Another noteworthy point on miracles, is that, given our understanding of nature (and how mystical it really is--e.g., quantum physics, general/special relativity, etc.), it isn't implausible that an extradimensional being (or one with representative faculties capable of representing not in time or space) may exist and still be a part of the natural processes of nature. It seems like one could still, even if one does not want to posit that minority of miracles as misunderstandings, more parsimoniously posit a natural, extra-dimensional being over a supernatural one. Making is supernatural just seems very extraneous.

Right, the boundaries of nature can stretch quite a bit. Eriugena's conception of "nature" includes God. Or we might place the boundary at the truly infinite and transcedent, in which case such a thing is in a way inaccessible, only known through finite causes.

I think that if there were phenomena which reasonably could not be explained with our knowledge of the natural order, in the sense that it was consistently violating the laws of nature and there was no good naturalistic explanation, then that would, prima facie, all else being equal, count in favor of supernaturalism. I think I have to concede that, in order not to beg the question.

If something routinely violated the laws of nature in a uniform way, we would just posit a new law. If it did so in a random way, we could just conclude that nature is random in some respects. Miracles then seem to be more than simple violations of what we assume to be "natural law" (i.e., Hume's view, which I think is ultimately question begging).

I think what makes a miracle evidence for the supernatural would be that it displays a certain type of intentionality. If a new, bright star appeared in the sky out of nowhere, defying all our theories of star formation, we would not tend to think of this as necessarily miraculous. It would be a confusing new natural phenomena.

If several new stars appeared in the sky spelling out "Allah is the Greatest," we would almost certainly take this as miraculous. To me, the difference seems to be the intentionality and the fact that it seems directed towards us for some purpose.

An argument against such supernaturalism is often that if God could do this, God would want to because then we would believe. I am not so sure about this. Certainly, very many people would initially convert to Islam if those stars appeared, but in the long term I don't think it would make people that much more pious or loving — it would get old, and so less miraculous. Plus, if one God reveals themselves to be real, it is now more plausible that others exist, and so the miracles boost the warrant for seeking alternative aid as well, which a major theme in the Old Testament. Seeing the works of God, the people, not happy with what God says, have more warrant to seek after the help of Baal, Moloch, and co., turn to walking in the ways of Jeroboam, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I think, perhaps, you hold a distinction between epistemic and ontological parsimony that I am not fully appreciating.

I think I might be able to clarify:

Consider that naturalism still has to explain gods, angels, djinn, genies, etc. Clearly, people think these exist, and so there needs to be a naturalist explanation for these entities, it will just be a different explanation.

Would we then say naturalism cannot be more parsimonious because it still needs to posit every supernatural entity that people conceive of? I don't think so. Naturalism accepts that people think these entities exist, but it will tend to claim that their apparent existence is reducible to something else. If some thing in the world can be fully explained in terms of some other things, then we are able to remove that thing as a sort of ontologically basic entity (making the system more parsimonious).

E.g., people used to think heat was a substance, phlogiston. Now we understand it through a process view rather than as its own entity — one less irreducible substance in our naturalism.

So, you could consider a very parsimonious naturalism where there are just atoms that come in five flavors. Each flavor has its own properties, and they relate to one another differently in different combinations. But here, it seems possible that we might be able to explain everything in terms of just these five things and maybe their relations, leaving us with very few ontologically basic entities.

But current forms of naturalism have a great many "brute facts." The more brute facts you have, the more ontologically basic things you have.

Someone like St. Maximus by contrast has a very parsimonious system because all the multiplicity of the many (logoi for him) are reducible to the Logos. There is an infinite ground (the Father), and the Logos (Son) that divides and incarnates it, and there is the subjectivity of the Spirit. Three things, but begotten and proceeding from a single source (without being reducible to them). Creation just is Logos incarnated, and doesn't have to be a separate thing.

Shankara gets even more parsimonious by having just one thing, although it's questionable if he falls into the excluded middle by having Maya (i.e.,the illusion of multiplicity) be as sort of "actual illusion." Ultimately, all things are reducible to Brahman (maybe requiring dialtheism).

A naturalist might say, "well there is one thing, Nature," but then they have a plausibility problem because "from whence the apparent multiplicity?" remains an open question. Parmenides bites the bullet and avoids the excluded middle by having just one changeless, divisionless thing, ultimate parsimony, at the cost of making implausible statements about the lack of diversity in the world. Naturalism, without recourse to a sort of "higher level" of being to which to reduce things, tends to get stuck with all the brute facts that science leaves it with (less some for some hopeful thoughts about their reduction). But if supernatural explanations are less parsimonious, they may have more evidential problems.

In PI, Wittgenstein talks about how people are convinced to adopt totally different starting positions due to their symmetry and parsimony. We might include beauty here too. If you look at theistic thinkers, this is often part of their explanation. Whether we accept the thought of someone like St. Maximus or Plotinus as plausible or not, they certainly do create very beautiful systems, which seem to lead to their enduring appeal.

But then again, prima facie there is nothing necessary about the idea of cats, protons, or communism. It could be that numbers are innate ideas, being then "world-independent".

Well, this sort of depends on one's view of the world. In ontic structural realism, things sort of are the mathematics that describe them. A proton or a cat can be described as a sort of mathematical entity, and so might be thought to exist in the way number do.

There is, however, a boundary issue here in that "things" tend to have fuzzy boundaries. That's why these sorts of proposals tend to take the entire universe as a single mathematical object and things as just parts. But this does not rule out the possibility that there are morphisms across various subprocesses within the universal process that describe "things," and these could exist in the ways numbers exist or sets exist, as abstract objects.

I do think there is something to this, but to boundary issue remains tricky. Any "thing" only exhibits some of its properties over any given interval, and its properties are defined by how it relates to other things or by relations between parts of the thing and itself. There is a contextuality in how the world works that makes it so that one can not describe any given thing without recourse to describing other things and how they relate. This isn't that far off the formalist mantra re mathematical entities: "a thing is what it does."

How things relate to minds is a very special sort of relationship then. When a thing is considered in thought, a great deal of a thing's relational properties become "present" at once to some observer. This is where things "most fully are what they are," because it is where more relations are pulled together into a unity.

The fullest realization of any entity possible would be in a perfect mind, to which all relations are present at once. In medieval thinkers, there is a general acknowledgement of the fact that truth exists in relation to minds, not being simply equivalent with being. The "mind of God," then is the place where this sort of "knowing" relation, all properties made present at once, exists. I've often thought that the "view from nowhere," would be better termed the "God's eye view," because what it really wants is to see things in this way. God was seen as problematic, so God gets axed, and then we get this problem where truth is the way things can be conceived of with no mind to pull any relations together.

Platonism though, makes more sense if things don't exist most fully arelationally, "in themselves," but rather both relationally and in-themselves, which I take it is how Plato himself understood the Forms, and this entails a sort of God-mind to which all relations are present at once. When modern Platonisms drop this for abstract entities existing "in-themselves," I think they start to lurch off the rails. The "view from nowhere," really wants to be the "God's eye view," but it has pulled the rug out from underneath it.

Psychologism is sort of the opposite extreme. It excepts the need for mind in an explanation, but then has mind floating off by itself, a sui generis entity in which abstract entities appear to be emerging ex nihilo. But this doesn't make sense either, it's the relation of abstract entities, nature, and mind from which knowledge emerges.

It's quite good. It's nice to dip into from time to time. You have to really sit with each aphorism. I find it similar to my Rumi's collected works in a lot of ways — a lot of short, deep poems.

I am not totally sure where they come from though. I have read The Book of Divine Consolation and most of the Penguin collected works, and it seems like the aphorisms are being pulled from various places. This is good and bad. On the one hand, I really do appreciate them this way. On the other, you do lose some context.

I've seen New Age Eckharts, Perennialist Eckharts, Gnostic Eckharts, and even Buddhist Eckharts in many cases. But I do think these take him out of context. The sermons all focus on the Bible. Often the aphorisms don't seem to be trying to challenge Christian orthodoxy at all, but rather they try to get you to look at their simple principles in a new and deeper light. So, there is a sense where it seems easy for people to "invent their own Eckhart," if this is all they read. And that would be a shame because he is a pretty unique thinker, and in many ways a philosopher with a deep systematic view alongside being a mystagogue.

I agree. Like I said, there would seem to be two horns here, the evidential and the ability to apply predicates to God. I do not see the evidential as much of a problem. We can have only grasped a finite number of natural numbers in with our intellect and yet we still have evidence that they are infinite. We don't have to have ever seen an uncomputable number to believe in such a thing, etc. The finite points to the infinite.

There is a problem of plurality here too. Many people claim to have knowledge of the divine, but they often disagree, so there is a question as to what is truly known. But of course, they often agree on many points.

The question then is if a plurality of exclusive viewpoints entails the impossibility of knowledge. I would say it clearly doesn't. At one point people had a great many theories about the shape of the Earth, the nature of the sun, the origins of species, etc. Plurality here did not entail unknowability. And knowledge can exist in the context of plurality. It would be silly to say we know nothing about quantum foundations just because there are like 9 major competing theories in this area. It is also possible that one among these theories is true, or more true than all the others, even if this can't be demonstrated. Otherwise, we'd have to say that truth doesn't exist before demonstration and consensus.

IIRC Maimonides puts forth a sort of radical negation of this sort, in that things simply cannot be predicated of God. However, Maimonides still allows that God can be known as cause, and of course God can be known via revelation. So, it's a somewhat similar idea, but I think it hangs together better because people experiencing miracles have warrant for their beliefs, it's just that their finite predicates have no grip on the infinite.

However, St. Denis and the tradition following him, particularly St. Aquinas believe they have a way out of this. Yes, all our predicates of God are equivocal, but they are ordered equivocal statements. It's not the same as "plane" and "plain," where the two terms just arbitrarily sound the same with no relation.

In The Meanings of Truth: Disputed Questions on the Truth, Thomas gives this example: take a the predicate of being "healthy." This applies to living things. A living being can be more or less healthy, and to talk of a man's health is a univocal predication. However, we also call certain foods, say lentils, "healthy." This is not an univocal predication. Lentils are healthy because they promote health. Likewise, taking medicine is "healthy." But the predication here is derivative of the healthiness of the organism, ordered equivocation.

Likewise, God's goodness, God's steadfast mercy, etc. are not the human versions of these predicates, but they are also not unrelated to them. So, for St. Denis and those following him, God can be known as cause, excess (above all predicates), and then negation (negating the human mode of the predicate). Maimonides is more dower on this.

So, this might not apply to all of your argument, which seems to be about knowing in general, but it gets at one horn (the one I find more serious), the ability to predicate things of God. I think the knowing can be addressed empirically, through religious experience, through how a thing is know through its causes, etc.

There is also metaphor, which St. Denis says is in many ways superior in most cases. When we do analogous predication, it is easy to mess up and confuse the mode of human wisdom with the wisdom being predicated of God. But when we say things like "God is an everflowing stream," or "God is a rock," we do not mistake God for these things.

I actually don't think ↪Count Timothy von Icarus' absolute prohibition on asking for signs is Biblically tenable.

Yes, this is absolutely true, I did not mean to imply otherwise; there is nuance here. I was thinking of Gideon in particular and Jesus' words about the value of signs in John. The nature of the asking matters.

Wouldn't knowing that God is unknowable constitute knowing something about God? Or knowing that God is infinite and that our terms cannot be predicated univocally of God? And might we be able to still make statements about what God is not (apophatic negations)?

But then there seem to also be ways of justifying analogical predication of God within these constraints as well, at least potentially given divine revelation. For as respects knowledge via revelation, "with man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible."

Declaring it a sign of poor character, to engage in critical thinking when it comes to one's religion,

This is really a misreading of the concerns with Gideon. Gideon points to his material conditions and says the Lord has abandoned Israel and asks why he hasn't already seen wonders. When asked to do something for the Lord he makes excuses and demands a sign. Contrast this with the Patriarchs, whose response is always "here I am." The idea is that Gideon fails to recognize the Angel of the Lord in the first place precisely because of his weak faith.

And this would probably be passed over if not for Gideon's later history. God helps Gideon achieve a miraculous victory over the people oppressing Israel. He then piously turns down becoming king. But after this he becomes vindictive and violent, pursuing his own ends, eventually making a huge golden idol that the Hebrews come to worship. So it's a textual analysis about the seeds of this when compared to other figures who always instantly recognized angles.

It's in line with the main theme: "in those days of the judges, there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what seemed right in his own eyes," (including the Judges). This is where we get Sampson and some of the other warrior heros that seem much more in line with Greek heroes or other near Eastern ones than the rest of the Biblical heroes. The general point seems to be that greatness alone, Herculean strength, etc., is nothing if not oriented towards the higher good, e.g. Sampson's great powers are undone by vice.

Plenty of other places seem plenty in favor of critical thinking. Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, Peter's invocation to be prepared to explain the reasons for one's faith, etc.

The Stanford Encyclopedia article on Hegelian Dialectics, which is quite good too. I can see why people found similarities between Spencer Brown's "Laws of Form" and this. There is some interesting work on formalizing Hegel's Logic using category theory but it's sort of over my head. I would assume that if it can truly replicate the idea of can overcome many limits to formal systems in that contradiction is no longer an issue, but the very engine of changing the system itself.

There seems to be an interesting link between Hegel's Logic, Brown, information theory, and St. Denis/Eriugena I want to write about some day if I ever feel like I understand them well enough.

The Gideon example is also interesting because in general it's not considered to be a good sign of his character that he "puts the Lord to the test." Gideon, like all the Judges aside from Deborah and Samuel, ends up being ultimately flawed, a backslider, and his need for this evidence is often taken as an indicator of his future deficits. For the idea is that one should love the Good and God in themselves.

Indeed, Jesus denigrates the need for signs and those who ask for them (despite working many signs).

How could such a test, in principle, ever verify that the more powerful being is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. let alone the creator of the entire world? It can’t. It just demonstrates, at its very best, that there was at least one being, in that day and age, capable of doing things humans could not.

Well, consider how one learns what a banana is. People show you bananas or describe them to you. People discuss their unique properties. They transmit a definition.

Given this, you now can compare you experience to what you have learned about bananas and say: "this is what people call bananas."

In the same way, super natural beings have unique attributes and abilities, and through observing these the same sort of inference can be made.

But of course, you raise a good point. Finite experience can never be evidence for a truly infinite God. So, the trouble distinguishing between "powerful and seemingly 'supernatural,'" and God is a real difficulty.

This is precisely why St. Aquinas says we cannot know God's essence. Also because God is simple, but human reason is necessarily discursive, working through joining and dividing concepts.

Yet he draws a distinction between knowing "what God is," and knowing "that God is." God's existence can be determined by signs/traces of God in the natural world (Romans 1:20), as can things about God. But for Aquinas, this unknowability was why revelation had to work as the first principles of any divine science. The point of theology then is not to prove the axioms, as this undermines faith at any rate (a person is "forced" to accept a logical demonstration). The point is to pull out what revelation entails.

But this intersects with the proof question in that recognizing God would ostensibly work in the same way we can recognize something that has been described to us or shown to us in pictures.

Aside from this, there is also direct noetic experience of God, God known in the same way we grasp self-evident truths that ground our knowledge in anything. So there is this path too, the "infused" knowledge, which is the focus of St. Denis and many of the mystics. Since God can make people grasp truths about God in this fully noetic way, outward demonstrations are less important.

Right, but it isn't just St. Paul.

St. Peter includes Christ right amidst the Father and the Holy Spirit in his doxology in his first letter. He then tells his people explicitly that their salvation lies in their faith in Christ. They are to be obedient to Christ, who is "the guardian and shepherd" of their souls. He tells them the to "sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts," "lord" here being the same word used for Adonai, the Father. Christ, who has been elect from "before the foundation of the world."

Peter follows up the appeal to keep Christ as "Lord in your hearts" by seeming to describe Christ descending into Hell to redeem souls (a theme he talks about elsewhere, as does Paul). Then he refers to Christ to whom "angels and authorities and powers are subject."


The second letter is even more explicit, opening with and appeal to "the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ," although opinion on Petrine authorship on this one is more divided (possibly not, or possibly it is a paraphrase by a different scribe since much material is the same but the style is different).

St. James likewise appeals to "our glorious Lord Jesus Christ," and appeals to "the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." Jesus himself also uses "the kingdom of God," and "the kingdom of heaven," interchangeably with "my kingdom" in the Gospels at any rate.

I am not sure how "prima facie" these appear to be the works of people who do not think Jesus is divine, even if it doesn't rule out something like Arianism (Jesus as created or somehow subordinate to God the Father). Peter would have to not be the author of either letter, and James not the author of James. But for various reasons, I Peter and and James are often dated at or before any of the Gospels. So unless these are pushed up significantly this leaves the earliest Christian texts as the letters of Paul, Peter, and James, who all seem to think Jesus has dominion in heaven and should be referred to as Lord next to the Father, etc.

But of course the synoptic Gospels also place the Son with the Father and Holy Spirit (at Jesus' own listing). Jesus accepts worship from men in them. In them Jesus claims "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," that he will judge the dead, that he will be seated with God's throne in allusions in Ezekiel and Daniel, etc.

Revelation has probably the most solid date of the NT books because it can be situated during Domitian's reign. In Revelation, Christ is clearly divine. Dating for the Gospels overlaps this period though, but even if you head towards the earlier range, the gap is 10-20 years, maybe thirty for early datings of Mark and late datings of Revelation. Thirty years might be enough for that sort of shift, but Jesus going from a teacher in the equivalent of 2014 to the obvious king of heaven in the equivalent of 2024?

This is why I find the thesis implausible. The various ranges for composition and authorship of the texts all have to line up "just so," to be even somewhat plausible, and even then it would still seem that most of the earliest sources have clear references to the divinity of Christ.

What the Apostles thought before they wrote anything is of course pure supposition. Any window into their thoughts starts with the Epistles and Gospels, and here Jesus hardly seems to be a preacher or even another prophet. James even goes out of his way to point out that Elijah, was "just a man" like the partitioners, in a contrast to the "Lord Christ."

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A more interesting question IMO is the status of the understanding of the Son as Divine Logos. This is most obvious in John 1 with its allusion to Genesis 1 and God's speaking being into existence and in John's letters, but then Colossians 1 (Paul) dovetails with it fairly well. Less obvious, I Peter seems to be possibly conflating Christ with the word/utterance of God, but the Greek term is different from logos so the exact connection is less clear. I am not aware of any potential Divine Word references in James.

This idea has profound implications for how Christianity interacted with philosophy in general and Platonist thought in particular, as the Logos can be the incarnated principle of divine ideas in general (Eriugena, St. Maximus, etc.).

Of course you can also trace the emergence of quantity to contradictions inherit in sheer, indeterminate being :grin:

Actually, on second thought, that might not be true. Various conceptions of panentheism have just one ontological entity. Shankara has Brahman and Maya and Maya is illusion, so that seems to get us to one entity. It doesn't seem possible to do with less. Because no higher reality stands behind the apparent one in naturalism, it would seem to require quite a number of ontological entities.

It depends on how you define parsimony. How many "brute facts," does naturalism require? The jury is out on that. Seemingly, it might be quite a lot.

So you end up with a lot of things that have no reason for being, they just are, irreducibly. Just from the Fine Tuning Problem, you would seem to have quite a few.

An explanation where God creates the world to have life only has to posit one such fact that "is its own reason."

If parsimony is considered from the point of view of explanation, it doesn't seem possible to beat theism. The answer "from whence comes..." always has one ultimate answer.

But from the perspective of ontological entities, I would agree that the argument holds in favor of naturalism.

I was imagining that if the Church were truly being guided by 1 person, that there would be much less confusion. I'm not aware of any human ruler in history whose followers were so confused about what he wanted while he was still alive.

But why should God's rule be anything like that of a human leader?

It seems possible that God might want to say different things to different people at different times, as is held by theologians embracing polysemy.

There are a lot of good articles on divine hiddeness. However, I have noticed that they seem to take the individual as the universal standard for judging divine hiddeness. However, the view from the Bible would tend to suggest something more corporate and world historic.

Knowing that man is categorically unable to fulfill God's commands without ongoing assistance, perhaps God is more focused on setting the historical conditions in which man comes to freely fulfill his purpose?

The Biblical narrative is that God did dwell with his people in a quite obvious way, telling them what to do in explicit terms. This did not stop them from turning to idols and disregarding God, wronging each other, etc. This seems plausible to me as far as people go.

That's really irrelevant, because the point is that we understand that it isthings which are interacting.

Yes, that is the defining claim of a substance-based metaphysics. I fail to see how this is a knock against process-metaphysics. It's saying "if we assume substance metaphysics is true, then process metaphysics isn't." Well obviously.

I will agree that substance metaphysics is more intuitive. However, our understanding of nature has often required us to drop intuitive models for less intuitive ones.

The particle is defined by its interaction with the equipment that detects it, which is substance. The fields represent the potential for interaction. So the particles are not "mathematical constructs" in the way that the fields are. "Particles" is an assumption made from, and supported by, sense observation, just like the existence of a table, chair, or any other object is an assumption supported by sense observation.

This just seems like question begging. If a particle is defined by "interactions" it seems just as correct to say it is defined by processes. To claim that "detection equipment" is fundamentally substance just assumes the truth of substance metaphysics.

There exist entirely consistent process-based explanations of physics. The existence of fields is likewise supported by sense observation in the same exact way that particles are.

Substance explanations have had a bad track record in general:

here is, however, a historical move away from substance models toward process models: almost every science has had an initial phase in which its basic phenomena were conceptualized in terms of some kind of substance — in which the central issues were to determine what kind of substance — but has moved beyond that to a recognition of those phenomena as processes. This shift is manifest in, for example, understanding fire in terms of phlogiston to understanding fire in terms of combustion, heat in terms of random kinetic motion rather than the substance caloric, life in terms of certain kinds of far from thermodynamic equilibrium processes rather than in terms of vital fluid, and so on. Sciences of the mind, arguably, have not yet made this transition

In particular, it seems hard to explain quantum foam, virtual particles, the spontaneous emergence of quark condensate, etc. in terms of "fundamental things." The "fundamental things" brought in to explain these are universal fields. But then you just have a thing, and it is changes in the thing, which are always occurring by the thing's very nature, which do all the explanatory lifting. That starts to sound a lot like process metaphysics.

What is meant by "stabilities" is also not unexplainable In brief:

The default for substances and Democritean “atoms” is stability. Change requires explanation, and there are no self-movers. This is reversed in a process view, with change always occurring, and it is the stabilities of organizations or patterns of process, if such should occur, that require explanation.

There are two basic categories of process stability. The first is what might be called energy well stabilities. These are process organizations that will remain stable so long as no above threshold energy impinges on them. Contemporary atoms would be a canonical example: they are constituted as organizations of process that can remain stable for cosmological time periods [but they can be created or destroyed].

The second category of process stability is that of process organizations that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Unlike energy well stabilities, these require ongoing maintenance of their far from equilibrium conditions. Otherwise, they go to equilibrium and cease to exist...

Aside from the track record and difficulties in being adapted to modern physics, I'd also count against substance metaphysics the way it splits the world into subjective/objective, provided strong emergence is barred. But if strong emergence isn't barred, then it seems like interactions, process, ends up generating new fundamental properties/substances. But then process now again seems to be driving the explanatory vehicle.

Positing a metaphysical realm of substances or atoms induces a fundamental split in the overall metaphysics of the world. In particular, the realm of substances or atoms is a realm that might be held to involve fact, cause, and other physicalistic properties and phenomena, but it excludes such phenomena as normativity, intentionality, and modality into a second metaphysical realm. It induces a split metaphysics.

Not sure how you can say it is hardly a problem. We fail to agree over the fundamental building blocks of civilization itself, forget the flat Earth or vaccine debates - they are symptoms of a bigger issue, aren't they? In increasingly diverse and polarized societies, if there is no shared mainstream narrative, chaos or internecine tribalism would seem to be a consequence. Is it any wonder that some people are calling for a return to religion or Christian values as a kind of nostalgia project, harking back to a perceived golden era?

Ha, no I didn't mean the denial of these things is hardly a problem. I meant that it isn't a problem to teach well justified positions just because some people disagree. Citizens shouldn't all get an equal vote on what an appropriate chemistry, carpentry, or biology curriculum might be; let's leave that to the chemists, carpenters, and biologists.

Well, I guess we could equally say that nothing needs to be a thorny issue, whether it be health care or fire arms policy. But it is.

Right, here I was thinking of how ethics tends to get approached in the upper grade levels. Rather than focus on areas where their might be broad consensus, like the Aristotlean vice-incontinence-continence-virtue distinction, the psychology/neuroscience of habit formation, the theory of virtue as a mean between extremes, virtue as a route to self-determination, etc. we seem to instead jump to focusing on the most ideologically contentious and complex issues (at least here in the US).

Identity politics, the individual versus society, etc. are all important. They shouldn't be the ground floor. Where ethics is actually taught, curricula try to build up an analytical and theoretical tool kit before approaching these issues. Having "race and the West" tacked on to history class as an aside is probably not the best way to go about this, especially when a sort of emotivist nihilism is already the cultural norm.



That post wasn't supposed to be "how do we get ethical behavior." It was a list of what I think are generally uncontentious notions about some of the ways in which we can promote ethical behavior.

If hard determinism is true, then no one is morally culpable.

I am not sure if this follows. Consider a basic sketch of compatibalist free will as one's relative degree of self-determination:

A. Initially, following conception, we are not conscious. We are the effects of causes external to us.
B. As we develop, more and more of what effects us lies internal to us, as in "within our bodies." For example, organ development is spurred on by signals that originate in the fetus, not by signals coming from the mother's body. Although obviously the mother's body continues to play an important causal role even in a normal pregnancy.
C. At some point, phenomenal awareness begins and we become aware of our own bodies and our environment.
D. As we develop, we develop faculties for self-control, planning, etc.
E. By the time we are adults we can engage in introspection and try to determine our reasons for acting. Further, we can shape our environment in accordance with our will. We can write post-it notes to remind ourselves to do things, we can sign up for fitness classes with a friend so that social pressure forces us to engage in exercise we would otherwise shrug off, go backpacking so that we are far away from cigarettes so that we can't smoke, etc.

Somewhere in this process of development, at least some of what we do comes to be determined by the thoughts and decisions that enter into our conscious awareness. Obviously, people can be more or less introspective, they can have varying degrees of self-control, and they can do more or less to shape their environment so that it supports courses of action that they prefer.

The free person is a self-organizing system. Self-determination isn't a binary. It's something that emerges over time and builds on itself. Everyone has the capability to be driven by what they think is right action to some degree, such that their thoughts about what is right plays a determining role in their actions.

We can also have what Frankfurt terms "second-order volitions," i.e., desires about what we do or do not want to desire. We can take action on these as well, e.g., someone on a diet eats a salad and drinks broth so that they will not have a strong desire to eat high calorie food because they do not want to have that desire.

Freedom then, would be a sort of state. It is when:
1. We do what we want to do.
2. We want to want to do what we do (second-order volition).
3. We consciously intend to do what we do.
4. We know why we want to do what we do, and we agree that those are good reasons for acting.

Obviously, such freedom is never absolute. A person who acts in a way they otherwise wouldn't due to ignorance fails to meet #4. No one ever knows all the reasons behind why they act a certain way, or all the reasons determining why they want to act the way they want to act. But I'd argue that at least some people manage to have a pretty good idea about these things in at least some instances, and in these instances they are responsible for their actions because it is "who they are" that determines their actions.

The universe being deterministic seems sort of aside the point, although I'd tend to agree with compatibalists that some sort of determinism is actually a prerequisite for freedom. What seems important for culpability and freedom is if a person's acts are determined by their thinking, and if their thinking has been determined by a life that has allowed them to become relatively self-determining, such that an appropriate amount of the proximate causes underlying their actions can be traced back to their own conscious reflection and decisions.

This entails that people can be culpable to some degree. We might also consider that people's own choices can either make them more or less self-determining. Self-control, knowledge, and introspection can all be developed or eroded based on the choices we make. Therefore, we might well find people culpable for not developing these capabilities if it leads to their acting poorly. There is a sort of negligence that comes from having a good environment for developing freedom and choosing not to take advantage of it.

g. Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe (a type of mathematical monism) includes the view that every possible mathematical structure exists. Would the Mathematical Universe of Max Tegmark then be a naturalised FBP?

It's worth noting that Tegmark justifies his view with the claim that it fixes the Fine Tuning Problem in physics. I do not think this actually works. Basically, if every possible universe exists, then we seem to run into all sorts of undetermination problems and issues that are somewhat akin to the Boltzman Brain problem, although different.

Apparently, my objection is not novel and someone pointed it out to Tegmark, although they did it by only focusing on the problem as respects non-computable mathematical objects. This caused Tegmark to revise the hypothesis such that only computable objects exist. Aside from seeming ad hoc though, I do not think this actually solves the problem of how the MUH is not a good solution to the Fine Tuning Problem.

It is, nonetheless, an interesting idea. I think it's worth pointing out that Tegmark's 3rd (or maybe 4th?) level multiverses are themselves mathematical objects, singular. That is, universes are not composed of multiple discrete mathematical objects, which makes them a bit different than some other forms of platonism/ontic-structural realism.

d. Conceptualism: really anti-realist? If we admit that the mind is part of reality, doesn’t research in mathematics equate with investigating our own minds? You might insist that it is still anti-realist because it’s not mind-independent, but the anti-realist label brings a connotation of fiction (not in the sense of fictionalist nominalism). In this case, the question is: does conceptualism really imply some sort of fiction (something we make up like stories, or perhaps useful stories like myths) or implies an investigation of our own minds as an object of study (cognitive science and psychology)? It seems to be the latter, given the fact that conceptualism turns mathematics into a branch of psychology.

Right, and if our minds produce such things, we might ask "why do they do so?" Trading off arguments made by enactivists, we can say that brains don't produce any consciousness in most environments. From development to death, there is a constant two-way flow of causes across any supposedly discrete barrier that constitutes a person. If we come to have mathematical intuitions and develop mathematical ideas, we do not do so in isolation, so how does this tie back to the world?

I can imagine all sorts of answers here, and many would not be anti-realist. IMO, it's really not that different from questions as to whether cats, trains, atoms, recessions, communism, etc. all really exist, if they are "mind-independent," etc.

My personal take would be that minds are somewhat unique in being able to use syntax to bring many properties of things together and make them phenomenologically "present" at once. However, this still represents a relation between things in the world, and is in no way a sort of "less real" relationship for involving phenomenal awareness. Indeed, I can see an argument for these relationships being "more real" in that the development of clear knowledge of "what a thing is," is itself the relation in which a thing "most essentially is what it is." In knowledge, many of a thing's properties come together at once, whereas normally any one thing is only manifesting some of its properties over any given interval.

c. Can a physicalist (or generally naturalists) be a platonist, or should they stick with nominalism or immanent realism? It seems they can't, because commitment to abstract objects seems to be a commitment to non-physical objects, but see for example naturalised platonism (3).

Naturalism seems generally to be defined loosely enough that I don't see an issue here. Consider Pinkhard's argument that Hegel is a naturalist for example. More broadly, it seems like there could be a naturalism that distinguishes between realms of being and becoming, existence/subsistance and actualization, actual and potential, etc., which might leave room for platonism.

Physicalism, if it's in the conventional package of "everything that exists is physical," superveniance, and causal closure seems more dicey unless a number of moves are made.

Gisin's application of intuitionism to physics adds an interesting wrinkle here, but I still think it might be consistent with a certain sort of naturalist platonism. If anything, it would seem to change physicalism more if it ever becomes mainstream.

Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to "speak" of indeterminism, its inability to present us a worldview in which new information is created as time passes. In such a case, scientific determinism would only be an illusion due to the timeless mathematical language scientists use. To investigate this possibility it is necessary to develop an alternative mathematical language that is both powerful enough to allow scientists to compute predictions and compatible with indeterminism and the passage of time. We argue that intuitionistic mathematics provides such a language and we illustrate it in simple terms.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02348

What counts as a "confirmed fact" is debatable, of course, but I don't know of any scholar or historian who seriously doubts (and provides some evidence for their view) that Mark was the first Gospel. If you do, could you share that? I'd be grateful.

The Synoptic Gospels were very likely not written like War and Peace, set out for publication by a single author, and then distributed. Material in the Gospels is widely thought to date to different periods and to be drawn from various sources, with adjustments occuring over an overlapping time period. This is what I mean by overlap - which material is oldest is difficult to determine.

Mark is widely thought to be the first Gospel compiled in roughly its eventual format, and it is generally given a date before 70 AD, but there is a difference between being the first compiled in roughly its current format and having the "oldest material." The Markan Priority Theory was not always as in vouge as it is today, and Mathew is still proposed as "first" sometimes, although as often the claim is that it doesn't make much sense to think of them in serial order. Much of the Markan theory hangs on the fact that Mark shows bad grammar and word choices, while Matthew and Luke are much more polished. The thinking runs that this is best explained by the fact that the other two are later attempts to fix deficits in Mark, but of course this is supposition, and there are reasons to think that the polish of Luke and some of its unique material has to do with its continued evolution. The argument is abductive, and this is what I mean by "not a confirmed fact." Yes, it's the most widely held position, but it's also a position that has to be extrapolated on not very definitive evidence.

At any rate, the thinking is that there are later additions to Mark and also that the other Gospels draw from sources used to compile Mark, as well as others. So, when we talk about "what the earliest sources say about Jesus," the priority of Mark shouldn't be thought of in the way modern books are published, with a single final manuscript coming out and being faithfully transcribed from that date on. And so my point would be more than we have a hard time knowing which material is the oldest out of all of these -

Ok, but he chooses to present his opinion as something much closer to "consensus historical fact:" "during his lifetime, Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God, and ... none of his disciples had any inkling at all that he was God. ..." Strangely, he appeals to St. Paul on this point too, stating that "the Gospel of John is providing a theological understanding of Jesus that is not what was historically accurate."

But this makes sense with claims that he has an "axe to grind," consistent with his arguments against the faith in general in "God's Problem." Hence the provocative titles "Forged" and "Misquoting Jesus." It's possible to be a well trained scholar who does good scholarships and to still have a non-scholarly agenda you want to push vis-á-vis contemporary belief. This is precisely what happens all the time with religious Biblical scholars. It's not that they don't know Hebrew and Greek well or carefully search the sources, it's that they approach the work with an agenda and present it with an agenda, whether that agenda is "showing how Catholic doctrine goes all the way back to Peter" or claiming "Christianity is largely some sort of later invention without much to do with the historical Jesus."

Apparently there is a third Bart Ehrman who goes on NPR and states that there is no evidence in Paul that Jesus is divine, and this is what I find to be completely counter to the text.

I find the overstatement of confidence in this field to be frustrating in general. For example, overall I find Diarmaid MacCulloch's "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years," to be excellent, and his being secular is probably actually helpful in that I notice that Orthodox and Catholic authors can't help re fighting 1,200 year old arguments in their histories. But he also does this sort of thing, presenting the idea that James is Jesus' biological brother as a sort of well supported fact. It isn't though. "Popular in secular Biblical Studies," can often be quite far from "well supported fact."

The claim about James is popular today particularly because it's provocative and contradicts Church doctrine, but is based on very scant evidence given the same word for brother gets continually used for all Christians and by the Apostles to refer to one another (plus Jesus telling John to take care of Mary makes less sense if she has surviving sons). There is no sort of stepping back and looking at the field and how often it changes and saying, "I should really just say no one knows."

There is plenty in the Synoptic Gospels that shows Jesus is divine. The difference in presentation is just as often explained as the Gospels having different targets audiences. The Synoptic Gospels target Jews, particularly the less hellenized, for whom Jesus' divinity has to be rolled out slowly through the continual fulfillment of prophecy and signs, with Christ only asserting his identity fully near his execution in Mark, because a blanket assertion would be rejected outright. John is for Hellenized audiences for whom divinity as such is not the main controversial issue, but rather the sole divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit must be stressed.

It reminds me a bit of Strauss' "ironic thesis," on Plato's Republic. A decent argument can be made on the text alone, and it's novel so it gained currency. However, you'd have to assume that Aristotle, who spent twenty years studying with the man, completely misunderstood his work for the ironic thesis to be true. Likewise, deflationary Jesus as a "preacher" has to assume that the people directly taught by Paul and Peter either radically misunderstood them or utterly transformed what they had said over a short period. Although, the deflationary Jesus seems even less likely due to Peter and Paul's own words, and that the dates of John's letters are hard to pin down (John is at least as clear that Jesus is divine in his letters as Paul).

Ehrman is one of the top biblical scholars (biblical historians?) and he tows pretty mainline, well-researched positions so I don't think his views are particularly controversial or should be treated as prima facie wrong. I think it's possible that his views are being misrepresented here.

Really? I am familiar with him largely through his name being synonymous with a sort of liberal "debunking" of the Scriptures. It certainly isn't a confirmed fact that any Gospel was written before any other. If Colossians wasn't written by Paul it still likely was written by someone very familiar with Paul around the time that the Gospels were written, and so represents one of the very earliest Christian voices calling Christ the entity through which all things are created and sustained (sounds a lot like God). I Peter is dated to the early 60s AD if Petrine authorship is accepted, and this puts Jesus being called Lord and prayers to Jesus in with the very earliest Christian texts in existence.

Attempts to deflate Jesus in the early church aren't unique to Ehrman of course and there has been a trend of them since the 1970s. The extreme end of this is "Jesus as a misunderstood social critic," which seems to have more to do with the desire to co-opt Jesus for contemporary political debates than anything in the Gospels, as Jesus does things in Mark like affirm he is the Christ and talk about coming down on a cloud with the Might One, etc.

The current academic system preferences novelty and creativity, which unfortunately leads to provocative theses gaining ground simply for being provocative. This isn't just true for Biblical studies. This is the driving factor behind Ionannodis' famous paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." The drive to get citations and standout for tenure just make this worse, and it effects a wide array of fields (e.g., there has been a lot of work on this incentive structure in economics)

The most true thing you could say about the church prior to the late third century is that it seems like it was quite diverse and no one really knows the order in which major texts were composed or who wrote them or why different editorial decisions were made. But this is obviously uninteresting and so you get all sorts of theories and supposition that rise and fall in popularity despite the underlying evidence staying the same.

Being mainstream doesn't mean "being supported by good evidence," in this area. From the late 1800s to the latter half of the 20th century biblical scholars "knew" there had been a Council of Jamnia in the late first century where the Hebrew canon was fixed in response to Christianity. Now this is a theory embraced by virtually no one. But the rise and fall of such theories has little to do with new evidence, and more with arguments over the same old evidence, which gain currency.

Jewish followers. Paul however clearly views Jesus as divine, and Ehrman would surely agree that Paul viewed him as such.

Paul's letters are widely taken to be the earliest Christian sources though, which makes the temporal argument seem a bit off. Luke is coming significantly later, perhaps after John, and in any event Luke taken with Acts shows Jesus as quite divine.

If the Church were really being led by God, why is there so much confusion in the church? I would think that if there were a single authority guiding it, then consensus would increase with time. But like all other religions, factions and confusions increase with time in Christianity, rather than decrease.

Consider than even if the Old Testament account of ancient Israel they are often divided against each other and unclear of what to do. Even as the authors want to present things there is division. Man is forever backsliding and unsatisfied. There is a very comical part of Exodus where, as God is literally splitting the sea for the Hebrews, and they cry out to Moses "why have you led us out here to be caught by the Egyptians. Were their not enough graves left in Egypt that we should die here in the wilderness!"

Factions haven't really increased either. The early church was incredibly diverse, with various sorts of gnostics, Arians, Donatists, docetism. If anything, it was more theologically diverse than today.

This compares poorly to science, for instance. There are arguments in science, but with time, knowledge and consensus increase. This is because science is based on sensory observation and on math, and these are the same for everyone.

Science continually has paradigm shifts where we realize that the way we thought about things before has been entirely wrong. It isn't stable, but goes through massive shifts. Consider the history of understanding what heat was, the dominance of views that proposed an eternal universe prior to the Big Bang Theory, Newtonian absolute space and time versus relativity, the "quantum revolution," the "chaos revolution," etc.

I would say science is much less stable than theology. Protestants, Orthodox, and Catholics can all look back and agree on much in St. Augustine, St. Maximus, etc. What science agrees with attempts at scientific theories from the years 400-800?

If the Holy Spirit were guiding the church, and it were the same for everyone, why would not the churches increase in knowledge and consensus, like in science?

If God acted like you think God should act, sure. But if God is truly God couldn't God just autopilot us into all being saints and agreeing? So even if Christianity led to far more consensus than science you could still throw out the same argument, claiming that "if it isn't perfect, it isn't divine."

I was writing a short story about this. Suppose a second Moon appeared in the sky one day. A giant rosey sphere about four times the size of our Moon in the sky with a huge cross on it, visible by day. How much would it really change?

You might get an initial surge in religion, but I imagine it wouldn't change much in the long term. Denominations would still fight over the meaning of the sign. Muslims could claim it was a trick or the devil or had some other meaning. If the appearance of the thing caused some flooding due to a shift in the tides, this would be taken as evidence of its non-divine nature.

Eventually we'd land probes on the thing and come to understand what it was made of. We'd have theories about ETs and wormholes. People would get used to it and the second moon would become mundane, "that thing that happened."


But if throwing a giant cross in the sky isn't enough, what is?

Interestingly, the Bible starts with God commanding man directly from on high in this sort of obvious way, in a pillar of flame, etc.. Over time, God shifts to speaking to a corporate people through prophets. God now reached man through man. This culminates in God becoming man and speaking to man face to face. Then there is a third switch to indwelling Spirit. God will now live in man, every mind a temple to the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul had it.

Man is expected to mature here. The relationship becomes more hands off. I would consider that if mankind is to become truly self-determining, this can't be otherwise. Divine autopilot or vast signs only work so long as the signs remain. But there is to consider Jesus' claim that it is better if we don't see signs and wonders.

Of course, we tend to look at things in a highly individualistic way these days. How does the individual become free, etc. So the old explanations in terms of mankind as a corporate body maturing and developing seem to lose their hold. We tend to think of our species as in its adulthood, rather than being adolescents, so we expect that the fruits of any historical process should be clear to us by now.

I would say Ehrman is vastly overstating his thesis, especially when including Paul in these assertions.

During his lifetime, Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God, and ... none of his disciples had any inkling at all that he was God.

Here is how Paul refers to Christ:

12 Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:

13 Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:

14 In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:

15 Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature:

16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

18 And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.

19 For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell;

20 And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven. — St. Paul - Colossians 1

Granted, there are some who contest Paul's authorship of the letter, but then I recall one scholar pointing out that the same methodology (mostly looking at how often words reoccur across different letters) would have it that they didn't write many of their own papers either. IIRC, this is one of the lesser contested of the "contested epistles." But Jesus seems quite divine in others too.

Both James and Peter refer to Jesus as "Lord" (kyrios) in seemingly the same sense that the word is used for adonai in the Septuagint, e.g., "hold on to the faith in our glorious lord Jesus Christ" (James). Peter also attests to the Transfiguration in his letter. At any rate, the idea of praising the glory of a human being in this way, or of offering prayers to him, doesn't make sense in the context of Second Temple Judaism if Jesus is simply a final prophet. Luke likewise features the disciples "worshiping" Christ after the resurrection, which is of particular note because Luke and Acts are thought to have the same source/author and in Acts Paul goes out of his way to tell people not to worship him because he is only a man (although Luke might not even be older than John).

The dating for the Gospels all have a lot of overlap in date range. Part of the arguments for later composition dates for John are that it contains some of the references Ehrman is talking about, but then this just makes the argument circular. It must be later because it has "later" material, and the material is said to be "later" because it is in John. In any event, the gap in average proposed dates for Luke and John is like all of a decade.

IMO, nothing really definitive can be said until a good deal past these dates. It's also really impossible to determine what the intent was behind different narrative choices either.

The Gospels certainly don't rule out a sort of subordinate relationship ala Arianism or Doscetism, but Jesus as non-divine seems like quite a stretch as a thesis. The reason the pharisees are decrying him as blasphemous in Matthew 9 is because he is saying he is the Son of Man, with authority to forgive sins (something only God can do in the religious context). Similar events play out in Mark and Luke. Then there is the application of Isiah's "make clear the way of the Lord" to Christ in Mark and the voice of God calling Christ "Son" during the Transfiguration (not in John).

But probably more conclusive is Jesus in Matthew 28 declaring "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The Son is placed between the two clearly divine entities, and then there is the promise that Christ will always be with his followers.

I kind of agree, but how would you teach 'the good' in a world where there is no agreement on what the good is or if it is anything more than perspectival.

Is there truly "no agreement?" People seem to agree on a lot of the basics. For example, no one seems to think that being ruled over by instinct, circumstance, and desire, with no rational reflection on one's impulses is a good thing. There seems to be a fairly wide agreement on epistemic virtues as well. The good learner doesn't jump to conclusions and then refuse to relinquish them. They listen to other people and take their words in. They are patient. They desire to know the truth, rather than being wholly motivated by some other end, etc. But if the Good isn't obvious, then the good person needs to be a good learner.

Plato's being ruled over by the rational part of the soul seems like a virtue that could have wide support. I don't see much of Aristotle's virtues raising too many hackles either. But you tend to only get these in pre-school, even though their application in the real world is quite complex.

Of course, not everyone will agree, but that hardly seems like a problem. Not everyone agrees that the Earth isn't flat, or that vaccines work, yet that is rightly not a determinant factor in what gets taught.

I do agree that ethics is a particularly thorny issue, but it's also a particularly important one. It doesn't need to be a particularly thorny issue. But sadly, moral nihilism and the idea that reason stops at the boundaries of morality has become an unfortunately common opinion. And yet no society can relinquish its morals and survive, and so what we get instead is a sort of schizophrenic blend of punishment without confidence in justice.

Teacher to student ratios tend to be such that it precludes many types of activities, and this ends up being a bit of a problem.

A focus on "critical thinking," "creativity," and group work is pretty much the norm in ed policy ideas, but I'm not sure how well it cashes out. The problem is that kids are forced to be there and there is a high level of antagonism in a lot of school settings. Classroom control is essential, but then maintaining this given students who haven't "bought in," to the processes is very difficult and requires a stilted atmosphere.

A huge function of schools is to provide childcare for parents who work. And it's this dual function that tends to lead to schedules that are less than ideal (that and transportation costs are huge so you can't have all the kids start at the same time because cycling them is much cheaper).

I went to a very poorly preforming school district where only 20-25% of students graduated, so my view might be biased, but it did not seem good for socialization. You learned to interact with all adults in an authority vs inmate type structure. This is horrible preparation for a university setting where networking is important or a career. A lot of home school kids I know actually seem much better socialized in this respect, knowing how to interact with adults.

And then moral education is completely absent. There is a lot on following rules and consequences, but I recall virtually nothing on "what is truly good."

Right, I am speaking to my own prior ignorance. Just the way it is usually talked about, I had always assumed the Iran coup was something more like a Bay of Pigs situation (but successful) rather than the slap dash, somewhat halfhearted bungling that it was.

resulted in the present mess.

Certainly a contributing factor. It's rather dizzying to try to compare what went right in South Korea and Taiwan (originally American support for military despots) with what went wrong in Iran, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. The move directly to liberal democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq went poorly, but then slow pressure campaigns aimed at reform also only worked in a few cases (with backsliding in the case of Hee). Ultimately, I think the US could do far more to prop the KMT up in China, or the Shah in Iran, etc. as militarily viable, then it could to influence their internal politics. With Mosaddegh, the case for action was particularly weak because, by all accounts, the communists were not in a particularly strong position for their own attempts to gain control, and Mosaddegh himself seemed committed to a middle path. It wasn't a Vietnam-like situation where pulling backing obviously meant the victory of the Soviet aligned forces, but rather a rare case with a viable non-aligned centrist.

But the first coup wasn't their idea

This is what I thought because it gets repeated all the time as an explanation for the poor US - Iranian relation.

Having later looked into the relationship in more detail, I discovered this is a quite skewed look. The influence from the world power with "hugely disproportionate economic resources," amounted largely to a single junior case officer with a suit case of $100,000 (worth more then, but still not THAT much) making lots of phone calls. The most effective bribes were probably for paying protestors, but all three sides were already in the habit of paying protestors at the time, making this nothing too exceptional. Large numbers of demonstrators don't appear to have been bribed anyhow, and were instead moving against Tudeh (who had previously supported the Soviets staying in Iran) engaging in their own revolt, and against Mosaddegh and his dismissal of Parliament.

For example, the book below has a blow by blow and, as the subtitles suggests, is not favorable to the intervention. However, it does show how the "CIA coup," wasn't some great plan by the CIA, but largely the work of a single guy calling together wavering figurines, and the biggest thing the US did was pump up the Shah to go back. Maybe it was just the right leverage at just the right time, but given how little it took for Iranians to do the overthrowing, the idea that it was smooth sailing for Iranian democracy and Mosaddegh had Kermit Roosevelt not been around seems unlikely. A right wing coup was still probably likely, and then left wing groups with Soviet support were also jockeying for position, fighting in the streets, etc.

But the image of full American control, as with Chile, gets support from two directions. On the one hand, you have intelligence services and their retired operatives wanting to play up their influence and involvement in world affairs. On the other, you have critics of the US who want to paint it as single handedly running Middle Eastern and Latin American politics.

Which is not to say it wasn't horrendous or perhaps a determining factor in the history of Iranian politics, but it could only be determining because there was a three way power struggle that was already very close to tipping one way or the other. It's often painted though like the situation was one between stable, liberal democracy and the coup, which is not the case.

I've been sipping in and out of "Miester Eckhart's Book of Secrets." It's a compilation of aphorisms, sort of a Christian version of Zen koans in a way.

We tend to understand processes through reference to the things which are actively involved in the processes.

I'd argue this is getting things backwards. We only understand "things" in terms of what they do. What properties does any thing have when it is interacting with nothing? You can only describe properties in terms of how something interacts with other things or how parts of it interact. Substances without process can't explain anything.

See the two quotes here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/885631

So for example if a molecule is a stability of processes, the things involved in those processes are the atoms. And if an atom is a stability of processes, then the underlying things involved in those processes are the parts of the atoms. Now when we get to fundamental particles, you might say that there are "fundamental fields" which constitute the processes, but fields are mathematical constructs

But the particles are mathematical constructs too. As Wilzeck puts it, with quarks the "it is the bit." These particles are entirely defined in mathematical terms. This is what ontic structural realism makes its hay on, the fact that they are defined as nothing but math. So, if being described in terms of mathematical constructs is disqualifying, then fundamental particles are every bit as problematic as fields.

I would say that these are not the same. A heart cell has a certain set of rules it follows, and when it fails to execute those rules it is faulty. When a video game, like the one you mentioned in the OP, Diablo, is facing a bug, its following the rules just not the expectations involved in its design

Yes. But I find it very hard to state the point clearly. I think we have to distinguish them this way. When my heart fails to fulfil it purpose - what it is "designed" to do, the fault is not in the design, but in the execution of them. When a bug arises in a program, there is a fault in the design of the game/program, not in the execution of the rules.

Well, in the case of some genetic disorders, e.g. pseudo-exfoliation glaucoma, the problem seems to be with the rules, not the execution. With PEG, the problem stems from a single nucleotide polymorphism that codes for the elastin protein. Essentially, what happens is that this gene instructs the cell to produce this protein in a way that differs from "normal" elastin. This results in a mostly functional elastin that nonetheless clogs up the passage of fluids between different parts of the eye, resulting in higher interocular pressures, which in turn kills neurons in the optic nerve, eventually resulting in blindness.

If we think of the genes as rules, as the instructions for building the organism, the problem here is that the rules are wrong. The cells are producing the protein as instructed, but the slight variation in the protein leads to unintended consequences vis-a-vis function.

Of course, here we run into a problem. As pointed out in the "What Is Logic?" thread, it has become common to think of logic or any sort of rules as being the sui generis product of minds. They only exist "in here" not "out there." A theory of rules as grounded in human social practice sort of goes along with this tendency.

So, in such a view, we can't really say the rules are bugged in PEG the same sense they might be in a game. Physics doesn't make mistakes, teleology is suspect even if impossible to fully root out, and so we shouldn't put too much emphasis in terms of defining conditions in terms of "function."

My objection here is that this seems to create a rather artificial barrier between our understanding of rules and function/purpose, and the world. Where do we get out idea of rules from? Why are we equipped to understand such things if nothing like them exists outside our minds? Why do cells seem to follow rules and "execute programs?"

I guess this sort of gets at some of the controversy surrounding the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. How strict should the commandments "thou shalt not invoke teleology" and "thou shalt not externalize rules," be? ("Thou shalt not have intentionality play a role in evolution," is sort of another.)

I'm interested in your original post, but I am afraid I don't entirely understand your intent or what exactly you're getting at, but it sounds very interesting.

I didn't really have a point, it just occurred to me as an interesting case. I was thinking that bugs like this might be the sort of thing that drives some aspects of rule evolution.

In fact, I'm convinced that a similar arrangement would work equally well for a community of atheists with personal computers and colourful clothes.

:rofl: yeah, the grey and black only look seems optional.

I am actually aware of a few "intentional communities" that seem to accomplish something quite similar while still making use of modern technology and some members working at jobs outside the community. My wife's cousin actually belongs to one.

The ones I am aware of are Christian communities, but I see no prima facie reason that such communities couldn't be grounded in some other sort of practice. In practice though, it seems hard to get people to "buy in" to the amount of short-term sacrifice that is required to make such communities work. It requires that those who are initially better off part with much and take a "risk" on the success of the community in providing a group benefit that offsets their sacrifices. Obviously, religious traditions that prioritize either altruism or a lack of concern for worldly goods is helpful here.

I know historically of a number of such communities based on socialist ideology, but I am not aware of any that still exist in the US. The kibbutz in Israel might be a good example of success in a more secular context though. The most successful intentional communities in terms of duration seem to be those that most eschew economic success. E.g., the monastery below Mt. Horeb, built around the supposed "burning bush" that Moses encountered, has been around for about 1,500 years, through myriad wars and changes in political control. I know there are a few Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayas that date to the 900s AD as well. It makes a certain sort of sense that these would be the most stable, because they have the least reason to ever change.

"Stabilities" are represented as equilibriums which are artificial ideals thathave no real independent existence. So the ideal equilibrium is compared to reality in modeling, and how reality strays from the equilibrium, is known as change. But the reality is that things are changing, whether fast or slow, so the equilibrium is just an artificial tool, and does not represent any thing really independent. It's a fabricated mathematical tool.

I don't see why this should be the case. Protons seem to have beginnings and ends, which is why it seems fair to think of them as underlined by processes. However, they are remarkable stable otherwise. I don't see any reason to think we have "invented" rather than discovered protons, atoms, molecules, etc. Indeed, it's hard to see what we can even say about the world if these are to be considered purely as "inventions." To be sure, we invented ways of talking about them, systems for describing them, etc. But such systems didn't spring out of the ether; rather, they were developed by examining these phenomena.

We might accept G.M D’Ariano's claim that particles are like "the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave," because universal fields and information have the ontological high ground, and still accept that these incredibly robust stabilities have a real ontic existence. The fact is, the "particle zoo" is still not all that big. Our "universal process" is such that it results in a fairly small diversity of stabilities that emerge at small scales - the same sort of thing we see when we play around with the rules of various "toy universe" models.

There are a lot of Amish here where I live. The Amish don't have jobs so much as they are community members, although if they are particularly skilled in a certain trade they might spend most of their time doing that. They do set up businesses where they sell to the general public, mostly prepared food, produce, and furniture. IIRC, some around here build barns for people as well, but their prohibitions on modern technology mean they don't do too much else with construction.

The interesting thing is that, despite their not using any modern technology and their scarce use of modern healthcare, they are both wealthier and longer lived than the general public. The health can be chalked up to diet and exercise, but the wealth really comes down to how their communities are organized I think, the way people pool resources and the lack of spurious consumption. All else equal, they should have less wealth because they have much larger families and so inheritances are smaller, but they make up for this. The way in which new households are provided for when the young marry is probably one of the major ways in which such success occurs. It probably helps that household formation also occurs much younger and then rarely ends in divorce and assets being split and costs duplicated.

Contrast this with mainstream US culture where people delay getting married precisely because weddings have become hideously expensive, $30,000+ on average. Instead of being given a house when you marry, you shell out the downpayment on a house lol. Children in such a community also become assets fairly early, in that they can assist with the labor (common in modern farming households too). But given the type of work available in urban areas, and the relative value of teenager's work, children are pretty much solely a drain on wealth for most modern households.

Absolutely. The one goal of philosophy. Our rallying cry is "to the sacred couch of contemplation!"

SOCRATES POMPOUSLY
I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun.

STREPSIADES
Thus it's not on the solid ground, but from the height of this basket, that you slight the gods, if indeed....

SOCRATES
I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven. I should have discovered nothing, had I remained on the ground to consider from below the things that are above; for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It's just the same with the watercress.

STREPSIADES
What? Does the mind attract the sap of the watercress? Ah! my dear little Socrates, come down to me! I have come to ask you for lessons....

SOCRATES
Do you really wish to know the truth of celestial matters?

STREPSIADES
Why, yes, if it's possible.

SOCRATES
....and to converse with the clouds, who are our genii?

STREPSIADES
Without a doubt.

SOCRATES
Then be seated on this sacred couch.

STREPSIADES sitting down
I am seated.

SOCRATES
Now take this chaplet.

STREPSIADES
Why a chaplet? Alas! Socrates, would you sacrifice me, like Athamas?

SOCRATES
No, these are the rites of initiation.

STREPSIADES
And what is it I am to gain?

SOCRATES
You will become a thorough rattle-pate, a hardened old stager, the fine flour of the talkers....But come, keep quiet.

STREPSIADES
By Zeus! That's no lie! Soon I shall be nothing but wheat-flour, if you powder me in that fashion.

SOCRATES
Silence, old man, give heed to the prayers.
In an hierophantic tone
Oh! most mighty king, the boundless air, that keepest the earth suspended in space, thou bright Aether and ye venerable goddesses, the Clouds, who carry in your loins the thunder and the lightning, arise, ye sovereign powers and manifest yourselves in the celestial spheres to the eyes of your sage.

STREPSIADES
Not yet! Wait a bit, till I fold my mantle double, so as not to get wet. And to think that I did not even bring my travelling cap! What a misfortune!

SOCRATES ignoring this
Come, oh! Clouds, whom I adore, come and show yourselves to this man, whether you be resting on the sacred summits of Olympus, crowned with hoar-frost, or tarrying in the gardens of Ocean, your father, forming sacred choruses with the Nymphs; whether you be gathering the waves of the Nile in golden vases or dwelling in the Maeotic marsh or on the snowy rocks of Mimas, hearken to my prayer and accept my offering. May these sacrifices be pleasing to you.

Aristophanes - The Clouds

'the One and the Many'.

I do believe this remains a primary issue even with the waning of particle-based conceptions of being and the rise of process-based (pancomputationalism, "It From Bit") conceptions and ontic structural realism (e.g. Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, the book "Every Thing Must Go."

The move to focusing on universal fields actually makes the problem more acute in some ways. If space-time is really a "metric field" rather than a receptacle-container thing, and if unification suggests a grand "field of fields," what you are left with is a conception of reality that is just one single, unified process. There is no multiplicity.

But then, there obviously is multiplicity. You might try to demote the existence of multiple types of "thing" to the status of "mere appearance" but the very existence of appearance itself underscores the obvious existence of multiple, distinct minds existing in this unified omni-process. Barring solipsism and a radical sort of idealism, it seems that this omni-process gives rise to a multiplicity of phenomenal horizons, and then these also seem to contain a multiplicity of things in them that also must be explained.

I do see some possible ways of addressing this, at least in their outline, primarily in Hegel and St. Aquinas. In Aquinas, there is the intuition that the things that are most truly discrete and self-determining are precisely those beings in whom a unity of phenomenal awareness emerges. Then, in Hegel there is the intuition that a proper explanation of the world requires something that wraps around the objective/subjective, nature/mind distinction, and explains how multiplicity emerges from mind and nature. Both are also realists re universals in some sense, which I think is essential. Nominalism tends to throw all of the multiplicity on the mind side of the equation, making it impossible to say what causes it, which in turn makes it impossible to describe the whole.

Agree. Also very much the point of my Mind Created World OP. Logical positivism is scientism par excellence.

Exactly. The sort of scientific discourse embraced by positivism is useful at times but incomplete. Good science, particularly theoretical work and paradigm defining work, tends to slip between this sort of scientific discourse and the philosophical mode of discourse readily.

The process view has its own problems, such as how to explain the reality of mass, as that which stays the same while time passes, inertia.

How exactly is mass a particularly thorny issue? The convertibility of the main definitions of mass is generally employed to explain it processual terms, mass to energy to gravitational fields, etc. "Fundamental particles," can be thought of as stabilities in process, and the fact that they appear to have beginnings and ends (e.g. the destruction and spontaneous formation of quark condensate) seems to go along with this nicely as far as I am aware.

The problem is that the two, the perspective of being and the perspective of becoming, are fundamentally incompatible as Plato found out, and since reality is revealed to us as consisting of both, the entirety cannot be reduced to one or the other. This is why dualism cannot be dismissed because it provides the only true foundation for a complete understanding of reality.

I agree with this. Natural numbers, essences, universals, the sorts of stabilities that can form in the world, these seems to exist, or at least subsist, in a sort of eternal frame. Things can be said of this multiplicity regardless of their actualization, and they would seem to subsist in some way as potentials prior to their actualization. So, being can't be reduced to becoming. Although Hegel's conception of becoming emerging from being/nothing seems to offer up a potential way to balance these issues if the dialectical is thought of in an ontological sense, as in Jacob Boheme and Eriugena, Hegel's big forerunners.

I notice that you are not arguing that my summary is wrong

Quite so, just an area that interests me so I can't help but throw my $0.02 in.

I assume you know about Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and the slogan "Private Vices, Public Virtues" (or at least Benefits). I think the genie is out of the bottle now. In any case, there was plenty of coveting and grasping going on even in the Middle Ages. It's the presentation and propaganda that has changed.

Yes, and I agree that social conceptions of virtue only get you so far vis-a-vis natural temptations. However, I do think there is a distinct difference between "grasping" (Aristotle's pleonexia, always wanting more) being an explicit vice and it being a virtue. Today people discuss feeling guilty about not doing more to make more money, to get raises, to work "side hustles", etc. Yes, a strong work ethic has always been a virtue, but these days it seems increasingly merged with this idea of having a sort of "big ego" and always wanting more. "Continuous innovation," and "continuous growth," are goals in and of themselves in the small business literature I read back when I was part of a start-up.

Contrast this with the medieval ideal vis-a-vis the trades. Yes, it was good to be profitable, to grow and train others. However, "being a great tradesman" was far more likely to be defined in terms of the quality and beauty of the products, not simply growth and volume.

I've actually read that Japanese culture still does a good job at this, and that it makes people happier. Here in the US, being "a pizza delivery driver" or "flipping burgers" is often thrown out as a sort of insult. Apparently in Japan there is more of an emphasis on the individual's display of mastery at work, even in contexts seen as more mundane. This certainly seems to come across in their entertainment to a degree, even if they poke fun at it (e.g., people being comically overcommitted to being "the best" at relatively menial jobs). I think Hegel gets at this in the Philosophy of Right as well, when discussing "corporations," his update of medieval guilds, which focus on a sort of "greatness" in a field that isn't defined by income, but rather by mastery. Some fields still have this, e.g. doctors, but most don't.

I don't love Marx, but the part about people becoming alienated from their work seems all to true. And once that happens, income becomes the obvious measuring stick for success.

Perhaps in a few days I will have time to gather some direct quotations, but for now I will just note that your prima facie take on Aristotle seems off. For Aristotle the moral virtues regard public life. The distinction becomes explicit when Aristotle contrasts it with intellectual virtue and the contemplative life, as well as the solitary life.

I don't really disagree with any of this. For Aristotle, human beings are fundamentally social creatures whose well-being is intrinsically linked to their relationships with others. Individuals develop and exercise their virtues through interactions with their fellow citizens. However, the person in the simulation experiences relationships with others that are indiscernible from real relationships (given that their memory of the external world has been removed).

That is, since Aristotle's reasons for prioritizing social interaction seem grounded in the individual's psychology and internal goods, the "perfect" simulation seems to present some wrinkles.

Think about it this way: suppose the planet was destroyed and the only way for civilization to survive was for everyone to live in a Matrix-like simulation. To keep people happy, their memories of the external world are erased. Now it seems like the objections to relationships in the simulation not being "real" is met. When a person develops friendships in the simulation, they are real friendships with real people, and when they help their community they are delivering benefits to a true common good. It seems like the person who lives in the communal simulation can be virtuous.

But let's say we have two people, Rob and Bob. Rob and Bob live psychologically indiscernible subjective lives, except Rob is in a simulation and interacts with what are essentially P Zombies and Bob's identical friends and family do have subjective experiences. In virtue of what is one of these a life of virtue and one not?

For example, the ground of moral virtue has to do with interacting with other people. Such a thing simply does not occur in the experience machine.

I'm simply not sure that this is a key distinction in these authors, particularly not in the Consolation itself. Virtue often seems to be defined almost entirely internally. Aristotle does make some nods to consequentialism in terms of deciding if an action is freely chosen in the Ethics, and he has an idea of negligence in there, but overall virtue is largely about how the person responds to the world. The virtuous person is virtuous if they choose good acts and enjoy doing them. A person who chooses the good in a Matrix-like perfect simulation of the world seems psychologically identical to the one who chooses the good in the real world, particularly if they don't know they are in a simulation.

There is no reason to think the person who acts virtuously in the machine won't act virtuously in the real world, so in what way are they lacking virtue if virtue is an internal disposition or habit of choosing and preferring right action? There is the crux.

Maybe Aristotle gets at the relation to the good of others more directly in the Politics, I am less familiar with that work. Certainly, the Ethics has a sense of a "common good," and virtue supports the common good, but this common good is grounded in being a member of a polis, which the person in the machine is not. This might give Aristotle a reason for people not to enter the machine, but they still seem to be able to meet the psychological conditions of virtue (choosing and enjoying right action) from within it.

The problem of how going into the machine affects others seems to get brought out much easier in a consequentialist framework or if the later Christian virtues of "love" and "charity" from St. Paul get added.