I think you should embrace the animal nature of our basic psychology and stop pretending to be something we’re not. — praxis
Clearly it's you who's acting stupid. Gravity is not "a rock falling". We might say gravity is the cause of the rock falling, but since it always causes the rock to fall down instead of falling up, it cannot be said to be neutral. A cause, since it affects an object in a specific way, and never in the opposite way, cannot be said to be neutral. — Metaphysician Undercover
I argued that if you premise that biases are bad, we must allow that some are good as well, or else we'd have to conclude that thinking is bad, since it employs biases as a base aspect. — Metaphysician Undercover
Obviously, it's you who is not following the principles of logic. If the effects of a phenomenon are said to be negative, then that phenomenon cannot be said to be neutral in relation to those effects, without contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover
Physics is a discipline, a field of study, therefore it is judged as good. — Metaphysician Undercover
You take gravity, which is not judged as being good or bad, and you compare it to a human property, "bias" which you do judge as being bad. — Metaphysician Undercover
What you are arguing is to replace one bias (preference) "hamburgers" with another bias (preference) "salad" — Metaphysician Undercover
The problem here, as I've already pointed out, is that you recognize bias as a "core", and therefore essential part of human cognition. This implies that it is a necessary aspect of all forms of thinking — Metaphysician Undercover
What you fail to understand is that all forms of so-called "critical thinking" proceed from biases, and these biases are essential and therefore good for that critical thinking. — Metaphysician Undercover
Interesting how nature, once 'the created', is now imbued with the power of creating itself. — Wayfarer
This is similar to the problem which I see with Christoffer's approach to bias. Christoffer sees that critical thinking can be very effective for detecting biases which inhere within logical arguments. But then Christoffer has the audacity to insist that the effect which biases have on critical thinking is necessarily negative, without recognizing that this is itself, just a bias. — Metaphysician Undercover
This made me consider abiogenesis and natural selection from the notion of bias.
I don't think it's logical to assign bias of any kind to such processes, even through it seems personally intuitive to me, to assign a positive bias to both because I would not be here if such happenstance had not occurred. I asked chat GPT, "Is natural selection biased?" — universeness
Is not all of our society based on us taming the animal nature of our basic psychology? Haven't we all introduced cultural restrictions so as to function past our instincts and desires in order to overcome the horrors of nature? — Christoffer
We, of course, do this better or worse depending on the individual, but ascribing to a higher level of self-control does not equal me trying to be something that I'm not, I'm trying to achieve more control than just natural apathy since it is something I can actually achieve through self-control.
No, not at all, broadly speaking we've organized and cooperated essentially in order to gain power (by conquest and eliminating competitors). Of course, that power is not distributed evenly so it's hard to claim that everyone has always been onboard with the basic plan. Religion has proven handy for the endeavor by having the power to bind tightly-knit groups of people through shared narratives, values, and purpose across wide regions. — praxis
You wrote "everything in modern life is a forced behavior to act against basic instincts of our animal self". Not sure how you distinguish what is animal and what is... human? but in any case, the animal is there and will always be there. — praxis
That's just the narrative of the elites. — Christoffer
Do you see many killings on your street? — Christoffer
Fights for money?
People act today in accordance with societal norms and those norms are partly formed by us taming the basic instincts and drives we have deep down. — Christoffer
Society forms out of a group's need to function as a collective and such collaboration requires a suppression of the individual's desires and subjective will, not by force but by their own will to be part of the group. — Christoffer
In my opinion, being able to act against my own instincts and desires, my pure animal self is part of me reaching a little higher as a human. — Christoffer
You still don't seem to understand the difference between two different values and two arbitrary emotional different values — Christoffer
Just stop it. A falling rock has no arbitrary value of "good" or "bad". If the rock is falling on you, then you can describe that effect on you as "bad" or "negative. — Christoffer
A falling rock in itself is not "bad", there's no such description of reality outside your emotional interpretation of it. — Christoffer
The bias effect on our cognition helps us navigate reality, but when doing critical thinking it produces an unbalanced understanding of a concept due to how it steers our thought process. This effect on our ability to conduct critical thinking can be described as bad for it. — Christoffer
Positive and negative in this context have to do with what bias is as a function. For fast navigation through reality, avoiding dangers; being able to go down a street and not constantly getting hit by other people, or cars; or being able to reach a destination on that street because your mind summarizes information in a way that helps you find what you are looking for. For this, bias has a positive effect on your function as a human with cognition.
But when you are conducting critical thinking, that same bias process that helps you on the street will be negative on your ability to objectively reach conclusions that are valid outside of your subjective preferences (which is the entire point of critical thinking to reach past). Critical thinking requires you to not summarize information based on your unconscious preferences or pattern recognition systems. So for critical thinking to function, you need methods of bypassing biases in your conceptualization. It is the entire point of unbiased critical thinking. — Christoffer
. This goes back to the discussion about the erosion of the idea of an animating cosmic purpose. — Wayfarer
I had in mind something like dharma - which is at once ‘purpose’, ‘law’ and ‘duty’. If described as ‘cosmic’, it is on the basis that human beings are microcosms - the universe in miniature. So individuals realising their purpose - if they do it truly, in accordance with moral principles - just is a way in which the cosmos realises its purpose. — Wayfarer
Elites don't want it known how people are manipulated. — praxis
For just one example, industrial food producers exploit our 'basic instincts and drives' for profit, dishing out unhealthy foods that lead to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc. People eat it up anyway. This has been going on since the beginning of civilization and is only getting worse as time goes on. This is completely normal. It is also completely irrational. — praxis
Actually, there's evidence that states were only initially successful in forming where people could not easily escape, because of geography or other local conditions. A lifestyle of agricultural work, disease, and war wasn't so attractive, as one might imagine. — praxis
I just don't get the dichotomy. It's also odd because animals aren't capable of heinous acts that humans knowingly perform every day. — praxis
This is a false distinction. All values are derived from subjects, therefore fundamentally subjective. There is no base difference here, that's why they are both called "values". Quantitative values, like 2, 4, 6, are no different in principle from moral values. The fact that quantitative values have a wider range of acceptability than most moral values is not sufficient to warrant a separate category. What would be arbitrary would be any proposed to principle of separation. — Metaphysician Undercover
nothing has any inherent value of good or bad, these are all judgements that we make. So this is irrelevant. What is relevant is that to judge something as neutral, and then also judge it as bad, is to contradict yourself. — Metaphysician Undercover
So this would be an example of the first sense, what I called the true sense of neutral. If we say a falling rock is neither good nor bad, and it could never be bad or good, no matter what it happens to do in this act, and so we have a true neutrality. — Metaphysician Undercover
If the effect of gravity (the rock falling) is sometimes positive and sometimes negative, then we cannot say that the gravity is truly neutral (#1) because whether gravity is good or bad in specific instances is contingent on how we judge its effects as good or bad. If gravity is truly neutral (#1) then the rock falling is always neither good nor bad, and only a person's actions relative to this event are judged as good or bad. — Metaphysician Undercover
Two questions I can ask myself about cosmic purpose:
1. Is it possible that there is no cosmic purpose?
2. Would life be worth living, or would human existence have value, if there were no cosmic purpose?
I answer yes to both. I think it follows that there wouldn't be much point in arguing for a cosmic purpose even if I personally felt there was one, since I would still admit that I could be wrong. Unless I wanted to advocate a myth, i.e., a noble lie. — Jamal
The point being, if I can act according to a social contract through self-control with the intent of having interactions that create a beneficial atmosphere in a group, then I should be able to step up the game and act on more self-control in thinking about complex concepts through bypassing my biological shortcomings in cognition. The key is high-level introspection. — Christoffer
There are such wonders in just accepting things as they are and no one seems to even talk in those terms anywhere.
It is also risky to focus the mind's eye on some grand purpose or meaning beyond everything because it loses track of the ball. It makes people apathetic about caring about the things that are right in front of them. Like trying to solve the problems in this world that threaten this world and the well-being of its inhabitants. If people stopped dreaming about some grander purpose, we might just find that we have a purpose in caring for what we can care for, for the sake of us and the world we live in. — Christoffer
In any case, while I would say philosophy played a significant role in me personally losing my religion, I'm skeptical towards the idea that philosophy plays more of a role in undermining religious belief than it does in sustaining religious beliefs. — wonderer1
You still don't understand the difference between a neutral thing and how a neutral thing can generate bad outcomes in specific circumstances. Even when I try to explain it like if I did so to a child, you still just continue your confirmation bias on this topic.. — Christoffer
The rock falling is neutral, the rock falling ON YOU is the specific case in which it is bad FOR YOU. — Christoffer
This is about the difference between human arbitrary values and non-human values of something. — Christoffer
A rock falling ON YOU, means that your well-being, your emotions, and your entity as a human being has become part of an event and IN THIS CONTEXT, the rock falling on you is "bad" for you because the arbitrary value is applicable for the human involved. — Christoffer
attempts to explain are incoherent. — Metaphysician Undercover
Obviously, if you judge the rock falling on you as bad for you, then you cannot without contradiction judge the rock falling as neutral. — Metaphysician Undercover
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