:up:

This brings me to the most important aspect of sense I want to bring out, which is the fact that sense is always motivated or responsive to contexts which makes the 'kind' of sense that it is. — StreetlightX

Pattee makes that biosemiotic point in support of Rosen's argument - that complex systems thus have many descriptions - in this paper ... (I mention it as I happened to be reading it.)

https://sisu.ut.ee/sites/default/files/biosemio/files/irreducible_and_complementary_semiotic_howard_pattee.pdf

Is empiricism of some kind a way out of the Trilemma? — Uber

Infinite chains are truncated at the level of appropriate meaning. — tim wood

I'd say this is key. Eventually we lack reason to continue to doubt because our purposes seem satisfied. In pragmatic fashion, any further differences or uncertainties don't make a difference to the beliefs upon which we are willing to act.

So philosophical reasoning is designed to be as open-ended a tool as possible. Part of the pragmatic equation is that it is useful to be able to keep on asking questions without limit. But then also the open endedness must be matched by a mechanism for achieving closure. And maybe science does a better job of expressing that formally as part of the total package.

Empiricism is a mechanism for limiting doubt and securing belief. It assumes that if questions serve a purpose, then it has to be a purpose capable of being satisfied - at least to the degree necessary for the creation of states of belief that we would be willing enough to act upon.

So the trilemma is like this pragmatic relation opened up to reveal its three essential elements.

Yes, questioning or doubt is open-ended and extends to infinity. That's healthy. It shows that bit of the apparatus is in good working order.

But then also foundationalism must apply. We need to be willing to risk asserting some starting belief. We need axioms that we aren't currently doubting. We also need a closure at the other end of the chain of reasoning thus created in the form of a principle of indifference. We need to know when a purpose is being sufficiently fulfilled and any errors of prediction, or degree of surprise, is simply the kind of fine-grain difference that makes no overall difference for us.

The overall deal is thus circular. Or rather, hierarchical. Knowledge can grow endlessly in principle. The ability to hypothesise and doubt is open by design, so the system can always expand its borders. But knowledge is then anchored by its two bounds - the limits or "event horizons" of purpose and indifference.

The two are reciprocal. That which is irrelevant to a purpose is matchingly a matter of indifference. Globally, our sphere of meaningful knowledge is defined by our largest purposes - the reasons we would have to act as if we believed. And locally, our grain of meaningful doubt becomes the degree to which surprises or exceptions could make a reasonable difference to what we would have done.

The system - empirical rationalism - is thus both open and closed. And so it is dynamical or adaptive - capable of settling on its own self-organising balances.

Can you rephrase and clarify? — chatterbears

It's what I already argued. Contradiction is to be what is expected. Cognition thrives on having alternatives to contrast.

So contradiction is not a fatal flaw like you suggest. It represents the fundamentality of choices that can be "equally good" in context. And so the job of ethics is to strike a reasonable balance.

Self-defense is justified because that living being's rights have been violated and needs to protect itself out of necessity. Well-being is still at work here, as someone's well-being has been diminished. — chatterbears

Well yes. We went over this. Well-being or flourishing is the generic goal. And then the "contradiction" is between personal self-interest and collective self-interest.

Society is founded on competition AND co-operation. It is essential that one does not exclude the other. It is also essential that as local vs global interests, they are fruitfully balanced within an ethical framework.

Eating meat is not a necessary harm in order to survive, therefore it is not justified. — chatterbears

But there are degrees of harm. And perhaps good reasons for recognising that.

Your monotonic absolutism makes it impossible for you to properly envisage that - even if in specific instances, as in killing in self defense, you feel forced to yield the issue.

You allow exceptions to the rule when things get so extreme your rule breaks. I prefer a more logically consistent approach that follows from seeking a fruitful balance of contrasting interests. That maps to reality more smoothly. It is how the real world works.

Which creates an internal contradiction. — chatterbears

And so in turn, a felt natural contradiction that ethical reasoning ought to aim to balance. no?

Like you agreed about self-defence for example.

The proper question would be, "Can a dog survive on a vegetarian diet?" - The answer is yes. — chatterbears

Great. You are consistent with your beliefs. And pragmatically, the modern techno-consumer society allows you to achieve that. There are the products out there now.

My argument was against your OP - where you argued that we should be consistent with our feelings. And what is obvious then is that we all could have different kinds of feeling about the issue of killing and eating animals.

So your initial argument could carry no real weight. Unless you could go on to say there is only one "right" way to feel about these things.

If you simply assert this rightness as some kind of objective moral absolute, then fine. But it lacks any actual reason. It is simply an expression of your personal faith.

And you do tend to respond just like that on a whole range of ethical issues, like slavery, discrimination, etc. You know what is right and expect others simply to agree.

I instead have argued for pragmatic morality. I see moral systems as expressing functional social and biological organisation. Morality evolves for actual good reasons. And that should be the starting point for ethical discussions.

This doesn't mean that our biological legacy should dictate outcomes - we evolved as meat eaters, therefore must remain so. But it does still rightfully inform the debate. If social and cultural choices are more under our control, then that is a thing too. But there is a context to which a final position must respond.

That was what I saw as ironic about your attempt to by-pass reason and invoke the "natural emotions" of compassion and empathy. Those are precisely the kind of evolve states of mind that are functional for an intelligent social creature.

And if we look to social science, we can see that the flip side of these feelings is just as functional - as our intelligence is all about weighing a competing balance of interests. We need to be competitive and co-operative, dominant and submissive, understanding and selfish, as best expresses some overall adaptive state.

So if you are going to look to evolved feelings as a basis to moral rightness, you would need to take both sides of the coin into account. Instead you pick out one aspect of what we naturally feel - the empathetic/compassionate - and then turn that into your absolutist rule.

As I say, I don't have a particular beef against vegetarianism. I won't lose sleep if we all generally head that way as food technology deals with the issues of our habitual taste preferences, the economics of lab meat means it wins on price in the supermarket aisle, and - what really counts - environmental footprints leave us with no other practical choice.

But when it comes to pain and suffering, that too is part of the pragmatic circle of life. For humans, it remains a natural part of the deal as well.

It is a different argument, but take away all apparent hardship and people still suffer. With no real sources of suffering and pain, people start to become hurt and anxious over the thousand trivial things they didn't have the time to focus on before.

Life just ain't simple in the way you need it to be simple to fit your one-sided analysis.

So there are good arguments - based on a balance of reasons - for encouraging a social trend towards veganism. Your OP was not an example of a good argument in my view.

My response to that is that there are no grounds for treating the PLA any more or less heuristically than any other law of nature — MetaphysicsNow

It's off topic, so I'll keep it short, even though it is the topic I'm focused on currently.

Even if all laws are heuristic, the PLA is a principle and so distinct in being foundational to laws generally. There seem to be three such guiding principles - the PLA, the cosmological principle, and the principle of locality. My particular interest here is how they fit together.

The PLA becomes truly mysterious and non-local in quantum physics. The path integral or sum over histories formalism suggests events take the least action path over all their possible states. Quantum gravity would (likely) have to see even time and space as emergent in this manner.

A nice intro is Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf

As regards the constraints based ontology you talk about, could you expand a little on this and specifically what you mean by "material sponaneity" and "formal limitation"?

Do you regard the formal limitations as capable of evolution, or are they fixed and immutable? — MetaphysicsNow

Again, keeping it short, I am arguing for a holistic metaphysics in opposition to the usual reductionist story. So I am arguing for an Aristotelian "four causes" or hylomorphic understanding of Being. As well as the bottom-up constructing causes of efficient/material causality, there is the top-down constraining causes of form/finality.

This is a systems science or hierarchy theory approach. And with CS Peirce, it becomes a semiotic approach where the top-down becomes understood as the informational aspect of reality, the bottom-up as the material or dynamical aspect of reality.

Peirce added the further critical logical wrinkle of understanding reality as a process of rational development - what we would call today, order from chaos or self-organising criticality. The thermodynamic or condensed matter approach to physical structure. So Peirce added Vagueness as a category of logic, a ground of being. A system crisply organised according to the four causes could have the appropriate kind of "nothingness" from which it could actually arise.

So this all cashes out as a general story where reality is the result of the development of constraints that organise a systems degrees of freedoms (and organises them in the precise evolutionary fashion that causes those freedoms, that resulting play of events, to cause the whole system itself to stably persist).

So it is an autopoietic story, a story of ontic structural realism, a story of dissipative structure, to name-check a few of the expressions of the general idea that might be familiar.

To make the contrast with reductionism - and nominalism, atomism, mechanicalism, etc - the systems view does see laws as "merely" the expression of collective behaviour. Peirce called them habits. But then the collective behaviour exerts the constraints that shape the parts making the system. So there is a cybernetic loop. There is feedback that limits the freedoms of the system's events so that they become the kind of thing that are the right stuff to keep the general show going.

From here, it is easy to see why symmetry principles become the governing factor of existence - hence the cosmological principle. At an almost Platonic level, there are logical forms that chaos cannot avoid falling into. For instance, a vortex or whorl is found everywhere in nature where there is dissipation to be done. It is the least action structure. Similarly for fractal branching.

And this is where logic comes in - as an unavoidable form. Logic expresses a least action principle in that is represents a maximal breaking of states of vagueness or uncertainty. It represents the symmetry-breaking which is a binary yes or no, true or false, present or absent.

And quantum interpretations are now picking up on this angle. Wheeler put it nicely with his "it from bit" papers...

This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question, How come existence?

No escape is evident from four conclusions: (1) The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any preestablished continuum physical law.

(2) There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum.

(3) The familiar probability function or functional, and wave equation or functional wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information-theoretic source from which they derive.

(4) No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy.

Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.
http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf

So it boils down to the idea that logic - as a Platonic-strength limitation on uncertainty or vagueness - can conjure existence into substantial being simply by applying its PLA-style constraints on naked or chaotic possibility.

Lewis and other nominalists/reductionists take a different view of possibilia in treating them as already definite and crisp degrees of freedom. Reality is a statistical ensemble of already concretely bounded alternatives. That assumption is explicit in modal realism's talk of "worlds". And the ensemble view is also what leads many to a Many Worlds Interpretation of QM.

But I am taking the alternative holistic view where possibility is more basic than that. It starts out as pure unformed potential - an indeterminate and unsubstantial vagueness. Then it starts to develop lawfulness or order as all its unlimited variety gets sieved according to a unifying principle of least action. You get a world that evolves into concrete form as it dissipates its early confusion and erases whole constellations of possibilities with every now definite physical event.

If my eye absorbs that photon from a distant star a billion light years away, then that is it. The event fixes a history. Time has been added to in a concrete fashion that forever limits any alternative result.

So we end up with just the one world creating itself by erasing possibilities. You don't have a modal realism/MWI story of whole new worlds being created every time there is a possible logical fork in the road. Instead, localised events are a non-local or contextual collapse of every other alternative.

The mystery of the PLA is that all the other alternatives did weigh in the balance. They were real in the sense that they really were there in a way that just got eliminated in a systematic and forever fashion. Until my eye did decohere that photon, the Universe was that fraction more uncertain. The alternative outcomes still existed as a fuzzy set of freedoms. And QM gives you a way to measure that kind of concrete possibilia. You can see it as a "block" of unrealised choices - the wavefunction.

Anyway, a short post has grown long. These are exciting times for metaphysics. :)

Animals deserve what they can understand and experience. — chatterbears

So does a dog deserve to eat meat? Or would you force it to be vegetarian under your bill of universal sentient rights?

No wonder you won’t extend the vote to dogs.

Similarly, black people should be allowed to vote, as well as women. — chatterbears

And dogs? Surely dogs too.

You would still need to explain why you deserve those rights, but an animal does not. — chatterbears

But if they are human rights, then they are human rights. Your earlier argument was based on natural justice for sentient beings. Emotionally, that is definitely a more powerful approach. Now you just risk leading people into legalistic confusion.

Because in many cultures, especially in the west, we grant these 3 rights to dogs. People can actually get locked up for abusing a dog, so people have recognized that dogs deserve these same basic rights. And that anyone who infringes on the dog's rights should be punished. — chatterbears

So now you are talking about animal rights. Yes, we have created those too. And they are lesser rights that pragmatically recognise the difference in sentience. So that in itself becomes a problem with this legalistic turn in your approach.

So why stop at dogs? Why not grant other animals the same rights as well? — chatterbears

But animal welfare legislation does normally cover other animals. Do you live somewhere where the legislation only applies to dogs?

And I would also argue, you may not even need empathy, but could replace empathy with a foundation for basic universal human rights. — chatterbears

But that is now a far worse argument. All humans may be animals, but not all animals are human. So it would be logically inconsistent to grant human rights to non-human animals.

At least in invoking empathy/compassion, you were providing some kind of affective ground for ignoring the difference.

Now you're just not even trying. — NKBJ

Correct.

These are not arguments, just angry noises.

It was a joke. If science did in fact believe it served some clear cut purpose, philosophy would feel more "ambiguous" about that - even when supposedly being all about clearing up any ambiguity.

Yeah. It is clear from this thread that passionate veganism relies on black and white thought at the expense of relativism and balance.

It's a shame as there are plenty of sound pragmatic reasons for promoting big changes in the standard western diet.

Thus, why the ambiguity inherent in philosophy, as opposed to the clear cut nature of science, — Posty McPostface

From a philosophy of science point of view, that statement seems very disputable.

I think I've read somewhere that a Bayseian approach combined with some kind of idea of self-locating beliefs (i.e. beliefs about which world you are in) can help with this, but I've not dug into it in too much detail. — MetaphysicsNow

Yeah. My distant memory is that Lewis relies eventually on counterpart theory and resemblances. So each of us is individual in our own world. And then there are all the other worlds where I am living a life that is only insignificantly different.

There is no actual identity - as we each represent at least one counterfactual difference in existing in a different world. But we would tend to formulate the same (Bayseian) laws of probability through sharing the near enough identical experiences.

Coin tossing would best be explained by a rule of chance, for instance. We would not resemble the selves that lived in the worlds where every coin toss ever experienced always came up heads.

So causation can be reduced to a subjective ascription. Nothing is either objectively chance or determined, you just happen to be located in a world that either looks that way or it doesn't.

But that's why I prefer a constraints-based ontology where both material spontaneity, and its formal limitation, are real things. It does require then a "weird" view of causality. But physics already has had to accept just that with the finality embedded in the principle of least action. Nature does sum over all of its possible histories to tend towards some optimal trajectory. The alternatives have to really exist, in some sense, so that they can count as that which is (mostly) the actually unactualised.

I get it. You are not a pragmaticist. You live in a world of black and white where morality is objective and absolute.

Philosophical discussion is really a waste of time. You already have all the answers you need as a matter of faith.

But it’s not me that demands your simplistic black and white form of consistency here, is it? It is you that is stuck with that as the dilemma.

Besides, this is about killing for eating. Are we back to eating autistics again here? What is the pragmatic reason for killing mental defectives in your scenario?

Could you expand on the above for my simple mind to comprehend? — Posty McPostface

It’s straightforward. The very notion of something working says there was some purpose being served.

Well, it is the whole purpose of philosophy according to Plato, to want and attain the good through the practice of philosophy. I don't see how any progress within the field of philosophy has emerged in regards to that, — Posty McPostface

Some people might think ethics is the prime purpose of philosophy. Others might target being. Or reasoning.

Because you need to explain why you don't feel empathy for a cow, but you do for a human. What is the trait that differentiates the two living beings? — chatterbears

It’s pretty obvious. Cows don’t have the cognitive capacity for empathy and compassion, let alone a desire for consistent ethical practices.

I haven't read Something Happened. I did reach Catch-22, — csalisbury

I only mentioned it as I happen to be reading it and felt it matched your interest in the inner games people play. I found Catch-22 hilarious as a teen, but laboured when I tried to read it again a few years ago. Something Happened is surprisingly honest about the stuff people think and feel, yet could never risk saying.

Rereading this I find it important that you mention "motivation". Or the desire to do "good" — Posty McPostface

I only said that pragmatism is epistemically closed by the fact some position works. There has to be a purpose that was thus served.

Whether that desire is for the good is another issue. It becomes part of the meta-ethical question being explored. You could take it as foundational - to the degree you have got a clear idea of its antithesis.

Both. I don't quite understand the obsession with picking sides with either/or. — Posty McPostface

It’s a corollary of starting a deductive argument. You have to start somewhere. And a foundational fork in the road is the most definite kind of place to start.

And that is also a reason for pragmatism. If you believe reality starts in the vague, then form is what gets imposed by the dialectic. It does still start in the either/or of a foundational act of dichotomisation. But the goal is then a resolution or synthesis.

But surely even a flawless argument is only true if the premises are secure.

So the gap that omniscience would have to fill lies in the truth of what gets assumed as motivation for your premises.

And then when it comes to the general validity of some topic, like ethics, there are the metaphysical level premises that are always going to be open to question.

Is morality objective or subjective ultimately? Either choice is just a necessary leap of faith to secure some definite further line of argument.

So deduction alone never bridges any epistemic gap. The only hope of at least minimising that gap is pragmatic reasoning - a cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation that can measurable narrow the divide between what was assumed for the sake of argument, and then how that works out in the long run. Given that the question had some purpose.

Real philosophy is the pragmatism of philosophical naturalism. Science is the applied arm of that these days.

Then you have that sound middle road flanked by the unrestricted objectivism/realism of AP, and the unrestricted subjectivism/relativism of PoMo.

It is a luxury that modern academia can enjoy I guess. A cultural entertainment. The tab is being picked up by the science dudes anyway.

The past constrains the future. And then what isn’t constrained will happen freely.

So yeah. There is no absolute determinism. But also, no absolute spontaneity. Given how much past has already accumulated, the world is highly organised and very restricted in the accidents that can occur.

You say there are futures where the laws can break down. You would have to be more clear about where physics might think this.

For a start, as the Universe gets ever more cold and dispersed, the chance of any spontaneous fluctuations dwindle accordingly. At infinite time, they would also be infinitely unlikely.

You could argue we are in a false vacuum state and so may plunge through to a lower true bottom level for some reason. But even that would only mean we didn’t understand the background story when we were describing the physical constraints producing a stable universe when writing down its “laws”.

In all cases, a modal realist is not going to allow the existence of non-real possibilities: all possbilities for a modal realist are equally real, although they might not all be equally likely. — MetaphysicsNow

Modal realists who subscribe to either intuitionist or classical logic will both fall back on the law of non-contradiction. Modal realists who subscribe to paraconsistent logics might not (it depends how expansive they take the idea of a true contradiction to be). — MetaphysicsNow

You made nice points. Possibilities are real to the degree that some logic, some principle of intelligibility, constrains an unformed potency. And logics suggest increasingly restrictive constraints, reaching their strongest form in possibilities that obey the LEM.

But my issue with modal realism is that it does reduce the real to the accidental. Every option that could be taken, does get taken. Probability - as some certain propensity or likelihood - is now some kind of illusion. In the infinite multiverse, we have no grounds for treating different outcomes as reflecting different propensities.

So there is a problem. Logic provides a formal structuring. It constrains an unbounded potential, a vagueness, so that it has to be - in the strongest logical form - a bivalent case of either/or. But modal realism then wants to make all accidents real. They each have their own world, or world branch.

Likelihood seems preserved in that many more of some outcomes are found than others. But that then raises the question of who actually knows this to be the case so that the events of any one world can rightfully be seen as probabilistic - actually a play of possibilities? A God’s eye view from nowhere is being smuggled in to secure this further metaphysical fact.

So while logic - as intelligible structure - does lie over events as an ultimate formal cause, we need to go a step further and throw in a finality as well. Some even higher kind of constraint must be real to complete the modal job.

And this is routinely suggested in physics. There is the principle of least action, or sum over histories, which collapses the many logically possible worlds back towards the one. Propensity becomes real because while all alternatives are real, they add or subtract in ways that further constrain the actualised outcome. We wind up back in just the one world because finality closes things. By necessity, the accidental winds up actually being restricted in its open, and even infinite, variety.

LOL. What’s not recent? The surge in numbers due to a generational shift?

Are you claiming that it is all the Baby Boomers who are suddenly turning vegan for moral reasons? The fact that you would deny something so factual is frankly weird.

Do those things count as a recent mass movement based on a moral argument? Do you want to claim that?

So when a cause becomes widely adopted by a generation, that doesn’t make it generational.

Sounds legit.

[Furious muffled scrapping noises resume down the deep hole.]

Keeping digging that hole you’re in. Others are celebrating the fact.

According to City A.M., research by Barclays reveals that those born between 1995 and 2005 (Generation Z) are way more into plant-based foods than previous generations, even millennials.

Yes, you read that right. Researchers find that Gen Z is buying loads of kale, tofu, avocados, quinoa, and dairy-free milk. How much more? They purchase 80 percent more kale, 57 percent more tofu, and a whopping 266 percent more avocados! And Generation Z consumes 550 percent more plant-based milk than Generation X.

As members of this generation grow older and start their careers and families, we can expect to really see a boom.

While significant, this increase is an extension of the consistent growth in veganism, especially over the past decade or so as millennials—the world’s largest generation—purchase their own food.

http://www.mercyforanimals.org/thought-millennials-were-vegan-af-meet-generatio

It’s a generational thing.

In 1971, 1 percent of U.S. citizens described themselves as vegetarians.[119] In 2008 Harris Interactive found that 3.2% are vegetarian and 0.5% vegan,[120] while a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey of 500 respondents found that 13% of Americans are either vegetarian or vegan

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

One reason is that I’m interested in how every generation finds its passionate social causes. — apokrisis

Veganism is annoying to the older generation. What is the source of that?

A prime principle of earlier generations was not to be fussy at the dinner table. Finish everything on your plate. Don’t be faddy. Eat what everyone else eats.

So there is a context of what was socially functional in an earlier era.

Then came the era of processed junk food, factory farming, instant meals and self indulgent diets as a socialised right. The effects of that have been generally disasterous for both individual health and the environment.

The next turn of the wheel would have to be better adapted to the realities. So veganism might be a large part of that. It might be a practical necessity. Or cloned meat could deliver the same general health and environmental outcomes. That is what would be up for moral debate. And philosophy would aim to be ahead of the curve on that score.

But what I objected to in the OP was the narrow focus on sentience and sufferering. That in itself is a symptom of a social dysfunction. It speaks to an egocentrism that isn’t in fact willing to see the self as a product of society. And this leads to moral arguments that lack that pragmatic balance at their heart.

Semiotics is not a replacement for the question of Being, although it certainly is relevant. — darthbarracuda

But Peircean semiotics gave a credible model of being as pure naked spontaneity. It supplies a mathematical, hence scientific, image. That gives a better purchase on the issue than a poetic description. The poetic view already presumes an experiencer as part of the equation - the story of this vague nothingness that is beyond any determinate somethingness.

The Il y a fails to de-subjectise the issue. So I agree about the direction it might signal for our metaphysical thoughts, but to cash that direction out, I find semiotics goes the furthest in striving for a mathematical level of abstraction.

At dusk, we may experience what Levinas calls the il y a - the "there is" without anything being. We are bewildered that a world exists that transcends our experience, with unfathomable depths where no understanding can penetrate. The il y a refutes idealism. — darthbarracuda

To address this bit, what are you actually experiencing but some counter-image, some umwelt, of your own imagining? It doesn’t escape the charge of being idealistic.

Consider what science says is the actual material story. There was a Big Bang. Now it is trailing away into a generalised Heat Death. That is a truer image. At least in terms of mathematical concepts cashed out in controlled acts of measurement.

So that more concrete story now gives us complementary forms of states of nothing. One is so hot that nothing material has stable form. The other is so cold that all material differences are statically frozen.

So how accurate is your il y a in the light of the scientific facts? (Talk of decay may be a nod to them.)

But then do those facts transcend our experience? No. They are also just the construction of another umwelt, another interpretation, another idea that has meaning for us ... an idea that actually is constructing “us” also, as that kind of observer of those kinds of observables.

The point is that idealism can’t be refuted by some sudden transcendent access to the thing-in-itself. But then idealism itself loses its troublesome aspect - the claim of mind being primal being - when the situation is understood semiotically. The very act of trying to grasp that which is beyond in a usefully meaningful way results also in their being some particular “us” existing in that particular unwelt, or state of interpretance.

That is why existence has to be understood semiotically as a recursive and irreducible complex thing. No simple metaphysics can free us from that. We have to see ourselves as part of the creative equation.

The difficult next step is to work towards an umwelt that is the most objectively minimal kind of idealism. Which is what science should be doing.

Beat me to it this time!

. The only way out of this is to see mind as ontologically primary and matter as derivative (idealism), or re-configure our understanding of what "matter" is (so that we get something like neutral monism, or Aristotelian hylomorphism, etc). — darthbarracuda

There is yet another way. And that is to talk about complexity. Mind arises due to the complexity of a sign relation that organises matter into a form. Consciousness is then just what it is like to be doing that at a massively complex level of development and evolution - one in which a self is modelled in contrast to a world to result in an embedded sense of autonomy or agency.

That semiotic view would also reconfigure our understanding of matter.

Our ordinary physics is constructed as a story of observables. The observer is not part of the model. Leaving out the observer is how we get really simple models of material reality.

So a semiotic view of matter would have to put the observer back into the system being modelled. Even at its simplest possible level, existence would have the logically irreducible complexity of a sign relation.

People think this a really esoteric metaphysics for some reason. :)

Not only is it fallacious, it's also just a cheap ploy so as not to have to seriously consider their arguments. — NKBJ

But I have even presented reasonable arguments for veganism. So it can’t be that.

A cult is an extremist social script that isolates its members from more general society. And I was talking about the philosophy limiting script that CB was using. To the degree it said focus on a feeling, it was trying to limit rounded debate on the issue. It was simply an attempt to convert.

I’m not against veganism or animal rights. Clearly I keep closely informed on these issues. One reason is that I’m interested in how every generation finds its passionate social causes. Society does keep evolving with a certain pattern.

Thanks.

Appeal to authority much? — Noble Dust

Have you looked up the definition of that yet?