And so as I suggest, the kind of world that does unfold before our questing gaze ought to be generated in some kind of accordance with our wishes. This becomes an empirical test (even if a reasonably modest one) of idealism as a metaphysical hypothesis. — apokrisis

As far as I can see this doesn't follow or support realism. Idealism has never claimed, to my knowledge, that whatever you want to happen happens, nor do I see what would ever commit it to that.

How would the transcendental idealist or simulationist deal with the fact that accidents happen all the time? I could get struck by lightning and never see the bolt before it kills me. — darthbarracuda

The same way that your character can die, even if you don't want them to. As for it all ending, that can either happen on the game's terms (you lose a life and black out), or outside of the game's terms (the console or CPU crashes).

The old sense of 'object' also survives -- to objectify someone is to reduce them to what you make of them. You can't objectify someone without looking at them, and trying to assimilate them into yourself, and so deny their independence (their substance, their 'subjectivity').

And the object of science is strangely simultaneously that which stands against humans, that they have to come to grips with because it exists in its own right, not on our 'subjective' demands, and that which is their for human manipulation, not existing in its own right but as something to be mastered. By contrast a 'subject' is both ontologically inessential and that which has some sort of intrinsic value or stake.

Yeah, I definitely think some of the classical transcendental idealists could be read as claiming that the universe is procedurally generated based on a starting facticity (roughly, the 'program,' the 'thing in itself') combined with a generation of the empirical world 'on the fly' as the knower's faculties come into contact with it.

Though these questions were already effectively raised by older video games. In a 1980's side-scroller, is what is off the right side of the screen 'there?' Does it 'exist?' When talking about the game, we talk as if it does, but also recognize a sense in which it doesn't, in which it's nothing more than a constellation of moving pixels programmed to appear depending on certain game states arrived at by certain inputs. There is still a procedure of generation, it's just far less variable because far more spelled out. What you can take the old transcendental idealists to be saying is that roughly, life is like a video game in this way. The sense in which the unseen world is 'there' is the sense in which the material off the right side of the screen is 'there.

What about its being true?

Also, don't give me this dismissive crap. If you don't have answers, then just cop to it. All my points are targeted directly at what you say and refute your central points. It's not like anyone's going to believe you if you just claim nothing is being said.

I am just arguing for what I see as the only possible discursive or intersubjective justification of moral principles; that they are more or less universally believed. — John

Well, then your imagination isn't very good. I don't think this is even a plausible lay account of how these things work. Moral principles don't become true in virtue of people believing them, and by and large no one thinks they can make them true by getting everyone to believe them. Presumably, people want to believe in moral principles or values because they're right or valuable, not vice-versa, and I'm not sure how the notion of a value is coherent otherwise.

The only possible discursive or intersubjective justification of an empirical belief is also that it is more or less universally believed. — John

But that's simply false. Again, if everyone believes the earth is flat, it's still round. And a way better justification for this is, say, looking at it from a distance and seeing what shape it is, not asking everyone what shape it is. They try to believe what is true, rather than trying to make true what is believed. I mean, to even consider this plausible makes a hash of the notion of any sort of inquiry other than survey taking, and of any attempt at advancement besides opinion-changing.

Observation is obviously subject to a different set of conditions than intuition is. — John

Observations are just certain kinds of intuitions -- we have certain feelings and then draw conclusions from them. What is the difference? Those feelings don't justify anything outside of themselves.

What do you think the skeptics have shown us except that our beliefs cannot be deductively certain? The certainty of empirical beliefs can only be relative, because they are contingent on observation, The certainty of moral beliefs is only as good as the intuitions they are based upon. I am not arguing for deductive certainty, so the skeptics' findings are irrelevant here. — John

The Skeptics have shown, not that such beliefs cannot be certain, but that thus far no means has been proposed to show that any one is any more likely than any other.

Can you give me any examples from history of cultures wherein the people unanimously agreed that, in general, murder, rape, child torture or sexual exploitation, or even theft, dishonesty, cowardice, disloyalty or refusal to work and contribute to the life of the community were OK practices within their own culture? — John

First off, this doesn't matter, because what you're committed to is actually far stronger -- you must believe that no community, past, present, or future, nor any possible community, could ever hold inverse values. This is what you must say if you think consensus is somehow what is required, or definitive of, the correctness of values. What's more, you have the same problem on a smaller scale so long as any two people, ever, at any time, have any value disagreement, even within a community. So providing examples isn't necessary, since your argument is flawed in a way that makes examples irrelevant. But even if it weren't, sure, people vary widely on whether it is okay to kill infants or the old, what constitutes rape versus use of one's property, whether torture is acceptable, what counts as theft and whether it's appropriate (see, taxation), and so on. To suggest otherwise is just profoundly sheltered.

Generally people cannot be wrong about their consensual observations such as that the sun is shining, the leaves are beginning to fall, the snows have come, it is windy today and countless other such common observations. — John

Of course they can. What a bizarre claim. Suppose we discovered the sun was a visual artifact and not a real object. Then we would have been very, very wrong about it.

But such things are ultimately determined by context; — John

That's not at all clear, and in any case, this could mean any number of things.

what could it possibly mean to say that disapproval of murder, child torture, dishonesty, cowardice and so on could be "wrong-headed"? What alternative standards could you offer to support such a contention, and on the basis of what could you justify them? — John

If it turns out those things are acceptable. Every decade people decide that things that were once deemed acceptable are now unacceptable and vice-versa. These people are not, and do not see themselves as, literally changing what is right and wrong by changing their opinion, but changing their opinion in light of a new moral sensibility and so discovering or taking seriously new moral truths. This is how they think of and present their motivations, and their desire to change them makes little sense otherwise.

The desire to limit language to an artificial subset of its expressive power isn't very enchanting, since you have to decide and make up what expressive capacities you want it to have, presumably using a more powerful meta-language for your new impoverished object language. The problem with this is that by the time we're done defining what we can say, we've said so much more, and much more interesting things. The artificial languages philosophers have traditionally been concerned with are just nowhere near as powerful or interesting as natural languages, and the latter's many features that were once considered 'defects,' like vagueness, have arisen as interesting features 'by design' in their own right. It is very hard to model these features formally, even though we all understand them intuitively, and it is hard to see what an artificial language can do for us except recapitulate that intuitive understanding.

You could create a technical language for specific purposes, which is basically what math is. But then, you probably aren't doing what you set out to do, which is limit the expressive power of language that can make metaphysical claims to something manageable and verifiable.

The logical positivist approach is unappealing in that it can only work by stipulating an arbitrary restriction on expressive power externally to that which it's trying to criticize. I agree that many ideas are worthless or gibberish, and am sort of a positivist at heart, but the best thing to do is first ignore these statements if already no one takes them seriously, and second, once they become influential enough to criticize, to do so internally, on their own terms. A positivistic reduction of language just isn't capable of this. To get the expressive power you need to show something is nonsense from the inside out, you need to adopt the expressive powers that our opponents (take themselves to) have.

It's a bit silly to be so attached to an old book. — andrewk

Not...really?

First of all, you're assuming a controversial principle of verification as if it were obvious.

Second of all, even if this held, the relevant moral fact would be the wrongness of murder, which is no more or less mysterious than any empirical fact. There is also no imaginable state of affairs that confirms or denies any 'factual' proposition (as the Skeptics have shown us), but for some reason people treat values as if they are different. This is in my opinion simply a prejudice -- empirical facts and value facts are equally inapprehensible, and it makes no sense to countenance one while being suspicious of the other, if you have any epistemological scruples at all.

Third of all, your position leads into obvious contradictions in that people can disagree, even unanimously disagree at different times, over what the relevant values are, which would mean that you'd be committed to affirming various contradictions, unless you adopt some sort of relativism about values by means of which they're constituted by whatever people (or most of people, I guess?) happen to believe at the time / place. But then this seems to conflate what people think with what is, which shows a basic misunderstanding of how belief works, that even the people who espouse the values you're looking at wouldn't agree with. That is, they would say they believe because it's so, not that it's so because they believe (and life would be quite convenient, don't you think, if we could make valuable whatever we wanted to just through consensus -- why not just all agree that whatever happens to us is valuable or good, and so solve all problems forever? Of course, because it doesn't work that way).

Finally, even if everything you said was true, this would go exactly no way to establishing that universal approval of some value does anything to establish that approval as right-headed.

He seems to be saying that group consensus is somehow constitutive of objective truth, not that it's an indicator of it -- of course, it isn't either of those, so I don't know why the distinction should be important. But even if it were the latter, it wouldn't be the former.

What other criteria could there be to decide that something is objectively morally right or wrong than the fact that everyone or very nearly everyone thinks that it is right or wrong? — John

In general, the inference scheme 'everyone thinks x' to 'x' is invalid. People having an opinion doesn't make the opinion so. If everyone believes the world is flat, it's still round.

I think that people all (or even almost universally) valuing something is precisely the only possible ground for claiming that something is objectively valuable. — John

Not at all. Just because everyone values x, doesn't mean x is valuable. They can simply all be wrong. There are plenty of things in history that nearly everyone has been in agreement about and were demonstrably wrong about.

Also, I think that the claim that there are no objective values other than the sensory pleasures of the individual would certainly qualify as one form of moral nihilism. — John

That would be a form of hedonism, which seems on its face to be incompatible with nihilism, in that the former endorses and the latter denies some sort of intrinsic value.

Yes, our experiences can be "denied as irrelevant, misguided or illusory", but any such denial presupposes objective values beyond pleasure/pain, and could never be a position coherently held by an avowed nihilist. — John

I don't see why. The experiences could be denied as relevant without supposing that some other set of values would have to take their place.

That people objectively all value something isn't grounds to say that it is objectively valuable in any sense -- and even if it were, this would be a refutation of nihilism, since the existence of pleasure would make nihilism itself false.

It's also questionable whether pleasure is universally valued. There's a certain sense in which that's true, but it has to be carefully worded -- there's a sense in which the experiences creatures have are such that these experiences present pleasure as intrinsically valuable. To deny this would seem not to know what 'pleasure' means (in other words, 'pleasant' is synonymous with 'feels good,' meaning that our feelings present the pleasant as good, and must do so, or it wouldn't be pleasant). But it seems that someone could very well hold an opinion at odds with their own experiences, and deny those experiences had any grasp on the truth. Although our experiences present pleasure as valuable, we might nonetheless deny that pleasure actually is valuable, by saying our senses can't arbitrate these things. This in fact seems to me what a nihilist must say, on pain of contradiction.

In other words, pleasure is intrinsically valuable in the court of our experiences, but those experiences can always simply be denied as irrelevant, misguided or illusory. I don't think that's a smart position to take, but then, neither is nihilism.

He claimed that roughly for what we think of as 'external impressions' of the outside world, yeah. We'd also be capable of conjuring images actively out of our own imaginations, and having impressions that were as vivacious as external ones but were spun out of our own minds, as in dreams, hallucinations, and after-images (but these also would ultimately come from God in a way, since he effectively would control the operations of our bodies and brains).

Nihilism is a position that denies the existence of something, and so if we're talking about value nihilism, it denies the existence of (at least 'objective') values. But hedonism is precisely an affirmation of the value of pleasure. Historically the two are opposed – the classical hedonists were not nihilists at all, and I don't see any compelling reason for it to go the other way either.

Adler included Locke in his criticism of the empiricists, but says that Locke did acknowledge abstract thought, and that the other empiricists criticized him for his inconsistency. — anonymous66

Fair enough -- but Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes were all more thoroughgoing in their empiricism than Locke.

Adler's main point in chapter 2, is to claim that mankind has 2 distinct cognitive powers or faculties... the sensitive and the intellectual. — anonymous66

Again, I don't think that claim means much unless situated in some tradition he's trying to defend, which knowing Adler, will be Aristotelian-Thomistic, and will probably come with some metaphysical baggage that the uncontroversial fact that people think won't support.

The duality of the mind seemed to shift more toward passive and active, rather than sensory and intellectual, in the early modern era. The empiricists do recognize a certain duality, with receptive faculties juxtaposed against volitional ones. Whether on the receptive side, the denial of the ability to form abstract ideas ala Berkeley amounts to the assertion that mankind has no intellectual faculties is questionable.

I don't really take him seriously as a philosopher. He falls more into the apologist camp, cheerleading for a certain tradition and attacking its attackers, rather than having anything to say for himself. I read his book on how to think about God and just wasn't moved by it.

The comment about the empiricists might have some merit to it, depending on what you make the intellective faculties of the mind to be. My suspicion is Adler wants to equivocate between the obvious point that people can understand and judge (something the empiricists obviously never denied) and whatever specifically metaphysically charged, Aristotelian understanding of this simple fact that he takes it to require. As a mere observation in the differences between an Aristotelian and a modern empiricist (the latter being, surprise surprise, empiricist) isn't very interesting.

Nihilism and hedonism are typically incompatible, not synonymous.

\m/

Here's an example of the early 90s prog metal aesthetic developed right around the same time DT was making Images and Words. Very very similar style, but I prefer it. Still not crazy about the keyboard sounds in this era, or in general the way everything was produced.



Overall I wish the late 80's sound had survived, instead of what we got. It got insane in places. This was probably its apex:



Recommended for anyone who wants a really satisfying challenge. One of my favorite albums / tracks of all time.

I prefer the super early sound, but Images and Words is still good in the sense that it just has really good songwriting. If you don't like that early-90's aesthetic, though, there's just no getting around it. Wait for Sleep and Surrounded are examples of DT tracks with no flash at all, and they're impeccable. And even the stuff with more guitar soloing like Under a Glass Moon or Metropolis are pretty carefully composed.

That's as far as I'm willing to defend them, though...even Awake, which a lot of people like, IMO has some outright bad stuff. And after that all bets are off.

Sounds like it to me.

shrug

Impatient utopianism is the hallmark of the left.

It's changing a lot right now. I think its metaphysics are still under construction. We're witnessing 'world-making.'

It's more like, what you feel is the change.

As far as feelings, they're a kind of motion and all motions wear themselves out, or else they'd just be standing still. But they don't just wear themselves out in one direction -- you could say being tired 'fatigues itself' when the energy comes back. So nothing lasts forever and any particular good thing is going to end and not be good anymore, but that doesn't mean there's any guarantee of the eventual disintegration of everything.

Briefly, 20th century existentialism mistakes a revolt against a cultural heritage for a perennial human condition: the notion that the world is absurd is only sensical when framed against a background that expects a totalizing sense to be imposed on it, and when this pathos is removed, so is the feeling of absurdity.

Schopenhauer's thought is more timeless and interesting, but I'm not sure it covers or even pretends to cover the same ground. He was the first deconstructor of his own philosophy in Vol. 2 of WWR, though he probably didn't see it that way, and the notion of Will as timeless thing in itself starts to break down there. The kind of lack Schop. talks about has a metaphysical grounding, whereas the existentialist thesis is precisely that it is because of a lack of such a grounding. There is a difference between seeing the essence of man as willing, and seeing man as devoid of essence (prior to existence). In that sense I think there's no substantive agreement between the two views -- Schop. is religious, eternalistic, and salvific, the existentialists are atheistic, temporalistic, and revel in a lack of salvation.

Now this is what I'm talking about:

Pretty much all of the early albums down to Black Hand Inn are masterpieces of speed metal. — Thorongil

Yeah, they have a very recognizable and likable sound. Actually, there is a Running Wild tribute band called Blazon Stone, which instead of playing Running Wild covers, just makes new songs in the band's style. They're not bad. I'm also looking forward to the new album! Even thinking you can do metal without a drummer is ludicrous IMO, it's a real dealbreaker.

The "wall of sound" to create an atmosphere is deliberate in black metal and certainly takes some getting used to, but I love it. I play in a bedroom black metal band with my brother and we're in the midst of trying to record some stuff now. If you want, I could send you a link in a PM when it's done. I'd love to hear what someone who's metal-literate thinks about it. — Thorongil

Yeah, for sure. I don't really know that much about black metal, though. But I'd love to hear it.

I actually have a soft spot for Running Wild, Black Hand Inn was one of the albums that made me appreciate metal. It's sort of a shame what happened to them. I've always liked more traditional death metal, and a little bit of techy stuff, but black metal is a little hard for me -- I find the constant single-note tremolo picking and double bass drumming a little tedious, and it seems to focus more on atmosphere than songwriting at times. I really love the vocal style, though, it's really a cultural achievement. There's some symphonic black stuff like early Arcturus that is a little easier to swallow for me.

Yes, I was a huge metalhead back in the day, I liked traditional doom, USPM, NWoBHM, a little thrash and death, and especially the classic 'speed metal' sound. Later on I listened to a ton of prog metal, and largely stopped listening to metal b/c I became more interested in prog rock then jazz fusion then jazz. Lately I'm coming back to it and my tastes are becoming more traditional, digging the old power stuff, or straight up hard rock / heavy metal, even moving back a little bit into the blues rock and folk music that underlies it.

If you like muscular power metal, you could check out the older stuff like Agent Steel, Liege Lord and Jag Panzer. But they are a little rougher around the edges than Falconer, kind of like cult versions of Judas Priest.

I agree about the cheesiness, but maybe less so now -- cheesiness is a state of mind, and the feeling of it goes away once you occupy the tradition from within.

It seems that if Schopenhauer's ethical philosophy were consistently and rigorously applied, birth would stop as a result of sex stopping. That can be seen as a kind of practical anti-natalism, which is perhaps more powerful than a theoretical anti-natalism ever can be.

Nowadays when sexual activity and birth are becoming slowly uncoupled, this might have to be qualified. But I don't think it would be a stretch to say that the denial of the Will is also incompatible with purposeful impregnation or generation of new life in any way, since the Will is the Will to life.

Power metal gets a bad rap because of the legions of copycat bands in Europe and South America, but a lot of it's pretty solid. Breitenhold is dedicated to reproducing the sound of early Blind Guardian, which was one of the better acts (still good now, but too pompous for my tastes).

There's some really good power stuff, but I think a lot of it wouldn't be considered power metal by today's standards because the genre has changed so much.

:)

The view I take on this is that the Democrats are the leading cultural force in America, and the left is the leading cultural force in the world. The right, and Republicans, in America, hate their opponents with resentment, while the left, and Democrats, hate their opponents with snobbery. The condescension in the article, and in this thread, speaks to that -- whatever the disagreements, the leftists do not see rightists as genuine people capable of thinking in the same way they are. That's the bottom line. And once in a while you get populist revolts against that sentiment, which are promptly put down by the ruling class, and their 'plantation voters' (ethnic minorities). I don't think economics has that much to do with it.

I think you can understand it in a way, but not on the world's terms and so inevitably not on the terms of the aesthetes themselves.

The doxa rules the world, and literally sets its limits. How does the doxa change? Well, as the transcendental condition of the world it has no conditions, and so to modify the gospel of john 'the doxa blows where it pleases.' A change in opinion -- where you're told what new thing you're to think -- is a mystical experience for someone who believes the world is all there is, since it is world-shaping.

Here's a fun and cheesy song explaining the phenomenon, where the doxa is called 'the tune:'

Sometimes there's no tomorrow
Sometimes you hate the day
You feel there may be something
That intends to screw with fate

Take a look at what surrounds you
Each time you watch the news
Your mind gets set by someone's will
A template you can't choose

Love and desire, dry ice or fire
Don't you just want to flee their magic spell

No mercy for the nations
Two people are at war
Beliefs divide the dream they share
Of peace and harmony

Their eyes look up to heaven
Address our God in prayers
Their souls exposed
They may decease by emperor's decree

Look, how they're crying
There's no denying
Now change the channel
On your remote control

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who share the fear
On a frequency for you and me
You stare but you can't see
You hear and you agree

We're all here for a reason
So we can't just hang around
There's so much left to see and learn
Make way for common ground

And those who head the wrong way
Will rate as minor class
As castaways they'll render fools
When the horsemen come to rule

Strike the last hour in their glass towers
Infinite lust has made the curtain fall

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who share the fear
On a frequency for you and me
You stare but you can't see
You hear but you agree, you agree

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who share the fear
On a frequency for you and me
You stare but you can't see
You hear but you agree

And the tune goes on eternally
For those who long to hear
And those freaks sense they're superior
We're hypnotized, you see
They wave and we agree

The issue of staying in or leaving the EU is far too important an issue to be put to a national referendum and voted on by the uninformed and those who might be motivated by emotions or bigotry. — Michael

Been hearing this a lot from the remain camp -- interesting look into the psychology of that side. The referendum was, broadly speaking, a nationalistic revolt against globalism and a democratic revolt against authority, at least in the popular mind. Maybe that's not what it actually was, but the psychology of the two sides seems pretty consistent on this. The remainers protest that people (especially working class people) don't know what's good for them, that a thing of any importance shouldn't be put to a vote, that people inhabiting a country have no right to self-determination but should be grateful to be determined by rulers, etc.

I'd like to suggest that precisely these attitudes are what fuel and keep hot the leave sentiment and the rise of nationalism. And let's be real, you're all being pretty repulsive right now (on many other things too, like claiming that older people shouldn't vote [nor,I guess, should any demographic that votes for the wrong policies]). When looking at statements like these, a leaver can genuinely ask, well, why shouldn't we despise you? You clearly hate us and have an active interest in taking away our political powers, as well as the powers of the British people to retain their own sovereignty under their own political impetus. So who are you going to blame when you're this appalling, and the authoritarian knives come out when, for the first time in decades, you are the losers of the culture war?

Shucks, I was really hoping to talk to you about philosophy, too.

Well, I'm not being funny about it. And yes the epicenter is college campuses, but it's all over the internet too, if you go to the right places. If you want to see what he cutting edge of history is you look at what the Protestants or I guess post-Protestants are doing. *shrug*