But I would then step back from the phenomenological justification to inquire about the natural basis. Why would humans have evolved (both biologically and culturally) to feel this way? And that is where we can see that it makes sense thermodynamically. Life exists as negentropy, or little pockets of organisation, so as to assist the Cosmos in its general entropic flow. — apokrisis
ou just want to start with "how it feels to me". I am interested in the hypothesis that "how it feels" is always going to be naturally rational. And the hypothesis is holding up pretty good. — apokrisis
As I say, many might be puzzled by climate denial, rampant consumerism, neo-liberalism, gated communities, McDonalds. These seem unnatural and unethical behaviours - according to PC romantic notions that are widespread.
Yet a shift in the entropic basis of the species now can make those behaviours "ethical" and natural. If we endorse the desires of fossil fuels, the things we might object to are in fact morally right.
And if we still feel they are wrong (which I tend to) then we have to dig into just why. And that is where the alternative of a slow burn sustainable entropification can be considered. We can now argue objectively why this is a better moral paradigm. — apokrisis
So my approach to ethical systems presumes nothing except that the Cosmos is rational. Nature has an over-arching self-organising logic. And that then presents us with the choice of either living within that logic or acting counter to it. And in fact, we can't act counter to it in any fundamental sense. But that still gives us a range of choices about the level of "harmony" we opt for. — apokrisis
Science has the advantage it is an open-ended process of learning. So we can get as close to the truth of things as we feel it matters. The answers one might have given 300 years ago would be much less informed than the ones we can give today. — apokrisis
As I have argued, I would always seek to begin with the fewest presumptions about what might be the case. — apokrisis
Nature lies there waiting to be discovered. Morality grows out of nature and so it would be questionable to hold to any ethical systems that go against nature. That would be - by definition - irrational and unsustainable (from a personal phenomenological point of view). — apokrisis
But that cuts both ways. We can't just cherry-pick the findings that support our preconceptions while not listening to the others that question them. — apokrisis
Your "out there" is my immanent nature. And your phenomenological "in here" is my hearing you assert transcendent dualism. You treat the mind as if it could exist without a body, without a world. — apokrisis
However the evidence that only humans have articulate speech, and thus only humans can evolve culturally encoded habits of "self-conscious introspective awareness", is just as scientific. — apokrisis
You are trying to talk about "sentience" as some generic property - a mind stuff abstracted from the world. This, as I say, is a Romantic hang-over - a dualistic belief in the mental as causally something apart from the world. — apokrisis
What are your thoughts on this? — Blue Sky
Yet a scientific ethics does not necessarily satisfy what we perceive to be moral. — darthbarracuda
Tell a person whom you're helping that you're helping them because they can go on and make more entropy, and not because they're a person who is valuable because they can suffer, and they might just shake you off and tell you to buzz off. — darthbarracuda
Yet surely these ends do not match with what we want — darthbarracuda
These behaviors are not wrong because of some entropic principle. They're wrong because we find them wrong, and then apparently some of us try to ignore this and shoehorn science in. — darthbarracuda
Query: what if the universe was malignant to us? What if, no matter what we did, we could never manage to escape its malevolent grasp? Would it still be "good"? — darthbarracuda
And yet it is intuitive that we should give non-human animals the benefit of the doubt despite this being a presumption. It's not necessarily rational, it is ethical. — darthbarracuda
No, I'm talking about the ability to suffer, however that manifests. Sentience is just a placeholder. — darthbarracuda
There's no point replying to nonsense like this. It is just a sign of desperation on your part. — apokrisis
And the choice becomes rational to the degree it is both possible and has some agreed goal. — apokrisis
Is the goal to make DC blissfully happy? Is the goal to remove the very possibility of psychic suffering? You might very well say so. I don't feel particularly moved to agree. — apokrisis
You keep talking about this "we". I realise you mean the many like yourself brought up on a steady cultural diet of vague romantic notions. — apokrisis
It is rational to give the benefit of the doubt when faced with uncertainty. But there is far less uncertainty about things like grades of sentience than you pretend. — apokrisis
So what we have here is only your weakly informed "intuitions" (ie: prejudices) against readily available scientific knowledge. — apokrisis
Why doesn't it surprise me that you not only abstract the object but even its properties? Your approach is Platonic and dualistic in classic romantic unbounded fashion. — apokrisis
Calling people desperate, it seems to me, is a sign of desperation. — darthbarracuda
You keep using this word "romantic" as a cop-out. — darthbarracuda
You mean exasperation. — apokrisis
No, I'm describing the cop out. But you are never going to address this confused dualism of yours no matter how often I point back to its familiar cultural basis.
It's been amusing as always. — apokrisis
Maybe you should actually make a post on this instead of having a assert it every single time. — darthbarracuda
The conflict here is between the Enlightenment and the Romantic point of view.
The Enlightenment was about recognising humans as natural creations with a natural logic. We could consider the basis of human flourishing and create the social, political and ethical institutions to foster that. And recognising the continuity between humans and other animals was a big part of the new thinking.
So it is Enlightenment values that have steadily changed our treatment of animals (and races, and sexes, and the infirm/mentally ill/infantile) to reflect what we actually know about their capacity to suffer. That is what rationality looks like - consistent decisions based on accurate information.
Unfortunately you appear to be backing Romanticism instead. Every individual is a special creation. Absolute rights apply because something "is a mind" or "has a soul" in black and white fashion. Romanticism rejects shades of grey. A papercut is as bad as the Holocaust. Any flicker of suffering at all becomes a reason to say life in any form simply should not exist.
Who was talking about "good" in some abstract absolutist sense?
Again you betray your Romantic ontology in worrying about what might "inhere" in material reality as if it might exist "elsewhere" in Platonically ideal fashion. If you understood Naturalism, you would see this couldn't even be the issue.
You point to the indifference of Nature - even its sinister character - as a way to sustain the standard mind/body dualism of Romanticism. You have to "other" the world in a way that justifies your absolute privileging of the self - the individual and his mind, his soul, his inalienable being.
But absolutism of this kinds works both ways - which is what historically makes it so philosophically dangerous.
In removing all moral determination from "the world" - and society and culture are the principle target there - the Romantic reserves all moral determination for "the self". So it suddenly becomes all right if you are a vegan or anti-natalist "like me". You don't actually need a reason. You get an automatic high five as a kindred spirit. Morality becomes reduced to a personal preference - the preferences the Romantic knows to be true because of the certitude of his feelings about these things.
Point being I think you should make a thread (I meant thread not post) on this because talk of enlightenment vs romanticism, absolutism vs relativity, etc is not exactly obvious or well-accepted in the general community.
Part of the reason everyone has so much difficulty discussing stuff with you is because you present a historical narrative of philosophy as fact, and then go on to rip on one half of this binary debate while promoting the other half, when nobody really understands the justification you have for seeing history in this way, nor why the romantic notions are just automatic dead-ends. You just assert that this is the way it is and glaze over the important details that would otherwise potentially help us understand what the hell you are even talking about. — darthbarracuda
Jeez, if the Enlightenment and its Romantic reaction are that unfamiliar to you, where could I even start.... — apokrisis
It's like a jigsaw that you have to put together through the various criticisms. — schopenhauer1
Semiotics is somehow trumpeted as a continuation of the Enlightenment (with the assumption that the Enlightenment is a purposeful movement rather than a collection of varying ideas). Anyways, its at least trumpeted as part of the empirical, and thus Scientific Image (though semiotics itself does not seem empirical as much as a speculative interpretation of the scientific findings.. but I that is another issue). — schopenhauer1
So he claims entropy, being the basis of universal teleology (and in the background of the semiotic process I guess) is a big deal, and that at the self-conscious social level that we humans experience, we can actually slow down or speed up entropy, at least as it pertains to our little organizational part of the universe. — schopenhauer1
nyways, Romanticism puts the individual experience on a pedestal (which is a base characterization and not a comprehensive understanding of most of what these Romantic proponents are saying).. and thus are limited in their narrow, merely phenomenological interpretations of personalized experience.. He also claims that the Romantics do not take into account group dynamics and how the group shapes the human. — schopenhauer1
It is just assumed that because it is the group, it somehow is self-evident that it should continue and the individual should know his place in continuing it. — schopenhauer1
The issue it can only ever define itself in biological and economic terms. In the mythos of transcendent freedom and immortality, the culmination is a seeking of biology and economics; if only we had the resources, the biology, to exist forever and ever and ever.
This is merely the response in our being of being confined within the rigid parameters of the material world we find ourselves in. A condition which is accentuated by the restlessness of human behaviour. If we found ourselves in a less rigid and more fluid, or ethereal world things would be quite different.I don't mean this in the crass sense of our bodies or earthly possessions, but rather in the sense of our presence. If only we existed in a way that gave us more and more all the time into perpetuity. Endless resources such that our existence would extend into perpetuity without cost or hitting limits.
Along with Wayfarer, I agree with the first two sentences in this paragraph. But your comment on the "transcendent camp", is incorrect. I know this, because I have personally affirmed "That's enough. I've obtained all I need. it's okay for me end". Many people who have embraced and embodied the transcendent have made this affirmation in their own way. One is made whole, repleat and is in the right frame of mind to act constructively in the progress of the humanity and the biosphere.The modern world's endless quest for economic growth is, quite literally, the mythos of freedom and immortality transplanted into the world. Like it pre-modern counterparts, it views the goal of existence to endless get more, to live forever, to be free of any Malthusian limits. In neither transcendent camp does anyone have the respect or self-awareness to say: "That's enough. I've obtained all I need. It's okay for me end."
Of course, why someone needs to keep the group going merely to keep the group going is not really explained — schopenhauer1
Animals have been taking care of themselves for billions of years before humans came around and not one ever charged sexism, racism, or specieism against another.No, it's not genocide. It's humanitarianism. Animals cannot take care or advocate for themselves in the way humans can. They live more on instinct than rationality - yet they can suffer all the same. All non-agents are free of responsibility - ethically innocent. — darthbarracuda
Animals have been taking care of themselves for billions of years before humans came around and not one ever charged sexism, racism, or specieism against another. — Harry Hindu
Because they weren't capable of doing so. But now humans have entered the stage, and I'm arguing that it's time we put down the mirror of narcissism and start acting more productive and responsible.
In any case it is clear that non-human animals have not been taking care of one another. Look at predation, social rejection from disease/disability, and r-selection. — darthbarracuda
But your comment on the "transcendent camp", is incorrect. I know this, because I have personally affirmed "That's enough. I've obtained all I need. it's okay for me end". Many people who have embraced and embodied the transcendent have made this affirmation in their own way. One is made whole, repleat and is in the right frame of mind to act constructively in the progress of the humanity and the biosphere. — Punshhh
This is merely the response in our being of being confined within the rigid parameters of the material world we find ourselves in. A condition which is accentuated by the restlessness of human behaviour. If we found ourselves in a less rigid and more fluid, or ethereal world things would be quite different. — Punshhh
Supposedly, the world needs a transcendental outlook to avoid an abundance of [various kinds of problems]. Unless we believe the transcendent, we are doomed.
This is not true. What matters is our actions and our ethics. We could put forward and enact a policy regarding a more harmonious use of resources without mentioning the transcendent at all. — TheWillowOfDarkness
That's the group's need clearly. It doesn't have to be the individual's. It is just likely to be the individual's as logically the group would need to be able to make that kind of individual as the way it has managed historically to persist. — apokrisis
Of course your problem there is even if only a few individuals did not want to drink the Kool aid with you, they would survive, breed, and pass on their habits of thought. All you would prove is something about your own mental quirks. The circumstances which produced a persistent social entity in the past would roll on probably better adapted for its self perpetuation in the future. — apokrisis
Stepping back, are you thinking that existence itself must have a meaning, and so your realisation that it doesn't have a meaning is then a meaningful lack?
My argument only needs to be that meaning is what a system constructs. Goals are emergent regularities that exist because they foster their own persistence. That's the basic difference between taking the immanent view vs the transcendent view.
So in that light, a social system is free to form its own goals, it's own identity - and do so via the particular kinds of individuals it creates. That is as high as we need to shoot in finding a meaning in existence, or equally, as far as we can go in making some complaint about a lack of meaning. — apokrisis
That still leaves the individual free to construct his own life meaning, or equally, construct a notion of his own cosmic meaninglessness. Maybe the individual can even start up his own small movement - like antinatalism - as a gesture that appears to imbue his existence with the meaningful lack of meaning which he seeks. That is a lack of meaning of suitably trans-social, trans-historic, cosmically-absolute scale.
Such a moral construction - an anti-goal - can be proclaimed. On rarer occasions, it might even be acted upon. But as I say, it is unlikely to impact the collective system if that system already has up a head of steam and will simply end up reproducing via the kind of thought habits which are in fact functional in regard to its persistent being.
You can't stand in the way of natural selection anymore than natural selection can stand in the way of thermodynamics. — apokrisis
And again I say that from the point of view of pansemiotics - reality's own construction of meanings or habits of interpretance. It doesn't matter that goals don't pre-exist and are only found as whatever are the habits which permit persistence. The claim is never that meaning could have a transcendent status such as what instead exists counts as some kind of cosmic failure. — apokrisis
I wonder if you see this yet? The very basis on which you want to mount your fundamental criticism doesn't even exist from my point of view. There is no standing outside existence that could count as meaningful here. — apokrisis
So continue with your little psychodramas if you can't respond to the substance of my post. It's all good entertainment to distract us while we wait to die, heh? — apokrisis
But just as antinatalism does not sound appealing to some, telling people that they are here to keep the group going would probably not get much fanfare either. So your own claim would not pass your own "appeal to the majority" test, oddly enough. — schopenhauer1
Whether the group persists, there would be less people that suffered that could have otherwise. The harm prevented from preventing one birth does not get nullified by someone having a child. If you saved someone from getting hurt and someone in the town over does get hurt, that other person's pain does not nullify that the person you saved did not get hurt. — schopenhauer1
Again, even if this was true, "knowing" that people are created by social institutions that want to ensure survival for individuals and the institution itself, does not negate the absurdity one may feel if one self-reflected on the fact that we are keeping our own individual upkeep going, the group going, and pursuing more goals simply to keep it going. — schopenhauer1
This is where you make the category error. Humans do not just exist with no internal reflection and simply take in information and output actions... — schopenhauer1
Maybe its futile, but that does not mean it is wrong. You are making the is-ought fallacy.. just because something is a certain way, does not mean that this is what someone ought to do. — schopenhauer1
There is no cosmic failure.. rather we have the ability to self-reflect on the situation and have emotions, attitudes, and such on the human condition itself.. something that is not merely there to keep the group surviving. — schopenhauer1
My point about the "transcendent camps" (whether pre-modern religions and traditions or modern consumerism) is to do with the motivations and understanding of the word
There is no necessity for a conflict here, as I said transcendent insight is in alignment with constructive practical living. I do not see Wayfarer falling into the religious cliches regarding the transcendent, although his stance is towards the other end of the spectrum from your own.This is what brings me into conflict with Wayfarer all the time, despite our occasional agreements and shared interest in the importance on meaning. He thinks meaning must be granted by the transcendent. I say there is no meaninglessness, so there is no work for the transcendent to do. There are those who are depressed, anxious or despairing, but those are instances of meaningful lives, who find themselves in some unethical situation. A worldly change is what they need (it could even be a belief the transcendent), so they realise their meaning/end the horrible state that's haunting them.
So what is your assessment of its credibility? — apokrisis
Because they weren't capable of doing so. But now humans have entered the stage, and I'm arguing that it's time we put down the mirror of narcissism and start acting more productive and responsible.
In any case it is clear that non-human animals have not been taking care of one another. Look at predation, social rejection from disease/disability, and r-selection. — darthbarracuda
There's this other quality of nature that you are forgetting - balance. Nature has achieved a balance among organisms where prey need to have their population limited by predators in order for them to not over populate and eat all their food to extinction and then they become extinct. — Harry Hindu
The most important aspect of life is competition. Without it life would never evolve into the variety of forms and behaviors that we see today. — Harry Hindu
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