Exactly.

:up:

Language itself is normative — Sirius

Language can be used to make normative statements.. Stating that language is normative is overreaching. Normativity describes a standard of behaviour. To the extent that behaviour and language do not necessarily coincide, language absolutely is not normative.

A poor child comes to you and spreads his hand saying, "I am starving" , you can derive the implication from his statement, "You should give me ( a poor child ) some money" . He is not just stating a fact, "I am starving" , he is begging for help and expecting you to be a kind person. — Sirius

I completely agree that this we can and should contextually interpret such things as requests. One hundred percent. I have made the point myself. But there is a difference between the illocutionary utterance (the declaration) and the interpretation whereby that utterance gains normative force. The request itself does not have that normative force. This is precisely where the "gap" occurs.

Perhaps if you specified exactly what "Ought" you are deriving I might be able to offer a more specific argument. If you are suggesting that "You should kill Tom" is an ought, I would respond that this is nothing more than an example of an illocutionary act (command by the boss) and that the perlocutionary effect consists of the hitman's response to the command. If this is your definition of the meaning of an "ought" then, logically, any time anyone tells us to do something and we accept, the conditions for normativity have been satisfied, which is absurd.

A command is not the same thing as a moral ought. An ought is something that we do "because it is right" not because we are commanded to do it by another person.

How does it follow from your premises that the statements (already) exist? — Echarmion

Yes. You would have to establish some kind of necessary connection between the existence of a necessary truth and the existence of the conditions that make the necessary truth true.

I do agree that necessary truths implicate a cognizer though.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
H.P. Lovecraft

Mmm. Yes and no. Being-for-others itself can be genuine. Perhaps someone acts bravely, even to the point of self-sacrifice, catalyzed by the gaze of the group. There is an inescapable honesty in solitary thought, but there can also be the revelation of a publicly discovered truth. I think that commitment is the differentiator; and I agree that a lot of gratuitous philosophizing smacks of affectation.

My view is that determinism must be true. — RepThatMerch22

The notion of truth and falsity are inapplicable in a completely deterministic context. The fact that you are able to offer a statement about the truth or falsity of something means that your capacity for making a statement must, at bare minimum, not be subject to determinism.

@Bob Ross Do you believe that ethical reasoning ought to be effective in influencing actual moral behaviour? Or does it simply exist for the purpose of providing post hoc justifications? If actual moral practices are not directly affected by ethical analysis, of what merit is the analysis?

The early Confucian philosopher Hsun Tzu holds that man's original nature is bad or imperfect. Thus man desires improvement in the same way that anyone who lacks something beneficial desires to increase it. So stupidity would be not desiring to correct one's own deficits.

Galactic Patrol
E.E. "Doc" Smith

A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy
Wing-Tsit Chan, Translator

Pre-Confucianism to Neo-Rationalism. Should be...enlightening.

Similarly, even if a super-intelligent alien showed us a page from "The True Nature of Reality", we could never make sense of it. — RussellA

Yes, if man tried to explain the universe to an amoeba it wouldn't translate.

But essentially, the amoeba eventually becomes a man. So maybe it does happen?

As a cat cannot transcend the physical limitations of its brain, neither can a human. — RussellA

But, for the cat's brain to actually register something, that thing has to already fit with its perceptual schema. There is an experiment I keep citing where a meaningless tone that is within the cat's audible hearing range is played, but the cat's brain does not appear to register having heard the tone. Subsequently, after the tone is associated with something meaningful, the cat's brain will display the signature of auditory stimulation.

So it is "mechanically" possible that there are exactly such unregistered events as Corvus is postulating. With what concomitant causes, who is to say?

James has a unique approach to interpreting the connection between beliefs and reality. Materialism, for example, is not so much a fact about the universe as it is a fact about the way a certain type of person lives his life. What is a fact? In the limit, it is an isolable quantum of human experience, "this redness now." As soon as you start to expand that momentary quale, to generalize it, you lose the only true measure of facticity, its givenness. So maybe your fact becomes gravity. Then whether the quale was an apple or the planet mars, what is evidenced is the facticity of gravity. But the momentary expression of gravity in both cases is not a pure or simple thing. The apple falls under the composite influences of gravity, air pressure, coriolis force, etc.. And while the path of the planet seems to be a straightforward exemplification of the law of gravity, that is only an illusion of approximation. The three-body problem has no closed solution.

Materialism relies upon rationality for its facticity. But rationalism and idealism too are also facts insofar as they are embodied by people....

Pragmatism
by William James

The lyrics of "The Boxer" by Paul Simon are often appropriate when discussing beliefs, facts, and reality.

Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest — Agree-to-Disagree

I prefer the Doobies,

But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing

In other words the "principle" is really just a recapitulation of the features of the universe that we actually observe?

I agree with Dewey's characterization here. Realistically speaking, pragmatically speaking, consciousness is evoked by problematicity. Functional certainty realizes itself as effective practical action. Functional truths are so fundamental as to be constantly evidenced in ongoing processes. We do not question the "truth" of gravity. However when it comes to abstract expression, doubtfulness arises. Is a principle evidenced in a specific case applicable in a wider or more generalized sense? Or even in a different context? In such cases, truth may stand as an ideal or objective, but the actual representation is better described as a "working hypothesis."

Primordial features of reality, as far as we know, all have a kind of locality to them. They aren't aware of the macroscopic "objects" we would perceive them to be a part of. An iron atom doesn't know if it's part of a hammer or part of a human - it just does things iron atoms do, no matter what it's a part of. That's what I mean when I say panpsychic consciousness implies a kind of locality. If consciousness is fundamental, then you still have all the explanatory work of figuring out how this fundamental consciousness becomes macroscopically aware, macroscopically integrated with a macroscopic brain. — flannel jesus

This is all non-sequitur to me. Laws in the early universe were expressed stochastically. I'd hardly describe that as conforming to locality. The opposite.

panpsychism almost implies a certain kind of extremely local consciousness — flannel jesus

I don't see where panpsychism implies anything specific beyond that consciousness is a primordial feature of reality. I don't think it really coincides with what is traditionally conceived of as soul. Collective consciousness, perhaps.

...and still not enough. A statements is not true if and only if there is a consensus that it is true. — Banno

I don't think that the future state of the universe is trivially, mechanistically computable from the past. So the kind of "truth" that interests me isn't analytic. In a constructivist framework, consensus may well count towards truth.

No doubt, consensus is complex and not simple. :up:

Old Niels seems to have been a bit hyperbolic on that one. Everything we call real cannot be regarded as understood, seems a bit more reasonable to me. — wonderer1

Maybe. On the other hand, he probably had a better grasp of quantum mechanics than most, so his credibility rates pretty high with me.

Drop truth and statements cease to be of any use. — Banno

Hence the import of...consensus.

Ok. So facticity is founded in reality. Except that reality doesn't hold up under intense scrutiny:

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."

Facts may point towards things, but things are not facts. Facts always exist in a context which implies a perspective. So facts are always going to evolve.

But are the facts what we know? For thousands of years humans believed that the sun revolved around the earth. And the fact is, from a strictly geocentric perspective, this is accurate. Isn't it just as likely that at least some of the things which we currently identify as "facts" will be proven to be inaccurate in light of an expanding perspective? Perhaps we should focus more on the power of consensus versus the worship of facts.

if panpsychism is true, human consciousness (probably) isn't the result of evolution. But I don't think that's likely - I don't turn my nose up at it either, but I don't think it's likely. — flannel jesus

On the other hand, human existence presents the appearance of a concordance of improbabilities. In which case, perhaps it is the validation of an unlikely hypothesis.

Anticipations, The Open Conspiracy, The New World Order
by H. G. Wells

Seems that H.G. Wells wrote a lot of futurist social commentary. I love digging for gems.

edit: Well, fudge that. Impossible to get a usable kindle edition of the collected works. The man just wrote too much I guess.

this instead

Island Nights' Entertainments
by Robert Louis Stevenson

I think there is a spectrum of belief, stretching from things that we entertain as hypotheticals, to things upon which we are willing to act, in some cases even in defiance of consequences and personal risk. Which is why philosophical exercises that revolve around counterfactual or merely-possible hypotheticals are so tiresome. It isn't really important what someone "might" believe. It is important what people actually do believe, and how much they do believe it. Some people think that belief is easy to accomplish; it isn't. Many people make a great many pretensions to a great many beliefs But how many of those beliefs rise to the status of convictions?

Nevertheless something gives rise to thought, and since it is prior it is without telos — Chris Degnen

Not necessarily. Perhaps thought is a symptom of teleology.

Incomplete Nature by Terrance Deacon is an interesting modern attempt to recover Aristotlean formal cause through thermodynamics and thus to explain purposeful behavior and the emergence of first person perspective. It isn't fully convincing, but it's the best effort I've seen.

One deficit it has though is that it assumes that information only exists in terms of life, as a given. To assume otherwise would be to introduce humonculi for Deacon.

I think this is mistaken. My hunch is that a satisfactory accounting of intentionality will include an explanation of the way perspective and semiotic elements of reality are "baked in" from the outset. Scott Mueller's "Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information," and Carlo Rovelli's "Helgoland," have some interesting points on this front. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks, I really appreciate the references/recommendations, those are always beneficial.

I think it has utility as an aspiration, as in calling thought into action when required and resting it when not required; — Chris Degnen

Which is identical with what I wrote, no?

I do think that will can and should be employed in both an externally realizing and internally self-restraining sense — Pantagruel

As far as there being something "prior to thought" here we part ways. This can only be speculation, IMO, and it isn't productive, pragmatically speaking. It tends towards an kind of idealism which I no longer support I see consciousness as inextricable from the contexts of its expression.

Yes, I know that isn't your gist. But personally I think that the undercurrent of purpose is not disposable. There an innate conation to consciousness. I do think that will can and should be employed in both an externally realizing and internally self-restraining sense. But I don't see the "null-state" as being meaningful, except as an exercise perhaps.

"there is a perception of a refined truth of the dimension of nothingness" — Chris Degnen

Various philosophers also consider the faculty of "intellectual intuition"

Lots of people attempt to abstract essential features of consciousness and then deny consciousness. I have never found this cogent. Rather, it seems to me fundamentally "autologically unsound," viz., relying on a faculty to deny the existence of that faculty. "Passive volition" is an example of a paradoxical concept found in Tibetan yoga and zen buddhism. But this is not being without mind so much as it is being of two minds.

The fact that teleology exists. You can't abstract away from something that is evident. You can hypothesize what a universe absent consciousness might be like but, per impossibile, you cannot actually experience such a universe without being in a state of self-contradiction. If you want to deny teleology, why not also deny materiality?

That is fine in a world of thought and things, but in an unconditioned world without (or before) thought there is no telos. — Chris Degnen

I would say that whether there is or is not such a world is precisely what is in question. And the essential fact of telos suggests to me that there is not such an unconditioned world.