Thinking preceeds action; there is no action without thinking — Gilliatt

Possibly.

I would say that if thinking precedes action then thinking needs rationality and logic. the problem is that people can act on weak or false belief.

But it is also not clear if thinking can justify action. I don't think nature can validate action except that nature permits any action that occurs, indiscriminately.

I think it seems that way, too, but what I'm saying by that is that there are things that I feel (sometimes very strongly) about interpersonal behavior being acceptable or not, recommendable or not, etc. — Terrapin Station

You seem like a moral nihilist not convinced of the strength of your moral intuitions.

Re the doctor comment, by the way, the doctor can't tell you whether anything has an objectively positive or negative value — Terrapin Station

Function and value are not the same thing. However I find it implausible that someone would want to be unhealthy. If someone wants to be healthy then a doctor can advise them.

If you have certain goals and preferences there are ideal ways to achieve them sometimes.

I am not sure what your stance is and whether you want any moral system at all or if you want a purely subjective moral system based on individual feelings and subject to whim.

People can define morality how they feel.

:smile:

I have tried that. Nothing seems to want to surface. I feel like I might be repressing a lot of crap. I don't know how to access it. — Posty McPostface

I don't find writing helpful at the moment although I am considering writing something fictional as therapy. But it does help some people.

In my case I feel I know a lot of what is causing my issues and spend a lot of time thinking about it. But in a way I also feel nervous at writing about my issues and exploring them to closely so fiction might be a disguised way of exploring an issue.

In the end either you can cope with your life or you can't and it feels almost like a lottery. Don't feel to bad about it.

I've tried so many. Dunno what's left to do about the depression. I even tried disidentifying with my depression, to no avail due to its intrinsic nature. — Posty McPostface

I have tried various things but I am still trying something new at the moment . I feel like the right therapist might be able to delve deeply into your mind and give advice that way. I don't think anyone here is likely to give you better advice.

Is this another way of stating disenfranchisement with adult life? — Posty McPostface

I think the wonder of adulthood is different than the naive wonder of childhood. Life is usually never perfect and as an adult you can see lots of things that need altering or improving. If society is getting you down then there might be some actions you can take even though it seems like a David vs Goliath struggle.

You might need to search around for new things to interest you.

my psychotic disorder would prevent me from trying it — Posty McPostface

I can't comment on psychotic disorders because I haven't experienced them so I am not sure what advice could be given there. I can kind of rationalize depression anxiety as rational disorders but am Not sure what could cause things that give wild mental states, hallucinations and so on.

It is probably worth just continuing different treatments. It disturbs me when people stop medication even though it was helping them and I am reluctant to completely stop myself because they might still be doing something substantial whereas some peoples mental health rapidly declines because they refuse to take medication.

I don't even know where to start — Posty McPostface

Have you tried writing about your feelings and analyzing them that way?.

I wish I could capture that wonder of life again. Do you feel that sometimes when you rummage around in your own time machine that is your brain? — Posty McPostface

I like the notion of the brain as a time machine!

I don't know if I want to recapture the wonder of life or rather create a new more realistic wonder.

I am never going to appreciate presents like I did as a child. But I suppose that you can recreate similar experiences, treating yourself, buying yourself gifts, trying to recreate the attitude, trying to be more childlike impulsive and less cynical.

If a depression is largely biological then it might require brain intervention more than behavioral intervention. If your childhood felt good then maybe adulthood is too much a disappointment?

I am quite sympathetic to the Freudian unconscious. I think we might repress or forget the source of our mental distress and have repressed anger etc. For example my parents were not affectionate and so I did not expect it from them so now I am closed off emotionally. I feel uncomfortable with affection and feel I don't need it. I am quite certain that a lot of events from childhood have affected my psyche where I find it hard to renormalize my world view. I think it is going to be hard to ever get my self esteem back.

Self medication is a very dangerous game of playing doctor with your own body. — hks

The problem is that often you do not get enough professional help.

I have met someone who has used masses of experimental medication, supplements and so on. It is a kind of immediate survival technique I suppose. I have not tried illegal/recreational drugs but do use alcohol a few days a week and cigarettes

Apparently MDMA/ecstasy is now being explored for use on depression. Some recreational drugs and up being adopted in medicine.

I think I just need to become undepressed. — Posty McPostface

Do you have any idea what is causing the depression so you can tackle the cause?

I don't get why children don't get depressed — Posty McPostface

It seems like it is probably substantial brain differences. Also there is a lot you don't know as a child and you have a lot of novel experiences and hopes. But that is not say no child is depressed.

I was an optimistic child in the face of damaging experiences which was unhelpful because I should have been fighting back against my circumstances.

So being an adult can be disenchanting I suppose

I'm on Zoloft (Sertraline), but I feel it pooping out, which is an issue any depressive faces when prescribed medication. My p-doc already told me I have enough chemistry going on in my brain (Also on Zyprexa and Haldol)... yeah, pretty intense stuff... It sucks, because I know that they are potent mood stabilizers that could and likely are contributing to my apathy and anhedonia. I used to be a stim freak, which helped tremendously with the a-motivation I experience. I often wake up craving Adderall or Dexedrine in the morning. Ehh. — Posty McPostface

The problem with medicating and self medicating s that they are probably altering your brain as well as other experiences and past experiences.

I don't know to what extent I should mess around with my brain but I am not opposed to anything. In England where I live a woman had an implant put in her brain with a control that she could carry round and stimulate herself. If someone feels drastically mentally unwell they can do major interventions. Some people never feel suicidal but have unbearable low mood.

Apparently the danger point is recovering from low mood which I have experienced where you feel like dying so as never to go back to the low mood.

I am not sure what philosophy can offer me. I don't like scientist which I find nihilistic. There are few modern debates that cheer up my world view. I think we are due a thinker that is genuinely unbiased, calm, not ego-maniacal and inspiring.

I used to be enamoured with death, now not so much. It's kinda scary if you ask me. — Posty McPostface

It is certainly scary to think about dying but sometimes living is more frightening and I don't know if dying can be worse than a terrible quality of life. Sometimes I think death is inevitable so we have to confront the fear at some stage. But I do want to die peacefully of old age ideally if I can reach that stage.

But the inevitability of death itself can fuel my feelings pf pointlessness. I personally don't advocate suicide but I think people suffering from mental distress often have to consider it.
Like Camus I think the question of why not die is really important. If we keep ourselves alive what is motivating that? I don't think fear of death is the only thing keeping me a live.

I don't like platitude style advice where you go through the motions of recommending every cliche of pop psychology and positive psychology in the hope that something will work but not getting to the root of someones problems. If you have suffered trauma or fear death etc then I think it is worth discussing or researching these things to confront them in a spirit of inquiry.

Do you take anything that helps? — Posty McPostface

Citalopram has a significant effect on my anxiety. It had a bigger effect when I started it years ago but it is the only consistent medication that keeps my head above water.

What I have found that some medications can radically change your mental states, dreams and moods etc so it seems to me that it is brain chemistry definitely affecting mood. I am quite pro medication and brain alteration as well as using other therapies or anything else.

I think my traumatic childhood has probably permanently altered my brain and also I just this year found out I am autistic (at 42).

I don't think the brain equal the mind (call me dualist) but I do think it is bound to influence mind and thought.

I suffer from chronic low mood and anxiety. I drink a lot of coffee smoke a couple of packs of cigarettes, go for walks, get drunk, listen to music, distract myself on the internet.

I often contemplate dying as a release from the remorseless low mood and bodily fatigue.

Contemplating dying can be comforting sometimes as a potential way out and feeling less trapped. life can seem like a remorseless cycle but then sometimes the mood is alleviated.

I feel frustrated and disturbed by people. I feel like humans are mad and bad and that causes more helplessness and anxiety. You have to try and look for positive affirmations of reasonable people.

I think talking therapy could help but it can be expensive and you need to find the right person and method.

What kind of advice do you want?

Do you want advice on medication? Self medication with alcohol, caffeine and cigarettes et al? Therapy recommendations?

Talking to someone can help temporarily depending on who the person is. Do you have any goals you want to achieve? Can you pamper yourself? Does philosophy help.

I find food has a temporary antidepressant effect and sometimes walking and listening to music. You can just focus on surviving which is what I do.

Do you have a specific problem that needs solving? I have some specific problems and being trapped with them can heighten depression or lead to a perpetually trapped feeling.

It wasn't because you think you can solve moral disputes via some other means. It's that you don't think that we can solve moral disputes period? — Terrapin Station

I think solving moral disputes is hard for various reason. Firstly there do not appear to be any moral facts. Secondly people can act against moral claims.

That is why I think teleology/function/purpose would have been a good basis for morality. A Doctor can warn you about what will objectively cause damage to your health. But there appears to be no purpose or natural rules that humans can transgress.

I suppose we can just persevere and try and force our moral claims to top position through various means including reason.

But it seems that if there is a moral good it is something that should be enforced or pursued as soon as possible.

This is "will lead to feeling good/will lead to feeling bad". — Hallucinogen

The word "good" originates from the word God. So it does not directly refer to pleasure or pain. The word moral comes from the Latin for character.

My point is that pain and pleasure are not a good indicator of what is good or bad. Even if the end goal is to attain pleasure their is no reason this is good if what is causing the pleasure is not good. The issue is the quality of the things or circumstance causing pleasure or pain.

If you do a pain-pleasure calculation for life or reality this is like utilitarianism and can lead to a rejection of life as overwhelmingly immoral, something I favor at the moment.

However I do think assessing causing pain is a good way of deciding whether something is immoral the problem then is enforcing the prevention of pain and proving to others that they are inflicting unnecessary pain.

But all moral claims can be ignored and overridden by action. I think the best we can hope for is karma and that peoples "bad" actions will create their own punishment or disincentive etc.

I am not concerned with whether functions definitely exist

My argument is that if there were functions then you could base morality on that.

Computers can be repaired because they have been designed to perform certain tasks and bodies can be healed and restored to a previous functionality.

The problem then is how can human behavior be described as immoral or dysfunctional with no purpose or telos? If nature allows an action that seems to be the only arbiter of what is acceptable.

I would say that the word "moral" means "feels good" or "will lead to feeling good" in however many ways you can fathom it, and "immoral" means "causes pain". So the very dichotomy comes from the dichotomy of the pleasure-pain axis. — Hallucinogen

The problem is we can judge some pain as good and some pleasure as bad.

We can judge painful life saving surgery as good and we can see the pleasure from drugs and alcohol or over eating as bad. Or we can simply not judge pain or pleasure morally.

i think virtue ethics focuses on character and the motivation of the person acting.

On the other hand deontology see morality as obedience and following laws.

Personally I think minimizing suffering is very desirable regardless of moral convictions. I can't see the benefit of excess suffering. I don't think minimizing suffering is moral as opposed to pragmatic or a strong almost inevitable preference

Morality can mean and probably usually means not acting. — Andrew4Handel

So the problem then is what is the point of calling behavior immoral if it has already happened?I think moral judgement are used to judge the past and influence future action. In this sense it is abstract.

All morality depends on action. — Hallucinogen

Morality can mean and probably usually means not acting.

Not stealing, not lying not causing harm. The problem is convincing other people not to do these actions as well.

Positive moral actions probably means altruism and charity. But one might also be concerned with ones own attitudes and beliefs such as trying not hold prejudice beliefs.

However this all seems problematic if there are no moral truths to pursue.

What I was getting at is that we're naming a limited set of things "morality," and one of the criteria for limiting the set there is that we're talking about interpersonal behavior. — Terrapin Station

But where are we getting the initial concept of morality from?

A moral sense seems to entail someone believes something is objectively wrong even if this turns out to be a preference or mistake.

I am not sure to what extent we can disentangle ourselves from our upbringing and cultural influences but still we do have some strong moral intuitions.

I think by doing moral philosophy we might lose our intuitions. If morality turns out to be simply a product of culture that is very worrying leading to arbitrary fluctuating principles.

Let me just clarify, first, what an example would be in your view of resolving a moral dispute? — Terrapin Station

I would ideally like to be able to show someone that their behaviors or beliefs were wrong. I would want to persuade them based on reason.

I am currently a moral nihilist because I think it is not possible to prove a behavior or attitude is wrong.

The way you have changed someones moral preferences is by giving a moral argument. Whether there preference changes is based on the success of the argument.

On the other hand if someone dislikes pork and you cook it in a delicious sauce you could disguise the fact it was pork and make them appreciate it that way. But I don't think moral arguments aim to change peoples preferences by subterfuge. (an emotive argument might however)

So I don't moral arguments are simply an attempt to change peoples preferences but rather to invoke reason

What type of 'society' could you and I build where you may have your way and where I must agree to it, or not? — gloaming

The problem is that the only way a society is validated is by simply existing and not by passing some kind of moral test. If someone tries to change a society to suit his or her notion of good they are attempting to use persuasion or force to make another set of behaviors more prevalent.

I think moral nihilism can lead to caution in making moral assertions and would require actions to have stronger justifications. If justification for an action turns out to be simply preference that would undermine moral claims.

I think a possible difference between preference and morality is that you could change someones moral ideas by argument but you are unlikely to change someones dislike of pork or their sexuality through argument.

Right. For one, because morality is judgments about interpersonal behavior, and that's not interpersonal behavior. That's not an exhaustive definition, just part of it. — Terrapin Station

Is it not based then on preexisting moral ideas.

I don't see how you can resolve a moral dispute by preferences because then that ends up as morality by brute force or survival of the fittest.

I agree that morality does definitely seem simply like preferences and that is what I want to transcend. The problem of transcending a preference argument is proving that there is some other basis to a moral judgement.

Because that's factually all that's going on when we "do morality." — Terrapin Station

I don't think the fact we have a preference and or intuition about certain behavior means that is all that is going on.

On the conscience view these preferences are created so we can differentiate between good and bad behaviors. This is like the argument concerning pain where pain indicates what is harmful for us.Pain can really be a good signal for avoiding harm.

So if someone is upset when they see violence I don't think that is simply a preference but an appropriate response to harmful behavior. henceforth I don't think responses are arbitrary or shallow.

I think moral responses lead us to want to change behavior and action in a moral way and also I think they have a mental component of judgement not simple negative or positive sensation. So for example pain caused by standing on glass does not lead me to a moral judgement but pain caused by being slapped does.

Certainly I can. But how? Well, based on how I think about that, what my preferences are, etc. — Terrapin Station

What about the fact that there are objectively different states something can be in. A malfunctioning computer is no in the same states as a functioning one.

For a moral judgement you want to differentiate between actions in some important respect to illustrate say, why charity and rape are not equivalent. One simple difference could be the harm caused. But I think moral needs something more rather than just stating that something is harmful or not to your preference.

Don't you believe that you're living and you have a mind? That would be something they have in common, right? They're both "things that you currently have/that you're currently doing. — Terrapin Station

I have the experience of inhabiting a body and experiencing that body and also of being a subject of experiences of thoughts and other mental states.

Over all I feel like a subject encountering a wide array of differing entities from thoughts to colors, an external world, an internal world etc and I don't see myself as identical to anything of this.

Your questions show that you have already turned dualist. — Harry Hindu

I think for a monist/materialist/idealist position you have to be functionalist about mind and cannot pin it down to one type of matter such as neurons. Otherwise you have an identity problem.

It is hard to see how neuronal firings and neurotransmitters could be identical to an experience or memory. So functionalism is seen as the solution. But then it creates things like The China Brain problem. However if dualism is true I don't know what that entails.

Personally I am worried about the possibility of reincarnation. I don't think materialism or computational views of mind rule out reincarnation because you can imagine someones mind on a disk being installed in another body.

However if the mind is very closely aligned with a particular brain that raises issues about how we alter the mind to do things like improve our mental health, happiness and treat mental illness.

Dualistic attitudes might cheer people up if they think they can somehow transcend their body. A brain based view might lead someone to endorse medication or a new health regime. At the moment I favor chemical intervention myself.

Everthing physically possible is a function.

"How something functions ideally" is about individuals' preferences. There is no objective "ideal," no factual "ideal," beyond that people prefer. — Terrapin Station

You can think about human inventions here specifically. Can you not tell the difference between when your computer of phone is functioning or malfunctioning?

In the case of human artifacts they are designed with a specific function in mind with a design that is meant to optimize that function (or even allow for new functions or flexible functions).

Another example is games. To play the game Monopoly you have to follow the rules in order to play the game otherwise if you make up your own rules that will not be Monopoly. You can define something with a coherent set of rules.

The alternative is you don't assign any definitions or concepts etc at all and I think that is impossible. I think we have to perceive functions, concepts and dispositions in order to negotiate life.

Sometimes somethings properties decide how we can treat it for example we can't swim in ice. You can't just arbitrarily attribute functions or dispositions to things in defiance of some fixed attributes. In my opinion.

Morality, factually, is simply ways that people feel about interpersonal behavior. — Terrapin Station

I don't see why the way someone feels about a certain behavior equals a morality. I don't consider all my responses to behavior of myself or others as moral responses. I can differentiate between harmful events that have no moral or volitional component (illness/weather events) and harmful behavior caused by ill will. I think you can justify giving a moral response to certain actions.

My idea of morality is looking for the proper actions to perform for myself and for society to be moral through its actions. I don't want people to be good just so I have nice thoughts about them.

I don't think humans are just like weather events and I don't think you can just describe humans like machines because using language humans express ill intentions, justifications and values that guide action. At the very least I think you can distinguish between harmful and benign behavior and malicious or benign attitudes.

One state that they're in is not objectively preferable to any other state they're in or can be in. — Terrapin Station

It is not a case of whether a state is preferable but whether it is performing a function. You might want to commit suicide but that does not mean you body is not being kept alive by generally automatic functions. To kill yourself you need to end this function.

The point however is that you can describe how something functions ideally at a certain task such as comparing a weak heart to a healthy heart. This means if you want something to function optimally in that situation there is an optimal function to be achieved. But in terms of an individual humans whole life I don't see there as being a function for it like this (paradoxically) our body can be very healthy with no physical illness but we can have no purpose or telos.

It seems futile to call a behavior immoral or moral if no consequences come from that.

I still don't see anything life and mind have in common.

For an explanation I think you have to give an explanation of the relationship between parts or structures/functions such as a causal or entailment account. For example you might say what all pumps have in common to give them the property of being a pump. or you might detail how a specific pump is made.

There are two levels of explanation you could have. You could explain how neurons firing produce mental states or you could give a broader (functional) explanation of what something has to do to have a particular mental state such as to be a memory.

You could say there is something unique to brains that is required to create minds or there is a function being performed that can be recreated in other material. I think one tactic is to specific and another is too broad.

So would you say that you're not alive, or would you say that you have no mind? — Terrapin Station

If things can be alive but not conscious that means life doesn't entail consciousness.

I think we need to find an entailment relationship for a correlate of consciousness.

Functionalism does not rely on correlation however so a functional account would concern a particular structural-functional relationship leading to a function that entailed mind, although I am not sure what consciousness as a function means.

People advocate functionalism sometimes because they say if the brain correlations are too specific it would rule out a lot of animals having particular mental states.