What's up with all of this mumble-mouth crap? — GRWelsh

Incomplete sentences, because if you never quite make sense, you never actually lie. (First discovered by admen). Hope to have given a strong impression of exactly what I have definitely not said that you might think.

Some stipulated counterfactuals are more plausible than others, as here:

So when we try to say that some things that happen could have been prevented; that some drownings, for example, would not have occurred had their victims learned to swim, we seem to be in a queer logical fix. We can say that a particular person would not have .drowned had he been able to swim. But we cannot quite say that his lamented drowning would have been averted by swimming- lessons. For had he taken those lessons, he would not have drowned, and then we would not have had for a topic of discussion just that lamented drowning of which we want to say that it would have been prevented. We are left bereft of any 'it' at all. — Ryle

(my bold)

At this level of plausibility, such a counterfactual can function as part of an argument for - swimming lessons in schools, for example. And speaking of schools it a common part of history lessons to "Imagine you were a Roman citizen of the 1st century AD, and describe how you would have lived on a typical day" and similar counterfactual tasks. Counterfactuals can be instructive and interesting in spite of all being false.

Did y'all know, counterfactuals are all false? they have the form, If [false stipulation] then [false plausible consequence].

If [wishes were horses] then [beggars would ride].

But wishes cannot be horses {because they do not have the right DNA???}. and therefore, beggars go on foot unless they can steal a horse, and then they become horse thieves, not beggars.

It is in fact impossible for anyone to have been born other than how and when they were born simply because one is only born once. But this need not prevent me from declaring that 'if I were twenty years younger, I'd give y'all a good kicking to knock some sense into you.' because such counterfactuals are not claims of fact but stipulations of an imaginary scenario, which can be whatever the fuck I want to fantasise, thank you very much.
Unsurprisingly, I am not in fact twenty years younger than I am, so you don't have to worry about covering your arses.

Cool. But I won't be joining you there to discuss. Or possibly I will, whatever!

1. No morality but everyone believes that it is immoral to kill babies
2. It is immoral to kill babies and everyone believes that it is immoral to kill babies
3. It is moral to kill babies but everyone believes that it is immoral to kill babies

What is the practical difference between these worlds? — Michael

I can't make the possibility of any kind of moral obligation believable. T — Michael

I take it that you are someone. I take it that since you cannot make the possibility of any kind of moral obligation believable, you do not believe it is immoral to kill babies. Therefore there are no possible worlds in which we can discuss these worlds you propose as your presence makes them impossible.

In fact the moral world is a possible world itself, because we do not do what we ought to do, and so in a certain feeble sense you are right that the moral world is not the real world. Rather, it is an imaginary world like the plans of an architect are an imaginary building. And it is the business of ordinary brickies and plumbers etc to realise the architect's plans as it is the business of ordinary humans everywhere to realise the moral world as best they can.

No one suggests that architecture is not real, and no architect designs piles of rubble. But that is by analogy, what you are doing with this thread, especially when you suggest that possibly "...It is moral to kill babies".

I can't make the possibility of any kind of moral obligation believable. That's really what I'm trying to show here. — Michael

I pity you.

But I will just point out that you have undermined all of your thread which is based on various scenarios of "everyone believes..."

I read it, but i decided it would be a cold day in hell before your nonsense achieved much agreement. So I decided not to wait.

If it's not true by definition then it's not necessarily true, and if it's not necessarily true then it's possibly false. — Michael

Right. But you cannot make the possibility believable? Then I won't believe it. But i have made a suggestion of how it might be believable - it just requires a religion to be true. Shall we go with that?

there is a possible world (with humans) in which we do not have a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe and population crash. — Michael

You would have to make that believable to me. Your declaration does not do it without some understandable detail. Perhaps it is a world in which humans have a more significant afterlife such that survival in this world is unimportant - something like that? I'm struggling... one can say there is a possible world in which humans are descended from insects, but I don't think it makes much sense.

Yes. I cannot make sense of

a world in which we don't have a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe and population crash — Michael

I understand that an anti-natalist thinks otherwise, but I just think they are confused. Such a world would at least have to be a world without humans, and I am a human and so can have no perspective or judgement on such a world.

I would suggest that this is a gross misunderstanding of personal identity. Identical twins are not the same person, and if someone undergoes gene therapy they do not become someone else, in the sense that a sober person is likewise the same person when drunk or that the same person can be happy at one time and sad at another, or young at one time and old at another. Wrt. social identity, we can stipulate a genetic absolute in this sort of way, but in such case I am identifiable by my genetic code or equally by my fingerprints, but not as them.

What does this have to do with the truth or falsity of "one ought not kill babies"? — Michael

Something. Or nothing. I cannot help you beyond pointing out that moral beliefs are efficacious, and some are life affirming and others life denying. At some point one has to choose what side one is on. And from there one can judge rightly or wrongly.

Whether our belief that we ought not kill babies is true or false has no practical consequences. — Michael

Yes. Our belief is efficacious., whether it is true or false. the question is though what is its effect if it is true, and what is its effect if it is false. On the face of it, believing false things is likely to be deleterious and believing true things is advantageous. Immediately, if we believe we ought to kill babies, we will probably kill babies. The question of the truth or falsehood of our belief is borne out on a larger frame than the immediate. Later, we notice that our numbers are dwindling, and there is no one left to change our nappies when we become incontinent.

"Unlike other kinds of beliefs, our moral beliefs being right or wrong has no practical consequences." — Michael

Yes, I assumed you were saying that, but can you provide an argument for it? It seems rather unlikely. We agree that our moral beliefs have real consequences individually and socially I assume, and it seems likely that having false moral beliefs would be at least limiting and possibly deleterious or even fatal consequences. For example if we all believe it is wrong to kill babies, but we are wrong about that, then there will be more living babies than there ought to be, and hence population overshoot environmental catastrophe, and eventual population crash. All, very practical consequences. On the other hand, it might be that it is wrong to kill babies, but also wrong to be making so many babies. Life is complicated...

Moral beliefs seem to guide our social behaviour, and the factual content of those shared beliefs are the practical consequences in terms of the flourishing of life; particularly our species and its environment. If we were to discover life on another planet, we would have to become less parochial about it, but I stick to planet A for simplicity.

You could have it that rule-based morality represents wisdom about what worked best for our forebears. Since cultures evolve, what works changes over time. In one era, greed is destructive, in another, it's constructive. In this way, you could have a kind of moral realism, it's just that the rules are in flux. The basis for the rules is always the same, though: cultural evolution. — frank

In this case, the basis itself might change; if cultural evolution was the basis for most of history, there comes a modern time when it is no longer wise to ignore the environmental consequences of 'cultural evolution'. Again, it is a practical matter, and something that has only recently become a dominant moral issue. Anyway, the correct morals are the ones that lead to flourishing, aka 'the good'.

There was a science fiction story - forget whose but I think by a woman writer, about an intelligent species that procreated by a mass spawning in the sea. The juveniles spent their time in the sea and were prey to all sorts including adults of their own species those few that survived to emerge onto land as adults were only then considered to be moral subjects, rather as we (or some of us) treat birth as the beginning of moral subject-hood, or for others it is conception, or implantation, or rarely "every sperm is sacred." The Romans considered children to be property, I believe, and thus killing children was a personal matter, or killing other folks children a matter of infringement of parental rights. (I might be making that up, but it's a possible moral position. The Spartans had some fairly harsh ideas anyway.

Anyway, human cultures have moral beliefs that modify the culture in many ways, and not least in the effect on the psyche. Shaker beliefs, for example were that to procreate at all was wrong, which meant that without a plentiful supply of sinners, they could not survive. And they didn't. I am getting a bit Dawkins here for my own taste, but anti-natalism generally does undeniably suffer from short-term-ism unless its failure is guaranteed. A society that relies on immorality to survive is arguably merely indulging in double-think, a very common human trait, aka hypocrisy, that enables immoral moralities to survive at the cost of psychological misery.

I'm not trying to demonstrate that there are no moral facts, only that moral facts don't matter. It is only our beliefs that matter. — Michael

Does the shape of the world not matter?

In a world without moral beliefs this would happen, but I'm not asking about moral beliefs. I clarified that above: — Michael

Ah right, I missed that. Then I think the question is ineffective. People live according to their beliefs. If everyone believed the world was flat, no one would try and sail round it, whatever shape it actually was.

This does not demonstrate that it has no shape.

To make it simple. Explain to me the difference between these possible worlds:

1. No morality.
2. It is immoral to kill babies.
3. It is moral to kill babies. — Michael

1. In a world without morality, folk would kill babies if they wanted to and not if they didn't want to. There would be no law against it or moral opprobrium attached to it. We would chat down the pub and I would tell you how i had killed next door's baby because I couldn't stand the crying at night, and how upset she had been about it, and you would shrug and say, "women,Eh? They are so attached to their offspring.",
"Yeah, I might have to kill her as well if she keeps making a fuss. But you actually live with them all the time, why do you bother?"
"Oh I rather enjoy them most of the time - I guess I get attached to them too."

2. I would have to keep quiet about killing babies, because you would call the police if I told you - I even had to hide it from my neighbour, the mother and make it seem like a cot death.

3. My neighbour would have to keep her baby secret and find a lonely place to hide if she didn't want the official baby exterminator to call. If I heard crying, I would already have informed the authorities about this disgusting pervert next door having a baby and not killing it. Finding a place to hide would be fairly easy, because the human population would be very small in this world.

I checked my last two links and they work for me, so I think it must be your end cos I don't have any special access to anything...

Meh. — Mikie

They must be really worried, to commit to beginning to maybe think about actually doing something at some point, after only 28 summits.

So the so-called world of science which, we gather, has the title to replace our everyday world is, I suggest, the world not of science in general but of atomic and sub-atomic physics in particular, enhanced by some slightly incongruous appendages borrowed from one branch of neuro-physiology. — Ryle

I am questioning nothing that any scientist says on weekdays in his working tone of voice. But I certainly am questioning most of what a very few of them say in an edifying tone of voice on Sundays. — Ryle

What follows (P.75) is an extended analogy that has unfortunately been taken literally in the UK and the US, in the case of university colleges, and other institutions and become The social model that is taken to be the whole human political world. It was intended to show the folly of such thinking as applied to fundamental physics as a reductio ad absurdum. Alas, the argument from economic analogy now needs to be considered literally on its own merits as well.

That is such an honest, humble, and illuminating speech. Now I want to read his work some more.

Mrs un writes to save her life, and writes from an unknown silent source. I do not try and save my life very much, but am content to spend it, day by day, dialogue by dialogue.

So if I should use a metaphor for the action of writing, it has to be that of listening. — Fosse

This is an ancient tradition. One listens to the Muse, and allows Her to speak through one. "Invocation", it is called and that is everything that he is talking about in that speech, but doubtless not at all what his books and plays are about, but what they exemplify.

This is a nice quiet corner where we can put the world to rights without being interrupted by the world and his brother.

Say, where does "being reasonable" fit in? (in a colloquial sense, with a nod towards ethics) — jorndoe

Sound judgement? It requires the love of wisdom. There are threads currently on what is love, and what is stupidity; they are both somewhat confused.

I am start with moral realism as an unconditional condition on our philosophy. Plato puts 'the good' at the heart of philosophy, and the final object therefore of reason, defined as sound judgement, not merely sound reasoning.

So I lay this out in the form of a conditional, because that is how it can be understood universally:

IF you do not really value truth,
THEN you are not worth talking to or listening to.

I bypass all the hypothetical baby killers and axe murderers by staying right now in the present of this dialogue. This is the necessary condition for talk to be meaningful. It doesn't "have to be meaningful", but if it isn't then I am not interested.

In this sense, philosophy is religious in just that way that science pretends not to be, from the outset. Sophia is an object of worship, that her lovers seek to realise in their lives, not a convenient advantageous heuristic.

So we are dying in our own waste because we live in a godless age. You are right to put science in the dock. But Popper was trying to mend something in science, but ended up curing scepticism with more scepticism. Personally, I blame Descartes. The original thinking thing and originator of mechanical man. Also he was French!

And "fuck off" is not a normative utterance, I suppose — Leontiskos

A mere pleasantry. Are you expecting honesty, rationality, or good sense? Reject my argument, but don't then complain when you see the consequences.

I'll take your moral indignation as a sign that there is an implicit 'ought' in your account. — Leontiskos

There is no moral indignation. Just the end of communication.

"Society ought not collapse" — Leontiskos

Cool! Fuck off and die, then.

I'm not clear how this relates to Ryle's use of the idea. — Ludwig V

When considering the parents' duties, we have no doubt that they are to blame if they do not mould their son's conduct, feelings and thoughts. When considering the son's behaviour we have no doubt that he and not they should be blamed for some of the things that he does. Our answer to the one problem seems to rule out our answer to the other, and then at second remove to rule itself out too. — Ryle

Can you not see the same shape in this description as in my first Bateson quote about the lying Cretan? Two mutually undermining claims tied together in a knot like "the set of all sets that are not members of themselves".

Our moral judgement is made to judge itself unfavourably.

There can be non-moral obligations. I ought to brush my teeth otherwise they will fall out, but it's not immoral to not brush my teeth. — Michael

Yes it is, but I am not going to argue that right now. But you ought not argue that it is not immoral to lie, because you are undermining your own argument when you do so. Your bullshit undermines this site; It is a performative contradiction. It is not immoral for a-social beings like the cat that walks by himself to lie. It is immoral for humans to do so. And also in the quoted post, I indicate that it is not immoral for a stick insect to pretend to its predator to be stick. because they are not in a social mutual relationship. But humans are.

This to me is a good example of an anti-realist account. Morality is a conventionalized system devised to punishes uncooperative behavior and reinforce cooperative behavior. If moral claims are to be considered "true", they are only true in terms of this system. — hypericin

It's my anti-antirealism. The reality is that communication happens, and is advantageous, and can only happen in a largely truth-telling community. The summary of these facts is that one ought to be honest, because otherwise communication ceases, language is useless, and society collapses. This a physical reality.

I'm not sure if this will be helpful, but Bateson derives a notion of 'category error' from Russell's theory of logical types.

One of the first things that Russell and Whitehead observed in attempting this was that the ancient paradox of Epimenides - "Epimenides was a Cretan who said, 'Cretans always lie' " - was built upon classification and metaclassification. I have presented the paradox here in the form of a quotation within a quotation, and this is precisely how the paradox is generated. The larger quotation becomes a classifier for the smaller, until the smaller quotation takes over and reclassifies the larger, to create contradiction. — Bateson

For the abstract presentation, consider the case of a very simple relationship between two organisms in which organism A has emitted some sort of sound or posture from which B could learn something about the state of A relevant to B's own existence. It might be a threat, a sex­ual advance , a move towards nurturing , or an indication of membership in the same species. I already noted in the discussion of coding (criterion 5) that no message, under any circumstances, is that which precipitated it.
There is always a partly predictable and therefore rather regular rela­tion between message and referent, that relation indeed never being direct or simple. Therefore, if B is going to deal with A's indication, it is absolutely necessary that B know what those indications mean. Thus, there comes into existence another class of information, which B must assimilate, to tell B about the coding of messages or indications coming from A. Messages of this class will be, not about A or B, but about the coding of messages . They will be of a different logical type. I will call them metamessages.
Again, beyond messages about simple coding, there are much more subtle messages that become necessary because codes are condi­tional; that is, the meaning of a given type of action or sound changes relative to context, and especially relative to the changing state of the relationship between A and B. If at a given moment the relation be­ comes playful, this will change the meaning of many signals. — Bateson

[My bold]

Emoticons are very often just such metamessage qualifiers that can indicate irony, or hyperbole, or indeed playfulness.

Like all revolutions of the past, we often start with the intention to enforce the foundation that 'all people are equal, and must be treated as such,' and we end up with 'all people are equal but some people deserve more resources and power than any other person.' When the people get rid of a nasty system, they often fail to prevent their good work from getting corrupted by the nefarious that still exist amongst them. — universeness

Oh dear. This is not a good analysis. If all people are morally equal, then it is an error to divide them into the nefarious and the righteous. That is what must result in the inequality, when the nefarious are brought down and the righteous exalted. Because it follows, after the revolution that the righteous are in charge and deserve all the benefits. So the revolution just turns round and round getting nowhere, because the righteous become the nefarious - there is no difference.

So make a law that the people in charge of every institution must live in the accommodation for the homeless, and receive the minimum wage, and have no private wealth at all, and as long as this law is enforced you will never have a greedy politician, banker, or company director, and the wealth will be very well distributed.

As for information in DNA, that is your burden to defend. I think it's just your mental projection. It might be an abstraction but not physically fundamental as brain state is. — Mark Nyquist

My position on DNA is that it used to work just fine even before that woman discovered it and some blokes stole her idea and got the Nobel prize for it.

No. I see that my seeing anything requires me. But my finitude and mortality entails that information does not depend on my knowing it

indelible? Questions — Bella fekete

Your English is a bit off, but not too badly. Basically a lie can only work in a community that expects truth. Clearly there is no community of 'predator and prey', so there is no conflict between the individual interest and the community interest.

But I think there is a lesson here for humanity that in order for everyone to put the community before self interest, everyone must benefit from the community, and not only the dominant members. Someone has put it this way - that the most dangerous person is someone with nothing left to lose. Like that monkey. So with the morality of truth must also come the morality of fairness, and equality.

So a society that is stratified by race or class in a totally unequal way becomes more like a predator/prey arrangement where morality breaks down because society is fractured.

I'm not familiar with falling abacus, but mindless computers do process information all the time unobserved... and present the results to us at our convenience. Indeed modern computers process information in ways that humans do not fully understand, and programs develop abilities that are unexpected by programmers.

The footprint can only become information if there is a mind — RogueAI

Literally not so.There are footprints millions of years old, from dinosaurs that predate humans. The print of the foot is literally preserved in what becomes rock and informs minds millions of years later. The mindless rock preserves the information until the curious ape evolves to think about it. The necessity of the curious ape so long after the event is patently absurd.

Actually, — JuanZu

Actually, not. We disagree. Can you accept that in your ontology?

Well, the only evidence of information you have is not the footprint, but something that you represent to yourself and assign more or less a truth value to. That is, information is the content that you have in your head (so to speak) and which you could transmit to another person. — JuanZu

Yes you express very clearly what I disagree with. Information is not all in my head, but all in Google. Well not actually all in Google either, because I have faith that tomorrow another fossil will be dug up and some of the information it contains of a time before humans will be seen, interpreted and disseminated to interested parties, information that is new to humanity but millions of years old in reference. I have evidence that this has happened before, but no evidence, obviously, that it will happen again in the future.

Information that is in my head I tend to call knowledge, or habit, or superstition, or some such; not identical with all information, that can be found in books and timetables and DNA, and rock strata. I don't think this is a particularly obscure or idiosyncratic usage. Even the information that comes out of my head is not entirely in my head. I cannot remember exactly, even my last post in this thread, never mind the thousands of posts prior to that.

The corresponding problem with government is that it cannot distinguish itself from a Mafia. The ordinary decent man has a free choice as to exactly what to call how he is fucked. :mask:

The information was born from your relation with the foot print, the relation of interpreter-interpreted. — JuanZu

I'm afraid I flatly disagree. The information is there in the sand, literally imprinted as a record of the shape of the foot that trod there. And this is the case whether I or another, or no one has a relation to it of seeing, interpreting, or knowing. The information is born of the relation of foot and sand, and only introjected by the interpretation of an observer.

Perhaps some light could be shed if the question is reversed.

What characterises the mindset associated with dishonesty? My first impulse is to notice that the mindset must typically include a notion that some advantage will accrue, either personally or tribally.

Consider the deceptive body of a stick insect. It (metaphorically) declares to the world and particularly to its predators "Ignore me, I am a stick." The Blind Watchmaker learns to lie, and simultaneously in the evolution of the predator, tries to learn how to detect a lie. Such is communication between species, in which morality plays no role. Nevertheless, the advantage of deception is obvious.

Imagine a tribe of smallish monkeys in a jungle environment; they have various calls of social identification, and perhaps some to do with dominance and other stuff, but in particular, they have two alarm calls, one warning of ground predators, and one warning of sky predators. One day, one rather low status monkey, who aways has to wait for the others to eat and often misses out on the best food, spots some especially tasty food on the ground, and gives the ground alarm call. The tribe all rush to climb up high, and the liar gets first dibs for once on the treat. This behaviour has been observed, but I won't trouble you myself with references.

Here, one can clearly see that dishonesty is parasitic on honesty. Overall there is a huge social advantage in a warning system, but it is crucially dependent on honesty, and is severely compromised by individual dishonesty. Hence the social mores, that become morality. Society runs on trust, and therefore needs to deter and prevent dishonesty. And this cannot be reversed because the dependence is one way, linguistically. If dishonesty were ever to prevail and be valorised, language would become non-functional. The alarm call would come to mean both 'predator on the ground', and 'tasty food on the ground'. that is, it would lose its effective warning function and its function as a lie.

Any idea why he had to go that way in CPR? — Corvus

Kant was trying to save rationalism from Hume's sceptical challenges particularly wrt causation. Empiricism as hume developed it starts with something like, "Life is not an argument. Shit happens and minds have to try and make sense of it, get used to it and hope the sense will continue. " Rationalism always wants certainty in its ordering like an obsessive compulsive: retreating from reality precisely in order to make it conform to the logic of the mind - hence the contortions admirably laid out by @RussellA.