But what I'm highlighting is that there are also sadists. And it's possible to set up a social world where those who get off on kindness go to the kind spaces, and those who get off on violence go to the violent spaces — Moliere
Cultural problem solving is not about accurately representing an independent world. It is about construing and reconstruing our relation to the social and natural world from our own perspective in ways that allow us to see the behavior and thinking of other people in increasingly integral ways. Progress in cultural
problem solving is about anticipating the actions and motives of others (and ourselves) in ways that transcend concepts like evil or selfish intent. It is not that we become more
moral or more rational over time (Pinker’s claim is that the formation of the scientific method made us more rational). We were always moral and rational in the sense that we have always been motivated to solve puzzles. What progress in puzzle solving allows us to do is to see others as like ourselves on more and more dimensions of similarity. — Joshs
The point that I was trying to make is that a religious community and traditionalism in general is constraining, both in openness to new ideas and in moral development. That’s not to say that progressivism is better than conservatism, it’s just pointing out the difference. An independent can defy a group and the leader of a group if what they’re doing is judged to be immoral. — praxis
Well, maybe you can help me figure out who my ultimate authority is. I may get a clue if you would share who your ultimate authority is. — praxis
Maybe if it were possible for us to step back far enough we'd clearly see the Truth of Eternal Recurrence. Everyone's experienced déjà vu, after all. How much more proof do we need? — praxis
I don't disagree, but I'm not convinced that you aren't saying one is better than the other. — Noble Dust
I'm not convinced that to be constrained is inherently a bad thing. — Noble Dust
How would that help you? I don't get it. — Noble Dust
how have the "primitive conditions" he lists, namely "war, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace," actually been alleviated or overcome by "Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress"? — Jamal
he truth is that nothing can absolve humanity of its crimes and nothing can make up for the suffering of the past, ever. Nothing and nobody will redeem humanity. Nothing will make it okay, and we will never be morally cleansed. We certainly ought to strive for a good, free society, but it will never have been worth it. — Jamal
Big question: what does the following look like in action -
Progress in cultural problem solving is about anticipating the actions and motives of others (and ourselves) in ways that transcend concepts like evil or selfish intent. — Tom Storm
I didn't get this from the passage. Of course I haven't read Pinker, but the passage, to me, did not mean they are relics. He said they are a part of natural existence and countries can slide back to them - at the expense of the wisdom of the Enlightenment. So, in essence he doesn't expect those evils to go away, but only to become latent. He used the word "pacified" at one point in his works (?)But what he really means is that even if we do still suffer from some of those evils, they are relics. We are on the forward march, and it's only a matter of time before we consign them to the dustbin of history. — Jamal
I think we commonly mistake the definition of "primitive" as the past. I actually was first confused as to the use of the word when I came across the word in philosophy. I think in philosophy, primitive means basic and simple, as in the ordinary means of dealing with things. (I don't know, I'm trying to get to the definition that sounds satisfactory). — L'éléphant
The problem I have with that thinking is that it is impossible to separate science from the rest of culture. Changes in scientific thought run parallel with changes in ideas in the arts, politics, philosophy, moral theory, because they are all inexo intermeshed. If we’re going to argue that progress occurs in science and technology, then we have to concede that it takes place as a general feature of cultural history. — Joshs
The worldviews we erect to organize our sense-making define the nature and boundaries of what is ethically permissible or unjust. — Joshs
Seems reasonable. Before I do it myself, can anyone see how to save my original analysis? — Jamal
1. If something improves, e.g., the eradication of guinea worm disease, it happens in time, going from worse to better. The past condition is worse, closer to the beginning of a progressive development and thereby primitive.
2. If it gets worse again, this can rightfully be called a slide back to a primitive condition.
3. Many very important things have improved in tandem.
4. These things improved in tandem thanks to a way of thinking and a way of going about things.
5. If these things get worse again in the present and future, this can rightfully be called a general slide back to primitive conditions.
6. We have to maintainthe successful way of thinkingthe styles of thought and practice of the Enlightenment to prevent such a general slide back.
6a: there is only one system of values which prevents such a general slide back.
6b: that system of values is "the styles of thought and practice of the Enlightenment".
Seems reasonable. Before I do it myself, can anyone see how to save my original analysis? — Jamal
If something improves, e.g., the eradication of guinea worm disease, it happens in time, going from worse to better. The past condition is worse, closer to the beginning of a progressive development and thereby primitive. — Jamal
I think your argument was that airplanes are the product of a diseased breed, so it's foolish to think of them as progress. — frank
I'm sorry if it wasn't clear. A species, such as Elm disease, that destroys its environment will not last long. Aeroplanes are part of the fossil fuel dependent culture that cannot long continue and will die out. — unenlightened
Looking for Progress and her sister, Endless Growth, is a wretched mistake that leads to the cliff edge — unenlightened
I am likening humanity to a species that we call a disease, that has not established a stable relationship with its environment but undermines it. I am arguing that this undermining is what we call progress in our own case. — unenlightened
I agree with this assessment. What's at issue is whether progress is exclusively a threat which must be abandoned, or if it's the solution to the problems we face. — frank
Seems reasonable. Before I do it myself, can anyone see how to save my original analysis? — Jamal
But is that like saying that since knives are used to kill, and killers are destroying their own world, knives are inherently self undermining? — frank
The worldviews we erect to organize our sense-making define the nature and boundaries of what is ethically permissible or unjust.
— Joshs
I think that's nonsense, and quite evidently so. Ethical judgements tend to involve quite different parts of the brain than might be involved in sense-making, and most precede any such activity by many years developmentally, and by many milliseconds in processing terms. I just don't see any evidence whatsoever to back up such a theory. — Isaac
“The inextricability of feeling and world-experience is not adequately acknowledged by philosophical approaches that impose, from the outset, a crisp distinction between bodily feeling and world-directed intentionality. Most philosophers admit that emotions incorporate both world-directedness and bodily feeling but they construe the two as separate ingredients. Some have argued that feelings can be world-directed. But, in so doing, they still retain the internal– external contrast and so fail, to some degree at least, to respect the relevant phenomenology. For example, Prinz (2004) argues that feelings can be about things other than the body but he adopts a non-phenomenological conception of intentionality and continues to assume that the phenomenology of feeling is internal in character.”
“At the neural level, brain systems traditionally seen as subserving separate functions of appraisal and emotion are inextricably interconnected. Hence ‘appraisal’ and ‘emotion’ cannot be mapped onto separate brain systems.” Pessoa (2008) provides extensive evidence from neuroscience that supports this view of the neural underpinnings of emotion and cognition. He presents three converging lines of evidence:
(1) brain regions previously viewed as ‘affective’ are also involved in cognition; (2) brain regions previously
viewed as ‘cognitive’ are also involved in emotion; and (3) the neural processes subserving
emotion and cognition are integrated and thus non-modular.”
”Sense-making comprises emotion as much as cognition. The enactive approach does not view cognition and emotion as separate systems, but treats them as thoroughly integrated at biological, psychological, and phenomenological levels. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or
being-in-the-world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166)
“...appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural
levels (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2005). At the psychological level, one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is a means to the having of an emotion, and vice-versa); rather, they form an integrated and self-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an ‘emotional interpretation.’(Thompson 2009)
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