The point is that you want to found your position on the transcendental subject. Good luck with the pure solipsism that ensues.

pure solipsism — apokrisis

I mean, solipsism is one of those annoying philosophical positions that get in the way of affirmative progress. Even if they're wrong, it says a lot about your priorities that you're willing to deny their validity without any real argument. Instead of refuting solipsism, you use it as a threat.

It also says a lot about your powers of observation that you're willing to accuse me of solipsism when, for a very long while now, I've been articulating the point that ethics, fundamentally speaking, is about the relationship between the self and the other, and the harm and manipulation of the latter in particular.

But carry on with your repetitive affirmative narrative.

So we aren't mincing terms, can you define affirmative narrative?

I think this debate only makes sense if both sides recognize the same definitions and then go from there.

I think darthbarracuda's point, and mine as well, is that you cannot remove yourself from the muck of the experience by hand waving it as good/bad and therefore above evaluation. There are experiences which are simply not pleasant and would not have been experienced otherwise had one not been put into that situation. However, life, social relations, environment, and sometimes INEVITABLE poor predictions or underestimation of consequences lead us to harm. Also, better options that were never even open to the individual (e.g. COULD not occur to them due to unknowability at the time) or personal pathologies, lead us to these negative experiences.

But the things listed above are CONTINGENT harms- or what you seem to call "accidental" harms. They are not necessary to being a living being, but 99% of the time will inevitably occur in some way due to the circumstances of events of the individual interacting with the environment. There are also NECESSARY harms. This is my Schopenhauer influence coming out. The necessary harms are ones that are built into the system. One such harm is the striving-but-for-nothing, the instrumentality of being. We can concretize this in more scientific terms to "survival for survival's sake". This is not as much a problem until you get to self-reflecting beings such as ourselves. Then, we experience this harm in feelings such as existential boredom, world-weariness, the anguish of having to push the boulder up the hill and struggle, and find entertainments and fake struggles to overcome the feeling of time itself without a goal. Of course there are long-term goods- relationships, learning, art, music.. I am not denying we can and do pursue this. What I am saying is that these harms can be overwhelming and are pervasive. Contingent harms are not easily solved, and necessary harms are never solved. You can whistle Dixie through your teeth, and pretend that this all goes away by simple apokrisis-branded techniques, but it does not go away easily.

Further, to put more people in existence for certain long-term goods- relationships, learning, art, music, etc. seems to be putting these goods as just so compelling, that harms experienced by the individual, both necessary and contingent, are denied, repressed, Pollyainaized (forgotten for the past or underestimated for the future), ignored. It is a bit of trickery to have people brought into life, and then say "Well, you have to be part of the maintenance crew because you want to keep experiencing good things, don't you!!". That is unfair, as being alive is the default. There is nothing to compare it to other than the "scary" notion of dying/death. This dying or death is not the same as never being, we can never experience death. Thus there is an asymmetry, as we cannot compare living with the experience of death, that is never an option for the already-born. Thus, no shit, someone will simply take what is known- life good and bad, and obviously want to live so they can have more of the good. That is the ONLY option to him/her once they already exist. And good here, can be your little pleasure/pain mix that you like to tout as counterexample of bad that is "good".. Yes, we all agree that things like games, exercise, learning can cause pain as but also be in some sense "good" because it has an element of excitement, or appeals to our sensibilities, or is part of achieving a goal.

Same old one note lament. You make the choice to view everything as pointless and whine on and on about it.

Yet life as normal people experience it is a mix of ups and downs. As I said, once you get into the lived complexity of our feelings about events and meanings, then you can start to see that what has most value is efforts in the name of purposes. It's a sad fact for you (as it destroys your excuse to whinge) but constructed meanings are fine. Why climb a mountain? Well it hurts in a way that is fun. Who cares if a pessimistic neuroscientist says that is an endorphic delusion.

But I'm wasting my breath. The way you have constructed the meaning for your own life is that it utterly lacks purpose. So every effort or action is a harm and a pain. Congratulations for adopting such a dull one note socially constructed idea. You may have biological level depression. So your personal umwelt may chime with this one-noteness you want to claim as existentially universal. But I am happy to get on with a more complex level of ethical analysis when talking philosophically about the human condition.

So we aren't mincing terms, can you define affirmative narrative? — schopenhauer1

I'll quote at length before adding my own thoughts:

Someone once considered the Introduction to Formal Logic of the Spanish Thinker Alfredo Deaño as "logic for children." In some ways, I wish this book A Critique of Affirmative Morality will be considered an "ethics for children." Indeed, the questions -often exasperating –this work rises, are the basic questions of life that usually appear in the stubborn and monotonous questions of kids: Why are we here?, Why should we live?, Why do we have to die?, Why may be not kill our family?, Why should we love our parents?, Why not kill ourselves?, Why have we been brought to the world?, etc., and these questions are raised here exactly with the same innocent cruelty of children. That will no doubt infuriate the “adult” ethicists who promptly want to surpass the stage of the children‟s questions and to analyze “the serious moral crisis of our time”, the political, ecological, diplomatic, military subjects. These "adult" issues do not interest children and they are not interesting for the present book either. Philosophers and poets share with the child the unbearable conviction life is a badly told story, and that no "big issue" newspapers talk about and the more powerful countries of the world discuss will be able to extinguish the disturbing flames of Origin. In this sense, the child has his own maturity. All the “naive” and childish spirit this book could transmit is strictly intentional precisely because one of its main points is that jumping directly to those “great ethical issues of our time”, ignoring the original problems, is one of the basic features of the lack of moral sense of our time, and maybe of all times. — Julio Cabrera

[...]

The lack of radical reflection in the current ethics of beings (both classical and modern, of Kantian or, specially, Utilitarian inspiration) consists of the fact the crucial question has been, throughout the history of philosophy, how one should live, without considering in a positive way the possible ethical character of dying and abstention. Asking, in the ethical field, how to live is admitting ab initio there is not and there cannot be any moral problem in the very fact of being; that all moral problems arise "afterwards", in the domain of how. If the initial ethical question is how to live, it is assumed beforehand that living has not, in itself, any moral problems, or that living is, per se, ethically good, or that, for some motive that should still be clarified, the matter of good and evil does not concern to being, but only to beings. Affirmativeness is the historical form taken by the lack of radical character of the ethical reflection. (Indeed, a reflection that would answer "no" to theinitial question would not be radical either). But what is the philosophical-rational justification of living as ethically good (valuable) per se, and of the idea the
only thing that ethically matters is how to live, that is, how to turn into ethically good this or that ontic human life, excepting life itself from any questioning whatsoever? — Julio Cabrera

[...]

Since the beginning of this book, I have taken an attitude of that kind (which, in my view, is not “skeptical” in any pejorative sense, nor “nihilistic”), presenting the argumentations on the first chapters as of “a radical and anti-skeptical moralist” (using there Habermas‟ conception of skepticism), but disposed to argue until the end, employing the same conceptual tools supplied by the moral cognitivist. I will call “empty skeptic” the skeptic who refuses to argue, and “plenary skeptic” this who accepts to argue infinitely and radically. Perhaps the “skepticism” is maintained in the negative conviction of the plenary skeptic that it is not necessary, in argumentation, to destroy concepts and theories, but only put them in movement, let them live. From a negative point of view, the most appropriate way of denying a concept is not killing it, but –on the contrary –letting it die naturally. — Julio Cabrera

[...]

One of the most employed terms in the previous reflection has been “affirmative” and its derivatives. What has been understood as such? I understand by “affirmative”:

(a)The non-critical acceptation of fundamental theses of the type “the being is good”, “to be is better than not to be”, “the more being, the better”, etc, as well as the conviction that the ethical theory should ask directly about how-to be, how-to live, how to conduct an “ethical life”, and never ask if life itself is ethical, if there is not an ethical cost in simply staying alive, in “living a life” as if the being was, so to speak, “granted” and immunized against criticism. The ethicity of being, of living, of emerging to life, of being born, is given, in affirmative thinking – in my sense -as a granted and never thematically exposed conviction, as something already positively valued.

(b) In the second place, affirmative means assuming the task of thinking as “insuring” or “supportive” (and, maybe, as a solace, as a certain type of “conceptual edification”), in the sense that the conceptualization of the world shall protect us, for example, against relativism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism and, in general, against all that may threat the continuity of the life of thinking. For affirmative thinking, it is not the case of pure and simple “looking for truth”, but of looking for all truth compatible with the continuity of life, with the enterprise of not allowing that thinking get blocked so it could keep developing itself indefinitely (I have used the word “affirmative” because it has, in Spanish, precisely these two meanings: “affirmative” as opposed to negative [in the sense of“positive”, of “saying yes”, of “assenting”], and “affirmative” as “affirming”, “supporting”, “finding something firm, or firming” [as in expressions of the kind: “It is necessary to firm on something, on some belief”, etc.].). — Julio Cabrera

[...]

From the optic of the present book, what is interesting in those theories is they all are “affirmative” theories, in the explained sense (contemporary north-American Pragmatism is perhaps the philosophy which has most openly assumed the “affirmative” character –in the dual sense mentioned –of ethical reflection, through a pragmatist theory of truth [vide, for example, the attempt of reconstruction of moral theory proposed by John Dewey]: true is what protects us from danger, what can be used as an adequate instrument for successful survival. What pragmatism has openly exposed remains implicit, I think,in the rest of moral philosophies in general, including Kantian ethics).

“Affirmative” are theories in which the movement of the quest for truth is conceived as a vital process (even when this “Nietzchean” interpretation might seem offensive to many of theauthors of these theories), in which the hypothesis that the quest for truth may lead us to an anti-vital result is rejected beforehand and not critically. The basic affirmative meta-thesis would be the following: life and truth go (or should go) on the same path, they never get in conflict; discovering truth is (or should be), at the same time, to discover the continuity of life, the uninterrupted process –however arduous –of vitality. There are not (or there should not be) anti-vital truths. — Julio Cabrera

___________________________________________________________________

The affirmative narrative is the historical-social-political-ethical bias towards continued existence. That there is something good, or at least nothing wrong, with life and existence and that there is some reason to continue the whole thing. If you dive into the ethical literature, you'll be amazed by how conservative and non-radical ethics tends to be, often manifesting as appeals to absurdity - something threatens the existence of society and this is taken as evidence of an ideas' falseness.

The term "affirmative" is not only referring to the affirmation of life but also the suppression of dissent. It's non-radical because it cannot exist if it is questioned all the way down. Children wonder why anything exists, why they have to do anything, why they have to die, and are looked down upon with the patronizing smug smiles of the adults who have "figured it all out" - but they haven't, they have just suppressed these ideas (if they had, we wouldn't be having this discussion!). It's as if part of the coming-of-age ritual and the subsequent assimilation into society is the systematic suppression of radical questioning. You don't do it, because it threatens everything that exists. We have places to go and people to meet and things to do and we don't have time for any of this radical philosophical bullshit. Why do you think philosophy in general, these days, is so frowned upon? Because it doesn't "fit" with the social mode of operation. Capitalism is literally a symbol of affirmativity.

Part of the negative dialectic here is to show how banal some of these questions objectively tend to be. If approached unabashedly head-on, the answers to these sorts of questions are relatively obvious. It's not as if the negative thinker believes they are handing wisdom down from above - rather, they are simply pointing out the obvious. Everyone else just has to "catch up" a bit. Deep down, most people realize life is not that great, that the manner in which we live and the relationship we have with the world at large is absurd, and that we're all going to die someday. Every now and then this manifests in little cracks in the affirmative system, and become wildly popular for their cathartic nature. But as soon as this crack begins to spread as the realization sets in that it's not just a phase, people go batshit and panic and try to pretend there's something "else" that will save them. Like Nietzsche said, only so much truth can be lived.

Negative ethics, in this case, simply takes the concepts affirmative ethics uses and applies them universally and consistently.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life. - Cioran

We keep going, don't stop running
They keep selling, we don't want it
So close to it almost found a way
Two steps closer, they keep coming
We keep yelling, we don't want it
Almost better, this things about to break.

Thank you for explaining- those were some good quotes. As far as what I read, I definitely agree that life itself is assumed to be "obviously" good. It reminds me of the neoplatonoic idea that more existence must be better existence.

Do you have examples where he applies this negative ethics to certain ethical questions? It's funny how he specifically targets pragmatism's affirmative approach, which is akin to apokrisis's theories on this thread. So as applied to apokrisis' view, his assumption of survival has already made his theory dead in the water, due to not questioning the very assumption of the argument to begin with.

Edit: I'm reading a bit of his work, but only at the beginning. From what I can see, he probably would not go over applied ethics as much as that would be participating in the "intra-wordly" ethics rather than looking at Being as a whole.

Yeah, Cabrera's book is more meta-ethical and meta-philosophical than normative or applied ethics. He has some things about how you shouldn't kill anyone or have children but that's about it. The closest he gets is basically when he asks whether or not negative ethics is even possible, or if we need to make "negative categories" after the affirmative ones die. I know somewhere in the book he talks about how letting a murderer kill you is "technically" an ethical victory, but I also think he realizes the clumsiness of this view (severe agent centered restrictions, essentially). But I suppose that goes all the way back to the initial observation, that we can't have life without some kind of conflict or compromise. Someone gets hurt, no matter what.

Yeah, Cabrera's book is more meta-ethical and meta-philosophical than normative or applied ethics. He has some things about how you shouldn't kill anyone or have children but that's about it. The closest he gets is basically when he asks whether or not negative ethics is even possible, or if we need to make "negative categories" after the affirmative ones die. I know somewhere in the book he talks about how letting a murderer kill you is "technically" an ethical victory, but I also think he realizes the clumsiness of this view (severe agent centered restrictions, essentially). But I suppose that goes all the way back to the initial observation, that we can't have life without some kind of conflict or compromise. Someone gets hurt, no matter what. — darthbarracuda

I was thinking about this for a bit, and I am wondering about the "salvation" theories that a Buddhist, Schopenhauer, Mainlander, et al would say about existence. That is to say, if Being entails the fact of non-Being, and non-Being is preferable, wouldn't we need both in the picture in order to have the salvation of non-being? According to this view, being is perhaps inevitable, or built into the structure somehow, so if that is the case, despite being's harmful nature to the individual, it is also through being that non-being is achieved?

As an addendum, does non-being ever have its own metaphysics by itself, or must it always be in relation to being? If it must always be in relation to being, does that mean, that non-being is not even a possibility and therefore an ethics surrounding it is moot?

My answer might be that the closest we can get is antinatalism, as it is an ethics preventing future being. There is the possibility of pure non-existence of being. The ideal of antinatalism would be to remain pure possibility without actuality. The possibility of actuality should not be actualized.

It's funny how he specifically targets pragmatism's affirmative approach, which is akin to apokrisis's theories on this thread. So as applied to apokrisis' view, his assumption of survival has already made his theory dead in the water, due to not questioning the very assumption of the argument to begin with. — schopenhauer1

Except you forget that my naturalism has been checked out all the way down. So I am happy to ask the question whether nature is natural. Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure.

Of course you can dispute that new metaphysics, argue with it as a theory. That is when we turn to the empirical evidence to see whose theory best explains what we observe.

And you know that I've made that argument often enough in terms of modern romantically striving western consumerist culture and the entropic desires of a bazillion barrels of buried, energy dense, fossil fuels.

So I am hardly guilty of affirmative bias - in either the guise of pollyannism or pessimism. Instead I'm quite happy being the scientist putting competing theories to the test. It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness".

Except you forget that my naturalism has been checked out all the way down. So I am happy to ask the question whether nature is natural. Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure. — apokrisis

Honestly, do you have the ability to not use jargon? Either you are obfuscating a real argument or you do not have the ability to easily explain your ideas.. If I was to interpret this into something comprehensible and relevant to this argument, you are trying to somehow justify why living things exist with "negentropic structure" in an otherwise "entropic" universe. But what this has to do with Cabrera's point is lost on me. If I was to try to stitch this together as somehow relevant, you may be trying to say that the goals of survival are inherent in the universe or something of that sort. Even if that was the case, you seem to continually make the is/ought fallacy over and over again. You take (your version of) a description of what is going on and try to justify it as prescription. You cannot keep doing this and think that no one will see it. What is currently the case, and what we ought to do, or what our reaction to the case may be, are two different things. This should not even have to be stated. So, survival is the outcome of evolutionary pressures of the organism and the environment. Humans can self-reflect though, and make deliberate actions- ones that even prevent the very actions that lead to more survival (at a species level). Thus, your argument is moot there. The inevitability of human actions are not "written in the stars" if I was to be poetic. Again, that is the naturalistic fallacy. It may be this way for non-reflective, non-deliberative animals.. but we are both reflective and deliberative.

Of course you can dispute that new metaphysics, argue with it as a theory. That is when we turn to the empirical evidence to see whose theory best explains what we observe. — apokrisis

I didn't know I was disputing a new metaphysics. Again, this is vague, but this seems like your other area of creating a strawman false dichotomy so that you can set up your Romantic vs. Apokrisis theory again. This is something that seems shoved into the argument that doesn't need to be there. I have yet to see how your metaphysics has much to do with the ethics we are discussing.

And you know that I've made that argument often enough in terms of modern romantically striving western consumerist culture and the entropic desires of a bazillion barrels of buried, energy dense, fossil fuels. — apokrisis

This also makes little sense how it fits with the argument. You are shoehorning this into the picture it seems. Maybe because you are trying to show that we have not planned our energy consumption in a responsible manner to protect the future of the species.. So, it unintentionally is making survival less likely. Okay, but what does that have to do with whether survival of the species itself, SHOULD be the goal of individuals? That was really the problem that Cabrera seemed to have with pragmatism- the idea that what is "logical" is that which "works" to achieve ends.. But those ends (things as seemingly basic as survival) may be questioned.. His notion was that ethics focuses on "intra-worldly" goals and evaluations, but does not question the assumption that Being itself should be a goal.

So I am hardly guilty of affirmative bias - in either the guise of pollyannism or pessimism. Instead I'm quite happy being the scientist putting competing theories to the test. It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness". — apokrisis

Again, your jargon obfuscates your argument. This seems to be the naturalistic fallacy again. You are denying that we are self-reflecting and deliberative. We can look about our situation and know what we are doing, assess it, and take actions about it. Oddly, your "organicism" approach seems to deny this, thus making humans more mechanical- the very thing you accuse me of doing. In other words, we can question why we continue to put forth more people into the world. We can evaluate structural harms of coming into existence (with its necessary and contingent harms). In Cabrera's terms, we can question whether we should pursue the goal of more Being in the first place. But, if you think I don't interpret your "organicism" right, it is because you are using jargon-heavy philosophy where it is not needed.

Now if you want to debate whether you need Being in the first place for the "salvation" for non-Being, because non-being cannot metaphysically be apart from being, then we can have an interesting discussion.

Hobbesian, and Lockean Contractarianism, as a conceptual political framework, entails sacrificing individual "natural" rights, because it presumes that human nature, when left to its own devices, would produce chaos. Therefore, a government would be required to mitigate and control these excesses. Implicit to this view, is that government is distinct from human nature.

This distinction between government and human nature was anathema to Spinoza and, later, Diderot and other thinkers of the Republican Democratic persuasion, who, while agreeing with the Contractarianists that it was in humanity's best interest to join together to form a government (albeit a republican one, contra Hobbes), argued that such a socio-political configuration was an extension of human nature, rather than apart from it.

What is correct in schopenhauer's opening analysis, is that, assuming a Contractarianism framework, it would be perfectly acceptable for individuals or minority groups to sacrifice their rights or their "nature" (think LBGTQ, or religious or ethical minorities) in order to maintain a wider group cohesion. This is how Locke is able to argue for intra-toleration between Christian sects only, rather than wider, full toleration that includes Jews, Atheists, and other religious minorities, as Spinoza argued for.

Again, your jargon obfuscates your argument. — schopenhauer1

Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar.

Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar. — apokrisis

Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology.

Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology. — darthbarracuda

Or you could get used to the fact that academia uses technical language for the sake of precise thinking.

And here you are, on an internet forum with a population of less than thirty people. Congratulations.

But I'm not the one complaining about the fact there exists a whole world out there where people talk funny.

I'm not complaining about esoteric scientific jargon itself, I'm pointing out that the few people you communicate to on this forum are not scientists who are "in the loop" and because of this, the use of this sort of terminology is out of place and irritating. You use this vocabulary to communicate ideas efficiently between professionals - those online here are not professionals and so it is not appropriate to use this same vocabulary when addressing them.

Can I help to draw a line under this? Posters can write in as technical or sophisticated a way as they want even it's not helpful or it's irritating to some. Better to send a PM if you'd like some extra clarity. (And I think the population here is more than thirty people, but hey, who's counting?)

I was thinking about this for a bit, and I am wondering about the "salvation" theories that a Buddhist, Schopenhauer, Mainlander, et al would say about existence. That is to say, if Being entails the fact of non-Being, and non-Being is preferable, wouldn't we need both in the picture in order to have the salvation of non-being? According to this view, being is perhaps inevitable, or built into the structure somehow, so if that is the case, despite being's harmful nature to the individual, it is also through being that non-being is achieved? — schopenhauer1

Cabrera cites Nietzsche as an example of a negative philosopher who nevertheless "affirms" life, but not through rationalist argumentation. Nietzsche criticized morality, in particular Christian morality, as having a queer valuation of salvation that is required for it to even work. Essentially, God created man in order to save man. It's very...strange.

Cabrera uses this same criticism when he talks about non-Being and Being; initially, everyone "exists" in non-Being. Then some of us get thrust into Being only to return back to non-Being. And so we have to wonder what the whole point of it all was. Being is just a little "bloop" from non-Being.

I can see, if Being "did not exist" or something like that, how it might be difficult to see non-Being as "good". And I guess I would say we have two different paths we could take: we could swallow the literalist pill and grant that non-Being is simply a fiction and that immanent Being is all there is (which might be technically correct but is difficult to work into language and general intuitions), or we could see non-Being and Being as inherently intertwined (as you were saying, I think) and that Being, from the perspective of conscious beings like us (Dasein), is always less preferable than non-Being.

I see Buddhism as an example of a pessimistically-inclined religion/philosophy that nevertheless has an overall positive undertone. Nirvana is achievable. It's not all doom-and-gloom. Existence is suffering but there is a way out, and in fact the ultimate reality is "good". Put this sort of thinking in lines of what you were saying and we get the perspective of non-Being as not necessarily "salvation" but more like "going back home". We're exiled in that Cioran-esque sense, for whatever reason. This is, I think, part of the reason why Buddhist philosophers put so little value in intra-worldly things.

But like I've said elsewhere, I don't know how much I buy into all this talk of non-Being apart from fictional discourse. It's useful but ultimately does not represent reality as it actually is. As far as I understand his work, Cabrera explicitly denies any substantial metaphysical structure in his theorizing. He works under what he calls "natural ontology" or "nature" which he describes as the way the world "naturally" appears to humans and not how it literally is. Hence how he claims he can talk coherently about value while simultaneously agreeing with Wittgenstein that there is absolutely no value in the mind-independent world. So straight-up it seems like he accepts that non-Being is not necessarily legitimately a real concept but more of a useful heuristic or fiction.

Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar. — apokrisis

If you didn't notice I tried interpreting your "pleonastisms" anyways, thus trying to be charitable to your content. I just thought it comes of as bloviating (i.e. talking at length, especially in an inflated or empty way). That is where YOU have to not be lazy and actually put context to your term dropping and self-referential jargon. I use a word like "instrumentality" or "Will", and somewhere in the argument, I will explain what these mean, so not to confuse the reader with other interpretations. It's just being courteous to the audience and making sure we are on the same page as far as the language of neologisms, jargon, or non-common usages of words. It also ensures that I am not simply trying to use academic or fanciful language simply to try to show off some knowledge of terms but not really say anything of substance or clarity. If it makes you feel that you are "winning" an argument by using such terms, I won't stop you, I'll just let you know what it looks like. Anyways, you still haven't addressed my response to your content of the last substantive post.. so I'll wait here, and patiently wade through the jargon as well.

What jargon were you struggling with exactly in the bit you quoted?

But given your rhetorical strategy is to keep tooting "naturalistic fallacy", there's not much to say. One is either a immanent naturalist or a transcendent romantic on these issues. You've made your choice. You believe the mind stands apart from its own conditions of being. You are not interested in being part of nature. Well fine.

What jargon were you struggling with exactly in the bit you quoted? — apokrisis

Here are some things that should be explained more clearly:

Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure. — apokrisis

It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness". — apokrisis

This also has to be explained without using Romantic, or labeling, or general ad hominems.. In other words real analysis:

One is either a immanent naturalist or a transcendent romantic on these issues. You've made your choice. You believe the mind stands apart from its own conditions of being. You are not interested in being part of nature. Well fine. — apokrisis

I am especially interested in what you mean by "not interested in being a part of nature". How does that not fall in line directly with the naturalistic fallacy? This is what nature does, so it must be good, seems to be what you are saying.

How are you defining naturalistic fallacy? The original version was the claim that what feels good is what is good. And clearly that isn't what I argue in any way.

Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics.

If you ask me what is the good, I would have to say look to nature and see what it is doing. It seems to like entropification but also negenentropic stucture (as you can't have one without the other in fact). It seems to like homeostatic enduring balances (as what else could exist?).

So we can look to nature and see its basic necessary logic when it comes to the question of Being. And clearly my naturalism doesn't attach any superfluous human valuation to what nature "likes" - even as it does turn the metaphysical conversation around to now grant existence its own "mind" in terms of formal and final purpose.

So the difference between our perspectives is that I say Being has to be a story of hierarchically-organised structural constraints on material freedoms. That simply is the definition of Being.

And within that metaphysics, talk of non-Being makes no sense. It wasn't an alternative possibility. If there is Being, the only alternative (the state from which things begun) would be the everythingness of disorganised possibility - a Vagueness, Firstness, Apeiron or Chaos, to use the various technical metaphysical terms.

Well you can in fact have non-Being as a finality. Where existence is all ending up is in the crisp emptiness of a Heat Death universe. An utterly generic structure with utterly reduced freedoms. So nature is heading there - and we would call that "good" if we were still trying to play your game of applying transcendental valuations to a tale of immanent self-organisation.

But clearly, that isn't how I would think about the good. My argument is that - naturalistically - the good itself is going to be a dichotomy. So that is why it makes some naturalistic sense that both negentropy and entropy feel good to us humans...and also feel bad.

We are surfing a wave of entropification. It is exhilarating to carve out shapes on a crashing wall of water. And so that seems a metaphor to me for how to live life.

But you refuse to engage with that other way of looking at things. You insist that you can start apart from nature and judge it transcendentally. You can focus on suffering and burdens and every other thing that already takes your own notion of the good as its reference point, so as to justify the claim that living is irretrievably shit.

None of what you argue rings true to my science-informed view even though I can see why you would say it.

For example, it is no surprise that "consciousness" - that is attentional level processing - seems to be full of the negative. Attention is what is reserved for dealing with the uncertain, the unstable, the threatening, the unsolved. So if you focus on what mostly catches your attention while living, mostly it is another problem to solve walking in through the door.

Yet psychology will tell you that most of life is lived as a matter or habit or automaticism. Like an iceberg, the bulk of life is assimilated smoothly with barely making a ripple. That is, if we are well-adjusted. Life just flows and suffering or effort feels minimal.

So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help.

Sure, I agree that the world isn't perfect and actually does have some deep issues that require critical thought. I continually point out the clash that has arisen between a humanity adapted to live at the pace of the daily solar flux and our recent switch to a life predicated on blowing up fossil fuels instead. Humanity has adjusted rather too successfully to blowing up the planet. We have a real life problem and it is quite right to step back and question that (especially if you have kids to be concerned about).

So my objection to your pessimism is that it is not just shallow metaphysics but an actual distraction from facing the realities of nature. You can't fight global warming if you have some pollyannish view that what humans are doing in wanting to surf this really collossal wave is somehow unnatural, so everyone is suddenly just going to come to their senses and fix things for the environment.

Again, you are fighting battles that are already out of date because the response follows on a generation after the emergence of the new possibility.

Romanticism was the natural reaction to the Enlightenment. Existentialism was the natural reaction to Industrialisation. Even anti-natalism is some kind of delayed reaction ... kill me now as I reject your relentless Consumerist affirmation of life as an exponential trajectory of entropy production.

Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain.

Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics. — apokrisis

What we have here is yet another false dichotomy you've set up. You don't need any sort of Platonic "good" to reject your version of naturalism. Nowhere "out there" is there "goodness" or any sort of value at all. All your talk of entropic structures and whatnot does not capture the essence of what people know as "good". You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong.

In a Wittgensteinian/Heideggerian way, although the world does not have any value itself, Being-in-the-world and its various modalities do. The universe does not give a damn about us, so why should we give a damn about its perpetual entropic expansion?

And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s.

So we can look to nature — apokrisis

...and we see absolutely nothing resembling what anyone typically would see as "good", unless we're talking aesthetic value or something. This is what we call equivocation. Nobody here is denying that objective "goodness" value is "spooky". This changes absolutely nothing. We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. You just go further and neuter the whole concept of goodness to fit your metaphysics.

So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help. — apokrisis

No, your cherry-picked "science-informed" bullshit is handwaving the problem away. Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? Maybe it's because they don't seem to fit your narrative of how reality is supposed to be.

Sorry, Chief, but the psychology of humans is oftentimes in direct opposition to the overall direction of the universe. You approach this problem by advocating a kind of Heraclitian Taoism, just go with the flow, immerse yourself in the world and understand its processes and you're good to go. We're going about it by pointing out this is nothing more than a l'esquive, an escape mechanism, something that has been going on since day one and is represented fully by organized religion. Consciousness is a sort of "exile" from the rest of the world. Once you know, you can't go back. This is literally the whole point of the Adam and Eve narrative, a myth that has been replicated across civilizations since the dawn of time.

Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain. — apokrisis

Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious. - Cioran

You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. Look at all this talk about naturalistic fallacies and false dichotomies. Who knows what these crazy folk are talking about. Why can't they speak plain english.

And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s. — darthbarracuda

Are you deliberately spouting gobbledegook now to make some clever point? It's all way over my head.

We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. — darthbarracuda

But ... but ... but ... I just said that is exactly the only place any valuation is taking place.

Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? — darthbarracuda

Goodness gracious. All this jargon I'm meant to know.

...rant continues in same vein... — darthbarracuda

Zzzzzzzzz....

Have fun sleeping in apo la-la land.

Huh? That was the bees in your bonnet.

Zing! >:O

So you've reverted to full-blown childish comebacks to avoid answering any question that makes you uncomfortable or strays away from your little hermetically sealed philosophy patterns.. You mine as well say, "No, you're stupid!". Anyways, I'll get back to your last post soon. I'm just thinking it will be in vain.