The law of causality is absolutely coercive to the understanding regardless of any and all to the contrary — Constance

The universe was created. Still, it was not physically caused.

The motion of the ball on the Norton dome is not caused.

stated, "no one has ever been able to explain how anything out there to can get in here (pointing to his head). — Constance

Is that so difficult to explain? Why? The world is constantly projected into our brain. Except when we sleep or are absent in thought or pondering. The brain is the receiver and creator at once.

The mental and physical world are dependent on each other. Structures in the physical world engrave themselves in our brain and the brainstructures inform the physical world. — EugeneW

I find the newer thinking about the role and process of science to be more exciting. I dont find the idea of physical objects to be all that useful anymore for quantum physics, biology or psychology. It’s a relic of an older era.

. I dont find the idea of physical objects to be all that useful anymore for quantum physics, biology or psychology. It’s a relic of an older era. — Joshs

Quantum particles are still just particles. The wavefunction in which they are embedded makes their behavior non-local but they are still particles.

I think so. Rorty's neo-pragmatism is postmodernism and less mystical that Witty. Rorty's anti-foundationalist project seems primarily (and I only have general understanding of his work) to be opposed to what he sees are remnants of Greek philosophy - notions of idealism and absolute truth 'out there'. In Rorty's view humans are able to justify claims but can say nothing about Truth. — Tom Storm

Truth as something discovered and this discovery lays itself before one's eyes as a discovered object, event; he would say no to this. Knowledge, truth, the real, being, and so on, is to be pragmatically conceived, but he accepts this world of science as the only wheel that rolls, so he is willing talk as if this world had the objective standing scientists take it to have. Wittgenstein was the same, working in the Kantian tradition that the world is an empirical world and there is no sense beyond this. I think this kind of thinking gave rise to positivism and the decades of analytic philosophy.
Yes, to what you say about justification and truth and Witt. But this does leave knowledge claims hanging out there. Frankly, one is driven to wonder why there is such disagreement about this, these two sides of Kant: the metaphysical idealist (because as much as Kant wanted to deny metaphysics, the very notion of transcendental idealism says otherwise) vs the empirical realist. I think it comes down to the way we are put together. Some have metaphysics built into their faculties?
The foundation for Rorty is pragmatism, and like all good hermeneuticists, this too is indeterminate.

But this does leave knowledge claims hanging out there. — Constance

Exactly. Having not read widely in his oeuvre, I have sometimes wondered how Rorty justified his strong social justice beliefs. He one said the the meaning of life is 'to make the world better for our descendants'. Do you have a sense of how he arrived at this logically?

The universe was created. Still, it was not physically caused.

The motion of the ball on the Norton dome is not caused. — EugeneW

I don't know what the universe being created means. Causality is far more accessible and intuitive. And if you are going to support a motion uncaused, then you have what I would call a radical paradox on your hands. Radical in that it is bat shit crazy, and I don't mean this insultingly. Keep in mind that intuition is what drives the rational process that gives rise to problems like the Norton Dome. The denial of movement ex nihilo is the strongest intuitive insistence the mind can make. I am aware that there are equations and contrived thinking that have rigor and lead to counterintuitive conclusions. But when this happens, it is not a matter of resolution, but one of endless head scratching until it is resolved.

I don't know what the universe being created means — Constance

What's so difficult to understand about that? The gods had plans to recreate heaven. Their words or expressions made the univerde come into existence. They created it. It's plain English.

The denial of movement ex nihilo is the strongest intuitive insistence the mind can make. — Constance

If you know about virtual particles you would know that they laid the basis for thermodynamic time. They go back in forth in time. They were all that resided on the central singularity and the surroundings of that singularity set inflation off. There are infinite serial big bangs. Each has its own beginning of thermodynamic time. So the creation of the universe, with its infinity of big bangs, is not a temporal process.

Does science passively give knowledge and information about a world outside of the knower — Joshs

In "Constructing quarks", a fascinating account of the history of the literal construction of the quarks is given. Weel, not exactly literally, but reality is seen as a moldable material. To be molded by experiment and ideas.

As well as reaching out and bending space to your will — jgill

To my will?

Exactly. Having not read widely in his oeuvre, I have sometimes wondered how Rorty justified his strong social justice beliefs. He one said the the meaning of life is 'to make the world better for our descendants'. Do you have a sense of how he arrived at this logically? — Tom Storm

He is often attacked for this, because on one can see how one can be so bound to the contingency of knowledge and truth, and hold that there is some moral imperative that fits into this. Simon Critchley:

The obvious (if banal) question to be raised here is how such a
committment to universality can be consistent with Rorty’s anti-foundational
‘relativism’(between quotation marks, for I take it that relativism would be the
name of a pseudo-problem for Rorty)

And then

Rorty just adds the caveat that an ironist
’Cannot be a “progressive” and ”dynamic” liberal’ (Rorty 1989, p. 91) and
cannot display the same degree of social hope as the liberal metaphysician. But
isn’t this just to suggest that the liberal ironist is regressive, sedentary and
hopeless- and what good is that sort of liberal?

You see, Rorty wants to have his cake and eat it too,. But you really can't do this. You find no metaphysical grounding that can secure a moralist position out of irony and contingency, and out of this the best that can be gotten is a weakened stand on affirming that "cruelty is the worst a person can do."

To me, wherever you go, you run into Dostoevsky's Ivan: no God, no morality. Metaphysics is the only thing that can save morality, which is why I argue a support for moral realism. Not everything is a "language game".

If you know about virtual particles you would know that they laid the basis for thermodynamic time. They go back in forth in time. They were all that resided on the central singularity and the surroundings of that singularity set inflation off. There are infinite serial big bangs. Each has its own beginning of thermodynamic time. So the creation of the universe, with its infinity of big bangs, is not a temporal process. — EugeneW

But you don't seem to know about the presuppositional time, prior to anything a physicist might inquire about. Foundational time, call it: Prior to any quantum thought occurring the head of a physicist, or any thought at all, there is the foundational temporal construction that is there in the first place, "through which" thought passes and in which existence and its genesis can be examined. This is the level of assumptions we are dealing with. Causality, as with time, is a term that is foundational, not derivative (though it is always important to know that no knowledge claim is unassailable. The question here goes to, what level of inquiry is making determinations). The term is derivative, no doubt, and the way we understand it certainly is derivative, that is, contingent upon the language contexts it is brought to light in. But this "pure intuition" of causality is not derivative.
As someone who reads science, then assumes there is in this a foundation for all things, what you say is rather typical. You don't realize that what physicists do rests upon an intuitional givenness.

Is that so difficult to explain? Why? The world is constantly projected into our brain. Except when we sleep or are absent in thought or pondering. The brain is the receiver and creator at once. — EugeneW

This is almost willfully naïve (apologies). Do you really think a brain is a mirror to nature? Have you ever seen a mirror that looked like an opaque brain? Patently absurd.

To me, wherever you go, you run into Dostoevsky's Ivan: no God, no morality. Metaphysics is the only thing that can save morality, which is why I argue a support for moral realism. Not everything is a "language game". — Constance

I totally understand where you are coming from here. I'm sympathetic too. Personally I don't see god as realistic and I'll come back to this in a tick. For me morality is unlikely to be metaphysical - as far as I can tell morality is created to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order. And maybe Rorty holds to a similar view. Generally communities come to a shared agreement about the core values. But I agree with you about the odd gap between Rorty's philosophy and the certainty of his 'real world' ethical positions.

Like Zisek (who I am not in the thrall of) I generally reverse the Dostoevsky idea - 'with god anything is permittable' - hence inquisitions, forced conversions, homophobia, holy wars, misogyny, slavery. There's not an egregious behavior available to humans that hasn't been justified by a direct appeal to god. Now I do understand that this has no bearing on whether god approves or not, it's just a comment on the alleged moralizing effects of theism.

In "Constructing quarks", a fascinating account of the history of the literal construction of the quarks is given. Weel, not exactly literally, but reality is seen as a moldable material. To be molded by experiment and ideas. — EugeneW

Sounds like my kind of book.

As someone who reads science, then assumes there is in this a foundation for all things, what you say is rather typical. You don't realize that what physicists do rests upon an intuitional givenness. — Constance

Are you just regurgitating Kant here?

Metaphysics is the only thing that can save morality, which is why I argue a support for moral realism. Not everything is a "language game". — Constance

Which sort of moral realism do you advocate for? Are you more a fan of Nussbaum and Pereboom’s blame skepticism (deterministically-based forward-looking blame) or P.F. Strawson (free will desert-based moral blame)?

he was not contradicting the basic intuition that a spontaneous cause is impossible. — Constance

He went further. He said the idea of cause in physics is meaningless.

Let’s be clear about the “two things” intraontology is talking about. It is the noetic and the noematic , the subjective and objective poles of experience. They are not separable, don’t appear individually and thus don’t form a synthesis or merger. But without these poles there could be no differential ,and without a differential there could be no time. — Joshs

So a differential is what is there, but simply the way we talk about what is there. Originally, it is all just "of a piece". Rorty I think would say yes to this. All talk is an abstraction from what is not talk at all. I think this is right.

But you wonder about my comment on time, and I see that this will not go well. It is a unique issue between me and Kierkegaard and the Prajnaparamita. Put baldly, I think time is the generative source of what divides the world. There is this constant precipice of anticipation, anxiety laden. Put aside Kierkegaard's religious thinking; put in place the actual practice of kriya yoga and ask, what kind of affair is this if not the annihilation of the burden of time.

Analytically, this kind of thinking is abysmal. It is born out in a manner that is revelatory. For me, when the reductive method is engaged, there is a "stilling" of the world in a way that theory does not touch. Here, Śāriputra, all things have the characteristic of emptiness,

I never read Husserl talking like this. He seemed surprised when students were becoming religious converts. Rorty fled philosophy because he felt it had reached its end. Half right. It reached its end centuries ago.

Are you just regurgitating Kant here?
an hour ago — Joshs

An intuitive givenness. This comes for Husserl and his progeny. Reading Ideas one is invited to look closely at the reduction and what it is about. There is, in this intuitive apprehension of the world, something foundational. It doesn't matter if the predelineated time event of conscious awareness never "stops" for presence, so to speak. Not does it matter if 'time' is a contextual term, contingent and impossible be anything but what its embeddedness in thought allows.
What can I say, Kant opened doors.

Which sort of moral realism do you advocate for? Are you more a fan of Nussbaum and Pereboom’s blame skepticism (deterministically-based forward-looking blame) or P.F. Strawson (free will desert-based moral blame)? — Joshs

I am a moral intuitionist, and the issue is metaethics.

What is the anatomy of an ethical act? There are aspects that are not really ethical, which are facts. It is a fact that I borrowed the ax, and a fact that its owner is now drunk and bent on revenge, and so on. In themselves, none of these presents the essence of what makes an affair ethical. Facts have no ethical dimension. To see this, one has to turn to value, the strangest thing in existence.

I could go on, but only if you are interested.

Put aside Kierkegaard's religious thinking; put in place the actual practice of kriya yoga and ask, what kind of affair is this if not the annihilation of the burden of time.

Analytically, this kind of thinking is abysmal. It is born out in a manner that is revelatory. For me, when the reductive method is engaged, there is a "stilling" of the world in a way that theory does not touch. Here, Śāriputra, all things have the characteristic of emptiness, — Constance

They just think they’ve annihilated time. By trying to ground change in the stasis of emptiness, what they’ve actually done is reified it by not noticing that emptiness is a form of valuation. Nietzsche and Heidegger recognized that Emptiness and the nothing are pregnant. Not pure terms of absence but transition itself. Emptiness is a refusalof the past in the face of the future as not-yet articulated possibilities which is already upon one. Emptiness doesn’t precede time , it defines its structure.Emptiness for Heidegger is the moment of vision , rapture, astonishment, wonder, the uncanny.

He went further. He said the idea of cause in physics is meaningless. — T Clark

But the idea is not what is discussed here. It is not logical discursivity that discovers the essential that tells us something cannot move unless acted on. What makes causality so intractable to analysis is that it is intuitive, and not empirical, and such things are not reducible. I mean, we can try to call them something else, but language always forces matters into its own designs, hence Russell's trouble. It is like talking about metaethics (now that I think of it). We deny that ethics has an absolute foundation, such that in any given ethical case, there at its core something absolutely coercive. This is not because there is nothing like this there, but because the moment you try to talk about it, you place it in the dubious hands language and analysis. Causality as an intuition is taken AS causality in play, in context. But as an intuition, it is unassailable. Causality the same, I argue.

There are aspects that are not really ethical, which are facts. It is a fact that I borrowed the ax, and a fact that its owner is now drunk and bent on revenge, and so on. In themselves, none of these presents the essence of what makes an affair ethical. Facts have no ethical dimension. To see this, one has to turn to value, the strangest thing in existence — Constance

There are also aspects that are clearly deterministically explicable , like the child who didn’t understand or the schizophrenic who heard voices telling them to kill. In P.F. Strawson’s famous paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’, he distinguishes between such obvious examples where ethical judgement doesn’t apply, and examples where what he calls our reactive emotional-valuative moral attitudes do apply. He concludes that we should listen to our reactive emotions that drive us toward retributive justice. My question for you is how you parse valuative emotions like anger. Nussbaum and Pereboom reject anger because they see it as aimed at payback, retribution and revenge, which are backward looking valuations.

Pereboom on the irrationality of anger:
“On the skeptical view, an expression of resentment or indignation will invoke doxastic irrationality when it is accompanied by the belief—as in my view it always is—that its target deserves in the basic sense to be its recipient.”
“In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.”
“…when someone is mistreated in a relationship, there are other emotions available besides resentment and indignation—these emotions include “feeling disappointed, hurt or shocked about what the offender has done, moral concern for him, and moral sadness and sorrow generated by this concern when the harm done is serious”. Communicating such disappointment,
sadness, or concern can be quite effective in motivating avoidance of future misbehavour. In addition, communication of such alternatives to resentment and indignation “is not typically aggressive in the way that expression of anger can be, and will usually not have its intimidating effect” “ “moral sadness and sorrow—accompanied by a resolve for fairness and justice, or to
improve personal relationships—will serve societal and personal relationships as well as resentment and indignation does.”

Then there’s Jesse Prinz, who argues that moral
values are driven by emotions, and emotions are relative to individuals and communities. Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions.

I totally understand where you are coming from here. I'm sympathetic too. Personally I don't see god as realistic and I'll come back to this in a tick. For me morality is unlikely to be metaphysical - as far as I can tell morality is created to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order. And maybe Rorty holds to a similar view. Generally communities come to a shared agreement about the core values. But I agree with you about the odd gap between Rorty's philosophy and the certainty of his 'real world' ethical positions.

Like Zisek (who I am not in the thrall of) I generally reverse the Dostoevsky idea - 'with god anything is permittable' - hence inquisitions, forced conversions, homophobia, holy wars, misogyny, slavery. There's not an egregious behavior available to humans that hasn't been justified by a direct appeal to god. Now I do understand that this has no bearing on whether god approves or not, it's just a comment on the alleged moralizing effects of theism. — Tom Storm

No, Zizek is entertaining, and seems right on several things, like his Hegelian ideas (of which I know relatively little). And I like his Marxism, which I think holds a powerful truth about societal injustice.
As to morality, as I am explaining to Josh above, knowing it will end up badly because my views on ethics are very unpopular, ethics needs to be looked at phenomenologically, and I simply mean it has to be analyzed for its essential features apart from what is endlessly and tediously hashed over in the attempts to make sense of our attitudes and beliefs and the world. Is there something that makes ethics a problematic that fitting to its nature. Long story short: value.
An arguable idea.

Like Zisek (who I am not in the thrall of) I generally reverse the Dostoevsky idea - 'with god anything is permittable' - hence inquisitions, forced conversions, homophobia, holy wars, misogyny, slavery. There's not an egregious behavior available to humans that hasn't been justified by a direct appeal to god. Now I do understand that this has no bearing on whether god approves or not, it's just a comment on the alleged moralizing effects of theism. — Tom Storm

I did mean to say I am not that find of him, but found him at least a clever dynamic presence.

But god: it is a term that requires better clarity before one can talk well about it. It is a mostly fictional account of why we were born to suffer and die and what we need to do to get free of it. this makes it a concept about the world, not about the way narratives tell us things. The issue is suffering, plain and simple (and happiness, but this for latter), and God the creator, the omniscient, omnipotent, the omnibenevolent, all out the window, as logocentric overreach and manipulative, dogmatic hyperbolic dismissibles.
Suffering, then. I ask, what is it? A very good question.

You don't realize that what physicists do rests upon an intuitional givenness — Constance

That's exactly what I realize to arrive at virtual particles as the foundation of both real matter in space as well as asymmetrical thermodynamic time. Before unidirectional, intuìtional, thermodynamical time took off, time was circular, and comparable to Aristotle's eternal circular motion, which neither went forth nor back. This eternal oscillation lied at the basis of all big bangs and beginnings of TD time.

He went further. He said the idea of cause in physics is meaningless. — T Clark

Which is obvious nonsense, had he had some knowledge of physics. The problem in physics is why cause precedes effect..

Do you really think a brain is a mirror to nature? — Constance

It's the only plausible way to approach reality. We assume what our brain creates is a true image. Wouĺd you assume we're given a fantasy? Would you prefer it?