I'm not sure I understand, are you saying that black holes are merely theoretical? — TimeLine

No, my mind was addled by mathematical structuralism, point taken.

https://philpapers.org/rec/VELLAA

(Velleman, Love as a Moral Emotion)

If you go to philpapers you can search on various philosophical aspects of love, e.g.:

https://philpapers.org/browse/philosophy-of-love/

Here's what I'm getting at with a lot of this: I think you and a few others on this forum have a disastrous tendency to conflate this sort of glamorous image of "the philosopher" with modern academic philosophy. — Carbon

I've gone back to school in what's nearly old age to study philosophy. The enthusiasm of people on this forum was one of my motivating factors a few years ago (as was the enthusiasm of a group of fellow old gits I still attend when I can, we call ourselves 'a philosophy group'). I'm mystified by what's disastrous about this tendency of ours to have an image of the philosopher that clashes with yours. I find it heartening, that various groups of thoughtful people are worrying away at intellectual problems. We in our various groups are every bit as real as you and your various students and fellow-teachers. I can't see how you have any more right to define the word 'philosopher' than us.

I am 24 hours fresh from a talk about mathematical structuralism which I only one-tenth understood. I believe I have grasped though that we could safely assert black holes as abstract but instantiated mathematical structures, and white holes as abstract, uninstantiated mathematical structures. As ever, though, there are then several possible forks in the path to ontology, and my grip on the complexity weakens towards zero.

If animals could create "what-it-is-like-to-see-red" knowledge, then what is to stop them creating knowledge of any kind? They don't create knowledge of any kind. — tom

I am inclined to regard corvids' memory of where they have stashed their food - the most able can remember up to 500 locations - as 'knowledge'. Just as a for instance. Wouldn't you call that knowledge?

I wonder whether there's a conflation here of different senses of 'subjective'. Experiences are 'subjective' in the sense that they're attributes of a subject. But facts about experiences are still perfectly objective facts about reality. — Philip Goff

I went to a philosophical talk about historiography yesterday which brought me back to this topic. In writing history, people of many different backgrounds - conservative, feminist, monarchist, Marxist, believer-in-objective-history, whoever - can agree on good historical practice, which will include a pool of what some people might call 'objective facts about reality'. Facts of some kind, anyway.

Nevertheless any historical narrative is irredeemably the writer's own perspective, their standpoint. Their sense of self, their I-ness is bound up with their own sense of their own history. And some of their material is going to be testimony: individuals' accounts of their experiences put in language as best they can, testimony that only has itself for justification. So there can't be scientific writing of history, but there can be good and bad practice in writing history.

I think the same about 'consciousness', or whatever better word there might yet be found for the unifying sense that the experiencing self has. There's a limit to what third-person scientific talk, evidence and reasoning can tell us about consciousness. Some of the material involved is first-person testimony, or it won't be true to what it's trying to explain. And any account is by a conscious person, whose own consciousness is entangled in how they tell the story they're telling.

I don't see that I disagreed with these facts.

the nature of affirmative ontology — darthbarracuda

My ontology is something of a blank: I take everything as epistemology, provisional, but that most of the time I live as if things were thus and so.

Isn't, though, the idea of an 'affirmative' ontology in the eye of the beholder? For those who engage with a detailed ontology of their own, the overall state of things just is as it is. If it is an ontology then surely it is prior to valuation.

This is related in my mind to my feeling about your very absorbing op - that you are using Being in two different ways but writing as if they are the same concept. Heideggerian and Sartreian Being just is. There is at the core is-ness. Then, secondly, there is (for Hr) Dasein, human being, and it is this latter version of 'being' that Sartre calls 'imperfect', from the pre-cogito outset, because its Being derives from the Being-it-is-not.

You mean the Bangladesh that achieved record rice and record total cereal production in 2015? Last year's harvest being marginally below that record. You mean the Bangladesh that has reduced malnourishment to the tune of $1billion due to increased crop yields, and still gaining land due to sedimentation? — tom

Yes, that Bangladesh. I think andrewk is referring to the widely-known prediction that Bangladesh, whatever their present magnificent record, is the country most likely to be adversely affected by anthropogenic climate change. Here's a recent article about it.

Well said. :)

...in a sense the thrust of evidence based science and logic in pursuit of truth and fact is antithetical to that instinctive bio-mechanical part of us which would see such emotions influence our decisions in ways that are to the detriment of ourselves and our own values — VagabondSpectre

It's good to try and see things from an 'unbiased' perspective, I agree. I don't, however, in my heart, accept the opposition you propose in this phrasing. There is nothing 'good' or 'right' about the world of truth and fact, though they help if we're trying to understand goodness and rightness. For me it's emotions all the way down. Only emotions stand against emotions, both of them entwined with reasoning, in moral debates, where what is 'moral' is always in question, although all of us feel there is some sort of core to it (if only we could agree what the core consists of :) ). That's how it feels to me. But maybe this just reflects a lifetime of being an arty-fart; I've only taken philosophy seriously in the last five years, so my deeper opinions are grounded in my life experience.

Doesn't seem to get round the "robot problem" - i.e. to grant a robot qualia requires a change in its programming, not its matter. — tom

I agree. I went to an interesting talk the other week about morality and ai. One sideline area that interests me is how we read other minds. At the outer limit, we - people mostly - tend to assign something like qualia to the behavior of machines, as if they had some mind-quality. The indifference of the robot is, to the human being, an indifferent stance - and we take indifference in our fellow-creatures to be a sort of emotive position. 'How dare you be so indifferent?' But I'm drifting off the point.

it seems to me that consicousness, by its very nature, is not analysable in the way that materials are into atomic units which tell us why they are as they are — Moliere

I should have made it clearer that although I think panprotopsychism is 'more attractive' than panpsychism, I don't endorse it at all. I agree with your fundamental point about phenomonology not being assimilable to the Chalmers view. By 'more attractive' I only meant that the proto business is curious about an interesting place - what a Darwinian analysis might make of the notion of an evolution into something like consciousness from something like pre-consciousness. I'm hoping some future or even near-future may conjure up a better vocabulary than we have so far, which will enable us to focus on what this so-called problem actually consists of.

A bit of point missing going on here — unenlightened

I think you're missing my intended tone, I should have made myself clearer. I do perfectly clearly understand your point.

In the old days, humility was a virtue, and pride a sin - so it was the opposite situation where one could be proud of one's humility, but humiliated by one's pride. This is a stable self regulating system, and much to be preferre — unenlightened

Depends on which old days, of course. There were the Aristotelian old days when you really ought to be proud of the right things for the right reasons in the right way - one of which was almost certainly to love yourself, which Ari also regarded as part of Ethics Central.

You might also be interested in panprotopsychism. This is as Chalmers summarises:

...roughly, the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious, that is, that they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems...' — Chalmers"

I think this is a more attractive view, in that it allows for an evolutionary 'moment', as it were, when hominids 'became' conscious, without landing every fragment of fallen hair with a complex intrinsic nature.

Here's the paper by Chalmers.

The great news is that we have things like logic and science which can really help us begin to sort out the hard truth of whether or not our up and coming moral strategies are actually effectual — VagabondSpectre

I've been spending several weeks reading about emotion science and emotion in philosophy for an academic project. It still seems to me that 'Othello', in the Shakespeare or Verdi versions, is a more useful guide, for instance, to the moral implications of jealousy, than the science of it (which is astoundingly primitive). Euripides' 'Medea' still profoundly disturbs my sense of the rational and emotional, and I've seen it performed three times in my lifetime, in a way that works in the rationalist enterprise fails to do.

Science will need to clarify the most basic of terms before it can be much help, and maybe the odd philosopher will contribute to that. :)

At least try to gain some common ground on ethics. — MonfortS26

There are people around with whom one has common ground. A shared love of drink or drugs or music of a certain kind, a shared desire to help others, a shared fascination with some obscure topic. I've spent a lifetimes joining in with such people.

I read around this topic lately. To add another other option...Perhaps it is that we love to universalise, but sometimes the attempt to patch up a universal ontology creates more problems than it solves. A 'phenomenology first' approach implies, to me, that some sort of universal explanation linking matter and consciousness is probably beyond us, and indeed is asking an unanswerable sort of question.

Thanks for the thread, though :) I like Galen Strawson as a provocateur, for he puts his finger on a sore spot even if he has no healing balm.

I imagine situations of that kind crop up during war. Do we bomb the munitions factory even though civilians are working there? Should we sacrifice a few to save more? — Michael

That's my basic difficulty with 'moral realism'. I can't think of a moral-sounding assertion that is factual. '[proposition] is wrong' is an assertion of a belief that requires a context. Otherwise its truth-conditionality may be deflationary, i.e. it's only as good as the words that constitute it. And how is that factual, except to be confident that someone said it? I think it can only sort of hold up on a subjectivist view, and I don't get how subjectivism and realism get along. But then I'm not a realist, so what would I know? :)

There are various versions of 'the world is the totality of so-and-so' — quine

Presumably any totality is at time t.

I'm not a great one for totalities. If a totality is in its details unknowable - and I presume it is - how can we reasonably claim to know what it consists of? Or perhaps, what constitutes it?

Wittgenstein's 'everything that is the case' was part of a tightly-defined set of propositions about, as we would say now, a closed formal system. I take it the others are.

What of gods, individuals' beliefs that no-one knows about, expectations that might or might not come to fruition, brilliant ideas for novels or the use of graphene that are about to be imagined but haven't been yet, ideas of beauty and morality...?

Any activity X only gets you so far before you question why any activity really matters other than your mind craves SOMETHING to care about at a particular time. — schopenhauer1

I often feel very empty at the end of enterprises but I don't think that short-term result is a guide to what value they had in the medium term for me or for other people involved or the wider world around us. I stick with the claim that a multiplicity of 'micro' things I and people I know have done had and have value. If social changes remove some harm, enhance possibilities and are rewarding in themselves for some of the participants, then to me they have value. I don't feel that bouts of existential despair justify inertia. To be self-reflective about the fact that the human creature seems to need something, sometimes any old thing, to care about just doesn't strike me as an argument against social action. But this is indeed an existential thing - because I found Sartre at a critical age and lately have been reading Kierkegaard and Heidegger - I don't think of a sense of absurdity as a barrier to action, but a leap to made over a chasm. That's just how I am. One commits. Then, plonk, here one is.

I'm with the pessimists. Alas 'sustainability' has been over-used - sometimes as a pr gloss to non-sustainable ideas - but in the long run homo sapiens will only enjoy a long and fruitful species-life if it discovers a way of harmonising with the natural in and around us. Even seemingly 'green' initiatives are often dependent on energy-heavy inputs, rare metals that are mined in dirty ways, and take resources from the hungry. Short-term policies to improve agricultural productivity have medium-term disbenefits - nitrate poisoning, for instance - and we don't have a long-term policy toward the soil, which gives us life and health.

That's all you had to say. We are "thrown" into it (living, Dasein). So, how is that good? Or rather, why is this good "for" somebody in the FIRST PLACE? Does this thrown need to take place? Why is this necessary? To continue what? — schopenhauer1

I didn't say it was good. I said it was unalterable. Whether it was good for someone in the first place is neither here nor there (as it happens, I was a late mistake by Catholics where my father refused to adopt sensible methods of birth control, but that too is unalterable however much I contemplate it).

So, I find myself in this living situation. And over time I, for myself, have come to embrace this much of Stoicism: that I will try to understand those areas of life that I can have some effect on, and then have effects if I can, and that I will nod sadly and sagely towards those areas of life that I can have no effect on, and move on.

You wrote early in the thread of 'an ideal society'. But your criticism of what I put forward seems to be a criticism of anyone who attempts any kind of social change. Are there any social changes you admire? What is your ideal society, since you say you have one, and what would it take for it to be achieved? I take that sort of question as my starting-point. I don't know if you saw Mongrel's thread on 'slave morality', or have read any Nietzsche: it seems to me that to focus one's philosophical attention on irremediable injustice is a pointless circular exercise.

"It's wrong to torture children." This is a moral claim, and it's also true. — The Great Whatever

Is it wrong for tigers to torture children? Is it wrong for other children to torture children, even if we would normally not hold such a child responsible for their actions? Is it wrong in times of desperation to abandon new-born infants with a near-zero chance of survival?

...it is at the microlevel of the sub-contract that we usually live our daily lives. We give up the right to have our ideal society in the light of the fact that, institutions cannot be created from scratch at the whim of any individual who wants to set up the relations differently to suit their ideal living experience. We must deal with the culture, institutions, relations, and society already in place and work within it. — schopenhauer1

We are thrown into living or Dasein; there is nothing we can do about our individual history; and because we take so long to develop as independent creatures, we are stuck with parental and other social arrangements for many childhood years.

We do however co-make culture, institutions, relations and society. They don't make themselves, and many idealists or pragmatists make new arrangements for themselves. I've made lots of art, engaged in many relationships, co-founded more than my share of mutual and cooperative groups; others more daring than me have created different forms of family so that their intimate lives have different forms. During my lifetime many aspects of the world around me have transformed, including the acceptance of homosexuality, for instance, and the gaining of women's equality.

If you give up the right to enter into transformative social relations, you are volunteering to do that, no-one is forcing you. Indeed, on the Sartreian model that an old git like me trapped himself in by enjoying existentialism as a young man, if one recognises the oppressive rationale for predominant social relations and doesn't act on that recognition, one is exhibiting bad faith.

It's an anarchic setup. That's both a great pleasure, and infuriating, about all our chats. I think I accepted what I descried to be the principle of the old forum: all commenters owe respect to the thread-originator to honour the initial subject, no matter how far they might seem to stray. This duty is only reasonably overturned if the thread-originator vanishes.

...value-laden assessments of the human condition? Do they have truth aptness? — darthbarracuda

I'm reading Joseph Raz, who writes a lot about valuation, and so forth, I don't know if you're acquainted with him.

I think you may be confusing two things: the valuation of humans, and the valuation of how humans live.

There is then the question of who has the right to do the valuation, in both cases. If you assert that you yourself have the right, then to what others do you grant similar rights, either by rational argument from whatever your premisses are, or out of sympathy?

It may also be that a related difference is the Aristotle-to-Kant distinction between theoretical and practical reason. One might theorise for instance that human life as it's lived largely lacks value, but also have a practical view - which then forms a more primary ethic - that every human life deserves as much respect as you would wish your human life to be accorded.

He said we must be silent about such things — Question

There are certain things which the Tractatus says we should keep silent about. But I think, as you know from other exchanges, that the Tractatus is not the 'template' for everything Wittgenstein thought: it's the starting point of a man in his twenties who later saw things more broadly, especially in terms of how we use language and what the grammar of philosophical enquiry is. I've just been reading 'Culture and Value' which is a piecemeal, illuminating summary of other remarks by Wittgenstein about, well, matters of culture and value.

He did talk about Ethics. Famously he's said to have thought it was on a par with Aesthetics. He thought that Ethics-talk involved stepping out of the natural into the Supernatural, and therefore our language renders it nonsense - but nonsense which is attempting to express profound meaning, only our language fails us.

Here's a link to the 1929 lecture on Ethics, it's hard to read in this format, oddly enough it's one of the few things I've found easier to read on a phone than on a pc.

simulation theory — Grey

Just to be pedantic for a moment. 'Simulation' does not involve a clone, nor an identical copy. Simulated sex, for instance (to lower the tone momentarily) is nothing like the real thing. Simulation is something which imitates in an unspecified number of respects the thing or activity simulated. The 'unspecified' part makes me worry at the vagueness of the concept, which provides a get-out close if there are details uncopied in the simulator.

This of course applies both to 'simulation theory' and to the Deutsch idea of quantum computers simulating life. Simulation is limited-in-some-way imitation.

Heidegger is often accused of smothering ideas in an excess of his own language. But I found him sometimes pretty illuminating by use of etymology, though I confess I needed a good teacher or the resources I found on the Web. Here for instance is a commentary on 'causa' and its origin in the Greek 'aition' (http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide2.html) - which has stuck with me. That's from Questions re Technology. 'Being and Time' devotes some effort to trying to retrieve Aristotelian concepts from the mud that has stuck to them over the millennia.

Believing without good evidence is nearly always a harmful thing to do — andrewk

Just to be picky - it's acting on the basis of poor evidence that is harmful. I'm not sure if one acts on the basis of belief or of knowledge, but that's 'cause I went to see Timothy Williamson speak last week and I'm thinking about it. Does the Christian say, I know that my redeemer liveth? Or, I believe?

How ought we view Thomas, and trust in general? — Heister Eggcart

Trust is under-studied. It feels as if mutual trust is so obvious a basis for most human lives, we forget to mention it. Or analyse it.

Baden, I used to teach scriptwriting in a department using the McKee model. It's like all good writing structures in my opinion: great to learn as long as you don't finally become a prisoner of it. Are you writing scripts yourself?

Natural laws are the natural extension of a Cartesian epistemologically-oriented metaphysics, one that rejects teleology in favor of mysterious, immutable forces that exist for whatever reason. One of the alternatives would be a rejection of natural laws as such — darthbarracuda

I agree with Pierre-Normand, coming at this from a more wayward angle. The metaphor of 'law' is, when you stop to think about it, quite an odd one. It was a Roman rather than a Greek concoction, to apply it to 'nature' (an odd idea too) and then 'natural law' was revived in the 17th Century, indeed by Descartes.

Behind the metaphor, a law qua law - a legal-system law - is not immutable, nor is it something that everything obeys. The laws are what ought to be obeyed, but often aren't, or no-one on the forum would ever have smoked dope. The laws don't last necessarily beyond the next meeting of our lawmakers, praise be their devotion to public duty, although they seem eternal to anyone caught up in infringing them.

So laws have - for determinists - an annoyingly non-deterministic linguistic cousin. Me I like them that way, but then I'm a non-deterministic sort of a fellow.

Anyone know the backstory behind the Keynes quote of God stepping out of the train at some time? — Question

It's from a letter Keynes wrote to his future wife Lydia in 1929 when Wittgenstein returned from self-imposed exile to Cambridge philosophy after a 15-year gap. Still Keynes continued to look out for him, though they weren't 'friends' by this time.

Keynes seems to have seen that Wittgenstein was super-smart in 1912 when they first met, and helped to get him admitted to the hallowed group of 'the Apostles', a Cambridge secret society of the self-appointed elite (in the 30's a nest of spies developed at its heart). But Wittgenstein left the group almost as soon as he joined it; he was rude, to English ears, and certainly not afraid to express his honest opinion even if it offended people. Biographer Ray Monk quotes Julian Bell writing a poem in the early 30's about Wittgenstein's God-like bullying demeanour:

... who, on any issue, ever saw
Ludwig refrain from laying down the law?
In every company he shouts us down,
And stops our sentence stuttering his own,
Unceasing argues, harsh, irate and loud,
Sure that he's right, and of his rightness proud... — Julian Bell

I don't accept that the Investigations are an 'elaboration' of the Tractatus. There are four indexed references to the Tractatus in the PI. They all place it as something other, a work by a different sort of thinker - a 'logician' he compares his former self to, in one remark. I suppose this is all a question of emphasis, but I regard the world that's everything that is the case as, to the later Wittgenstein, just a formal language-game, one among many, the terminus of a certain closed way of thinking before moving on to the openness of PI.

It seems odd to regard Wittgenstein as 'emblematic of England', since he was Austrian, wrote mostly in German first and only reluctantly became British so as to travel safely to Germany in 1939 to try to help out his family (having been an Austrian soldier in 1914-18). His tastes in music were German-focused, and his cultural preferences often Russian - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. He and Nikholai Bakhtin, brother of the more famous Mikhail, liked to read Pushkin together in Russian. There aren't many English people of this sort.

I'd like debates. It's been a pleasure of going back to school, to watch bright people focus on their own and each other's ideas, and occasionally to contribute.

Pace Rich and Agustino's remarks, I think politics would generate more heat than light.

Let's develop philosophical topics that we keep coming back to here.

Like Streetlight I didn't get the Tractatus on first reading and still find it a strange summation of a position Witt eventually 'placed' within his range of view. The middle books and P I have changed my outlook on thinking about philosophical things.

There is a fine paper by Herbert Feigl called 'The Mental and the Physical' which dates back to 1957 and you can read it online here. I hasten to add that I strongly disagree with it, but it's beautifully written, and marks the beginning of the analytic philosophical drift to physicalism, as far as I can map it. Rather remarkably he imagined teaching children to stop saying 'belief' and 'expectation' and to start talking instead about 'brain-states', a development which he thought would be 'an enormous enrichment'.

Feigl was a remarkable man, Austrian but of broad interests - he met Wittgenstein in Vienna in the 1920's and had some chats with him even though he'd quickly realised that Ludwig was not the positivist his Vienna Circle friends had been hoping to meet. Feigl escaped to Minnesota in the 1930's and had a fruitful collaboration with Sellars, see other threads. He had strong humanist options and sympathy with practising scientists.