Not just "metaphysical" but "Metaphysical". — darthbarracuda

That's just something my iPad spellchecker started auto-capitalising. I can't be arsed to correct it all the time. :)

Care to elucidate or do you prefer to keep dishing out these empty criticisms? — darthbarracuda

For the 1001st time you will be pleased to hear that I generalise the notion of mind to the metaphysics of sign. So - pansemiotically - the Cosmos has telos or values, even if of the most attenuated kind from our point of view.

You don't recall stating it but that seems a fair implication. Or can you state in more positive fashion why it isn't.

that seems a fair implication. — apokrisis

Can you state in a more positive fashion why it seems fair?

Sounds like you didn't address the argument I happened to be making in the post to which you purported to be responding. Your "questions" amounted to a restatement of your monotonic pessimism where only one value in nature counts. And you did your usual trick of trying to pretend I say all sorts of things I don't say. I mean it is hardly a problem for me that life is sub optimal. How could it even have a goal if it were already there? Little logical idiocies like that keep getting in the way of any sensible conversation with you.

I could. But I can see you are not really interested in discussing.

I'm not interested in ridiculous inventions. I'm talking about the fact/value distinction, and saying that value is primary. That's nothing to do with dualism.

In fact it's of the essence of pragmatism, I would have thought. But go all sniffy if you like.

For the 1001st time you will be pleased to hear that I generalise the notion of mind to the metaphysics of sign. So - pansemiotically - the Cosmos has telos or values, even if of the most attenuated kind from our point of view. — apokrisis

So you say, but why should I believe this? And if this "value" is so thin, why should it concern us?

What smells very fishy is the claim to ground value in the "being of human" and then to start equivocating when you are asked do you mean "human experience".

You over-estimate my concern over what you believe. The fun is in watching how the arguments play out.

What smells very fishy is the claim to ground value in the "being of human" and then to start equivocating when you are asked do you mean "human experience". — apokrisis

Values - truth, love, beauty, whatever, are the ground of (human) being, and the ground of reason, not the fruit. — unenlightened

The smell is of your misunderstanding. Rather than ground value in being, I ground being in value. First I give a shit, and then I value truth and reason and measurement, and even eventually perhaps, the distinction between mind and matter, who knows, as ways of dealing with shit.

Ah, solipsism it is then. Pragmatism is the process view, and so it grounds being in acts of evaluation. It is not the feeling that is true (or good, or beautiful) but the sign relation that develops as a persisting balance between a "self" and a "world".

Pragmatism is the process view, and so it grounds being in acts of evaluation. — apokrisis

Glad we agree. But what's with the name calling all the time. It's really pathetic, and timewasting

The fun is in watching how the arguments play out. — apokrisis

So you're a dick. Got it.

To remind folk of the key issue as I see it, ethics is generally a topic unmoored because it can't place itself in the world in general fashion. It winds up in transcendental modes of thought where either the conscious self is the solipsistic author of all value, or some appeal has to be made to the dualistic or supernatural, such as determining gods or Platonic ideals.

So I offer the natural philosophy alternative where the Cosmos is granted all four Aristotelian causes. Existence is organic, not mechanical. The Universe in a sense has a mind and a purpose in that it is organised by "reasonable" principles and has generalised habits or tendencies.

This organic view seems hard to swallow because the mechanical view of nature is so technologically triumphant. That in turn leaves notions of the mental or spiritual aspects of life no place to exist except "outside the world". But just because western intellectual culture has driven its articulated truck and got jammed up that particular cul-de-sac doesn't mean that organicism hasn't being off doing its own philosophical thing all the while. Organicism thrives inside science in fact.

Anyway, the point is to grant formal and final cause to cosmological being in a way that is sensible and scientific, not mystical or handwaving. And semiotics is about relations of evaluation or interpreting that start as spontaneous and hesitant suggestions, but which by positive feedback become established as robust habits that have formed their own "umwelt" or world of sign.

So a feeling of good or bad - approach or avoidance, reward or pain - are examples of biological level symbols. They are not perceptions of anything actually noumenal. Just like seeing red or green, they are acts of judgement. When we point to them, we are pointing to signs we have constructed as a reliable and pragmatic way of mediating our interactions with the world.

That is why it is ridiculous to point to feelings as metaphysically primary. They are merely ciphers that stand for an interpretation at the end of the day.

Of course they are ciphers with maximum meaning attached. They really matter to us. Yet still, they are the products of habit and thus emergent and developmental - meaningful to the degree they reliably reduce any requirement for actual further thought or inquiry. That is why "feelings" are fundamentally irrational or anti-philosophic. The Romantic waves them about to put a stop to any unpicking of his or her umwelt. The contextual subjectivity of the sign is treated as an objective fact of being. And when questioned about where this being exists, the Romantic has to give an anti-materialist response as justification. Feelings are have substantial being because they reside in some place called "the Mind", or "Platonia", or "the Spirit".

A cosmological naturalism based on a general four causes realism and the specific mechanics of semiosis (as the way to bridge the gap between "mind and world", or rather top down constraints and bottom up freedoms) instead sets things up as a hierarchy of being. There is a cosmological gradient from the simple to the complex, the entropic to the negentropic, the general to the particular, the necessary to the contingent, etc, etc.

So then from the point of view of the moralising human, we can look out across this orderly hierarchy of concerns and place ourselves within it. We do that intuitively already. We can decide not to eat cows on the grounds they are sentient, but eating cabbages is OK because ... we don't regard themselves as sufficiently sentient just because they can turn themselves to the light or communicate with their peers about pest invasions through chemical signals, or whatever.

Hah. Already I am returning to the point of how unmoored from scientific measurement most moral thinking is in fact. We still do want to apply all or nothing judgements on issues like sentience even when there is a gradient that more careful world modelling would reveal.

Anyway. The point is that naturalism puts mind and meaning back into the material world in a metaphysically rigorous fashion. It models it in a orderly and counterfactual fashion which is what makes it scientific and measurable.

Of course as an intellectual project, this "pan-semiosis" is not yet completed. However if it were a done deal, safely finished, I personally could hardly find it so interesting. The fun is seeing what is happening at the edge of human thought right now.

Big and swinging. Mind your head, coming through.

Glad we agree. — unenlightened

So you agree that "value" is a relation and not a thing? It is thus provisional on something other than itself and not a primary fact of being?

I mean, it just kind of puts things into perspective when you said you don't care what I believe. It means you aren't concerned with teaching anyone. For whatever reason, you enjoy patronizing other people on an anonymous internet forum.

Hopefully you'll grow bored with this all and move on. That'll be a day to celebrate.

Hah. Already I am returning to the point of how unmoored from scientific measurement most moral thinking is in fact. We still do want to apply all or nothing judgements on issues like sentience even when there is a gradient that more careful world modelling would reveal. — apokrisis

Why do you assume morality must be like science? What if trying to limit morality to the constraints of the world is not satisfying for our deepest moral beliefs?

As for the general idea being presented: you offer a generalized account of what your pragmatic morality would look like, but this is all it is. You make claims about gradients and models but fail to give any precise examples; you mention cows vs cabbages but fail to show how this issue changes in your ethic. What does your ethics fundamentally look like in the every-day, and how does this differ from more popular ethical theories?

I've already said it many times before, human psychology is strange and morality is not something that is flexible enough or even suitable to be applied in as broad a manner as you wish it to be. Ethics, as far as I am concerned, is always going to be un-moored from the rest of the world, as it's inherently tied to the individual and the individual's freedom of choice, which includes the phenomenology of transcendence beyond the immanent.

What you are presenting here is, as far as I know, something not particularly similar to any of the mainstream ethical views or any ones in the history of ethics and so you'll have to pardon me when I say I am highly skeptical of your ambitious claims. If you're trying to start a Nietzschean re-evaluation of value, which it seems like you are, you will need to provide more than just a blueprint hypothesis.

I ground being in value. — unenlightened

it grounds being in acts of evaluation — apokrisis

So you're a dick. Got it. — darthbarracuda

I got it too.

So I offer the natural philosophy alternative where the Cosmos is granted all four Aristotelian causes. Existence is organic, not mechanical. The Universe in a sense has a mind and a purpose in that it is organised by "reasonable" principles and has generalised habits or tendencies. — apokrisis

You say 'all four causes', but one of them is a final cause, a telos, which is, I think, what your naturalistic ethos doesn't recognise. Isn't everything just headed for 'heat death', and us humans just a fancy way of 'maximising entropy'? So I think there's a gap in your accounts there. And the alternative isn't just 'hand-waving', either. It is the recognition of that sense of 'final purpose', or the reason that things occur, in some larger sense than the simply naturalistic, because all natural creatures do is consume, procreate, and die, in the end. So it has to appeal to something beyond that. That might be conceived as 'beyond nature'. That is, I think, the significance of mokṣa, liberation or release, because it is something that humans can conceivably realise, which validates or makes sense of the whole process of evolution, instead of it having been a cosmic heat sink all along.

As I suspected. You are not here to defend an argument. You just want an excuse to chip in with the ad homs. Stroll on buddy.

Why should I in the end be overly concerned about what you in end claim to believe? That would be crazy, especially when you make it clear your beliefs in the end are non-negotiable. That's why I'm interested in the patterns of the arguments. Those are entertaining and frequently revealing.

And the alternative isn't just 'hand-waving', either. It is the recognition of that sense of 'final purpose', or the reason that things occur, in some larger sense than the simply naturalistic, because all natural creatures do is consume, procreate, and die, in the end. — Wayfarer

I think it's very difficult to produce epistemologically sound moral principles without determining the proper ontological status of things like final cause, intention, and will.

Why do you assume morality must be like science? — darthbarracuda

But that misrepresents what I say. I certainly think natural philosophy (or four causes science) is the right way, the best way, to look at ethics and aesthetics. So that can be assumed as a hypothesis and then checked against the facts. Where's the problem exactly?

What does your ethics fundamentally look like in the every-day, and how does this differ from more popular ethical theories? — darthbarracuda

But you've already heard the answer many times. Mostly I simply support commonsense notions about the hierarchical balancing of dichotomous impulses. Society is founded on being able to encourage both competition and cooperation - global integration and local differentiation, global constraint and local freedom.

So the only difference is that my triadic approach explains its dichotomous underpinnings as being natural, and not unnatural. It is meant to be a case of competition AND cooperation, constraint AND freedom. It is not a case of having to reduce nature to one or the other as the good, or the foundational, or whatever the heck else a reductionist feels to be the imperative when "caught on the horns of a dilemma".

Ethics, as far as I am concerned, is always going to be un-moored from the rest of the world, as it's inherently tied to the individual and the individual's freedom of choice, which includes the phenomenology of transcendence beyond the immanent. — darthbarracuda

Yep. That's how it stands. Your belief system requires its foundation in the transcendent. That makes it essentially a position of personal faith. Champion.

What you are presenting here is, as far as I know, something not particularly similar to any of the mainstream ethical views or any ones in the history of ethics and so you'll have to pardon me when I say I am highly skeptical of your ambitious claims. If you're trying to start a Nietzschean re-evaluation of value, which it seems like you are, you will need to provide more than just a blueprint hypothesis. — darthbarracuda

You are very flattering. But even in this thread I posted what Peirce had to say. And there is nothing much I would say that would amaze a social psychologist or theoretical biologist.

I think it's very difficult to produce epistemologically sound moral principles without determining the proper ontological status of things like final cause, intention, and will. — Metaphysician Undercover

"The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end."

"No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will."

-Peter Zapffe

I don't think it's necessary to have a super-sophisticated metaphysics in order for ethics to take off, as if we couldn't do ethics without some sort of Cartesian-style metaphysics-in-the-service-of-ethics. The two above quotations are qualifications enough, I think, because they don't demand any sort of (non-trivial) metaphysics while simultaneously being extremely compelling.

Even if the desire the Universe encodes is its heat death, isn't Thanatos or a death drive recognised as a telos in Romantic/Freudian thought?

But don't make the mistake of thinking I have to anthropomorphise the Universe to make sense of it's tellic nature. That gets it exactly the wrong way around. The Universe doesn't have to be characterised by some overall tendency that I recognise as being "typically human". It doesn't have to be about love or destruction or peace or intelligence. To approach metaphysics with that kind of is-ought thinking (as we are, so ought the Universe) would be ridiculous.

But on the other hand, if we arise naturally as some local expression of that Universe, then we should expect to see some impact of whatever happens to be its most general tendency. So the way the Universe is would have to have an ought attached for us - to the degree that the Universe needs pragmatically to give a fuck. Which as we all know, is not very much. All that is really forbidden is the building of perpetual motion machines.

So the only difference is that my triadic approach explains its dichotomous underpinnings as being natural, and not unnatural. It is meant to be a case of competition AND cooperation, constraint AND freedom. It is not a case of having to reduce nature to one or the other as the good, or the foundational, or whatever the heck else a reductionist feels to be the imperative when "caught on the horns of a dilemma". — apokrisis

Meant by whom? The universe? Again, why should we care what the universe thinks? Why should we care what it ultimately has planned?

So I'm not playing by the rules. It's only because I think the rules are unfair and unjust and that we can do better than what the universe initially demanded us to be. We've outgrown our darwinian impulses and can look beyond.

We're too moral for this world. If this means those who realize it go extinct, then so be it. This changes nothing.

We're too moral for this world. — darthbarracuda

Now that's funny,

Glad you agree.

I dont think he has undermined anything; Sorry for the late reply.