Have you ever been in love? Can you TELL me what that is about?

There are things which are simply beyond the reach of our intellect (pretty much everything :). To me, to be forced to live in a world defined by our critical thinking alone truly defines what my mentor used to tell me repeatedly, "Man makes his own Hell on this Earth." — synthesis

Of course, you're right. I only add that what is spoken is brought into understanding. I can talk about being in love, explain the physiology of it, throw in adjectives and metaphors, and so on, but these just dance around what is in itself, entirely beyond the saying. All things are like this, as you say, not just love, or intense emptions, but everything: my dog and cat, the clouds in the sky, the cup on my desk, and so on.
I claim we live in transcendence, for all things are a presence that is irreducible. This is not a popular idea, though.

Value is not ineffable any more than the ‘objective ‘ is transcendentally true. Moore was a Kantian, still caught up in a subject-object , feeling-thinking split. Value cannot in any shape or form be separated from that which would supposedly be understandable or existent independently of it. The same is true of the relation between affectivity and intentional meaning, which is what we’re really talking about here anyway. Heidegger realized precisely this, which is why he didn’t think of ‘value’ as mysterious in some way that cognition or perception is not. Value is befindlichkeit, how we find ourselves in the world, how things have pragmatic meaning and significance for us. — Joshs

I think it is right to say things are, as I take Heidegger to claim, of a piece: concepts, pragmatics, value, meaning (Dewey said the same); and it is not my intention to take metavalue as some kind of impossible ontology apart from all entanglements (which would the worst kind of dualism I suppose). I put matters of drawing ontological lines between things in suspension, but would like to take an analytical look at experience just to see what is there, plainly. Take a lighted match, apply it to the finger, and observe, apart from all presuppositions that would make a claim to it (which of course would remind one of Husserl, or perhaps of analytic philosophers' concept of qualia, or see Dennett's rather stark use of 'phenomenon' in his paper on qualia, and so on).

I mean, what is it As pain, and I care not at all how hermeneutically entangled it is otherwise, or whether belongs to a temporally structured event in which existence is predelineated, preconceptualized, or whether knowledge is inherently pragmatic. All off the board. It is the screaming pain I wish understand for what it is. I find this: When I break Wittgenstein's maxim to "pass over in silence" the whole affair, I find language that does not speak what value is any more than it can speak the color yellow as yellow. But there is one thing that does issue from the pain, and that is an injunction not to inflict this on to others nor myself. It is an injunction that is not contingent, as if "the world" were speaking, as if it were written on tablets by God.

I suspect this, contradicting myself from earlier, is the only Real ontology.

What you can learn, takes place before your critical thinking mind engages. Once it kicks-in, it alters reality into your personal reality which is simply incapable of figuring out much of anything. After all, how long would it take you to figure out the forth root 35467.94324 to the tenth place in your head? Compare that to the non-thinking mind that can process an infinite amount of information each moment. — synthesis

The "non thinking mind"? And what is this if not a thought in your head about something you observe. Note that every time you take up something about consciousness, you do so IN consciousness: "non-thinking" is a unit of language you learned, and when your understanding turns to identifying this, it turns where? to more language.
Did you think this was about the mysterious processes that underlie language and thought? TELL me what they are, emphasis on "telling". The point is, at best, observations show that actuality is not a language event, but such things are "empty" to the understanding if the attempt is made to conceive of them outside of language. The understanding is a "bundled" affair in which thought and sense intuition come together, as a piece, if you will. You may, as I see it, posit that there such things apart from what thought can say, speculate, analyze and so forth, and I think this right, but then you will be on the threshold of metaphysics, and would referring to affairs beyond what can be witnessed.

Yea, but these are inseparably intertwined. Value isn’t an ineffable internality, it’s a function of intersubjective patterns of relation , and questions concerning dualism and monism, the real and the relative are directly relevant to questions of value. — Joshs

But then, the "meta" end of value is just this ineffable "property" or as Moore put it, non natural property. Putting value into its contexts, theoretical, practical, invites discussion about everything BUT value. Is value Real? Then, what is real, and then follows the categorial move to "totalize" (Levinas borrowed from Heidegger, I think) which is away from the truly mysterious nature of value (that is, the pains, joys, miseries, celebrations, fascinations, interests, anxieties, terrors, and so on).

Perhaps value is effective in evolutionary accounts. No doubt. But what IS it that we are talking about that is so good for reproduction and survival? What are the descriptive features of, say, being tortured, qua the tortuous experience itself?

There are literally an infinite number of stimuli coming at you each moment. Do you believe that your brain is taking the time to "think" about all of these stimuli and then figure out what to do or are you just "doing it." — synthesis

One has to see that the claim there is an interpretative backdrop, a "predelineation" in place that defines the world when you are in your daily affairs do not reveal themselves in the explicit conscious event. They are implicit, just as the confidence that the sidewalk beneath your feet is solid to the step in every step you take is present even though you are not explicitly attending to it: You have stepped many times on many sidewalks, the aggregate effect of this making for the current confidence. We have such "aggregate consciousness" in all of our affairs, otherwise we would be like James' "blooming and buzzing" infantile perceivers.
You're driving? Is this some primordial event, or rather: is it learned, practiced and familiar that in the space of the moment only seems immediate?

Saying they are a mixture doesn’t make things clear.
Objectivity is a matter of intersubjective agreement on events which appear in different guises to each of us. We learn to treat our own vantage on an event as just an aspect of the ‘objective’ object , the ‘same’ object for all of us, when in fact it is never ‘same for all’ except as an abstraction, albeit a very useful abstraction. What is certain is that for each of us experience of that world is shaped by constrains and affordances such that some ways of interacting with the world are more useful relative to our purposes that others. The criteria of objectivity change over time as cultural an scientific practices change. — Joshs

But then, what is the bottom line? For me, there was a good reason Wittgenstein both denied talk about ethics at the foundational level, yet posited divinity (admitting it was indeed odd to do so. Kierkegaard taught him how odd this was).
Rick Roderick turned to his psychiatrist once and asked, "Why are we born to suffer and die?" An excellent question, to which the psychiatrist replied, "?!#$%&&$#."
It is THE question of consciousness. All others "beg" this question implicitly, the question being, why bother at all even asking? Our metaphysical haunt is not, good lord!: Dualism or Monism or whether ideas subsist in the Real, or if human consciousness is reducible or derivative; it is value and its meta-value consummation. Buddhists essentially understood this long ago. I suspect the Hindus and their mysterious metaphysics, sans the mythology, were closer to the truth, though: there is much, much more to our consciousness, or if you like, to heaven and earth than in your philosophy, Horatio.

The moment after Reality is perception-altered but before our critical thinking begins would seem to be the closest we can get to actual Reality. Although it has already become our personal reality (due to processing by our senses), it's must be considerably purer than what happens once the full monte of our intellect transforms it into some convoluted dystopia.

Mediators concentrate on this moment and often find it to be a portal to another place altogether. What is happening in this moment and where does it lead? — synthesis

It leads to itself, after all, when you encounter a thing in the perceptual moment it is already taken up in thought. A glance is inherently interpretative, so talk about what it is that is separate from thought becomes an exercise in metaphysics: No one has ever witnessed a "thoughtless perceptual object".

On the other hand, there is "presence" there that is not thought (see Kierkegaard e.g.). That we can apprehend this as it is rather than AS something else, language and logic, is, I think, indicative of our own meta-self.

The husk of the acorn is analogous to human personality. We are not born with it but it is acquired in life. It is the source of the OPINION of ourselves. We re born with what we ARE. The healthy kernel of life within the husk is analogous to the seed of the soul which has the chance to develop and become an oak or in this case, to become evolved Man. — Nikolas

Ah, the soul. Pray, elaborate.

The seed of the soul is connected by a vertical line to its source. Where our personality is guided by appearance as with materialism, the seed of the soul is nourished by the experience of vertical truth. — Nikolas

Fine, but tell me more about the soul, I mean, what there is in experience that gives warrant to this notion as a meaningful one. We begin with what we witness, not with metaphors and assumptions and metaphysics.

As we are, our personality is the dominant part of our lives while the inner man remains in the background and doesn't grow. It is possible that a person can consciously strive to awaken the inner Man containing the seed of the soul by weakening the reactive dominance of our personality. Instead of being limited to animal REACTION they can become capable of conscious ACTION. They can become conscious of the forest rather than being fixated on the trees. — Nikolas

It's not that I disagree with all of this, rather, I don't know its foundation beyond the arbitrary positing of the soul. To argue the case, one has to begin with what is there, present and "at hand" so to speak. From this, one moves outward.

The problem is order and value. how do you value a moment compared to an eon or infinity. how do you value a quark compared to a planet. For us humans we have to be able to quantify and qualify things and put them in order to understand some form of algorithm or story that makes sense to us.
What I'm calling existence is outside our conscious awareness (self) and hence cannot be valued within existence or our value systems.
The problem may be (relating to Constance's issue) that your looking for meaning where their is none. Existence doesn't present questions or answers, it just 'is'. What it is everyone and anyone will question but there is no substance or temporal 'fix' we can put on it because it is outside our knowledge and perhaps our understanding of what it is, so it does not fit into the categories, orders and values we have for all other things, there is no interconnective or relational connection to it as compared with all other things within it. It is as definitive as we have got, it is the base of our being the base of our universal understanding.

What is in the world and the interaction of self in the world, everything we do, feel ,think and be is another story of dissection, division, definition, purpose and reason. This is where the complexity of uniqueness, individualism, ism's, social beliefs, systems of belief, and just being in existence itself lies. — Peter Paapaa

Not sure why I'm looking for meaning where there is none. Clearly, meaning is there, in indulgence, the rapture, bliss, suffering, pain, and so on, IN the world. There is no mistaking this: right there, in my pounding headache or the Haagen Dazs I had for dessert. In terms of the sheer "presence" of these, I take them as foundational and irreducible.

As to the notion of "just is" keep in mind that physics held a consensus at the end of the 19th century that believed for the most part there was little else to find out in the field in terms of its fundamentals. "Just is" is itself a theoretical term. When we speak of what IS we put in play a history of thought handed to us culture and language.

This is true with philosophy as much as anything else. Consider the difference between Eastern and Western thought. the trick, though is to find common ground. After all, they are talking about the same world, it's just that there is this persistent "what it is" body of paradigms that gets in the way. The difficulty lies in bringing them together, and phenomenological thinking does this.

Imagine, I said, that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as the acorn. Let us further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon you notice that after a while they crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce acorns which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful! — Nikolas

Since the acorn is a metaphor, the merit of acornology lies with its borrowed explanatory powers, and to me, it doesn't really capture the analysis of the self. True, cultivating better acorns is roughly like improving oneself, but the devil is in the details and this is not brought out by, well, acorns.

"Chemical analysis" of acorns? What are you (or he) suggesting? This is what needs to be explained.

We only know self in juxtaposition to the world and also as part of it. The self has no known material existence that inside or outside the world. Many will provide component parts to show existence of self, this is not relevant. Only you can know self as you do. you cannot know others 'self' because you cannot be other anything. Hence 'self' is the unique you and inclusive of all. . — Peter Paapaa

Fine. Now what IS it? When you put your attention to the self, its apparent descriptive features, what is there to "see"? this presents questions like, what is the meaning of meaning? For the first thing encountered is the fact that things are not just there, but they are important, we care. But what is this caring about? It is about things in the world, but the caring about things presents the question as to what there is in things to care about, and the matter turns to value, or, the value of value: We bring value into the world. It is the self that makes things meaningful, both conceptually and valuatively. The self is the center of all meaning in the world.
What does this mean?

Have you considered this question from the point of view of the "Great Chain of Being"?

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Chain_of_Being

The Great Chain of Being describes the hierarchy of being and its many levels. Man is a microcosm. Man's being is structured like the universe. Plato described our higher and lower natures in the chariot analogy suggesting that the corruption of the dark source is the source of all our difficulties.

Regular ethics tells a person what to do but metaethics describes what we ARE: But it requires a person existing as the three parts of the tripartite soul to become inwardly balanced. Man exists out of balance so cannot experience metaethics but responds to indoctrinated or acquired ethics.

The goal of metaethics is conscious evolution; the evolution of our out of balance level of being into a higher quality of conscious evolution or inner unity along the Great Chain of Being where metaethics or objective conscience would be the norm. — Nikolas

If you want to think about evolution and metaethics, then perhaps De Chardin is the best way to go. At least he recognizes qualitative divisions in evolving creatures. Really, it is here, in the evolved features that the issue lies with. I mean, before there is talk about a hierarchy of Being, we need to look closely at the evidence before us that is the grounding of any and all metaphysical thinking, because all things have their final justification is what is clear and present. Metaphysics can get very messy and preposterous and you find yourself with your head in the clouds wondering how things got this way. This happens when lose touch with what is there, in the world primordially. First, there is the experience and then there is the question! The question opens possibilities. For me, I first look to the actuality of an ethical problem, and determine its parts. I find at the center there is the defining Real: the value. then Wittgenstein, Mackie, and others make their contribution. THEN one may be tempted to draw conclusions about the "meta" nature of evolution, its teleology, perhaps.

The point of this is to first establish qualitative distinctions in ontology BEFORE one makes extravagant elaborations. Pain is there, in one's midst. What makes it ethical at all? The ethics of pain qua pain is at issue. It is not in the descriptive facts, as facts are simple states of affairs, no greater of worse than any other, sitting there on the logical grid.

If one thinks our experiences can be sublime, profound, deeply important, somehow, and these are acknowledged as evolved features, then the structure of evolution must include this. Chain of Being? Would this not mirror the hierarchy within, which is, after all, the source of all speculative thinking?

Using just words? Quite herme-tic as well, isn't it? — Raul

Not just words, but observations of the structures of experience. Hermeneutics says that knowledge is deferential: terms always have their meanings tied to other terms. To think at all is to take up the world AS a symbolic system, and to think about "things in the world" is not a reference to some alien ontology like "substance" or "nature" but exists in a problem solving matrix that interacts in "the world". Such a term as "nature" suggests that what is natural is the bottom line for ontology. Hermeneutics claims that this term belongs to an interpretative matrix and it is here the bottom line is to be found" it is a term that is "regionally limited" and this is not what philosophy is looking for. Nature is a broad and inclusive concept, granted, but it is not foundational. You see, before one can discuss what is natural, you have to go through the very faculties process what one receives. It would be nice if the brain were like a mirror of nature (Rorty's book name, by the way), but just look at this "natural" object, the brain, I mean, I think you really have to be honest about this: that thing is entirely opaque, and this is working with a very clear physicalist view of objects. The brain is an object! You see this point. All the advanced chemistry you can imagine is not going to come to the aid of making two objects, my brain and my cat, come together epistemically.
Analytic philosophers like Dennett know this! You ask Dennett about this and he will simply shrug his shoulders, for he knows, as Wittgenstein claimed long ago: such questions are impossible! for one would have to step out of epistemic relations to "say" what this is, and the saying is inherently epistemic.

I take this as unassailably true, though, keeping in mind that there are NO unassailable truths in the absolute sense.

Your intuitions and language are aggregates of problem solving that you learnt while you grow up during your childhood. I would even say more, you would never be able to talk or conceive the linguistic categories if you are not exposed to a family context where people talk. Language is not trascendental and the categories we use are contingent and relative to the problem solving of our lives. — Raul

But all of this talk about childhood resides in a terminological setting that is hermeneutical. You have to give up the idea that when you perceive a thing there is some "absolute" connection. Dennett would entirely deny this. The "really and truly" part of what is is hermeneutics, and the "input" is, the moment it makes its entrance into the brain thing, nothing at all as to what that thing is if the brain were removed from the account of what the thing is.

If you think this is intuitively contradictory, if you will, then you're right. There is something IN the understanding that affirms existence qua existence. This, I am arguing, is value. Existence reveals its true nature in the value-meanings of the world and what intuitively asserts itself in the ultimate question about "what is" is value-meaning. Without value, the question would be ontologically no more meaningful that, way, ones and zero in a computer binary system.

Douglas Adam's question he poses to Deep Thought, of life the universe and everything, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, value.

Would be interesting to see what he would say about superposition states of particles and about bosons and fermions. For me it looks like Kierkegaard's thinking has been overestimated. He was pushed by the christian religions as he served their purposes. But this is another discussion. — Raul

No, it is this discussion. Take a look at his Concept of Anxiety. Of course, we are in the early 19th century, but this matters not at all. Note that Daniel Andler reveals that Cartesian problems remain entirely at a distance from CURRENT theory! Descartes??? Dualism? That was the 17th century.

Of course, K's Anxiety is a difficult work. Most fear to go.

This is you saying those things I talk about are not in those systems. I of course disagree. — Raul

But the assumption that a tree is still a tree when all experience manufacturing faculties are removed (I leave the scene) is a claim that one knows beyond knowing! It is kind of crazy. I think this clear...as a proverbial bell.

But phenomenology can be conceived within empirical world thanks to heterophenomenology. It is a branch of cognitive naturalism. — Raul

so, if you will, tell me how, briefly, cognitive science gets my cat into my brain. Note that the moment you lift an explanatory finger that you are bound make explicit references to what is NOT my brain.

It is not that cognitive science is wrong. Not at all. The point here is that this is speculative science. not philosophy. This is not the bottom line of inquiry. This is a Dennett shrugging his shoulders, then getting on with arguing AS IF the natural world were in fact the natural world. As analytic philosophers all do. Ask an epistemologist about affirming "P" in "S knows P". S/he will tell you, well, you have to have P adn that's it! They ignore more penetrating "Kantian" questions simply because they know these go places their logical rigors dare not go! Levinas, Husserl, Fink, Heidegger and on and on; analytic philosophers do not go here because they just like working on puzzles, flexing cognitive muscle. Whole books written on Gettier problems! Nonsense, really. Degrades the entire enterprise.

Heterophenomenology is not "existing my interior". It is working under the assumption that your brain and my brain functions the same way so I can study yours to make conclusions about mine. — Raul

But of course you have to go through your own experience to get to the Other's brain. How is this done, again?

No technical language, but the naturalistic presumption. Yours is metaphysical, mine is naturalistic. — Raul

Explain, please, vis a vis the above.

We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one. — Raul

We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one. — Raul

Not sure what is winning. It is more like more of the same under the aegis of new language. Dualism? Still talking about dualism. Ignoring Kant. It just SOUNDS like progress. Never, ever get past Wittgenstein.

Of course, he is humble and realistic, but he follows what I think is the right way... philosophy but with science. Not a philosophy that tries to positioned itself above everything as the king of the world with their anthropocentric views of things (meta-things are good examples). Andler puts nature above anything, being humble pays off. — Raul

Being humble does not undo what he is saying. Nice try. Remember, it is NOT just Descartes. He runs through many ideas taken up by contemporary philosophers, and it is not like a physicist talking about Newton. These basic philosophical issues are not one whit closer to being solved because you will never get beyond the cat to me.

Don't you think this is a "religious" absolutist way of defining philosophy? it appears toas your position your capabilities of thinking above any real, above nature. As Daniel Andler and naturalists say, many philosophers position themselves above nature. This simple thing is what naturalism fixes, putting below nature, approach nature in a humble way. Same way science does. — Raul

Not religious. Just looking to what is presupposed by knowledge claims, that is, looking into the logical structure of such a claim. You say C-fibers firing, e.g., and then, fiber? What is this? I mean, what is the thought that utters it, the intuitive foundation of the world that I receive, what can and cannot be affirmed foundationally? And so on. One does not look at the world for such answers, simply at what must be the case in order for thought and science and being in the world to be the case. Of course, it is accepted that there is a world, but only to the extent that such a world presents itself in the most "immediate" way, as presence. Beyond the analysis of is metaphysics: affirming what is present is also a non presence. Now we are in metaphysics.

Yes, together with philosophy, naturalistic one. Are you telling me a phenomenology conceived as only using human reasoning is more powerful? No, quantum mechanics experiments could never be understood using any phenomenological reasoning... goes beyond naif human intuitions. — Raul

No, Phenomenology does NOT cancel science in the least; at all! It simply says that here, you are not at the ground level of inquiry. There is a question that is something of an elephant in the room, however: When we make observations of the world, we are presented with what is not experience, even though this cannot be confirmed, understood in any model whatsoever! "Outthereness" is not an abstract transcendental, but an IMPOSING transcendental. This is what all th fuss is about in Derrida (?), Husserl, Heidegger(?), Levinas, and others because, for some, the Other is an ethical transcendence. The question is, what IS there that is MORE than the totality of experience? The issue goes to Time. More on this as desired, but it is the basis of my metaethical claims.

Are you serious or being cynic here? — Raul

Philosophy has been going on a very, very long time. Very hard to thumbnail this. We live not in a world of things, but of events. to step beyond the boundaries of an event is to cease and desist making the event in question, aka, experience. How do we do this? Meditation. the trouble with philosophy as you have been reading it, is that it can never objectify the self totally, subsume the self under it Totality fo understanding. It wants to do this, but the egoic center can never be made into an object, and all along, it is the self's Being that hs been at issue. Other things are not actualities, hence the nonsense of words like "material" and "substance" which are at nst placeholders for thigs unspeakable, at worst bad metaphysical assumptions, as if calling a thing natural could establish a basis for the Real.

Likely typos, not proofreading, sorry, no time.

What about the superposition principle? Incoherent state of particles? — Raul

The same as it is with all concepts: it is hermeneutically grounded. Talk about quantum mechanics is first language, and it is here that phenomenology stakes its claims. Physics, even the most cutting edge, are not ontologically basic. What is basic is the construction of thought and the world at the level of original generative description; it is Kant, or rather, Husserl and Eugene fink's Sixth Meditation carrying on Kantian idealism, that takes center stage. An idea of any kind is a taking the world up AS, and an in this phenomenological ontology, the phenomenon is a bundled "event". How this is explained differs across the board, but it is clear to me that the eidetic dimension of an object pragmatic and the field of Being that comprises all things, that is the "what it is" is pragmatic, a body problems solved (ready to hand). You observe a hammer, realize implicitly its nature as something settled, familiar, "known intuitively," that is, immediately, always already: this is our "sense of reality" which is a lifetime of pragmatic successes, or "consummations" (Dewey). This account reduces reality to an aggregate problem solving, it "region spatially desevered" when encountered (a little Heideggerian terminology that I won't repeat. He really wanted a break with everything traditional and this makes him theoretically alien to standard discussions).

I think he is right. I think Richard Rorty and the pragmatists align with Heidegger, and give us a startlingly compelling account for the answer to the question, what is Real? It is hermeneutical pragmatics.

BUT: there is a rub! And this is Kierkegaard, or begins here: There is "something" here in my midst in the object that is not pragmatic, and this is actuality. Notice the paradox: A "say" actuality, but in the saying I subsume in language the very thing I am trying to, errr, performatively dismiss. The saying and the thinking IS the performance and I can't ever "get to" the actuality beneath the terminology, but there is no mistaking that this actuality of a cat is not a concept, not a pragmatic "eidetic affair of an actuality" (Husserl)
Here it gets complicated. Time becomes the structural center.

I have to insist here, I see this happening in other artificial systems we humans create. In engineering and physics we call them complex systems. Complex systems have the capacity of new properties and capabilities to emerge within them. Properties and capabilities impossible to predict. One good example are the Convolutional Networks that learn to recognize objects in images. Nothing metaphysical but just physical, physics of information. And those complex systems are heuristic and stochastic as our brain is. — Raul

Interesting to note: You are such a system, and talk about things that are not in or of such systems is really what metaphysics is. Freud's psychoanalytical constructions of ego, id and superego is considered meta psychology. I mean, look at it like this: if one wants to localize events at the level of basic questions, saying here is a tree, there is an application possibility for the concept of "convolutional networks that learn to recognize objects in images" all of these begins at ONE locality, and this is the foundational level of philosophical inquiry: the experiential matrix of a self. One never, at this level of discussion, even observed an object that is free of cognition and affect, such a thing has never even been witnessed once! To talk like this is an abstraction from the source, which is experience.

It is not that talk about the theoretical structures of thought in computer science modeling is meaningless. Such a claim would be patently absurd. But it is to say that in doing so you are not thinking at the level of basic questions, the ones that look into the presuppositions of empirically based theoretical systems. As I see it, one has not crossed the threshold into philosophy until the focus turns to foundational questions, and here we encounter hermeneutics.

But this "otherness" and the "me" is another mental object, maybe the highest level one but as any other that emerges during childhood. If you would grow up in the forest (like Frederick II in 13th century did with many children) without any contact to other humans, no contact to human language it is very likely you idea of the others, your "self", would be very very different and you would not have the instruments to make the questions you are making here. This is to say that it is the culture and the environment you grow up that determines your Self and how you are in the world. So this example illustrates as well that this "otherness" and this "me" is a reflexion, a literal mirror-reflexion of the "other" humans that your brain recognize being like you (same body, same gestures, capabilities...). 2 mirrors opposite one to the other. No surprise they generate the idea of infinite like it happens in the infinite images reflected in 2 confronted mirrors. — Raul

Sure. I think you treat phenomenology the way Dennett does in part of his qualia paper, as another word for qualia: what stands before us in the physical world has the sensory input and the conceptual form that put's it together. This sensory input, can it be acknowledged as it is independently of its concepts (to speak in Kant-ese)? That would be a way of referring to qualia, the "being appeared to redly."

Phenomenology is nothing like this, (though Husserl's epoche and the extraordinary claims he makes about "the thing itself" do need explaining. But not here unless you want to). All of our interhuman affairs remain as they are. Interpretation as to their meaning at the basic level, however, has changed dramatically. Phenomenology allows the world as it is to "speak" and prioritize, allowing meaning to dominate rather than empirical science paradigms in which meaning is localized as one event under the general rubric "the natural world". For a phenomenologists, the natural world is, analytically, a region of thought that circumscribes its own "domain"" if you want to talk about nature, then nature talk commences, specialized fields recognized, each with its distinct domain.

What is sought for in philosophy is the grounding of all domains, and this is Being. What is Being's domain? This specialized primordial domain is formally called ontology (despite this term's being coopted everywhere these days), and it has a history of metaphysics behind it. Phenomenology says Being is here and now, right before your eyes and in the analytic of experience.

No need, professionals in this field have already explained it and earn their lives explaining and making research to better explain how concepts are caused by external objects interacting with our brain. It is not yet digested by the pop-culture but it will come and as always in history, this paradigma-shifts happen in silence. Stanislas Dehaene (who works for French ministry of education) and Georg Northoff are good ones doing this. — Raul

All this is preanalytic by the standard imposed by existential thinking. Such researchers do not care about phenomenology, just as a geneticist does not care about Adlerian psychology.

No, here I think you make a fundamental mistake. What I can say is the result of scientific+philosophical studies of the subjective narratives of people, studying their subjectivity. Heterophenomenology successfully studies the subject as an object — Raul

Dennett will tell you that when he discusses such things, he implicitly dismisses, say, the Kantian objections. They all do. Quine despised Derrida, yet if you follow his thoughts about indeterminacy, you find yourself aligned with the conclusions of deconstruction (see David Golumbia's Quine, Derrida, and the Question of Philosophy). This is because this issue ran for over a hundred years and Russell and Moore got sick of it (Moore was a Kantian, then one day just asked, am I raising my hand? Looked at his hand and said, of course! following Diogenes who walked across the room to disprove Parmenides.

But then: One can read about heterophenomenology, acknowledge the sense of it, and still realize that while true, this or that big claim, the theoretical divide has not been crossed to basic questions. A philosopher like Rorty, whom I like because he straddles the middle so well, can on the one hand argue against phenomenology's intensionality--pain? where is the intension there?--, and presenting a monist view that looks a lot like what a physicist would put together (see, e.g., his view on Leibniz's brain tour of thought), but then, he takes Heidegger and Dewey and Wittgenstein (a phenomenologist? Not explicitly, but...) to be the greatest philosophers of the 20th century (and he adored the Kantian, Thomas Kuhn)! The thing is, Rorty's ontology is radical pragmatic phenomenology, and I think he is right: out thereness is nonsense if taken to be independent of the human contribution. I walk out of the room, and I take the cat with me, for "cat" is a pragmatic construct embedded in language and experience. That out there? Utterly transcendental and unspeakable. Rorty is the one who said, "how does anything out there get in here? is an impossible question, but only at the level of basic questions.

Dennett would say the same, or similar.

Sorry but yes we can and we do, again through heterophenomenology. Another way is looking at cases where the brain system breaks due to accidents or illness. Those case-studies are so helpful as well to kill so many prejudices about what we're. Good reference here is Ramachandran.
Do you know we can know your decisions before you know them (Libet)? Do you know we can induce a brain to be a religious brain (Ramachandran)? Do you know Capgras syndrome? Did you see in youtube the man with only 7-seconds memory? We can induce you the sense of presence of someone else just with some drugs altering you state of consciousness. A tumor can make you a pedophile (you can google it, real story).
These are cases that allow us to exit from our interior as these are like doors that open to what we're really are and how our brain cheat us :grimace: — Raul

Yes, I guess I these things. If you really think you can "exit" your interior you have two choices. One is to affirm that causality carries knowledge, is inherently epistemic, and you would have to say how this works. Another is to construct a metaphysics that does this. All we observe is not all there is, and "beneath" observed events there are knowledge relationships that make the essential connection. This sounds insane, but then, and this is where Rorty gets off the bus: 1) this "exteriority" that is present in our interior is, upon examination, something that subsumes our interior! 2) There is also a nondiscursive "intuition" in the affirmation of otherness that just won't go away in that it presents a picture of ourselves in the world that is a kind of simulacrum of the really Real.

I will not go into this unless you want to. It is very alien to one's familiar world.

It is very important, in my pov, to see that no matter how one slices it, you will never get beyond neurons and axonal connections and neurochemistry that fill the explanatory need, which is why I began with the cat. Brain talk does not get beyond this because this physicalist talk is presupposed. I look at the matter as one of opacity, clear and simple. There is a brain, and I am inside. There is no question that I am a physical brain manifestation inside a physical brain. This is just the opposite of metaphysics. Tell me abut the pathway from the cat to me. No need to be complex, just give me the rough detail, BUT, in full knowledge of the arguments here presented.

Doors? Wittgenstein rightly tells us that doors are first part of states of affairs, part of facts of the world. What is a fact? A propositional construction. There are no propositions "out there".

Ontological :-) I understand you use it here in its full metaphysical sense so I have to say nice metaphysical word but not epistemic value outside virtual illusive metaphysical systems. Sorry, here we diverge fundamentally. For me metaphysics is like an invented philosophical religion. I know it sounds strong, but it is how I see it. Well and many other philosophers. I do not subscribe to any meta-something view of things.
You can call me pragmatic. I would not accept this either. All this for me is completely obsolete terminology. I subscribe to naturalism that I'm quite sure you're not familiar with (see Daniel Andler and Sandro Nannini). — Raul

Pragmatists are not metaphysicians. Entirely the opposite. (See Rorty's Mirror of Nature.) And as to its being obsolete, this is simply the presumption that comes with placing oneself in the discussions that use contemporary technical language. Even old Kant, while his thoughts have had two hundred years of development and have been shred and pulverized over and over, has never been refuted in the essentials laid out. Heidegger's Being and Time is almost a hundred years old, but contemporary phenomenologists, many of whom are French (Nancy, Henry, Marion, et al) work in his long shadow. Note Andler's references to so many in the history of philosophy: all unsolved matters, their thoughts still, in his mind, contemporary; mind/body? Still haunting the analytic scene? Rather telling, I think, of the direction of their work.

I looked into Daniel Andler and read his Philosophy of Cognitive Science paper. First, he is French, which is surprising since the French are famously post Heideggarian phenomenologists. Anyway, I can see that he moves in circles outside of phenomenology, and this means there are a host of questions begged that are not acknowledged as such, and he admits the limitations of addressing these are due to space and his purpose.

Interesting: Looking for something enlightening as he peruses the history of cognitive theory. Mostly I am familiar. He is doing speculative science: let's assume the world is the world of our everyday lives, known in greater detail in our sciences. this is the assumption that begs the question. He says earlier: even the keenest defender of philosophical naturalism can see that a full naturalization of the mind delivered by cognitive science remains a distant prospect. He knows about that cat! that all such thinking runs into the cat problem which is there is NO demonstrable way out of phenomena, and all one can do is talk AS IF there were a way.

Yes agree, but science does paradigm shifts, progress, what ensures continuous and concrete progress. Philosophy has always had to follow, they go hand-to-hand but science dictates the reality. It is not the other way around. — Raul

No, empirical science has not done this at all. Philosophy is an apriori discipline. this gets forgotten because science gives us pain killers and cell phones. But really, it has little to do with authentic philosophy which looks to presuppositions.

And I subscribe to this, while I think Husserl and subsequent followers have gone too far with phenomenology. I'm anyway not an expert on this topic. — Raul

Expert? You don't have to teach Husserl to know what he says. It takes reading. Most analytic philosophers have not read much continental philosophy. Kant, but little more. This is why they don't really understand that the problems they are trying to solve have been rendered all but moot.

Yes I subscribe to this. — Raul

If you think the Other is beyond our totality, then you can only think naturalism is a defensible thesis preanalytically, like thinking that mountains are mountains, and stars are stars, and so on. Philosophy hasn't begun yet.

Wonderful!
Just to say, yes, religiously as God, and not religiously as the "existential delusion" — Raul

Not sure what an existential delusion is.

Agree. But would you agree that science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world?
Philosophy's role is that of consolation (Boezio's), about dealing with our inner needs of further existential explanation but most of the epistemic value comes from science. Well, nowadays philosophy is important as well to articulate what human civilizations want to become with all this science and technology challenging the foundations of our ethics, laws and politics. — Raul

Of course, I would say all of this is very important, indeed! But as to "science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world"?? it is quite out of its league. See earlier.

Value qua value... yeap!.
It is hard to build the bridge... but I think I'm almost there, thinking that value can be reduced to the homeostatic principle. Or, like I like to do, the other way around... Homeostasis importance has to be expanded as the main driver of existential value.
I know one could say... but homeostasis describes a biological thing, this is materialism... yes and this is the purpose of "naturalism" to get rid of materialistic prejudices and expand the powers of nature! A very much unknown nature that we are discovering is beyond any existential-human claim. — Raul

I think this is the hope of analytic philosophy in general, that through discussions about what our working concepts can mean and can "hold" in terms of novel theory. My view is this may be entertaining, but that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Philosophy has reached its end, in fact, it "reached" this when Buddha found enlightenment. One has to realize some basic things about the work of wisdom: in the end, it is clear that the bottom line for inquiry into the nature of the self and its world is not cognitive; cognition is a tool that seeks out value. The point to all things lies with the value they produce, putting the issue squarely on an issue into the nature of value, meaning, importance.

It's my standard grudge against theists, it has nothing to do with Kierkegaard specifically. — baker

Okay. But K is by no means typical. His Attack on Christendom rails against the banality of middle class Christianity. He thought the medievals has it right with their singularity of devotion.

What is material Constance? I think you're very reductive or do not understand contemporary physics if you think as material world as bounded to the necessity of casual sufficiency.
I could understand you say this 100+ years ago... not after relativity and all the rest... — Raul

This is not an issue in contemporary physics. And causality is not intended to reflect any advance beyond the apriori principle of sufficient cause, that all things subsist in events that cannot be conceived ex nihilo. The only thing that you could bring to bear on the issue at hand would be something that could be a knowledge bearing medium, like the hand written commandment from God. I don't suppose you have an argument for this, but then, even if you did, the conditions for knowledge claims would still be there: there are the tablets, there is you. It would only be the arbitrary assumption that God put the tablets before you that affirms the knowledge that there are tablets at all.

There is then the matter of quantum entanglement. but I have never heard that this can apply to bridge the gap between objects and the perceptual equipment of an epistemic agency. But then again, even if this were somehow implicated in an attempt to make such a connection, one would never get beyond Wittgenstein and the rest who place all knowledge claims within the the framework of the structures of meaningful utterances, i.e., logic. the "aboutness" of a proposition regardless of the hard science context in which it is made is something that cannot reach beyond its own nature. There are no, say, conditional grammatical forms "out there".

Of course, as I say those causes are the mental objects you learned during childhood. Your chilhood is when you internal world gets built. — Raul

Of course they are. And you are quite right to say so, but this kind of knowledge claim about the causal world and a descriptive account of the way things "cause" a child to develop is exactly what is in question. This conditioning: what is its nature? How is it even possible to conceive of it such that objects as independent of perceptual conditioning can be the objects in perception?

it is not that I think there is nothing out there independent in this way. One has to admit that there is something to this otherness of objects, they are not me, but outside of me, or, they transcend me. I certainly realize there are things there that are not me, but the moment I take up the matter, the object, in the faculties of my understanding, I bring the object into this "totality" of my conceptualized experience.

And it gets worse. The question then turns to an analysis of this interiority, and this has as its center, TIME. Hence the book's name, Being and Time. There are no things, only events.

My position is this: there is no world, only worlds.

Yes it does. — Raul

Oh, thank God! Please tell me how this works so I can call the newspapers.

We call it memory, neural-traces that keep our memories and form our memories as the memories of the computers but in the brain and with neural networks. (have you watched the second Blade Runner?).
Artificial Neural Networks do it as well. — Raul

A terrific film. Alas, not useful here.

Yes, there is a model, the one you build during your childhood as your brain interacts with the world. — Raul

Model? Model of what? All that you can say is composed IN the very mind that is supposed to be the object of your explanation!! You do see how this works, right? I mean, you are never going to get this to work: All that you can say about the real "brain" that produces pain, ideas, consciousness and so on, is conceived IN the very thing that is being reduced. You cannot reach out of phenomena to affirm this natural world, for every utterance, every observation you make is phenomenal!

This is why you can never affirm that cat. That cat belongs to eternity once the perceptual lights are turned off, for this is the removal of the logical form of propositions, the sensations, all thought identity, any possibility you can even imagine.

Best to side with Rorty: Our knowledge is pragmatic. To stand on a street corner, look around and acknowledge the many knowledge relationships you have with the world of the things before you is to know what happens when these things are confronted. A road is for driving, it is hard to the step, supports one's weight, can be dangerous and on and on. These are all pragmatic determinations, not ontological (unless you are making pragmatism into an ontology. Heidegger sort did this).

Pragmatics do not only refer to the world you see. Your comment is quite naif. Electromagnetic fields are part of nature, are natural. This is why I tell you you should stop using materialism or physician because you have an obsolete understanding of matter (materialism); better if you talk about nature.
Blind people are humans too :grin: — Raul

I do appreciate that grinning face. I do not want others to get angry about ideas. But they do.

There is no argument here that denies electromagnetic fields, evolution, stellar analyses, carbon dating, or anything at all science and its paradigms (provisional theories. See Kuhn, who was a Kantian) have to say. I am an adherent and an admirer.

But these are just not useful here. Here, they beg the question, that is, assume what needs to be proven, and I should add, they are fine this way and scientists do not for the most part care at all about arguments like this one. Not their field.

It has been built: heterophenomenology. I see you haven't watched the videos of Dehaene I proposed you. You're too concentrated trying to show you're right — Raul

Yes, Danial Dennett. Acctually the first true heterophenomenolgist was Emanuel Levinas. See his Totality and Infinity, Alterity and Transcendence, Time and the Other, and so on. It is not that phenomenology says there is nothing there, no "cat" (note the double inverted commas) there, nor any "people" or other things. This gets complicated. remember, Heidegger's Being and Time, Sarte's Being and Nothingness, and Husserl's Ideas and all the rest, devote a great deal of thought to others, but they are affirmed by the collective ideas that we witness within. It is understood that the horizon of our phenomenological gaze is both confined to interiorityand inclusive of others that are not us, for in the phenomenal presentation, we witness otherness; otherness is IN the interiority of the perceiving agency, and this is confirmed by no more than its presence. Phenomenology is a descriptive "science" (Husserl called it this).

The Other, therefore, comes to us embedded in our own interiority, yet in this setting, is presented as Other. This Other is transcendental, as are all things not me; it is just that this "outsideness" of things occurs within, and this sets the stage for a great deal of post modern philosophy. Levinas holds that the Other is beyond our Totality, which is Heidegger's dasein; the other intrudes in the face that reveals an ethical obligation to respond that issues from transcendence, which religiously is construed as God.

It is certainly not the case that phenomenology reduces the world to subjectivity. Rather, it understands what is means to grasp a thing and that behind or "below" knowledge, there is a transcendence, and transcendence is defined by what escapes our totalizing reach that wants to integrate all things into itself. This is Levinas. This totalizing principle meets the face of the Other and ethics is born. But Levinas doesn't take the matter to its core, for the Other's presence's significance lies with the more fundamental and irreducible value qua value.

The old-age metaphysical question: Why is there anything at all?

We first need to know how to approach such a question. Here is a list of possibilities:

Humor: Why is there something rather than nothing? *shrug if off with a joke*
Pragmatic: Why is there something rather than nothing? Does it matter?
Philosophical: Why is there something rather than nothing? [Insert a philosophical viewpoint here]
Scientific: Why is there something rather than nothing? [Instert a scientific theory here]
Bewilderment: Why is there something rather than nothing? No idea.

Once you've decided on the best approach to tackle such a question, perhaps you might want to provide your insights into this discussion.
How do you approach the "why is there something rather than nothing" question?
With humorWith practicalityWith philosophyWith scienceWith bewildermentNone of the above; other — Wheatley

Begs the question: Something? Nothing?

Of course it is not language. It is about biology of your brain.
Capgras syndrome, phantom-limb-syndrome... we can induce you the feeling of someone following you just increasing certain neurotransmitters and certain hormones in your blood and brain... and you would swear someone is following you, doesn't this change the way you understand "presence" and the "feeling of presence"? And you still think you can rely on your metaphysical ideas of the "pure presence"?

We can even make someone more or less religious, believe more or less in deities, or make him believe he is god by stimulating activity in certain areas of the brain (see Ramachandran research). Doesn't this change the idea we have about religion?

A tumor can change your personality (see the case of pedophile the medicine discover he was pedophile because of a tumor in his brain, famous one you can google). Doesn't this change the idea we have about pedophile? It challenge our justice system and our values (google it, is really worth it). — Raul

Of course, all of this is true. Too true, meaning too commonplace for philosophy. You are thinking a a world of unquestioned assumptions about knowledge relationships with the world. This matter here is about the questions that are rightly ignored by functioning scientists. Science needs to know its place, however.

Ok Constance, let's go with how the cat gets into the brain.
At the beginning it works the same way a cat would get into the microchips of the computer that has a webcam. Light hits the cat that hits our eye that hits our visual cortex.
Our visual cortex contains already certain neurons that are sensitive to the cat as part of our learnings when we were children (I assume this brain has seen and interacted with cats before).
So those neurons related to cat-ness get activated (here it is exactly same way a CNN works), the image triggers the associated word cat, uit gramatics and it triggers as well lot of neural-networks that get activated that situate the cat within our model-of-the-world so that we get the cat and its properties, expectations activated, the cat-ness gets active.
Our brain is ready to interact with the cat.
Makes sense? — Raul

Of course.

It is the questions begged that this hinges on. You say light hits the cat, and I ask, light? Cat? I should first be clear that I am working with a model of physical materialism, not phenomenology of ontological dualism weak or otherwise. Just a world of material things bound to the necessity of casual sufficiency, which I take as provisionally unassailable (the provision being that we not talk about grounds for its assailability).
The next question I ask is, these causal events where the light hits the cat, then reflects, hits the eye, on to the retina and so on: in order for this to constitute a knowledge yielding event, there must be something epistemological that carries the object, the cat, to my interior world. Causality doesn't do this. I mean, the dented fender of my car does not "know" the guardrail that caused the dent. You can say the matter with knowledge is much more complex than this, which is obviously true, but prior to the 3 to 4 pound mass of neurons, where the light reflects off the cat, this is far more simple. How is it that the reflective event "over there" off the cat, can carry, if you will, the "ofness" that eventually becomes my knowledge OF the cat?
Ordinarily, one would not ask such a question the case of photos, videos, digital or otherwise, because we already have a model of the original object in mind, confirmed in familiarity. All one has to do is observe the original, compare it to the photo, and you have confirmation of verisimilitude. But here it is very different: it is the original that is in question, and there is no model beyond this that can be brought in for comparison. All models beg the same question!

It is not reducible I agree, naturalism (forget about word materialism) is not reductive because it actually expands our understanding on the power of biology in our brain instead.
I would say that dualists are the ones that have a "reduced" concept of the power of nature (matter, energy, however you want to call it) and lose time with what I think are naif and solipsistic intuitions of the meta-thinking that has not made any progress since Aristotle. Metaphysicians are always trying to reinvent the wheel (Kant, Heidegger, etc...), this is well accepted among philosophers.
The pain you feel in your finger can be induced in your brain from external people activating the specific group of neural network that trigger it using electromagnetic fields. Doing this you won't need the finger to feel the pain, we induce it. But you, subjectively will swear it is your finger burning !
If I disable those specific finger-pain related neural networks you will not feel that pain anymore even if I cut your finger.
Makes sense?
Let's go even beyond, we could trick you neural networks in a way that when I burn your finger you feel the pain in you ear. All this is possible and it is possible because all your pain is within the biology and architecture of your brain.

It is painful I know, but pain is in your brain. — Raul

On this last part: undoubtedly pain is in your brain, but then the question is begged: where is the brain? Jump to the chase: If you cannot affirm that causal networks are analytically epistemological, then you cannot justify that your knowledge of the cat is about that "whatever over there" based on a physicalist's, materialist's, or naturalist's model of the world, for all models like this would have to show the same thing: magical knowledge at a distance. Why magical? An idea is only as good as its justification.
So, there you are, a competent surgeon with an awake patient probing around the brain looking for responses so as not to remove anything vital and it is clear: brain and experience correspond. To argue against this is folly. But the issue was never about our functioning, pragmatic grasp of the world, but about whether your grasp of the world could be about something OTHER than pragmatics. Pragmatists like Dewey, Rorty and even Heidegger (his ready to hand instrumentality) say your knowledge is inherently pragmatic. There is no magical "reaching out" beyond one's apperceptual faculties, rather, the object that we see, hear, and so on, is a pragmatic/conceptual of-a-piece presence. If you take electromagnetic fields to be in their exhaustive analysis about what is "out there," independent of experience, then you would be committing the metaphysical fallacy of positing things unseen.

Existentialists are anything but metaphysicians. They are phenomenologists, committed to a limitation of ideas to what actually is presented.

What does this have to do with ethics? Physiclist, materialist, naturalist (it matters not here) models yield to models of meaning and value. We can now proceed to construct a new model of the world, one in which values are not subordinated the "metaphysics" of science, and the subjective/objective division at the ontological level simply vanishes.

Analysis is reduction. What are you saying, pain ought not be analyzed? That's a value judgement which needs to be justified. How do you justify it, by insisting that pain is the absolute, metavalue? And you justify this by claiming that pain ought not be analyzed. That looks like a vicious circle to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. I am saying that when one puts the analytic game in play, which is the taking apart of things, ethics does turn out to be a thing of parts. But in this analytic reduction, we discover a "part" that entirely resists analysis. The same is true for all things, really. I see the color yellow and analysis gives me talk about the electromagnetic spectrum, the comparative qualities vis a vis other colors, emotional values associated, and on and on. But the color itself? Just as a yellow "presence," there is nothing to say, for the saying contextualizes, which brings in what is NOT the presence. This is what being irreducible means. All language is contingent, analyzable, but that presence before me is not language.

The "circularity" you see in this is of course, not simply right, but rather profound: Did I not just "speak" to you about yellow telling you it was unspeakable? This is a fascinating philosophical passageway into post modern thinking. It gets "worse" not better, regarding the paradox of the understanding's being locked into language for interpreting the world, on the one hand, and on the other, being "impossibly" clear that yellow, a "given" sound, feeling, emotion, etc., are all in their "presence" not language at all!

No, not quite, I'm not observing the brain, I'm observing the finger, the pain is in the finger. And it is the fact that the pain being in the finger makes the brain want to analyze it, which makes it appear to consist of parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, but this is all "outside" the given phenomenon. Even the fact that the pain is in the finger is beyond, if you will, the "qualia" of pain. the analysis that brings the entire ethical issue at hand to its parts, then the recognition that there is a part, THE essential part that is not reducible, suspends all talk about brains and fingers and locality.

The hardest part of this is, to bring a little jargon into it, is to actually DO the phenomenological reduction, the release of the phenomenon that is before you to its bare essentials, its "pure" presence. See my comments just now on the problem this poses regarding language and objects.

I'm not denying the pain, I'm saying that there's more to it than just the pain. I feel the pain, I look at the place where it hurts, and I see the wound. Oh, there's a reason why I'm feeling this pain. PAIN is not the end of the inquiry, it's the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Depends on what you are inquiring about. If you are dicussing human anatomy, pain gets very complex. But here, it is a phenomenological examination of pain. If you were an empirical scientist, you would have as your foundation a body of paradigms that go to work, always already there the moment an issue rises. Here is it the same, only we are in another field, that of phenomenology, which begins with the "thing itself" and moves into examinations of the structures of experience respecting the full value of the given as its foundational assumptions.

I had turned to Kierkegaard to help me solve my problem with theism. It didn't help. All in all, he struck me as yet another theist basking in his faith. A faith I had no hope of obtaining. The idea of a leap to faith is to me like a spit in the face -- like someone telling me, "See, I can do it, but you can't!! Shame on you!" — baker

What the !@#$# did you read to get that impression?

Not to be difficult, but you should be suspicious yourself at your reluctance to be direct. What the self is is not asked. Nor have I asked how the brain works. Two objects. When a knowledge claim is made, on the physicalist's view of things, there are two objects, localized physical things. How does the relationship work such that one thing can know another? The actual content of the brain is not at issue. It could be a rock. The question is , causally antecedent to the brain, how does the cat thing even begin to make a first move to get into the brain thing such that I can say, I see (have visual knowledge of) the cat.

If I were to ask this of two plain objects, an offended car fender and a guard rail, say, one might simply say, the fender impacted the guard rail, it's body yielded to the extent is structure could not absorb the event, or something like this. Of course a brain is complicated, but so what? If the account begins with the object, the complexity of the brain doesn't enter into it; just keep things on the outside, as with the car fender.

Well, "solipsism" doesn't complicate it for me, nevertheless is it you that is talking above about "epistemic connection" — Raul

But I want to emphasize: all you said is evasive. Leave out the meta concerns. There is the cat, here am I, a perceiving agent. Two things. How does it work?

I should add that solipsism is a term that complicates a simple question. If it is clear, to you, then just be clear. References to other theoretical terms already violate the terms of the question.

This one is an easy one. Do you have children? just observe them, see how the grow and learn,. Specially during the first 3-4 years. They interact with the external world in many ways, they copy the behaviour and sounds of the adults, they try and learn via a trial-error approach.
Their inner nervous system that initially is just worried about keeping homeostasis in a very simple way (crying when hungry) little by little gets more sophisticated.
Their brain absorb so many things during those 3-4 years, it creates so many mental objects.... should I follow? This is how the external and physical world gets in your brain.
Then the self rises as the baby interact in society and builds self-consciousness.... should I continue — Raul

Well, that is an easy answer. But I am putting the question to the simple affirmation itself. There is my cat under the table. Here am I. How is it that an epistemic connection is made such that cat over there gets into this brain thing such that I can say, I know the cat is under the table in a way that is sustainable independently of any experience making faculties. One might begin with, well, we perceive the cat, to which I ask, is perception like a mirror rendering a faithful representation, and you might reply; well, how would you reply?

At this point, I am moral-realism-adjacent. I think most people are moral realists, but are aware that it is taboo to actually declare oneself as such, so they devise other moral theories in order to mask their moral realism.

For all practical intents and purposes, moral realism (in the form of moral egoism) seems to be the only viable way to be. — baker

I think most people who think are not moral realists because they also think science defines the world and science cannot discuss morality; therefore, it is assumed morality has no meaning.

But then, most thinking people do not read Continental philosophy. Only here does one find the vehicle for affirming the ontology of ethics. It can do this because it takes as first philosophy meaning, not a model of the physical universe, which is infamously absent of discussions about meaning, or, the meaning of meaning: meta-meaning.

Alas, these arguments require a lot of hard reading and a reorientation of one's attitudes. I don't see why you are averse to Kierkegaard. He "speaks" (thought he does it with style, with far too much style--the extended metaphors are maddening) what meditation IS. Again, it is in a circuitous way that he does this and he is so embedded in the Greeks, post Kantians, Hegel, religious exegeses, and so on, that his references are often entangled things. But once one reads through all this, it is clear: Kierkegaard was right! Putting aside the colorful BS and the pseudonymous narratives, he was right, essentially, in analysis of the self vis a vis meditation. this is why he is called a father of existentialism.

If you agree with this principle, wouldn't you agree that it is more likely that neuroscience gives you the right tools and categories to better understand what Husserl called phenomenology?
You can say that technology is the way of being modern human's (Heidegger) but isn't language itself a contingent technology that emerged from a very successful nervous system? Instead of relying on the categories "meaning" and "sense" as used and understood by Heidegger and Dreyfus, shouldn't we open the black-box?, the brain, and analyze it using the new senses we have created (EEG,  MEG, fMRI, photon migration tomography, transcranial magnetic simulation, etc.). Don't they have something new to show us related to the categories we create?Shouldn't we give a chance to the transcendence of heterophenomenology? Traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.I guess you see this more a risk to fall into reductionism? — Raul

Neuroscience is not the ticket into this. And a lengthy justification for what I think is true goes absolutely nowhere. As I see it, the only way to move forward, or at all, would be dialectically. Otherwise it would simply be a lot of wasted writing.

I would begin with a question, which is clean and to the point. Assume the material physicalism implied by your references to EEG's and MRI's and the rest, or even, if you're like Wittgenstein or Rorty, you are not ontologically committed to this, but you see this as the only way to talk at all about the world, foundationally or otherwise, making you a conditional physicalist. Whatever. But assume the above: In this this physical model of all things, how is it that anything out there (the mind independent world) gets in here (the mind)?

Just to note, to is intended to be taken for no more than it asks. Lengthy justifications for affirming the "outthereness" of things are beyond the parameters of the question. Just tell me how this "out there to in here" works.

It's not "an event" though, that's a misrepresentation, and you ought to be able to see this. There is a huge multitude of things going on all required for me to feel pain. You cannot reduce pain to "an event". — Metaphysician Undercover

It is about the multitude of things no more than logic is about the multitude of axonally connected neurons. Pain is NOT reducible. Such complexities are only analytical correspondences. When experience the horror of being, say, tortured you are not IN the event having a "gee my neurons are very excited" experience. Such an idea is patently absurd.

But you also encounter this is such a reductive attempt: When you make the move to higher ground analytically, looking to physical brain activities, in the act of data extraction in the observation of the brain, you are not working from outside perspective looking at the brain. You are LOOKING. Literally a product of brain activity and precisely the kind of thing you are supposed to be analyzing. This is the most obvious form of question begging imaginable.

The pain is what is evidently there, unproblematic in what it is. The reduction is on your part: you take what is clear as a bell, the screaming pain and claim this is not what it really is. It's explanatory grounding is elsewhere. Well, of you are doing a scientific analysis on thephysical anatomy of pain, then fine. But that is not this here at all.

Sorry Constance, I don't buy it. I don't see getting to "the pain itself" as the final reduction. It's just a turning point, of going from the external world of what you call "facts", to the internal world of feelings. So there is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings. And I don't buy the notion that this is a world we cannot speak about, because we commonly talk about our feelings. It just requires a completely different way of talking from the way that we talk about the external world of "facts". — Metaphysician Undercover

Consider then: facts of the world. Is my migraine, just because it is an interior event, any less a fact? Is it not somewhere in the grid of worldly affairs as much so as glaciers and planets and clouds and everything else? The problematic here is not location, in my head or on top of a mountain. The mountain is there, in the world. As is my headache. Factual affairs. Only in this factual affair, over here, in my left side, there is a spear in my kidney and the phenomenon we call pain. I see no reason to separate sensate feelings from other facts at all. Everything is just there, an aggregate of atoms.

So once you complete that turn in the turning point, and you observe the sensation, it is just another event no different than any other event as an event.

So then, the matter goes to describing what is there. Very simple. Only, unlike the cloud or the untied shoe, this event is painful. So, what is pain? Observe, there is the feeling. Is it not qualitatively distinct from other facts? I would say so, since the pain hurts like hell! And then, what is this?

Then of course, the matter of the ethical "badness" of the pain shows itself. this is an absolute. See the argument in the OP Metaethics and Moral Realism.

Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.
Are you saying you agree on Kierkegaard's divine moral? — Raul

I think this is right, yes, though, not to get too hung up on overwrought terms like 'soul' and 'God'. A close reading of K's Concept of Anxiety will reveal that he thought such terms as part of the very nature of 'sin' (another dubious term which he rejects emphatically: the old fashioned, Lutheran sense of Adam's atrocious transgression).

As for K's religious thinking, his phenomenology serves to dethrone the sensibleness of common thinking, hence the affirmations of the Bible where thought really had no place at all. Thought cannot encompass the world, one reason why Wittgenstein was such a fan. To see where thought can go, we find his philosophy: a temporal dialectical phenomenology that overtly rejects the the primacy of reason. the divide I mentioned occurs where reason seeks to subsume the actualities of the world. Nonsense. the world's actualities are not categorial.

For the long version of this, see his Concept of Anxiety. In it, you see over and over, the foundations of later existential thought.

Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.
For example Wittgenstein said as well that : "..."And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is neither good not evil; therefore, the world of living beings can in itself be neither good nor evil." and then from here he concludes the "nonsense" of the world and sense being contingent — Raul

One has to be careful with Wittgenstein on this. Not the same, exactly. That would be impossible. Not mixing them up, but drawing on parallels in thinking. First, the following passage to your quote is "Good and evil enter only through the subject. And the subject does not belong to the world. Rather it is a boundary of the world."
When I speak of the world, I am not in W's world. I am thinking of the world of Heidegger's dasein and "Being in the World" and so references to the "world" get confused. W confuses me, frankly, but everybody is confused by him because he presents ideas that are open concepts. Anyway, he writes: "so good and evil which are predicates of the subject, are not properties of the world....Here the nature of the subject is completely veiled." Further, "What is good is divine, too. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the supernatural."

Facts suspended? Looks like you're building a play of a movie you imagine within your speculations but studying emotions and feelings like pain (Damasio) and seeing how they work I would say that "suspending" an emotion makes no sense. Do you mean to suspend the conscious phenomena of the pain? Well we know this is a construct of our unconscious, we know our brain unconsciously decides about what to do with this "pain" around 200ms before we become conscious of it (Libet). It can become conscious or maybe not.
This is to say again that the "local" fact of a pain is not something you can suspend. it doesn't work that way. — Raul

Such a suspension is meant to serve the purpose of analysis. But think of it like this: We suspend facts all the time, as I am doing as I write. I am not thinking about many things as I concentrate on one. In this way thought itself is a matter of abstracting from the general body of related ideas to particular ones that rise to an occasion. Here, you are being invited consider an ethical case, an extreme one to make for poignancy. There are many details to the case. If I were to inquire about the logical form of the propositions that describe the case, then I would abstract from all that is not propositional as such, focusing, as Kant did, on the logical forms, the conditionals, the negations and assertions and tautologies and so on, that make propositions possible.

Here. I am after something specific as well: I want to know about the anatomy of an ethical case, what makes ethics what it is, its essential features. I am not interested in how to determine what to do. I want to know what ethical goodness and badness is, what all the fuss is about. This is a phenomenological question, a question of the Being of the phenomenon of pain and pleasure, suffering and joy; it is a descriptive account I want.: just to observe and acknowledge.

Talk about the brain and anything else that is not there, in the bare descriptive of the event is suspended, just as Kant suspended everything but logical form to discuss pure reason, not that I am so keen on Kant, but his method is just simple analysis that looks to rational form in judgment and extrapolating from this to what must be the case given what is clearly there.

We, who? Well I guess Chalmers and metaphysical thinkers. As you can guess me and many other contemporary philosophers do not agree this "qualia", the way you explain it This dualist qualia is not needed to explain pain in a satisfactory way. Emotions and feelings are "incarnated", we have to work with the concept of an extended brain to understand them. Well I guess you know Damasio. Emotions do not need of consciousness to exists, etc. etc. This is the contemporary concept of emotions, again no need qualia... emotions and feeling can artificially be triggered as we know very well how they work. It can be done using electric signals in certains parts of our limbic system or inducing special conscious states with certain chemistry (drugs, psychotropic substances, etc.) — Raul

But you wander from qualia with all this talk. To speak at all about qualia, and surely you see this, is to use language. Language cannot speak what is there. One cannot say the color yellow, but the presence of yellow is fit into and contextualized by a theory of color, and the many ways color turns up in casual or technical talk. There is not stand alone talk about yellow and referring to the limbic system has nothing whatever to do with the problem of qualia.

To play a game in philosophy, one must at the very least attend to the way the problem is presented. This is a simple, descriptive affair of something that lies before you. If I were to ask for an exclusively descriptive account of a cloud's phenomenal presence, such a request would be unproblematic. Same here.

Can you demonstrate it? In the meantime I would claim this residuum is not needed to explain the word "bad". You just need to put it in a context. If in this case you put it in the context of my finger burning is bad. Well, in this case, this forum is not the right place to explain it as it is not that short but here you can find a good source to understand how pain works and why it is associated to the word "bad". As anyone could expect, such a complex things requires a complex and very technical language but if you really want to understand it I'm sure you can find it accessible:
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/65/65ps1.full — Raul

It is spelled out more explicitly in the OP entitled Metaethics and Moral Realism.

But Raul, the ideas presented here did not rise up ex nihilo. See G E Moore's Ethica Principia. Moore wanted to know the nature of the Good. He concluded that it was a non natural property. Then Wittgenstein, Read his Tractatus, his Lecture on Ethics. Then read John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing right and Wrong.

The context is not complex. You are being invited to think phenomenologically and if this is not familiar to you, if you have never read any Continental philosophy, well, hmmm, you perhaps should consider this.

Maybe being a friendless loner for most of my youth... and now most of my adulthood... basically every time besides my early 20s experiment in being a popular person... was actually good for me, then! — Pfhorrest

Perhaps more than simply good. It depends on what you read. We are what we read. One can either go analytic or Continental in philosophy. The former is a dead end, fun if you like rigorous thinking, useful in many of the penetrating arguments (like Quine's Two Dogmas and Indeterminacy of Translation), but afraid to go where human inquiry gets interesting, in the depth of meaning, the impossible presence of things, the threshold where thought and feeling encounter themselves.

Going out on a limb, you might like Jung's Red Book, Augustine's Confessions, Kierkegaard's either/Or, or even Pseudo Dionysus' Cloud of Knowing or even Eckhart's Sermons (Eckhart famously, or infamously wrote of prayer to God that he could be rid of God).

Or not. Up to you. My allies are perhaps not yours. As I see it, the religious world is filled with nonsense, but beneath this is the heart of our humanity. I am reading John Caputo's The Weakness of God and his How to Read Kierkegaard and Radical Hermeneutics.

We are what we read, literally.

I must admit though, I really don't know what you mean by "metavalue". — Metaphysician Undercover

Here is an account. There is a lot behind this, but in essence (btw, it likely will be encountered as novel thinking. Apologies. Should best be read fully before judgment):

It is the easiest concept to grasp, and yet, the most difficult. Easy because it is clear, intuitive, and not a logical product of argument. Hard because we don't think like this. Heidegger said the same of Being: There, in the intimations of our existence, most close to us, pervasive in every thought and engagement, yet so distant from the understanding. For Heidegger, being was complex, for there is nothing intuitive and direct that reveals some absolute nature of what a thing is at some unimaginable foundational level, like God or material substance. All that can be affirmed is bound to the interpretative conditions of affirmation: language and culture and history.

But take a look at, say, Dennett's argument on qualia, the conclusion of which is that it is an impossible term, just like Heidegger. Impossible, to put it Derrida's way, because it is a term that, like all terms, defers to other terms for terminological meaning. Wittgenstein called these states of affairs, facts, like the Earth being of greater mass than the moon, or that my shoe is untied: a fact, dull and equal to all other facts as a fact, and this is what the understanding can grasp in the logicality of meaningful utterances. the rest that is NOT fact, is transcendental, unspeakable. Open your mouth to speak it, and there you are in the middle of the delimitations of logic and language and memory. History: language is a constructed thing. Took centuries, and, it took a the personal assimilation process a much shorter time. Every utterance brings this into play, this interpretative medium.

Anyway, I bring all this up to make a point: A given perceptual event, qua perceptual, is thick with meaning. Not perceptual, but apperceptual. One cannot even conceive of what a direct intimation of a thing could even be at all. Pure nonsense.

But there is something direct about it, in the mix, that is, of language's meanings and the actuality before one. This is why Kierkegaard is considered a father of existentialism: he said there is this qualitative divide between what is there and what can be said about it. IT cannot be spoken.

But here is where ethics comes in and why Wittgenstein said ethics is transcendental. My example of the finger on fire: In the perception as one's finger is literally aflame, there are the facts, the logical, propositional possible utterances, like, well, pain is conducive to evolutionary survival, or, there is an event, I do not enjoy it, there is the physiology of nerves reporting pain, the quick withdrawal of the finger, and so on: facts, facts, states of affairs.

Here is the rub: Once the facts have been suspended, and all that remains is the most "local" fact, the pain itself, right there at the, if you will, Cartesian center of experience, we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia, the unutterable presence of the pain. Once analysis has taken the matter this far, the meta value becomes clear: this is not a dull fact like my shoes being untied. There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad". This clumsy sounding usage is unavoidable.

The argument I find definitive regarding moral realism is the above; in fact, I find that once value is so understood, there is no choice but to reify goodness and badness in the moral, transcendental conception, and the reification of these argues for a reification of the ego as well, for the center of our existence is the productive origin of value in the world. We are no longer in the empirical scientist's world, but in the phenomenologist's, and meaning---value-meaning, importance, interest, caring. loving, despising, and the rest, all issue from the self. These transcendental events issue from us.

o is self reflection good? Or bad? Or is it always a mix. Or is it impossible to establish either case without the influence of the contrary side/ for example can we not be introspective if not only for the relationship we have with the external world and the feedback we get from the environment? — Benj96

You seem to take a psychological pov on self reflection. But you need to look at it structurally: pull away from the habitual self, and you are "out" of the self and its compulsory continuity. Do this enough, and the grip compulsive belief has on you slips, and in time the "world" begins to fall away, the familiar becomes alien for a certain distance between you and ordinary affairs has settled in, and once you've have gone this way, there is no turning back--one cannot turn off this "enlightenment".

Heidegger called the question the piety of thought, and this self reflection begins with a question, one that undermines the authority of everydayness and drives one to freedom (not talking about the principle of sufficient cause, here).

Carl Jung thought that solitude was a prerequisite for profound insight, for only outside of the circuitry of the self affirming values produced in a culture can one bring the whole affair to a halt. And the world can finally "speak".

When one grows up as the only non-Catholic among Catholics and is bullied by them, and tries to make sense of it by reading a lot of Catholic literature, one begins to consider many things as ordinary that other people probably don't. It's a long sordid tale. — baker

Oh. I see. Well, I frankly understand this. I attended a Catholic high school for a couple of years myself. Very authoritarian, to the point of cruelty. The Catholic philosophy on child rearing is that one is born into sin, and it is the mission of Christian parents teachers to annihilate the freely expressive child. I have talked to the Brothers who were my teachers and found them to be deeply embedded in orthodoxy. NOT moveable.

Oh, I took to Buddhism because it promised enlightenment, and I thought that once I'd be enlightened, I'd be able to figure out which religion is the right one, specifically, whether Catholicism is true or not. Needless to say, that didn't work out so well. — baker

Oh, again. What can I say, I genuinely think there is such a thing as enlightenment and Buddhists have been right all along. Philosophers like Kierkegaard help rehabilitate a conditioned mind by taking mundane experience apart, revealing the underpinnings of mundane events.

Probably because I don't approach religion with self-confidence and in the hope to find a solution to existential problems.
Which also happens to be why moral realism makes so much sense. — baker

You are a moral realist?? As am I, and I argue for this frequently. There are few takers on this as it requires a break with the familiar world. Unfortunately, what I consider the most penetrating reading is the least accessible.

Why are you a moral realist?

No it wouldn't. There's nothing 'impossible' about a hedonic calculator incidentally. But like I say, I stipulated that, for the sake of argument, the average human life creates as much pleasure as pain. My focus was on desert and how deservingness can make a radical difference to how much such pleasure or pain counts, morally speaking. — Bartricks

A hedonic calculator would have to reflect the subjective actualities of engaging the world. This is not possible. Of course, there are good guesses, but take Mill's own being a pig satisfied vis a vis the philosopher dissatisfied. He favored the philosopher, but is this right? Put the pig aside: is it really so much better to ponder arguments than to have, say, a good mud fight?

I will not take sides on this. The point is that standards of evaluating pleasure, affect, interest and the nuances of these are embedded in a private world that resists objective measurement. Objectifying people's experiences in the way you are suggesting works to reduce things to general ideas which is, granted, done all the time, but this is rather a pet peeve of mine: the reduction of a person to the generalities of a culture.

Not really to your point, but since you defend the idea of a hedonic calculator....

And it wasn't Bentham but Mill who distinguished between higher and lower pleasures. But like I say, that's not the issue. For there can be deserved higher pleasures, undeserved higher pleasures and non-deserved higher pleasures. — Bartricks

Well, I would agree if the matter were kept away from the more interesting questions of the nature of desert, responsibility, accountability, guilt, innocence. These concepts are questions begged: what does it mean at all for someone to deserve his or her fate? Such a question turns the matter over to existential theory.

You then say that desert makes no sense in this world. Well, I think that's demonstrably false. Certainly the burden of proof is on the desert denier, not me. But note too that if someone can only resist my argument by rejecting moral desert wholesale, then it must be a very strong argument. It's a bit like rejecting my argument by saying "but we can't know anything!" — Bartricks

Not that we can't know anything, but that the foundation of the moral dimension of our existence is absent, while our affairs virtually scream for justification, redemption. Put down Bentham's calculator and behold the world of horrors and delights. These are present, undeniably, but the value, the actuality of being, say, burned alive at the stake, presents a profound deficit in our ability to "account" for it's possibility as an actual event. This takes things far beyond the trivialities of counting hedons.

Four years ago, I discarded all the books I had of his and all the notes I made. So I'll just summarize: I was not impressed with his work. Affirming God over reason seems quite ordinary to me. — baker

"sigh" ! You found the Concept of Anxiety ORIDINARY?? Not possible. You thought his existential dialectics ordinary? But it is here that the connection to Buddhism is clearest, where he elucidates the structure of meditation itself. One cannot be interested in Buddhism and think Kierkegaard is a bore. There has to be a radical misunderstanding somewhere.

When I first read this work I instantly thought how Kierkegaard was so aligned with the act of meditation. There is no question of this.

Caputo's How to Read Kierkegaard is a wonderful elucidation.

As I said, Plato demonstrated long ago, that we do not base value in pain or pleasure. I gave an example, as to why a person's attitude toward pain does not provide a good represent of one's attitude toward value, therefore pain cannot be used as a metavalue. There are many more examples, but it seems like you are in a condition of denial, so I don't see the point in producing a list of examples. — Metaphysician Undercover

Take another look. It is a descriptive position, and certainly not about how people feel about things, their attitudes. This latter doesn't enter into it. to understand the metaethical issue one has to simply put a lighted match to one's finger and observe. There are clear empirical features, but once these are removed there is the residual value. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, or see G E Moore's Principia Ethica to get an idea of this. the question is about the Good and its nature or essence. Attitudes follow on this.

Yes, your state of denying the example, and also the reality about value, demonstrates this unassailability very well. However, the fact that one's personal perspective on value appears to be unassailable does not demonstrate that it is absolute. It just indicates that it appears to the person who holds the unassailable perspective on value, that value is absolute. — Metaphysician Undercover

try to see that this isn't about a personal perspective. Consider the matter as one would consider qualia. My opinion, attitude, regard for qualia is completely off the table. Arguments that deal with this look to the possibility of apprehending something in the pure, uninterpreted phenomenon. Here, the claim is that the flame on your finger carries a non empirical, non discursive or irreducible intuition of a metavalue, i.e., an ethical badness.

The problem though, as I explained, is that a person will subject oneself to pain, for the sake of something valued in some circumstances, yet at other times the same person will avoid pain because in this circumstance avoidance is seen as more valuable. Therefore pain does not suffice as evidence for any sort of absolute value. — Metaphysician Undercover

But the reasons for opting one way or another are grounded in conditions that are factual and contingent. The value in place remains independent. the argument insists that you abstract from all of the contingencies. Once done, there is a residual non contingent presence, which is the metavalue. All that is required here is observation and description, not judgment. Granted in less striking cases it can be difficult to see whether one is having an enjoyable experience or not. that does happen, but it is not the point at all. If one case can demonstrate and non contingency in the presence of the world, then one has a case for moral realism.

Come to think of it, it's a mistake to look at the issue in an "either...or..." way. We could take both - thoughts and deeds - into account when we judge the moral status of people. — TheMadFool

I go either/or on this one: If a person is simply pouring all thought and sentiment into doing the right thing, and gets it all wrong, I am entirely impressed, and if it had turned out better, I would not think one scintilla less of this person who just didn't have the wit to work things out, a deficit that is morally arbitrary.

Although I think it is almost certainly the case that an average human life will cause much more suffering than pleasure overall, I was very clear in saying that I would not assume this and would instead assume that the quantities are equal. That is, I will assume - for the sake of argument alone - that the average human life creates as much pleasure as pain.
I do not ignore qualitative distinctions, they're simply not relevant to the argument I am making and so I didn't mention them (for the point is about our deservingness of the pains and pleasures involved, a point that cuts across qualitative distinctions).
— Bartricks

That would have to be determined by some impossible hedonic calculator. As I recall, Bentham did insist that some pleasures were superior in their cash value than others. I lean toward the romantic: Living a life of deep, Wordsworthian experiences or, as Mill would have it, the philosopher's, exceeds that of the brute mentality.

As to this: "The dismissal of undeservedness or deservedness antecedent to being thrown into an existence is an assumption that needs to be argued". That too is both incorrect and irrelevant. It is incorrect because the burden, surely, is on you, not me. That is, the default is not that we are born positively deserving to suffer, or born positively deserving pleasure; the default is that we are born 'innocent' - that is, we do not positively deserve to suffer, nor do we positively deserve pleasure. If you think we are born deserving to suffer, or born deserving pleasure, then you need to provide us with some justification for that belief. — Bartricks

It would ground suffering in a metaphysical justice if our joys and ills were antecedently accountable. Of course, metaphysical details about such a thing is hogwash, but the posting of an ethical grounding for all the horrors and injustice beyond what can be empirically observed does, say, establish meaning where there would otherwise be none, and the hedonic balance of all things is shot to hell. If we consider that being human in the world has value beyond the world, then the justification for having kids is, in one way or another, altered.
Also, not to forget that an analysis of responsibility, desert, accountability, guilt, all make no sense at all in this world, hence the call for metaphysical thinking.

Indeed, good intentions and not good deeds but Christian morality revolves around deeds, don't they? — TheMadFool

If I invest in the stock market, make a fortune and incidentally support a company that does good deeds, it isn't reasonable to say I have some stake in the goodness of the deeds; and then, I scrimp and save to support Doctors Without Borders, but find I have been hoodwinked by some intermediary and all the money went into some billionaire's pocket, regardless of my money's "deed" I am on morally superior ground.
But this is simply a reasoned point. Does Christianity talk like this? It's somewhat debatable for them, considering how morally ambiguous it has been. Assuming a version of Christianity that isn't bats^^t crazy, I think this reasoning applies. I take Kierkegaard to be the source of wisdom for all things Christian, and I think he would agree.