I've been shocked over the past 20 years or so how much progress has been made in doing what everyone said was impossible - increasing renewable energy production and distribution. Elon Musk and a relatively few entrepreneurs have changed everything. They took a bet on finding a way to make good environmental sense also make good economic sense. Of course technology had to improve in order for it to work, but no one had even really tried before. — T Clark

I'm afraid I don't share your optimism with respect to the powers that be.

Hottest day on earth ever recorded happened this week.

And I know that in spite of these various positions that we've only increased fossil fuel expenditure: the green tech future sounds nice, but it all runs on coal and oil at bottom.

Though I have optimism towards people's ability to overcome.

I don't see how this would work. It's not trust and friendship, it's making doing good economically advantageous. That's the only way I can see. — T Clark

Upon making "doing good" advantageous, the people seeking advantage will start doing good.

But then when "doing good" changes, because the world always changes, they'll insist that the old "doing good" is the new "doing good"

I think trust and friendship are more powerful than these technocratic motives, though certainly more unreliable for the spreadsheet bean counters.

Is this true? The current US administration, Biden, have had a dramatic effect on the direction of technological growth and change by just throwing a few billon, or is it trillion, dollars at it. — T Clark

Yes. I'm voting for Trump due to my location, regardless of who I vote for. And "reasonings" don't garner votes.

I know who I prefer, and it's not Trump, but I think what I'm saying is true still.

Doesn't apokrisis's scaling require central planning? How can it possibly grow from the anarchist bottom up? — T Clark

There are many examples of anarchist organizations, but the one I like to refer to is https://quaker.org/ -- because they aren't strictly anarchist in the sense of ideology, but they are anarchist in that they utilize consent-building techniques to a point that everyone has to agree to something.

It takes time, it takes commitment to your fellow humans, it takes care: but it doesn't take rules or programs. Central planning is one possible path, but not the only one.

I like this from your quote:

We can identify three major 'roots' of the Enlightenment: the humanism of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Protestant Reformation. Together these movements created the conditions in Europe for the Enlightenment to take place.

I think it gets along with my speculations

Also gets along with my belief that Kant is the pinnacle of The Enlightenment: both rational and romantic.

Implement life as the Enlightenment imagined it? But add planetary limits to human aspirations as part of the political and ethical equation this time around. — apokrisis

Implement life as we imagine it together, which can include some Enlightenment, as a treat :D -- though that'd be the same response to every imaginary of the future. It's not like the imaginary of the Enlightenment is easy to specify, right(and the same for all the other Big Movements)? And it's important to imagine, I believe, though allow others' to do so as well, and share those sorts of things.

But all communication is propaganda in being a message with a meaning and so coming from a point of view - a message with some intention conveyed from a “me” to a “you”.

Are you wanting to split the world into those messages that are particularly annoying to you and those are matchingly pleasing? Your world needs this new message setting.

Do you see this as a pragmatic job for AI browser settings or a case of “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee”? — apokrisis

I thought you were going to tell me? — apokrisis

I believe I did in defining philosophy as an anti-propaganda, at least. Propaganda is a virus, as you say, but philosophy is an anti-virus in that it inhibits the mechanisms of propagation by asking questions and not giving answers, but rather methods of thinking through things.

If this is your belief then in what sense are you interested in a real inquiry into solutions? And you should steer well clear of me as all I’ve got nothing but those. :wink: — apokrisis

Oh, I like the idea of solving some of these problems, I suppose.

Give me your wisdom, o lord! ;) :D

And so on and so forth in terms of Maslow’s familiar hierarchy of needs. — apokrisis

Why Maslow?

Is it true?

Perhaps something along the line that any should be free to have an opinion and yet everyone ought to be fact-checked? — apokrisis

I'd be on board with that, roughly.

Sounds a shit notion of philosophy. Sounds exactly like propaganda run wild in feigning reason so as to spread its irrationalism. — apokrisis

It may sound that way, but is it that way? What is propaganda?

Also, on philosophy: I think of it more of an anti-propaganda. Rather than giving easy answers to difficult questions it raises difficult questions without answers. Rather than attaching emotions to particular actions it questions emotions at every turn (to a point that's a bit much, at times).

So, in a way, teaching philosophy and doing philosophy is an anti-propaganda, and thereby useful, insofar that we think propaganda ought not rule our lives.

Also, on Propaganda:

I understand its necessity, but I like to imagine a world without it. In order to do so, though, there'd have to be some agreed upon definition of propaganda which could possibly serve as a basis for law. I mention it as separate because I believe the liberal state is fully capable of combating propaganda. Jason Stanley's How Propaganda Works I read recently that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the topic. (I also read Bernays Propaganda, but I don't recommend it so much because it's basically just propaganda for propaganda)

So in criticizing liberal theory I don't mean to say it's all bad either, and I see possible solutions within the institutions we have.

Preference is good in my opinion. Creative people usually have all kinds of preferences, and its in working together I've noticed that interesting things result.

Also, I just like ideas, I don't care when they were made -- I don't even care if the idea is true. Since we don't really know what will work to solve our problems I like to keep an open mind and simply try things out to see where they go. It's not like I really know what I'm talking about anyways (as the scary part of that is: I'm pretty sure no one does. We're strapped to a rocket without knowing where it's going, when it will stop, or how to control it)

After graduating with my chemistry degree something that dawned on me was how we already have every scientific bit of technology we need to address climate change. The problem isn't a matter of scientific knowledge, but political ability: At present the social organizations we have to deal with collective problems are unable to come to a global solution to a global problem.

So the answer to does it scale is: No. None of them scale across the globe. That's the problem to be worked upon: How to build social global social organizations that are able to address these major problems without killing each other along the way?
***

Here what are we able to do, though? I'd say all we have the power to do here is share ideas. Creativity is what's needed, and creative thought is fostered by collective trust and friendship. If we want to win and prove that we're the idea-maker then we'll compete and keep to ourselves and make sure we say nothing until we have our name on it and can say "See! I am the creator of this idea!": But that's exactly the problem. To even make a science of the economy we'd have to agree upon a unit, and have access to financial records of private institutions, which we don't. We'd have to have political control over the economy, and political influence in the first place.

The problem with coming up with different scenarios is that it doesn't matter which we choose since the powers that be will do what they do regardless of our reasonings.

This gets back to the reality of doing politics: There's plenty of propaganda to go about (and in fact I think that's a separate but related problem). But what politics is about is about building relationships with one another. The politicians job is to talk because talking is how we build relationships. And to do that you need trust, which in turn is only earned by being trustworthy, forthright, and caring.

But these aren't programs. These are character traits -- that is, ethical virtues.

For the ideas of anarchy and marxism, though, I point to the obvious with Marxism at marxists.org, and the ironically canonical anarchist faq. -- the important part to me here is that these are just ideas that I'm working through and from. I'm not advocating as much as exploring the ideas, because that's what this space is for, though I also want to be honest in saying hey, duh, I'm attracted to these ideas because I see possible solutions in them to the modern world.

And what I like about pairing these ideas is it gives both a critical problem -- the Marxism -- and a different solution than Marxism-Leninism -- organizing along anarchist lines. Further the "anarchy" makes it to where it's not something I'm going to cook up all on my own: I'm going to explore and share and hope we can come up with something that works, because that's all that's ever worked to address collective problems before anyways.

Because of its various failures, too: colonialism, racism, and the atom bomb come to mind. The ideas about appropriation of land and the need to civlize the lesser races are part of the Enlightenment as much as the romantic vision of the Human Being. It has good and bad, like everything.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096251/
Technically I just finished it, but it was interesting enough to share.

NSFW whatsoever tho

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.

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)

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?

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"?

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.

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?

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.

And I bet it's even less central to your Doing! — Banno

Well, here's where we can get critical of ourselves and maybe don't realize what it is what we are doing. So the dialectic plays no role in my doing, I'll say, but I go to work and pay my bills and dance around the boss all the same: so the material dialectic would play a role in my doing even if it's not a part of my thinking.

But, I take your point. It's not clear enough to myself to say one way or the other -- I can give some nascent beginnings of an attempt to give clear distinction, but that's about it, so clearly it doesn't play a role in thinking or my conscious doing.

Wittgenstein and Anscombe are lurking in the background here, pointing out that it's the use of our metaphysics that has meaning. — Banno

Heh. So Hegel's metaphysic is a good way to ensure the continuation of philosophy professors? :D (EDIT: I ought say this would be a point in its favor, for me)

Of course. Marx was a decent critic of his times. He took a systems view. He and Engels had their model of Dialectical Materialism.

But diagnosis did not produce the cure. Fukuyama points to the historical evidence that dialectics can't balance things. You need trialectics to achieve that.

After the madness of Stalin, the USSR achieved a stable political formula in having the triadic balance of the Politiburo, Army generals and KGB. An arrangement of power was institutionalised.

So we do know what makes systems work. And it ain't demolishing hierarchies. It is ensuring that hierarchical order does in fact have the two way information flow where top-down constraints exist in balance with bottom-up construction. A society is well balanced when it is a collective of interest groups formed over all scales of its existence. — apokrisis

My view is that you can't science your way into future social organizations -- I think it's the scientific claim of Marx's that fails. Though it describes a pattern we still are contending with fairly well, it's not at present a scientific theory in the sense that it wants to be.

So when I see these sorts of claims it looks to me that you guys are in the same camp: you have the Newtonian Laws of social organisms and from those Laws we can control the direction of development of social organisms. Something like Comte's positivism?

And what social purpose was that existentialism shaped to serve?

At what point did a revolutionary political idea become the basis of modern mass consumerism? The "because you're so individual and special" reason that you deserve a Lamborghini or Rolex?

At what point did it become the justification for neo-liberalism and the worker as entrepreneur?

Counter-culture mutates into mainstream culture to the degree that it fuels the end result – fossil fuel burning and resource consumption. If it is a "good idea" in that sense, it becomes the norm. The new ought. — apokrisis

We can describe norms, but that's not the same as saying which norm we should pursue. The question isn't "What social purpose was that existentialism shaped to serve?" but rather "How shall we shape this existentialism?"

hink about it this way: if you became convinced that all of the Dialectic was in error, would that change your view of what ought be done? — Banno

Oh no. It's not that central to my thinking.

So what is it that dialectic does?

Mostly cause me a headache :D -- it's more that it's so undeniable to Marx's philosophy that it's something I have to contend with and figure out its boundaries in understanding that philosophy. Although I see value in understanding a thinker in his own time on his own grounds even where I disagree with him -- but here it's not clear enough yet for me to agree or disagree, but it's something I like to work out.

Apo, Way and Moli are all attempting to answer the Big Questions with various stories. Much easier to point out the problems with their accounts, — Banno

Heh, I don't mind. Without something to think against the thoughts kind of just drizzle away in the day to day. So pick away.

Your choices may be free - but also likely to fail if your analysis of how is and ought are connected is faulty. The past doesn’t determine the future but it sure as hell constrains it. — apokrisis

I think the question about thermodynamics and value is to ask: How are is and ought connected?

And this also highlights a difference in our approach: I tend to think of these organisms in a historical model, meaning we come to understand them through political practice and study, of course. I'm not averse to description at all. And I'm trying to point out that what you say is pretty much what Marx is on about :D -- wanting to understand how the capitalist machine works through critique in order to supply theory for the movement.

One's freedom of choice is an existential condition more than a political one, I'd say. What position within a social organism you're born within has a lot more to do with the political situation than one's free choices.

For Marx if you're a proletarian then is/ought are connected through the teleology towards communism. It's the revolutionary program which "bounds" the dialectic: which in turn is bounded by the concrete conditions one finds oneself in, and what we are able to do together.

It's this latter part that gets more into the anarchy side. Marx's philosophy is a revolutionary philosophy much in the vein of progressive humanism, but anarchy supplies the positive vision which is at the same time presently practical in a prefigurative way or within collectives.


In order that I might understand ways in which to avoid such endings.

Though "confabulate" isn't the same as "making stuff up" -- if nothing is working then "making stuff up" is a necessity to continue.

In my discussions with fellow semioticians, a dichotomy of dichotomies emerged from this murk. The local~global and the vague~crisp. — apokrisis

Could another set of dichotomies emerge?

What I'm noticing from the primer on hierarchies is that it's a descriptive venture. It's purpose is to model phenomena.

But what if rather than modeling the world we wanted to change it?

Then the question: "To what?" comes up.

That's what the "ought" side of the is/ought distinction is asking.

The description of the hierarchies may be useful to this or that end, but without an end there is no ought, only description.

A bit more on dialectic. A contradiction leads to explosion, as explained. Dialectic bases itself on contradiction, where "opposite sides" lead to a "speculative mode of cognition".

I would like to place some emphasis on the second criticism I offered above, that " even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear."

In Hegel the first moment, of "understanding", gives way to the instability of the second moment, the "negatively rational", and thence to the third moment, the "speculative" or "positively rational".

But somewhat notoriously, what that third moment consist in remains quite undetermined. Just as from a contradiction, anything follows.

This is close to Popper's criticism, that dialectic is unfalsifiable.

In effect dialectic provides the opportunity to invent a just-so story in support of your preferred third moment, by choosing your first and second. But such a method can explain anything, and so ends in explaining nothing. — Banno

This is nice to think against, and I had a thought this morning about just accepting the principle of explosion as an outcome, but one which is somehow bounded by informal rules of practice.

At least, this is how I'd lay out Marx's dialectic, which I think I have a better handle on than Hegel's. The practice is the point so the dialectic continues on, but unlike with Hegel continuing on within the halls of philosopher's concepts forming the Prussian state and on upward towards human Freedom through this dialectic, Marx's dialectical pursuit of freedom occurs in collective practice which "bound" the contradiction from an arbitrary conclusion that the Principle of Explosion would allow. (at least, so the thought goes -- there may be disagreement later on, and the problem then is that there won't be any easy way to deliberate: the practices diverge and inform our ideas, and we diverge in practices so the ideas can be different, or you're not thinking dialectically enough :D )

It may be that the dialectic is not so much an explanation, but as recognition of the collective. I think Hegel is similar there in his emphasis on the community coming to define the self. But with Hegel I believe his motivation is more along the lines of defending an Ideal of Humanity as an agent of Freedom, and through the dialectic of concepts progressing towards this humanistic vision of the future (which surely starts in the Prussian state ;) )

Whereas with Marx Freedom is still the goal -- for all of humanity no less -- but the dialectic is historical.

So one way I think of seperating Hegel from Marx is to say that their domains of evidence are different. For Hegel the domain of evidence are the classic philosophical corpus, Christianity, and the political movements of his time. For Marx the domain of evidence is the records, the balance sheets, the newspapers, the reports from the workers front, and so forth (which is why it can dovetail pretty nicely into modern historiographical methods), with the philosophical influence, of course, to provide the intellectual frame for understanding said evidence.

Where I disagree with Popper is that something needs to be falsifiable in order to be valuable on pain that history is not falsifiable, and that this is the only way we understand how science works -- rather than a science of science we understand science contextually, by the records and practices of scientists and this knowledge is transmitted from one generation of scientists to the next even though it's not falsifiable.

I'd hazard that what's being chased after in Hegel and Marx is simply different from what Popper wants.

There is a retrojective argument. For things to be crisply divided then they would have had to have been previously just an undifferentiated potential. A vagueness being the useful term.

Our imaginations do find it hard to picture a vagueness. It is so abstract. It is beyond a nothingness and even beyond the pluripotential that we would call an everythingness. It is more ungraspable as a concept than infinity.

Even Pierce only started to sketch out his logic of vagueness. That is why it excited me as an unfinished project I guess. One very relevant to anyone with an evolutionary and holist perspective on existence and being as open metaphysical questions. — apokrisis

I'm excited for your thoughts on the unfinished product. These are open metaphysical questions; I have no doubt on that. If you could do more than sketch out a logic of vagueness that'd be impressive, and I can see the connections to the perspective -- I think I'm less holist these days, but still on board with evolutionary perspectives.

So the "leap" is : things are individuated, and they can only be so if they were an undifferentiated potential.

Things are Individuated

Therefore, things were an undifferentiated potential.

How do you get to the PNC from there?

The result of contradiction in classical logic is not just vague - it's quite literally anything.

(p ^ ~p)⊃q. From a contradiction, anything goes. That is, if we allow contradiction then everything is both true and false, and we cannot explain anything. There are various systems of paraconsistent logic that accomodate or mitigate explosive results, so I won't rule out some form of dialectic, but I won't rule it in, either. (see what I did there...?) — Banno

:D

Yeah.

I got Marx so I gotta rule it in, in some sense at least, and figure that out. If possible.

As long as they have 2 legs, I'd call them human. Featherless biped and all.

Yes, that's true. But both have their uses in a building. Whether the same proposition can be a hinge and a foundation is hard to say. We could perhaps say that the same proposition might be used as a hinge in one context and a foundation in another. But not, I think, at the same time. Case studies would be interesting. — Ludwig V

I agree with holding to the metaphor -- the hinge is easy to replace, or even switch over, but the foundations we build upon -- whether they be river-beds or mountains, geological timescales don't care about the chemical distinction between solid and liquid and air -- are the sorts of things we identify as "OK I don't think I can pull that bit out yet" -- though, to continue the metaphor still, there are houses that are taken across the highway which gets us into Capital volume 3 and . . . :D

The result is mathematically clear. Reciprocals and inverses are pretty easy to understand as approaches to mutually complementary limits of being. A dialectical “othering”.

The dialectic doesn’t have to worry about breaching the PNC. It is how the PNC is itself formed. It is the division of the vague on its way to becoming the holism that is the general - the synthesis following the symmetry-breaking. — apokrisis

The part here that I'd like to better understand -- and is part of why I find Hegel frustrating -- is the "leap" from prior-to-PNC to PNC, or some variation thereof.

Basically I agree that the dialectic doesn't have "to worry" about the PNC in the sense that it's philosophically legitimate. But I'd like that "doesn't have to worry" spelled out more such that I can say how it avoids the principle of explosion.

That's where I get stuck still.

Ah ok in that case I'm just being a sensitive-something.

think he presents the hinge metaphor in the context of analysing a debate - elaborating the idea that the debate turns on a fixed point. I would assume that this only applies to the context of the debate, and that what was a hinge may become a bone of contention in another context. — Ludwig V

In the context of him analyzing a debate: debates turn on fixed points, and foundations are below those fixed points: a hinge can be replaced, but the foundations take time to change.

Heh. Musical theatre is good for entertainment at least :D

It came to mind cuz:

naw this one:

https://youtu.be/rfywkvRq4Ns?si=utbm4wP1Afol_8ed&t=34

I think he presents the hinge metaphor in the context of analysing a debate - elaborating the idea that the debate turns on a fixed point. I would assume that this only applies to the context of the debate, and that what was a hinge may become a bone of contention in another context. — Ludwig V

I'm being too poetic for the conversation. I'd take your or anyone elses reading over mine -- just some silly thoughts that came to mind.

How about you? — frank

Eh, it doesn't look good, though I doubt that's a surprise since you're asking me :D

I could say who I'd vote for, but since this is a place of truth it doesn't matter who I'd vote for: living in Missouri I already know who I'm voting for regardless of who I vote for.

As democracies do.

I interpret this to mean that bedrock assumptions are like the river bank. They change along with the river itself, but more slowly. — Joshs

That's how I understand them: "hinges" are almost too mechanical for foundations: and in a way hinges can only be placed upon structures build on foundations... hrm. The up-down metaphor

My experience has been that there is a small community of thinkers who grasp the most radical implications of Heidegger and Derrida, and a much larger group that misreads them as similar to writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Levinas. — Joshs

If ever you feel the inclination, I'd like to participate in a thread on these distinctions. I cannot claim that the ideas have been assimilated, and -- as a pluralist, always -- I think they ought to be.

I fear being part of:

a much larger group that misreads them as similar to writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Levinas. — Joshs

Because these are my guys :D -- tho it may be better for another thread?

I don't think either H or W are regurgitating, but that they've had an influence upon philosophical thinking to a point that anyone whose read philosophy knows these points, even if they are hard to articulate -- especially because they're enigmatic, rather than logically valid.

Not a bad thing, at all. I think the Witti Heidegger comparison holds pretty well, tho I prefer to say Derrida-Wittgenstein is the true duck-rabbit of western-philosophy :D

Wittgenstein's concept of "forms of life" in his later philosophy is infamously vague, despite doing a lot of heavy lifting.

On some views, the relevant "form of life," is something common to all humanity. It is something like "what we all share by virtue of being human and of living in the same world." Advocates of this perspective often pay a lot of attention to Wittgenstein's comments on pain. When it comes to pain, it seems to be our natural expressiveness, something we share with other mammals, that is the scaffolding on which language about pain is built.

However, there is an equally popular view where the "form of life" one belongs to varies by culture. The more "extreme" forms of this view also tend to posit that we cannot "translate between" forms of life. So, when Wittgenstein says "if a lion could talk, we could not understand him," or "we don't understand Chinese gestures any more than Chinese sentences," this is sometimes taken to mean that we cannot simply discover the differences between different forms of life and convert between them. Sometimes this comes out in almost essentialist terms, where a person from another culture is precluded from ever understanding another culture in its own terms. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The way I think of "form of life" is biological -- which includes the social.

So if a lion could talk then we'd understand the lion because they've decided to pick up the language game: it'd be strange but here they are talking to us. How could I deny the lion if they're saying something I understand?

So biologically we'll be inclined to speak in this or that way, but if another species somehow learns how to talk then I think we'd convert between them, but also we can't specify how "ahead of time" -- it would not be a priori.

His arguments are sufficiently enigmatic that none of them are logically valid as stated, they rely on unarticulated but perpetually unfolding and changing concepts. Honestly he's just like Heidegger. — fdrake

:D

Yeah.

I just brought up climate change because that's the issue that made me start thinking about abandoning democracy. — frank

Sure, and same, given that our current versions of democracy don't seem to be able to address this real problem that we all face.

Vance fits the form of a moral hero that Trump needs: it was a good pick for him, strategically. But the "why not, for real?" is the various connections the Republican party has: Republicans will be anti-labor, no matter the elegies written. Trump already proved this with his presidency.