It is self-evident that I am responding to you, and that the language of my response is English. You can see for yourself that it is so, or you will be able to when I have posted my comment. It might not be self-evident to someone who does not speak English, but since I speak English it is evident to me that you speak English, and thus it will be evident to you that I am speaking English. If an infant were to see these posts, it would not be evident that a discourse was going on, they would see a rather dull screen. So in this sense, things only become self-evident in the light of other things of experience. However, the light of experience fully entitles me to conclude that English does not get written by accident, and thus that you speak English and we are not going to argue about that.

Accordingly, to refine a little, "some truths are self-evident in the light of other knowledge that does in fact obtain."

White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate.
— Cavacava

Is this a virtue or a fault? — Bitter Crank

No. It's a privilege.

I suggest that for the purposes of this thread it is just assumed that Universal Perfection is realistically possible. — Justin1

Can I suggest that you do not even need this assumption. It is sufficient that things can get better or they can get worse, and one ought to move in the direction of better, even if perfection is never to be arrived at. Rather as one cleans the kitchen, knowing that the cook will immediately make a new mess; the goal is not that the kitchen be in a state of permanent cleanliness, but that the dirt is fresh.

Actually, all swans are still white; its just that Down Under, everything is upside-down and back to front and black is white and white is black.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/09/california-police-white-supremacists-counter-protest

Have some more pomo marxist propaganda chaps.

To be entirely honest, your writing on many issues is interesting and original, but that doesn't mean it's right. — Agustino

Yeah, let's not go into the rights and wrongs of it here. "Interesting and original" becomes "madness" when you accuse the department handing out the certificates of being racist and using racist course materials. You can agree or disagree; you can go read the book I was discussing and give your own critique; that's not the point. What happened is that I got from the experts no response, no critique, no defence, I simply didn't get accepted on the next course. And that is why Peterson is wrong. Speaking uncomfortable critical things to power, true of false, is dangerous.

So what if people (or my society) is racist and mocks me for spending time with people of different skin colors (for example)? Doesn't matter what others say. I can care less. Indeed, it would be a shame if I stooped to the level of caring what X or Y thinks of me. — Agustino

This is bollocks too. If we decide you are mendacious ignorant foreigner who doesn't deserve to be here and cannot be trusted to do a job, you get no work and get sent back to from where you came. Caring or not caring is irrelevant.

But the future is not like the past.

Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full.

Supposing that the future is like the past requires quite a selective view. — Banno

Supposing that the future is not like the past requires an equally selective view.

It is, presumably, the same bottle of wine that was full and is now half full?

One way of avoiding confusion here is to pay close attention to tenses. There is in English no fixed distinction between tensed and un-tensed usage. There might have been once, there might be in the future, but in the meantime there is not, and the "meantime" encompasses at least the history of this thread, and however many more posts it takes to establish a change of usage.

That the future has been like the past (only different, for the nit pickers) is not a supposition, but experience. That it will be like the past, is supposition, imagination, projection.

Though isn't it clear that we need some first-principles, which cannot be derived via argumentation, but must be derived rather from experience? — Agustino

Fuck, do you want to go another round or two[? That the future will be like or unlike the past, that it will be something or nothing, cannot be derived from experience.

Do you think that this is what Kant says or is this unrelated? — Agustino

No, I'm being totally unfair to Kant here, because this is a thread about Hume.

I'm saying that this is one of our foundational premises — Agustino

Yes. We reason from it, but we cannot reason to it. Which is about what Kant in his long-winded way eventually arrives at; one might say that it is part of what we mean by 'the future', that it will follow in an orderly fashion from the present and past, and if it doesn't, then we would have to call it a new world, or an afterlife, or something. But to claim, after having been dragged kicking and screaming over several pages to it, that "we would expect" the result is - extravagant.

My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future is like the past. — Agustino

You're muddling the tenses. "My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future has been like the past." And this says exactly nothing about what will be.


You have to rely on the assumption that the future will be like the past in order for past evidence to be relevant to the future. Which is assuming the conclusion. I don't object to you doing it, I just object to your claim that is is reasoned.

Another broken link I fear, leaving me with very little clue what you are saying. Are we in the transactional analysis world of child, adult, parent?

No knowledge and no immediate experience means no evidence. So one is reduced to the inductive argument which is circular:-

What are the chances that the future will be like the past? Well the future has always been like the past in the past, so if the future is anything like the past, chances are it will be like the past. — me

And your username and password Sir? >:O — Agustino

Ah. I haven't been there so long, I forgot how it works. I'll try again

Right. So the claim that the future is like the past is justified by evidence, not by a valid argument from accepted premises. — Agustino

Yes, and the only people who have evidence of the future are Nostradamus and Jehovah's Witnesses.

I wonder if it might be PTSD.

the sound of a purse striking the child — Alurayne

That is so specific. Perhaps you saw it, and so describe it that way, but otherwise, It would be a hyper-sensitive distinction. As if we are all familiar with the particular sound of a purse striking a child and how it differs from -say- a handbag striking a dog. I might be reading too much into this, but a sound that reawakens/reactivates a repressed traumatic incident can have this disorienting effect, and 'leak' into consciousness in just this way of an identification that just seems too precise. Try some talking therapy, would be my advice, and see if there is anything behind it.

Hmm, so have you suffered from any diagnosable mental disorder then? — Agustino

No, no diagnosis, no counselling, no therapy, no psychoactive drugs prescribed. I did manage to get myself thrown off a counselling course, a long time ago, see here, if you want all the sordid details.

I think one of the 'secrets' is that they do not operate alone. The patient is seen in their community, and the therapist also brings their community with them.
— unenlightened
How do you think this contributes to better outcomes? How would you imagine this goes in a practical situation? I imagine that people with - say - schizophrenia - who have hallucinations, would be asking about what they should do to deal with those when they have them, etc. What would the therapists say? — Agustino

I think it is terribly important. It fosters exactly that openness and honesty - we are not talking about you behind your back, you are not being singled out and separated from your family/community before any intervention. We are all together trying to sort out a problem.

Dude, that's a really good exposition you have going there. Thanks.

Speaking as the aspirational hoi polloi, it seems to me that this vale of tears, or whatever it is, can only be understood - personally - as something like an educational toy. In this sense, though materialism may be false as a matter of ultimate judgement, nevertheless it is the 'correct' way to play the game - as if it were real. but perhaps I am still on level one.

What?

Right, so if neuroscience demonstrated it to be be 'true' that certain passions were, by biological necessity, present in the brain, how would that not be a justification? — Pseudonym

One such passion might be a preference for one's own children's welfare over other peoples'. Thus of biological necessity, my kids are preferable to yours. and of biological necessity, you take the opposite view. Neither view is justified, and since they are mutually contradictory both of them cannot be justified on pain of logical explosion.

A claim is justified by evidence of its truth or valid argument from accepted premises. I don't understand your difficulty. A bio-evolutionary/neurological explanation of belief in God is a very different thing from a justification of belief in God.

Hmm, but I disagree with your basic premise that identity is fragmentation... and probably so would Peterson. — Agustino

Yes, I know. I won't argue it here, I just wanted to point out that there is a big difference between the half-quote and the whole, and so between what Peterson is saying and myself.

Does 'justify' mean something different to you? — Pseudonym

Yes it does. One might say that anti-natalism is an evolutionary dead end, but this does not entail that it is wrong. Evolution has an explanation for both selfishness and altruism, but it does not vote for either. As Dawkins says, genes are not selfish, they don't have selves, they don't have wants.

I am so happy that you have been saved. :D
But seriously, thanks for your personal account.

Many GOOD therapists (psychologists) are already doing that anyway. So these people from Finland are keeping secrets - either their results are not as great as they claim them to be - OR - they don't want to share their real secret. — Agustino

Yes, I too am a bit frustrated that there is so little of the actual practice or even accounts from clients or case notes available. I think one of the 'secrets' is that they do not operate alone. The patient is seen in their community, and the therapist also brings their community with them. But in a sense, it is not having a secret - not having a theory, or a method to see through and act upon that I suspect makes the radical difference - assuming there is one.

One of the difficulties of measuring the effects of therapy is that it is personal to the extent that the character of the therapist is more important than the theory they espouse. This partly explains why there is often a guru-like emphasis on having been trained by the originator of a therapy. And it means it is impossible to separate the GOOD therapist from the BAD in terms of their method, though one knows who is helpful to one's own situation - or does one? Anyway, the focus on the therapist's own relationships as part of the whole story seems important in Open Dialogue, and that it is brought explicitly into the therapeutic encounter rather than hidden away as 'supervision' as is usual.

I don't have a personal story to relate, in the sense that I have always made myself responsible for my own madness, and so have only been a witness to encounters of others with therapy, the institution and the individuals. Which is not to say that I haven't needed and found help, as you did, but it was under the rubric of education, or friendship, or some such - and the drugs were aways illegal and sporadic.

As to what rocks my world, you missed out the first half, and it is the juxtaposition that makes something non-trivial. If identity is fragmentation, then what is honesty? Who is or isn't honest? But it may not be clear to others what I'm getting at here. I don't think Peterson would accept the first half, so the second half becomes a moralistic dogma, as if one has the truth always available.

Why is reason defined as deductive logic? Seems that animals and humans rely heavily on inductive reasoning. Deductive is something we came up with rather recently, but our ancestors didn't use it to survive, communicate and utilize tools, etc. — Marchesk

So you want to define reason as 'how we think'? That seems a bit broad.

Take Hume's other critique, of moral reasoning, summarised as 'you can't get an ought from an is'. And take medicine as an example. Science says that these pills have these effects, and medicine makes use of the facts. But it also has an unscientific attitude, that pain and death are bad things to be avoided if possible, and these are not facts, but -shall we say? - passions. Now Hume is by no means suggesting that we should not have these passions; he is simply saying that the reasoning of science cannot justify them, but rather is employed in their service.

Similarly, he points out that the reasoning of science, that there is this history of evidence and experience that can be described and structured according to mathematical formulae says nothing, and can say nothing about the future, because there can be no evidence of the future, it is all of the past.
And again, he is not in the least suggesting that we should not imagine the future and expect it to be like the past; he simply points out that it is not any form of reasoning that gets us there, but the equivalent of passion - habit. We want to predict the future, so we want it to be related to the past, which is what we already know of.

It's all very annoying for philosophers, because they want reason to be king, and it isn't, but a mere servant of those animal passions that the enlightened man imagines himself as having transcended.

Tell it to the bitcoin investors, I'm sure they'll agree. Here's a reason to ground doubt: things change, trends reverse. But I am consenting to play your game here, as if trends changing will continue. So even your best reason, which amounts to throwing up your hands and saying 'what else?' is double-edged to say the least.

Yes, I presume the trend will continue. But what was the reason again?

However, you must concede that it is overwhelmingly more likely, given the evidence, that the future will be like the past. — Agustino

No, I don't have to. You have to provide some evidence or argument that does not assume what it seeks to prove.

Dude, when I use your own words against you in that way, you are supposed to notice that you are being as uncharitable/hyperbolic/ mendacious/ whatever, as the people you are complaining about. What you let Trump off the hook for is the same as what you condemn 'the media' for. This is called hypocrisy.

So if we had to make a bet, which option would it be wise or rational to bet on? That the future is like the past, or that it will be different? And why? — Agustino

We do have to make a bet, and we do bet that things will go on as before. And it would be unwise to do otherwise. But rationally there is no reason to do so; except that there is nothing else to go by.

It is not a leap. It is brought about by habitual recognition. — Rich

Indeed, habit, as Hume himself says; but it is a leap that reason cannot justify. One might say, by way of analogy, that passion is the boss, habit is the worker, and reason keeps the accounts.

I like 'like'. I don't prefer 'similar'. Less picking of nits, more thinking about the arguments. The leap is that the pattern continues into the invisible future.

I find it odd that folks are quite happy with 'you can't get an ought from an is', but balk at 'you can't get a will be from a has been.'

This is what I mean, the media is really dishonest. How can anyone read and believe this crap? It's like the most uncharitable way to read someone's statements in history! — Agustino

Depends what you mean by dishonest. It depends how you interpret it. It can be taken as hyperbole. A hyperbole isn't a lie.

Talk of probabilities rather misses Hume's point.

What are the chances that the future will be like the past? Well the future has always been like the past in the past, so if the future is anything like the past, chances are it will be like the past.

One has to assume the conclusion even to reach a probable result.

As I see it the argument goes along these lines:
We see the sun rising and setting, but this is an illusion, because really the earth is turning.

Whereas I want to say:
The sun really rises and sets just as we see it, because the earth is turning.

Experience is of the world, and the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is unsustainable.

The claim is that we have no access to the parts of the objective world that aren't our own subjectivity, so there is no contradiction. — Michael

Well if you don't see a problem with the notion that subjectivity is the only thing that is objective, then I wish you good luck with the hard problem.

The hard problem, of course, is how to reconcile subjective experience with an objective world of causal
processes. — Joshs

On the one hand, there is an objective world of causal processes, and on the other there is a subjective world of experience. This called indirect realism. All experience is subjective, and therefore the experiencer has no direct access to the objective world. Yet, by realist hypothesis, the experiencer is part of the objective world that he has no access to.

Subjectivity is undeniable, and therefore objective. But we have no access to the objective. Therefore we have no access to the subjective.

But we do have access to the subjective, and therefore we have access to the objective. Direct realism does not have this hard problem, because the world is what I partly experience and what I am part of.

Flowers are very uplifting, but no substitute for expert advice on the right tie for the occasion.

I don't think that inability to cope with life is seen as a real problem that needs intervention. — Andrew4Handel

I want to question the whole sense of this. One can cope to just that extent that one has the support of society. Society then "intervenes" when it fails to support.

A gentleman cannot cope without a butler, and a butler cannot cope without a gentleman.

If you are unhappy, unable to cope with life, the reason for this is probably because you have made a shitload of mistakes. — TimeLine

Everyone makes a shitload of mistakes. If you cannot cope, it isprobably because you do not have a good butler to cover for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves_and_Wooster

Edit: Or a wife.

No one can cope alone.

Ah. I fear I am far too naive; or perhaps it's intrusive thoughts that people are more often daft than depraved. Anyway, point taken.