So your claim is that things are thus-and-so and so must always be thus-and-so.

But that does not tell us what to choose. At best it is to pretend that we have no choices. And so it leaves the whole issue of what we ought do unaddressed.

And in the end, that is most unsatisfying.

Nor have you shown why we ought adopt - what is it, a "powerlaw thermodynamic balance" over a "Gaussian balance of a no-growth". — Banno

Why would I have to treat these as antithetical rather than complementary?

You haven't even said clearly if you view equal and fair as different, let alone exactly what that difference might be.

So yes, you are being tiresome. Let's hear what you case actually is here. Do the work. Use your words. Stop deflecting.

So your claim is that things are thus-and-so and so must always be thus-and-so. — Banno

Nope. That is just you making shit up after I specified that I was talking about systems that grow, evolve and change ... as is possible in a metaphyical paradigm based on thermodynamical self-organisation.

You can play the dunce and pretend you can't follow what is plainly said. But then don't get upset by finding that hat being planted on your head.

My own non-religious philosophical worldview is based on the notion of a "self-organizing logic" that serves as both Cause and Coordinator of the physical and meta-physical (e.g. mental) aspects of the world. For material objects, that "logic" can be summarized as the Laws of Thermodynamics : Energy ->->-> Entropy --- order always devolves into disorder. And yet, the Big Bang has somehow produced a marvelous complex cosmos instead of just a puff of smoke. — Gnomon

This is why I thought Apo's approach might appeal to you. I hope that I've shown that how things are is not sufficient to tell us how they might be, and that there are broader issues here.

I've already answered over a dozen posts this morning alone, and have five more in my "in tray", so please forgive my terseness... :wink:

, , back to spitting.

You do not do yourself a service.

All you've shown is that if determinism is the case, if no one could ever have done otherwise than what they have done, because all events without exception are completely pre-determined by antecedent events, then there is no rational justification for morality. However, if humans are determined to have morality, then they will have morality, rational justification be damned.

But is determinism the case? How would we know? If humans are truly free, there is no guarantee that that freedom is analyzable. If freedom were analyzable in causal terms it would not be freedom.

You do not do yourself a service. — Banno

Enough with the bully tactics meant to show that your audience stands with you in judgement of me. Either give proper answers to fair questions or bog off.

Enough with the bully tactics — apokrisis

:rofl:

Yep.

I might add that, even if determinism is true, what we do next is still undone... and so we do not know what we will do. The choice remains to be made.

And so, the need to examine what we ought do, remains.

And so, the need to examine what we ought do, remains. — Banno

:100:

So to draw a line from physics to moral choices is a complex and evolving tale, but perfectly doable.

My argument here is that to start the discussion, you first need to realise that we are indeed already caught in a choice between two poles of the "distribution game".

In one panel of Banal's diptych is everyone standing on the equality of a ground that never changes for anyone. The other panel represents the "fairness" of everyone being allowed as many boxes as take their fancy.

Assumed is that the world has some supply of boxes in the first place. And this particular world as pictured further assumes that only three boxes are enough to make everyone equally happy so long as the said boxes are distributed with the "fairness" of a maximum inequality.

So much to unpack as so much has been already assumed in the parable of the three boxes. As usual Bang-on pretends something is so obviously true it needs no further explication on his part. And as usual, he could not be more wrong. — apokrisis

I can spell out what I think it means -- I don't think it's very deep. I think it's comparing two versions of equality -- the equality of opportunity and the equality of outcomes.

I don't think it's much deeper than that, though. And if it needs be deeper then that's perfectly fine, but the question has less to do with the set-up -- boxes, firms, ownership, whatever -- and more to do with the question "How do we draw a line from physics to moral choices?" -- if it's doable, then can we do it?

Or is the statement of two sides enough to demonstrate that physics can draw a line to moral choices? What does this "drawing a line" consistent in?

Any scenario will do -- I'd be interested in hearing how you go from physics to ethics (as generally I don't think it can be done)

So a description of how things are, even if complete, does not tell us what we ought to do about it. — Banno

Yes. That's the role of Philosophy, not Science. As you noted, we will never have a complete comprehensive understanding of "how things are", or of ding an sich. All we ever know of the "real" world is the subjective sensations of our bodies, and the imagery (ideas) in our minds. But, without "objective facts", such as the contributions of physical Science, we might never be able to communicate from one mind to another.

The Facts of Science are intended to represent a hypothetical universal or god's view of "how things are". They may also be postulated as-if they are the common human experience. Unfortunately, the universal language of Science is Mathematics. Which is so abstract and idealized as to be incomprehensible to those who are not mathematically inclined. That's why a parent's smack on the rump of an unruly child is a directly sensible lesson, that can be easily understood as "you ought not to do that". It's close to a universal philosophical language. :wink:

I would not describe myself as an "immaterialist". I've argued that what are sometimes called abstract concepts are better understood as institutional facts. They manifest our intentions, so to speak. The "our" here is important. And the issues involved are complex. — Banno

Is that an indirect way of saying that you identify as a Materialist? The term I used was "immanentist", so your discussion of "immaterialist" misses the philosophical issue of Immanence vs Transcendence. I borrowed the term from another poster ; understanding it to mean something more like "realist" vs Idealist, or even "materialist" vs spiritualist in a different context. In other words, there is nothing --- no minds, no ideas, no spirits, no souls, no gods, and no philosophical metaphors --- that are not of this world : i.e. transcendent, hence not subject to verification or falsification. However, some Facts of Science (e.g. quantum quarks) are also institutional, and must be taken on Faith by those who are not members of the institution. :smile:

Immanentism :
any of several theories according to which God or an abstract mind or spirit pervades the world.
Note --- for this thread, I equate this term with "anti-supernatural", meaning that there is nothing out of this physical world. And "meta-physics" is sometimes interpreted as anti-immanent.

Institutional Facts :
In terms of Searle's theory, the facts he is puzzled by are institutional facts, i.e. facts created by assignment, performed by collective intentionality, of an agentive function of non-causal type to an object.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-0589-0_18
Note --- This is over my head, but it sounds like a reference to church dogma about such non-entities as The Trinity. You can't see it, or even understand it, you just have to believe it. Ironically, a three-flavored Quark is a sort of Trinity.

But Janus, morality may have no rational justification whether determinism is true or not. I think it evident to all that if determinism is true, morality makes no sense.

Yes, I agree with your second paragraph. It seems to me that free will may not even be conceivable when thinking of a deterministic universe.

So what will you do about it? What will you do next?

It remains that you must choose.

But Janus, morality may have no rational justification whether determinism is true or not. — NotAristotle

If determinism is not true and we are somehow radically free to choose then on that assumption morality would be rationally justified.

Regardless, as @Banno says

It remains that you must choose. — Banno

Yep. In a perhaps counterintuitive sense, determinism and free will are irrelevant to ethics, if ethics is considered as the study of what we ought do.

I can spell out what I think it means -- I don't think it's very deep. I think it's comparing two versions of equality -- the equality of opportunity and the equality of outcomes. — Moliere

That’s right. Which you can see is putting us into the frame of being growth predicated organisms. And yet then confusing things by pretending that there are sufficient boxes to go around to achieve every one’s growth goals.

This is a metaphysics of infinite human potential without entropic constraints. It is the very modern worldview of a romantic/technocratic age where we can have our heaven on Earth rather than having to wait for the release of death.

It is a surprisingly toxic ethics when you dig into it.

Any scenario will do -- I'd be interested in hearing how you go from physics to ethics (as generally I don't think it can be done) — Moliere

But my systems view doesn’t draw one way lines. That is the reductionist expectation where reality is just a tale of bottom-up material construction.

The systems view says reality is a growth process in which a stable existence arises from a complementary balance of two polar opposites. It is dialectical. A system is formed by its lived interaction between its top-down constraints and its bottom-up freedoms. Global constraints shape the local freedoms that then in their turn - statistically, on the whole - reconstruct that prevailing state of constraint.

So a neoliberal political structure is a mindset that constrains the youthful mind in a way that is intended to shape that person as an entrepreneur. We are encouraged to take risks (and incur debt) so as to reap the self-actualising rewards.

The entropic cost of a planet of entrepreneurs is left out of this mindset. The success of a society is literally being measured in GDP - where tearing down things Is equivalent in value to the GDP involved in building them up.

But still, this can work for at least one or two generation of humans. We have a system that limits the choices of its parts so that their free action is ensured to be of the kind that rebuilds the system as it stands. At least to a statistically constrained degree.

This is the evolutionary algorithm in a nutshell. A genetic template that produces enough direction to rebuild the living body while also producing enough trait variation to incorporate the changes that work.

Entrepreneurship celebrates failure as taking a chance is even more important if you want to grow your lived world at an ever faster rate.

Conservative politics favours the other end of this risk/reward setting. So the constraints become more obvious, the agency more clearly “ethically” restricted in definite directions.

So the line here is not from some reductionist notion of physics or thermodynamic science to the human self-creation of utopias on Earth. It is a reframing of the whole tired field of classical ethics with its is/ought debates that arose at the intersection of the scientific revolution and its romantic anti-deterministic response.

It seems there is a rational debate to be had with is/ought safely demarcating ethics as its own cool little social enterprise, predicated on the open infinity of human potential. But yeah, nah. Times have moved on.

Yes, "irrelevant" because we just can't answer the question regarding determinsim vs free will.

...it sounds like a reference to church dogma about such non-entities as The Trinity. You can't see it, or even understand it, you just have to believe it. Ironically, a three-flavored Quark is a sort of Trinity. — Gnomon

That's a bit of a misapprehension. Institutional facts are not mythical, transcendent or metaphorical. They are common everyday things like money, property, keeping promises and playing football.

This piece of paper counts as five dollars; this land counts as your property; this expression counts as undertaking an obligation; putting the ball in the goal counts as scoring a goal.

The physical thing has uses attached to it in accord with our shared intent.

There's a bunch of things in your post with which I disagree. So

Is that an indirect way of saying that you identify as a Materialist? — Gnomon

No, but it depends what you mean by "materialist".

ding an sich — Gnomon

I don't think this notion can be made coherent

...god's view of "how things are"... — Gnomon

I don't think science looks for the gods-eye view from nowhere, but the general view from anywhere - Einstein's Principle of Relativity.
But maybe in other threads?

I think it a boxed beetle.

:up:

But my systems view doesn’t draw one way lines. That is the reductionist expectation where reality is just a tale of bottom-up material construction.

The systems view says reality is a growth process in which a stable existence arises from a complementary balance of two polar opposites. It is dialectical. A system is formed by its lived interaction between its top-down constraints and its bottom-up freedoms. Global constraints shape the local freedoms that then in their turn - statistically, on the whole - reconstruct that prevailing state of constraint. — apokrisis

Let's try to answer the titular question with this in mind.

It sounds to me like you'd have to say that the real world is fair and just, and that fairness and justness have a counterpart of some kind. If it's dialectical then how do you intend "complementary balance of two polar opposites"? Mostly interested in what "opposites" are in this.

Are polar opposites are simply the negation of some concept, like Justice/not-Justice, or if Justice is contrasted with injustice, or if Justice stands alone in relation to Fairness?

So if we take Hegel's philosophy we get a dialectic where the negation of the negation does not lead to the original concept, but instead is a process of sublation -- in which case I'd be inclined to think that Justness and Fairness are the teleological ends (top down constraints) and our human choices are the bottom-up freedoms. Or something along those lines.

But in a systems view I imagine that the dialectic must work differently? What is the system? What are the constraints and freedoms that would allow us to say something about the state of the world?

I'm guessing that we'd say something along the lines that you have to accept the good with the bad, so that the world is neither wholly just nor wholly unjust, and the same would go for fairness. Since we're always in a state of growth or becoming it's going to be the case that we'll find ourselves on the side of injustice as well as justice as we progress.

How does that sound?

Is unfairness or injustice really just the product of human action? — L'éléphant

I've been thinking along similar lines since my last reply to ↪Tom Storm

There’s also a sort of latent animism in some of our expressions in that we do attribute intent to things around us as well as to people. — Banno — Banno

Thanks for responding.

I am under the impression that we act on something -- in this case, out of our sense of justice or fairness -- because WE see the situation as unjust. So this much is clear. But as you and I know already, not only we act on unjust policies, treatment, and abuses by people in our society; we also do something about natural calamities and help those who are affected.

WE interpret the first as unjust or unfair (and we do something to remedy the situation), but what about the second scenario? Why do we save those people who are in danger by virtue of natural calamities and diseases if not out of moral judgment as well? There is no intent (nature has no evil intent) in the second, but we also do something about it. In truth, our moral sense works the same way whether the situation is caused by human action or by naturally occurring cluster fuck!

The only way in which we can "address those that are the products of the natural world" is by human action. — Banno

No objection there.

So does the sense of injustice include, or perhaps derive from, a desire to make things better? Then it makes not difference if the source of the injustice is a human or a cancer, the response is a desire to make things fair?

It sounds to me like you'd have to say that the real world is fair and just, — Moliere

But in what sense? What context? Can you define these terms as you contextually understand them.

The slippery use of language shows folk are uncertain of their metaphysical assumptions. We have physicalist terms like equal and balance being thrown around with it remaining unclear how they either complement or challenge these other idealist terms such as fair, just and good.

So are folk building in the strong division that thus resist its ontological bridging? Or do they assume the opposite that Nature is a functional whole and so separation is part of the game that leads to eventual reconciliation as a dialectical unity of opposites?

My approach is the usual one of hearing folk agonising about some puzzling duality and then explaining that this is merely a symptom of a greater holism – the triadic ontology of a holomorphic system.

If we are concerned that the Cosmos appears in some way fundamentally unequal and unfair, while humans have this idealistic potential for understanding fairness and constructing equality, then that dilemma is the place to start a larger ontologial reframing.

We can know that our terms make proper sense once they apply comfortably to both the polar extremes involved – from the most brute physics to the most enlightened philosophy.

What do balance and equality look like at the sociocultural level of human "morality". And what do fair and just look like at the cosmological level of thermodynamics?

We are getting somewhere when we can see they are polarities that encode a spectrum of state that constitute "the world inbetween" their limiting extremes.

This is the power of metaphysical logic. It dichotomises to arrive at a unity of opposites. Mind and matter denote to opposing limits. A useful distinction which gives us the measure of all things inbetween to the degree they seem either more mindful or more material. Our definition of terms is precise to the degree it has been framed as a logical reciprocal relation.

Mind = 1/matter in being the least materially bound condition we can imagine. And matter is likewise 1/mind in being the least mindful level of any conceivable real world process.

Anyone who cares about their philosophy would make the effort to ground their use of terms in this dialectical fashion. They wouldn't just grunt and gesture – as if pointing is enough and no explaining is required.

Proper definition is counterfactual and must point to what is present in terms of what is absent. But how does the grunter and gesticulator point to that which is the absent? What use is such a person on a philosophy forum?

Are polar opposites are simply the negation of some concept, like Justice/not-Justice, or if Justice is contrasted with injustice, or if Justice stands alone in relation to Fairness? — Moliere

Right then. The work begins. And perhaps some terms are so soaked in idealism (or physicalism) that there is no rescuing them?

I myself tend towards systems jargon like constraints and freedoms, plasticity and stability, vague and crisp, chance and necessity, etc, etc. I already inhabit a dialectical paradigm where work has been done to create robust reciprocal distinctions. There are a ton of terms that bridge the divide that reductionism creates. Those in system science speak their own language for a good reason. That is how they can share the same general mindset as a community.

If the talk turned to justice, this would be understood as some kind of optimising balancing act – as illustrated by a set of scales. Differences can be converted to equalities. A pound of cheese can be measured in terms of its equivalent – some sum of money being what matters to the shop keeper with physical goods to trade for hard cash.

Weighing the value of goods is prosaic. The exchange of money acts as the most impersonal way of establishing a biosemiotic connection between a society and its entropification. Definitions of a fair, just, balanced and equal deal seem to be synonyms of each other as the gap being bridged is so habitualised and ritual. Just read the price and pay the money. Or don't.

But then where we get to "moral" decisions that weigh the individual and their actions against their society and its norms, the weighing of the scales becomes a lot more difficult and complex. Pile up the sin on one side and what then is the good that can be placed on the other?

Is it an eye for an eye or juvenile rehabilitation? Does a crime of passion deserve an automatic market discount?

You have to see through these abstracted notions – fair, just, balanced, equal – to discover the pragmatic complexities they are supposed to encode. And that is even simply in the everyday human social context let alone when someone poses the very broad metaphysical question of whether the real world in general is "fair and just".

So if we take Hegel's philosophy we get a dialectic where the negation of the negation does not lead to the original concept, but instead is a process of sublation — Moliere

I find Hegel pretty clumsy. Peirce tried to tidy him up.

I think what needs to be added to the dialectic is the trialectical arc of rational development – the steps from the firstness of vagueness, to the secondness of dichotomy, to the thirdness of hierarchy.

So we start just with a pure unbroken "everythingness" that is thus also a "nothingness". Counterfactuality ain't even born. We just have an Apeiron – an unstructured potential.

Then there is a symmetry-breaking or dichotomisation. The hot separates from the cold in original Greek abstraction. It may start as a more seed of difference but then feeds on itself to become a general polarity. If we break the symmetry of 1 as the identity element, then we get both infinity and the infinitesimal as its logical extremes. Shrinking and growing arrive eventually at their own complementary bounding limits. Infinity = 1/infinitesimal and infinitesimal = 1/infinity.

So the antithetical arises not as thesis and its sublation – a temporal order – but is present right from the start as the other side of thesis in a more spatialised sense. It is already a pair of directions ready to unfold in mutual fashion.

But yes, in general the systems view is dialectic. But if you start in a pure vagueness of a structureless Apeiron, then you are thinking more thermodynamically as it is all about symmetry-breaking itself and not already into the realm of dyadic counterfactuality – Peircean secondness.

The universal and the particular as logic-grounding concepts have to arise from "somewhere" that is their own ground. And a logical vagueness is how to get that triadic game going. Peirce defined vagueness as that to which the PNC doesn't (yet) apply. (And generality as that to which the LEM fails to apply).

So this is Hegel+, perhaps. Sublation is what an action reveals by managing to leave that further somethingness behind. But from a fully relativistic point of view, attention is drawn to the mutality or logical reciprocality of the deal. Both are revealing their other as a "leaving behind". One isn't the first move, the other the second. It is a dependent co-arising.

Justness and Fairness are the teleological ends (top down constraints) and our human choices are the bottom-up freedoms. Or something along those lines. — Moliere

The situation is hierarchical and so local~global is the most general view of it as a dichotomous symmetry breaking. We have the community as the social level of mindfulness and rationality. We have the individual as the local degree of freedom – who is in fact having to juggle social diktat and personal biology as a microcosm of the same juggling act that society is having to balance its more general ecological equation.

Both global constraints and local freedoms are "being mindful" or making intelligent choices about the same basic issue – staying alive by maintaining an entropic capacity for running repairs and reproducing growth. But their "cogent" scales are as different as possible. Individuals must be able to make split second choices. Communities might prefer to remain essentially recognisable and unchanged for as far back and far forward as they can remember or imagine.

Can fairness and justice be made terms that fit neatly into this kind of systems perspective? You can see that the local and global view might be quite different.

If I am a rich kid and my envious schoolmates force me to share my lunch "equally and fairly", whose perspective carries the moral absolutism? Am I being robbed or socialised? Your justice could be my injustice. So you need a model of social systems that can weigh the scales in some balanced fashion. Which is where I came in with that point about Gaussian vs powerlaw distributions.

It is not just about whether thermodynamics can apply to such scenarios, it is about knowing enough statistical mechanics to understand the dichotomies that polarise a thermodynamical point of view.

Just take climate change. We are already having many more extreme weather events than the models predicted. But the models were too Gaussian and the reality more powerlaw. A straight line was drawn and this assumed linearity proved to harbour more non-linearity and feedback than allowed for.

Science hasn't even had the final word on science let alone ethics. But that doesn't mean it ain't thundering down the line.

I'm guessing that we'd say something along the lines that you have to accept the good with the bad, so that the world is neither wholly just nor wholly unjust, and the same would go for fairness. Since we're always in a state of growth or becoming it's going to be the case that we'll find ourselves on the side of injustice as well as justice as we progress.

How does that sound? — Moliere

I think that is a soft answer. We do have the power of choice and can vote for better. Back in the 1960s, science told us about all the terminal 2050 problems of climate change, peak energy, overpopulation, ecology destruction. The exponentialising and even super-expontialising of the growth curves had to be matched by their own exponentially-growing antidotes. Just to get back into a powerlaw regime, energy efficiency had to reduce demand just as fast as energy consumption was increasing it.

Computer chips are at least a technology hitched to such a curve and so are a pretty sustainable growth ambition. But most other things, like food, stable weather, cars, clean environment, are not.

But that is the world we are making – which is arguably unnatural to the degree it is unregulated growth and not the kind of long-run ecological growth where we have had a gradual increase in entropification in terms of biology climbing its ladder of organismic complexity.

So again, the OP question has to make sense by its context being defined. And everyone just jumps to the idealism of the Platonic kind of fair, balanced, equal, just and good that inhabits a realm of contextless abstraction – then wonders why they can't draw any kind of line back to the real world that must ground these as pragmatically useful distinctions.

But in what sense? What context? Can you define these terms as you contextually understand them. — apokrisis

In the context of a thread on TPF asking for a general reflection :)

So, yes, I think you're right to say:

the very broad metaphysical question of whether the real world in general is "fair and just". — apokrisis

Is the question posed, and even highlighting difficulties in answering -- or highlighting possible ways of thinking about the question -- is enough of an answer.

So, is the world fair and just?

I'm going to highlight where I see you answering the question more directly, whereas before what I was reading looked to be so different from the question I was struggling to see how it addressed it -- basically it seemed that is/ought ought to apply, and you were firmly coming down on an "is", but now I'm seeing the possibility of a bit more.

We are getting somewhere when we can see they are polarities that encode a spectrum of state that constitute "the world inbetween" their limiting extremes.

This is the power of metaphysical logic. It dichotomises to arrive at a unity of opposites. Mind and matter denote to opposing limits. A useful distinction which gives us the measure of all things inbetween to the degree they seem either more mindful or more material. Our definition of terms is precise to the degree it has been framed as a logical reciprocal relation. — apokrisis

Proper definition is counterfactual and must point to what is present in terms of what is absent. — apokrisis

Right then. The work begins. And perhaps some terms are so soaked in idealism (or physicalism) that there is no rescuing them?

I myself tend towards systems jargon like constraints and freedoms, plasticity and stability, vague and crisp, chance and necessity, etc, etc. I already inhabit a dialectical paradigm where work has been done to create robust reciprocal distinctions. There are a ton of terms that bridge the divide that reductionism creates. Those in system science speak their own language for a good reason. That is how they can share the same general mindset as a community.

If the talk turned to justice, this would be understood as some kind of optimising balancing act – as illustrated by a set of scales. Differences can be converted to equalities. A pound of cheese can be measured in terms of its equivalent – some sum of money being what matters to the shop keeper with physical goods to trade for hard cash.

Weighing the value of goods is prosaic. The exchange of money acts as the most impersonal way of establishing a biosemiotic connection between a society and its entropification. Definitions of a fair, just, balanced and equal deal seem to be synonyms of each other as the gap being bridged is so habitualised and ritual. Just read the price and pay the money. Or don't.

But then where we get to "moral" decisions that weigh the individual and their actions against their society and its norms, the weighing of the scales becomes a lot more difficult and complex. Pile up the sin on one side and what then is the good that can be placed on the other?

Is it an eye for an eye or juvenile rehabilitation? Does a crime of passion deserve an automatic market discount?

You have to see through these abstracted notions – fair, just, balanced, equal – to discover the pragmatic complexities they are supposed to encode. And that is even simply in the everyday human social context let alone when someone poses the very broad metaphysical question of whether the real world in general is "fair and just". — apokrisis

's post strikes me as someone who does not have abstracted notions, and is wanting to see the limits of thinking on the subject, so this is a perfect sort of response, isn't it? Rather than my first guess, it sounds to me like you're saying the question cannot be answered without first answering some other things, such as the definitions we're using in the question or the context in which the question is being asked, and it cannot really be answered "in general" -- one has to go through the dialectical process, and as such, engage in the dialectic rather than ask for a final answer that let's us check a box "yes" or "no" -- "just" or "unjust"

***

Now, in my context, I'll just flat out answer that the world isn't just, but I'm a Marxist so there's that :D

Is that an indirect way of saying that you identify as a Materialist? — Gnomon
No, but it depends what you mean by "materialist". — Banno

OK. What do you mean by "materialist" or "materialism"? Is there a definition of those terms that you would apply to your own worldview? For example, I am a Materialist in the sense that I take the existence of sensible Substance for granted, for all practical purposes. However, for philosophical (theoretical) purposes the term is sometimes taken to an extreme : THE sole fundamental substance. Which no longer makes sense, since Einstein's equation of Matter with Energy and Math.

The Hard position of Materialism makes another thing-I-take-for-granted inexplicable : my own sentient Mind : the only thing I know intimately. If you assume that massy matter is the sole universal substance, whence the invisible massless things (e.g. ideas ; appearances) that we imagine to represent various parts of the non-self world? Chalmers called that question "the hard problem". But materialists call it "irrelevant". To me, it seems that Energy (E=MC^2) is a more likely precursor of both Life and Mind. Is there a philosophical monist position for an Energist? No, I'm not an Energist, but that might be closer to the truth. :smile:

Modern Materialism :
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states, are results of material interactions of material things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
Note --- "interactions" = exchanges of energy. Interrelations = exchanges of essence (ratios ; proportions).

ding an sich — Gnomon
I don't think this notion can be made coherent — Banno

To me, the notion of ding an sich, as a philosophical essence, seems coherent (rational) enough. Of course, materialist Science doesn't do essences. So the ding seems to be a Philosophy thing. That may be because essence, qualia, property are categories of our rational analysis of the perceived world. :nerd:

Why things may not be what they seem to be :
The world as it is before mediation Kant calls the noumenal world, or, in a memorable phrase, Das Ding an sich, a phrase which literally means “The thing in itself”, but whose sense would be more accurately caught by translating it as “the thing (or world) as it really is” (as distinct from how it appears to us). . . .
Kant was sure that there was a great deal more to it than that. He held that thinking in terms of causes was not a philosophical aberration, but arises out of the very essence of the way the human mind is constituted, the essence of the way it is compelled to reason.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/31/Kant_and_the_Thing_in_Itself

Anyone who cares about their philosophy would make the effort to ground their use of terms in this dialectical fashion. They wouldn't just grunt and gesture – as if pointing is enough and no explaining is required.

Proper definition is counterfactual and must point to what is present in terms of what is absent. But how does the grunter and gesticulator point to that which is the absent? What use is such a person on a philosophy forum? — apokrisis

Ask not what use a person is, but how beautiful the uses being pursued are and whether or not we ought to change the uses we're pursing. There's the pragmatic ground of active values, and there's the possibility of changing what we pursue: the beautiful allows us to say "while this is useful-for, I think we ought do something else" (or, perhaps, the ethical). I think it's the latter question that physics cannot give a good answer to, though of course -- in the dialectical sense -- one has to know things about the world we're in in order to make pragmatic choices, and values, in turn, constrain the world in the sense that we'll only find what we're looking for (and pass over what we're not), and many a metaphysician is in fact speaking about an ethic and vice-versa.

I find Hegel pretty clumsy. Peirce tried to tidy him up. — apokrisis

I find Hegel frustrating, but he's still sort of the guy to go to when talking about dialectic and process -- it's not the dialectic of Plato, but a process whereby one doesn't have a worked out syllogism but rather the syllogism is placed within a context which starts a dialectic (or, really, the syllogism is replaced by process, and one goes from one idea to the next in a dialectic)

He's very open to interpretation, and inspired all kinds of philosophy after him so he's a good reference point for thinking through these problems of process and big systems and what-not -- a touchstone, more or less, for you and I to think through dialectics. In a lot of ways I see his system as the last Big System really worth considering (because not even Marx's system is really complete, exactly, and Marxism spans across many writers -- but Hegel really did just write The Big Idealist Philosophical System, so if that's the goal of philosophy he's kind of the go-to)

So when you say:

So this is Hegel+, perhaps. Sublation is what an action reveals by managing to leave that further somethingness behind. But from a fully relativistic point of view, attention is drawn to the mutality or logical reciprocality of the deal. Both are revealing their other as a "leaving behind". One isn't the first move, the other the second. It is a dependent co-arising. — apokrisis

I'm good with that. You can argue for co-arising in Hegel, as well. Your paragraph talking about Being and Nothingness sounds very much like Hegel in The Science of Logic -- so I mention him as a touchstone only, and Hegel+ -- so I believe -- is what every interpreter of Hegel has in mind :D

Science hasn't even had the final word on science let alone ethics. But that doesn't mean it ain't thundering down the line. — apokrisis

Heh, I don't see science as coming close to understanding science or ethics. Science understanding science is basically the 20th century philosophy of science -- what could be more consistent? -- and I believe it fails when it comes to ethical questions. I sometimes wonder about dithering is/ought, but then -- like The Subject -- it seems to come back around even if we "pass over" the distinction.

And everyone just jumps to the idealism of the Platonic kind of fair, balanced, equal, just and good that inhabits a realm of contextless abstraction – then wonders why they can't draw any kind of line back to the real world that must ground these as pragmatically useful distinctions. — apokrisis

Good point. Though I'm fine with it being useless, :D -- in the end I'm not a pragmatist.

↪Gnomon's post strikes me as someone who does not have abstracted notions, and is wanting to see the limits of thinking on the subject, so this is a perfect sort of response, isn't it? — Moliere

Since I have no formal training in philosophy, 's posts are often over my head. So, in that sense, I may not have extremely "abstracted notions". But Fairness and Justice are fairly commonsense notions aren't they? Yet some posts make it more complicated, by further abstracting the notion of what kind of world (Hegelian, Marxist) can be judged morally.

Perhaps, as you said, it would be helpful to place "limits" on our thinking : to define our terms. One definition of "world" in this context might be simply "human culture", as the relevant element of ethical concern. I'll leave it to you and Apo to define whatever abstraction you are arguing about. :joke:

Since I have no formal training in philosophy, ↪apokrisis's posts are often over my head. So, in that sense, I may not have extremely "abstracted notions". But Fairness and Justice are fairly commonsense notions aren't they? — Gnomon

They kind of are, until you start to get into the details it seems.

They're kind of like "Freedom" -- everyone loves freedom, but wars are fought over which version of Freedom is going to rule.

Perhaps, as you said, it would be helpful to place "limits" on our thinking : to define our terms. One definition of "world" in this context might be simply "human culture", as the relevant element of ethical concern. — Gnomon

That definitely narrows the scope down from some kind of ontological Fairness or Justice, but there might be some difficulties here still.

What would your commonsense notion of Fairness or Justice look like, within this human world? Is it specifiable, exactly?