Which objects do you know of that exist, but do not affect us?

If something exists, that doesn't affect us in any way, then I don't see how it could be called anything.



The human genome was completely mapped, what in the early 2000's or so? I wasn't consulted about it, that I know of.

And when new drugs are created, I'm not invited to take part in the test trials.

But then, how does this work? It is assumed, correctly, that we share the same nature, so that if the genome of another person is mapped, then mine is as well (at least to a massive degree, perhaps a difference of .00001% or something.)

How do I know a person is depressed? If he tells me, and is honest about it, then I can assume he is depressed. He could be lying. I cannot enter his head.

But if I observe his behavior and see that he acts in a way consistent with a way I would act if I felt depressed, then I have a good reason to believe that he is depressed. Add that to his own description, and we can proceed.

Generalize this to virtually everything, and you can see how what Hume said is not a contradiction. There will be a tiny portion who diverges from this norm, but that's to be expected.

We are the same creature, and thus overwhelmingly act in a similar manner, given similar situations. So, I don't see a problem.

So the world is intelligible only for those for whom it is intelligible.

Yep. Not exactly Berkeley, is it.

What is it that makes this a form of idealism, I wonder, since it seems to be something with which a realist would agree unproblematically? — Banno

It's not intelligible to a rock, so far as I can see. Other animals don't seem to have concepts, so the issue of intelligibility doesn't arise.

It's a form of idealism because it is only through the way objects affect us, that we are able to form any picture of the world at all. As I quoted Hume before:

"Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass."

The fact that we can attribute independent existence to the entities postulated by science is a (reasonable) postulate, subject to further refinement.

For instance, Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a minor planet, after more information was gathered. GR and QM were discovered and used as a way to complete a picture that what once held as absolute, Newtonian physics.

And on and on, from re-labeling species to the age of the universe, if these refinements don't come from a mind capable of analyzing, conceptualizing and so forth, I don't see how it would be possible.

Finally, science studies appearance, not inner natures or "things in themselves". We observe what gravity does, we don't know what it is.

And we can't get out of our bodies and see how the world is, absent us.

Nope, it is not. The idealism I defend, posits that the world we belong to, this world here, is only intelligible to creatures with the capacity to use cognitive faculties to make sense of that world.

It doesn't deny evolution, nor QW. These things happened independent of us but can only be discovered to animals endowed with reason.

There is time as we experience it, and time as it occurs in the universe, which doesn't have subjectivity.

I don't defend Hoffman, in fact, I'm critical of his formulation of the problem as you can see.

But, as you will tell me, I am confused in my use of words - because since you studied Wittgenstein with a magnifying glass, you understand the actual meaning of words, as opposed to the clowns.

But then, don't bother with clowns, myself included.

Berkeleyan idealism is hard to defend. So is something like Hegel's idealism.

Even worse is the whole Chopra-like industry.

It's very different with people like Cudworth, Schopenhauer and Kant. You can add Hume too, within an interpretation, as well as Locke.

I don't need to mention how much the fathers of QM - or least several distinguished figures like Einstein, Schrodinger and Wolfgang Pauli thought of Schopenhauer, and Kant.

This whole tradition of marginalizing consciousness is rather recent, arising after WWII, and now slowly losing force.

These types of idealism are far richer, and in fact, without them, science wouldn't be possible.

So, it very much depends on what "idealism" one defends.

Kastrup is very interesting, though his notion of "depersonalyzed complexes" referring to objects is not convincing. I much prefer Raymond Tallis, who isn't an idealist per se, but certainly has very rich things to say about consciousness.

As for Hoffman, his value, I think, is to make idealism a respectable position in the sciences, which it should be. These metaphysical questions are quite enriching and offer plenty of food for thought.

As for ordinary people, I don't know - some of the more informed (which does not mean they are correct) might say that science tells you what there is. Most, I'd guess, would be baffled to think that anything other than naive realism could be true. If you add in religion, they may have some ideas about the "in itself" - or similar notions.

But at the same time, despite the noises made by some of the rowdier types, scienticism isn't taken seriously by most scientists.

The computer analogy breaks down quickly, so while it has its pedagogic value, it is limited.

But then I agree with the content of your post, so I'm not sure what you want me to reply to, or comment on.

Those are hard questions. If we look at most living things virtually all of them lack reason.

Maybe higher mammals have some glimmerings or sparks of reason, but nowhere close to us. Which is to say, that it could be "dumb luck" that we are here.

If that's true, that might cause us to pause and marvel that we are lucky enough to have reason. But with a sample planet of one, it's hard to say.

I read Hoffman's book and have seen interviews. I don't recall him explicitly mentioning reason in any exulted manner, though he pre-supposes it.

I agree with you. I'd only accentuate that if we look at a river - conditions being good, we being mentally healthy, etc. - that's a remarkable achievement of reason, by sense alone we wouldn't discover them.

Since we are alive, we must have gotten many things right (and true), despite numerous errors in perception.

At bottom pure experience? Sure, I agree with you that there is no good evidence for this.

The given is a fascinating topic, though Sellar's own arguments are complex, and I often don't follow his reasoning. I prefer C.I. Lewis' take on the subject, or Raymond Tallis, but I don't see much disagreements here.

I mean I am a rationalistic idealist in these topics, so the idea is far from foreign.

As for the analogy, there's a limit, it's fine for a video game. For real life it's different. If I see a tree, and am confident I am not dreaming, nor hallucinating, then I take the tree not merely seriously, but literally, there's a tree outside my window.

Now so far as the transistors go, they play a massive role in its constitution, and if our best theories say there are transistors, then I take them literally. The transistors are at a deeper layer, but I wouldn't say that the transistors are "more real" than the tree.

There are other questions too, crucial ones, like the idea of "things-in-themselves", which I take very seriously, but I don't think science can speak about these.

I agree that it's with organs like eyes and ears that we acquire data of objects. These sensations evoke in the mind/brain a powerful interpretive apparatus that includes things like: interpretation, imagination, combination, continuity in time, concept formation, classification and so on.

We could call these things "ideas", but to imply that we are "stuck" in them suggests that it's a prison. We can also call them thoughts, perceptions, goings-on, object processing, object reactions or any other word.

Without the mind/brain doing this, we would have no registration of the data of sense, it would be like using a flashlight on lump of wax or a chunk of clay - nothing happens.

I don't get why this process isn't "direct". I take it that it is directly caused by the object, as we react to them given the brains we have. Why would I doubt the existence of the world and its objects? I have no reason to take skepticism too seriously, or otherwise I couldn't move.

It depends on how the veil of idea is formulated, if it as was done by Locke and Hume, I don't see it as a trap, but then it is also misleading to call it a "veil".

As for Hoffman, it's not his idealism or his "consciousness realism", that I have any issues with, it's that the foundation of said arguments are flimsy.

It even becomes obscure what "truth" or "reality" means as used by Hoffman. It almost sounds like what's true is what we don't find useful for survival.

I have seen it and it does not address the issue. It goes against what he is saying, if he is giving evidence that our senses mislead us, why trust the evidence? It too is misleading.

He goes on to say that in fact, "spacetime is doomed" - meaning, it is not fundamental enough, there has to be something beyond it, or something which supersedes it. But then why trust the data of physics?

Physics is based on what our senses can capture, which then combine with our intellect to either accept or reject the data within a theoretical farmwork.

But perceptions systematically mislead us...

He would need to explain why evolution and physics are special in relation to all other types of knowledge. I don't recall him replying to this rather important point.

I think Raymond Tallis put it best when he said that if Hoffman really believes we didn't evolve for truth, but only for survival, then why should he trust his experiments which rely on evolutionary arguments being true as a necessary condition for how own view?

I'd elaborate that: either evolution is misleading Hoffman and we can't attain any truths, rendering his view incoherent, or evolution is correct, then Hoffman must grant that we evolved for truth (in some instances), rendering his views false.

Not that I have any problems with idealism - or at least some versions of it - but the way Hoffman proceeds is far from being a good way to present idealism.

I don't see how it is possible to "bypass" emergence, of any kind.

Just as liquid can arise in a specific combination of molecules, which lack liquidity individually, so does consciousness arise in a specific configuration of matter, while the separate parts of matter constituting a brain are not themselves conscious.

It's a fact about the world as well as a fact of our cognitive makeup, that we cannot understand how this could be possible. Too bad for our understanding.

:up:

I take it that this quote from Hume could be labeled "indirect realism":

"Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass."

Despite this quote, Hume never denied we directly see tables, river and trees, even if "we never advance a step beyond ourselves." To have a perspective is to see things from a certain way, anchored to the relevant creature.

The only alternative I could imagine, would be to somehow step outside our bodies and look at objects from no particular perspective and then compare that, to what we see when we are inside our bodies.

As you say, when we see an object, we imagine it has a backside, we can go around and "verify" this.

An important problem remains: what do you say about animals whose sense perception is more acute than ours in certain cases? Such as Eagles in relation to vision, or dogs in relation to smell. Do they experience the world more directly than us?

Actually, what would be interesting to consider is a situation in which we cannot die, no matter what we tried to do.

I wonder how things would play out. Overpopulation would be a big issue. But how would it feel like, knowing that you will always live?

It's unclear to me...

The sense of your life mattering while you achieve things only holds good for a moment in time, afterwards, those that know you will mourn, family and friends, and then they'll be gone too.

Nevertheless, given this is a fact, you might as well do something you find rewarding or interesting, if you can - it's what you make of it, to a large extent.

Death can give a sense of urgency for things you want to do, or finish - and for this reason is excellent motivation. But one should also consider the case, that no evil can last long enough that a mortal has to endure it forever.

I strongly suspect that death itself is literally a non-issue for you (in general) - but it means a massive amount to those close to you - somewhat of a paradox.

Finally, we should consider that, something like 99.999999999999....% of everything that IS, has no consciousness or awareness, so it shouldn't be as strange as we sometimes make it out to be.

And I actually have you to thank for that, it was a discussion with you that made me got my thinking and vocabulary correct on the topic. :up:

To say that indirect realism implies something like, we only have access to our ideas, or we only have representations or arguments along that line aren't convincing.

When someone asks, while pointing at a tree, if they are seeing "directly", one takes it that they are asking about the phenomenon in question and not as a "thing in itself", that's a different question.

For that question to arise, a different question should be asked, for instance: "Do we see the inner nature of objects?" or "Is my experience of this object everything there could possibly be about the object?"

I'm thinking that a dog or a bee have a different perception of the object under consideration, surely.

But that's not an issue of directness or lack of directness. It's an issue of our cognitive configuration.

Absolutely, with the only caveat that we incorporate sub and unconsciousness processes in addition to those that are accessible in experience, through introspection.

Having taken care of that, or at least taking it into consideration, we are left with the original phrases: direct and indirect.

We have direct, but mediated access to objects through representations. What then are we to do with "indirect"? It's not at all clear to me how this word could be used intelligibly, outside of ordinary usage.

Even if someone called themselves an indirect realist, I don't know what that means, and can only suppose they mean mediation. But if lack mediation, we have nothing.

True, but we aren't dealing with the "average person" here, who usually does not care too much about the science stuff, much less philosophy.

It's not mere "philosophy of language" or nitpicking - it's trying to get a better understanding of what people have in mind when they speak about "direct" or "indirect", particularly in this context.

Sure, it's good to see a brain on display, can help remind us that it's intimately related to all these things we encounter in the world. The issue now is, what does that organ do? Is it only meat and empty, or does it play a role in our conceptions and perceptions of things?

It it's empty - only meat - then the blood and bone holding it in, is a minor inconvenience: by being attached to sense organs it gets "unmediated" (pure) sense data.

But if there something more than meat, and sense organs, then there's a lot more to say, in my opinion.



Hah. Don't play coy Mww - if the topic is brought under your territory, I am a mere spectator, despite recent efforts to improve. :cool:

I think it depends on how one takes the initial question. Simple-mindedly speaking, if someone interested in this topic asks "Do I directly see this tree?", they have in mind this object they see and (usually) point to.

And then I ask, what else are you seeing?

Now, if the question is asked, "How do I see this tree?", it may elicit a chuckle to say "with your eyes", but taken more seriously, we'd have to include an extremely complicated mental apparatus without which we couldn't even ask anything.

So the substance, as I see it, is either there is something going in my brain/mind that plays a massive role in my experience of the object, or there is minimal activity going on inside.

This way we avoid dealing with the semantics of "direct" or "indirect", which can cause a lot of confusion.

I think this whole debate is better thought of in terms of "mediated" vs. "unmediated" perception. We run the risk of saying funny things like I indirectly see a tree outside my window.

It could be that I am indirectly seeing a tree, because there is a mirror outside my window blocking a direct perception of the tree, but I can see the object in the reflection of the mirror.

Or alternatively one can say that I directly see a person's love for me, given the way I am treated by said person. But what we strictly speaking see, are patterns of behavior which we interpret as love.

But if we have mediation in mind, we get to the gist of the issue: either we experience things, as images "in a theatre", as Hume says, or we filter said images based in part on "innate ideas", to borrow Leibniz' phrase, or alternatively, one can use a Kantian formulation.

I don't see a coherent alternative.

You are correct. There may be a person now or in the future who may come up with a solution to the problem, we cannot rule this out.

But we should keep in mind that in over 2000 years of philosophy, nobody has yet proven it false, so it is unlikely (but not impossible) to be solved by someone else. We have the same reasoning abilities of the Greeks, not more. Likewise with more recent philosophers.

As Russell discusses - I believe in his An Outline of Philosophy - there are degrees of solipsism, as well as degrees of skepticism.

Probably the most radical - yet most consistent - form of solipsism is the view that, only the immediate present exists, whatever is right now, because, for all we know, 2 seconds ago we might have come into existence, yet we cannot rely on memory to show we existed that long ago.

Yet people who may be attracted to solipsism wouldn't go that far.

As for skepticism, sure, it is quite useful, but the most extreme version, Pyrrhonic skepticism, would have people literally standing on roads ignoring cars that may come your way, because the senses may be misleading us.

In fact, it's even worse, we wouldn't bother standing up, as we might fall.

So yes, both are useful, within certain boundaries. Outside this, they lose usefulness and practicality quite quickly.

I can see that. You have to keep in mind, that the best minds - people like Schopenhauer and Russell, couldn't refute it: it is irrefutable. But that's just a fact about the way our reasoning capacities are constituted, it's like complaining that we can't see more colours in the electromagnetic spectrum - true - but irrelevant.

Now, I for instance, cannot do math beyond the basics, if I see something like 2x=2a or something, my brain hurts. Other people take this to be trivial. Why would I want to create something I don't have the capacity to understand, but others do?

It's a torture - and a nonsensical one. It's more probable that these other people who are good at these things don't depend on me for them to do math, and likewise with super athletes and so forth.

Philosophical topics often do this to people. In your case it's solipsism, for others, it's deep pessimism. To others, it's absurdism, etc. For me, it's the nature of the external world.

However, the distress caused by my bouts of obsession with the topic, is not entirely negative, I try to find the positives in the stress. How utterly strange that such abstract questions - deep ones too - can cause such distress, it's a kind of wonder too.

In your case, you can take it and say, wow, my mind is extraordinarily powerful to be able to create everything. In won't eliminate the problem, but it could help on such occasions.

But as Hume says somewhere, something along the lines of: nature hereby is shown merciful, for what she induces in us (unsolvable problems) are also relieved by her. When we go back to other activities and divert our attention, the problem fades away. When we return to it with this relaxed state of mind, the problem looks cold and distant.

There's something to that reasoning.

Once you consider that there are several problems that arise that are one the same level with solipsism, in terms of being irrefutable by reason, you can mitigate the impact.

One cannot refute strong skepticism. Nor the idea that we live in a simulation, nor can you refute the multiverse, or refute the idea that we are inside the dream of another person and so on.

Multiply the scenarios as you like, and then you can begin to see solipsism lose its importance in terms of impact - if anyone can make up a scenario, an infinite amount of them, out of thin air, how likely is that scenario to be right? Exceedingly small.

While working through Leibniz New Essays on Human Understanding, I randomly decided I needed a bit of a break from the classical tradition, so am re-reading, after a decade:

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

As for a novel:

Death Within the Evil Eye by Masahiro Imamura

It's interesting that you mention Dennett. I would agree that his views on consciousness being an illusion might lead one to think that he takes a deterministic view. But the opposite is the case. He defends compatibilism.

Yes - the ideas of eliminitavism can lead to the idea of man as machine, yet Dennett is a good liberal, so these things need not be connected. You are correct that such views can lead some to think of human beings as "mere" organisms, but these same people rarely act as if others were disposable insects.

The funding issue is interesting. We are not far from practical limits in terms of experiments we can do, and money is spent on few theories. This is expensive, and popular theories like String Theory or Quantum Gravity, get more funds than others, which are just as promising. Funders should be made aware of this, I don't assume they know this, a lot of the time.

There can be connections of the kind you suggest, but if you follow, say Foucault and his disciples, you will find extremely tenuous, and sometimes imaginary connections all related to obscure notions of "ideology". It's good to perceive structures of power. One should temper this with sober realism: real power structures are often out in the open, as seen in business journals and the like.

If someone is being honest, say, a religious person or scholar, they can use metaphysical arguments for political ends and even do this in good faith, that is, being clear about what goals they may have and what motives fuels them to action.

If someone is concerned with using metaphysics or epistemology to try and figure out what there is fundamentally in the universe, let it be fields of energy, miniscule mental entities or moments of perceptions, etc., then I don't see how politics can enter here in any meaningful sense of the word.

This does not make the latter is better than politically motivated ideas, it simply has a different emphasis in terms of what is covered and what is left out.

This is horrific. We are just dying to race to oblivion, there is no end in sight.

The more this goes on, the bigger the risks of someone making a mistake, which we barely have any margin for.

It was very good and interesting. True, it became difficult and heavy-going in several places, particularly when he becomes repetitive. So, some parts I just skimmed over.

I also sensed that the translation, or maybe even his way of writing instead, did not contribute to ease of understanding.

As to the content itself, in so far as I could see, it was rather persuasive, but didn't do a good enough job at explaining why his account of a veiled reality should apply beyond QM to larger objects.

But quibbles aside, it was nice to see someone trying to develop a philosophical system based on QM, by a person who made important contributions to experiments on non-locality.

@Maw

Just finished The Melancholy of Resistance - it took longer than I would have liked, I lost a bit of focus towards the last 3rd of the book, with the exception of the concluding chapter.

I can only compare it to Satantango, his only other novel I've read. It's hard to pick one, without spoilers, it seems to me that Melancholy is richer in general content than Satantango, and yet, and yet, the way the ending of Satantango went, tuned it from a decent book to a complete masterpiece, essentially focusing on a simple, yet very powerful philosophical idea/literary trick.

I struggled less with Satantango, and I felt it was somewhat more coherent, but again, Melancholy was richer in plurality of ideas... I suppose that Satantango's execution was just too good, so I'd give it the edge.

How does Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming compare with these two works?

I'll probably read one or two easy novels, then go back to a challenging one, then on to Baron - it requires some effort.

Any general thoughts?

We can't help anthropomorphizing. What we can avoid is that in the anthropomorphizing, we actually believe that this machine has cognition, or even cognitive abilities. We have trouble trying to get a good idea of how human being's cognitions works. If we have significant troubles with ourselves, how can we expect to get an insight into something that isn't even biological?

Granted, your point of not playing down the general achievement of these programs is quite correct. I personally don't have a principled problem against "reductionism" - when it works and when it makes sense to apply, let's do so. If not, then we don't.

It's likely that the basic element(s) of the mind is the repetition of something simple, which compounds into something very complex and multi-faceted. But one thing is what we take to be, commonsensically, "the way we (think) we think" and another thing is the way we actually think, which we cannot access in experience. My fear is that we are taking the commonsense approach and concluding that these AI's have cognition.

But I see your point, and it's true, we should be careful. I'm just skeptical about it as something that tells us about intelligence, but I fully admit that it is quite entertaining and useful, when used correctly. But then someone like you knows enough about these things to be on alert.



Yes, that could be a source of optimism, IF people of opposing views are willing to engage in different ideas, instead of wanting to have what they already believe be reinforced. It can also be helpful to get say, a rough outline of general ideas.

I have played around with the previous version - the one currently freely available now, I think the one you are mentioning is somewhat better, but the way it works is very similar, so far as I've been told.

There is no doubt that these A.I.'s are interesting and can be put to good use, we will see how the field continues to develop. But I should mention, as a general comment that, not including ethics, which the machine doesn't have, it is misleading to think of this kind of machine intelligence as anything remotely like what a human being does.

One thing is to sift through vast amounts of data to look for regularities and patterns such that certain results can be given within a parameter dictated by how much information there is for any given topic.

The human mind is different, it forms extremely rich ideas from quite poor sense-stimuli, and forms hypothesis that are often quite substantially underdetermined given the evidence. There is a large role here played by intuition - a faculty we cannot explain well at all - as well as other aspects such as use of the imagination, genuine understanding as well as intentionality, concept formation and several other factors which are just not found in these programs.

It's also worth mentioning that the type of prose it writes - say short stories and the like are also created by methods that include vast accumulation of data and generalizations, which is only a small portion of what we do.

Granted, it may do the things it does more efficiently, because it doesn't need to rely on finite memory, for practical purposes.

So, while the development of these programs is promising, following them too closely can cause one to believe that what the AI does is what human beings do, and it doesn't follow. I hope it manages to develop in a manner which is not damaging to the current climate of misinformation we are living in.

The comment about the competition of power reminds me a bit of Plato's dislike of the Sophists, who argued for the sake of winning an argument, not for any inherent goodness or correctness. I believe we still have that around in philosophy, particularly in the "Deconstruction" tradition, and some aspects of postmodernism generally.

I can understand political philosophy - but philosophy itself being political, is not entirely clear. Some branches are - ethics say, or maybe even some aspect of aesthetics. But I don't see a reason as to why metaphysics, epistemology, logic, language, etc. are in themselves political or about power.

They can be depending on how they are used, but I don't see a necessity to it.

Perhaps you have something else in mind.

So, I am asking what do you think about making sense in the maze of philosophical pluralism? Also, to what extent is philosophy a quest for reason, a search for personal meaning or connected to power balances or imbalances in social structures? — Jack Cummins

It depends on what you mean by "philosophy". If you mean by this word, what "ordinary" people commonly regard as "that's my philosophy", then philosophical pluralism is indeed helpful and enlightening, for the trivial reason that we learn about how other cultures deal with issues similar to ours. And often with issues that aren't ours.

Now, if you mean by "philosophy" the tradition going back to Plato, then it's more nuanced. I'd say it's good to have a "reasonable" amount of plurality - it gives us different options to consider. But going from a reasonable amount to "anything goes" is very different. If we allow an anything goes attitude into philosophy in this sense, then we are severely degrading the tradition, because we are allowing too much garbage in.

Your second question depends on what your interests in philosophy are. But it's legitimate to tackle all those questions.

That I do see rather clearly (in so far as anything he writes can belled "clear"), his conservative stance in terms of being rooted to nature and following a certain tradition rooted in quite worldly affairs.

As I have read him in the past, through Dreyfus' lenses, and latter, through Tallis' eyes, I do think his mentioning of science as one way of the various ways we have to analyze and understand the world is valuable.

He seems to me to gain back some strong quasi-religious dimensions in his Contributions, which is really, really obscure - almost unreadable.

In general though, he would not be the best person for ethics I'd think. But frankly, I know very little of it because it's not my area. So, I'll take your word for it.

That much is sensible. Especially when it reaches to the level of metaphysics and epistemology, knowing a bit of the science of the time really helps understand why they argued things that, absent that context, sound bizarre.

For ethical issues, maybe there's something there.

I suppose this is a matter of personal preference to a large extent.

They did - and it makes sense too, given the recent experience of the war at the time. I believe Arendt eventually forgave him - I don't think she was aware of the extent of his involvement with Nazism though. We know much more of it now.

Quite the opposite. These things should be brought into the conversation, but that is not to say they should be "cancelled". — Fooloso4

I don't care much for the topic. I read these figures because I'm interested in what they say about epistemology or metaphysics.

I don't focus on ethics in philosophy. Not that ethics isn't important, it obviously is, but I prefer to speak about current events instead of frequently abstract discussions of right and wrong.

It's useful to know how much progress we've made in ethical matters, but to focus on what Descartes, Locke or Schopenhauer believed in that we now take to be reprehensible is kind of "so what?" We have burning issues now, what's the point in judging people with standards they did not have, but we take for granted?

It's not at all clear to me that most of us wouldn't have been racists or sexists or imperialists back then, to think otherwise is potentially misleading.

Of course, Heidegger, Camus and others are recent figures, so it makes some sense to discuss this.

And absolutely, I agree with no cancellation.