Can you elaborate on the darkness? I don't understand the allusion.



I suppose being able to negotiate is a presupposition of conflict resolution.

Bollocks. Whatever view you have that entails this contradiction should be discarded.

What's the difference?

Declaring something beyond philosophy, one must think both sides of the limit...

That's the kind of approach I was trying to promote. But I think there's some place for ethical systems. For example, if you're speaking with someone who has much different ethical intuitions from you, appealing to their self interest in terms of their decisions' consequences for them can help bridge the gap.

Can you be more specific about how your system of values constrains the means you can use to achieve your ends?

Regarding the independence of what's good from any ethical system, maybe there's a generalized Euthyphro problem to demonstrate this. Is it good because the ethical system entails it or does the ethical system need to entail it because it's good?

In isolation, yes I think this is something that's ok. In principle, no, if a meta-ethics or normative ethics gives you no heuristics or ways of thinking about ethical decisions, how could it possibly be used as anything but a philosophical abstraction? The contents of ethical discourse should be, minimally, about ethical decisions - which are right, what makes them right, how to think about ethical rightness (or its impossibility) - but not as individual elements in systems, rather there should be some link from meta-ethics to normative ethics, from normative ethics to applied ethics.

Let's take an example in Levinas, who grounds ethics in the experience of the other and the non-reducibility of the other to me. How to treat the other - how we are partially responsible for their welfare- is always a prescient question for this account of ethics (more a coupling of applied ethics, normative ethics and meta-ethics through phenomenology). Ethical decisions are found in the space the other announces to me, and their non-reducibility to me imbues a pre-theoretic responsibility to attend to them.

If we can accept this notion that ideas are inventions of the mind, that ideas are, when it comes down to it, only interpretations of something, and if ethics, in fact, is taken to refer to real other persons who exist apart from my interpretations, then we are up against a problem: there is no way in which ideas, on the current model, refer to independently existing other persons, and as such, ideas cannot be used to found an ethics. There can be no pure practical reason until after contact with the other is established.
Given this view towards ideas, then, anytime I take the person in my idea to be the
real person, I have closed off contact with the real person; I have cut off the connection
with the other that is necessary if ethics is to refer to real other people. This is a central
violence to the other that denies the other his/her own autonomy. Levinas calls this violence
"totalization" and it occurs whenever I limit the other to a set of rational categories,
be they racial, sexual, or otherwise. Indeed, it occurs whenever I already know what the
other is about before the other has spoken. Totalization is a denial of the other's difference,
the denial of the otherness of the other. That is, it is the inscription of the other in
the same. If ethics presupposes the real other person, then such totalization will, in itself,
be unethical. — Anthony Beavers on Levinas

Anthony Beavers on Levinas, click for link

It is quite straightforward to see that ethical decisions - attendance to the other -, for Levinas, mandate a renegotiation of how you make ethical decisions whenever you do them. So to speak of ethics is to speak of my responsibility to a concrete other and their conduct, which should not be subsumed through their reducibility to whatever theoretical pretensions I have, on the contrary these pre-developed philosophical or normative structures can only be used to inform decisions about them, to enrich understanding to facilitate judgement and action, rather than to reduce the other to a model of my ethical system.

So as part of this renegotiation, we need to think how our already developed intuitions and beliefs can and should be applied to the other, even if they won't do justice to the complexities of attending to them. What people do isn't a punchline to make yourself and your personal philosophical system right.

For example, I don't steal or deceive people in order to grow my business. — @Agustino

Can you give me some derivation or heuristic that gives motivation not to steal or deceive people from your system of ethics? Rather than saying what behaviours it promotes, I'm interested in why it promotes those behaviours. How can you use your system to live a better life? Or is it simply a vouchsafe that you're right in whatever decisions you happen to make?



I'd like to draw a distinction between ethical heuristics - which are rules of thumb for treating others, like the golden rule, and ethical systems - which are ways of speaking about what ethics is, what moral language consists in etc.

You already have an applied ethical principle in 'don't hit children', but you haven't say, derived it from @Agustino's interpretation of virtue ethics (nor would you need to, in my view). What I'm asking of posters here is that if they have strong beliefs about a personally developed (or more standard, like error theory) ethical system, how do they use it to face problems in their lives? Or is it solely an intellectual abstraction?

Examples of how your ethical system has guided you towards certain actions concerning people?

If using ethical systems in your day to day life is an important part of ethical philosophy, it is a glaring omission that we speak about what structures ethical decisions without caring about what they prescribe for us to do or how they structure our thoughts about what is right, wrong and permissible. Is there much of a difference between any two normative or meta-ethical theories in terms of how their adherents would make ethical decisions? If not, they're empty ideas. About ethics while being indifferent to how to live our lives.



I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the choices we make during a day don't have any ethical dimension, they're mostly habits. Personally anyway, when I'm thinking ethically it's because I've been surprised either by either an event or information. Usually when having a disagreement with someone or my actions have hurt or inconvenienced another. I worry about what to do and when what I do isn't already governed by habits or 'ethical habits', like being there for your partner and trying to be understanding when teaching people things, for example. It's only been in these circumstances that I've found knowing anything about ethics, meta-ethics or normative ethics useful.

Another sneaking suspicion I have is that an ethical theory (be it meta-ethics or normative) that doesn't begin with an account of what it means to make an ethical decision is going to have orthogonal concerns to living ethically. Maybe in the manner of replaceability (what good is your ground when another will do just as well) or uninformativeness (what behavioural distinction would being a realist vs an anti-realist in meta-ethics bring in terms of day to day decisions?). What's cared about is being right about ethics, not about getting ethics right.

Time is mysterious. Duration in every day contexts is not. It isn't as if the mysteries of time impede interpretation and calibration of watches. That's the point I was making.

They're almost certainly not independent lines of inquiry though. Do you think it would be normal for someone to study normative and meta-ethics all their life and gain no insights into how to not be a jackass?

If so, surely it's a bad state of affairs.

Ok Wayfarer, I can see the link directly to 2. Someone who practices mindfulness or meditation is probably more able to deal with that, maybe also someone who practiced a martial art. Any ethical system or 'compassion exercises' - those things which help a person cultivate virtues - would probably benefit someone's ethical decision making in general. But then - it isn't because of the specific ethical system you have, it's because you're attempting to cultivate personal virtues. In this regard, your ethical system was useless or more precisely replaceable on the specifics. So what's the point in it?

A few examples would be nice.

Say your friend turns up really late to a restaurant you're eating at, you can see they're a bit flustered and worried when they arrive, they are usually calm and punctual, how does spiritual enlightenment help you here?

You see a beggar in the street, they hurl abuse at you - how do you respond? What do you do? How does your ethical system influence your decision?

Two late teenagers you pass in the street are having an ironic performance of racist jokes, but what they're saying is indistinguishable from the worst racist crackpots, what do you do?

I exempted you from it because, if I've understood your comments and some of your blog posts, you actually care about the description and structure of ethical decisions and any moral theorizing you do is based around derived properties of these structures. In my opinion this isn't 'walking on its head' like is usual here.

I don't think that people who have ethical systems or meta-ethical beliefs on the philosophy forum are hypocrites. What I'm criticizing is the idea that people actually use those ethical systems in their day to day lives. Do they? If they don't, do they actually believe in the system? Ethics is about doing stuff after all. Will give a couple of examples.

I'm having an argument with my partner, she thinks I've done something wrong but I don't see what it is.

Say someone on here is a really firm believer in Mackie's error theory, how do motivational internalism and the falsehood of all moral propositions help you resolve the dispute? Alternatively, say someone is an emotivist, how does the idea that expressing a moral idea is equivalent to expressing a sentiment help you understand where your partner is coming from?

On the realist side, say you're a divine command theorist, how do you use the idea that all your moral beliefs flow from a benevolent God to help you in the dispute?

On the ethical side of it, how would you use hedonistic or negative utilitarian ethics in your day to day life? How does a self professed harm minimizer behave differently from a self professed pleasure maximiser?

What I'm trying to criticize is an absence of care about ethical decisions here on the forum, people only care about them insofar as they are potential defeaters or supporters for ethical proposals or ethical systems. Ethics, then, is empty of applied content on here. Maybe this generalizes, but I don't know.

This attitude is not at all present in Epictetus, for example.

I've definitely seen you express a few moral ideas and hanging around ethics threads Wayfarer, do you believe in any philosophical system of ethics (or meta-ethics)? How do you use it?

I made an effort to act less like a jackass when I was 21, it worked. Unfortunately maybe, but it did.

I used to get a thrill out of committing small social faux pas, I imagine they annoyed some people.

My favourites were:

(1) When someone asks you to guess how much something cost, make a guess which is either much larger or much smaller than the amount they're about to say, depending on the direction they intend (how cheap vs how expensive).

(2) Hold doors open for people who are greater than approximately 3 meters away, often they will half run to the door then thank you out of politeness despite the mild inconvenience and stress you have caused them.

(3) When someone is telling you a story you have heard many, many times before, interject at the punchline or critical moment by repeating it in the same tone of voice and delivery that they usually present it in.

So I suppose 'me' would be a good answer for some of the people in my life.

The kind of time we're talking about isn't some phenomenological or lived time, it's temporal duration. So:

Ways of measuring duration - decided by convention. Using convenient periodic phenomena in nature and engineering (days, moons, clocks, pendulums, oscillations of a hydrogen atom).

Units of measuring duration - again decided by convention. Can be made to equate a previously conventional measure of time (quantities proportional to seconds with the same dimension) and a physical phenomenon (oscillations of a hydrogen atom).

Duration - something real that is measured. Time constrained to a start and finish.

Time - the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole (thanks Google).

The central concept here is periodicity, or the propensity for something to repeat with high regularity. Regularity of measurements - oscillations in phase, periodic phenomena. Corrections can be made to account for small irregularities in the oscillations OR in terms of conventional measurements of duration (years -> leap years, errors in atomic clocks).

There is absolutely nothing mysterious here. It isn't philosophy, it's well established engineering and mathematics.

Since I couldn't do a text impression of Zizek with a link (sorry whatever mod deleted the post), he has an interesting view on love. At least romantic love.

In loving someone, do you imagine that they satisfy some preexisting romantic ideal? You give roses and go on dates and then you break up after the rainbows go away 2-3 months in. That's superficial, a person should not be loved for their satisfaction or instantiation of a personal or ideological romantic ideal, they should be loved for their stupidities and weaknesses. They should still be loved when you piss them the hell off and fail as a partner - and they reprimand you for it. Love, as a category of thought is aligned with the particular and the singular, what is unique in the person, not with the universal and repeatable.

Click here for a link giving a pithy exposition of his views on it.

The best thing I've read on love is 'In Praise of Love' by Alain Badiou, which essentially advocates the above as well, but also attempts to locate love metaphysically too.

I don't have a problem. Was only asking for clarification.

Aight, I read the link, were you using it to say symmetry breaking is still a thing, contra the OP?

O I thought you were a staff. Sorry. But thanks!

What informed you about: amount of symmetry breaking is insufficient and lurked in the big bang, chiral symmetry breaking in the weak force through the Higgs mechanism.

Stuff about life (this life, whatever it is) depending on particle sizes, imagined you had proton channels and more fundamentally bonding in mind, don't think it needs more detail.

As payment, check your PM inbox for a link.

Supporting links?

Or alternatively 'no reason to assume the universe is anything but a contingent accident'.

If, then at least until someone stops you.

Can you guys stop your bickering please. Neither of you is going to back down, neither of you is going to 'win', there's absolutely nothing at stake in what you're doing. Instead, you've been putting each other down in various ways over the last, I dunno, week? You're both forum staff, act like it.

What's the book?

Enjoying studying stats?

You're leveraging the principle of indifference to assign these probabilities, which is inappropriate without constraints on the situation. You also start at arbitrary points in your evaluation of conditional probability.

What I tried to convey with my previous comment was the absurdities that you can derive using the principle of indifference. By substituting in a creator with some extra, non-necessary property into jyour argument, you can derive the same probability estimate as the original. The properties are arbitrary, and repeated application is absolutely allowed if the argument form is valid, so you can form a tapestry of inconsistent probability assignments - as I did.

Another thing you're doing is conflating a probability distribution expressing our lack of knowledge of a phenomenon (an epistemic probability, what do we know about a possible creator) with a frequency distribution (the non/existence of a creator in a set of universes), at best you can conclude 'there is no reason to prefer the presence of a creator from the non-presence of a creator in terms of evidence' rather than 'there is a 50% chance of a creator existing'.

You can ascribe a 50% chance to a conscious creator with blue hair, a 50% chance to a conscious creator with red hair, and a 50% chance to a conscious creator with neither red nor blue hair, using exactly the same argument. The assignment of probabilities it allows doesn't give you a probability distribution when averaged over the possible creators, so there isn't a 50% chance for the conscious creation of the universe, whatever that may mean.

It's probably more worthwhile to ask, 'Does the creation of the universe work like the creation of things we are familiar with?', and, 'Is an intentionality and folk-physics reliant notion of creation appropriate to apply to the entire universe?'. The answer to both questions would be a resounding 'No'.

I'm gonna re-post something I did in your previous thread @Marchesk, but will add to it.

This is one of those philosophical issues that I don't see the point in, but I don't think this is because of quietism, rather because I don't really see what's at stake in the issue.

What is a theory of perception? Presumably it's a way of assigning a description to the following kind of event: X perceives Y and set of properties and relations P(Y) influenced or deriving from the set of properties and relations P(X,Y). As an example.

I perceive a cup on my table, it is plain white and filled with coffee.

I (X) perceive a cup ( Y ) on my table ('on my table' is a relation between the cup and the table, a member of P(Y) ), it is plain white (a property of the cup, a member of P(Y)) and filled with coffee (being filled with coffee is another member of P(Y)).

I think any direct realist and any indirect realist would agree that indeed I do see a cup on my table, and that it is plain white and filled with coffee. What matters between them is how to analyse 'I see' in terms of the subject: me, X; the object: Y, the cup. Specifically, what matters are the properties of the relation 'sees' between X and Y. How does it arise? What does it mean for me to see X? What are the relations between the seen object and the object? (representational sense data or identity for indirect/direct examples). Answering these questions gives elements of P(X,Y).

What does a theory that uses sense data or identity as fundamental entities in P(X,Y) achieve? At best a generalized description of what it means to be a sensory object - an element of our perceptual world. Whether it is constituted by sense data or populated by the objects themselves doesn't gives us any information about why the relation between the seen object and the object obtains. We 'see' sense data, we 'see' objects, so what? How can someone learn anything about vision or perception in general - how it works - just by attempting to describe the conditions of access to the sensory object?

Let's take a couple of, very abridged examples, of how to learn something about perception philosophically. In the transcendental aesthetic in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It proceeds, abridging a lot, by attempting to found the perception of objects in terms of a mental application of necessary qualities of a sensory manifold. Stuff has spatial extent, stuff persists in time. So then we're left, even if you do not agree with the specific conclusions Kant has, that a perceiving subject conditions the observed objects in some way. Hurrah, we've learned something. How do we condition the objects? Through the application of these constraints to the sensory manifold. What about the 'real' relationship with the object? ... Well, whether Kant's noumenon is given a positive (there's really real stuff underneath our perception) or negative (the noumenon is the name of a conceptual delimiter between the intelligible and the unintelligible), no longer tells us anything about perception, rather about how perception relates to knowing. The latter is still debated within Kant scholarship, the former is well established science at this point.

Another is Husserl, with his idea of 'bracketing','reduction' or 'epoché'. This means, roughly, forgetting the objectivity or veridicality of our experiences and instead attempt to deal with their internal structures and webs of meaning. One way he proceeds is by using his imagination to vary perceived objects in order to filter out their non-necessary properties for being those objects, and thus attempts to derive internal structures to perceptual acts. Great, we can learn something through these descriptions about how we intuit objects and ascertain what they count as or are identified as. Whether the object is 'really there' or 'just a sense object' doesn't matter for the purposes of (transcendental phenomenology) description of perceptual events. If you asked Husserl whether his phenomenology cared about the real existence of objects vs their status as perceptual ideals, he'd probably say something like 'no, I don't want to repeat the errors my method was meant to avoid'.

The debate between direct and indirect realism(s) proceeds after granting people a perceptual world. The next step is for some reason thinking 'how perception works' can be answered through analysis of our condition of access to the already granted perceptual world. How perception works is a question on the level of the manifestation of the perceptual world, not on its conditions of possibility. Is it then surprising that absent from this kind of analysis is any analysis of the performativity in the perceptual event, and this changes the kind of questions that would be asked of a perceptual theory. A contrastive question between direct and indirect realism, of specific sorts, might be 'do I see the cup of coffee or do I see a representational sense datum of the object?', an analysis inspired by the performativity of the perceptual act (it's a verb, c'mooooon) might ask "how is it that I see the coffee cup? what perceptual structures allow me to see the coffee cup?". It changes debates from, ultimately, a semantic theory of perceptual verbs or their conditions of possibility to 'what makes us perceive how we perceive and how do we perceive?'

In terms of the original formulation, the debate between indirect and direct realism does not attempt to flesh out P(X,Y), it instead attempts to look at the conditions for the possibility of P(X,Y) while forgetting that it does this. Is it any wonder that this thread and the previous one are full of unsubstantial semantic dispute, and that any 'evidence' for direct or indirect realism based on the real properties of perception can be interpreted favorably or explained away...

If we already grant the 'world of perception' to a person, what remains is to give an account of its formation and stability rather than our conditions of access to it.

@unenlightened fiddles while Rome burns.

This is one of those philosophical issues that I don't see the point in, but I don't think this is because of quietism, rather because I don't really see what's at stake in the issue.

What is a theory of perception? Presumably it's a way of assigning a description to the following kind of event: X perceives Y and set of properties and relations P(Y) influenced or deriving from the set of properties and relations P(X,Y). As an example.

I perceive a cup on my table, it is plain white and filled with coffee.

I (X) perceive a cup ( Y ) on my table ('on my table' is a relation between the cup and the table, a member of P(Y) ), it is plain white (a property of the cup, a member of P(Y)) and filled with coffee (being filled with coffee is another member of P(Y)).

I think any direct realist and any indirect realist would agree that indeed I do see a cup on my table, and that it is plain white and filled with coffee. What matters between them is how to analyse 'I see' in terms of the subject: me, X; the object: Y, the cup. Specifically, what matters are the properties of the relation 'sees' between X and Y. How does it arise? What does it mean for me to see X? What are the relations between the seen object and the object? (representational sense data or identity for indirect/direct examples). Answering these questions gives elements of P(X,Y)

Notably absent from this kind of analysis is any analysis of the performativity in the perceptual event, and this changes the kind of questions that would be asked of a perceptual theory. A contrastive question between direct and indirect realism, of specific sorts, might be 'do I see the cup of coffee or do I see a representational sense datum of the object?', an analysis inspired by the performativity of the perceptual act (it's a verb, c'mooooon) might ask "how is it that I see the coffee cup? what perceptual structures allow me to see the coffee cup?". It changes debates from, ultimately, a semantic theory of perceptual verbs or their conditions of possibility to 'what makes us perceive how we perceive and how do we perceive?'

Husserl noticed the difference between these two styles of questioning, or something like it, with his idea of 'bracketing','reduction' or 'epoché'. This means, roughly, forgetting the objectivity or veridicality of our experiences and instead attempt to deal with their internal structures and webs of meaning.

If we already grant the 'world of perception' to a person, what remains is to give an account of its formation and stability rather than our conditions of access to it.

Thanks for the clarifications Tiff. I usually have difficulty telling parodies, sarcasm and ironic chatter from the real thing, so it was a request for clarification as well expressing a desire for some bickering to stop. In my experience if there are a few active posters showing contempt for the forum's staff it ends up being very unpleasant for everyone. Members get frustrated with the toxic environment, since public conflict between staff and member groups quickly becomes an institutional problem.

Though, I think my experience with administrating a leftist discussion forum is a bit different from leading a general purpose philosophy forum. Specifically because people here don't seem to know how to be cruel to each other creatively (no one knows seppuku like the academic left), and there aren't so many preformed ideological cliques and entryists attempting to subsume the group to a particular method of thinking. For example, I find it unlikely that a group like the Platypus affiliated society or terrorist fantasy organisation Leading Light will join the philosophy forum en-mass and try to make it an advertising platform. In contrast, the people who advertise their own philosophical systems on this site are just individuals and very easy to ignore if reading that kind of thing isn't up your alley.

No Posty, if the system contained enough arithmetic it would still be subject to Godel's theorems.

It applies to any system that contains arithmetic. This is why it's so important. If you want a system to do maths in, it should definitely contain some kind of arithmetic, so Godel's theorems - or analogues of them - will apply.

So what would be more impressive is next step hardware that can also imagine particular cats based on its accumulated knowledge of felines. That would then be a fully two-way system that can start having sensory hallucinations, or dreams, just like me and you. The indirectness of its representational relationship with the real world would then be far more explicit, less hidden in the choice of training data, as well as the hierarchical design of its hardware. — @apokrisis

I'm just going to leave the Painting Fool here. Neural nets can already learn ontologies (operational stratifications of concepts). It's probably being worked on somewhere in a lab at the minute.

If every atom of oxygen is equally likely to be drawn from a series of independent random draws, this implies that the probability of obtaining a particular oxygen atom within a volume of size V is proportional to V. So picking bigger volumes to search in makes it more likely to contain the elusive oxygen atom you're after.

However, this doesn't say anything about the speed of the strategy. If the rate oxygen atoms can be individually processed does not vary with the volume you're searching in, then any search strategy that ensures non-repeats would be optimal (IE there's no search strategy preferences).

If you can process all the oxygen atoms within a considered volume at once, then obviously you choose the biggest volume you can (and get the oxygen atom immediately).

Search strategies depending on the volume size would be a continuum between 'it doesn't matter which you pick' and 'the biggest volume', and would depend on the specifics of the method you are using to test which oxygen atom is which.

This isn't really philosophy, it's an exercise in probability.

I don't know how the law of excluded middle relates to Godel's theorem, or how rejecting it relates to Godel's theorem. One way to find out how it relates would be to study Godel's incompleteness theorems in the context of intuitionist interpretations of mathematics. Here is a starting place, but I can't guide you any more.