I’m just interested in hearing what other individual people’s complete philosophical systems are... — Pfhorrest

All complete philosophical systems are existentially dependent upon complex language use replete with metacognition(thinking about thought and belief). Such a system need not get thought and belief right in order to be called "complete". However, if one's notion, definition, and/or conception of thought and belief is wrong in some specific way, then so too is everything else resting upon the misconception, in some foundational way or another.

That's what my own comments here have to do with the OP.

Nowhere in your system have you clearly set out an exhaustive universal criterion for what counts as thought and belief...

What method you use to generate answers to these questions is up to you. Part of the reason I asked this spread of questions was to see if there was any methodical or systemic pattern apparent in them, or if people had opinions on different topics that didn’t all fit together well.

Nowhere in your system have you clearly set out an exhaustive universal criterion for what counts as thought and belief... — creativesoul

I haven’t laid out a system of my own here. I’m asking other people about their systems. But I think I have answered your question for my part in our earlier discussion about it, so if you don’t think so then there’s some miscommunication between us happening. In any case, if you think that that’s an important thing to take into account in your answers to the questions I did ask, then by all means feel free to talk about it in your answers to them, if you feel like answering them.

There is indeed a misunderstanding or miscommunication at hand. This is shown by your latest reply. All the conventional categories of philosophy are based - in part - upon a gross misunderstanding of human thought and belief.

Perhaps I'll take a stab at incorporating this consideration into specific responses to some of your questions... That may make for a more fruitful exchange.

All the conventional categories of philosophy are based - in part - upon a gross misunderstanding of human thought and belief. — creativesoul

:chin:

Perhaps I'll take a stab at incorporating this consideration into specific responses to some of your questions... — creativesoul

Please do.

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe? — Pfhorrest

Satisfaction of that criterion requires a creature capable of thinking about it's own thought and belief.

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean? — Pfhorrest

Prescriptive claims are non-descriptive, but cognitive; that is to say, they are not trying to assert anything about the way the world is, any facts about reality, but they are nevertheless capable of being correct or incorrect and therefore are truth-apt in their own sense. They are most akin to imperatives, or commands, that are capable of being objectively good or bad (in ways to be elaborated later); but whereas commands are always have the person being addressed as the subject of them ("you do this"), prescriptive claims can have anything as the subject ("[anything] do this", including "[anything] be this way"), making them in a sense more like optatives (a la "Saints be praised!, which is not a command to the saints, or to anyone in particular to praise them, but an exhortation for anyone and everyone to praise the saints). In technically language, I would say that they impress intentions, rather than express desires as expressivism would have it; in more common philosophical language that's roughly equivalent to saying the "assert moral beliefs", except that I don't think morality (being non-descriptive in character) is something you can rightly have a belief about, but rather that there is a moral analogue of belief, intention, that bears the same relationship to desire as belief bears to perception: perceptions and desires are feelings, while beliefs and intentions are thoughts, and each differs from the other in the direction of fit of their respective attitudes toward the same kind of ideas. And impression, or assertion, attempts to get someone else to hold the same opinion as you do, while expression merely demonstrates the opinion that you have.

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality? — Pfhorrest

To claim that something is beautiful is in essence to claim that it "feels right", where "right" might mean either "good" or "true". Comedy and tragedy are both different ways of framing something that is in one of those ways "wrong", either bad or false. Comedy treats the wrongness with levity, playing it off as frivolous, not a big deal, while tragedy treats the wrongness with gravity, playing it as a serious big deal. Each of these can in its own way contain a kind of beauty, as when comedy makes something bad not feel so bad anymore, making it feel more right, i.e. making it beautiful in a way; or when tragedy tells some painful truth about something that is bad, but the telling of that is still right inasmuch as it is true, and so beautiful in that way. Beauty can just stumbled upon in nature, or it can be presented specifically for an audience to provoke some kind of reaction to them, where it is called art.

Anything thus presented to an audience to provoke an emotional reaction is art, whether or not the intention is to convey beauty. Something is good art when it is successful at evoking the intended reaction, where "intended reaction" can vary between the artist, the audience, the surrounding society, or some broader moral standard. This all relates to prescriptive claims about morality in that this notion of "good as success" is a kind of prototypical morality in the same way that the abstract existence of mathematical objects is a kind of prototypical reality: most of the things we consider good, we consider good for their proficiency at bringing about something else that we consider good, and we rarely directly contemplate those ultimate ends in the same way that we rarely contemplate the most concrete elements of reality, the occasions of our experience, but instead deal in abstractions that are still nevertheless grounded in them. Just as mathematical "existence" is what you get when you deal in such abstractions completely ungrounded in concrete empirical reality, so too aesthetic "value" is what you get when you deal in pure proficiency completely ungrounded in those ultimate ends.

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral? — Pfhorrest

The short answer is hedonism. The long answer requires an analogy to empiricism. When we're appealing empirical experience to judge what is real, we don't just poll people on their beliefs, or even on their perceptions, but rather we ourselves stand in the same circumstances that they report having sensed or observed something, and then see if we also experience those same senses there. Then, rather than taking those sensations to justify whatever perceptions or beliefs the first person who reported them had, we come up with some model that accounts for those sensations we've confirmed and also all of the other sensations that we've confirmed, which will probably not be what anybody initially perceived or believed, as the increasingly weirder and weirder (less intuitive) models science has produced shows.

Likewise, when we're appealing to hedonic experience to judge what is moral, we shouldn't just poll people on what they think ought to be, what I term their "intentions", or even on their desires, but rather we ourselves should stand in the same circumstances that they report having had those hedonic experiences, like pain, hunger, etc, that I term "appetites". Then, rather than taking those appetites to justify whatever desires or intentions the first person who reported them had, we should come up with some model that accounts for those appetites we've confirmed and also all of the other appetites that we've confirmed, which will probably not be what anybody initially desired or intended. This is very similar to the methodology called principled negotiation, which says to "focus on interests, not positions" (appetites not intentions, in my terminology) and most importantly "invent options for mutual gain".

The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with? — Pfhorrest

The short answer is "deontologically", but all I mean by that is "not consequentially". Not exactly, at least. I think that the ends don't justify the means in exactly the same way that observation cannot confirm theory... but it can falsify it. Initially, any course of action is permissible, but negative consequences can rule out possible courses of action, yet still leaving infinitely many permissible ones, never positively justifying one particular course of action as the one that must be taken. Long story short, "do no harm". It may be really hard to figure out a course of action that is not ruled out by any negative consequences, but it's also really hard to find a theory that isn't ruled out by any observations: we've just got to deal with that difficulty if we want to try to do good.

Also, analogous to how logic forms sort of side-constraints on what is possible, just as a necessary consequences of the meaning of words, so too property rights form a kind of side-constraint on what is permissible as a necessary consequence of the ownership of property. But, just like the correct meaning of the words from which we derive logically necessary conclusions is itself contingent, so too the correct assignment of ownership from which we derive such rights and obligations is itself contingent. At the bottom both of them are socially constructed: words mean and people own whatever other people agree that they do. But I think that both are subject to continuity with previous agreement, barring a unanimous consensus to break with that continuity: one subset of a community can't decide to change the meaning of words or the assignment of ownership out from under others without their agreement, unless they can show that those others came to that state through similarly illegitimate non-unanimous action and they're just setting things right again.

This is a good thread and it may be dead but no harm in reviving it.

I'm in a strange place philosophically. I do have a philosophy degree but it's been like 6-7 years since I've graduated and my job just doesn't involve philosophy but I still find it popping up from time and time and I'm happy to engage it.

I'm gonna have to dig back in my brain a little but to give a quick run-down, I'm an meta-ethical realist but I don't subscribe to any particular normative theory. I have an interest in virtue ethics, but I could never quite make it work rationally (i.e. I couldn't make it work within my broader meta-physical framework.) I'm currently non-religious but I'm willing to entertain theistic arguments. I'm very open philosophically and willing to entertain a lot. Hume and Wittgenstein (Investigations-era) are some of my favorites. I loved reading Anscombe even though I'm not a Catholic, but she was incredibly bright.

I'm generally skeptical of people who get "married" to a train of thought, and I see this a lot of marxists and libertarians. I hold facts and practical application in enormously high regard - as well as experience- so I suppose I'm kind of an anti-philosopher in that sense? I am a bitcoiner so the whole cypherpunk and decentralization movements hold a special place in my heart, but that does not mean that I accept them unquestionably. I am skeptical of many of the dogmas I see today.

It's not dead, it's just resting, but glad you woke it up anyway. :)

The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend? — Pfhorrest

As with mind, I think there are two different things to consider when it comes to the will. One of them has to do with determinism or lack thereof, and like with phenomenal consciousness, I don't think this is a philosophically important topic, but technically everything has "free will" in this sense, because at least according to contemporary models of physics, everything is at the fundamental level nondeterministic. So an electron has "free will" in this sense, just as much as a human does, and none of that really matters for any other purposes.

What actually matters is the functional ability a person has to control their own behavior: to make judgements about themselves, and for those judgements to be causally effective on their future behavior. It is, basically, self-control. I sketch out the necessary features of such a function analogously to how I sketch out access conscioueness: the system must first differentiate aspects of its experience into their relevance either for a model of the world as it is (a model made to fit the world), which I call sensations, and for a model of the world as it ought to be (a model made for the world to fit), which I call appetites; a function that I call sentience. It must then interpret those experiences into such models, forming what I call feelings, divided into perceptions on the one hand, and desires on the other hand; a function that I call intelligence. It must then reflexively form both perceptions and desires about those feelings, which reflexive states I call thoughts, divided into beliefs and intentions; a function that I call sapience. The prescriptive (world-to-fit-mind) side of that sapience function is what I deem rightly deserves to be called "will", and the causal efficacy of such will upon a person's behavior constitutes their freedom of will.

In short, your will is free in the important sense when reflectively thinking that something is the best course of action for you to do causes you to do it. Which might be an entirely predictable process and could in principle be a fully deterministic one, but as it so happens, indeterminism does seem to be a fact of reality, not that it matters for these purposes.

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

The short answer is anarchism, which doesn't mean no government, but no state. The anarchic government I envision is modeled after the educational system I previously described, with "law books" being compiled through a process of what is effectively peer review: primary sources publishing not their observations but their appetitive experiences, pains and pleasures and so on, in various circumstances, for others to stand on those circumstances too and replicate those findings; then secondary sources commenting on the notability and quality of that primary research; and finally tertiary sources assessing and documenting the current consensus of secondary sources. Those "legislators" would be separate from both judges and police, and in addition to reactive police patrols analogous to public educators, there would be more proactive life coaches / personal lawyers advising people on how to avoid doing things that will get them in trouble with someone else. People would hire judges directly as a kind of "conflict insurance" so to speak, someone standing by to step in an adjudicate disputes, hiring police/lawyers to help defend their clients as necessary, and tertiary legislators to compile the law books they use to do that job. If parties to a conflict appeal to different judges, and those judges cannot work out an agreement themselves, they in turn can appeal to their own higher authorities of the same structure, and so on until at some level the dispute is resolved.

For this to work requires a generally egalitarian economic structure, so anarchism requires socialism, which doesn't mean state redistribution of wealth, just somehow or another avoiding a class division into non-working owners and not-owning workers. My deontological principles encourage this through the invalidation of certain kinds of contracts most notably those of rent and interest, which I believe are the mechanism by which the egalitarian consequences one would naively expect of a free market get subverted giving rise to capitalism.

All of this is the ideal, but I also support the intermediate use of less-anarchic forms of governance to step in in case this form fails, to keep it from failing immediately to the absolute worst. So there should be a bare-bones democratic-socialist state standing by ready to keep society together and re-establish this anarchic state as need be, and possibly further layers or still-more-authoritarian government standing by in between that and the absolutism that would arise from the power vacuum should all government fail completely. From those, or from our present less-anarchic forms of governance, we should progress toward this anarchic ideal conservatively, that is to say making cautious change, but change nevertheless.

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with? — Pfhorrest

I call this task, the inspiration of the will to actively pursue the good, the moral, the just, or the state of the will being (or the process it of becoming) fully free or self-controlled, "empowerment". We cannot empower someone just by telling them what is good. We cannot simply tell them to operate their will some way either. We must somehow inspire them to exercise their will, show them opportunity and motive to take action themselves of their own accord. To do that we must show them that achieving goods is actually possible, and thus that there is hope for them if they try to do so themselves. But we must conversely be sparing in our direct help, lest they come to rely upon us, take our help for granted, and deem it unnecessary for them to try to do things themselves. Instead, we need to help people to help themselves, to require that they take initiative in trying to pursue their own goods, but to stand by and hold their hand while they get a bearing for it, to ensure that their early attempts are successful, and build in them the confidence and skill that they will need to continue pursuing good on their own.

At the same time, we must also show them that achieving good is not a foregone conclusion that someone else will always handle for them without any action on their own part, because if they thought that was the case they would have no motive to try to learn themselves. So to that end, we need to point out to them how any authorities on knowledge that they may be tempted to rely on are fallible, and that without their personal action such authorities may fail, not necessarily catastrophically or globally, but in any particular case, in which cases the individuals involved will need to be ready to pick up that slack and stand up to injustice themselves.

But helping not only oneself, but also others, can also help to cultivate that feeling of empowerment, the feeling that achieving justice oneself is both possible and necessary. So more than merely helping people to help themselves, we can also enlist them to help us help other people to help themselves, with the promise that doing so will in turn empower them, help them learn to help themselves, and in doing so begin to build the groundwork for the kind of joint, mutual pursuit of good necessary to underpin the kind of governmental structure I've previously outlined.

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean?

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?

I'm a moral realist so I do believe moral claims express propositions; they can be true or false. In regard to an exact rational system to sort moral claims... I don't really know and I can't imagine we'll ever find one. It's kind of a mind-warp studying philosophy in college... nobody needs to explain to anyone in a different major or in a different walk of life that strangling babies is wrong. That kind of thing is understood without question, it's acknowledged in every culture, it's felt deep in the bones of the vast majority of the population. It's first felt and then it's justified. The justification part of it always seems post-hoc to me. At this point I'm sympathetic to some version of intuitonism I suppose, but I'm down to be questioned here and I could change my mind later.

I'm also an aesthetic realist and I believe beauty is both real thing (a property, I guess you could say) and that beauty is inherently valuable as a property and in turn ought to be preserved. Value ought to be preserved, but that's not to say it's always wrong to destroy a beautiful thing. I believe someone who can't grasp beautiful will have difficulty living a good, complete life. I do believe in the case of music that it can be learned (e.g. one often hears of someone slowly growing accustomed to, say, Bach or Mozart and growing to appreciate it.)

Anyway, I guess that's the bare bones of my thoughts. Anyone is welcome to challenge or comment on it.

Anything thus presented to an audience to provoke an emotional reaction is art, whether or not the intention is to convey beauty. Something is good art when it is successful at evoking the intended reaction, where "intended reaction" can vary between the artist, the audience, the surrounding society, or some broader moral standard.

After WWII American soldiers would take nearby German civilians on tours of concentration camps. I guess Auschwitz is art then.

Found art, sure. (It wasn’t made to be art, but it can be presented as such).

Thanks for your responses!

Okay, let me try a different example.

Lets say you're in an art museum and you go into one of the rooms there and a couple gallons of sewage water pours down from the ceiling with an overwhelming smell (lets say this event was orchestrated by an "artist.") This would elicit a greater emotional reaction out of a typical person than, say, viewing something by Picasso or Rembrandt. It would just seem to follow under your logic that whoever orchestrated the sewage dropping would be a greater artist than any of the painters of the past.

I'm not arguing with you here, I'm just trying to flush out your logic and making sure that I understand you correctly.

That would count as art yes, and it would be highly successful from the artists POV, but not from the patrons POV, who did not intend to have that reaction invoked in them.

Today's Existential Comic reminded me of this old conversation:

The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place? — Pfhorrest

All actions are driven by a combination of belief and intention, so no matter what you’re trying to do, half the battle of doing it successfully is having the correct intentions to drive your actions.

Finally up to the last of my own set of questions from two months ago:

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life? — Pfhorrest

"Meaning" in general means important or significance, so this question is asking what is important about one's life. That in turn depends entirely on how connected to the rest of the universe you are, which is to say how important a role your function plays in the overall function of the universe: if a lot of processes in the universe run through you, that makes you important to the universe, and makes your life meaningful. Those inputs can be in the form of being the beneficiary of goods, having the universe serve your ends; or in the form of learning, of gathering truths about the rest of the universe to guide your own behavior; and those outputs can be in the form of doing good for others, being important and so meaningful because of your influence on the rest of the universe; or for the truths that you compile and impart unto others, the teaching that you do. So the meaning of life is to "earn" and to learn, to help and to teach: to both receive and to spread both goods and truths.

There are also feelings of meaningfulness or meaninglessness, that can vary regardless of the actual meaningfulness of one's life. The feeling of meaninglessness, which I call ontophobia, is I hold the prompt of the question about the meaning of life, and when someone is feeling that way no answer will alleviate the feeling, giving a false impression of meaninglessness. The feeling of meaningfulness, ontophilia, is on the other hand the greatest feeling imaginable, a feeling of profound acceptance and understanding, like everything is intrinsically fine and makes intrinsic sense; and being in that state of mind is both enlightening and empowering, enhancing the function of the mind and will, increasing the ability to both receive and spread both goods and truths. Achieving and spreading such a state of mind is thus a reflexive, second-order meaning of life, which is both promoted by and promotes the first-order meaning of life.

@Pfhorrest :clap: Well done. Now you've got me reconsidering a summa of my own (which has been brewing for a decade or longer). Thanks for that and kicking-off this topic.

☆ Happy 2020 ☆

Thanks! Happy New Year to you too, and best of luck on your own summa project.

For discussion's sake here are some labels (to ponder now and (hopefully) unpack later):

• metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic (i.e. agent (habits, capabilities)-based/centered; where harm (i.e. the bad) = reflexive loss of (some/all) agency) Naturalism [NIEN]

• normative ethics - Negative Hedonic Utilitarianism (i.e. right (conduct/response) = to minimize harm; wrong (conduct/response) = to maximize harm) [NHU]

• applied ethics - Negative Preference Consequentialism (i.e. just (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = mitigates double-binds, hobson's choices, tragedy of the commons (i.e. unsustainable practices), burden-shifting, free-riding, scapegoating, etc;  unjust (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = generates double-binds, ... scapegoating, etc) [NPC] — 180 Proof

UPDATE: I've edited the above for clarity's sake (I hope).

• metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic Naturalism (i.e. GOOD = optimal (adaptive-synergistic) agency; BAD = suboptimal (maladaptive) agency) [NIEN]

:point: Agency (i.e. ethos) consists in individual and collective capabilities (i.e. adaptive habits, skills, norms-conventions, commons-affordances) of agents to help others and themselves to prevent and reduce harm to others and themselves.

• normative ethics - Negative Hedonic Utilitarianism (i.e. RIGHT (conduct/response) = to minimize harm to agency; WRONG (conduct/response) = to fail to minimize harm to agency) [NHU]

• applied ethics - Negative Preference Consequentialism (i.e. JUST (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = to mitigate double-binds, hobson's choices, tragedy of the commons (i.e. unsustainable practices), burden-shifting, free-riding, scapegoating, etc;  UNJUST (laws, policies, contracts, inequalities, conflicts) = to fail to be JUST, or mitigate double-binds, ... scapegoating, etc) [NPC]

:point: Morality (i.e. mores, norms) is the customary or systematic codification of 'right conduct' and 'just practices' (defined above) sufficient for optimizing Agency.

metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic Naturalism — 180 Proof

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "non-identity" here? That's the only part of this I didn't (think I) understand.

to the OP

metaethics - Non-Identity Eudaimonic Naturalism
— 180 Proof

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "non-identity" here? That's the only part of this I didn't (think I) understand. — Pfhorrest

Let's start with my two main posts from the old "The ethical standing of future people" thread:

One. My use of the non-identity idea (Parfit, not Adorno) is sketched ... Two. Some clarifications & elaboration.

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life? — Pfhorrest

The bonus question only has bogus answers.


(The boogie man's main function is to get you. The boogie woman's main function is to dance all night long in her dancing shoes.)

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life?
— Pfhorrest

The bonus question only has bogus answers.

(The boogie man's main function is to get you. The boogie woman's main function is to dance all night long in her dancing shoes.) — god must be atheist

:clap: :cool: