Yes.

That’s a matter of definition, not the kind of thing that calls for empirical verification. We simply do not usually use the words that way.

If the question could reasonably be interpreted as asking for an interrogative word them sure, “what” would be a good answer, but I don’t see how it could be interpreted that way.

The list of interrogative words and their answers I gave as a hint was meant to suggest “What? This (or that).” And thus a self-referential demonstrative (“this (sentence)”) in answer to self-referential interrogative (“this question”).

@Syamsu Can you share with us that thing you have with the two columns, and on one side is things like "subjective", "choice", "opinion", "creator", etc, and the other side has things like "objective", "no choice", "fact", "creation", etc? I think that would really clear things up for everyone.

Not if it makes the child, or anyone else, feel bad.

Empiricism doesn't mean every hallucination or illusion someone sees is definitively real, it just means that reality is generally judged by things "looking true", but to everyone, in every context...

Likewise, hedonism doesn't mean just anything anybody likes to do is good, it just means that morality is generally judged by things "feeling good", but to everyone, in every context...

I wrote all this already but you said you ignored it.

TL;DR: Hedonism is not egotism.

I feel like I should have warn you guys about this guy, who has been going on about creationism and free will and the relationship of them to “facts” vs “opinions” for over a decade now, but whatever you’ll all see for yourselves soon enough.

See just above.

To elaborate:

“What is the answer to X?”
“Y is the answer.”

X = “What is the answer to X?”
Y = “Y is the answer.”

So X = “What is the answer to “What is the answer to “What is the answer to [...]?”?”?”

And Y = “““[...] is the answer.” is the answer.” is the answer.”

:100: :clap: :up:

That is the older version. “What is the answer to this question?” “‘What’ is the answer to that question.” That’s not how language works though.

No, that’s the answer to the even dumber old version of the joke that I hate and invented this one to replace.

You might want to link to the particular comic, not just the site:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/342

Also

You've skipped the hedonism here. Hedonism claims that something is good when it produces pleasure. If I find pleasure in hurting, hurting is good. — David Mo

Hedonism as about all kinds of experiences of pleasure, pain, enjoyment, suffering, etc. Hurting means inflicting pain or suffering: making someone feel bad. Hedonism just says that badness lies in things feeling bad, goodness lies in them feeling good. Just like empiricism says truth lies in things looking true, and falsity in them looking false. In both cases there are a lot of other details to work out (that I already went over in those paragraphs you skipped earlier), but that’s the basic experiential criteria.

Of course, because you're not treating hedonism from an ethical point of view, but from the point of view of psychology: People look for what gives them pleasure and they say it's good. — David Mo

Quite the contrary, I say nothing at all about what people DO pursue, and I don’t support any psychological theories of hedonism that say that people are just looking out for their own pleasure. People do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons without always factoring pleasure or pain etc into it.

I’m only saying that when we come around and judge the morality of those actions, the only non-arbitrary way we can judge them is by how good or bad they make people feel, in a way that is replicable, as I have already detailed in those paragraphs you skipped before.

Very, very close.

To say that it is good that produces pleasure is an empty statement if you do not specify what pleasure you are talking about. — David Mo

I am not saying that. I am saying hedonic experiences, broadly construed, are the only public criteria by which we could judge things good or bad without some kind of appeal to faith. I am saying the opposite of “there is such a thing as a victimless moral crime”. If something is bad, it’s bad because it hurts someone. To say otherwise is to say that some things are bad just because, even though they don’t feel bad to anyone.

And that this is analogous to how empirical experiences are the only public criteria by which we can judge things real or not, without appealing to faith in claims about things that are supposedly real even though nobody could ever tell if they were or not.

you cannot find a circumstance that generates pleasure in every person — David Mo

The trivial case of giving every person their own private virtual world would satisfy that.

Human beings could be conditioned by society or their instincts to enjoy violence, and that would not make violence good — David Mo

Violence has to be bad because it hurts people. The only reason it could possibly be justified is that it prevents more hurting of people. Still we find ourselves judging by hedonic criteria.

your claim that hedonism can be justified as a scientific truth — David Mo

I didn’t claim that hedonism was a scientific truth, but that it’s the moral analogue of empiricism, which underlies the physical sciences. Anti-hedonic philosophies end up at the conclusion that we can’t really ever tell what is moral in a way that is both critical and objective, in a way comparable to how science approaches reality, but must instead either take someone’s word for what is moral, or else take all claims of morality to be utterly baseless opinion, either of which is just to give up on doing philosophy to morality.

I've hidden it now, just in case.

I think you're conflating different threads of this conversation.

Besides there being philosophical allusions, no.

As for hints, hmm...

I think the thing that you get is the old joke riddle that was told to me, where the answer to the question was "what". This isn't that riddle. I don't like that riddle. This is a version with an answer that actually makes sense, and isn't just unclear communication pretending to be clever like that "words that end in -gry" joke.

Yeah shooting someone is already illegal. Taking away someone's right to bear arms by shooting them doesn't need to be more illegal than it already was. I don't really see the point of this.

I take it you're trying to turn the 2nd amendment against itself, and restrict the right to bear arms on account of the potential that bearing arms has to restrict the right to bear arms? In other words, you can't bear arms in a way that would restrict someone else's right to bear arms, e.g. by shooting them, or threatening to shoot them, etc?

That makes sense, except... you already can't shoot someone, or threaten to shoot them, except in exceptional circumstances that you'd want to allow under these circumstances too (e.g. urgent self-defense). So I don't see what this adds to anything.

corvid-19 — Judaka

Is that that new pandemic spreading between ravens and crows and some jays and the like?

The answer to a contextless supplementary followup question is either a question or a statement. — Outlander

An answer has to be a statement, but the statement you gave as an example is not an answer, it's just a response.

The whole "contextless" thing is really getting to the point though. What exactly is the question asking? What would an answer to a question like that look like?

I'll give an hint. Or maybe an anti-hint, as it were. This riddle was adapted from a much dumber joke riddle someone one asked me many years ago. The question was the same: "What is the answer to this question?" After a bit of thought I gave an answer -- the answer I'm hoping someone gives here -- and they said no, that's not it. They said that "what" was the answer to that question, treated the question as though it was a statement, telling you its answer, which... no. That annoyed me and reminded me of this xkcd / the "joke" it's about:



I think there is a much more actually-clever answer to that dumb riddle question, and the question/answer pair shed a bit of interesting light on a few philosophical issues about linguistic meaning and the act of inquiry.

Are you wearing a mask inside, and why? — Bitter Crank

Because they won't let me in if I'm not / will hassle me and throw me out if I don't.

(Seen people thrown out for not doing it right in front of me).

“The” answer to a question is the correct answer to it.

Nope, that’s not it.

If the first person is actually mad, yet still sane enough to recognize himself as mad, then he is sane enough to recognize the second person as sane, as the second person claims. If he was so mad that he was not able to gauge his sanity, then he would say he was sane, which he doesn’t.

If the second person is actually mad, so mad he can’t tel, then the first person is sane. But a sane person would not incorrectly assess themselves as mad, which the first person does.

So either they are both mad, or only the first person is mad. Since you’ve stipulated that only one is mad, we must conclude the second is sane.

Or we’ve been lied to about the whole setup and there’s no success possible.

Energy is whatever it is that makes something do something. That’s even in its etymology.

To say that matter is made of energy is more or less to say that things are what they do. The existence of a thing consists of its capacity for action.

“To be is to do” and “to do is to be.”

(Also, to be is to be perceived, and to do is to be perceived, so to perceive is to be done-unto. Experience is just the flip side of interaction).

Thank you. One more thing that was going to be the last post in that series: Philosophy is not just Literature

Similarly, philosophy has many similarities to the arts, broadly construed as communicative works presented so as to evoke some reaction in some audience. Philosophy is likewise an evocative, more specifically persuasive, discipline, employing not just logic, as with mathematics, but also rhetoric, to convince its audience to accept some ideas. But philosophy is not simply a genre of literature. Whereas works of literature, like all works of art, are not the kinds of things that are capable of being correct or incorrect, in the way that scientific theories are, but rather they are only effective or ineffective at evoking their intended reactions, with works of philosophy correctness matters. It is not enough that a philosophical theory be beautiful or intriguing; a philosopher aims for their theories to be right.

Yes, with the additional differentiation from math already discussed earlier.

So philosophy, in your view, is restricted to the a priori. Since anything a priori does not rely on empirical observation or experimentation, it's quite a stretch to associate it with "evidence." If it's a priori, it needs no evidence. — Xtrix

The “evidence” part was just distinguishing it from religion. I said “reasons or evidence” then. Distinguishing it from science further narrows that down to basically “reason”.

This includes your proposition about critical rationalism. — Xtrix

Critical rationalism does not rely on you accepting critical rationalism to begin with. You can start out unsure of whether critical rationalism is true or not, and then find problems with assuming it’s not and so conclude that you should adopt critical rationalism — exactly in according with the principle of critical rationalism.

So, latest news from my employer suggests (can't get an answer out of him directly) that he is not looking into a PPP loan. I don't understand why that would possibly be. The things he actually said are that the problem is sales are down, not "access to money", but surely getting two months of payroll and other expenses covered by the government would be a good thing in any case, even if it doesn't completely solve the problem of sales being down.

Can anyone think of any reason why a small business would not pursue a PPP loan?

In my case, I can conceive that maybe he doesn't want to have to hire me back specifically (he also says things about "reorganizing due to coronavirus") because I was "highly-paid" (BLS says I was making just under the median pay in my field, but he seems to think what I asked for was a lot), but since the PPP loan would cover that payment for two months, and all his other employees' pay, and the rent, etc... that seems like the overall costs/benefit balance would still be in his favor.

I can see how why might also be being dodgy about it with me specifically, like maybe he is pursuing the loan but doesn't want to tell me because he doesn't want me to know he's avoiding rehiring me specifically... but then, the PPP loan would require him to (and pay for him to) pay someone the same thing he paid me, at least for those two months, and if he paid someone else besides me that same amount just for those two months, it would surely cause some big hubbub if he suddenly pays them half that much (or whatever; half that was his opening bid to me eight years ago) after the two months are over.

It depends of the variety of socialism. Most of them will distinguish between “private property” and “personal property”, where “private property” is the bad kind (privately owned means of production etc) and “personal property” is fine (stuff like your toothbrush). I’ve always found the technical distinction between them rather nebulous, but I gather it’s supposed to mean that things belong to whoever uses them for so long as they use them, not in perpetuity until transferred. I also find that too fuzzy a line though: if I leave my house, how long until it’s been disused long enough that it stops being mine? A day? A week? A month? A year?

So I prefer to not make that distinction, and to instead focus on making it in people’s interests not to buy more than they’re going to need for their own use, and to sell off excess that they’re not using. Achieving the same ends — people only own the things they use — without any of those procedural problems. I think getting rid of rent (and interest) would accomplish that.

In my view those tiny landlords who can’t afford to miss a month of rent (because they’re still paying a mortgage) and tiny businesses and so on are in many ways still in the underclass harmed by capitalism, they’re just trying to claw their way into the overclass instead. That doesn’t excuse any abuse of their tiny power that they so use, but I think a good strategy is to recognize those kinds of people as more aligned (whether they know it or not) with the workers than with the true capitalists, and emphasize strategies that will benefit them as well as their employees and tenants. (While not undermining the eventual goal of having people own their own homes and businesses. On which note: small investors just trying to save for retirement or for a down payment on a house also fall into this category of “bourgeoisie so petit they’re basically proles”).

On the contrary. Different ethical theories think they know what good is, they just don't agree. — David Mo

They say what they think is good, in a way that you either accept or don’t, like a religion. But they don’t provide a way of telling what is good for someone who doesn’t already know, the way that “the scientific method” provides a way of telling what is true for someone who doesn’t already know. Hedonism by itself doesn’t tell you what particular things are good, it just provides a criterion for assessing the goodness of things: does it feel good? Just like empiricism provides a criterion for assessing the truth: does it look true?

But it is not the same to share an experience of the same phenomenon, as to share the experience of an event that only happens inside my head. — David Mo

Nobody’s talking about things that are only in your head. We’re talking about whether we have the same hedonic experience in the same circumstances or not, in exactly the same way that we compare whether we have the same empirical experience in the same circumstances or not.

There's a fallacy here. The moral good cannot be elected by a majority like the government. — David Mo

I explicitly said that same thing in part of the quote you snipped.

Hedonism is only a theory within ethics. Where do you leave all its opponents? — David Mo

As not actually philosophy at all, in the end, because they ultimately end up saying there is no way to tell what is good or bad. Leaving room only for religion or else sophistry with regards to ethics, which we have already established are not philosophy.

One's own experiences are very different from scientific ones. These concern inter-communicable experience of external objects. They are or try to be objective. If you restrict philosophy to personal experience this would relegate it to subjective. — David Mo

Objectivity is just the limit of inter-subjectivity. Every scientific observation is just a bunch of people confirming that they too also share that same subjective experience in those same circumstances -- or else figuring out what the differences are between them that account for why some do and some don't.

The same can be done with hedonic experiences.



With regards to opinions about reality, commensurablism boils down to forming initial opinions on the basis that something, loosely speaking, looks true (and not false), and then rejecting that and finding some other opinion to replace it with if someone should come across some circumstance wherein it looks false in some way. And, if two contrary things both look true or false in different ways or to different people or under different circumstances, commensurablism means taking into account all the different ways that things look to different people in different circumstances, and coming up with something new that looks true (and not false) to everyone in every way in every circumstance, at least those that we've considered so far. In the limit, if we could consider absolutely every way that absolutely everything looked to absolutely everyone in absolutely every circumstance, whatever still looked true across all of that would be the objective truth.

In short, the objective truth is the limit of what still seems true upon further and further investigation. We can't ever reach that limit, but that is the direction in which to improve our opinions about reality, towards more and more correct ones. Figuring out what can still be said to look true when more and more of that is accounted for may be increasingly difficult, but that is the task at hand if we care at all about the truth.

This commensurablist approach to reality may be called "critical empirical realism", as realism is the descriptive face of objectivism, empiricism is the descriptive face of phenomenalism, and what I would call a critical-liberal methodology is more commonly called just "critical" as applied to theories of knowledge.


On Morality, Goodness, and Justice

With regards to opinions about morality, commensurablism boils down to forming initial opinions on the basis that something, loosely speaking, feels good (and not bad), and then rejecting that and finding some other opinion to replace it with if someone should come across some circumstance wherein it feels bad in some way. And, if two contrary things both feel good or bad in different ways or to different people or under different circumstances, commensurablism means taking into account all the different ways that things feel to different people in different circumstances, and coming up with something new that feels good (and not bad) to everyone in every way in every circumstance, at least those that we've considered so far. In the limit, if we could consider absolutely every way that absolutely everything felt to absolutely everyone in absolutely every circumstance, whatever still felt good across all of that would be the objective good.

In short, the objective good is the limit of what still seems good upon further and further investigation. We can't ever reach that limit, but that is the direction in which to improve our opinions about morality, toward more and more correct ones. Figuring out what what can still be said to feel good when more and more of that is accounted for may be increasingly difficult, but that is the task at hand if we care at all about the good.

This commensurablist approach to morality may be called "liberal hedonic moralism", as moralism is the prescriptive face of objectivism, hedonism is the prescriptive face of phenomenalism, and what I would call a critical-liberal methodology is more commonly called just "liberal" as applied to theories of justice.
[/quote]

When it comes to tackling questions about reality, pursuing knowledge, we should not take some census or survey of people's beliefs or perceptions, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, believes or perceives is true. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct sensations or observations, free from any interpretation into perceptions or beliefs yet, and compare and contrast the empirical experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for a belief to be true. Then we should devise models, or theories, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be true. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian academic structure.

When it comes to tackling questions about morality, pursuing justice, we should not take some census or survey of people's intentions or desires, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, intends or desires is good. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good. Then we should devise models, or strategies, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be good. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure.

This is very confusing. "Thinking alone", "armchair"... You mean philosophy doesn't do experiments? This would differentiate philosophy from the natural sciences, but not from many other branches of knowledge. Pure mathematics, for example. — David Mo

You keep giving me perfect segues to introduce the next would-have-been-OP-of-that-thread-series-I-was-going-to-do, so I may as well quote you and make that clear this time.

Philosophy is not Math

I've previously concluded, following that philosophy is not religion, sophistry, science, or just ethics, that it provides the justification for appeals to a posteriori experiences (whether that means empirical experiences for physical sciences or hedonic experiences for ethical ones) while never itself appealing to either of them, instead dealing entirely with a priori reasoning. That in turn may raise the question of how philosophy is to be demarcated from mathematics, which also deals entirely with a priori logical reasoning without any appeal to a posteriori experience. Indeed in some ancient philosophy, such as that of Pythagoras, mathematics and philosophy bleed together in much the same way that what we now consider the separate field of science once did with philosophy as well. But today there is a clear distinction between them, in that while philosophy and mathematics share much in common in their application of logic, they differ in that mathematical proofs merely show that if certain axioms or definitions are taken as true, then certain conclusions follow, while philosophy both does that and asserts the truth of some axioms or definitions.

So while mathematics says things of the form "if [premise] then [conclusion]", philosophy says things of the form "[premise], therefore [conclusion]". Mathematics explores the abstract relations of ideas to each other without concern for the applicability of any of those ideas to any more practical matters (although applications for them are nevertheless frequently found), but philosophy is directly concerned with the practical application of the abstractions it deals with. It is not enough to merely define axiomatically some concept of "existence", "knowledge", "mind", etc, and validly expound upon the implications of that concept; it also matters if that is the correct, practically applicable concept of "existence", "knowledge", "mind", etc, that is useful for the purposes to which we want to employ that concept.

My own personal take is that there isn't so much a problem with the mechanics of that arrangement of one person putting in all the money and then hiring people at market wages to operate the business, but rather the problem is the prior circumstances that mean some people have the opportunity to start businesses like that, and others don't and have no realistic option but to go to work for them.

In my view, a solution to the problem would involve other facets of society being different such that businesses are more often formed by people coming together making mutual investments and mutually operating the business. Cooperatives, basically. That requires that average people have capital to invest in the first place, though. My objections to capitalism aren't so much the workplace stuff directly -- that's just a symptom -- but the deeper, more abstract, systemic features that lead to the imbalances of capital that lead to the workplace stuff. I identify the enforcement of contracts of rent (including interest, which is rent on money) as the source of that problem, in the absence of which the kind of capital concentration that gives rise to the workplace problems under discussion would tend to naturally dissolve under normal market forces.

Nobody is saying that the players get paid the same as the janitors.

The idea is that instead of some non-working owner deciding how much to pay the players and the janitors and keeping the rest for himself, the players and the janitors etc all get together and decide how much to pay each other -- and don't cut some non-working "owner" anything.

If it's much easier to find cheaper janitors than cheaper players, then sure, everyone involved in that decision will have motive to pay more for players than for janitors. Because the more money the business saves, the bigger a pie for everyone's piece to be cut out of, janitors included. But they get to make that decision; someone else doesn't get to make it for them all.

Thank you.

They are a team, but jamalrob owns the site.

I asked him for admin consensus, so presumably he spoke to the others.