Thanks for the reply,

I'm still having a hard time expressing a proper delimitation for the concept. So, instead of being the negative of Kant's guarantee against the arbitrariness of truth determination, which I guess must translate in a priviledged access to the transcendental object by the philosopher?, we would be talking about the negative of a guarantee against the arbitrariness of meaning creation?

I have a rather base example that I wish to have you examine, if only to help me see if I understand the concept well enough to recognize it in a specific context. Lets say a discussion thread were to emerge on the subject of IQ differences amongst preconceived racial groups, its social impacts or remedies or whatever horrible thing sure to follow such a subject. Even if it were discussed however seriously or factually by standard generic users of TPF. Would it be correct to say that such a discussion, regardless of how it is conducted, would be essentially transcendantally stupid if only because the vast majority of users would not meet the prerequisite experiential baggage to speak meaningfully in that conversation? That we have no access to its object, or only a skewed, arbitrary one?

- I think it's also worth wondering just how happy wild animals actually are...

I would recommend reading Being a Beast, by Charles Foster. Its not rigorous phenomenological research, but it gives you a sense of just how alien to us even an otter' umwelt really is, and how hard it would be to relate something like happiness to his existence. Still, the problem of suffering is far more apparent than that of happiness, as well for beasts as for humans.

But this is a bit otiose to the question. We have little responsability to the welfare of wild animals we do not interact with. But, given our imprints extension on this world, we almost always have some degree of interaction and therefore responsabilities. Domestication is not the problem, really, its the mass industrialization and complete and utter commodification of independant, sentient living beings. I am actually of the opinion that the domestication of companion species demonstrate one of the most noble aspect of humanity, despite the fact that it is far from being a perfect relationship.

-It's good you don't work there anymore. Did you become vegetarian/vegan because of that experience? Or do you still eat animals? If so, why.

No, it did not affect my habits at the time, at least much. I tried avoiding sausages for a while, simply because I had worked on the casing line, which is super eewwww. I was conscious of the animal's suffering, of how much better off they wouod be even in a regular family farm, at least for a psrt of their existence. But honestly, I beleived that back then the conditions of effective protest against the meat mass industry were not there. Our plant was selling mostly to Americans, Japanese and Chinese markets. Even if I stopped althogether eating pork, there was no way for Olymel to register my act of economic protest.

I'm also comfortable with the fact that my existence might cost others theirs. Or that theirs might end up costing mine. I didnt make up those rules, would change them if I could, but honestly, I'd rather be the wolf then the deer, if the choice was mine.

It is also important to realize that most of us meat eaters are quite simply addicted to it. I tried piscarism (only seafood, no red or white meat) for about a year and half, and its stupid to say, but walking next to a salami stand at the market was one of the worst craving moments I've ever felt.

Still, I find the willful blindness to the horrible conditions of livestock to be seriously infuriating. One of the thing that struck me, working at the plant was how, if it was humans being gased, proded, hooked, cut at the throat, dunk in boiling waters, passed through flamers and then broken for parts, that this would be the very best and most vivid presentation of evil and Hell ever. And we've been pretty good, as a specie, at coming up with those. And yet I didn't feel horror for the hogs, none of us did, even when we agreed the conditions were terrible.

I would put into the ground anyone who would do to my cat what I did to those hogs, and yet, even when I'm writing this, I can't help but feel that this is normal and in no way hypocritical. Our worst curse is probably our ability to justify just about anything to ourselves...

Hi Evil,

As many know here, I'm French-Canadian, with French being my first language and the only one I spoke regularly until I was 18-19, and moved to Alberta. I think predominently in French, as my writing will often betray.

Since then my work has always required that I speak both French and English on a daily basis. I find that I think in English often although not a majority of the time, mostly after I had to speak or read in the language.

I never have to translate from English to French before understanding the text. Comprehension is immediate unless the language used belongs to a very specific registry of vocabulary. For example, reading Moby Dick in the original can prove very frustrating, simply because a good 30% of the vocabulary relates to maritime stuff that even I, having been raised sailing all the time, was never exposed to.

As far as preference, I try as much as possible to remain positive when having no choice about speaking my second language. Its an occasion to practice (and show off my suave accent). Its really easy at work, a bit less outside, because there is a social question around the preservation of our French roots here in Quebec. French isnt easy to learn as a second language, and strategically, it makes better economic sense to prioritize learning English even when an allophone moves to Montreal, since Anglophone jobs pay slightly better even here. It does piss me off a lot when WASP anglophones who grew up in Montreal start complaining about being second class citizens here, and in that context, having to speak English to someone might be a bit infuriating.

I think rather evident that interpreting transcendental stupidity as an indictment of metaphysics by @StreetlightX does not relate correctly to the terms he has used, and the intent stated in his posts. Really, only the term 'transcendental' and the quick example of Plato's metaphysical musings can really push us down this path of interpretation, if we are already on the defensive about the subject at hand.

Let's go back to the space delimited for transcendental stupidity. "One of Deleuze’s most prescient insights was that the major problem of thought is not error - mistakes, untruths, and falsities taken for facts - but triviality and arbitrariness." Would it make sense for StreetlightX to state that that the whole of ancient metaphysics must be condemned in this light? I don't think so, if only because triviality and arbitrariness doesn't come close to qualify properly the underlying attitude behind Plato's works, or really that of any other ancients. I agree that Plato is "full of shit", in the sense that it would very hard for me to find something to which I can give my unreserved assent in his entire body of works. But you couldn't properly qualify those falsehoods as "trivial", they were the first (available) attempts at laying down the grounds that would later allow for empirical knowledge to take over. They weren't trivial if only because they carried an extra weight as point of origin for all further philosophical discussions in the Western world.

If we expand a bit, we can question if any philosophical position, in the current academic curriculum and in their historical development, would fall under the charge. I think the closer we go to "pop philosophy", the closer we get to a point where this charge is effective. Stoicism and Scepticism in their ancient manifestations were serious enterprises, trying to come up with effective means of relating to a reality which had only moments earlier been brought up to consciousness (historically speaking). On the other hand, when we see nowadays young students adopting an affected yet unmotivated stoicism or scepticism, we are closer in my opinion to transcendental stupidity. There is a blindness to context at play here, or even a willful ignorance.

Its true that using animals as labour also carries its own ethical (and environmental) dilemmas. And in the case of horses, yes, a large portion of those used nowadays in tourism industries live a horrible life. But usage doesnt always correspond with abuse. If you have ever had the chance of doing some dogsledding, you'll know that the dogs can barely contain their excitement as you rope their harness in. Here, use correspond with something the animal wants and does naturally, which has simply been appropriated by the musher, structured and imposed back on the dog.

I dont know much about horses, must admit I cant stand being close to one, but I assume that it must be possible for one to live domesticated, doing some amount of labour,and still be a happy beast. I think Tiff here has a ranch, and has a few horses. She doesn't seem like the kind of person that would raise an animal to an unhappy life.

It also strikes me how the last thread on baseless speculations and the BIV offers us an example of said transcendantal stupidity. Please dont ban me, I'm not calling anyone stupid, just saying that some people in it argued from a position which seemed to fall under the currently investigated domain.

Having to mount serious intellectual defenses against every baseless speculation encountered seems both counterintuitive and counterproductive. You should not feel compelled to offer a serious rebuke to a string of non-sensical sounds, why should you act differently simply because in another occasion you are offered a proposition which can be interpreted in your language?

Baseless is not wrong, per say. You could inadvertently stumble upon the truth. But if your arrival there was baseless, then you remaining there is equally so. Someone who argue from baseless speculation wont hold the truth for long before he trades it for some new shiny falsehood. Baseless is unhygienic. Its bad praxis.

- And conversely, I think of the kind of cases you describe are when the gears spin-out, catching only here and there, or engaging the wrong kind of differentials for all the varying parts in motion: this latter is transcendental stupidity.

I think this would work as an analogy for faulty reasonning, where we feel for example that our thoughts are consequent to one another while it would become very clear, if they were exposed to critique, that they do not. Same thing if we arrive to a conclusion by invoking at each step of the reasonning some completely otiose proposition.

When you speak of transcendantal stupidity, what comes to my mind is the disconnected yet complementary nature of truth and sophistication. An answer can be true, and yet be entirely so vulgar as to be less compelling than a known lie. A sophisticated falsehood might actually be the best tool at hand to deal with how we relate to the world (in my case I always come back to how filled with fictions and falsehoods the legal system is, and how better off it is for it).

I would be incapable, right now, to explain in further detail what this sophistication consist off. Immediately we'll have to deal with accusation of elitism and bias if we are to advance that some truths might be indeed true, but still objectionable on the basis of specific transcendantal characteristics. Regardless, I think that 'transcendantal stupidity' remains an important area to uncover, especially in our current, increasingly-divided political climate.

Perhaps a start would be to suggest that the cause of this peculiar form of stupidity is a form of ontological cecity? Being blind to certain facets of a truth still allows you to present this truth as true, but your presentation cannot equal that of someone who wasn't blind to those same aspects...

Life in massively industrialised breeding farm causes the animals to suffer a form of 'systematic' cruelty, tho. Hogs are raised in cages that do not allow them to move or stand. They are mutilated so as to not hurt themselves to death. And then, after a year of being fattened, they are piled one over the other and then fed into the grinder.

'Cruelty' is the best term to describe the overall tone of their existence.



No. I spent a few months working there, and then at some point I counted the number of hogs I had seen going in. 2 millions. My dad had told me, when he sent me working there, to work hard at it, but to always be looking for a reason to quit and get myself a better job. That I had a (shared) killcount of anything in the millions was a good enough reason for me.

- Likely an animal of prey is slaughtered far more violently and suffers more long when it is killed by a pack of wolves than how their domesticated relatives meet their death in the industrialized slaughter house

That is questionnable, but also largely irrelevant. It would depend on the prey, the slaughtering methods used and the level of care. When I was on the kill floor, we used a gas chamber, electrical rods and then would bleed the hog from the jugular. The eletrical rods would paralyse the hog if it came out alive of the chamber, but sometimes even that wouldnt be enough. So the hog would have his ankle pierced and hooked to a chain, get lifted, have his jugular sliced, then sent into a room where he would be dunked in boiling water and then brazed by flamethrowers (so as to give it the rosy look and burn all hairs and parasites). Not exactly a great end.

As for care, the plant I worked at had received a lot of negative feedback concerning cruelty, so the government had actually forced the company to accept having an permanent inspection officer on location to prevent abuse. Even that didnt stop much, in my opinion.

Jesus bloody Christ what kind of friend lets you be a cuckold out of sympathy for you?

Ya'll are weird. Kicking the hornets nest is its own reward. :naughty:

Humans being meat eaters isn't what is wrong. It is that we actively impose on Nature the nightmare that is industrialized mass breeding and slaughter.

And while industrialized breeding comes with its horrible share of end-product waste (the butcher plants are actually really good at not producing waste), you cannot either deny that its historical rise has coincided with a massive reduction in the number of famines we have had to endure. We used to have one every decade or so, now we worry about a 5% increase on the cost at the market. So we might want to hold of on judgements that it doesnt contribute to our survival.

The reason why focusing on the terminology is important is because different categories of beliefs/knowledge/statements ellicit different responses and degrees of engagement. A theory in a specific field engages everyone working in that field, weither or not they agree with the content of the theory. Every biologist must somewhat address natural selection, they cant seriously just dismiss it on the basis of a gut feeling and remain good biologists. An hypothesis requires limited supporting evidence, and so is bound to engage anyone in relation to this evidence.

However, pure, empty speculation does not engage us to anything more than an interpretation of the language used. You can immediatly dismiss it because you can always immediatly dismiss anything, but in this case it doesnt make for bad praxis to do so.

Silly PossiblyAaran doesn't know lizard people can grow human skin and impersonate us perfectly. :smirk:

t may not have been what Harman or Putnam were talking about, but it clearly is what Pattern-chaser is talking about, so I think it might be reasonable to dial down the indignation a bit. — Pseudonym

But, as I have now too-often repeated in this thread, it doesn't make sense to question the likelihood of a thought-experiment. And presenting it as a theory doesn't magically turn it a theory. If Pattern-chaser can say with any semblance of rectitude that Putnam's brain-in-a-vat "theory" does not provide us any evidence to support either its conclusion or its contradiction, it is exactly because it did not even attempt at becoming an hypothesis. Putnam may often be very confused, but he isn't anywhere confused enough to do such a beginner's mistake.

And acting as if Pattern-chaser's interpretation is just as valid is simply wrong. Putnam's BIV was never about what Pattern-chaser's want it to be. Not even close. It's not an earlier version of the Simulation "theory", never was anywhere close to it, and you are doing a serious disservice to philosophy by spreading this misrepresentation.

Of course, you had to start this topic when I'm on page 21 of the book... :shade:

You miss my central point, with your quibbling over terms and philosophical orthodoxy. — Pattern-chaser

I didn't miss it, I meant what I said when I said that evaluations of likelihood are useless against a thought experiment.

Whatever this "something" is, can you quantify how "unlikely" it is? If not, how do you know it's "unlikely"? — Pattern-chaser

Fuzzily, yes. More likely than say, Platonic Idealism being the case, but less likely than humanity turning out to be the only currently alive form of sentient and sapient beings. It's a large ballpark, so much that the corners escapes into the horizon, but its still a ballpark. But it doesn't change anything to the fact certain linguistic methods restrict the range of responses which can be applied successfully to them.

A thought experiment is closer to a game of Dungeon & Dragons then it is to a scientific theory.

"The proper philosophical attitude"? Please. — Pattern-chaser

I'm not kidding. Some people, some of my friend included, are incapable of adopting a philosophical attitude. They cannot entertain hypotheticals if these do not seem to apply directly to immediate cases. Moral dilemmas are annoying to them. Even intellectuals came be this way.

Well, its all downhill for every religions as far as I know, none are actually growing once you compare to population growth. Catholics are probably amongst the safest christians for now just because Italy and south of France will always remains theirs, and how well the south-american demographic is at maintaining its size. I assume the Orthodox Church also is doing relatively better than most other religious groups in christianity.

But that red cow means I have to go get my bug-out bag ready. Hope I get to so you all in real after the Rapture. :halo:

Does it really matter whether we call it a thought experiment, a theory, a hypothesis or a fairy story? Quibbling over the label we use to describe it just distracts attention from the topic. — Pattern-chaser

Yes, it does matter. It is the topic. There are some moves which are permissible against a theory and which have no purchase whatsoever on a thought experiment. For example, questioning the likelihood.

If you spend your adult years researching the chances of survival of a 3-d human being thrown in a 1-d universe, and someone tells you "but that's dumb, that's not going to happen", that person has a point. You have spent an inordinate amount of energy and time researching something that is absolutely unlikely to happen in the history of existence.

If someone offers you a moral dilemma, say, "you are stuck in a burning building with a young child and the person you consider to be the most culturally important in the social domain you respect the most, they are both passed out, and you may only save one, what do you do", and your reflex is to say, "yeah, but I won't ever be stuck in a burning fire with John Dickerson and a kid", you failed utterly at grasping the terms of the linguistic exercise you were committing to.

Questioning the likelihood of a thought experiment is a sure-fire way of signaling how far you are from the proper philosophical attitude.

Not even, although it is kinda closer, on the metacognitive level. Still, Putnam's argument was about putting to light certain things about our epistemology in relations to our views on how directly connected our beliefs are to the world. That is all that a thought experiment does, it sets a scenario in a way to bring our attention to certain things we normally dont notice. Dennett calls them intuition-pumps, and I think the term fits well. But you need to be careful about how much pumping you do. Just like a thought experiment can bring to light certain aspects of a philosophical problem we didnt notice before (like in the trolley dilemma), it can also obscure the more relevant aspects of the problem, or simply throw you down an infinite discursive loop, which is why in the end Putnam himself said the brain in a vat argument didnt work.

Its not a theory. Its more like a linguistic or cognitive puzzle box. It doesnt posit new knoewledge, it wraps and unwraps previously held beliefs on themselves to view them in a new light.

Jesus bloody Christ.

The brain in a vat scenario doesn't describe a theory

There are a world of difference between a thought experiment and a theory. If you ever wanted to answer "but that's dumb, that won't ever happen" to a thought experiment, then you missed its point. If you did the same to a theory, you would raise valid concern about the reach of said research.

The brain-in-a-vat scenario is not a theory, it is a thought experiment. And it doesnt concern itself with weither or not we can tell or if it is happening to us, but rather about the epistemological implications of such a scenario. Is the brain right or wrong in believing what he believes to be true, considering he truly is receiving the impulses leading to those beliefs, although in the end it's just an elaborate mascarade?

It has none of the components of a theory. It doesnt pretend to be one. It is not about ontology, but epistemology.

Is that because it is hard? — Andrew4Handel

It's rather because it is not urgent, nor particularly useful. And it is rather easy to subsume any "act" of philosophy under another domain.

The catholics must be having an even harder time of it because I would suppose that the same thing is affecting their ranks and all of the abuse and corruption problems they are having. — Sir2u

Nah. We have South America, we're good and comfy while you guys go extinct.

Thoreau would have said the same as what Rand has asserted here. — Marcus de Brun

Nope. Not at all. Thoreau wanted an empowered individual through the means of democratic rule. The idea that altruism was antithetical to progress would never have been accepted by an admirer of Hinduism and Bhouddism.

I participated in a brain scanning experiment a few years ago. The cognitive science subdept came and specifically asked for philosophy students as we were consistently scoring the lowest when it came to practical knowledge.

We may be brighter as a bunch, but its the kind of brightness that still thinks that a ton of feathers is lighter than a ton of lead.

You could do with a late transcript of those thoughts, if it was taken according to a very tight methodological inquiry. Alone it would have little value, but you could repeat this with many technology developpers and get enough transcripts to try and find a baseline. But that would yield a phenomenology of the creation of technology. Your relation, and ours, as technological entities, to the subject is already sufficiently exposed to allow for further disclosure.

How about you take it as an opportunity to apply the method to the subject matter? Otherwise 'Opinions on technology' would be more accurate, but also a lot more boring.

An epoche is the work or neutralizing metaphysical and personal biases in the philosophical description of a phenomenon. It can be as simple as neutralizing your disgust toward something, forcing yourself to adopt a more neutral point of view, or as complicated as preventing any form of preconceived belief from being stated in the text, and likely should involve a bit of both.

The importance of the epoche is in the proof-of-work it provides, its important to explain the process of epoche almost as much as you treat the subject matter itself, because it is the only way a third party may judge weither or not the author does manage to reach the state of the transcendental attitude.

Ok so you have the first paragraph of your "Prolegomena to a Phenomenology of Technology". Thats good, but thats barely laying down ink on paper. After that you'll need to work out the methodology and restrictions you want to impose on your research through an description of both your epoche and your phenomenological reduction(s). This would at least involve redrafting multiple times the same text in order to evacuate any metaphysical or natural bias you, as the author, inevitably inject in the treatment.

If you just want to share your introspections with the group, that is great, but until you dedicate yourself to the work I've begun to describe above, you are precisely not doing phenomenology.

How is any of this nonsense "phenomenology"?

The hell did he mean "we woulndt want something bad to happen to (TPF) if you get my meaning"?

- Perhaps what we - at the general cultural level - lack is then a way to picture in our heads how informational modelling winds up "feeling like something".

There is that. As of yet, talk about qualia are always just 'making it up as they go along', even if it is very well informed or sophisticated. We havent decided yet how to talk about it, really.

There is also that, beyond what you put your finger on, we live in an intellectual culture which, for a large part, has decided that since science had not yet said much about qualia, its chance had come and gone, and every other option was equally valid. 60 years of neuroscience and you still dont have an answer as to how neurons firing could produce a 3 dimensional field of view inside the mushy confines of a wet lump of flesh? Then I guess it could be panpsychism? Quantum particules being created in the synaptic cleft? Access to the realm of pure Ideas?

And then there is simply misinformation, or a lack of curiosity about things which might contradict us. While philosophers are still stuck working out colour ontology, scientists and corporate interest have been busy working out the hardware part of colour perception. We can now identify people who have atypical perceptions, even to the point of being able to say that someone can perceive a colour we cant. We can correct many of these atypical situations and give to people colour perceptions they never had before, and know that these corrections bring them closer to typical perception. Slowly but surely, we are figuring out the terms of this new domain, and these terms are purely scientific in nature.

- Because it's not something describable in physical terms.

We have very good evolution simulators out there, which you can even run on your cellphone. You can easily see your critters learning to interpret different stimulus in different manners, creating 'meaning' from the interaction with the world.

Evolv.io was really limited, but its the one coming up to mind right now.

- Even physics turns out to be a mathematical model - and where does the maths reside?

This meme need to stop. It lasted long enough already.

- "Is it possible to arrive at a general definition of "person" given the natural-legal distinction?"

Yes, a person would be a legal fiction which can hold, demand and receive rights and obligations. If we ontologize this a bit, a person would be an object in a legal domain capable of being attributed specific characteristics in the form of socially mandated powers and restrictions.

But this definition doesnt resolve the philosophical problem of personhood, which is that our relation to its essence is completely different from the one we have toward its phenomenology. Taylor is wrong : the only real relation to personhood is that of recognition and attribution, it is absolutely dependant on the actors performance (both the actor and the attributor). But Taylor is also right : if left to performance recognition, the concept of personhood loses a lot of steam, we no longer have any reason to believe that there is something inherently nobler in a person than an object. We are always thrown back to the idea that there is a qualitative difference to being a person.

However, it is important to note that Taylor's significance criterion is a complete step backward. It is either vague to the point of being absolutely useless (generous interpretations will range from 'having an Umwelt makes you a person' to 'reacting in any way to anything makes you a person) or restrictive to the point of turning any legal system into a nightmare (do we have to determine every legal actors 'domain of signification' in order to check his rights? Is significance really the best gauge for rights recognition?).

Performance is how we are cursed to recognize what constitute a person. But this recognition actually hints at something else, hidden, ineffable, and which we have, as a specie, mostly ignored until now : the intrinsic and increasingly rich community of all beings populating this universe.

"The stick is bent in water is false even though the light being refracted by the water makes it appear bent. "

That is just a question of unwrapping the event and attributing truth to the proper parts of the statement. There is nothing false about it, simply misleading to an average perceiver with average expectations. 'The portion of the stick outside of the water will appear, to an average homo sapien, misaligned in relation to the part submerged, because of the effect of refractation of fluids on the trajectory of photons' is a true statement, and the "onus" of it, so to speak, rest both on the shoulders of how the world is and how homo sapiens are.

Colour perception is not us "painting the world" with some palette that, by some miracle, we have access to. Its learning to use something of the world in an almost proto-linguistic fashion, taking pure data and turning it into a language which enriches our relation to the world.

"False, they're the same shade, which I verified with my color picker: RGB( 126,126,126 )."

To be fair, it is relatively easy to train yourself to spot this illusion. At this point my first reflex is just think they are identical before checking the colour code. Start by looking from both top and bottom rather than from the center.

But you are playing my game here. Colour ontology is exactly the best way to realize that Relationalism is The Truth. :heart:

Sadly, being abusive verbally has shown to be a good strategy in online argumentation. The objective being not to convince the other or make them accept that they made a mistake, but rather to be the one perceived as able to "school" rather than be schooled.

Since such argumentation rely on pre-existing groupthink dynamics and humour rather than a logical analysis of the content of the arguments, a site like TPF should (and does :up: ) restrict its use as much as possible, and encourage everyone to adopt the later form.

But as a tool, abusive argumentation remains very effective, if the objective is to score points with an known auditory.

The colored in world we see around us isn't how the world is, it's how it looks for conscious creatures with visual systems like ours. — Marchesk

This relation is symmetrical. The world is also the world that appears coloured to such creatures as us.

How could you possibly be so sure, if it is a work in process? — Banno

Ever been a while on a sailboat? After a while you start being able to sense the wind shift direction before it does. Maybe it's something like that... ?

That is an interesting perspective from a legal viewpoint. So maybe what is implied is that their are different kinds of persons? — Waya

At the very least, there is a distinction between a natural person - a human being - and a legal person - a private or public organization - and this distinction somewhat relates to degrees of possible liability, so yes, in a way, there are different kinds of persons. But you have to be careful with such qualification. 5 generations ago it was still ok to discriminate purely on the basis of preexisting legal fictions.

I think that the vagueness of the concept of personhood forces us, ethically, to err on the side of generosity : better remain open to the idea that something might be someone in principle, so as not to deny the existence of alternate form of subjectivities.