Heh. So Hegel's metaphysic is a good way to ensure the continuation of philosophy professors? :D — Moliere

The slobbering slave is living proof. (Too rude? I enjoy Žižek)

Heh, I think he paints himself the clown so it's all in good taste. I also like Žižek, though find him frustrating for similar reasons.

What does the job of organising our behaviour in some useful and self-sustaining way? — apokrisis

:up: I think that is what it all comes down to. Philosophy should be about how best to live. Whatever does not inform that, however interesting and creative it might be, is just a diversion in the form of speculation.

My view is that you can't science your way into future social organizations — Moliere

What was the Enlightenment all about then?

The question isn't "What social purpose was that existentialism shaped to serve?" but rather "How shall we shape this existentialism?" — Moliere

Well exactly. And are you planning to do that individually or collectively? Do you expect it could be done collectively and not hierarchically? Is it some form of evidence here that you can’t even advance anarchism or Marxism as politics that achieve their stated in advance goals?

If one ought not piss oneself does that not require one ensures he/she is not pissing into the wind?

Nature created human social order in its image. How you piss about starts from that thermodynamic foundation. The rest is the unfolding of history as an ever-enlarging and hierarchically complexifying growth project. With its own grumbling chorus of dissent.

Agreed. The sad thing is that philosophy would now seek to reject such a totalising discourse? The very idea of a single way to live that would constrain us all as if we lived under actual environmental and thermodynamic constraints!

What was the Enlightenment all about then? — apokrisis

Oh, the easy questions, eh? :D

Maybe I should say: I don't believe, at present, we can science our way into future social organizations, and I'm skeptical of the attempt due to the many attempts thus far.

I'd say the Enlightenment is over. I'm not sure where we're at now, but what could succeed in the Enlightenment as done so and what couldn't could do so again -- but that doesn't mean it's the only philosophical project in town either.

Well exactly. And are you planning to do that individually or collectively? Do you expect it could be done collectively and not hierarchically? Is it some form of evidence here that you can’t even advance anarchism or Marxism as politics that achieve their stated in advance goals?

If one ought not piss oneself does that not require one ensures he/she is not pissing into the wind?

Nature created human social order in its image. How you piss about starts from that thermodynamic foundation. The rest is the unfolding of history as an ever-enlarging and hierarchically complexifying growth project. With its own grumbling chorus of dissent. — apokrisis

To take it back down a few notches of abstraction: Did Martin Luther King begin with thermodynamics? No of course not, but surely he knew something about how social organisms work. Or is everything he wrote and did parochial in the face of the new science?

The very idea of a single way to live that would constrain us all as if we lived under actual environmental and thermodynamic constraints! — apokrisis

Yes, there would seem to be little hope for us as a species if we don't find such a way.

COMMANDOS: Hear! Hear!

LORETTA: I agree. It's action that counts, not words, and we need action now.

COMMANDOS: Hear! Hear!

REG: You're right. We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches. It's not going to shift one Roman soldier!

FRANCIS: So, let's just stop gabbing on about it. It's completely pointless and it's getting us nowhere!

COMMANDOS: Right!

LORETTA: I agree. This is a complete waste of time. — Monty Python

I gotta make a lasagne.

I'd say the Enlightenment is over. — Moliere

Huh? It's political structures are largely still in place organising the world. Even in the US with all its current corruption and division.

To take it back down a few notches of abstraction: Did Martin Luther King begin with thermodynamics? No of course not, but surely he knew something about how social organisms work. Or is everything he wrote and did parochial in the face of the new science? — Moliere

Were you referencing?

And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (Amen) That's a new definition of greatness.

And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, (Everybody) because everybody can serve. (Amen)

You don't have to have a college degree to serve. (All right) You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve.You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. (Amen)

You only need a heart full of grace, (Yes, sir, Amen) a soul generated by love. (Yes) And you can be that servant.

What ground is King calling upon here then? What balancing structural principle is this ancient Christian wisdom meant to invoke?

Even as religion it resonates. And that is because it is the systems view which you dismiss as "just thermodynamics". King was addressing the gross inequalities his social interest group faced, pointing at a systematic imbalance that a new politics of the US would have to address.

And various technocratic measures were implemented in the US as a result – affirmative action, and end to busing, sensitivity training for law enforcement. Mechanisms designed to achieve outcomes. Even if the headwinds of self-protecting wealth and privilege, not to say engrained social prejudice, made it tough for America to live up to its original founding Enlightenment creed.

I gotta make a lasagne. — Banno

Yep. Time to fire up the thermodynamics and turn that entropy flow on. :fire:

Were you referencing? — apokrisis

No.

Though any other activist would do the job just as well, and I reached for King because he's familiar and a person who, no matter what we say here, did good things. And in order to do good things, so it seems to me, we must know something about the world.

Whatever King said his actions resulted in various good things, so we must accept that King knew something about social organisms since he had real effects upon them that continue on into this day.

At least, I'd suggest that. And so his writings on how to do things become interesting in light of that fact. They do not include thermodynamics as a base of thought to come from, though.

They do not include thermodynamics as a base of thought to come from, though. — Moliere

But he said you don't need good grammar, philosophy or science in general. Just Jesus. Or at least the plain commonsense that Jesus expressed in saying competition must be tempered by cooperation. The social and ecological organising principle that hierarchy theory captures with mathematical crispness.

You keep reaching for this word, thermodynamics, as if it were restricted to the dead realm of gone-to-equlibrium closed systems. But even the Second Law doesn't demand that reality. Prigogine got his 1977 Nobel for proving that and so launched the new age of thermodynamics as dissipative structure and "order out of chaos".

You might have approved of Prigogine as a person.

Born in Moscow at a complicated historical moment ... the family fled what Ilya himself described as “a difficult relationship with the new regime,” ... his attraction to the humanities would be decisive in his turning away from the more practical chemistry chosen by his father and older brother ... and instead seek more philosophical ground.

“Maybe the orientation of my work came from the conflict which arose from my humanist vocation as an adolescent and from the scientific orientation I chose for my university training.”

He was particularly fascinated by the concept of time, which he explored through the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. ... Bergson was known for his rejection of rationalism and science in favour of intuition and subjective experience. But in an age when time was just one variable in equations that could work both ways, the idea of unpredictability that he found in Bergson may have broadened his vision to take a step back and look at physico-chemical natural processes more broadly.

There was another essential ingredient in his cocktail of influences: his mentor and doctoral supervisor, Théophile de Donder, who specialised in thermodynamics.

Prigogine found a limitation in the thermodynamics of his time: it applied only to systems at or near equilibrium. This idealisation of nature left out a wide range of processes, such as the emergence and evolution of life itself, processes that are far from equilibrium and which, because they are irreversible, have a clear direction of the arrow of time, contrary to what occurred in the physical equations used at the time. The thermodynamics of irreversible processes was the subject in which Prigogine continued the work begun by [de Donder], considered the father of this discipline.

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya-prigogine-brought-order-to-chaos/

It is worth keeping an open mind and reading on. Your reaction to the term "thermodynamics" maybe because you view science and scientists as it they were some race apart from their worlds. Your lens is the one set to "scientism" as being dialectical to ... its righteous other.

But he said you don't need good grammar, philosophy or science in general. Just Jesus. Or at least the plain commonsense that Jesus expressed in saying competition must be tempered by cooperation. The social and ecological organising principle that hierarchy theory captures with mathematical crispness. — apokrisis

In history I'd call this "cherry-picking" -- he says this in some context at some point, but what else did he say? What else did he do?

You might have approved of Prigogine as a person. — apokrisis

We definitely sound like kindred spirits :D

It is worth keeping an open mind and reading on. Your reaction to the term "thermodynamics" maybe because you view science and scientists as it they were some race apart from their worlds. Your lens is the one set to "scientism" as being dialectical to ... its righteous other. — apokrisis

My reaction may be due to this. How would you know, though? I agree that keeping an open mind and reading on is worthwhile.

I think the question is more of a: where does the rubber meet the road? Same sort of question Marx receives. If we start from any thermodynamic paper, how do we get to "ought"?

In history I'd call this "cherry-picking" — Moliere

But this was your choice of example. I just followed through with the historical facts. And these seem to tell another story.

I think the question is more of a: where does the rubber meet the road? Same sort of question Marx receives. If we start from any thermodynamic paper, how do we get to "ought"? — Moliere

Yet again you simply ignore that I have already said that your disjunction is my conjunction. Is and ought wouldn't be separate, they would have to be openly complementary or reciprocal under a dichotomising systems logic.

A two-way mutuality is assumed as a condition of them being the larger thing of a causal-strength relation.

The top and bottom levels of a hierarchy must be in support of each other even if they are doing opposite things.

Even Bongo tried to make this point in his homily about corporate management where the board level ought must cash out as the bottom level office manager's is. The boss sets the strategy, the underlings beaver away at the monthly targets.

But in a fast moving world, underlings become closer to the changes that matter. The leisurely decision horizons of the board become a growing problem. Theories of flat hierarchies and the entreprenurial employee become the vogue.

Management science is another department of system theory. Like the rest of the humanities (even if the tap on the door hasn't quite been heard in the dusty forgotten corners of this large ramshackle institution).

Somewhere there are folk still sitting in their stuffed armchairs, digesting a belly of good lunch, basking in golden glow of their 1950s memories when philosophy had banished metaphysics, booted out the continental Marxists along with the irritating scientists too, so that all that counted was having a damn fine wrangle about the meaning of life in plain old ordinary language English.

a model is presumably a model of something. — Banno

That presupposes the separation between the model/construct and the world it attempts to represent. Presumably, from some point outside both of them ;-)

I'd say the Enlightenment is over. — Moliere

I must agree, but with a touch of irony, if it be granted the single most influential textual representation contained an offer of benefit to posterity, and at the same time, the cause of its demise.
————-

….outside both of them….. — Wayfarer

Sorry to intrude, but to say outside both is to invite that pathologically stupid homunculus nonsense, and to some lesser degree, Ryle’s Regress and a Cartesian theater, for which there never was any admission.

All for which sufficient account had already been given….ironically enough…..in that self-same Enlightenment textual representation, which one should hope isn’t so much dead as neglected.

And that ain’t the height of irony, oh nosir-ee, bub!!! Simultaneity….misunderstood if not outright denied in its time as a justifiable albeit purely a priori condition in Enlightenment metaphysics, but subsequently given gasps of epiphanic revelation in post-Enlightenment/pre-proven therefore abstract, physical theory.

But I can dig it, donchaknow. We love our models, don’t we. Model for this, model for that. Model for every-damn-thing. All of which fails miserably, when we try to model the modeling, in which case we usually invoke the principle of sheer parsimony, insofar as the validity of our models is their non-contradictory relation to some empirical condition, re: its use, or what is done with it, when the fact remains any model, empirically validated or otherwise, is only non-contradictory, hence its very validity is even possible, iff its construction is in accordance with a set of rules.

So I now assume Rodin’s posture, and ask however rhetorically…..does it work to combine rule simultaneity with model construction? At worst, such feasibility removes the notion of “outside of” insofar as models and the rules to which all of them must conform are inseparable with respect to time (insert A/B reference as proof here), and from there, at best, it is not contradictory to posit that models and their intellectual constructions are exactly the same.

Kinda cool, though, in the end, when the original question regards fairness and justice, which are, you know…..always in accordance with somebody’s rules.

Dude, "the world" is not an intentional agent so it cannot be "unfair" or "unjust". Stop whining about your category mistake, for fuck's sake, and get on with playing the cards you were dealt as well as you can – get on with living and thriving – or die trying (as per e.g. Laozi, Epicurus, Epictetus, Pyrrho, Montaigne, Spinoza ...) :death: :flower: — 180 Proof

So as usual, you fail to understand what I said and make a strawman of it.
Let's breakdown what I said:

As long as we live in a world not of our making, that often causes great harm to the users and which the users cause great harm to each other, then no, this world isn’t fair and just a priori from any individual instance. No political arrangement will save this fact.

Notice I said "live in the world", NOT the world itself.

I also said "this world isn't fair and just a priori from any individual instance". That is to say, from the human perspective. If you boil it down, it just says that because we didn't choose to be here, the situation humans find themselves in is unfair from the start.

So stop fuckn whining about my whining. For some odd reason, your comments are unnecessarily vitriolic and ad hom.

They also take the least interesting parts of what I am saying and raising it to the main point and attacking that. I guess that's just more strawmen and red herrings.

and get on with playing the cards you were dealt as well as you can – get on with living and thriving – or die trying (as per e.g. Laozi, Epicurus, Epictetus, Pyrrho, Montaigne, Spinoza ...) :death: :flower: — 180 Proof

I will not play into the conspiracy:


I've discussed this before, there are coping mechanisms of acceptance (Stoicism, Taoism et al.) and there are coping mechanisms of rejection (Schopenhauer, Buddhism, et al).

We have gained a consciousness not like the rest of nature. It creates immense burdens. Suffering in the present for other animals, becomes self-knowledge of suffering- suffering on steroids. There is a malignant uselessness hanging around our every decision, goal, desire, and action. The precariousness of contingency, loss, fortune, a fact that we are uniquely and acutely aware of, not just effected by, making it all the much crueler for us.

But this was your choice of example. I just followed through with the historical facts. And these seem to tell another story. — apokrisis

Yeah, but there's a but, but it goes into a digression on the differences between science and history which I'm guessing would diverge the thread from the original topic into, well, just that.

Yet again you simply ignore that I have already said that your disjunction is my conjunction. Is and ought wouldn't be separate, they would have to be openly complementary or reciprocal under a dichotomising systems logic.

A two-way mutuality is assumed as a condition of them being the larger thing of a causal-strength relation.

The top and bottom levels of a hierarchy must be in support of each other even if they are doing opposite things.

Even Bongo tried to make this point in his homily about corporate management where the board level ought must cash out as the bottom level office manager's is. The boss sets the strategy, the underlings beaver away at the monthly targets.

But in a fast moving world, underlings become closer to the changes that matter. The leisurely decision horizons of the board become a growing problem. Theories of flat hierarchies and the entreprenurial employee become the vogue.

Management science is another department of system theory. Like the rest of the humanities (even if the tap on the door hasn't quite been heard in the dusty forgotten corners of this large ramshackle institution). — apokrisis

How am I ignoring what you said? I'm asking a question for how you put it all together: How does the conjunct of is^ought work, in your view?

I must agree, but with a touch of irony, if it be granted the single most influential textual representation contained an offer of benefit to posterity, and at the same time, the cause of its demise. — Mww

I mean every philosophy carries the seeds of its own destruction just by being philosophy :D -- no surprise. (EDIT: Well, maybe a small surprise given The Enlightenment project...)

It's still really interesting stuff and worth pulling from and developing. I just think it, like any philosophy, has limits. (where those limits are... well, that's the philosophical question)

…..every philosophy carries the seeds of its own destruction just by being philosophy. — Moliere

That may very well be, but as far as I’m aware, only one of any real significance puts the very ground of its own destruction in writing.

Gotta appreciate the forthrightness of the author of a philosophy, that says that even if one finds the supporting theory sufficiently justifies one’s own a-HA!!! moments, he’s still more than likely to ignore its lessons in toto.

@Wayfarer

I should have just said ontological idealism generally instead of specifying Berkeley. Berkeley is just the original ontological idealist. Religious/spiritual views sometimes find their philosophical justificatory wing (almost exactly like Sinn Fein and the IRA) embracing ontological idealism. Not that I have anything against that.

And yet you think it is your gotcha… — apokrisis

The point about zombies is not whether or not you believe in them (nobody except Daniel Dennett does), but whether a functionalist account like yours plausibly rules them out. Your account of an organism that models its environment and makes predictions based on that model is good, I like it. But the question of whether such a creature is conscious or not remains open. I see nothing in that account that rules out the creature being a zombie - it seems to me all the functions you have described could just as well occur in a creature with no experiences. Using the word 'zombie' is just a convenient and intuitively accessible way of making the point. And being lazy, I like that. As a theory of the self I think your account is much more plausible.

The point about zombies is not whether or not you believe in them (nobody except Daniel Dennett does), but whether a functionalist account like yours plausibly rules them out. Your account of an organism that models its environment and makes predictions based on that model is good, I like it. But the question of whether such a creature is conscious or not remains open. I see nothing in that account that rules out the creature being a zombie - it seems to me all the functions you have described could just as well occur in a creature with no experiences. Using the word 'zombie' is just a convenient and intuitively accessible way of making the point. And being lazy, I like that. As a theory of the self I think your account is much more plausible. — bert1

The neverending debate between mappers and terrainers.

The point about zombies is not whether or not you believe in them (nobody except Daniel Dennett does)... — bert1

I'm skeptical of the idea that Daniel Dennett believes anything these days, but anyway, that appears to be gratuitious slander.

From Wikipedia:

Some physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett, argue that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible, or that all humans are philosophical zombies;[4][5]

Yeah, I like the enlightenment in a general sense. It's not like I pine for religious institutions to be in charge again, and the enlightenment helped with that transition.

In terms of the OP though it seems that here we are wondering about how to make the real world fair and just while we are also the children of The Enlightenment. It's just that influential that even the appeals that matter changed.

At the time it makes total sense, but now, in light of its various successes, I come to doubt it.

You haven't and Wayfarer hasn't, said what that alternative form of idealism consists in. If it is only that the brain models a world, well I think that is uncontroversial. But to think that what is being modeled exists in its own right seems most plausible to me given all the evidence from our experience as it is given by everday life and by science.

If there are no mind-independent existents and if there is no collective mind to which we are all connected, then how would you explain the fact that we all perceive the same things, including at least some animals? I am yet to see even the beginnings of any such explanation coming from you or Wayfarer. — Janus

Has been explaining his alternative form of idealism on this forum, and in magazine articles, for years. But his Buddhist-based metaphors & analogies do not translate into the vocabulary of Materialism or Physicalism or Scientism. My own worldview has more to do with ancient Plato & Aristotle philosophies, and little with Buddhism, but we have arrived at similar worldviews, that focus more on intangible Ideas than on corporeal Matter. My influences were mostly in 20th & 21st century Science ; especially Quantum & Information & Complexity theories. So, instead of calling my worldview Idealism, I labeled it as Enformationism*1. But I suppose you could style it "scientifically informed Idealism".

A recent development in science has been the notion that inorganic & organic Evolution is lawful*2. It proposes "a second arrow of time" which is positive & constructive, and opposed to the second law of thermodynamics : Entropy*3. The team of scientists haven't settled on a name for this anti-entropy law, but an old ironic label --- since the arrow direction is positive & progressive --- was Negentropy. In my own Information-based thesis, I refer to that "law" of gradual emergent evolution --- from a simple beginning (Singularity) toward more complex forms (Cosmos) --- as a natural trend, and label it as Enformy*4.

The Cornell University team called their "new law" of Evolution : "the law of increasing functional information.". And one member of the team calls it "a second arrow of time", pointing in the opposite direction from devolving Entropy. He also "explains that evolution seems to not only incorporate time, but also function and purpose". That latter term is provocative, since it seems to imply a Purposer, a Motivator, an Intender, an Organizer, a Designer, a Cosmic Mind. All of which are anathema to those who view the world as directionless & meaningless and destined for Nothingness.

Throughout history, most cultures have referred to that First Cause & Prime Mover as a God or Mind of some kind. But Plato gave it the less anthro name of Logos*5. You can call it whatever makes sense to you. But it's getting harder to deny that the universe was born in a burst of Energy & Law, then evolved toward sapiential maturity, and shows no signs of devolving into icy Entropy anytime soon. The world is not now, and never has been Ideal, in the sense of perfection. But since its most important feature so far, to us idea-sharing philosophers, is the emergence of creatures with Concepts, perhaps unrealistic Idealism is not too far off the mark. But I prefer the unfamiliar term Enformationism, which has no history of philosophical politics to elicit incredulity and knee-jerk reactions. :smile:



*1. Enformationism :
A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe ; including ideas.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Note --- Several blog posts explain in what sense Information can be considered an Aristotelian Substance.

*2. Scientists propose 'missing' law for the evolution of everything in the universe :
The research team behind the law, which included philosophers, astrobiologists, a theoretical physicist, a mineralogist and a data scientist, have called it "the law of increasing functional information."
"This was a true collaboration between scientists and philosophers to address one of the most profound mysteries"
https://www.space.com/scientists-propose-missing-law-evolution-of-everything-in-the-universe
This idea suggests that while as the universe ages and expands, it is becoming more organized and functional, nearly opposite to theories surrounding increasing cosmological disorder.
https://bigthink.com/the-well/the-second-arrow-of-time/

*3. Entropy :
Refers to a state of disorder, but the term literally means Transformation. But if the Big Bang was followed only by disorder, it would have quickly disappeared in a puff of smoke. Yet, instead, the world system has gradually increased in organization, until now some of its offspring have evolved rational minds that are capable of imagining what the world was like 14 billion years ago. Many thinkers have interpreted Entropy pessimistically, to predict an eventual "heat death" in another 14 billion years. Yet, here we are, looking up at the stars, and wondering how & why we got to this point, and where we go from here.

*4 Enformy :
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

*5. LOGOS :
A principle originating in classical Greek thought which refers to a universal divine reason, immanent in nature, yet transcending all oppositions and imperfections in the cosmos and humanity.
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/theogloss/logos-body.html

Yeah, I've never been able to get to grips with his stuff. I don't think I'm the only one.

:up:

... perhaps unrealistic Idealism is not too far off the mark. But I prefer the unfamiliar term Enformationism, which has no history of philosophical [cogency or self-consistency] politics to elicit incredulity and knee-jerk reactions. — Gnomon

:sparkle: :eyes: :lol:

:rofl:

Notice I said "live in the world", NOT the world itself. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, and then you draw an unwarranted conclusion about "the world itself" as if the living are the world's victims. Stop shifting goal posts and admit you've been caught poorly reasoning again (e.g. category mistake of "world as perpetrator of unfairness and injustice").

I must have missed something, somewhere down the line. Just wondering why one would doubt something despite its various successes. Must be some subtleties involved I haven’t accessed.