn't seem to bear on the distinction you want to make. Statements of desire, as Anscombe puts them, intend that the world should fit our beliefs, as opposed to statements of fact where we expect our beliefs to conform to the world. That seems a reasonable assessment, but says nothing of the universality of those beliefs. My belief that "you should wear red more often" is a desire that the world should be some way it currently isn't, but it's clearly just mine and not something I expect other people to desire also.

So I don't have any problem with the direction of fit classification (unless the version you're using is significantly different to the one I've used), but I don't see what work it's doing here. To say that there are matters of fact about the world-to-belief direction is to undermine the direction itself, it turns moral statements into beliefs-to-world statements again, yet the 'world' to which they're being adjusted is just psychology (people's beliefs about the way the world should be). But this doesn't get you an 'ought', it still only gets you an 'is'.

there is pragmatic reason to dis-prefer positions that require jumping through elaborate hoops to maintain them like that, namely that of efficiency, which in the case of descriptive knowledge manifests as parsimony. — Pfhorrest

I agree, but this, then, is a subjective matter, not an objective one. What people personally find more or less elaborate, more or less efficient will depend on the extent, clarity and embedded-ness of their other beliefs. We, as a society cannot judge our beliefs that way. I also have deep doubts from the work I've personally done on belief construction (it happens to be my research field) that anyone does maintain an overall low efficiency 'tangle'. There's good evidence that the way our internal modelling cortices work would make it impossible fo that to actually occur, even though any given 'local' belief network might be inefficient in isolation.

If this were the case you should be able to produce evidence of it happening. — Isaac


See the history of science for reference. — Pfhorrest

Science would be the one and only candidate, as far as I can tell.

Naturalism is the study of 'what you see out the window'. Phenomenology is the study of 'you looking out the window'. — Wayfarer

It's not what it's the 'study of' which differentiates naturalism in this context. I could read Tarot cards and would be quite accurate in saying that what I'm studying is the future. My methods of doing so, however, make it highly questionable that I will ever accumulate a corpus of information about the future.

What differentiates naturalism (and appeals to those who - perhaps excessively - idolise it), is that the corpus of information it yields about it's object of study is readily shared, without (by and large), the person holding that information having very much impact on it. If an engineer says a car works, it probably works no less for me than it does for you.

Phenomenology may well study 'you looking out of the window', but what consigns it to the lesser status it suffers is not that, it's the fact that the corpus of information is derives from that study is completely ephemeral, having no anchor of 'fit-to-world' to hold it.

It's a constant diversion of the woo-merchants to start by saying "science doesn't account for X", and end by promoting their own version of woo which has X as it's subject matter. But an investigation's having X as a subject matter does not in any way entail that that investigation will yield any useful information about X.

Just to be clear, you mean the people whose reason tells them that if they order themselves to do X, then necessarily Xing is right? — Bartricks

Who said anything about 'order'. It is not necessary to frame moral feelings as an 'order'. The feeling that I ought to do X is not necessarily an order to do so. Regardless, if there were people whose reason told them that, then they would be on no different footing to those whose reason told them otherwise.

As your argument currently stands, all we have is that our feeling something is the case stands as evidence that it is, in fact, the case. That's all you given thus far in furtherance of finding out what, in fact, is the case.

So we have evidence from some that objective moral facts obtain, and evidence from others that they do not. Now what?

What is it that we've done to 2+2=4 vs 2+2=5 that means we can dismiss the prima facie evidence from those whose reason tells them the latter?

There is no countervailing evidence. — Bartricks

There are all the people to whom it seems as though moral norms and values do not have an external source.

Yeah, if these are the tests for enrapture I'd be happy to fail too.

“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” — Victor Hugo

Er, no. I didn't say any of that.

If something appears to be the case, that is prima facie evidence that it is the case. That doesn't mean it 'is' the case, just that it is evidence that it is the case. So, what's true is not just that which seems to me to be true. — Bartricks

What you said was

If individual subjectivism is true, then if I tell myself to do X, then necessarily it would be right for me to X (for by hypothesis the rightness of Xing 'is' my instruction to myself to do it). Yet it is as clear to my reason as that 2 + 2 = 4 that if I tell myself to do X, that does 'not' entail that it is right for me to do X (anymore than if I tell myself that 2 + 2 = 5, then it will = 5). Thus individual subjectivism is false. — Bartricks

Where, in that statement, is the additional information confirming that what is clear to you "if I tell myself to do X, that does 'not' entail that it is right for me to do X" is, in fact true such that "individual subjectivism is false."? You literally wrote in the form " it is ... clear to my reason... Thus ... is false" without any caveats about 'evidence' or further analysis being required.

Or did you mean to say "individual subjectivism seems to have evidence showing it to be false but cannot be determined to be until we've investigated further"?

it is as clear to my reason as that 2 + 2 = 4 that if I tell myself to do X, that does 'not' entail that it is right for me to do X — Bartricks

So what is true is just that which seems to you to be true, but what is right cannot be that which seems to you to be right?

You're saying that if I think to myself "I ought to do X", I should assume that because I thought it, it cannot be what is morally right. But if I think to myself "What is morally right seems to be something external to me" I should, on this occasion take that thought to be the absolute truth of the matter?

How do you distinguish between thoughts which are 'self-evident' and thoughts which originate from you alone? How is my thinking "I'd like to do X" not evidence that Reason dictates I ought to do X? Do your thoughts go around with little labels on them telling you if they've come from reason or just from you?

This view, commensurablism, is just the conjunction of criticism and universalism, which are in turn just the negations of dogmatism and relativism, respectively. If you accept dogmatism rather than criticism, then if your opinions should happen to be the wrong ones, you will never find out, because you never question them, and you will remain wrong forever. And if you accept relativism rather than universalism, then if there is such a thing as the right opinion after all, you will never find it, because you never even attempt to answer what it might be, and you will remain wrong forever. — Pfhorrest

This is muddled. Criticism is not the opposite of dogmatism as a general approach and relativism is not the opposite of universalism.

As per Wittgenstein on certainty or Ramsey on truth, we cannot doubt everything, to even doubt requires a framework of hinge propositions which cannot be doubted, so dogmatism (belief held unquestioningly) is unavoidable. You cannot rationally doubt something without a dogmatic belief in the process of rational thought. So all positions involve degrees of dogma and degrees of flexibility (elements open to criticism). It's not sufficient, therefore to simply advocate one over the other, but you'd need, rather to say what ought be open to criticism and why.

Relativism is not the opposite of universalism, especially when it comes to morals. That moral rights might be relative (to time, place and individual) does not prevent it from being the case that such rights might be universally so for every replication of that time place and individual. Since such a replication may never happen (or rarely so) a pragmatic relativism may be more realistic, but it doesn't contradict universalism.

Both of which mean that your key conclusion is wrong.

If one is dogmatic it is not true that one will "remain wrong forever" because it's most often the case that any question will contain elements of dogma and elements of flexibility. Even a divine command theorists may unquestioningly hold that what is 'right' is the word of God, but discuss at length with theologians what exactly the word of God is on some matter. There are a vanishingly small and irrelevant number of people who are so dogmatic that for any given real-world question they will have no route by which to update their beliefs on that question.

If one is relativist, it is not true that there is no such thing as the right opinion. relativism only states that what is right in one context may not be so in another. It neither asserts that this is always the case, nor does it prevent anyone from determining what is right in the exact context they find themselves in. If I am relativist about morals, for example, it has no bearing on the fact that I need to work out what the 'right' amount of money for me to donate to charity is, that I believe that 'right' amount applies only to me in the exact circumstances I find myself in does not make me 'always right' about that calculation.

I hold that there are two big mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive questions, neither of which is reducible to the other, and between the two of which all other smaller questions are covered. One is the descriptive question of what is real, or true, or factual. The other is the prescriptive question of what is moral, or good, or normative. — Pfhorrest

You need to support this. Why, for example, is there not also a question about what is beautiful, what is tasty, what is exciting...? It is obvious that we share answers to the question of what is real - we agree on the vast majority of it, and those areas where we disagree are largely specialist fields where new data is being actively discovered with specialised instruments. This is abundantly not the case with what is moral. There's no new data being acquired with specialised instruments, it's largely the same data we've had for millions of years and that about which we disagree remains that about which we disagree. On the face of it it seems far closer to aesthetics (about which there is similarly widespread disagreement and no new data). There's a heavy burden of justification if you want to place morality with judgement about reality rather than aesthetics.

All that matters is whether there are any reasons at hand to prefer one answer over another. — Pfhorrest

As we've discussed before, this undermines your principle of avoiding the 'never find the right answer' state. There are always reasons. Data severely underdetermines theory and theory severely overdetermines confirmation. No-one who wants to hold a particular position is ever going to find themselves unable to produce reasons to prefer that position over another. As such they're going to be in no better a position than the dogmatist or the relativist. All that you've required of them additionally is the imagination to come up with a good post hoc rationalisation for their belief.

In my view 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

If this were the case you should be able to produce evidence of it happening. We've had 300,000 years at least as modern humans, so in that time how does your theory explain the first 290,000 years of remarkably similar cultures and then 10,000 years of explosion into the chaos we have now? What evidence can you draw from long-term historical studies that supports this idea?

It would not only be unphilosophical but also unscientific to follow the mainstream simply because it is mainstream. After all, today's mainstream can be tomorrow's nonsense. — spirit-salamander

What other approach would you advise? Given that evidence, rational conclusion, intuition...all severely underdetermine theory, we're left with either consensus or divergence.

"some people don't believe in moral universalism therefore moral universalism is false". — Pfhorrest

No. If you want to paraphrase it like that it would be ""some people don't believe in moral universalism therefore moral universalism is not a good analogy with external world realism (which everyone does believe in - hard-wired from birth)".

your same objections ... have once again flooded another thread and displaced any conversation that might have taken place about the actual topic of it. — Pfhorrest

Who else is vying for the space? You've had three responses, two agreeing with me (more or less) and one from a sociopath.

...while completely ignoring the libertarian deontology that ameliorates pretty much all of your claimed concerns — Pfhorrest

It obviously doesn't. That you think it does is not at issue here. again, I already assume you agree with with what you've written.

It's a matter of the "looney" being able to convince the expert presiding over the case that he has a point, so that that expert will at least suspend judgement while he (if necessary) escalates the issue to those above him and so on as necessary. Like how if a student in a science class somehow finds something that looks plausibly like new evidence against a prevailing theory -- which should get less likely over time, just as described in the OP -- he can show his professor, who can then begin the process of research that might possibly overturn the scientific consensus. And in the mean time, the professor knows that he shouldn't just outright tell the student he's completely wrong, if the student managed to present plausible evidence to the contrary. — Pfhorrest

Which is exactly the process we already have with laws, as I described it. the 'student' can make his claim in public, other people can empathise (or not) to see if they find his claim accurate, if enough people do it will become a policy in a manifesto and then law. It's no different. We don't conduct science by vote because there are matters of fact discoverable only with particular experiments or instruments. This is not the case with moral facts, so there's no reason at all to move away from seeking the consensus of the population. Even if you assume universalism or moral realism (as external facts) it is still the case that no individual has better access to them than any other, there are no special instruments or experimental set-ups required, we each have an equally valid claim to knowing what those facts are.

why did you mention equality ("egalitarian" = equal-itarian) here? — Pfhorrest

Only as an indicator of a society that had broadly got morality right, was functioning reasonably well insofar as how to treat one another

If we have a generally libertarian society where everyone gets to be master of their own little domain instead of being subject to the whims of others then we don't run into those kinds of conflicts nearly so much and so don't need to predict huge numbers of tiny details far in advance. — Pfhorrest

On what basis do you make this claim?

The only issues that remain are in public spaces, where e.g. Alice is doing something in a public park that Bob claims harms his equal right to use the park, and Alice rebuts that Bob is being an over-sensitive crybaby and she's not doing anything harmful, and we need to decide whether Bob's claim is legit or not. — Pfhorrest

That's literally all of morality. Morality is about how we treat others. If there are no 'others' being affected by our actions, there's no morality.

For that we don't need to predict a ridiculously complex dynamic system of all people everywhere years in advance. We just need a "today's forecast", to use your weather analogy from the other thread. — Pfhorrest

Nonsense. Take Alice's wish to buy a new car and Bob's desire that his air remain free from diesel fumes. alice will claim that the economy will suffer if she doesn't, Bob will claim the environment will, Alice will claim that prosperity has brought about environmental benefits, Bob will claim that it's destroying the environment in the long-run... Even your trite example of using the park has implications for the moral character of subsequent generations, obedience to authority, slippery slope etc...

I sincerely doubt you could come up with a single moral dilemma which could be solved by reference only to the two people involved.

I realized that last bit a month ago and went back and made a new post with that argument in that thread, but you ignored that. Maybe go back and read that now? I can link it if you want. — Pfhorrest

Sure, I'd be interested to read it.

Do you see the pattern here? — Pfhorrest

Well, yes, but it's obviously quite a different pattern from my point of view. As I said before it reads to me as if you keep making new threads which rely (in part) on premises from old threads which have numerous outstanding issues. That comes across as being more interested in proselytising than in discussing - proselytise for two thousand words, have brief discussion, shut that down and then proselytise for another two thousand words without even so much as acknowledging the numerous issues with the premises.

The problem, as I see it, is that you're too ready to duck the issues by referencing some other part of this bible you've written without actually having to make the argument there and then about how exactly it resolves the problem. You're doing it here. Instead of outlining how you think...

a thread on the libertarian and deontological aspects of my ethics ... would address many of [my] concerns based out of [my] assumption that [you were] some ends-justify-the-means authoritarian — Pfhorrest

... you just allude to that fact that it would, but when we turn to that thread, no mention is made of how it addresses the issues we were previously discussing. I've no doubt it all makes sense to you, I kind of presume that from the outset, so there's little point in writing anything publicly unless you address what other people say about it.

I don't read all of your threads, nor all the replies in the ones I'm involved in, but from what I have read so far, this isn't confined to me. I'm one of the few people who reply to your threads at all (in any long-term engagement) and of the few others who do, most seem to raise similar issues (namely that your premises are the problematic part, and what you assume is self-evident is not so)

most philosophers agree that one of the marks of a moral norm is that they have categoricity. That is evidence that the reason of those who are exceptionally good at attending to their reason - represents moral norms to be categorical. — Bartricks

Not at all. You've already established that they may simply be defending a stupid view cleverly. So their agreement carries no weight at all.

you sound like grudge central to me. — Bartricks

Thanks, I'll mention it to my therapist.

that's what the vast bulk of contemporary metaethicists do. They defend stupid views very cleverly. — Bartricks

So if it is possible for professional philosophers to defend stupid views cleverly you've still not given any ground for accepting their assessment of that which is self-evident to reason. It could be a stupid view defended cleverly.

the "dynamic" solution to the problem I'm talking about is a liberal/libertarian one: let everyone control their own surroundings in real time. — Pfhorrest

Again what difference does that make to my argument? An individual doing it is no quicker than an institution doing it, they're no more able to predict what every future human's appetites are going to be for the rest of human existence as that dynamic future changes in real time in response to their emerging strategy. Either you're saying that everyone can do anything they like without hindrance, or else the nature of that hindrance is crucial to your ethics It's the hindrance that we're talking about here, the calculation of that which you'd like to do but should refrain from doing because of the consequences on the suffering of others. The whole debate is about how to work out what those things are, so saying that you can do what you like absent of those restrictions is irrelevant. We started out that way, one already can do what one likes absent of the restrictions laid down by whatever moral code one follows.

You seem to want to force upon me a dichotomy of either me saying nothing new and so nothing worth saying, or else me arrogantly thinking I'm some kind of unprecedented genius because (so far as I can tell) I've had a new idea. — Pfhorrest

No, there's having a new idea but having the humility to recognise that each step is complex and fraught terrain which has been trod before. The only thing I object to about your posting style is the manner in which you text-dump your entire completed world-view, and when anyone questions some part of it you say "that's not what we're discussing here, I've dealt with that elsewhere", then when we look to the thread in which you've dealt with it you say "well, I don't want to waste time with people whom I can't convince (after five minutes) so I'm moving on to the next thread", issues are raised in that next thread and are referred back to the previous one... and so it goes on. Nothing ever gets dealt with because all you want to do is blurt out the entire edifice, but in doing so never deal with any of the issues that arise.

Every single step you take might well be new, exiting and world-shattering (unlikely of course, but not impossible), but you'll not find out if only a short while into the issues you abandon the debate in favour of just assuming you're right and moving on to the next step. The reason philosophy (and science, for that matter) deals with small issues in great detail is that most authors and scientists are humble enough to know that if no-one else has come up with their grand world-view it probably because the issues are extremely complex and so are best tackled one at a time in great detail. Bit by bit we make progress.

People come up with folk beliefs about what is real all the time too, and broadly agree on the obvious things, yet disagree on less-obvious things. Does that mean we shouldn't do natural sciences, but instead just poll people on their beliefs? — Pfhorrest

No, because or model of what is real assumes a shared external source of our sensation, Our model of what feels good does not.

Yes yes complexity I get it... so we shouldn't do meteorology then? — Pfhorrest

No, because I didn't say we shouldn't do ethics (which would be analogous). What we shouldn't do is try meteorology by tracking the movement of every single air molecule, it's too complex, we need shortcuts like pressure and temperature, and even then we don't predict the weather this time next year. Five days is about all we can manage with any accuracy, we are circumspect about our ability to deliver answers and don't do so in situations where we very obviously don't have the data.

You can argue in your defense that you didn't do the thing, or that the thing you did is not the thing the law is against, but "I did the thing the law is against, but it's not wrong to do that" is a non-starter. You don't even get a chance to argue that the law is incorrect. — Pfhorrest

Nor would you in your system. As described, those matters which cause suffering are determined by a panel of experts. If any individual could argue the case and have it changed in real time on the basis of their argument alone without having to convince any number of people nor with any checks and balances ensuring they're right then it would be chaos. Right now, if an individual believes a law is wrong they can campaign about it, try to convince other people to see it from their point of view, if successful they can lobby, get the 'panel of experts' to agree and it will be changed. It's just a mtter of havign check in place to prevent the law changing every five minutes as some looney thinks they've got an argument against it.

What does this have to do with (in)equality? — Pfhorrest

Nothing.

Societies are bigger now, so we must have authority (and thus inequality) to make them predictabl(y bad)? — Pfhorrest

No, societies are larger now so determining the course of action which causes least suffering overall is exponentially more complex, leading to a greater proliferation of theories about it, most of which (by chance alone) will be wrong.

You don't do philosophy by consensus. You assess a position based on the evidence. — Bartricks

Then what do you mean by

It is also worth noting that the majority of philosophers who have thought carefully about this issue have also come to the conclusion that we have free will, despite disagreeing over what possessing it involves. — Bartricks

most moral philosophers agree that moral norms and values are categorical — Bartricks

most people's intuitions - most people who think soberly about such matters, are capable of understanding, and who are not in the grips of a dogma - deliver the verdict that it would be wrong to torture one to maximise the happiness of the many.

That doesn't mean they're right. But it is very good evidence that they're correct. — Bartricks

the majority agree that we have free will of the moral responsibility-grounding kind. — Bartricks

I could go on, I honestly wasn't expecting the search to yield so many results. Central to the support of your premises is that fact that a majority of philosophers agree with them (I don't even think that is true, but that's not the point here). The charge you've yet to answer is how you can use majority consensus to support your premises whilst dismissing this exact same property when it departs from your own preferred positions.

You will, of course, be tempted to turn to a distinction between premises and conclusions - premises are supported by consensus, but conclusions only by reasoning from evidence. But if you want to support that distinction, then what exactly are philosophers doing such that they are more likely to arrive at true premises than non-philosophers? If premises are not reasoned to then there's no skill-set in reasoning being applied to deriving them, if they are being reasoned to then they are a conclusion of some process and as such consensus carries no weight.

Has a professional philosopher annoyed you or been mean to you or something? — Bartricks

Yep. More than once. But I don't hold grudges.

Professional philosophers are expert reasoners. — Bartricks

Then I'll ask again. Are metaethicists not professional philosophers? Or do you have some definition of idiocy that does not exclude being an expert reasoner?

Where in there (in either case) was any actual systematic research and consensus-building done? You just asked some people what they already thought — Pfhorrest

You've answered you own question. Yet again, for some reason, assuming everyone but you is an idiot waiting to be instructed. How do you suppose those people arrived at what they 'already thought'? we've a sense of empathy from as young as six month's old. We dedicated that overwhelming majority of our brains to predicting the behaviour of others and how our behaviour will affect them based on that empathy (together with a whole host of other sources). By adulthood people have spent more hours studying other people, putting themselves in their shoes, predicting what the results might be, than any other subject. They've talked about these things with friends, family, colleagues... They've read books with heroes and villains, watched films, plays, songs...

They've all come up with much the same answers when it comes to the obvious stuff, and no law is ever going to tell people to kill innocents, they just won't do it.

But some stuff, the more complex stuff, people's research has yielded different answers, and the rightness or wrongness of those answers can't be tested because a lot of the time it's about consequences too complex to actually follow (like predicting the weather by following air molecules, accurate but impossible).

It's not the research that's lacking, nor the dissemination of that research - both of which have been going on through every childhood for hundreds of thousands of years quite happily without your intervention. It's deciding on matters where the consequences are too complex to predict, no matter how much we know about other peoples feelings.

We naturally strive to accommodate those who we care about, but rarely explicitly codify in our processes that we should accommodate everyone, as I'm advocating. — Pfhorrest

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

And when those cultural practices are entrenched, in law or even just in tradition, we're loath to make exceptions of revisions to them when they fail to work. — Pfhorrest

Yep. Again with this assumption of ignorance. People are loathe to make changes because changes are often mistakes, they often don't yield sufficient benefits to justify the effort...

I'm advocating that if a "law" as written produces a demonstrably bad result, that alone is reason to change the law. — Pfhorrest

Yep. And I can't think of a single person who doesn't already think that. The problem is with the demonstration of this 'demonstrably bad' result. conservatives will say "yes, it looks bad now, but if we change it things will be even worse for the next generation..."

Are you suggesting that inequality produces good outcomes more reliably? Or just that it lets us more accurately predict outcomes -- by forcing them to be bad? — Pfhorrest

Neither. It's about uncertainty in complex systems. The more nodes in the system the more exponentially complex it becomes. small hunter-gatherer tribes have fewer nodes and so more predictable feedback loops. Larger societies have exponentially more complex networks making feedback practically impossible to predict. Imagine the difference in a game of Chinese whispers with a group of ten compared to a group of ten thousand. How ell could you predict the final word in each case?

The part you're talking about is basically my account of how to compile reliable advice on how to avoid conflicts in such a free and equal society, to use both preemptively to prevent such conflicts from occurring, and in the assignment of culpability if such conflicts occur anyway. — Pfhorrest

Yes. Plus the fact that the state we're in is largely a result of trying to deal with that exact problem, so no other aspect of your New World Order is going to be possible because your conflict resolution strategy doesn't work and most of the institutions we have result from attempts at dealing with that.

You are again assuming that I'm aiming to create a static world that permanently satisfies everyone exactly how it is, rather than a dynamic world that adapts to satisfy people's changing appetites in real time. — Pfhorrest

No, I'm well aware of the fact that you're talking about a dynamic world adapting to satisfy people's changing appetites in real time. I'm saying that such an aim is impossible. the fact that you're prepared to update your world as people's appetites change does not have any bearing on the problem of people's appetites changing faster than you can update your 'ideal world' to accommodate the change. If your 'ideal world' is permanently several years behind the appetites it is supposed to satisfy then what exactly is its purpose?

Would you at some point say "that's enough suffering eliminated, we can stop now", and just give up on even attempting to get rid of even more? Where is that line to be drawn, and why? — Pfhorrest

It's not your objective that's in question, it's your methods, but to answer your question directly, yes, I would at some point in time say "that's enough suffering eliminated, we can stop now" I don't hold the elimination of all suffering to be the only goal in life, and if suffering were eliminated to a degree where I found it to be less important than other goals, then I would suggest we stop there.

As I said before, you could argue that the frustration of these other goals was a form of suffering, but then you end up saying nothing at all because reduction in suffering become de facto the only goal there is.

The whole method of verifying people's hedonic experiences that you're contesting to vehemently is just a way to tell reliably if something consistently causes certain types of people to suffer in certain contexts, so that we can know to stop doing that. — Pfhorrest

No it isn't. I've (quite exhaustively now) explained why it doesn't do that. whether or not something causes certain types of people to suffer in certain contexts is, in part dependant on the very actions we take to prevent it and so will already have changed the very moment we enact any strategy to prevent it. As such it is not "a way to tell reliably if something consistently causes certain types of people to suffer in certain contexts, so that we can know to stop doing that." It is only such a thing if we don't make any changes to our culture as a result of the data we glean - which is exactly the opposite purpose.

some of these recent adaptations are the things met with the fiercest social and political resistance. I guess just half of everyone are sociopaths? — Pfhorrest

No. Again, despite your frequent nods to it, this is just ignoring the complexities of long-term satisfaction. Most people who object to these changes do so from economic, societal or religious reasons - ie they think that pursuing them may bring satisfaction now, but the effects of doing so in the long term will bring less satisfaction overall. since such long-term satisfaction cannot be tested, the arguments are all moot and we end up deciding democratically. as I said on the other thread, you're not an unprecedented genius, we have all been here before and the system we have is largely the result of having been through all this.

See a few paragraphs up ("The whole method of..." and "This is exactly analogous...") for elaboration on how what I'm advocating is different from that. — Pfhorrest

See a few paragraphs up for how it's irrelevant whether you're talking about a static or a dynamic idealisation. What matters is the fact that the very act of idealisation effects the appetite data it was idealised to meet, and as such it is rendered immediately inaccurate. Saying that you'll update it as appetites change is pointless. All you'll have is record of what appetites were at the time of survey and no reason to believe they'll be of any use trying to satisfy whatever appetites will be by the time a strategy is devised and finally has its effect.

Translation + stress testing of the bridge translation builds. — fdrake

Yes. I should not have forgotten the duty on the part of the scientist, as you say

the inverse question induced by the translation; said the neuroscientist to the folk theorist - does this make any difference on a day to day basis? Does this make a difference therapeutically? — fdrake

I think you're right here, it's really important to keep in mind the wider goals of science and one of those has to be to report back to the folk conceptions and processes. I know it's an unpopular position, but I'm not a "science for science's sake" kind of person, we do science for a reason, it's as much politics and social jostling as any other aspect of human affairs.

One way of framing the issue is that if people behave as if there were a thing, and that behaviour wouldn't work as it does without it functioning as if there were a thing, does it make sense to say that thing exists in some sense? — fdrake

I think we're kind of forced by our grammar to go along with that - "X doesn't exist", "then what is the subject of that last sentence?". The problem perhaps, arises in importing the connections between those 'things' into that behaviour. It's too binomial, perhaps, to say behaviour either works or doesn't, it could work better or less well?

if something behaves as if a model of it were true, then the model can be treated as real/held to be true/is true. Like F=ma or something like that. If the system involved works in accordance**
with F=ma, F=ma is true for it. So that system's behaviour generates a commitment to that it acts in accord with that description of it. — fdrake

Likewise here. I think this crosses into some of the issue I have with the binomial properties (true/false, known/unknown) being used as if they were a different type of property to their graduated cousins (works-fails, believed-doubted). If something behaves as if a model of it were 'true' then it should, I think, be treated as if it were true. But as I use the terms (which I accept is idiosyncratic) what we're really saying is that a model works. The difference being that another model can work better, whereas one cannot be more true.

Not sure if I'm nitpicking though (there was that body you asked me to ignore, after all, and here I am doing a bloody autopsy on it)! It definitely works as framing if one allows for graduation in place of (what I'm reading as) binomial binning.

I think, in that latter sense, science is actually doing nothing special (or at least nothing unexpected). We do it throughout our childhood. I used to think all sorts of things that we might call my own personal folk science, and I updated those models as and when they failed me. My folk ontology was being updated by conflict with the world throughout. And more often than not the process was no less fraught!

If you can't already tell we have will, there's nothing I can say that will make you believe that we do. — Manuel

What kind of argument is that? It amounts to nothing more than "if you don't see things the way I do there's nothing to say". Well then I have to ask what exactly you thought you were going to get out of posting on a public forum?

I thought you were studying free will, not the "sensation that you have chosen to do so". — Manuel

They are synonymous.

Object permanence highlights the point that was already obvious to people like Locke. It doesn't tell you how it arises, nor why we have it. — Manuel

Again, what reading have you done on object permanence to be able to judge what it does and does not have to say?

If statues and trees and everything else were subject to "learning", we would still be debating what they are. — Manuel

Why?

I said:

"the complexity of manifest reality cannot be explained by neuroscience, we simply know way too little."

"brain science says very, very, very little about the mind"

Also "knowing a tree", "speaking of trees", "classifying trees" aren't explained by anything in current brain science.

I said that physics says virtually nothing about the mind.

Now you are mis-interpreting me. — Manuel

Nope, it's those exact claims I'm disputing.

I still do not understand your point. — Bartricks

It's quite simple.

Either philosophy has an externally demonstrable measure of 'expertise' or it does not.

If it does, then the fact that virtually every professional philosopher that's ever lived disagrees with you should give adequate cause to assume you're wrong (at least about the clarity of your argument).

If it does not, then your frequent references to expertise, Dunning–Kruger etc. are irrelevant to the assessment of your argument.

like I say, the argument I have given demonstrates that view to be mistaken. — Bartricks

The issues with it don't go away if you ignore them.

Your argument for this rests upon that which is self-evident to reason being determined by the attention of professional philosophers - a class of people who your conclusions demonstrate have no special abilities in that regard and therefore no justification for trusting their support for one of your key premises.

Put yet more simply, If philosophers have some special capabilities in reason then you should take seriously that fact that virtually all of them disagree with your conclusion. If they do not have such abilities, then there is no reason to believe your key premise that moral prescriptions are not the prescriptions of individual humans.

I didn't say anything about only considering present first-person experiences. Future suffering or enjoyment is still a first-person experience. True, we can't know the relationship between present and future experiences entirely in the first person, we have to do a third-person study of the world to establish that, but that's once again a question of particular means, not of general ends, and so not something I'm saying anything about here when doing philosophy, but a subject for some logically posterior scientific investigation. — Pfhorrest

I'm talking about the defence of @baker's accusation that

he doesn't seem to care whether his theory of morality actually has the potential for ever being applied by humans. — baker

To counter that you'd have to show that your system is, in fact, possible to apply. A system which relies, for its execution, on facts which are impossible to obtain with sufficient accuracy to yield results better than guesswork is not applicable. This third-party data on which your system relies changes too rapidly with too strong a feedback from the system itself for any scientific-like investigation to yield its answers in time for their enaction to bring about the desired result. Hence your system is not one that can be applied by humans.

The part of moral theory we're discussing here is deciding on what are good ends. That's not in itself a means to achieving those ends, it's just deciding what ends to try to achieve. How to achieve them is a separate, later question. — Pfhorrest

That's where your system fails. What's the point in deciding that Xs are 'good ends' if later analysis of how to achieve those ends shows us that doing so is impossible? We have a choice here, we can set up our 'good ends' such that they are practically achievable, or we can set them up such that they are entirely useless at any pragmatic level. If you ignore the issues with method, you are just building pointless sky castles. Ethics is about real action among real humans.

What you think you're doing is immaterial to issue. — Isaac


So you get to tell me what my views are, and I don't get to clarify that what you think I'm saying or doing isn't actually what I'm trying to say or do? — Pfhorrest

Again, what you're trying to say is immaterial, this is a not a database of things people think, so the accuracy of your personal entry is not the main concern. You said (in the paragraph to which I responded "philosophy is just laying the groundwork for why and how to go do a science of some kind, rather than some ineffectual non-science that will at best yield non-answers." That is an empirical claim. Either your philosophy does lay such groundwork, leading to effective science, or it does not. That you think it will has no bearing on that fact. I'm not questioning your motives, I'm questioning the pragmatism of your methods. Hence what you think you're doing is irrelevant to the argument. It's not about pretence here, I'm making no claim to have all the answers about the pragmatism of your methods, I'm only making th point that the relevant debate is there, not in this pointless theorising.

You're taking too much emphasis on the "perfect" part, unless you want to deny that even something so vague as "certain kinds of people in certain contexts will tend to find certain things pleasant and certain other things unpleasant" is impossible to predict, — Pfhorrest

No, That is possible to predict, already has been predicted, and is something no-one but a psychopath generally struggles with. So no new method is required to assist with it.

I've already said it but I'll say it again: I'm not suggesting that we have to make the world one exact unchanging way that will make everyone satisfied forever, and so figure out exactly what exact unchanging static state of the world that would be. Just that we have to (do our best to) ensure that the world and people's target valences always align, which can (and probably would best) be done in a dynamic way, enabling people to adjust the part of the world around them to satisfy their appetites in real time. — Pfhorrest

You've just completely ignored the argument I've already given against the pragmatism of this. I'll just repeat it, in case you're confused into thinking that ignoring it makes it go away.

The affect resulting from finding oneself in some set of circumstances changes with the model that each person has of those circumstances and the likely affect they would cause. This model is itself effected by one's own moral thinking and that of one's culture. To resolve a moral dilemma (using positive affect in all people in all circumstances as a target) one would need to know what affect each option of the dilemma was likely to result in, not just now (that would be the cliched hedonism you deny) but in the future and for future generations. At least to a level of probability capable of significantly distinguishing between options.

But the feedback inherent in the fact that your decision will change the affects felt in the future means that you cannot possibly have a clue in any but the most obvious of cases. Anything remotely complex and the chaos effects of the multiple feedbacks would quickly render the likelihood incalculable. So only simple, clear cut cases could be decided this way.

And then you remind us that your model is not meant for simple clear cut cases as we've already worked these out.

You might argue that the rate of change in affect is slower than the rate at which we could discover the effects of acting on such a change... But the rate of change in affect (and the rate at which we can calculate the effects) are both empirical matters, and you've assured us that your approach here does not rely on empirical data for its soundness. — Isaac

I'm not sure I can make it much simpler, but

Clear cut cases are already clear and no new method is needed to decide them. Only complex cases currently yield dissimilar strategies we need to choose between.

Responses to complex cases affect the long-term satisfaction brought about by the strategies themselves in difficult to predict ways (that's why they're complex cases).

The time it takes to work out how every person would react, in real time, to the execution of some strategy, is longer (by a long way) than the time it takes for that reaction to move on to some new difficult-to-predict state.

As such, a meta-strategy of working out how every person would react to individual moral strategies in order to inform them is unworkable in complex cases.

we as a civilization (any civilization, or the global civilization) sure don't seem to be recognizing and practicing it in the political sphere right now. — Pfhorrest

What makes you say that?

f you think the ordinary legislative processes in use today resemble that process, I'd appreciate if you spelled that resemblance out, because I really don't see it. — Pfhorrest

Sure.

People have experiences, they talk to each other about them - have done for hundreds of thousands of years. We strive to make the world such that it fits what we think, from experience, will satisfy us, both now and in the future. Being creatures with empathy and a co-operative social structure, we also strive to make the world such that it fits what we think will satisfy those other we live with, both now and in the future. We work this out from those aforementioned conversations, and our imagination.

Over time the same issues arise and the same solutions are developed such that cultural practices become a shortcut to the process of working those out - particularly where the short-term and long term degrees of satisfaction clash.

But, as mentioned in your other thread, prediction of long-term effects in a dynamic environment is nigh on impossible - hence a wide variety of cultural practices and a long history of their utter failure to correctly predict long-term degrees of satisfaction.

The less dynamic the environment, the less interactions whose feedback need to be accounted for, the less chaotic that probability space is. Hence the many thousands of years of relatively egalitarian societies devolving into the mess we have now.

Predicting the effect of our current actions on future satisfaction is the key element of uncertainty. You're acting as if that uncertainty could be reduced by study of our current responses to circumstances, but the uncertainty is about how a response to those circumstances might bring about satisfactory future ones, not about which circumstances are satisfactory in the first place.

That's a clear sign of cause and effect. That's something we normally wouldn't do in normal life, put a flashlight in front of your eyes. If for whatever reason, you choose to look at a flashlight, you are using your will to continue looking at the flashlight. That's different from causes and effects. — Manuel

Just stating how it seems to you at first glance doesn't really help, obviously the argument moved past what appeared to us to be the case at first glance a long time ago. The earth seems flat at first glance. So with...

If for whatever reason, you choose to look at a flashlight, you are using your will to continue looking at the flashlight. — Manuel

...what is preventing some preceding cause resulting in the effect of your continuing to look at the flashlight and triggering a sensation that you have 'chosen' to do so?

Do you believe we have free will, experiments aside? If you do, then you'll look at how that's possible using neuroscience. If you don't, like Sam Harris, he'll look to neuroscience to prove his point. — Manuel

That's just talking about confirmation bias. Again, how is philosophical investigation somehow immune from confirmation bias in a way that scientific investigation is not?

Psychic continuity is what Locke described: when we look at an object at time t1, we take to be the same object at time t2. In other words, when you go outside and see a bird in the sky, you will continue to see it as the same bird through out the time span you are looking at it. Maybe I'm a total Martian, but I can't help but recognize the tree outside my window as the same tree the next day. I can't get rid of it if I wanted to. — Manuel

OK - we call call that object permanence in cognitive science. There are entire books written about it. So I'm struggling to see how you can support the idea that the cognitive sciences cannot investigate the matter.

I'll grant you the "self" argument, people are different in these regards. — Manuel

Yep. Hence not "always there on every topic". Your list of 'common' assumptions is growing thin.

You're telling me that when you visit a place for the first time, you don't already know what a river or a statue is? You take time after seeing a place to think to yourself that's a tree and not a light post? — Manuel

Why would I be telling you that? I'm a grown adult and all of that object recognition work would have been done in early childhood. Do you think we're born knowing what a statue is?

the point remains. I don't know of a physicist who claims that physics tells us anything substantive of the mind, that was not already obvious years ago: that it's physical. — Manuel

No, the point was that physics (and neuroscience) cannot tell us anything about the mind - you've since retracted that to 'not much, now it's just "I don't know of any" - at least we've now reached a conclusion that we can agree on - you don't know of any physicists or neuroscientists that have have said anything you personally find to be substantive about the mind.

Having you're finger move by an electrical shock is the same as you willing to move the finger? Press you palm with any object and watch your fingers move. Afterwards move your fingers by yourself. Is that in any way the same thing? — Manuel

Those things being different doesn't imply that they're not both caused by stimuli and response. Having a finger move by electric shock is different to fainting, but that doesn't mean one of them has to be modelled differently in terms of causation.

Either we have free will and you can find some way to see if neuroscience as anything to bear on the subject. Or we lack it and we go to neuroscience to prove that we don't have it.

In either case it's stipulated. — Manuel

How is it stipulated? One can quite coherently ask the question of whether we have free will from a neuroscientific perspective. We could look for signals driving physiological events associated with decisions (like moving an arm) and see if they are accounted for by preceding signals. How's that 'stipulated'?

I'm mentioning specific things: "self", "psychic continuity", "categorization", etc. What's given in experience and must form a part of it for us to form an intelligible world at all. — Manuel

You're assuming the contents of your experience are features of collective experience. I have no idea what you mean by "psychic continuity", I don't feel like I have a consistent 'self' and for me 'categorisation' is distinctly post hoc. It's monumental arrogance to just assume whatever world view you happen to have is somehow foundational to any enquiry just because it's how you happen to see things.

we could not theorize at all if did not have these things as given. When we speak of the self, at no point do you lose consciousness or stop categorizing, it's always there on every topic. — Manuel

Right. an issue which affect philosophy and neuroscience equally. so I'm not seeing why neuroscience is being singled out as the one unable to talk about those things.

We experience speech and vision as manifest activity, not non-mental processes. That these non-mental processes are essential for speech or vision, no one could doubt, but we have linguistics and vision science, which are different than neuroscience. Why do we have these fields? Why don't linguists just study the brain and forget about sentence structure? — Manuel

Because it would be extremely complicated to do so. I've already answered that question, and so has @khaled in a separate post. Why are you still asking it? the existence of a simpler way of talking about something doesn't prove the more complex way is false, just, you know, more complex.

Which physicist would be crazy enough to say appeal to physics to explain the mind? — Manuel

We weren't talking about explaining the mind. You said..

Physics is amazing, while saying almost nothing of mind. — Manuel

Now you disingenuously change the claim to physics 'explaining the mind'.

If that's how you interpret it, fine. — Manuel

It's not an interpretation. I've supplied evidence of hundreds, if not thousands, of papers from well respected, peer reviewed journals talking about the subjects you specified.

You're speaking about stimuli and reaction. I'm talking about will. — Manuel

How do you know those are two different things?

when we speak of will, science either denies it exists or tells us nothing about it. — Manuel

No. https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=neuroscience+of+volutary+action&btnG=

You can speak of stimulating a finger to go up, but it's very different from moving your finger. It's a bit like Wittgenstein once asked:

"What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arms goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" — Manuel

No. Wittgenstein's aphorism asked the question (albeit with an implication), yours answered it.

You can't take these things away and study the world "value free" as it were. — Manuel

Indeed. So how does philosophy magically duck that problem then? The very theorising you're doing right now, the one in which you're trying to dismiss the role of neuroscience is itself replete with the already-embedded assumptions by which you conduct any such theorising. Either no study can say anything at all or you must concede that it is, after all, possible to say something useful about the mind despite the fact that one is using a mind to do so.

seems to be highly unlikely that physics can say much about mind. — Manuel

Why would your assessment of the likelihood be of any use here. You're not a physicist. If a physicist thinks it likely their subject can say something about mind but you don't, what merit would there be to following your judgement over the physicist's? They should surely know their own subject's capabilities better than you.

Neuroscience is extremely useful, while not being able to say much about the self — Manuel

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=neuroscience+of+self+identity&btnG=

You seem consistently to confuse a subject's not saying anything you like the sound of with its not saying anything at all.

we don't need to know anything about brains to discuss whether or not it is the case that suffering and suffering alone (as a kind of experience, in the first person) is intrinsically a bad state of affairs. — Pfhorrest

Of course we do. 'Bad' is not synonymous with 'feels bad currently'. So in order to know whether first person experiences of suffering are 'badly we need to know something of the future consequences of first person suffering. These are not given as part of the first person experience but rather as results of empirical investigations.

But of course we need to know about brains to properly discuss how to reduce suffering, since it turns out upon third person observation of the physical world that the experience of suffering is a product of brain function. — Pfhorrest

Right. And any moral theory (of your negative hedonistic type) is a means of reducing suffering. If you start any proposition with "One ought to..." you're talking about a method, not simply a logical fact.

the philosophy is just laying the groundwork for why and how to go do a science of some kind, rather than some ineffectual non-science that will at best yield non-answers. — Pfhorrest

What you think you're doing is immaterial to issue.

I directly responded to that, immediately after the bit you quoted:

I'm absolutely not saying that we need to be able to predict perfectly exactly what everyone's target valence will be so as to preemptively prepare a static, unchanging world that will perfectly satisfy everyone's target valences. — Pfhorrest

No. You responded as if to a suggestion that we could not achieve perfection in our predictions. That's not the issue I raised. I didn't say "We shan't be able to get it perfect", I said we shan't be able to do it at all.

Edit (for clarity) -

The affect resulting from finding oneself in some set of circumstances changes with the model that each person has of those circumstances and the likely affect they would cause. This model is itself effected by one's own moral thinking and that of one's culture. To resolve a moral dilemma (using positive affect in all people in all circumstances as a target) one would need to know what affect each option of the dilemma was likely to result in, not just now (that would be the cliched hedonism you deny) but in the future and for future generations. At least to a level of probability capable of significantly distinguishing between options.

But the feedback inherent in the fact that your decision will change the affects felt in the future means that you cannot possibly have a clue in any but the most obvious of cases. Anything remotely complex and the chaos effects of the multiple feedbacks would quickly render the likelihood incalculable. So only simple, clear cut cases could be decided this way.

And then you remind us that your model is not meant for simple clear cut cases as we've already worked these out.

You might argue that the rate of change in affect is slower than the rate at which we could discover the effects of acting on such a change... But the rate of change in affect (and the rate at which we can calculate the effects) are both empirical matters, and you've assured us that your approach here does not rely on empirical data for its soundness.

Yes, it was the second half that I'm asking about. The "recognize that process and practice it intentionally" bit.

I cited the fact that we have mapped all 302 neurons in C Elegans. We don't know why the thing moves. — Manuel

We do. It moves because some external trigger sets off a chain of neural signals which evetually lead to acetylcholine being released from motor neuron cells into the neuro-muscular synapse which causes the protein channels to open in the membrane of the neighbouring muscle cell. The resultant ion diffusion alters the structure of tubules within the cytoplasm of the cells causing them to contract. So it moves.

I can't think where you're getting the idea from that we don't know why it moves.

What I take the tree to mean, how I categorize it, how I relate to it, etc. It comes from the brain all right, but these things are assumed, not discovered. — Manuel

I can't make sense of this sentence, I'm afraid, perhaps you could rephrase it?

There's the problem also that neurons might be the wrong place to look, in that case we might have to look at microtubules. But then it goes down to the level of physics. You would not be wrong in saying that seeing a tree is nothing more that the complex behavior of quantum phenomena. I don't think that says much at all. — Manuel

Really, that seems wildly dismissive of all the work physicists have done. Why would you say it doesn't say much?

Maybe one part of "what's missing" is regarding the scope of useful condensations of the information. On a day to day basis you don't have access to someone's brain, but you do have access to someone's behaviour. — fdrake

Yes, I think that's true - in that it's missing from a neurological account. But that would be a matter of translation wouldn't it? The question the folk psychologist should be asking of the neuroscientist in that context is more like "but what does that mean for me?". The accusation would be "You've not translated that", rather than "you've not accounted for something".

The difference I see between the two is that in the first we have a (hopefully) faithful relationship between the two via an accurate translation (as both your examples show), in the second there's scope for all manner of additional entities to be created and manipulated. If X neurological process just is Y folk psychology, then we have a good translation. I think the problem comes when there's common element in the framings. Say, for example something as basic as causality (which exists both in folk psychology frames and in neuroscience ones). Here, if neuroscience shows that A follows B but the nearest folk psychology translation would have B follow A, I think we have a breakdown of translatability. There's little that can be done to rescue the folk psychology of B following A because the concept of how one thing follows another is common to both frames so can't have any function applied to translate it.

(I'm thinking particularly of models of socially mediated perception or emotion here, as examples)

One could say that B(folk) needs to be translated to A(neuroscience, and vice versa to keep 'follows from' intact, and I don't think that's necessarily impossible... just not sure how the folk psychologists would take it.

It seems to me that there's a fundamental difference between the inclusive project of relating folk psychology to neuroscience (an admirable task) and the conservative project of upholding folk psychology against neuroscience. It's not always easy to tell who is doing which at first blush, but I'm not yet ready to be so charitable as to assume all comers are of the former persuasion (but maybe that's just my general captiousness - bringing a sledgehammer to the castle tour again!)

What I have in mind when I ask that question is that it seems to me that a lot is left missing. You can say that stimulating X and Y area of the brain is the same as seeing a tree. I think that while in principle you could stimulate the brain to do this, we know way too little about the brain. — Manuel

Again, how are you reaching this conclusion absent of a thorough survey of that which neuroscience does, in fact, know about the brain?

Also, if seeing a tree were more than certain neural activity, then what is the more that it would be? As has already been pointed to...

if “seeing a tree” is an experience independent from the physical state, how does it influence it and seem influenced by it? Same with “anger”. How did the emotion move the arm (I would simply say that the emotion is precisely the neural event that moved the arm)? — khaled

Nothing is made clearer by invoking some 'missing piece' from the neurological explanation. If anything the situation becomes more complicated. Much like introducing magic into a novel, once you've allowed your main character to read minds, or travel in time, or pass through walls to get them out of some tricky spot you're left having to support those possibilities with an increasingly unstable system of props and caveats. I can't think why anyone would want to bring that upon themselves. We have a clear connection between the brain and all mental events (via scans, lesion studies, probes...) so far every mental event has been linked to a neural one. We could say "ah, but they're only linked, it does not prove that one just is the other", but why? If we can explain the existence of these mental phenomena, and their relationship to the brain, using the simple argument that one just is the other, then why would we want to avoid doing so. What does it gain us?

You're not any less able to talk about social institutions, poetry, politics etc. even if we adopt a model where all these things can be explained by the interaction of neurons, to do so entirely would be too complicated to even contemplate. The weather can be explained in terms of movement of air molecules, but it's a lot easier to talk about pressure gradients and temperature. But to ignore or contradict such detailed models where they do have some use would be equally daft.

I thought you were coming from a Churchland perspective. Alex Rosenberg would argue in this manner. — Manuel

Then I think you've also misunderstood the Churchlands' and Rosenberg's arguments. Perhaps cite the claims you have in mind, might help explain where you're coming from.

None of which answers the actual question.

What on earth makes you think all that hasn't already happened in our long history of social interaction. — Isaac

A doctor (rightly IMO) takes as given that reducing pain and suffering is an end goal, and then concerns himself with the means to do so. If someone was self-harming because they thought they morally deserved it, a doctor would see that as a sign of poor mental health — Pfhorrest

You've misunderstood the analogy. I'm saying that the 'pain' a doctor deals with is psycho-physiological and responds to medicines based on it's psycho-physiological properties. Those properties are facts of biology and psychology.

If you claim, as a philosopher, to be dealing with the reduction of 'suffering' you're either dealing with something entirely different, or the subject of your enquiry is a physiological event with biological properties. If you don't know what those properties actually are you're philosophising about an entity you know nothing about. If that seems fine to you, then you crack on, build your air castles as grotesque or grandiose as you like, but they will have no more normative force than a rival book about the natural history of unicorns.

Your system relies on static data points of hedonic value — Isaac


I literally just said otherwise in my last post, and you even quoted it: — Pfhorrest

I'm not disputing what you said, I'm disputing the soundness of it. You understand that merely making a claim is not sufficient to have other assume it's soundness, yes? The point I'm arguing, which you've failed to answer is quite clearly written...

You can say what the answer was yesterday, but by the time you've worked out what the answer is today it's already not the answer any more. — Isaac

We have to stipulate what the brain is, what parts of the body are directly relevant to the brain and so on. — Manuel

It is crucial to remember that we also have another structure that resembles the brain, but is not conscious:the gut brain — Manuel

What is it that you think stipulating/remembering these two issues helps with?

If you think that seeing a tree and all that goes into such an act, such as belief, perception, categorization, psychic continuity and so forth is explained by saying, it's because of actions in the brain, you've said almost nothing. — Manuel

Who said anything about explaining it by saying 'because of actions in the brain'? Your contention was that no-one could give you an example of...

how a brain state produces a qualitative state, such as seeing the sky or a tree. — Manuel

You did not ask how the entire process works. If I asked how a car works, a description of the fuel, the engine, the wheels...etc is usually taken to suffice. It's not usual to say that this description is inadequate because it doesn't go into the sociol-political history of the motor manufacturing industry. You're using 'explain' in a very weird way which seems reserved entirely for talk of the connection between brains states and mind.

If you think that by studying the brain, we will understand not only seeing trees, which includes all of what I mentioned (categorization, psychic continuity, etc.) then I think you're mistaking different aspects of reality. — Manuel

What on earth would give you the impression that I think studying the brain can yield an understanding of all that? What, in fact, makes you think that any sane person would think that?

I think it is an evident mistake to think that you need to do neuroscience to do philosophy of mind at all. If what you say is true, then Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell, Strawson, etc. haven't done anything. — Manuel

You can do philosophy of mind without understanding neuroscience if you want to. My question had nothing to do with merely doing philosophy of mind. You made a specific claim - that neuroscience had no explanation of "knowing a tree", "speaking of trees", or "classifying trees". In order to see that a field has no explanation of something you must have conducted a fairly thorough survey of that field - I was just asking about the manner of that survey.

That manifest reality is explained by processes in the brain is another assertion — Manuel

Indeed, but not one anyone is, or would, make, I think. So we're untroubled by it's lack of support.

I'll focus on manifest reality. There need be no clash, I don't think. — Manuel

What happens when you look at an fMRI scan then? When your 'manifest reality' includes neural scans, psychological experimental data, EEG and microprobe readouts, saccade diagrams, the actions of lesion patients... What then? You talk as if cognitive scientists are non-human, that the stuff we look at is somehow apart from this 'manifest reality' and we have to, what, invent our own language so as to not pollute yours with what we've seen?

If you had no intentionality or "aboutness", there would be nothing to produce the effects, or being more accurate, there would be too many factors coming in to distinguish anything from anything else. — Manuel

Agreed, but there's perfectly adequate models of intention in neuroscience.

I'm speaking of the mental, what you are seeing right now, as you read these letters and whatever examples come to mind as you think of a reply. You are saying that this is caused by neurons — Manuel

No (although it is). Right now I'm asking you to explain why you think it isn't. You seem to have offered nothing but your incredulity at moment. I mean, it seems completely implausible to me that electron go through both slits at once (or whatever it is they do, I'm no physicist), but I don't refute the physicist with that argument.

there's much more to speech than what can be accounted for by looking at Broca's area — Manuel

Yes. Fortunate then that Broca's area is networked to thousands of other areas responsible for modelling those other aspects.

There is much more complexity in manifest reality than what can be said by appealing to causes in the brain... There seems to be a massive gap in our knowledge when we go from the brain to our picture of the world... Also "knowing a tree", "speaking of trees", "classifying trees" aren't explained by anything in current brain science. — Manuel

This just seems like a bare assertion. Can I ask what your expertise or understanding is in neuroscience against which you're measuring the complexity of manifest reality to reach such a conclusion?

Simply put: a neuron looks nothing like green or brown, it doesn't smell anything and by itself, it sees nothing. So there is a gap between quantity like number of neurons involved and location of brain module and experience. — Manuel

But that would be sensing the neuron, not the tree. You're asking how sensing the tree produces the feelings you have. The answer is that the external effects from the tree fire nerve endings of various sorts which trigger other neurons, the collection of which, coupled with the feedback you get from your further interaction with it and your social environment, is what it is for you to experience seeing a tree.

What I'm not getting is why that isn't a satisfactory answer. Oddly though it seems as if were I to say "light hits the neurons on your occipital cortex and they turn brown", that would somehow satisfy you. But then who looks at the brown neurons and how?

give me one example of how a brain state produces a qualitative state, such as seeing the sky or a tree. — Manuel

What would an answer to that request be like? I mean how would you know you've had such an answer. I could say - your occipital cortex starts a chain of neural firings which, on average, lead to reports consistent with what we describe as 'seeing a tree'. Why isn't that an answer, what's missing?

In the first phase, analogous to the creation of primary sources in a typical academic peer review process, detailed accounts are to be published, not of observations or sensations, but rather of appetites — Pfhorrest

In the second phase of the process, analogous to the compilation of secondary sources in typical academic peer review, groups of other people are to review and comment on the quality of that original research in media such as journals — Pfhorrest

the third phase, still others are to gauge the consensus opinion held between those secondary sources on what can somewhat reliably, though of course alway still tentatively, be said about what is moral, and publish those conclusions — Pfhorrest

What on earth makes you think all that hasn't already happened in our long history of social interaction.

Have you read the Lord of the Rings? Are you confused about who the heroes are? Are you confused about why they're the heroes and not the orcs?

If yes, then you're probably a psychopath and should pop yourself along to the nearest mental health facility.

If no, then how do you think Tolkien managed to get it so right prior to undertaking any of this behemothic exercise in bureaucracy you seem to think required for us to act morally?