You’ll get the same from me either way — I like sushi

Perhaps like saying, "I would say this, even if you put a gun to my head"? Some contexts dictate results in ways we might not anticipate.

Do you think the quality of criticism offered by someone who has, in turn, offered their own work for criticism is the same as someone who is critiquing from a completely external standpoint?

As long as one always give a reason for one's pleasure, the question why the reason you gave makes one experience pleasure can be asked. — TheMadFool

Yes, that is the essence of criticizability in general. It's what makes rationality possible!

Edit:
I think it isn't clear that pleasure is the only or highest desideratum. Many moral philosophers believe the apperception of duty through recognition of obligations and rights to be an elevated type of experience. I think I'm rather of that ilk. I don't believe my answer on the other thread (which was just the question "why are you here") depended in any way on the concept of pleasure.

So an exercise in philosophical rhetoric, basically? Contribute if you want to critique?

Why are you here Pantagruel? — TheMadFool

LOL! I presume you just read why in the other thread and this is banter.

Why would you call this a fallacy? — TheMadFool

Because it is specifically an example of the fallacy of division?

Johnny loves his car. Johnny mostly loves the engine of his car. But without the car, Johnny no longer loves the engine.

why are we, the readers of this forum, here, on this forum? — Pfhorrest

There are certain specific themes and directions of thought that I find most interesting. I like to compare my perspectives with those of others. I'm not so interested in debating issues. My approach tends to be quite holistic and inter-disciplinary, so I may suggest consideration of a new salient dimension to a problem.

I especially like the forum as a way to discover areas and philosophers I may have overlooked; and to motivate me to undertake challenges. Reading Karl Popper has been an awakening for me. I read The Critique of Dialectical Reason as a result of tiddling online dispute. I'm taking on Das Kapital because of a thread proposing a close-reading group of the text. Stuff like that.

Edit. I guess on reflection, the sense of belonging to a community of like-minded individuals. Even people with diametrically opposed viewpoints to mine presumably share my passion, in some way. That in itself is an interesting philosophical paradox I think.

I have a pretty heavy reading list already, but I'm definitely interested in tagging along on this. I just may not participate in every discussion.

This seems to me a spurious regress. While you can always analytically decompose any thing or event, this does not remove or divert the value or experience from the original thing. A enjoys X. X has the features f1,f2,f3,f4. Just because A enjoys f1 more than f2 does not mean that
1. A does not enjoy X
2. A enjoys f1 outside of the context of X

I would call this a 'decompositional fallacy'

I'll be honest, I have no idea how to interpret your proposition in that case.

It seems that you are using "creationism" as a kind of anchoring symbol or paradigm of an "ultimate metaphysical value". This is exactly what Talcott Parsons calls the "Telic System". Which certainly does figure prominently in the way our personal-socio-cultural systems function.

Edit: I think this quote from Habermas pretty much parallels your reasoning about the way in which this "religious intuition" is (or tries to be) foundational:

Parsons insists that any talk of a telic system presupposes belief in a sphere of ultimate reality (This strategy is not at all unlike that with which the late Schelling, who took the experience of God's existence as his basic point of departure, introduced his "positive" philosophy.) In Parsons' words: "With full recognition of the philosophical difficulties of defining the nature of that reality we wish to affirm our sharing the age-old belief in its existence."

i.e. the essence of goal direction and valuation presupposes some shared belief in an ultimate reality - which historically has been thematized through religious beliefs and which you construe specifically as the creation myth. As far as I can tell.

Truth, validity, accuracy, preference, etc. they are only meaningfully defined in respect to creationist logic. Your arbirary use of them without foundation in creationism is just noise. — Syamsu

Creationist logic is only valid within a communicative framework of rationality.

Efforts to deny creationism are futile at best, and more likely just plain lies. — Syamsu

I don't deny that creationism exists as a sociological fact (although I do think that is over-narrowly construing the scope of sacred meaning). That does not in any way, shape, or form imply that it is true, or valid, or accurate. At the most, you could claim that it is a "universal tendency" or preference, either at the psychological or social level.

I think the ultimate authority must affect us not at a proscriptive but at a prescriptive-motivational level.

Is it possible to define anything, in a encompassing way, to describe something in a singular manner? And to what degree does that quality define itself in contrast to the [functional?] connections that allows that system/trait to exist? — ISeeIDoIAm

I am thinking that the mind's intuition of its own existence corresponds with and is the synthetic integration of the total set of ts functional connections. So consciousness, qua identity, i.e. this perspective, could be so singularly defined.

I wonder what happens if all references to "creator" are substituted with "knowledge"? — Zophie

Exactly. Any metaphysical system that can describe both the empirical and the subjective in criticizable (rational, intersubjective, reasoned) terms equally fulfills the success criteria assumed here. Popper's three worlds is the best example there is IMO.

:up:

Religious social facts are necessary not open to review because they are by nature inexplicable — praxis

The sacred is not open to the review to the extent that it is used as the basis for normative authority, and therefore not subject to rational criticism. I guess that equates with inexplicable.

Does anything truly matter? — Cidat

Not according to Freddy Mercury....

It's hard to imagine anyone saying, doing, thinking anything other than with the assumption that whatever it is "matters". Anarchists or iconoclasts who seem to want to undermine all values implicitly value something, or else why would they bother?

There are some really interesting cases in physics around physical entropy and large-scale structures. For example, for any given volume in a state of disorder, in order to be truly random, there must be substructures of a definable size which are actually ordered. If randomness is completely average, you end up with a large scale average distribution, which ends up in fact being ordered, not disordered. Really cool stuff.

Treating something as sacred is to establish value. You can value things without being religious. The mark of religion is a definable institution such as a church and people associating with each other.
— jacksonsprat22

Durkheim wouldn't agree. — h060tu

Would he not?

"the sacred principle is nothing but society hypostasized....it should be possible to interpret ritual life in secular and social terms" (Oxford World Classic edition, page 257).

Which is exactly what I said in my post and to the point re. it being a general type of value, per @jacksonsprat22 s point.

Unfortunately, when you read something based on a presupposition (this is about religion) you will tend not to see other interpretations because of confirmation bias. viz., this is a text about socialized communication and socialized action.

Durkheim's characterizations of the sacred and the profane are couched in the context of early or primitive levels of social development. In a more general sense, the sacred is what serves to unite the empirical-cultural, socio-normative, personal spheres. So perhaps we no longer experience the sacred, per se, in our modern world. It is precisely this disenchantment (Habermas' word) with the sacred that contributes to Durkheim's malaise known as anomie.

So my point remains that there is nothing special about biology in this regard. The inter-theoretic reduction program is difficult and contentious at just about every level. — SophistiCat

I went through an Intertheoretic Reductionism phase, and it is tortuous stuff. I recently came upon Popper's writings. He maintains that this type of science, even though it cannot reach the answers it seeks, nevertheless is excellent for leading us down different paths, and opening doors to new areas of research (leading to new metaphysical research programmes) .

No doubt you've examined Chalmer's "Hard Problem." Would you share your thoughts about it? — Greylorn Ell

So I used to be much obsessed with the mind-body problem (Chalmer's hard problem). I favoured a kind of idealist-cartesian perspective as it suited my intuitions about the hegemony (free will) and autonomy of consciousness. When I immersed myself in systems philosophy last year, I became aware that the problematic nature of the mind-body phenomenon is a function of the reductionist approach. By taking the system as fundamental (in a paradigm-shifting sense) all events are comprehended in situ, specifically, insofar as they are elements (holons) within hierarchically nested systems. So the mind-body problem just isn't something that gives me pause anymore. There are psychological entia, intersubjective entia, empirical entia. They all participate in the operation (and self-reorganization) of the complex adaptive systems that constitute our reality. I'm finding Popper's scientific realism really works well with this perspective, especially his three worlds and critical objectivism. Habermas' theory of communicative action too, as it also carves experience up into subjective/social/objective realms which mutually interpenetrate.

The OP and subsequent comments seem to regard "mind" as an entity separate from the brain, repeating Descartes' mistake of conflating the concepts of soul and mind. — Greylorn Ell

The mind could be strongly emergent, in a systems theoretic sense, for example, without postulating a separate immaterial entity such as a soul.

chemistry is clearly reducible to physics — Pfhorrest

This is very much in contention and , given your usual thoroughness and scope I'm very surprised you would slip this in in such an offhanded yet apparently authoritative manner. Chemical properties are clearly not reducible to the mechanisms of physics. The entire science of Systems Theory (which offers a much better basis for a fundamental theory) is based on the emergence of new properties governing emergent realms, like chemistry, biology, psychology, etc.

e.g.

"After a long period of neglect, the philosophy of chemistry is slowly being recognized as a newly emerging branch of the philosophy of science. This paper endorses and defends this emergence given the difficulty of reducing all of the philosophical problems raised by chemistry to those already being considered within the philosophy of physics, and recognition that many of the phenomena in chemistry are “epistemologically emergent”."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009932309197

Ironic that objectivity is one of those "foundational" concepts that essentially never emerge in ordinary practical contexts of discourse. It seems like it takes a critical-reflexion to become objective.

I think too that the external property (property?) of objectivity is probably related in a significant way to the subjective quality (ideal?) of objectivity, or "being objective."

Exactly so.

In general, the systemic approach treats "systems" as the fundamental units, so right there, subject and object always exist in a functional context. Which they kind of do anyway, being dyadic in nature, don't you think?

You’re not cognizing the rules of the language; you’re cognizing the content of language according to rules. This is why theories of knowledge are so complex, because even though all thought is considered to be according to rules, doesn’t mean each instance of it will obtain the same knowledge. It should, but that isn’t the same as it will. Ought is not the same as shall. All thought according to rules can do, is justify its ends, but it cannot attain to absolute truth for them.

The boundaries can be blurred, for sure, but context helps with clarity. They are both qualities, but sometimes what they are qualities of, gets blurry. Subjectivity is pretty cut-and-dried, I think, but objectivity isn’t just about objects. — Mww

If anyone is interested in Habermas' take on this, objectivation is the result of the interconnection of systemic and psychosocial mechanisms. In other words, the actual unification of the natural, normative/social, and subjective worlds. This is communicative action in operation. It involves the hermeneutic problem of excavating foundational presuppositions about reality.

This avoids the whole subject-object problem (as systems theoretic approaches in general do).

I do know that this is the case, but are fields "processes"? — Echarmion

I would say that the manifestation of particles is a process for sure.

Right, but note that your description of the process is based on particles. So the particles ("things") seem to be required to have a notion of a process. — Echarmion

Yes, I used the term particles consistent with the accepted model of physics. It in no way constitutes or represents an atomistic ontology. Technically, particles are instantiations of underlying fields. I was expecting this response however.

But then how do we know there are processes behind the objects? — Echarmion

Everything from a purely physical standpoint is a process. Particles cling together for finite durations then proceed on their way, in the "direction" of whatever impelled them to begin with plus the sum of interactions. It is only because we have a psychological affinity for a specific spatio-temporal scale (the observable universe) that we preferentially identify things as "things". Change the spatio-temporal scale slightly and some things begin to look more like processes....

the present exists — Cidat

"There is thought now" is an updated version of Cogito Ergo Sum.

hence the origins and manifestations of thinking and of talking are necessarily completely distinct and separate, even if they are under some conditions related. — Mww

Someone better tell Jurgen Habermas this, because his theory of communicative action explicitly evaluates the emergence of rational thought in the context of the evolution of socialized communications.

My argument is that because life is consistent, it can be known, as oppose to a dream which is understood shortly after as unreal. — ztaziz

I thought the OP was speaking metaphorically, so not a literal exposition of the epistemological status of the dream-state was intended.

I like this notion. I would like to add to it the idea that there really is no such thing as "true understanding". As examples, Socrates', to know is that you know nothing. Or Richard Feynman, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't really understand quantum mechanics.

I guess in this light, we are all waking up to the reality that we are only dreamers?

Finished Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1
so probably a good time to start
The Theory of Communicative Action
Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of Functionalist Reason, Volume 2

I can understand him joining in and not knowing the context, but you've been a part of the discussion with me from the beginning. Jesus. — Coben

I was actually the second person to respond to the OP, ahead of yourself.