Yet, to allow that we can be wrong about things—wrong about what is truly "useful"—seems to presuppose a truth of the matter that is prior, not posterior, to our beliefs about usefulness. And at any rate, the ubiquitous experience of regret seems to show that we can certainly be wrong about what is useful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't thinkg ethics is grounded in pragmatics. Truth is hermeneutical, but there is something, as you say, prior, and this is the essential givenness of the world: appearance in the appearing. Touch a stone, and you stand in the midst of an absolute. This of course, is an issue.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think it contradicts itself. Your answer seems to be: "everything contradicts itself?" I just don't think that's true. Lots of philosophy avoids refuting itself in this sort of way.

At any rate, isn't the sort of defense you are giving simply absolutizing a particular metaphysics of language and philosophy of science? That is, "there is no absolute context, regardless of the context, practices, or beliefs," (which is, or course, itself an absolute, gnostic claim, and one that seems to contradict itself).

I can think of plenty of philosophers who would contradict some of those claims. So in virtue of what is this sort of take presumably "true" and the others false? Why are the "sociology all the way down," folks right about science, but the traditional realists and hard-nosed physicalists wrong? If truth is just about what is dominant in a culture, it would seem that realism still rules the roost amongst scientists and the general public, so wouldn't that make it "true?"

Truth traditionally understood is untenable, for traditionally, the object is conceived apart from the perceptual act, and this is impossible. One would literally have to stand outside of experience to affirm it. — Constance

I don't think that's an accurate description. Truth in the Western tradition is "the mind's adequacy to being," or "thought's grasp of being." That's as true across scholasticism as it is for Platonism, and the Indian philosophy I am familiar with is not that different in this regard. The idea that truth requires something like "stepping outside of experience" is largely a modern one, one that I don't even think came into its own until the early analytic period (and honestly, it's more of a caricature if expressed in those stark terms).

That's a theme in post-modern arguments though. The argument often looks something like:

A or B
Not-A
Therefore B

But this doesn't work if the first premise is a false dichotomy. The "mirror of nature" in modern, empiricist thought is not the "microcosm" of someone like Saint Bonaventure. You're not going to see being set over and against thought in Plotinus. Parmenides' "the same is for thinking as for being" holds for a great deal of thought before the modern era.

It's a pet peeve of mine because it seems like early analytic thought (or modern empiricism more broadly) often gets backwards projected onto the whole of Western philosophy, so that "all past thought" can be dismissed, which is a shame.

I appreciate the clarification, but it seems to me your reply doesn’t really answer the questions I raised. If “God” is simply another name for “the inescapability of ethics” or “the ground of value,” then my challenge about extinction, predation, and mass suffering still stands.

Because if God = metaethics, then this God is not protecting anyone, not reducing harm, not preventing injustice, and not promoting well-being. It seems indistinguishable from saying “ethics exists,” which is true, but doesn’t explain why harm, cruelty, and death dominate so much of life on Earth.

So I’m left wondering: does calling the ethical dimension “God” actually add anything beyond rebranding metaethics? And if so, what work is the word “God” doing that “ethics” or “value” cannot? Also, no dictionary defines the word "God" the way you have defined it. I don't think your definition is correct. — Truth Seeker

Well, if you are left wondering now, I think at the end of reading this, wonder will yield to either contempt or more wonder. It really depends on the kind of thinker you are.

Dictionaries give general accounts. They don't analyze. Here we want to go deeper. Religions of the world personify metaphysics, and have for millennia, and this kind of thing is grist for the mill for those who think religion is without meaning--atheists take naive theism and argue for nihilism. But religion and its God is essentially not this facile depiction conceived by overwrought ancient minds.

Protecting, reducing harm, and the like: what is this if not a redemptive concept that delivers us from suffering? See how Christians go on about redemption, but they drag this concept through dogma of theology. Christ the redeemer', and we are all guilty of sin, "original" or otherwise and it is sin we need to be redeemed of, and we have to have faith and God's grace comes to us through the church or through "the blood of Christ" ---and this kind of talk becomes saturated with irresponsible thinking, and by irresponsible I mean without evidential grounding. Such grounding requires observing before believing and what is it that religion is such that it can be observed? It is not an empirical science so it is not about empirical categories. It is apriori. Philosophy is an apriori study of the structure of our existence, and this goes to the presuppositional ground of what is observed in the everyday way. And HERE, I am arguing, one discovers the metaethical foundation of religion. Our existence is inherently meta-redemptive.

Religion is essentially about redemption and consummation. Your "extinction, predation, and mass suffering" is front and center. Now this line of thinking gets a bit weird. It has to be acknowledged that the world is far more alien to common sense that ever imagined IN common sense. I probably can't make things like this sound reasonable in a post. When it is realized that the world is given to us in a perceptual act, then all empirical concepts melt into air, for the perceptual act releases thoughts, feelings, anticipations, memories, resolutions and really, the entirety of what is human, INTO the object, and the object is no longer "objective" in the standard way science thinks. The object is now flooded with subjective content, and this gives all that we ARE, which has been sorely exluded from the scientific metaphysics that is the default disposition of most people these days, an ontological status in the world. Now this cup IS the anticipation prior to encountering, the memory and classifcation of cups, the feelings, the interest, the use value and purpose, the mood, and so on. The cup is now an event!

And what hs this todo with ethics and religion? The suffering you refer to above is released from empirical science and can now stand alone as what it IS, which is not empirical at all. It is decontextualized and can be seen purely, outside o f the interpretative matrix of everydayness. Suffering is no longer the deflated concept idle talk. Take a lighted match and apply it to the palm of your hand. Now you know the nature of the prima facie ethical injunction not to do this (to yourself or others). This is its essence, and this suffering is a stand alone phenomenon, outside of theory, social rules, reason; and this means the prima facie injunction, the "should not", too, stands outside these categorical reductions to the ordinary. If you can stand it, "the world" issues this injunction. And this the essence of God: An injunction to do and not to do bound to eternity (the world, after all, is not a round mass circling the sun, of course. It is Being).

If ethics issues from Being itself, there lies here the question of redemption: Thrown into a life of misery, but what does it mean for this misery to be, as I call it, meta-redeemed? A further inquiry for this.

Thank you for unpacking your view - I see now you’re drawing on a phenomenological line of thought where ethics arises directly from Being, not from rules or doctrines.

I think I understand your point that suffering itself is the ethical injunction (‘do not burn the hand’ precedes theory, rules, or society). And you’re saying this injunction is what you call ‘God.’ That’s clearer to me now.

Where I still struggle is with the word redemption. You describe existence as ‘meta-redeemed,’ but for the billions of animals in factory farms, or for children dying of preventable diseases, I don’t see how their suffering is redeemed simply because it issues an ethical command. Isn’t it just there - brute and tragic - unless someone actually relieves it?

So my lingering question is: if God is this eternal ethical injunction, does God do anything beyond obliging us? Or is it really up to us alone to respond, and the word ‘God’ is simply a way of naming the ultimacy of the demand?

I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think it contradicts itself. Your answer seems to be: "everything contradicts itself?" I just don't think that's true. Lots of philosophy avoids refuting itself in this sort of way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I say something simple, like, There is a sign post by the road. If anything is free of contradiction in ordinary affairs, I think it would be something like this. And in the situation where sign posts and sides of roads are taken for what they are unproblematically, agreement is enough: I see it, you see it, it's there by the road, and no issues emerge. But let's say I was being metaphorical, and I meant the sign post to be an augur of future events and the road meant to be the road of progressive living events. Or perhaps I was being ironic, referring to some blunder I made about sign posts earlier. The point is, for every meaning we can assign, we can imagine alternative ways the language can be taken, and in being taken differenly, the question of what it IS, has no final context, if you will, as if God were to declare once and for all that sign posts are just "this and only this". This "in and out" of identity undermines any thought of determinacy in what is being said. In the sentence, "There is a sign post by the road," I am now not referring to any actual sign post at all, but it is just the object language to my metalinguistic talk about the variability of language.
I am saying ALL language is like this. If contradictions are the gainsaying of what something IS, then contradictions are always already implicitly in the margins of whatever is said. They too, rise and fall, come and go. This is why nothing is sacrosanct, for the moment it is said,

At any rate, isn't the sort of defense you are giving simply absolutizing a particular metaphysics of language and philosophy of science? That is, "there is no absolute context, regardless of the context, practices, or beliefs," (which is, or course, itself an absolute, gnostic claim, and one that seems to contradict itself). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not absolutizing. Rather, Hermeneuticizing. Contradictions are confined to where they turn up.

They are just saying essentially two things: One, whatever is affirmed is spoken, written, gestured or otherwise affirmed in language. So it is a philosophically responsibility to give language analysis for the way meaning is handled. And two, the assumption that the world is received in some kind of mirror of nature of perception is, IF this assumption is grounded in naturalism or physicalism, demonstrably false. Brain's are not mirrors. But if this assumption is grounded in the phenomenon, the simple givenness of the what appears, then the "distance" between the perceiver and the perceived is already closed, and epistemology becomes a very different problem.

I can think of plenty of philosophers who would contradict some of those claims. So in virtue of what is this sort of take presumably "true" and the others false? Why are the "sociology all the way down," folks right about science, but the traditional realists and hard-nosed physicalists wrong? If truth is just about what is dominant in a culture, it would seem that realism still rules the roost amongst scientists and the general public, so wouldn't that make it "true?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

True in science, yes. But this truth is irrelevant in dry cleaning of knitting of bowling. A physicist can give a rigorous analysis using equations and specific language involved of knitting, perhaps, but this would require moving into another framework discussion. They are all right, and they are allowed to be: language never was some truth alignment between things and language that had nothing to do with the way the object is perceived, conceived, structured in the subjective setting that observes, cares, anticipates, assimilates, synthesizes, and on and on. Science works presuppositionally with this more fundamental ground, but it puts aside, say, the subjective temporal structure of the event in which an object's existence is acknowledged. This kind of analysis is presupposed by Einstein's spacetime.

There is no way around it that I can see: One cannot pry loose the object from perception. Such a thing could only occur if the object could be apprehended outside of experience, and this is among the least intelligible things I can think of. The only thing a person has ever witnessed is the phenomenon.

I don't think that's an accurate description. Truth in the Western tradition is "the mind's adequacy to being," or "thought's grasp of being." That's as true across scholasticism as it is for Platonism, and the Indian philosophy I am familiar with is not that different in this regard. The idea that truth requires something like "stepping outside of experience" is largely a modern one, one that I don't even think came into its own until the early analytic period (and honestly, it's more of a caricature if expressed in those stark terms).

That's a theme in post-modern arguments though. The argument often looks something like:

A or B
Not-A
Therefore B — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not an either/or. Empirical science sits perfectly intact along side phenomenology.

And it doesn't matter when such a thing arose. It is simply there, before inquiry: how does one affirm the existence of something apart from the subjectivity that receives it? It simply asks if sense can be made of such a thing.

Like most philosophers, he [Rorty] understands arguments better than he understands the world. — Constance

:up:

Isn’t it [suffering] just there - brute and tragic - unless someone [temporarily] relieves it? — Truth Seeker

Yes.

What does this have to do with ethics? Thoughts about ethics are properly about the world. Are they IN the world, or simply In moods, attitudes, feelings (Mackie)? Rorty is just wrong on ethics, because he is doesn't understand the world. Like most philosophers, he understands arguments better than he understands the world. — Constance

Can you expand on this? Wouldn’t it be the case that all thoughts are IN the world - whether those about ethics or those about Harry Potter?

I guess what I'm curious about is what motivates you to look for a moral foundation. Once you have the foundation, then what? What will be different? — frank

Like asking what if Christianity were actually true. Nothing woudl change, one would still do one's laundry, cook dinner, go to work, but the whole thing would be deeply meaningful. Physical death would still be imminent, pending, inexorable. But then, a human being never was a physical thing...was it?

a human being never was a physical thing...was it? — Constance

Humans and all the other living things are physical things. We are all made of molecules. Our subjective experiences are produced by the physical activities of our brains.

Like asking what if Christianity were actually true. Nothing woudl change, one would still do one's laundry, cook dinner, go to work, but the whole thing would be deeply meaningful. Physical death would still be imminent, pending, inexorable. But then, a human being never was a physical thing...was it? — Constance

I'm all for that. I think guilt and condemnation are the central engine of emotion in human life. It's incredibly powerful stuff. If finding a moral foundation helps finding a way into it, good.

Can you expand on this? Wouldn’t it be the case that all thoughts are IN the world - whether those about ethics or those about Harry Potter? — Tom Storm

(Sorry about the following, which is quite out there....and I am tempted to erase....but then...)

Or those about anything one can think of. But what does it mean to say the thought exists and not what the thought is about? It means it exists in so far as anything exists, not by virtue of its familiar accepted meaning in a shared understanding, but entirely apart from this, not unlike there being two maps, one completely wrong, the other right, but both are still maps, so the greater generality subsumes the two, but here, this generality is existence as such, and so this generality has nothing under which it is subsumed and this makes it an absolute: something that "is" but with no features at all, nothing to negate it, nothing to set it in contrast to.

But this makes the concept 'existence' vacuous, for meaningful concepts are one's that have something beyond them to say what they are, like a definition or an essence. Existence as such has nothing of this. It is nothing: Being as such is the same as nothing at all. But is this where the we are taken? Definitions are conceptual, as in saying what a banker is or a hammer, or anything. When we say existence has no features, we are simpy saying that language in the saying of the word 'existence' has reached something that is not language, and cannot be spoken, and yet is ineluctably affirmed. and this for the very simple, but important reason, that existence as a philosophical term, is outside the totality of what language can say. This is why early Wittgenstein said talk about "the world" was transcendental. Only the ability to defer to something else makes an intelligible meaning possible, and "the world" is stand alone, defers to nothing at all. Definitionless.

But what of this nothing? Take my refrigerator, remove, as a method discovering the "nothing" of being, everything that can be said, and language itself removed, yet the frig remains, but it is no longer a refrigerator at all. In my thinking, this is the discovery of metaphysics and central to a lot of very important philosophy: you find on the one hand that nothing has changed at all, for the presence of the frig is just as it was, only occurrent thought is absent. But this is because it being a refrigerator was not a singularity, but a network of identity that holds it, and everything else, in place. Language is systemic, and no thing stands alone, and ignoring it being a frig does nothing. On the other hand, it has to be affirmed that "that there" is beyond what can be said, merely, for IT is not just the sum total of what can be said; I'm not looking at a bunch of words over there. There is something about its being there as such which language cannot say because the question about it does not refer us to other language, but to something clearly not language at all: its being (or existence, if you like. For now, distinctions here don't matter).

You say, all thoughts are in the world, fiction, ethics, and I add, everything else. When "Harry Potter" is taken up in the general way, he is a fiction, but all fictions exist in the actuality of the thought, imagined or otherwise, the feeling, the anticipation, the presence of these as presence; when this "general way" is suspended, it is no longer Harry Potter, but an actuality, and existent as such, and now the same analysis is encountered. What does it mean for something to exist...at all? One teeters on the brink of nonsense, or an important affirmation, and I think the latter. So here, I'll just be plain: I think the existence of the thought, the frig, or anything else, seen, imagined, felt, and so on, qua existence, is one's existence projected on to "it" in the actual perceptual, cognitive, pragmatic, affective event. Acknowledging the existence of the frig, I am the nothing, which is absolute being, and I refer here to real existence in the strong sense, and when I think of Harry Potter, my existence is the presence of the presence of Potter-the-thought.

Then ethics: The good and the bad are just as invisible as being itself, and by invisible I refer to the above: they're entirely outside of the conceptual grasp that calls it good and bad (yet, again see the above, made manifest by the calling. All concepts bring existence {being} into being; they reveal the world that lies otherwise hidden), yet the living presence is striking, not at all like my frig, and for this I leave the matter up to your own ability to imagine how powerful the good and bad can be. But because we are "observing" the good and the bad not in the general way, the way Harry Potter is conceived as imaginary, but rather the way he is seen existing qua existing, these concepts are relieved of their mundanity, and are acknowledged as such, so that screaming pain in my sprained ankle is now reduced to its "as such" existence and stands outside of the contingencies of language, that is, the ability to bring ideas forth to gainsay what is said about this are suspended. This "as such"ness issues from me, when I encounter this pain. I am the ground of ethics, and the nothingness of my agency is value-in-being of my being as such, manifest in ethics/aesthetics.

This is my (derivative, of course) metaphysics of ethics.

Humans and all the other living things are physical things. We are all made of molecules. Our subjective experiences are produced by the physical activities of our brains. — Truth Seeker

But a thought is not a thing, nor is an anticipation, a memory, a sensory intuition, a pain or pleasure; caring is not a thing. These constitute our existence.

I think guilt and condemnation are the central engine of emotion in human life. — frank

These are negative. What about wonder, happiness, love, hagen dazs, Debussy,

Sounds like you are saying that thoughts, objects, and values like good and bad exist in some way and are experienced directly rather than defined by concepts. Our awareness brings their existence into focus, and in encountering them, we face the raw “as-suchness” of being inseparable from our role as perceivers and then we can turn this into discourse. In other words, there's a prior to language and our conceptual framing. Which I believe we’ve talked about before.

I guess that’s fine as far as it goes (and if that’s what you mean), but I’m not sure what it gives us when we talk about morality. We have no choice but to rely on language, shared values, and agreements. No one can access anything prior to these, this notion of 'prior' seems just as inaccessible as Kant’s noumena. So how is this formulation of use to us?

In your response, are you able to help me out and express your ideas briefly and simply? Philosophy isn’t my area, and complicated language is hard to understand.

These are negative. What about wonder, happiness, love, hagen dazs, Debussy, — Constance

I said engine of emotion. For that, you need emotional wounds. That's what morality is all about.

I said engine of emotion. For that, you need emotional wounds. That's what morality is all about. — frank

Yes, or more generally speaking, deficit. Emotional wounds are deficits, a lack; something is missing, and guilt over what is not that one desires should be, and condemnation is the same-- a person is deemed not good enough and this moves to resentment, Nietzsche's favorite term as he describes Christian motivation against those who are better endowed in the world. One big inferiority complex, an emotional wound bringing greatness to its knees (says Nietzsche).

But then, while the drive of emotional wounds is essentially negative, they are nothing without a desire toward something. The basic ethical structure is a polarity between one thing and another. You stole my muffin which was delicious and I want it back, and I resent your taking it because it was precious to me and now that precious value is absent and you are the cause. In this polarity, we have, I argue, the Real structure of ethics.

Yep. But isn't satisfaction fleeting? Pain endures, the pain of guilt, the pain of regret, the pain of resentment, the pain of longing for forgiveness.

Once the pain is gone, the mind wanders to find the next problem to solve. Pure, eternal satisfaction is the end of all quests. It's the end of the life of the mind.

Life is pain, satisfaction is death. More Schopenhauer.

So my lingering question is: if God is this eternal ethical injunction, does God do anything beyond obliging us? Or is it really up to us alone to respond, and the word ‘God’ is simply a way of naming the ultimacy of the demand? — Truth Seeker

(I should say before reading: It is thinking that has its roots in post, post modern thought, particularly the French neo Husserlian philosophers, and by this, consider that post modern thought is generally negative, nihilative. Here the apophatic thinking that annihilates affirmation, is the discovery of a positive ground. It is pretty alien to common sense).

God does things, but this analytic here, on the ground of God, doesn't do anything. I'm not saying there is a God, or that there isn't; I'm just not talking about that.

The eternal ethical injunction is essentially utilitarian, you know, do no harm, do good, b ut of course, there is no prescription as to how to determine what to do. The injunction itself is useless, you might say, because good and bad are entangled in purposes and uses and everythign else. They are just analytic terms pointing out that when one looks closely ethical/aesthetic issues, and one asks basic questions, there is an analytic residuum once the problem's incidental details are put aside, something elusive to inquiry. It takes philosophy to see it. There is no Benthamian arrangements of what is better than what, nor any idea of maximizing happiness: these concepts are hopelessly bound to complexities of our affairs that can't be quantified (though!: the question, is Ravel's Mother Goose Suite aesthetically superior to "vulgar" rock and roll? is a tempting one) or sorted out in ambiguous problem structures.

God is simply a naming of the ultimacy of the demand? Yes. But what is this ultimacy about? The finality of all this is profound, in my thinking, but steps over the line, brings one to face the line, the threshold of the meaningful ground of our existence. Ethics has its ground in the world, but by "the world" we refer not only to value in ethics and aesthetics, but the whole presence-qua-presence of all things--this is what both is and is not language. Tricky. That which is not language, this being happy, or miserable, in some way or other, is clearly not language, and the same can be said of "pure presence" of anything! Consider: I am thinking there is a tree in my living room, and there is no tree there, so I am wrong, but thinking it is there, as I think it, exists undeniably. How can this be acknowldged? If one is IN a particular region of thought and relevance, the terms of what is true of false are one thing according to this region. It could have been talk about the Korean stock market or whether these shoes are suitable for hiking, contexts vary. But pull back from any particular context, to the beholding of the whole of Being, and all falsehoods become something else, being as such, and since there is no context for there to be judgment one way or another, judgment falls away, and there is simply presence. This presence is absolute Being, and there is nothing it is not. What is not true IS, it exists as Being-that-is-not true, after all, my thought about the tree was in reality, a thought, an event; it was not nothing at all, yet there is no identity, no accounting for what it "is".

Presence has no definition, save when we bring it to language and call it presence, and now we have stepped into ontology: the attempt to bring presence to light, and "to light" here means talking about it. In the example above, the lighted match on live skin, in order to move out of any particular "vulgar" (Heidegger gave us this word) language setting, talk found in biology, evolution, anthropology, politics, the law, etc., analysis went after the phenomenon of pain itself, and in this discovered the metaethical ground of ethics, that is, what ethics really IS. Here, I am affirming that everything "really is", as all difference is taken away, for differences are between this being and that being, but difference itself IS spoken, thought, understood; it IS. There are no differences in the radical simplicity of "being there" (contra Heidegger). This pulling back is out of finitude, and into metaphysics proper. And metaphysics is now immanence itself, manifestation itself. Pure givenness of a world.

Now we step over the line: the world IS metaphysics, all of it, from the most insignificant to the overwhelming. Our ethics in the normal affairs we face are now metaethics. This movement is a movement away from all social/cultural institutions, and all that remains is the phenomenon itself, and this is a reduction to the interiority of subjectivity, I argue. A person has her entire life been working within the boundaries of a culture, but culture is a historical construct, and analysis has stepped beyond this, again, vulgarity (vis a vis philosophy, that is). All things lose their identity in this "place" of pure phenomenality where one sees the world as if for the first time. All affairs are decontextualized, and ethics boils down to a movement toward value affirmation.

What is meta-redemption? Suffering is redeemed in undisclosed meta-theodicy. This can only be understood if one makes suffering into a pure phenomenon: the burn of the match on your finger is completely decontextualized. You are Being, not A being, referring to your name, occupation, familial standing, and so on, for all of this is off the table. Your agency qua agency simpliciter is simply "thrown into" suffering as if ex nihilo, and so its features, that of the suffering itself, belong to Being unqualifiedly, and suffering is inherently what should not BE, but generally taken in mundane contexts, this is absorbed into conversation, and few look beyond into this "forgotten" foundational analysis. The "should not" of suffering as such issues from Being itself, and therefore is inherently auto-redemptive.

Humans and all the other living things are physical things. We are all made of molecules. Our subjective experiences are produced by the physical activities of our brains.
— Truth Seeker

But a thought is not a thing, nor is an anticipation, a memory, a sensory intuition, a pain or pleasure; caring is not a thing. These constitute our existence. — Constance

That’s a good point - experiences like thoughts, pain, anticipation, and caring aren’t 'things' in the same way molecules or neurons are. But they do seem to be processes or states that depend on things. For example, pain isn’t a molecule, but it is a state produced by particular neural firings and pathways. Pain relievers are also molecules that physically intervene to relieve the subjective experience of pain.

So perhaps the relationship is like this:

Physical things (neurons, molecules) provide the substrate.

Subjective experiences are emergent properties of those physical interactions.

Calling experiences ‘not things’ doesn’t necessarily make them non-physical - it may just mean they belong to a different level of description. The same way 'temperature' isn’t a molecule but arises from molecular motion.

I’m curious how you see it: do you think subjective experiences point to something beyond the physical, or are they just a different way of talking about physical processes?

Thank you for laying this out. I see what you’re doing - pulling back from all cultural and contextual frames to speak about suffering as a pure phenomenon, rooted in Being itself.

But I struggle with your claim that suffering is ‘inherently auto-redemptive.’ From my perspective, suffering simply is. A burn, an illness, a grief - they happen, and they devastate. Calling them ‘auto-redemptive’ risks sounding like a metaphysical gloss over lived harm.

If suffering is inherently what ‘should not be,’ as you say, then how is it redeemed simply by being recognized as such? Recognition does not stop the pain, nor prevent the recurrence. Children still die, animals are still slaughtered, injustices still multiply. If the redemption isn’t concrete - if it doesn’t reduce or relieve suffering - can we honestly call it redemption at all?

It seems to me that redemption requires change in the world, not just reinterpretation of phenomena. Otherwise, aren’t we just sanctifying the very thing that cries out to be abolished?

Sounds like you are saying that thoughts, objects, and values like good and bad exist in some way and are experienced directly rather than defined by concepts. Our awareness brings their existence into focus, and in encountering them, we face the raw “as-suchness” of being inseparable from our role as perceivers and then we can turn this into discourse. In other words, there's a prior to language and our conceptual framing. Which I believe we’ve talked about before.

I guess that’s fine as far as it goes (and if that’s what you mean), but I’m not sure what it gives us when we talk about morality. We have no choice but to rely on language, shared values, and agreements. No one can access anything prior to these, this notion of 'prior' seems just as inaccessible as Kant’s noumena. So how is this formulation of use to us?

In your response, are you able to help me out and express your ideas briefly and simply? Philosophy isn’t my area, and complicated language is hard to understand. — Tom Storm

Hard for both of us! I don't know if there is a simple way. I've never read anything by these philosophers that could be remotely called simple. But I am thinking about it.....

I believe that complex ideas can often be stated simply. :wink:

Physical things (neurons, molecules) provide the substrate.

Subjective experiences are emergent properties of those physical interactions.

Calling experiences ‘not things’ doesn’t necessarily make them non-physical - it may just mean they belong to a different level of description. The same way 'temperature' isn’t a molecule but arises from molecular motion.

I’m curious how you see it: do you think subjective experiences point to something beyond the physical, or are they just a different way of talking about physical processes? — Truth Seeker

There certainly IS a causal connection between brain states and states of mind. Only a fool would think otherwise. But here is the rub: In the identity of a state of mind or anything else, there is the perceptual act that is the foundation of its existence. Can one talk about molecular dynamics without talking? If "talking" were entirely unproblematic, then talking would be simply a nonissue. But talking, thinking, explaining, understanding, believing, and the rest are foundational questions presupposed and ignored by science's phyiscalism. Ask a brain scientist how a brain receives its object, and the entire edifice of science collapses. This is because brain talk is not foundational, and what is foundational cannot be simply bypassed. This is experience itself. An object cannot be understood apart from experience. It certainly seems as if that cup is separate from me, but this separation is an event IN the perception of the cup.
Science occurs IN the playing field of experience; experience does not occur in empirical science. There is "nowhere" else. Not idealism, not some "reduction to the mental," but rather a reduction to what is there at the basic level of analysis. This book is not an idea or a mental image. It is a book, over there, next to the candle; but the ontology of the book is a reduction to the most basic descriptive concepts. A brain occurs IN this playing field; what it is outside of this playing field is nonsense. Apodictic nonsense, for again, one cannot even imagine such an outside, and to do so is what can be called bad metaphysics, like talk about God having omnipotence and the like. So the Grand Canyon view is not "all in your head"; it is rather that experience itself is radically other than what it is taken to be generally. The "over there" of a peak, is an "over there" of my perception. They are one: the perception-of-the-peak IS the peak.

Calling subjective experiences emerging properties? For this to be true, there would have to be something that is not an emerging property. How is this to be posited? Where does one go to discover this? There is no where else to go other than other emerging properties. Physicality is only discoverable in emerging properties; again, unless you can explain how something non emerging can be acknowledged: Try it: there is a lighted room in which this green rug sits, and I am made aware of its existence because a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum reflects off the rug while others are absorbed, and the former traverses the space between my eyes and the rug, into the vitreous humor and to the back of the eye where it encounters rods and comes for color and intensity, and then further processing .....But wait: the moment light leaves the rug, it leaves the rug behind. And when light is translated into mental events, even the light is left behind. And touch and hearing are just as bad. There is absolutely nothing epistemic about causality

No one doubts brains receive ligth waves, and all of the above actually happens. This is never disputed. But it is not philosophy. It is not about ontological foundations.

Yep. But isn't satisfaction is fleeting? Pain endures, the pain of guilt, the pain of regret, the pain of resentment, the pain of longing for forgiveness.

Once the pain is gone, the mind wanders to find the next problem to solve. Pure, eternal satisfaction is the end of all quests. It's the end of the life of the mind.

Life is pain, satisfaction is death. More Schopenhauer. — frank

Well, for some it is like this, for other not. For most, it's in between somewhere. But Schopenhauer never knew how well science and entertainment could ameliorate the human condition. When he wrote, I think he was right. Imagine a world with no antibiotics, no dentistry, festering infections everywhere. Living for most was a filthy mess by our standards.

As to emotional pain, I think you are spot on: the delivery from physical suffering allows interpersonal relations to thrive, and these are now a strong imposition on one's intellect and feelings. We are more neurotic than ever before.

Pure eternal satisfaction the end of the life of the mind? I don't know; is it? If this satisfaction is not acceptable, then it is hardly satisfaction. What is a "pure" satisfaction, anyway? Being in love: Nothing matters but just this, and familiar differences yield to this singularity of being in love. You look at the clock and you are in love. Six inches off the ground, walking on air. Is this the end of life of the mind? Pretty much, IN the episodic moment when your heart soars. Yes. And all questions in abeyance. Is it satisfaction? By definition. Hard to see the complaint. Like complaining about heaven. And then, who says there is nothing to think about, ponder, rise up to? The life of the mind may well be flourishing, but just very happy in everything it does.

See Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling.

See Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling. — Constance

I have passages of that memorized. One of my favorites.

Thank you for the detailed response. I think I follow your point that science always already operates within experience, and that perception is not an afterthought to objects but inseparable from them - the “perception-of-the-peak IS the peak.” That’s a powerful corrective to the picture of brains as if they were somehow standing outside of experience, receiving inputs like a machine.

But here’s what I’m struggling with: if everything reduces to the playing field of experience, how do we avoid collapsing into a kind of idealism? You say it’s not “all in the head,” but once we deny any perspective outside experience, what secures the distinction between the cup itself and my experience of the cup? Isn’t there a risk that “ontological foundations” become just redescriptions of phenomenology?

Also, I’m not sure I fully grasp your critique of emergence. You suggest that calling subjective experience an “emergent property” is incoherent, because everything we can talk about is an emergent property. But doesn’t that simply mean “emergence” is a relational notion? Temperature emerges from molecules, but molecules emerge from atoms, and so on. If experience emerges from brain states, why isn’t that just one more layer in the same explanatory pattern, rather than a category mistake?

In other words, does your view amount to saying: experience is foundational, and any talk of emergence must be subordinated to that? If so, what does that mean for scientific realism? Can we still say that physics tells us something true about the world, or only that it gives us a useful way of describing how experiences hang together?

Is there any way to know for sure what is right and what is wrong? — Truth Seeker

Observations on the circumstances with evidence, reasoning and logical analysis on the case are some tools we can use in knowing right and wrong.

I have passages if that memorized. One of my favorites. — frank

You are full of surprises Frank. I took you for a cynic, a nihilist.

You are full of surprises Frank. I took you for a cynic, a nihilist. — Constance

I'm more a positive nihilist. A sad nihilist is trying, but failing to accept life on its terms.

I beleive that complex ideas can be put simply. — Tom Storm

Okay, but it is a series of simple ideas. Put complexly, Kant asks, How are synthetic apriori judgments possible? The simple version is this is so obvious it is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing. I am sure you're heard pf it: How does anything out there in the world get into perceptual reception?

The answer s obvious, at first. One simply sees the object, sees the receiving physical equipment and draws a line from the former and to and into the latter. Trouble is, once that line lays its first mark, the object is already lost. So consider this to be the first simplicity, that is simple perception. IT is to be taken only as it is. It is not just a challenge to ontological physicalism, but an overturning of this. When you take physicalist thinking out of the context of science's paradigms, and allow this to become the default thinking for philosophy, all is lost. Even thought itself is lost in the reduction.