So the only difference is that my triadic approach explains its dichotomous underpinnings as being natural, and not unnatural. It is meant to be a case of competition AND cooperation, constraint AND freedom. It is not a case of having to reduce nature to one or the other as the good, or the foundational, or whatever the heck else a reductionist feels to be the imperative when "caught on the horns of a dilemma". — apokrisis

Meant by whom? The universe? Again, why should we care what the universe thinks? Why should we care what it ultimately has planned?

So I'm not playing by the rules. It's only because I think the rules are unfair and unjust and that we can do better than what the universe initially demanded us to be. We've outgrown our darwinian impulses and can look beyond.

We're too moral for this world. If this means those who realize it go extinct, then so be it. This changes nothing.

I think it's very difficult to produce epistemologically sound moral principles without determining the proper ontological status of things like final cause, intention, and will. — Metaphysician Undercover

"The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end."

"No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will."

-Peter Zapffe

I don't think it's necessary to have a super-sophisticated metaphysics in order for ethics to take off, as if we couldn't do ethics without some sort of Cartesian-style metaphysics-in-the-service-of-ethics. The two above quotations are qualifications enough, I think, because they don't demand any sort of (non-trivial) metaphysics while simultaneously being extremely compelling.

Hah. Already I am returning to the point of how unmoored from scientific measurement most moral thinking is in fact. We still do want to apply all or nothing judgements on issues like sentience even when there is a gradient that more careful world modelling would reveal. — apokrisis

Why do you assume morality must be like science? What if trying to limit morality to the constraints of the world is not satisfying for our deepest moral beliefs?

As for the general idea being presented: you offer a generalized account of what your pragmatic morality would look like, but this is all it is. You make claims about gradients and models but fail to give any precise examples; you mention cows vs cabbages but fail to show how this issue changes in your ethic. What does your ethics fundamentally look like in the every-day, and how does this differ from more popular ethical theories?

I've already said it many times before, human psychology is strange and morality is not something that is flexible enough or even suitable to be applied in as broad a manner as you wish it to be. Ethics, as far as I am concerned, is always going to be un-moored from the rest of the world, as it's inherently tied to the individual and the individual's freedom of choice, which includes the phenomenology of transcendence beyond the immanent.

What you are presenting here is, as far as I know, something not particularly similar to any of the mainstream ethical views or any ones in the history of ethics and so you'll have to pardon me when I say I am highly skeptical of your ambitious claims. If you're trying to start a Nietzschean re-evaluation of value, which it seems like you are, you will need to provide more than just a blueprint hypothesis.

I mean, it just kind of puts things into perspective when you said you don't care what I believe. It means you aren't concerned with teaching anyone. For whatever reason, you enjoy patronizing other people on an anonymous internet forum.

Hopefully you'll grow bored with this all and move on. That'll be a day to celebrate.

The fun is in watching how the arguments play out. — apokrisis

So you're a dick. Got it.

For the 1001st time you will be pleased to hear that I generalise the notion of mind to the metaphysics of sign. So - pansemiotically - the Cosmos has telos or values, even if of the most attenuated kind from our point of view. — apokrisis

So you say, but why should I believe this? And if this "value" is so thin, why should it concern us?

Not just "metaphysical" but "Metaphysical". Care to elucidate or do you prefer to keep dishing out these empty criticisms?

Sounds so, welll, primitive. — apokrisis

Value outside the mind sounds like, well, equivocation.

But I did make a moral statement.

I disagree. "Everything I say is true" only implies the truth of moral claims if the set of things you say includes moral premises. — Pneumenon

What do you mean?

Validity is not the same as soundness.

Of course not. To deny metaphysics is not to do metaphysics. That sounds totally legit. — apokrisis

But I'm not denying metaphysics. I'm denying the relevance of metaphysics that isn't trivial.

[Sound of window being slammed, shutters closed, shade wrenched down.] — apokrisis

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice

So what irks you is the suggestion that balance is precisely what always goes missing in your highly subjective approach to metaphysical questions. — apokrisis

How many times do I have to tell you, I don't consider your type of metaphysics to be sufficient or adequate for ethical discourse. You say things like "balance" but never justify WHY we need to give a damn about the rest of the universe.

We're not doing metaphysics here.

Of course. Your arguments collapse as soon as anyone opens the window and lets any air and sunlight in. So why would you want your right to a completely subjective view on any issue central to your self-esteem publicly challenged? — apokrisis

It doesn't collapse at all. Your holism is unnecessary at best, and gets in the way most of the time. If we already both agree that individualism is important, there's no need to pretend we're getting justification from the cosmos for this. Adding whatever it is your advocating here is just redundant.

The young are clever, but the old are wise. — apokrisis

The latter also hold the former hostage...

Reductionism is fine as a tool for the everyday scale of reasoning, where all the holism required to keep it sensible can be provide intuitively as "commonsense". But it just fails when it comes to the big picture level questioning. But hey, if you're not actually interested in metaphysics, just your own state of mind, what the heck? — apokrisis

My stance here is that reductionism inevitably gives us stronger reasons for action than holism, as holism inevitably comes into conflict with individuality, and we inherently value individuality, freedom, and subjective experience more than any holistic framework that sees individuals as mere constituents of a larger organic population. Holism may be true in a descriptive sense but as far as I'm concerned it's irrelevant to any serious moral inquiry, i.e. the universe as a whole is not capable of supporting the imaginative depth of human morality. It's not compassionate enough.

Yep, hence why I said looking to the stars for moral answers is wrong-headed.

This is why so little progress has ever been made with "ontological arguments". Even if the syntactic structure is not a problem, they simply can't prove anything about reality because of the irreducibility of semantic vagueness. — apokrisis

Isn't this, though, an ontological claim about ontological arguments?

Or wait. Maybe gene pools permit homeostatic equilibrium of traits. Perhaps "homosexual genes" are part of maintaining the "requisite variety" that is the other side of the coin to the winnowing sythe of natural selection that is forever removing variety. Etc, etc. — apokrisis

Right, so like I said in the OP, we just have to question the premises. These sorts of "ontological arguments" as you call them aren't the only thing ethicists use. I prefer counterfactuals myself because I consider myself a constructivist of sorts and counterfactuals force us to consider consistency and universality.

So yes, one can "construct an argument" in good old reductionist predicate logic fashion. And that is a very useful tool for certain purposes. But it utterly fails when it comes to the kind of holistic thinking that answering questions at a metaphysically general level entail. — apokrisis

Perhaps the most striking problem with natural laws theories (including the rehashed naturalists) is that they have trouble prescribing specific action. How does "acting virtuously" help us in scenarios in which we're not clear which route of action we ought to take? How does "going with the flow of entropy" actually realize itself in everyday, common-sense action?

Reductionism cannot answer everything, but it's important for things like this, so important that I think it takes precedence over your holism. If you go to far in lofty abstract holism, you lose footing in the real world of everyday actions. Do you kill one person or five people? Was Hiroshima and Nagasaki ethical? Is the death penalty immoral? I don't see how metaphysics is supposed to help us determine the answers to these questions in a satisfactory manner.

And I would also argue that morality, and value, is a sui generis sort of thing, something that only exists within communities of rational agents. It's an isolated phenomenon and not something to be found elsewhere in the cosmos. Morality begins and ends with people and the basic interactions they have with each other and their phenomenological environment. Nothing more, and so it's just plain wrong to look to the stars for moral answers.

Like aletheist said, philosophical arguments for/against the existence of God are almost always insufficient to prove God (does not) exist. They're more like indicators of his existence, or lack thereof. Jumble enough of these arguments together and you're bound to fall on to one side of the board.

Anyway I think it is an interesting counter-argument, although I'm not entirely sure if it works:

If an omnibenevolent God exists, one wonders why he allows evil to exist. This might be defended by a number of means, like appeals to free will, appeals to divine compensation after death, etc. Theodicies.

If an omnimalevolent God exists, one wonders why he allows good to exist. How can this be defended?

The trouble is that I can imagine a universe that is better and worse than the universe I live in. Theodicies try to explain why the universe is not better than it could be. I see no method of doing so for an omnimalevolent God and explaining why the universe is not as bad as it possibly could be. Theodicies defend an omnibenevolent God against the problem of evil, while there doesn't seem to be any defense of an omnimalevolent God against evil. An omnimalevolent God would not care about free will, or divine compensation, or any of that. Why would he wait to inflict pain and suffering and evil? Why not do it now, and forever?

Now, of course, we could see God as a wrathful, vengeful, or manipulative trickster who takes pleasure in other people's pain but likes to watch the story unfold for dramatic affect. This is surely an evil God but not an omni-malevolent God, who would instead inflict evil upon the world for the sake of inflicting evil upon the world.

By whatever means science attempts to deny that consciousness exists (as they do with the concept of choice) the singular goal remains the same, that is to deny any possibility of the immaterial or more precisely the unmeasurable. The myth of science as being the sole holder and means to be truth must be upheld at all costs. There is a tremendous cost in quality of life for anyone who buys into the myth that only the material is real and everything else is an "illusion". — Rich

...and the attempt to apply scientific method to the kinds of philosophical issues that can only be properly addressed in the first person is the precise meaning of 'scientism'. — Wayfarer

I would absolutely love to start a new discussion over this at some point, but I agree and disagree with you both at the same time.

If subjective, first-person experience is a part of the world (as it does seem to be, thanks Descartes), then there are a number of courses of action that I see that science can take to account for this:

1.) Deny that first-person experience is something "special" and try to explain how it "emerges" from unconscious, third-person objectivity, as elim and reduct mats etc try to do.

2.) Deny that consciousness is fit for scientific study, as behaviorists and even some phenomenologists believe.

3.) Change the scope of the science itself to account for subjectivity.

By far, the third option seems, to me, to be the least used. Super-Scientists (as I like to call them) have the rhetoric against religion (and even philosophy!) for not observing the empirical data and for constraining the world to a hypothesis (when it should be the other way around), yet all too often they deny what is most obvious (consciousness).

So yes, I do agree that science, in particular physics and neuroscience, has an almost masturbatory fetish with reductionism. It's implausible, if not wholly insufficient.

That being said, I don't agree that scientism is merely the utilization of science for "first-person" projects. If we are being completely honest, if science can't answer questions about consciousness, then probably nothing can. Philosophy has its uses but if we expect it, and/or its relatives like mysticism or religion, to explain something when it has a generally poor track record of linear, teleological progress (not that that's inherently a bad thing), we're going to be sorely disappointed.

I also don't agree that there is a strict demarcation between science and philosophy. Science is more than just the study of third-person, objective facts about the world, and philosophy is more than just the study of first-person accounts. In order for there to be such a demarcation, there should need to be some kind of explanation as to why science can study this-and-that but not the stuff philosophy does.

I like to think myself as an open-minded methodological naturalist. When push comes to shove, I would rather align myself with the scientistic Super-Scientists rather than those who try to exclude science from some domain of inquiry (even it's justified), because all too often I've seen that those belonging to the latter group are pushing some sort of reactionary set of beliefs. "Science can't explain this!" unfortunately gets lumped together with more conservative claims like "Science as-it-exists-today is not capable to understanding this!" All too often the intentional limiting of science is an unconscious mechanism meant to curb the perceived threat of meaningless objective nihilism or what have you. Hence why phenomenology has been criticized as being conservative and trying to seclude human meaning from the rest of the world.

So once again I go back to the list I made before: that which cannot be studied scientifically must either be mistaken, unfit for scientific inquiry in general, or unfit for scientific inquiry as science is practiced today. There are examples of all three: the first includes things like ghosts, phlogiston, and magic, the second includes normative ethics, politics, theology and any sort of transcendental or supernatural-ism (and even then it could be argued that "technically" we could use science to do these things, albeit in a very clunky and indirect way), and the third includes, in my opinion, things like consciousness, aesthetics, and perhaps even some theological issues.

Like I said, I don't see any real strict demarcation between science and philosophy. You can go off and focus more on one rather than the other but they nevertheless are inherently tied. It's silly in my opinion to have a separate branch of inquiry, secluded away from everything else that studies matters in a methodological black box.

Eliminative materialists are denying that consciousness exists, in the same way chemists deny phlogiston or astronomers deny the planet Vulcan.

Part of the reason eliminative materialism seemsto be so misunderstood is, in my opinion, precisely because it is so staggeringly unintuitive - people wonder if they really understood the fundamental position because it seems ridiculous to actually believe consciousness does not exist. And yet this is what eliminative materialism accepts. You'll do a double-take and ask if this is really what it's all about, and continue to be dumbfounded as to how this can actually be taken seriously.

The main problem with elim mat is that it equivocates, by kind, consciousness with phlogiston or Vulcan. The latter two were unobserved, hypothesized entities meant to fill in an explanatory role. Consciousness is not this. Consciousness is the data, not something we put in the data.

It's also kind of funny to see how elim mat tends to be a "phase" of philosophers of mind. Not many elim mats have been elim mats since day one.

Elim mat is also not identical to reductive materialism, or type-type identity theory. Dennett's theory is reductive in the sense that it maintains that consciousness "exists" but not in the sense we usually see it as. Consciousness is an illusion, but it still is something. Eliminative materialism doesn't even give any room for consciousness to be anything at all, because it denies the existence of consciousness to begin with.

Reading a book on the science of consciousness right now by Antti Revonsuo, and this bit stood out (from the chapter covering the philosophical mind-body problem):

"The first person's point of view is not accepted as a valid source of data in the physical sciences, therefore it is possible to argue that subjective experiences are not a part of the overall scientific data that need to be explained by the sciences. Viewed from the third-person's objective point of view, consciousness (as data) does not exist, only behavior and brain activity do; therefore it is easy, perhaps even necessary, to eliminate consciousness from science as an erroneous folk-psychological hypothesis.

Then again, the opponent of eliminativism can argue that we need not accept the third-person's point of view of the physical sciences as authoritative or all-inclusive. If consciousness, whose very existence - as Descartes showed - is beyond any doubt whatsoever, can nevertheless be denied by some type of science, then there is something seriously wrong with the science rather than with consciousness. The task of science is to faithfully describe and explain the world: how the world works and what sort of entities it consists of. If there are undeniable subjective phenomena in the world that cannot be captured through the objective standpoint of the physical sciences, then we need to revise the scientific standpoint so that it will not be blind to consciousness anymore. We need a science that admits and takes seriously the reality of the inner subjective world. The least science can do is to stop pretending that such a reality does not exist."

This seems applicable to issues outside of the one at present.

Therefore, suffering is necessary to the wellbeing of individuals alone and as members of a society.

What kind of ramifications would this realization have?

For one, we can do away with pessimistic philosophies that have, well, misunderstood the whole point of suffering. They think suffering shouldn't exist, implying that it is unnecessary, which I've shown is actually necessary for survival. — TheMadFool

Yes, but why is survival automatically something we ought to cherish? You're right that suffering is necessary for survival, but this is exactly the pessimistic point. Survival for the sake of survival and with no endgoal in the linearity of time (re: Cioran's "stationary oscillation") makes survival ultimately meaningless, and as a byproduct makes suffering pointless.

You have to go through a grueling hell of an education to get a university degree. If you don't want to get a university degree, all that work and effort becomes pointless. There's no other way to get a university degree without going through four or more years of hell, but this is hardly any comfort to anyone who does not wish to get a university degree to begin with. In fact, it is probably one of the reasons why they don't wish to get a university degree. The costs are too high and returns are too low or even non-existent.

What Dennett is trying to draw out is the controversy over "what is a likeness" is a red herring. There is no such thing as that substance of mind. Experiences exist, and felt as they are (i.e. have a "what is a likeness" ), but that this doesn't amount to a substance of mind and subject contrary to body. All it means is that, for example, a conscious experience of a bat exists and it among to living through a feeling. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It seems to me like this is only workable if one makes a wholly different notion of what "materialism" is supposed to entail. Dennett's not an eliminativist. The mind exists, but according to him it is not itself a different substance, it's just one of the many different sorts of specimens in the world. In which case, the material world has to be altered to account for this fact.

For what it's worth, I understand the appeal to reductionist accounts of mind like Dennett's (no spooky shit), but in general agree that these theories are ultimately insufficient and more often than not motivated, not by independently good reasons, but by a deeply-entrenched opinion that the world needs to be a certain way (prophetic reasoning masking as a smug "I told you so" attitude), while the jury is still out. It's good to see people like Nagel who are willing to challenge this dogma and entertain different views, even if I don't agree with them either.

A problem with Wittgensteinean quietism is one that infects basically any attempt to disavow philosophy as we know it ("anti-philosophy") - that the very position itself is "philosophical", i.e. of the same general nature of that of which is attempts to repudiate. It's the exact same thing that makes statements like "Everything I say is a lie" paradoxical. There's always that annoying "dangler" proposition that escapes its own encompassing.

How can philosophy leave everything in its place if philosophy is supposed to have therapeutic value? — sime

I think, if we are going to take this literally, that such a therapeutic philosophy keeps everything in place while creating new relations between that which is. New paths, new connections. In other words, you can keep everything in its place while coming to a new understanding of what it is you are keeping in place. By disentangling yourself, you end up getting a better perspective on everything as a whole. In some sense, philosophy is a disease of the mind, if not treated properly.

Zing! >:O

Have fun sleeping in apo la-la land.

Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics. — apokrisis

What we have here is yet another false dichotomy you've set up. You don't need any sort of Platonic "good" to reject your version of naturalism. Nowhere "out there" is there "goodness" or any sort of value at all. All your talk of entropic structures and whatnot does not capture the essence of what people know as "good". You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong.

In a Wittgensteinian/Heideggerian way, although the world does not have any value itself, Being-in-the-world and its various modalities do. The universe does not give a damn about us, so why should we give a damn about its perpetual entropic expansion?

And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s.

So we can look to nature — apokrisis

...and we see absolutely nothing resembling what anyone typically would see as "good", unless we're talking aesthetic value or something. This is what we call equivocation. Nobody here is denying that objective "goodness" value is "spooky". This changes absolutely nothing. We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. You just go further and neuter the whole concept of goodness to fit your metaphysics.

So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help. — apokrisis

No, your cherry-picked "science-informed" bullshit is handwaving the problem away. Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? Maybe it's because they don't seem to fit your narrative of how reality is supposed to be.

Sorry, Chief, but the psychology of humans is oftentimes in direct opposition to the overall direction of the universe. You approach this problem by advocating a kind of Heraclitian Taoism, just go with the flow, immerse yourself in the world and understand its processes and you're good to go. We're going about it by pointing out this is nothing more than a l'esquive, an escape mechanism, something that has been going on since day one and is represented fully by organized religion. Consciousness is a sort of "exile" from the rest of the world. Once you know, you can't go back. This is literally the whole point of the Adam and Eve narrative, a myth that has been replicated across civilizations since the dawn of time.

Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain. — apokrisis

Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious. - Cioran

I was thinking about this for a bit, and I am wondering about the "salvation" theories that a Buddhist, Schopenhauer, Mainlander, et al would say about existence. That is to say, if Being entails the fact of non-Being, and non-Being is preferable, wouldn't we need both in the picture in order to have the salvation of non-being? According to this view, being is perhaps inevitable, or built into the structure somehow, so if that is the case, despite being's harmful nature to the individual, it is also through being that non-being is achieved? — schopenhauer1

Cabrera cites Nietzsche as an example of a negative philosopher who nevertheless "affirms" life, but not through rationalist argumentation. Nietzsche criticized morality, in particular Christian morality, as having a queer valuation of salvation that is required for it to even work. Essentially, God created man in order to save man. It's very...strange.

Cabrera uses this same criticism when he talks about non-Being and Being; initially, everyone "exists" in non-Being. Then some of us get thrust into Being only to return back to non-Being. And so we have to wonder what the whole point of it all was. Being is just a little "bloop" from non-Being.

I can see, if Being "did not exist" or something like that, how it might be difficult to see non-Being as "good". And I guess I would say we have two different paths we could take: we could swallow the literalist pill and grant that non-Being is simply a fiction and that immanent Being is all there is (which might be technically correct but is difficult to work into language and general intuitions), or we could see non-Being and Being as inherently intertwined (as you were saying, I think) and that Being, from the perspective of conscious beings like us (Dasein), is always less preferable than non-Being.

I see Buddhism as an example of a pessimistically-inclined religion/philosophy that nevertheless has an overall positive undertone. Nirvana is achievable. It's not all doom-and-gloom. Existence is suffering but there is a way out, and in fact the ultimate reality is "good". Put this sort of thinking in lines of what you were saying and we get the perspective of non-Being as not necessarily "salvation" but more like "going back home". We're exiled in that Cioran-esque sense, for whatever reason. This is, I think, part of the reason why Buddhist philosophers put so little value in intra-worldly things.

But like I've said elsewhere, I don't know how much I buy into all this talk of non-Being apart from fictional discourse. It's useful but ultimately does not represent reality as it actually is. As far as I understand his work, Cabrera explicitly denies any substantial metaphysical structure in his theorizing. He works under what he calls "natural ontology" or "nature" which he describes as the way the world "naturally" appears to humans and not how it literally is. Hence how he claims he can talk coherently about value while simultaneously agreeing with Wittgenstein that there is absolutely no value in the mind-independent world. So straight-up it seems like he accepts that non-Being is not necessarily legitimately a real concept but more of a useful heuristic or fiction.

I'm not complaining about esoteric scientific jargon itself, I'm pointing out that the few people you communicate to on this forum are not scientists who are "in the loop" and because of this, the use of this sort of terminology is out of place and irritating. You use this vocabulary to communicate ideas efficiently between professionals - those online here are not professionals and so it is not appropriate to use this same vocabulary when addressing them.

And here you are, on an internet forum with a population of less than thirty people. Congratulations.

Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar. — apokrisis

Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology.

Instead now I start with a head full of every kind of possibility and start to limit that in a top down fashion so it is reasonably predictive of what is likely to happen next in terms of some flow of sensory elements. I generate the idea of the room from memory and so pretty instantly will notice anything that sharply deviates from my forward model of it. — apokrisis

What does it mean, exactly, when you say you start with a head full of every kind of possibility? Do you mean to say that literally every sort of possibility is "implanted" in our heads, or do you mean that the brain merely has the capability to conjure up endless possibilities? As in, the power to actualize these events already makes these events "existent" in some sense?

If we look at the brain, we see it is limited in many respects. It has a certain size, a certain organization, a certain amount of processing power and capabilities. I cannot imagine ten thousand stars, all I can imagine is a very large amount of stars of indeterminate quantity. There legitimately is a limit to how much I can do.

How would something like you're describing evolve in the natural world? From where would the mind come from? From my perspective, a bottom-up view, while perhaps not being entirely sufficient, has leverage here. Consciousness evolves from lesser awareness to more, all in the name of efficiency. You said "less is more", but in my opinion it should be "more is more" so long as efficiency and adaptability are maintained within some set threshold.

Yeah, Cabrera's book is more meta-ethical and meta-philosophical than normative or applied ethics. He has some things about how you shouldn't kill anyone or have children but that's about it. The closest he gets is basically when he asks whether or not negative ethics is even possible, or if we need to make "negative categories" after the affirmative ones die. I know somewhere in the book he talks about how letting a murderer kill you is "technically" an ethical victory, but I also think he realizes the clumsiness of this view (severe agent centered restrictions, essentially). But I suppose that goes all the way back to the initial observation, that we can't have life without some kind of conflict or compromise. Someone gets hurt, no matter what.

So yes. This doesn't tally with the usual notions of how the mind should work. But that is because the phenomenology as we focus on it is naturally about all our constant failures to get predictions right. It seems that the homuncular "I" is always chasing the elusive truth of an ever surprising reality. However that introspective view by definition is only seeing things that way because there is such a bulk of events successfully discounted in every passing instant.

For example, in the second that just passed, I was effectively, subconsciously, predicting that Donald Trump was not about to barge into my room, an asteroid was not about to plough into the park outside my window, my foot wasn't about to explode in a shower of fireworks. So that is what brains do - allow us to discount a near infinite ensemble of possibilities as that which is almost infinitely unlikely. — apokrisis

Interesting. I can see how much of our awareness is all about what doesn't work, like Heidegger's broken tool analogy. We are most aware of that which did not go as planned. That which does go as planned is ignored immediately or soon after. I do not spend time thinking about what it was like to press the letter "a" key on my keyboard, but I do spend more time thinking WHEN i REALIZE i ACCIDENTALLY PRESSED THE CAPS LOCK KEY.

Yet I find it hard to believe that you were actually subconsciously predicting all these insane possibilities as you mentioned. That would require a hell of a lot of energy, would it not? What use would it be for the subconscious to go through all these possibilities - and how do you know your subconscious is, in fact, running through them? It's subconscious!

We keep going, don't stop running
They keep selling, we don't want it
So close to it almost found a way
Two steps closer, they keep coming
We keep yelling, we don't want it
Almost better, this things about to break.

So we aren't mincing terms, can you define affirmative narrative? — schopenhauer1

I'll quote at length before adding my own thoughts:

Someone once considered the Introduction to Formal Logic of the Spanish Thinker Alfredo Deaño as "logic for children." In some ways, I wish this book A Critique of Affirmative Morality will be considered an "ethics for children." Indeed, the questions -often exasperating –this work rises, are the basic questions of life that usually appear in the stubborn and monotonous questions of kids: Why are we here?, Why should we live?, Why do we have to die?, Why may be not kill our family?, Why should we love our parents?, Why not kill ourselves?, Why have we been brought to the world?, etc., and these questions are raised here exactly with the same innocent cruelty of children. That will no doubt infuriate the “adult” ethicists who promptly want to surpass the stage of the children‟s questions and to analyze “the serious moral crisis of our time”, the political, ecological, diplomatic, military subjects. These "adult" issues do not interest children and they are not interesting for the present book either. Philosophers and poets share with the child the unbearable conviction life is a badly told story, and that no "big issue" newspapers talk about and the more powerful countries of the world discuss will be able to extinguish the disturbing flames of Origin. In this sense, the child has his own maturity. All the “naive” and childish spirit this book could transmit is strictly intentional precisely because one of its main points is that jumping directly to those “great ethical issues of our time”, ignoring the original problems, is one of the basic features of the lack of moral sense of our time, and maybe of all times. — Julio Cabrera

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The lack of radical reflection in the current ethics of beings (both classical and modern, of Kantian or, specially, Utilitarian inspiration) consists of the fact the crucial question has been, throughout the history of philosophy, how one should live, without considering in a positive way the possible ethical character of dying and abstention. Asking, in the ethical field, how to live is admitting ab initio there is not and there cannot be any moral problem in the very fact of being; that all moral problems arise "afterwards", in the domain of how. If the initial ethical question is how to live, it is assumed beforehand that living has not, in itself, any moral problems, or that living is, per se, ethically good, or that, for some motive that should still be clarified, the matter of good and evil does not concern to being, but only to beings. Affirmativeness is the historical form taken by the lack of radical character of the ethical reflection. (Indeed, a reflection that would answer "no" to theinitial question would not be radical either). But what is the philosophical-rational justification of living as ethically good (valuable) per se, and of the idea the
only thing that ethically matters is how to live, that is, how to turn into ethically good this or that ontic human life, excepting life itself from any questioning whatsoever? — Julio Cabrera

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Since the beginning of this book, I have taken an attitude of that kind (which, in my view, is not “skeptical” in any pejorative sense, nor “nihilistic”), presenting the argumentations on the first chapters as of “a radical and anti-skeptical moralist” (using there Habermas‟ conception of skepticism), but disposed to argue until the end, employing the same conceptual tools supplied by the moral cognitivist. I will call “empty skeptic” the skeptic who refuses to argue, and “plenary skeptic” this who accepts to argue infinitely and radically. Perhaps the “skepticism” is maintained in the negative conviction of the plenary skeptic that it is not necessary, in argumentation, to destroy concepts and theories, but only put them in movement, let them live. From a negative point of view, the most appropriate way of denying a concept is not killing it, but –on the contrary –letting it die naturally. — Julio Cabrera

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One of the most employed terms in the previous reflection has been “affirmative” and its derivatives. What has been understood as such? I understand by “affirmative”:

(a)The non-critical acceptation of fundamental theses of the type “the being is good”, “to be is better than not to be”, “the more being, the better”, etc, as well as the conviction that the ethical theory should ask directly about how-to be, how-to live, how to conduct an “ethical life”, and never ask if life itself is ethical, if there is not an ethical cost in simply staying alive, in “living a life” as if the being was, so to speak, “granted” and immunized against criticism. The ethicity of being, of living, of emerging to life, of being born, is given, in affirmative thinking – in my sense -as a granted and never thematically exposed conviction, as something already positively valued.

(b) In the second place, affirmative means assuming the task of thinking as “insuring” or “supportive” (and, maybe, as a solace, as a certain type of “conceptual edification”), in the sense that the conceptualization of the world shall protect us, for example, against relativism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism and, in general, against all that may threat the continuity of the life of thinking. For affirmative thinking, it is not the case of pure and simple “looking for truth”, but of looking for all truth compatible with the continuity of life, with the enterprise of not allowing that thinking get blocked so it could keep developing itself indefinitely (I have used the word “affirmative” because it has, in Spanish, precisely these two meanings: “affirmative” as opposed to negative [in the sense of“positive”, of “saying yes”, of “assenting”], and “affirmative” as “affirming”, “supporting”, “finding something firm, or firming” [as in expressions of the kind: “It is necessary to firm on something, on some belief”, etc.].). — Julio Cabrera

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From the optic of the present book, what is interesting in those theories is they all are “affirmative” theories, in the explained sense (contemporary north-American Pragmatism is perhaps the philosophy which has most openly assumed the “affirmative” character –in the dual sense mentioned –of ethical reflection, through a pragmatist theory of truth [vide, for example, the attempt of reconstruction of moral theory proposed by John Dewey]: true is what protects us from danger, what can be used as an adequate instrument for successful survival. What pragmatism has openly exposed remains implicit, I think,in the rest of moral philosophies in general, including Kantian ethics).

“Affirmative” are theories in which the movement of the quest for truth is conceived as a vital process (even when this “Nietzchean” interpretation might seem offensive to many of theauthors of these theories), in which the hypothesis that the quest for truth may lead us to an anti-vital result is rejected beforehand and not critically. The basic affirmative meta-thesis would be the following: life and truth go (or should go) on the same path, they never get in conflict; discovering truth is (or should be), at the same time, to discover the continuity of life, the uninterrupted process –however arduous –of vitality. There are not (or there should not be) anti-vital truths. — Julio Cabrera

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The affirmative narrative is the historical-social-political-ethical bias towards continued existence. That there is something good, or at least nothing wrong, with life and existence and that there is some reason to continue the whole thing. If you dive into the ethical literature, you'll be amazed by how conservative and non-radical ethics tends to be, often manifesting as appeals to absurdity - something threatens the existence of society and this is taken as evidence of an ideas' falseness.

The term "affirmative" is not only referring to the affirmation of life but also the suppression of dissent. It's non-radical because it cannot exist if it is questioned all the way down. Children wonder why anything exists, why they have to do anything, why they have to die, and are looked down upon with the patronizing smug smiles of the adults who have "figured it all out" - but they haven't, they have just suppressed these ideas (if they had, we wouldn't be having this discussion!). It's as if part of the coming-of-age ritual and the subsequent assimilation into society is the systematic suppression of radical questioning. You don't do it, because it threatens everything that exists. We have places to go and people to meet and things to do and we don't have time for any of this radical philosophical bullshit. Why do you think philosophy in general, these days, is so frowned upon? Because it doesn't "fit" with the social mode of operation. Capitalism is literally a symbol of affirmativity.

Part of the negative dialectic here is to show how banal some of these questions objectively tend to be. If approached unabashedly head-on, the answers to these sorts of questions are relatively obvious. It's not as if the negative thinker believes they are handing wisdom down from above - rather, they are simply pointing out the obvious. Everyone else just has to "catch up" a bit. Deep down, most people realize life is not that great, that the manner in which we live and the relationship we have with the world at large is absurd, and that we're all going to die someday. Every now and then this manifests in little cracks in the affirmative system, and become wildly popular for their cathartic nature. But as soon as this crack begins to spread as the realization sets in that it's not just a phase, people go batshit and panic and try to pretend there's something "else" that will save them. Like Nietzsche said, only so much truth can be lived.

Negative ethics, in this case, simply takes the concepts affirmative ethics uses and applies them universally and consistently.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life. - Cioran

Probably my self-esteem. Like basically everyone.

pure solipsism — apokrisis

I mean, solipsism is one of those annoying philosophical positions that get in the way of affirmative progress. Even if they're wrong, it says a lot about your priorities that you're willing to deny their validity without any real argument. Instead of refuting solipsism, you use it as a threat.

It also says a lot about your powers of observation that you're willing to accuse me of solipsism when, for a very long while now, I've been articulating the point that ethics, fundamentally speaking, is about the relationship between the self and the other, and the harm and manipulation of the latter in particular.

But carry on with your repetitive affirmative narrative.

Nah, you're just missing the point by a mile. Oh well.