One of the things that I liked most about philosophy classes as opposed to any other humanities classes was how we were never judged on what our answer was, but on how well-supported our argument for it was. — Pfhorrest

Whether an argument is 'well-supported' or not is no less questionable a framework than the philosophical positions you could not bear the humanities classes taking for granted. Rationality is just a way of thinking afterall. No system can justify itself without assuming axioms. I'm not saying the humanities can't be dogmatic in areas where they really shouldn't be, but in their fundamental philosophical commitments. That's just not what they're there to study,

Logical contingency (in this context) might be A=B (when C). I'm no logician so I'm sure there's a more accurate way of putting it.

In the brain we could say A is sensory input, B is the response (signals to other areas, production of neurotransmitters, production of neural extension) and C are various environmental and mood circumstances.

The difficulty with applying the term to the way the brain seems to work is that one possible B is to change A. A is not faithfully reported from some objective external state of affairs, the report is biased by the response to it.

The kind of mechanism that notices a contradiction between propositions is probably a more abstract form of the kind of thing that notices a discrepancy between the ball and the position of my body; reasoning is (well, conjecture with some evidence) just one way of attenuating discrepancies and forecasting our actions. — fdrake

Absolutely.

This is exactly the kind of unification (or rather avoiding an artificial divide) between action and the concepts that dispose one to it. The 'law of non-contradiction' is no more than "I can't do that and that".

Anywho, he argues in that first book that a certain degree/kind of indoctrination is necessary in education, but that of course you're counterbalancing that (hopefully) with giving students the very skills to then question the "indoctrinated" values, etc. — Artemis

That's interesting. Contrast that with the work of free-educationalists like Sugata Mitra or Peter Gray. I'm not so sure the initial indoctrination is required because I'm not so sure the initial teaching is required. Put someone in an educational establishment with a test/reward system and you immediately set up a limbic system response which inhibits activity in the very frontal cortex you're hoping to stimulate.

It's surprising how children question indoctrination when left to their own devices anyway.

The question then arises, how is it possible to distinguish whether concepts arise from different mechanisms, or concepts arise by degree from a simpliciter, or, divide into simpliciters from a whole, from one mechanism? — Mww

For me, a combination of neuroscience and psychology, but I don't suppose that's the only way.

Concepts, for me, are just dispositions to behave, I don't divide ideas from the behaviour they entail, and, being a physicalist, those dispositions have to be brain states, the physical cause of certain behaviour in response to certain stimuli.

It's just that talking about them as if they were this is totally unhelpful because we can't get outside of them. We can't talk conceptless language to articulate, or categorise concepts. Like trying to arrange items in a drawer when one of the items is the drawer.

So we take the first group (of the three I mentioned in the last post) at least, as a given, probably much of the second group too (immediate post-natal concepts) even when examining the neuroscientific basis of those very groups. Personally, that doesn't fill me with the existential confusion professed by the "hard problem" crowd.

The thing is not to see these 'concepts' as static input/output machines, but as Markov-like calculating devices, capable of subtlety adjusting their structures in response to stimuli, so as to produce something different in different circumstances. So it's not really fully described by if/then laws, I don't know how to parse it in if/then logic, but it would be something like...

If A then B (where B is "change A a bit, its not quite right, I was expecting it to do C").

Coming back to this draft, I see @fdrake has already explained this.

How can both inhere in a pure wetware environment? In effect, law is subsumed by mere rule, which contradicts itself. — Mww

What do you mean by "mere rule". Isn't a contingent just as powerful as a law. Isn't a contingent just a law that describes a necessary function - if->then? Markov chains are perfectly computable are they not?

.......implies two separate and distinct mechanisms from which concepts arise. Is that what you meant to suggest? — Mww

Yes, I think of concepts arising in one of three ways (mostly based on standard child development work). There are clearly concepts we're born with (spatiotemporal models for one), then a whole bunch seem to come along immediately post-natally (object permanence for example), then the refinements come in adolescence/adulthood (social theories, science etc).

The first are virtually impossible to change (though in childhood, ways round them can be constructed), the second are very hard to change, and third are fairly malleable by comparison.

That is the problem with your claim that faith in non-religious systems is more easily justified, the justification referred to here is just an illusion. — Metaphysician Undercover

How so? We can't continue to justify a system by logical measures (like non-contradiction). At some point it's just a faith and the justification is utility. Non-religious systems tend to be used for prediction, so their utility is more easily measured. Religious systems are rarely used for prediction, they're rarely used for any kind of function which produces results in this world, so most of the time they cannot be justified by utility.

I don't really see how it could possibly be less useful than intuition, since intuition is where you start from and then try to improve upon it. — Pfhorrest

I just don't see conversations like that really taking place through, or doing what you think they're doing. When I talk about intuition, I'm not talking about using intuition to answer some moral question (how late should abortion be allowed, for example). I'm talking about it in the virtue ethics sense of making you (the actor) feel right. That's not necessarily a question that can be answered using your empirical methods.

Basically, intuition often gets crowded by the social pressures of 'debate', no matter how rationally carried out, and if we're not determining moral actions to be in line with our intuition, then what are we aiming for?

it's just a matter of getting people to have a common base of experiences that, they can all confirm for themselves, sure enough seem good or bad at least, — Pfhorrest

Agreed...but

and then from that common base working out what states of affairs avoid the experiences that seem bad and only leave ones that seem good (or minimize/maximize at least), and then the hard work of figuring out how to bring about those good(-seeming) states of affairs while avoiding bad(-seeming) ones. — Pfhorrest

No. This is just too much mico management ignoring the value of the very intuition that gave the objective.

I think you're creating too sharp a distinction between feeling - perception - action which just isn't there. I don't think we can trust the intuitive feelings (which we label 'good') but not trust the intuitive behaviour (even without a clearly thought out objective). I don't think we can work towards some feeling of 'goodness' as an objective but then try to work towards it with empirical facts as if the perception of those facts wasn't biased by the very feeling their collection is working toward.

2. I don't see anything there about judging hyperbolic discounting (future possible hedonic gains are worth less than current definate ones). — Isaac

I'm not sure what you mean here, you'll need to elaborate. — Pfhorrest

So hyperbolic discounting is the name for the effect I described earlier, good things now are worth more than equally good things in the future. I was wondering how your system accounted for it. Is the discount rate one of the things we just 'feel', or is it one of the "work out how to get there" things?

unless a voter also comments to say how they voted, voting is just throwing an anonymous token in a bucket. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, that's why I linked the number of posters (20 odd) to the number of voters (31). I was presuming that most people who voted also commented, but if not, then you're right.

I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, I think @Artemis nailed that one.

There's no way to check anything about any model if there are no objective properties. What would you be checking? — Terrapin Station

Whether it works. Whether you think it helps you achieve whatever it is you're trying to achieve with it (prediction usually, but also justification, comfort...)

There is a way that things are, but the way that things are is always from some point of reference. — Terrapin Station

Then how is that a property of the thing and not of the point of reference (or the two combined). If that point of reference suddenly popped out of existence, what would happen to the 'properties' the object had that were only from that point of reference?

How if biology is a concept you created and it has no properties independent of that? — Terrapin Station

You're confusing concepts I create with concepts I voluntarily create. My nominalism here doesn't fit in with your magic free-will woo I'm afraid, so the idea that my mind creates these concepts is not necessarily synonymous with any ability to control them.

Or they are the types, who for whatever reason reject the idea that formal training is important/beneficial for doing philosophy. — Artemis

Yeah, I think a lot of people confuse philosophy (small p) with Philosophy (capital P). You can train in both, but you can only really claim authority in the latter. Philosophy (as the imfamous badinage goes) really is the history of who said what when, and people who haven't learnt it aren't going to have a clue no matter what their native skill. Contrarily, philosophy with a small p is more like a skill, one could be trained in it (and so good), but equally one might simply be natively good at it, or train themselves. And yes, those who choose to get trained in it formally will inevitably pick up a bit of 'brainwashing' along with the methodology. It's not hard to break out of, but I think it's naive to image some kind of culturally neutral 'how to think' instruction could ever happen.

I would assume that anyone professing any interest in philosophy would already have come to terms with the non-negotiability of truth. — Pantagruel

What about the entire pragmatism movement?

So my take is: concepts mediate and inspire bodily processes and comportments rather than being strongly (probabilistically) tied to the neural architecture involved with executing (most types) of them. — fdrake

Right, so this is where the Bayseian Brain feedback stuff comes in (that I gave you the link to in PM). I think your model is right, but the conceptual stuff does seem to be able to make some pretty strong links with the neurons involved in executing bodily processes, so that leaves us with the slightly puzzling question of why concepts around what words, images mean to us (which can only possibly be learnt culturally) can have a massive impact on how we gather data, and how we respond to it (even subconsciously), and yet concepts like "It's OK, it's just my heart beating faster because I'm nervous", or "it's OK that the world is moving past but I'm sat still because I'm in a car", don't seem to be able to exert that same level of feedback control in panic attacks.

The most obvious answer (and my personal favourite because I've seen it work in therapeutic environments), is that they can exert that level of feedback, and the reason they don't generally is exactly to do with Kahnnemann's system 2 energy requirements, as you suggest. It's just too damn hard.

A little digression, but a worthy one, there's yet another book which I strongly recommend by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir called 'Scarcity'. It's basically about economical psychology, and it's very good, but in it they develop the idea of bandwidth. Simply because of the energy requirements of the brain, we cannot think of too many things at once, it's like we all have a bandwidth throttle. This really only applies to the frontal cortex, and even then to limited sections of it, as the post-natal development of the brain isolates some important parts (possibly because of this problem, like reserved bandwidth for the important bits). I think that's why bringing new concepts to bear on sensory inputs and bodily feedback is so damn hard, but not impossible. Digression over.

That's really cool. Do you think there's any correspondence with model averaging in stats, if you're familiar? If we imagine anticipation and memory as models of input states based on previous patterns of association; there might be more than one anticipation (model) running at once; a multithreading of thought-action chains (neural+sensorimotor impetus for the body's comportment, including thoughts) that originate in multiple places; these will amplify and die out in accordance with continual feedback (models learning different weights); but the feedback mechanism might 'get stuck' in a certain pattern of valuation. Edit: perhaps when, say, two patterns (which are models in this analogy) generate predictions (anticipations) that are "valued" very highly by each other? (edit: analogy breaks down a lot here, models and loss functions... stupid loss functions). — fdrake

This is unbelievably close to Karl Friston's work on Bayesian feedback in brain processes. The first time I read through what you wrote I thought of his work, but on the second reading it's almost identical, astonishing. This article gives an overview.

I've only got five minutes so don't want to fully get into this right now, but whilst this is fresh. The two points you've just raised seem to me to be exactly what you were denying when we spoke about moral discussions last. 1) that people have foundational moral principles "you can use various stances as foundational stances on a given occasion (and some people can decide to far more consistently use the same foundation(s))", and 2) that people may take a stance on one matter which they may later come to regret because they tend to prefer consistency.

These two principles are exactly those on which I was basing the value of moral argument - a) you're a human being, biologically driven, and most human beings have X as a foundational moral stance, and b) if you take position Y it clashes with stance X and I think you will regret that later.

The moral argument being essentially an attempt to convince the person that, firstly they do (or probably do) have moral stance X, and then to demonstrate by reason that activity Y is inconsistent with it and they will regret that inconsistency later.

Yet you seemed earlier to reject this very basis.

But what laws are there apart from physical necessity? I had the idea that in the atheist’s world the only principles resembling laws were physical laws i.e. laws of motion, thermodynamics, and so on. — Wayfarer

No, I think most atheists subscribe to some social, psychological and even economic models which they reference in rational thinking. "X will likely lead to Y because..." does not always have to reduce to physical laws.

Religious systems may well provide "do not do X because..." type of answers, but so can a favoured economic model. Of course you have to have - a) faith in the model, and b) an initial feeling about the objective you want the model to help you achieve. But I don't see religion getting anyone out of those problems. One must have faith in the system and one must always decide that following the system (or sometimes the rewards within it, like heaven) is an objective one wants to achieve.

One major difference between religious systems and non-religious ones is that faith in non-religious systems is more easily justified by their utility at helping to provide useful strategies, but this is far from universal (many people stick with favoured non-religious systems despite abject failures to produce anything useful, and conversely some religious systems produce useful interrim results people find useful).

Here, less than half of correspondents have done any serious study. — Banno

True, but I count about 20 or so people involved in this discussion and 31 polled, so most who polled also contributed some comments about it. Few of these are the contributors I would suspect have done some serious study, so I'm not so sure the poll is reflective of the community, but you may be right.

Of equal interest to me is the very premise behind such a question. This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, so respondents, I think, will divide into three camps.

Those who see their best interests served by claiming some qualifications (whether real or not is irrelevant here).

Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia.

Those who feel that either claim (again no matter how truthful) automatically makes them seem like someone in either of the first two camps and so refrains from saying anything.

I suspect that serious students are here may well disproportionately fall into the last category and so be less well represented in the poll (presuming most who vote also comment, or course).

I wonder what the scope of environment is there? I guess as abstract as can be habituated within. — fdrake

Good question, I hope not so wide as to end up saying nothing useful at all. I'd agree that it has to be first habituated, but it does seem to be strongly linked to sensory inputs too, so habituated conceptual environments don't seem to have the same effect. Faced with conceptually contradictory knowledge, people tend to become more entrenched in the original concept, so there's still some strong incentive in the brain towards predictability, but real panic (failing limbs, sweating, fainting etc..) seems to need sensory initiates, even if hallucinatory ones.

So, one interesting study here (I'll try to find it) was to do with panic attacks among hyperchodriacs. Here, what they thought they'd found, which would apply to the public speaker, the exam, the first date etc, was that a normal preparation (raised heart rate etc) was being picked up on and the brain was kind of going "hey, why's my heart beating faster, there's no tiger I can see" and panicking about the difference between the autosomal information and the perceptual information and completely ignoring the conceptual information that would have made sense of it all.

I thought it was so you could politely ask the girl to go on top. — fdrake

Ahh, the days when one only had to ask politely...

it's easy to use a vocabulary that we're used to that nevertheless contradicts the nature of the topic. Sort of like trying to draw on white paper with white chalk. — fdrake

Yes, I've lost count of the number of times in this topic I've wanted to actually use the expression "what it's like" despite disagreeing that it means anything at all! Academic technicalities can end up creating their own referrents, castles in the air, and they leach into topics where they do not belong.

Shame the flames we'd like to burn these ideas in are red. — fdrake

Indeed, but if I don't look...

I can't imagine not being academically interested in your kid if you're academically inclined. I'm more surprised that you stopped experimenting than that you started! — fdrake

Oh, you wouldn't believe the number of experiments we've surreptitiously carried out, it's a wonder they're sane!

Do you have a citation for this type of account? — fdrake

Yes, I'll dig some out when I'm back at home.

m a bit skeptical that "panic" is one sort of thing; my understanding of it neurologically, which is probably wrong, is that it's a neural/endocrine response to some threat that sets off a bunch of bodily cascades (including behavioural), the "threat" can be really abstract; nowadays a work meeting can be a tiger in the bush. — fdrake

Yes, that's quite right, but the brain seems to perceive an inconsistent environment as one of the bigger threats. It's possibly an attached consequence of our reliance on 3d integrated modelling of our environment (catching hold of a tree branch swinging towards you is actually really hard and takes up the vast majority of our brains). So, the idea of panic (and I should stress this is all highly speculative) is that it shuts down certain systems, particularly automotive ones, so that we don't go jumping from branch to branch when we're not sure where the next branch is.

Ever wondered what the evolutionary advantage could possibly be of legs turning to jelly at the exact moment you need to run away from said tiger in the bush?

it's a task we can undertake, however fallibly, in both cases. — Pfhorrest

The question (one that I think virtue ethics tackles) is whether the flaws in these calculatory systems are not so massive as to render them less useful than intuition.

More or less, though I expect some important technical details will probably need clarification in further conversation. — Pfhorrest

OK, thanks. So...

1. I don't see the benefit in asserting that the moral 'good' is satisfactory hedonic experiences. So many people would disagree and you get mired in an argument that can't be supported. Why not just say if you want to maximise satisfactory hedonic experience, then it seems empirically indicated that you should do X. Turning it into an if/then statement removes all the mess of the is/ought problem and, if you're right about most people's desires, would still resonate with the vast majority of people.

2. I don't see anything there about judging hyperbolic discounting (future possible hedonic gains are worth less than current definate ones).

There may be more, but let's not get bogged down too much to start with.

I am opposed to emotional judgments in law. — alcontali

I didn't ask what you were opposed to. I pointed out that an emotional judgement is a necessary requirement to accept (and continue to accept) that law. The existence of a law does not itself provide any rational incentive to accept it. Doing so must be entirely emotional.

Religious people trust their scriptures. Therefore, this is not a problem. — alcontali

The very problem is that religious people trust their scriptures. Where does that trust come from (and continue to come from each day)? It's not itself part of the religion, there are alternative religions one could choose (at any given time) so when a religious edict say "do X" the first decision is "should I continue to trust this religious text?" that question must be answered before accepting the edict and cannot be answered from within the religious system. So where does the answer to that question come from?

The system verifies if a particular behaviour is permissible or impermissible. So, it has only one predicate function: — alcontali

What follows this quote has absolutely nothing to do with the issue. I'm asking how the words are translated. Words, sentences, paragraphs have more than one potential meaning, who decides which meaning goes into the machine and what machine could they use to make such a decision?

rather that the human mind cannot be just an axiomatic system, since the human mind does things that mechanical systems cannot do. — alcontali

This doesn't seem to make any sense to me I'm afraid.

sometimes we can expect red and see green? Movies, green blooded human = replicant or something, the basis of surprise there. — fdrake

Yeah, I get what you mean now. The expectation of red informs the perception in some way unique to 'red'. 'Red' I can definitely do. 'Redness' I think should be consigned to use only by printers and paint manufacturers!

Unsure the internal/external distinction makes sense for most things like this. When your phenomenal self model (Metzinger) can assimilate to include a table, or when your apartment becomes a living memory bank (alzheimers patients); the boundaries break down due to what is involved with what. It seems more productive to think of these structures as ones of involvement that span the distinction between mind and body, rather than retroactively imposing more categorical distinctions which don't seem to be there — fdrake

You're absolutely right. One of the biggest problems with my writing here is laziness. I generally write on the phone whilst supposedly doing other things, and mostly when I write my thoughts race ahead of my writing. They seem to impatiently call back to my actual written words "come on, that'll do, we've got more stuff for you to translate". I often end up writing stuff even I don't believe just to get the ideas that surround it down before the next ones take over.

So my apologies to anyone having to pick up the slack of my sloppy writing. I agree internal/external is an unhelpful distinction. I suppose what I was trying to say was more something like 'red' being used primarily in a technical sense, to communicate some fact about an object, rather than in an experiential sense.

Wonderful stuff with your synasthete friend. My daughter has synaesthesia, but we learnt early on that most experiments of that kind made her extremely panicky (having a two psychologists for parents is not always a good thing, but we did stop experimenting eventually, promise). As I'm sure you know, the panic is the brain's response to contradictory information, just like travel sickness (motion feedback from the eyes, no motion feedback from the body). The interesting thing, for me, is the strong extent to which most of what we think of as our model of reality is the brain's kind of buffer against this panic. Most sensations, including memory-based ones, are actually contradictory to some extent. The stories our brain tells us, the illusion of self, is all about minimising the confusion. I think that's why we love stories so much.

I suspect "norms informing perception" is why it seems so natural to some to describe their experiences as containing "red quales" or "seeing redness". — fdrake

Not sure about this. I think 'redness' as a concept, enters much later than actually informing perception. I seriously wonder how much people do describe their experiences in these terms outside of philosophical qualia talk. I've never heard anyone answer "how was your train journey?" with anything like "well, it was pure 'redness'". 'Red' seems primarily used as a description of external states of affairs, never internal ones. I think there's still some sleight of hand being done here to define a post hoc division of the memory of experience into the 'qualia' of actual experience.

If one were to look at, say, a red wall (about the most purely red but still real thing I can think of). I still think that their 'experience' of seeing that wall would be undivided. The red, the sounds, the texture, the accompanying sounds, the feel of their clothes, the reason why they're staring at a red wall, the curisoty about why the wall is red...

The brain certainly divides things up, different cortices deal with different aspects of the experience, but evidence from synathetes, phantom limb, paraprenalia, psychosis...all indicate very strongly that the consciousness does not have any direct isolated access to those cortices. If it did, then synathetes, for example, would be able to divide up their number identification experience from their colour identification experience prior to the hyper-connection between the two which causes the mixed sensation.


Other than that, your point is well taken, we should include the social environment as well when understanding the extent to which 'experience' is constructed. All of which put together makes a 'redness' quale nothing but a philosophical conceit.

Demanding evidence within a system for system-wide axioms is not the same as critical thinking. On the contrary, it is just stupid, infinite regress. — alcontali

No one said anything about demanding such evidence "within" the system. Your error is in presuming there's no wider system of which religious texts are only a part. Most atheists consider themselves to be part of some system of physical, biological, psychological, social...etc system of laws which they refer to to make rational decisions. Religions are not the only systems.

my point was to distinguish between reason and all of those other non-rational influences, — Pfhorrest

Reason is not necessarily a 'rational' influence though. I think 2000 years of debate have pretty firmly established that reason does not deliver one clear answer to complex moral dilemmas, it is highly susceptible to competing theories and competing selections of empirical evidence. Simply presenting to someone a 'reasonable' case for doing X as a moral imperative is to simply bias that person in favour of doing X if one know that there also exists a 'reasonable' case for not doing X. The idea of reasonable debate producing the answer to moral dilemmas, even notwithstanding the possibility of genuine differences in objective, relies on the flawed assumption of full access to relevant empirical data and the pre-existence of all rational lines of thought in each mind (as opposed to having them introduced by persuasive argument). Neither I think are the case.

In addition, I simply do not think it is possible for the human mind to make rational decisions absent of any cultural, or psychological bias. There is an entire field made up entirely of evidence that this is the case and (to my knowledge) zero evidence to the contrary. We can't even take in the basic empirical data without bias, it's ingrained in our entire thinking systems.

___

I'm still not sure I fully understand your ethical theory, but rather than just ask you to write it out again, I'll tell you what I've got so far and you can correct/add.

The moral 'good' can be defined as satisfactory hedonic experiences.

We can determine the states of affairs which bring about those experiences scientifically because (unlike feelings and beliefs about what will bring them about) the experiences themselves are empirically verifiable.

Where people differ in their hedonic experiences in what appear to be the same states of affairs, we can examine closely to find if there are perhaps some subtle differences in those states of affairs.

Upon discovering the ranges of states of affairs which bring about satisfactory hedonic experiences in people we can derive some generalisable states of affairs which we can label 'good' on that basis.

Is that about right?

To know whether we ought to kill some innocent Germans, we both need to answer the descriptive question of whether that is necessary (or even sufficient) to prevent us from being taken over by Hitler, and the prescriptive question of whether some innocent Germans being killed is better or worse than us being taken over by Hitler. — Pfhorrest

OK, that's cleared that up.

You're making several basic errors in your fanaticism.

1. Morality is not necessarily rational in it's objectives, it is rational in its method for achieving them. The desire for state of affairs X to be the case is a feeling, not a rational judgement. Identifying that state of affairs Y is actually the case is part feeling, part rational judgement (comparing Y to X in its component features). Determining how to get from state of affairs Y to state of affairs X is a rational judgement based on whatever socioeconomic/physical system of theories you subscribe to.

2. In order to use some religious writing as a system for turning moral decisions into computable deductions, you would have to have "follow text X" as a moral objective. You haven't escaped the fact that moral judgements begin with feelings, you've just subsumed all subsequent reference to feeling under one initial feeling that text X is the one to follow.

3. Having chosen text X you have to repeat this feeling each time it delivers an instruction because it is not a one-time judgement. Each time the text delivers that you should do X, your mind will deliver either a sense of agreement or a sense of dispute. You have to decide afresh for each dilemma whether you will continue to believe the text or follow your contrary feelings.

4. Notwithsatnding the above, you still have to translate the words, sentences and paragraphs into some understanding in your mind as to what to do. No system of logic can interact directly with your mind and no system of logic can communicate results in a format where interpretation is not required (@Echarmion has already mentioned this, but I thought I'd re-iterate for completeness). No system is immune to the problems of incomplete data having been input, no system is immune to the problem of missing variables and no system is immune to the problem of interfacing with the human mind which ultimately has to carry out the instruction.

5. You're assuming, without any justification offered, that the human mind is not itself a system. Simply because you don't fully know it's workings does not mean it is demonstrably not a fully complete system. You would not expect a child to fully know the workings of religious systems, but to have faith that they are complete. It is no less reasonable to have faith that the human mind is a complete system, evolutionarily designed to deliver instructions on how to live. A system which can be interrogated by introspection.

I don't know if this is where you were going anyway, but I wanted to raise this angle now just in case it wasn't.

What you've said here speaks to the distrust I, and I think you, have about qualia talk (what it's like talk) not being a genuine reflection of experience but a post hoc modelling.

Regular in the literature about qualia (certainly Jackson and Chalmers) is mention of the "experience of redness" or something similar. That there is something it is like to experience red.

But there's obviously no such thing as the experience of red. It simply never happens. So whilst the 'what it's like' talk can be theoretically linked to some experience or other (though I still think there's no referent), talk of it being linked to something like the experience of 'redness' is clearly bogus. No one in the world has ever had an experience of redness, its always been an entire lived event involving a red thing.

I never said that I endorse "a justice system which serves only the wealthy" — alcontali

about wealthy people benefiting (who cares?) — alcontali

Jewish law is a real system. Islamic law is a real system. Arbitrary remarks about "serving only the wealthy" is not a real system. — alcontali

What measures 'real'? And you might try to actually answer the other questions you dodged too.

For a starters, Jewish law is adjudicated by Rabbis. It is Islamic law where you have Ulema and Mufti. I respect serious systems of morality. I have asked jurisprudential questions to serious religious scholars in the past, and I have received verifiable and absolutely satisfactory answers. — alcontali

None of which has any bearing whatsoever on the fact that it's you who decided to go and ask them, you who interpreted what they said, you who decided to remain in their religion after they spoke to you. It's still all you making these choices. Even if you had your stupid machine someone would still have to program it and you'd still have to decide whether to trust this programmer or that one, each time they delivered an edict.

Atheism does not allow for that. — alcontali

Yes it does, the device in question is a brain.

without complete system to figure out the implications or wider ramifications of what you are saying. — alcontali

How do you know the other systems have worked out the complete implications of what they say?

So, in your opinion, Asians would be sociopaths? Is that "philosophy" in your opinion? It sound much more like racist bullshit. I like Asians. I like their culture and their ways. Your racist views on Asians are despicable. — alcontali

Anyone who shows such blatant disregard for the welfare of others as you show by your endorsement of a justice system which serves only the wealthy is a sociopath by definition. Asian, Greek, Jew, Christian, atheist... It's not the group identity, its the opinion.

Your point does not make any reference to a complete moral system with real-world mileage. Hence, it is just the system-less bullshit that is otherwise so typical of the godless vermin. — alcontali

What measures 'complete', what smeasures 'real-world mileage', what measures 'system-less'? These seem like terms you arbitrarily apply to give post hoc justification for your dismissal of ideas which make you uncomfortable.

Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, all morality and all legitimacy emanate from the laws of the Almighty. — alcontali

No they don't. They eminate from you. It's you reading the book, it's you deciding which imam to trust, it's you deciding how to interpret laws in each unique case. The idea you somehow get told unequivocally what to do in each moral dilemma is nonsense. Believer or not, your actions come down to decisions you make based on what you think is right. You can't escape responsibility by hiding under the cowls of religion. You decided to adopt that religion.

That is probably why such wealthy people have moved all their factories to China, just next-door from here. — alcontali

Probably. So we collectivise to put pressure on China too.

stop lamenting that they should "bring back our jobs" because I do not see them doing that any time soon — alcontali

Why would I do that? I strive for what I think is right, not what I think is immanent.

All of that works absolutely fine for me. — alcontali

I don't give a shit how it's working out for you, this is a philosophy forum, not a tour guide for sociopaths. The point was a moral one.

And yes, we can do something about the fact that the rich have things better. We collectivise and use our collective might to force them to give up their wealth, or adhere to laws which treat people equally.

In some sense, they may somewhat favour the rich — alcontali

What the fuck? A system where the rich can basically carry out any crime they like because they're wealthy enough to pay the compensation, while the poor cannot afford to even risk being accused of a crime lest they get lumped with bill that might indebt them for the rest of their lives...

...and you call it "may somewhat favour the rich"?

There are raw experiential feelings of “preferring”, hedonic experiences of something just seeming good or bad, that are not had for reasons; but then there are also things that we instrumentally prefer for reasons grounded in exactly those experiences. — Pfhorrest

OK, I see what you mean.

If we are the ones in power and so can create circumstances that they’ll consider reasons to behave like we want (like “I’ll hurt you if you don’t“), sure. If they are the ones in power then we’re fucked. That’s why in absence of any way to persuade anyone, might supplants right. — Pfhorrest

But if we resort to persuasion, aren't the ones with the most persuasive rhetoric in power? I don't see how, by using persuasion, you've bypassed power structures. We already live in a situation where people can be persuaded to vote one way or another. The people with the best access to, and control of, the media tend to do better.

Also, on the slightly less cynical side, there's more than just "I'll hurt you if you don't", there's things like ostracisation which can persuade people to act against their preferences. We don't always have to choose between a dispassionate rational debate and a fight. There's the whole of politics in between.

It’s like I’m talking about comparing empirical observations and you think I’m talking about comparing people’s beliefs. Beliefs and desires don’t matter, they are subjective interpretations of experience; it is the experiences we have in common that matter. — Pfhorrest

I don't understand what you're saying here, could you try and explain it again?

if something else bad will happen if we don’t, if we’re forced to choose between two bad options because we can’t find an all good one, then we choose the least bad of course. — Pfhorrest

No, it's not about the least bad, it's about what will or will not come to pass. The issue with the Second World War was not "which is worse, killing some innocent Germans or being taken over by Hitler?", it was "is killing some innocent Germans a necessary act in preventing us from being taken over by Hitler?". That question is not resolvable by empathy.

If there are reasons that could persuade someone to prefer something, with the likes of which you could conduct such a debate as above, then working out what all of those reasons taken together say we should prefer just is figuring out what is objectively moral. — Pfhorrest

But it seems fundamental that there are not 'resaons' why we prefer things. We do not prefer things for reasons. Can you convince someone to prefer green, prefer chocolate to vanilla? Can you convince an arachnophobe to prefer spiders?

Where would you start? "We shouldn't prefer to cause unnecessary harm because..." (ignoring for now the ambiguity in both 'unnecessary' and 'harm'). What could your 'because' possibly be?

If there are no such reasons, then such debate is doomed to failure regardless, and we're doomed to a world where everyone does whatever they want and can't be persuaded to do otherwise — Pfhorrest

Why would we be in such a world? We can persuade people not to do what they want by all sorts of means. It's not a case of saying "If we can't persuade them to actually prefer not to do X we might as well just let them do X"

There just need to be something in common to our experiences that we can point to and say "because of that" as a reason to reject the supposed morality of something, and so begin narrowing in on what the remaining possibly-moral options are, in the same way that we point at disagreement with empirical experiences as reasons to reject descriptive claims and narrow in on the truth. — Pfhorrest

This is very much the myth of moral realism writ large. Note the vague hand-waiving when it comes to the really important bit. Yes, we can point to some things in our common experience, we're all humans and biologically we have some pretty similar gut feelings about stuff, but they're just that - vague gut feelings. the really important bit is the bit you simply assumed, the "begin narrowing in on what the remaining possibly-moral options are". I'm afraid in most cases, the 'remaining possibly-moral options' are almost anything we would realistically be arguing about anyway. It doesn't really get us anywhere.

we demonstrate the falsehood of descriptive claims by saying in effect "stand here and look that way and you'll see that that's false", and we can likewise demonstrate the badness (analogous to falsehood) of prescriptive claims by saying in effect "stand here and feel this and you'll feel that it's bad". — Pfhorrest

Again, this only works where some degree of 'bad' is universally agreed on, and some long-term lack of compensatory benefit is universally agreed upon and they never are. How would it help getting someone to imagine themselves to be a 'rank-and-file' soldier in the German army 1940. "would you like to be in his position, would you like to be shot at?", "No", "Well then you shouldn't shoot German Soldiers in World War Two". Where would that have got us? A lot of innocent people were killed in World War Two. They were killed because many people thought the long-term good outweighed the bad.

What you're describing is simply empathy. Over reliance on empathy is what makes people donate to sick-donkey sanctuaries that they happen to have visited but still maintain consumer practices which contribute to the suffering of thousands (who they can't see).

Given your ontology, there's no way to make sense of "this model is right." You don't even believe that there are any objective properties. — Terrapin Station

What have 'properties' got to do with measures of the degree to which I find a model to be right?

There's no frame-of-reference-free frame of reference, so to speak, or there's no "view from nowhere." Properties are unique from every point of reference, and there's no preferred point of reference. — Terrapin Station

Right. Which is exactly what I'm saying. There is no 'way things are' there's only the 'way things seem from here' or the 'way things seem from there' (where 'here' and 'there' are not here limited to spatial specifications), so where does this leave your "there is a coin"? Only from a certain perspective.

That doesn't imply that we can't get things right. — Terrapin Station

I didn't say we can't get things right. I said that if we did so it would have to be by chance as there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to ensure it.

Why not? What would constrain it? — Terrapin Station

Biology.

You weren't being skeptical. You claimed that there are no objective properties. — Terrapin Station

Yes. Like there is no god is skeptical of all God claims. I've not yet been convinced by any so I'm an atheist. I've not yet been convinced by any noumenal properties.

Wait so now there are objective properties, it's just that the objective properties are incoherent? — Terrapin Station

No, something that is incoherent cannot exist in the models I have.

Claiming some properties are absent when we aren't looking is commiting oneself to a presence of contingent states without these properties. — TheWillowOfDarkness

The claim is that properties are incoherent without a person to define them thus. Not that they aren't there. You're looking at this as if it were an unknown sheet of paper, I'm saying there's no words on it, you're saying that's no less a commitment than saying there are words - we're both committing to what the paper looks like.

But this is not what I'm trying to say.. . Firstly, the right analogy would be between assuming the paper is blank and assuming it has the soliloquy from Hamlet written on it. The soliloquy from Hamlet is just as good a guess as 'blank', but a different type of commitment, it has baggage. Secondly, to continue the metaphor, we're talking about what the paper is without people. The soliloquy from Hamlet is not the soliloquy from Hamlet without people. It is not even marks on paper (marks are only distinct to people who can distinguish black from white).

Yes, but a default position that no thing exists that we do not require as a necessary contingent fact is not the same as saying some thing exists which just happens to seem to me as if it does.

I'm not even favouring one over the other here, but a model with the absence of all features is not of the same dogma as a model with some given feature, despite the fact that both are conceptual commitments, they are not both of the same class.

We're getting way off topic with fundamental ontology. I want bring you back to the question this whole sideshow seemed to distract from

what is missing from the third party account? — Isaac


I just answered this: the perspective of being those states. — Terrapin Station

But where is that perspective if not in "Particular dynamic state of synapses, neurons, etc"? I'm afraid "At various reference points, including the reference point of being the thing in question." isn't really a coherent location for me. — Isaac

So the trouble with this line of argument is that an an absence of these properties also amounts to concepts. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I didn't say the absence of properties wasn't a concept. There's a difference though between positing the absence (or skepticism) of properties and the positing of some particular property (light, location, shape etc) as being real.

One is simply agnosticism, the other dogmatism.

Why would you think it's by chance? We seem to have access to the world, right? Via our senses. So you'd need a reason to believe that that's not in fact the case. — Terrapin Station

See 2-4.

Physics can't demonstrate anything if you think we can't tell at all what the world is like. Besides, you have to conclude that you made all of physics up. — Terrapin Station

I said "to my satisfaction". I prefer consistency, I can't really conceive of a reality that can be two ways at once, so two apparently conflicting models are sufficient to convince me that they can't both be right.

You'd need a reason to believe that (a) the world can't be different from different perspectives, and (b) that some people can't be wrong while others are right — Terrapin Station

For (a) we're talking about some way the world really is, so perspectives don't enter into it. The fact that they do is the very reason I don't trust 'there is a coin' type foundations. For (b) if it is possible for someone to be wrong, then our brains are not inevitably arranged to reflect reality accurately. Therefore it seems to me to follow from that that anyone doing so would do so by chance. That seems prima facae unlikely.

If you need to construct a foundational model in order to think, then how would you even get started? Don't you need to think in order to construct a foundational model? Otherwise it would be the case that you could think without a foundational model. — Terrapin Station

I think genetics wires models into our brains. We're born with a basic model.

So essentially you're a solipsist--at least an epistemological solipsist. So why would something like hate speech ever be a problem? You're just constructing the other people anyway, and can't you construct them however you'd like to construct them? — Terrapin Station

The fact that I'm constructing people does not lead to the fact that I can construct them however I'd like to construct them.

In short, your ontology is a complete mess — Terrapin Station

Yes. I think everyone's ontology is a mess.

I'm guessing there are psychological reasons behind it.... — Terrapin Station

Yeah, we can all play that game. You like to cling to strong libertarianism (probably fear of being constrained), the only way you can maintain strong libertarianism without becoming a sociopath is to convince yourself that you do not have a direct effect on others. This requires a strong sense of disconnected 'other' and a model where other people are in full control of their mental events. We can all play pop-psychologist.

How in the world would you know this? — Terrapin Station

1. That conception is done in our minds and I can't think of a single reason why we would, by chance, construct the exact properties that somehow reality has (if maybe you take a Berkelean view that God conceives of properties).

2. Physics has demonstrated to my satisfaction that many of the properties I think objects have cannot be reconciled with each other.

3. Different people seem to have different phenomenological conceptions and so it seems impossible that the 'real stuff' is some way or other, that someone is just right about some of it.

4. I think it's impossible to even think without foundational model, concepts on which to base thought. So I can't conceive of anything without those models.

Presumably you wouldn't say that other people exist outside of your concept of rhem, right? — Terrapin Station

Yes, that's right. The idea of 'a person' is something I've constructed.