What's wrong with rich privilege?

Why do you consider regret and shame necessarily psychologically harmful? — Agustino

I don't. I would say they are part of a powerful system of thought that has the potential to increase freedom as compared to other animals. Compare it with money - another construction of the mind. Money is a fantastically powerful means of cooperation that connects people right across the world. As a medium of cooperation is is unrivalled, but unfortunately folks get lost in it, and seek to accumulate it, when its use is in the flow. And then it becomes divisive not cooperative.

Human thought in general is a fantastic tool for creative living, but a lousy prison to live in. Think carefully, think hard, but don't let thought be the world, or you become isolated and lonely in your own head.

Does time need a FIXED arrow to distinguish itself from space? Doesn't time distinguish itself from space merely by being something different, namely time? — Agustino

I don't want to speculate how God could have created things differently or has done in a wider universe that we might call heaven/hell. In this world, freedom is built in by the openness of the future and our participation in its unfolding form. Now I don't think that God created the garden of Eden as another world with different rules.

So I take the story of the fall not to be about God literally punishing man for disobedience by deliberately fucking up His own creation.

thus it is innocent in its selfcenteredness because it lacks the knowledge of good and evil.
— unenlightened
Okay I agree. It is innocent in its selfcenterdness, but there nevertheless is a selfcenterdness about it no? Also what do you mean by it "lacks knowledge of good and evil"? How do you define good and evil in this scenario? — Agustino

Animals can be self-centered, and they can be loving and nurturing; what I think they do not do is reflect on what they do or on what happens by way of counterfactuals. They do not consider what they might have done, or ought to have done, or ought to do or ought not to do. They participate in the freedom of the universe with consciousness, but not with self-consciousness. The counterfactuals of could be, will be, ought to be and was constitute the psychological 'world' to which we have exiled ourselves. Thus animals do not have regret or shame, and their lives, though finite, are psychologically timeless. They live in the present and so there is no death in their life, though there is an end. I don't know if this clarifies my thinking at all?

where does this leave morality then? Can the enlightened person do anything? Is anything they do moral? (I would certainly disagree with that for example - because very often I hear this argument - namely that because someone is enlightened, their actions can hurt those who are not enlightened because they do not understand, or they are too attached to their egos, and in such a case, somehow, the enlightened person is never morally responsible for the pain they cause or the pain is otherwise justified by this - for example, your favorite man J. Krishnamurti and his behavior towards Rosalind and Rajagopal). — Agustino

I won't discuss Krishnamurti here, but my dentist sometimes hurts me because he needs to - I need him to. I think it is sufficiently rare and unfathomable that we do not need to worry about what the enlightened man's relation to morality might be. Jesus overturned the tables in the temple; I will not say that he had an off day, nor that it was a necessary hurt. Rather I will consider his teaching and try and make sense of that as one who is not enlightened.

What is the difference between forgetting yourself and being unconscious for example? — Agustino

It depends how you are understanding 'conscious' of course. Some folk take conscious and self-conscious to be identical. But the way I understand it is that a cat, say, is fully conscious but unselfconscious; thus it is innocent in its selfcenteredness because it lacks the knowledge of good and evil. Whereas humans 'ought to know better'. I don't think this is all that heretical. Having that knowledge, the path to ending or transcending self-consciousness is steep - one has to do better. But I think one has glimpses of paradise regained from time to time.

Freedom does not require an arrow of time. Do you disagree with this? If so, why? — Agustino

I do, but I am not dogmatic about what is possible beyond this world. Do you agree that freedom requires the possibility of change? If so, then I would say it requires at least one dimension of time, distinguished from space by its arrow. That is to say, my freedom comprises something undecided , yet, that I decide. If my decision does not stick because I can go back and un-decide, then it does not seem that that adds to my freedom, but undermines it; my decisions are no longer decisive.

Well, concieve if you can of a human being who does not have a self. Ask yourself, what it means for such a human to exist? Concieve also, how such an existence can satisfy the nature of man. — Agustino

There is no problem with such a conception. Indeed it happens to most people to forget themselves from time to time. Self is a habit of thought.

This is wrong. The absence of entropy does NOT entail the absence of time. It's just the absence of an arrow of time. If there was no entropy, for example, I could dissolve a cube of sugar in a cup of coffee, and then reverse the process and get the sugar back out exactly as I put it in. It wouldn't mean that there is no time, only that processes are reversible - they are not necessarily headed in a certain direction (ie no arrow of time, or many different arrows of time, always changing)! — Agustino

Well now you're just making shit up with neither physics, the bible, nor normal use of language to support you. What happened to 'Freedom could be time-less.'? Now it could be Dr Who's timey-wimey.

We cannot be held to even exist as human beings without our self identification. — Agustino

A rock or a tree manages to exist without self-identification. I'm not sure if you are claiming this as tautological, a defining characteristic, in which case I have no problem - to be human is to have fallen. Or if you want to say that it is necessary in some way to ensoulment, in which case I'll just go quiet and let you pontificate.

Why is an arrow of time logically necessary for freedom? Freedom could be time-less. — Agustino

No time, no change; no change, no freedom.

Yeah, thats a bit too literal for my wishy washy blood. I see the fall as primarily a psychological theory. Thus lions and lambs coexist in the garden with the lions eating the lambs and the lambs eating the grass, but there is no death because there is no separation of self. Rather as my cells die and replenish themselves without my having to die with them. The fall into knowledge of good and evil is the awakening of an identification with a continuing self-entity, which entity then will die, sooner or later. I don't think there is a need for some other earth with different physics; indeed I cannot make sense of a fall in a world without the freedom of entropy.

Christian doctrine is not univocal, but the way I heard it God looked at his creation and saw that it was good. I assume he was aware of thermodynamics already. The goodness of thermodynamics is the radical freedom it confers on creation.

The Fall is rather more human-specific than this thread allows.

Are we justified...? — darthbarracuda

As has been indicated above, the justification for justice is just that it is just.

If that is not enough for you, you might have recourse to theories of the evolution of grudger strategies as the most effective in prisoners' dilemma type repetitions in social animals. But that is an explanation rather than a justification.

Of course 'ownership' in a broad sense, that is, the effective control of something (and exclusivity to whatever surplus is gained from it), existed in varying forms in pre-modern times. But 'ownership' is a legal concept... — Shevek

It matters not to my point whether it is more broad or more legal of a contrivance; To claim it is already to claim the validity of the self same social contract which is then repudiated in the op when it comes to paying taxes.

As one revolutionary put it, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's'. The laws and practices that constitute property (or any other) rights of whatever formality or informality cannot be claimed without the quid pro quo of relevant undertakings. Well I suppose it can be claimed, but not justifiably; either a social contract with rights and obligations both, or else 'property is theft'.

People that can't form an orderly queue don't deserve breakfast.

If a new set of guests arrives that represents the real numbers, then, in that case, Hilbert's Hotel won't be able to accommodate them all. — Pierre-Normand

If they form an orderly queue, they can be accommodated; otherwise they will have to go to Cantor's night shelter which has infinite rooms each of infinite capacity on each of it's infinite floors. Breakfast is not provided.

I used to work in Hilbert's hotel as a night porter, and this sort of thing happened all the time. To move an infinite number of guests took an hour; half an hour for the first one and half the time for each subsequent one. But it was the kitchen staff who had it worst, and eventually the difficulties of producing an infinite number of cooked breakfasts while keeping the food waste finite gave the chef a nervous breakdown and he set fire to the place. As far as I know it is still burning.

Ownership came into being with agriculture, because you have to invest work for future reward. So you need ownership for culture. It is always open to you to be a hunter gatherer or robber pillager. There's nothing tacit about the social contract unless you don't bother to think about it and the alternatives.

I don't suppose it was sudden, but it was certainly invented and agreed.

If I take your money via taxation, then I am coercing you... — Pneumenon

Here it is right at the start; there is no 'your money' or your anything except by way of the social contract. We agree not to break down the fence round 'your' pumpkin patch, as long as you agree to pay 'your' taxes.

@Pneumenon A hungry law court might want you not to pay your taxes.

To put it more abstractly, the notion of coercion presumes social relations. The philosophical psychopath does not sign the social contract and takes prudential precautions against tigers and political authorities in the same spirit.

@Pneumenon Only the way tigers coerce you to stay out of the jungle.

This would seem to imply that citizenship is voluntary. That's not necessarily the case. It's the same problem as with Hobbes' social contract; when the hell did I get the choice to sign that contract? — Pneumenon

You don't have to sign the contract. But if you don't, then you cannot expect others to respect your right to property, freedom of movement, or life.

There is no virtue, beyond common prudence, in my putting on a pair of socks when my feet are cold. And if I felt the pain of your cold feet, there would be no more virtue in my putting socks on your feet.

Your scenario reduces kindness and love to mere sensible self-interest, which is why God doesn't implement it. To put it crudely, it makes mankind literally 'one flesh', and making love becomes universal masturbation.

If virtue were rewarded, then everyone would be virtuous and there would be no virtue in it.

A relationship is not any state of the world. It's a logical expression expressed across many. An intimate relationship isn't formed by any one state, a hundred states of a person, or even ten billion states of a person. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I simply do not buy this at all. Relationships are certainly states of the world, and one cannot talk at all without them. To say that the cat is on the mat is to affirm the reality of the cat, the mat, and their relation. 'On' cannot be merely a logical as opposed to an ontological term because the cat is not necessarily on the mat, but is sometimes in the bushes.

But a relation is not another thing, either; one cannot count - cat, mat, and on, and come up with 3 things. This works quite well too for abstracts like 'the orbit of Mars', which I take to be perfectly real and to consist of the spatiotemporal
relationship between Mars and the other celestial bodies.

This realism undercuts both scientism and the fact/value dichotomy (also attacked by Putnam). Secondary qualities, such a color and smell, that we perceive, and ascribe to objects, also don't change when we change the way that we talk about them. Not always, in any case. Talking about them can induce changes in the brute shape of our sensibility and aesthetic appreciation. That can lead to a change in the reference of the words that we use to refer to secondary qualities. — Pierre-Normand

I'd be interested to hear a bit more about this undercutting of the fact/value dichotomy. I'm inclined to say that values are (real) relations between observer and observed. Thus it might be that under evolution or gene therapy the human eye developed forth and fifth types of cones in the retina. This would give the potential for colour perception and terminology to be transformed from a three dimensional to a five dimensional range. At which, one suspects that 'red' would simply be inadequate to describe most of what is currently seen as red. Likewise, if we all became colourblind, colour terms would drop out of use, to be replaced by a more complex textural terminology. All this without changing the substance of London buses and poppies in the least.

Intimate relationships can - and often do - change as a result of how we think and talk about them. Do relationships exist? — csalisbury

Well, I'll withdraw the definition, as it only fits one half of my dualism. But it's an unfair example, as an intimate relationship is composed to a considerable degree of how we talk and think about each other; it is misleading to say that they change as a result of what they are - though they certainly do, like radio-active elements.

Consider, for instance, the concept of a planet (such that Saturn is one, but Plato isn't, because it didn't clear up its path, on one possible account of what it is for something to be a planet). — Pierre-Normand

Just so. What counts a planet changes according to how we decide to see things. Yet such changes in terminology do not, I maintain, change the ontology of the solar system; Pluto does not go off in a huff because we demoted it. Nor does it change how many planets make five.

In fact it might be a useful definition of being - that which does not change just because we change how we talk and think about it. Or is that horribly naive?

@Pierre-Normand Chess seems a bit hard to me, how about beans in a pod? What counts as a bean may well be somewhat vague and arbitrary; there may be partially developed bean nodules. But once we have decided what counts as a bean in this pod, it is clear enough that we can count the ones that count and arrive at a reliable 'five'.

This gives an ontology:

Bean, bean, bean bean, bean, five-beans-in-a-pod. It doesn't matter to me if you want to muddy things with that odd bean that is a sort of double, and that one at the end that is half-developed, it just leads to 'five to seven beans in a pod'.

Which is to say that though we must see a bean as a bean in order to count it as a bean, there is no 'seeing as' about how many beans make five.

So, whenever something is part of an ontology, because it can be seen as a P (where 'P' is a sortal concept that defines what specific sort of pattern any P is seen as), then P must be discloseable within some broader context of activity (i.e. an empirical domain being governed by constitutive rules, such as the laws of physics, for instance). It may or may not be the case that for some P to exist as such (i.e. as the P that it is, where 'P' is a sortal concept) consists in its being internally arranged thus and so. — Pierre-Normand

How am I to understand this 'exist as such', except as 'exist as stuff', as distinct from 'exist as a sortal concept': is this not the dualism of stuff and arrangement sneaked into the analysis without acknowledgement?

I wonder if anyone can relate all this to my own simple-minded dualist ontology of stuff and arrangements?

For example, wallpaper is stuff; but it is an arrangement of stuff, namely wood fibres and other. Wood fibres are arrangements of cellulose and lignin which are arrangements of carbon and hydrogen, which are arrangements of protons neutrons and electrons, which are arrangements of quarks or strings or some such, which is stuff.

Wallpaper is often patterned.

A wallpaper group (or plane symmetry group or plane crystallographic group) is a mathematical classification of a two-dimensional repetitive pattern, based on the symmetries in the pattern. Such patterns occur frequently in architecture and decorative art. There are 17 possible distinct groups. — Wiki

"There are 17 possible distinct groups."

It seems sensible to say this even if it happens that only 16 of the groups have ever been actually printed. But philosophically, it is an odd thing to say 'there are possible...', because ontology is all about what is actual. But mathematics is all about the possible arrangement of possible arrangements, and gives not a fig for ontology. If the universe turns out to be digital or discrete, and finite, then I suppose irrational numbers will turn out at the limit not to be instantiated along with ideal circles and right triangles. But however that goes, there will not be an 18th wallpaper pattern, and there will be 17.

How is bracketing everything with "experience of" any different to bracketing everything with "fact of the matter"? If the former leads to meaninglessness then why not the latter? Furthermore, the claim is that the experience is the fact of the matter, so one "ends up talking and behaving exactly as if there were facts of the matter" because there are facts of the matter. It's just that the facts of the matter are experiential (and subjects of discourse in the case of the unobserved) rather than something else. — Michael

Well the fact of the matter is that I don't generally preface my remarks with 'The fact of the matter...' - at least, that's my experience. ;)

I quite agree that universalising in either direction is meaningless. There are facts of the world, and there are experiences of the world, and I find it handy to distinguish them at times. In this way I can talk about what happened and what the jury thought happened, and envision the possibility that the jury were mistaken.

There are of course no trials or convictions, merely experiences of such. There is no rubber meeting no road, merely experiences of rubber meeting experiences of road.

The problem with such radical subjectivism/phenomenology is not that it is inconsistent, but that it does no explanatory work. One ends up talking and behaving exactly as if there were facts of the matter and simply brackets everything with 'experience of' which becomes meaningless to just the extent that there is nothing that is not 'experience of'.

When I want to waste time in this way, I usually preface my remarks with 'It seems to me...'; the rest of the time I just pontificate. But in the particular case, I live under a rock.

Having just examined my life and thus made it worth living, it occurs to me that all my ancestors back to the primordial slime, along with everyone who has contributed to my worthwhile life including all of you who have written yourselves into my life must also have worthwhile lives in virtue of the vital contributions they and you have made to my own life. Congratulations. I have examined my life, so you don't have to examine yours.

Perhaps not per se, but it can be the motivation behind a rational pursuit, or be the subject of sound reasoning. Just like altruism. — Sapientia

Indeed. but it is worth pointing out that self interest is no more rational than altruism. The myth of rational self interest leads to much nonsense. As though assholery is somehow clever and decency foolish.

There is nothing rational about self interest.

Anyone here want to fess up to being fully self-actualized? — Bitter Crank

Nah. Slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails; that's what little philosophers are made of. Even when all our basic needs are all met we're still assholes.

The main problem I have with it is that it is upside down. The primary needs are psychological; given sanity, peace of mind, and and awareness, matters social and physiological are either trivially solvable, or trivially unsolvable.

For most sciences, one can take it for granted that the subject matter is unaffected by the theories one has about it. This does not at all hold for psychology; one's psychological understanding is an integral part of one's psychology. This is why most psychological experiments involve deception.

It also explains why psychological theories run in fashions, because as a theory becomes popular, it changes the psychology of the public to the extent of becoming unreliable. Thus for examples, Freudian theory has changed the general attitude to matters sexual, and notions of body language have moved body language itself from being a largely unconscious 'tell' to being a conscious and practiced 'display'.

One might say that publication ruins most psychological theories.

One certainly could. But then one had better not claim that Plato thought it.

Mathematical? — Marchesk

The form of the good, primarily. But maths is good.

Plato thought... — darthbarracuda

This is the bit I agree with. But you have the allegory backwards entirely. It is the crass materialist who is stuck in the cave of facts and knowledge of what you are calling 'reality'. The philosopher concerns himself with the contemplation of the forms.

After the first paragraph, it all gets too confused to respond to properly. Except this:

But since there cannot be any certainty about anything, does this mean that any opinion is equally valid? Does this destroy the entire enterprise of rational inquiry? — darthbarracuda

Which I can quite confidently answer in the negative. I am not certain, of course, but I am pretty damn sure.

Cavacava raised a similar point which I addressed in my reply to him on the first page. — StreetlightX

Again, the point is language as we know it is developmentally continuous, rooted in a world of which it is one element among a vast assemblage of things, movements, bodies, institutions and so on. One can't treat language as a reified world-unto-itself without ignoring the very conditions by which language can be what it is. — StreetlightX

Yes, we disagree; it is discontinuous, as awakening is discontinuous with dreaming. It is precisely the initiation into a shared world, an awakening from the private world.

In the video in the autism thread, the section marked 'translation' is no translation. It declares that there is meaning and then refuses to share it. Well perhaps there is another awakening which I have not had, but then there is another world to which I have no access.

If one spends time with folks whose language one does not speak, one becomes very sensitive to emotional tone, to the relationships expressed by looks and gestures. One sees intimacies that the speakers have forgotten they are expressing and do not consciously read in each other. And this happens because one is ejected from the world of linguistic meaning back into the bar-bar world of the barbarians.

Johnston continues, "In other words, early childhood language acquisition isn’t so much a matter of building up [a language]; it’s more a matter of tearing down and eliminating (or, more accurately, attempting to eliminate) the nonsensical meanderings and ramblings of [infantile babbling], of the cognitive games [of enjoyment that] plays with the vocal apparatus." — StreetlightX

I think this is wrong, as a matter of fact, or at least radically incomplete. The babbling stage is imitative and thus eliminative, and I vaguely remember some studies that find that in the process certain distinctions are lost in favour of refining others, such that important sounds in one language cannot be distinguished if one has not heard them at the early stage.

Nevertheless, there is a magical realisation that I seem to see, that babble is not just babble, but means something. The first word moment is easily missed amongst the babble that sounds vaguely appropriate, but I think it is a step-change. There is an awakening to significance that is mutual - to in some rather interesting way 'another world'.

If it is not another world, then perhaps after all we are just babbling to each other.

Logical positivism: the metaphysical doctrine that all metaphysical doctrines are meaningless. — darthbarracuda

Is it a metaphysical doctrine?

It looks more like a fairly practical (physical) statement about the limits of good sense.

Not 'finally', surely, but 'In the beginning...' or 'Once upon a time...'

Like this:

Is this the rehabilitation of rhetoric? Meaning is use and we use it on each other?

The toddler knows tone and gesture as meaningful sans words, and for us to read words is to reanimate them in order to understand them, as one reads music...

And more so for the autistic - she uses it (her language) on the world, waving to the flag or the wind, scratching to the roughness, t(r)ickling to the water, singing the resonances of the room. Thus is the world structured and stabilised.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that puddles mean jumping in them. And laughing.