In this case, the quality pertains to both parts and whole. — Sapientia

I suppose I would say the way we determine what color quality something has is we look at it -- full stop. I don't think there's a more accurate method, such as designating wavelengths of light, since the designation of the wavelengths depends upon what we perceive in the first place.

By what means would you say the gray quality -- or perhaps we could say "not-red", if we don't get too picky about what we mean by 'quality' ? -- applies to both the parts and the whole? Maybe I'm just dense, but it seems to me that the argument is that since the pixels are gray the image of the strawberries are gray. no?

Let's just grant that.

You still have an argument, unlike the statement "there is no good reason to believe it" -- that is all I'm arguing against.

:D

I think the most important skill I bought was the ability to zoom multiple times in the boot store. I used it more than any other skill, and bought it early on. Not sure if that'll help you, just saying that it accommodated my playing style the most and made a lot of parts easier.

But, yeah, I agree the game is challenging.

Well, there's many options, but I would just say that you can't simply shrug off pan-psychism, is all. That "there is no good reason to believe it" -- you may find other solutions to the problem more convincing for x, y, or z reasons, or you may find the problem to be not a problem in the first place, but pan-psychism isn't just proposed for the hell of it, I'd say.

Indeed the spectrometer doesn't see red, it measures wavelengths. I don't see this as a problem. What's the problem that this implicitly relies on what we call red? — Benkei

Just seems to beg the question to me when you're proposing it as a means to adjudicate whether something is or isn't within said color category. Seems to me that it goes in the other direction -- first we determine said colors then we assign wavelengths. We can redefine our usage of 'red' at that point, of course -- but I'm telling ya, when I look at that image I see red.

It would be interesting to see what a spectrometer measured of the image, actually -- not sure if there's enough light from a monitor for it to work though.

To get back to my example of the banana. The yellow of the banana does not change from one second to the next and I know this when I put it on the dark blue blanket. I will still experience the yellow as more vibrant and bright. Following your line of thinking the banana got more vibrant and bright yellow. But we know nothing about the banana changed.

How do we know that latter bit, there?

Seems to me that it got more vibrant, no?

Here grey is included as part of a picture that causes us to white balance it causing the grey to appear red. Nothing happened to the grey that it all of a sudden became red. It's the surrounding teal that causes us to perceive it as red.

Right -- grey is part of the picture, as is teal. And the parts are different from the picture, since the picture is a whole. At least, that's how I'd parse it out. So we see the image as red, or perceive the image as red -- and thus, the image is red, just as the pixels are grey and teal. Nothing more to it than that.

What does it mean to say [1] that an image is different from what it is made up of, and [2] that experience and perception are bound up in what an image is made of? Where does that leave the image we see? It makes no sense to me. — jkop

Point 2 may be a bit poetical, all depending on how we want to hash terms out. I mostly mean that you shouldn't doubt your perceptions of one thing just because your perception of another thing happens to differ, and the other thing happens to make up the one thing.


As for [1]: I'm still moving with the distinction between wholes and parts. That the parts in this case are the pixels (and in the case of the painting the dried oil paint on canvas, or even more broken down if you wish), and the whole is the image, and therefore they can have different properties from one another.

I agree, but not to the extent that the strawberries in the picture are red, if that is what you're suggesting, or if that is what you conclude from this. I don't see how the arrangement of the pixels makes anything we've referred to thus far red, whether the pixels, the pixels in a certain arrangement, the strawberries, or the picture. — Sapientia

Here's an image I created out of two color picked items, one from the teal (what was white-ish) table, and one from a part of a strawberry:

http://imgur.com/a/sumhF

(hopefully that works)

And a bit of a zoom in and stretch out to show a mid-scale version:

http://imgur.com/a/15yRf

Clearly there's no red at the two-pixel level, and you can start to see the red fading in the mid-scale picture. Another way of putting this -- you could take all the pixels of one color and put it on one side, and all the pixels of the other associated color and put it on the other side, and you might see red in the middle, but it would fade out. (wish I had the capability to do that, but I'm not that good)


So, yes, I'm suggesting the image of strawberries in the original picture are red.

Unless you mean something other than what I mean when I talk about the picture. The strawberries appear red under certain circumstances, but I don't see how the circumstances would make the strawberries red. If what I see is red, it seems to me that it must be something else that I see. Perhaps some kind of distinction would be helpful here, like that between what I see and what I perceive: I see grey pixels in a certain arrangement, under certain circumstances, and I perceive them as an image of red strawberries.

Seems to me that this is the same distinction as appearance vs. reality. But I think that this distinction rests on a compositional fallacy. The tiny bits of things are not what a whole is -- what a whole is or what properties it has can have different properties or even be different than what composes said whole.

And we can see this is so because we can look at both the picture and the pixel in isolation.

I would say that the picture is made of pixels, but to say that the picture simply is the pixels isn't quite right. For one, there is the arrangement of the pixels which makes the picture. So even in a very reduced sense you have to account for that, too.

But then, I'd say that The Starry Night is not just paint on canvas. The Starry NIght is one particular painting made by one particular artist which regularly hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. It's more appropriate to just look at The Starry Night and describe how you feel and think when looking at it, and add to that various historical facts about The Starry Night and say that this what the painting is than to say it is this particular grouping of pigments on a canvas.


Granted, this image isn't a unique object in the same sense that The Starry Night is, so there may be room for making a distinction. I'm just trying to elucidate how I think about images and why, in general, I'd say they are different than what they are made up of. Our experience and perception of an image is sort of bound up in what said image is, if not entirely.

My problem with this approach is that the spectrometer doesn't see red. The spectrometer absorbs photons and spits out some data based upon this measurement. But the ruler doesn't feel length, even though it does basically the same thing at a much better accuracy and precision than our visual intuitions are able to pinpoint.

Defining 'red' as between this and that wavelength implicitly relies upon what we already call and see red. We just happened to draw a line somewhere based upon the colors we already perceive. We could just as easily say that the strawberries don't look red because they don't have this very particular wavelength of light which we happen to associate with red -- but that misses the point entirely.

When you look at the picture what you see is red. When you pull a pixel out what you see is grey-green. But since the picture is not the pixel it doesn't make much sense to say that the picture is really grey-green.

The only objection to panpsychism that one needs is that there's no good reason to believe it. There's zero evidence for it. Making shit up to solve something that's seen as a theoretical problem isn't a good reason to believe anything. — Terrapin Station

It's worth noting that there is zero evidence for a number of beliefs, some of which include beliefs about what counts as evidence for which we surely do not have evidence for.

In addition, successful scientific arguments have been theoretical before. When there's some issue with a theory people 'make shit up' all the time to try and resolve said issue and create arguments, some of which are philosophical, about which is a better solution. So at least with how scientists have gone about their business before and now it just doesn't make sense to reject creative theorizing.


I'd say that if someone were to say "There is no good reason to believe it", then I'd at first ask about their stance on consciousness, in the sense of the hard problem of consciousness. From there, if they agree that said problem is a problem, then it would seem they'd have to offer a solution themselves, or simply claim ignorance at least. Even if there is no good solution, the arguments are more abductive than anything, so there could still be a best solution (after all -- good solutions usually only come after having developed an already accepted theory). So if one were to claim ignorance then it would just be a statement of where they are in the debate, rather than something which we should adopt ourselves. Then we'd come to the various proposed solutions to the hard problem of consciousness, of which pan-psychism is at least a contender worth considering. If you believe otherwise, then my suspicion, initially at least, is that you are just incredulous at what sounds like a ridiculous idea on its face -- but that is no argument against adopting a belief.

So it seems to me that the only path to -- rationally at least -- shrugging off pan-psychism is through rejection of the hard problem of consciousness in the first place (insofar that said rejection is based on reason, too, rather than simple frustration with what sounds like some ridiculous ideas).

Maaan.... liberals in the U.S. are worthless. Which is basically just a rah-rah, yeah, but hey -- rah-rah yeah. ;)

I know who I'd vote for -- but it's basically based upon who I have a larger chance, relatively speaking, of guilt-tripping into doing what I think is better, if not best.

Definitely. Any more suggestions are of course appreciated.

Thanks for the suggestions, all!

These were exaclty the sort of recommendations I was looking for so I could begin tracking down books, and then building further lists from that. I was sort of coming up dry, so this is definitely a meaty selection of books that helps a bunch. (I'll keep posting my own suggestions as I come across more too)

The last game which reminded me of the old Zelda games was Titan Souls, which was unbelievably difficult, frustrating and repetitive, but so worth it for the sense of relief and accomplishment when you complete the game. The whole game consists of those classic boss fights. (And no words are used in that game, either). — Chief Owl Sapientia

Sounds like the sort of game I'd like.

Boss fights were a big part of Hyper Light Drifter, but so was the exploration and dungeon crawling.

Speaking of Zelda, the new Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, looks so good, and it has received exceptional reviews, with scores of 10/10. But I only have a PS4, and won't be getting a Nintendo console just for one game. — Chief Owl Sapientia

Yeah, while I agree that it looks like a very cool and fun game, I certainly won't be buying a console for it.

It'd be nice if they'd consider a windows release.

Hyper Light Drifter




I just beat this game. It has it's own unique flavor, but it has been compared to the old Zelda games -- and not unfairly, either. You journey through a fantastical land besot by some kind of danger. The specifics are never elucidated -- there aren't ever any words used, it's all told by pictures -- but the story is familiar enough that you get a feeling for what's going on.

Tons of fun. I'd recommend it to anyone.

http://www.heart-machine.com/

to grant a robot qualia requires a change in its programming, not its matter. — tom

I we want to give a robot subjectivity - i.e. "what it is like" knowledge, we have to program it that way. Swapping out a hard-drive, or adding more memory is not going to affect the running of the program that achieves this. What particular hardware constitutes the robot is irrelevant, but panpsychics clain it is relevant! — tom

We know that the robot, as a robot, does not possess subjectivity because we programmed it that way. — tom

The hard problem may indeed be hard, but I think the problem of how to create knowledge - of any kind - is the fundamental problem. — tom

I'm kind of grouping these since they are related.

I think, broadly speaking at least, whether a robot can identify a red card from all other colors is not the same sort of thing which the hard problem of consciousness is talking about. We can imagine a philosophical zombie, for instance, being able to identify red cards from all other colors. And the philosophical zombie is already more sophisticated than a robot in that it has all of our functional capacities -- which is (again, broadly speaking) how Chalmer's characterizes naturalism -- it just lacks consciousness, the "feel"-iness of first person experience.

We do not program the robot to have knowledge of qualia. We program it to identify cards which reflect light at such and such wave-length, then to send some kind of indicator that it has done so to us.

Also, I would say that 'qualia', while certainly related, are different from pan-psychism in that we could defend pan-psychism without, in turn, defending the more particular notion that qualia exist. (at least as entities -- of course we can use the word 'qualia' to simply refer, in general, to particular instances of subjective experience without committing ourselves to separately existing causal entities called qualia)

How do all the fundamental particle consciousnesses combine to create a unified consciousness, and why does that require a brain? i.e. how does a single unified consciousness emerge? This is the same question we have without panpsychism! — tom

I think this is a problem of psychological identity, which is something one can ask regardless of their stance on pan-psychism.

Even if there is no subjective experience we have people who profess to have a unified consciousness, and in general we observe that people who make such reports tend to have brains, so we can ask how this phenomena occurs.

So, I'd just say that what pan-psychism sets out to answer isn't this question.

Are atoms more conscious than fundamental particles? How about mobile phones?

Are humans 'more' conscious than dogs?

Honestly, one reason to adopt pan-psychism is it gets rid of this question. With emergence we might ask, at what point does a system gain consciousness? Does it come in degrees?

But I think a consistent pan-psychism would simply say that 'more' or 'less' aren't quite applicable here. It's a 'yes/no' question, and the answer is always 'yes', insofar that what we are naming is an entity (since clearly we can also speak of things which do not exist, and would thereby not be conscious)

It's just that the subjective experience of an electron differs from that of an atom differs from that of a cell-phone differs from that of a robot differs from that of a human.

Why are there no semi-conscious things. Or rather, there must be semi-conscious things, how do we identify them?

Because everything is conscious :D -- so there is nothing to identify.

Why do I lose consciousness when I'm asleep, given that I am physically the same? Do my fundamental particles also sleep?

I'd have to be a fundamental particle to say whether or not I sleep. By all observations, at least, I'd infer 'no' -- but there's no reason to rule it out, I suppose.

Also, this question hinges on two different meanings to the word 'consciousness' -- one such meaning is 'awareness', as in "I am conscious of Matt's feelings for me" meaning the same thing as "I am aware of Matt's feelings for me". When you lose consciousness in your sleep you lose awareness. But you do not lose out on what it is like to sleep. We feel dreams, after all, at least the one's which we happen to remember after waking up. I don't see why we wouldn't feel the one's we don't remember just because we don't remember them or why sleep, itself, doesn't have a subjective side just because we don't quite remember what it is like afterwords.

It seems to me that given enough understanding of memory and sleep that we could actually engineer ourselves to retain such memories.

I actually dislike his approach, here, because it seems to me to be committing the very mistake that generates the hard problem of consciousness in the first place. We wonder, how are we able to feel when matter is naturally inert? And proto-conscious properties are just a way of making consciousness something which is inert and analysable, when in fact consciousness is not well described as either. (I'm going from memory of The Conscious Mind here in this response. Let me know if I'm off base in saying this with respect to the paper) ((And there is an epistemic sort of drive, from myself, in saying this -- it seems to me that consicousness, by its very nature, is not analysable in the way that materials are into atomic units which tell us why they are as they are. We can break it apart, but something changes in so doing, and in fact the same 'parts' can feel differently from instance to instance, yet still be important to understanding how something feels. proto-consciousness just defers the explanatory gap from where it already is in current science.))

I think you have to kind of commit all the way. There is a first-person side for every existing entity. Adding "proto-properties" adds nothing to this explanation, at least in a scientific sense.

Reason we learn to identify consciousness with our heads is because all the evidence correlates with the brain and not the foot. — Marchesk

Let's back up a bit here. In this particular discussion the distinction between consciousness and where I am located at within my body is important, since the original article is talking about the hard problem of consciousness and pan-psychism, which is not the same as the self.

The part of our body which we identify with as the seat of our "true being", or the location of the mind, or the self, or some such, does not have evidence in favor of it. It's an act of identification in the sense of "to identify (with)". Even if the self exists, it doesn't make much sense to say that there is evidence in favor of the self -- it's not the same sort of thing as, say, dinosaurs, for which we have evidence for.

So it is hazardous to begin describing consciousness based upon our conception of the self because, 1, that's not what consciousness is in the first place, and 2, while there is something that it's like to be our self (and are thereby there is consciousness of the self, ala the hard problem), there is plenty of things which we are conscious of (hard problem definition) which our self is not aware of, such as PTSD. You still feel the affects of PTSD even when your self does not identify with said condition.

Now, neurons are a common cause posited for consciousness. But that has little to do with the seat of the self, considering that our neurons do, in fact, run to our foot, yet we do not identify our self with the foot.

But if panpsychism is true, then neurons (and only neurons in certain regions) in the skull shouldn't be special when it comes to consciousness.

Not when it comes to consciousness, no. Though when it comes to human experience pan-psychism wouldn't exclude the importance of neurons.

On your third question -- Epicurus believed the mind to be located in the chest -- where we tend to have a two-part mind, one in the head and the other in the chest. So, presumably, the body-part identification of your mind is a cultural phenomena.

I don't know if 'foot' would be a possible body-part to genuinely feel you are identified with, but I don't see a reason to exclude it either if, in fact, body-part identification is something you learn from the culture you're born into.


On the first question -- I think, insofar that we believe such-and-such to be an entity at least, that panpsychism would call it conscious. But I'm not sure that the parts of entities would be conscious.

So, an electron can be identified with 4 numbers -- principal number, orbital angular momentum, magnetic number, and spin. But the orbital angular moment of an electron is not posited to have consciousness, whereas the electron is.

So I think it would depend on what we admit as an entity. If we believe there is no self, for instance, then perhaps your conscious life just happens to include the conscious life of your foot too. Or, if we believe there is an ontological self, then that would be the reason your foot is not conscious -- it's just a part of you (your second question).

Golly, it's been wayyyy long since I've read Hume. I remember being very impressed with his argument though when I did read him. But I also remember learning later that I had misread him too.


My main disagreement was with his take on causality. I wasn't sure how to tackle the problem differently, because his argument isn't fallacious or anything, but it just seemed like there had to be something wrong somewhere since -- i knew that heat caused water to boil, for instance, and it didn't make sense that tomorrow the water would freeze due to heat.

It seemed to me, at least then, that a fallabalistic account of knowledge could accommodate Hume's causation skepticism. But I don't know if I could say that now. It just seemed a "quick fix", if anything at all.

Really, I think you'd need a different account of causation.



But, that specific problem seems pretty far astray from your lament with Hume. Yours seems more general, in that Hume's account of knowledge is largely the product of analysis -- the breaking of categories and things and concepts into its constituent parts, as well as the sort of hammer-scourge which skepticism has on other kinds of questions or inferences which are not exactly certain or even close to certainty, but still worth considering and wondering about in a philosophical fashion.

Do I have you right?

I did do that with paint.net color picker first :D. They were, indeed, grayish-greenish, and as I put blue on the blank canvas it began to look red.

One could argue that, though we wouldn't classify said pixels as red that they do have red as part of their make-up, but I thought it more interesting to just take the example at its word, so to speak, and try and argue against the strong case.

Good point in saying it's the image, not the dress -- though it might be the case that the dress could appear this or that way in different environments, too.

I guess the question here would be -- while it is not often the case that we come across ambiguous images, why are there ambiguous images?

Michael seems to be stating that color, at least, is added by the brain, and the brain adds colors in different ways in different environments, so the same object can appear to be different colors.

I was attempting to say you could explain this with a part-whole distinction -- the dress does seem problematic to my tactic, so I was going for the "both/and", just depending on how you look at it.


But I guess it comes down to -- what do you make of ambiguous images? Is it simply that they are ambiguous, and there is nothing more to it than that?

I'm just reporting on what the neuroscientist said about it. He's the expert. — Michael

Sure. I didn't mean to say you had to be an expert and lay it out for me -- only that these are the questions I think people should ask when they hear or are tempted to say "the brain did it"

Anything I've read thus far, though I may be ignorant and am willing to read anything more, may involve more steps than that, but it comes down to a similar event. We'll follow the light to the cones where differentials generate potential energy which transfers up into the part of the brain associated with visual processing where. . . we find the black box again.

And it's not as simple as two colours "sitting next to each other" appearing as a different colour. Remember the dress? People saw different colours - some white and gold, others blue and black - even though the stimulus was the same. And that's because the stimulus isn't the only thing that's responsible for the perception of colour. Our bodies play an essential role in that dress being either white and gold or blue and black. — Michael

Couldn't the dress be both? It would just depend on how you look at it, no?

Like the vase/talking faces.


I think color blindness would be a stronger example for your case, because at least there is a demonstrated hereditary association. But I'd posit the same thing here -- only that we have to dig a little deeper into our bodies to "see as" the colorblind do, and currently lack the technology to do so.

Even the whole itself doesn't have all the properties we see it to have (the red hue). That's added by our brain's processing. As explained here, "You brain says, 'the light source that I'm viewing these strawberries under has some blue component to it, so I'm going to subtract that automatically from every pixel.' And when you take grey pixels and subtract out this blue bias, you end up with red." — Michael

When did I have a conversation with my brain? Or does it speak to itself?

Obviously this way of talking is supposed to convey something -- but what does this personification of the brain convey? What in the world does it mean to say "Your brain says 'the light source that i'm viewing these strawberries under has some blue component to it, so I'm going to subtract that automatically from every pixel'"?

Colors which set next to one another change the way said colors look. Similarly so with what surrounds some color. So it is with this picture. Why do you believe that the brain "adds" red to the strawberries? (and, for that matter, why doesn't the brain add gray? I imagine you believe that it does -- but then why is this picture different? What does it demonstrate?)


I tend to find "your brain did it" explanations of perception to be something of a black box -- only worse, because even the inputs aren't defined. (images? pixels? wavelengths? information?) The brain is clearly involved, but "your brain adds red to the image because of the blue surrounding it, like it always does in all environments with blue lighting to maintain the colors which objects are thought to have" just doesn't cut it for an explanation. It's no different from saying "red next to blue looks more red", but somehow a third actor -- the brain -- gets involved and does this.

Only if there is no difference between the parts and the whole, though.

If the strawberry image just is the pixels, then I would agree with you. But if the strawberry image is composed of pixels, then wholes can have different properties than their parts, and we could reduce the object of perception to mind-independent things which causally explain the perception.

I'm not saying I want to do the latter -- but if we perceive a whole, then the whole could be mind-independent and cause said perception, even while the constituent parts don't share its properties.

Hrmm, I usually see panpsychism being proposed contra naturalism, though. At least, self-described naturalists would often object to panpsychism, differentiating themselves by saying they are "non-reductive naturalists" or some such if they agree the problem of consciousness is a problem, but don't want to concede that naturalism is false.

I don't think you'd find this satisfactory, of course. Obviously it would depend on what is meant by 'naturalism', and you mean 'naturalism' differently than these self-described naturalists. But I'm noting it because it seems noteworthy to me that self-described naturalists would object to panpsychism -- there is a relevant difference for them, even if it isn't one which is strong enough for yourself.

I'm tempted to lay your emphasis like "We have experience" to say that we are the sorts of being which have experiences, but that doesn't mean

the only thing we know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that some of it – the stuff in brains – involves experience.

is false.

That our brain is involved in experience -- and not identical to or even specified in what kind of relation it might stand towards experience -- can be inferred by the fact that ingesting chemicals, like coffee for instance or even large quantities of food, has an a/effect on experience. What we call matter interacts with the brain through the blood stream, and experience changes. So it's a fair inference from the first-person side of things, at least.

And at the very least his intended audience -- people who would believe that panpsychism is "just crazy" -- are likely to share this belief with him, even if they do not know it to be the case (I would disagree with the strength of his assertion, but that seems tangential)

From there the rest of his argument follows just leveraging the desire for consistency which panpsychism offers. Since they believe brains are involved in experience, rather than ask how it is experience arises from what has no experience (as per the belief of the audience), just conceding that everything has some kind of experience (though not necessarily mind, intent, or other features which are very much a part of our experiences) gets rid of the question all together.

This is just to say that it's not from the behavior of electrons which the panpsychist infers that electrons have experience, but rather from the desire for an explanation of how it is we experience when we previously presumed matter did not experience. "How do the electrons in a rock suddenly become a mind in a different configuration?" being the target question which panpsychism deflates.

Damnit! I so do like being thought of.

;)

I'm not sure if that's directed at me or just something to keep things on track. I'll clarify why I asked how Heister is using ideology just in case.

Heister stated:

I'd argue that ideals come first in the informing of one's thinking. — Heister Eggcart

Which I took to mean ideals come first (relative to ideology) -- so I figured there must be a difference between the two, in the OP, though common usage wouldn't make a distinction.

It seems a terrible answer, but it really does just depend.

Useful for what?

I don't know what principles you're reflecting on here that have been lost, though, either -- politics has always been clanish or tribal-ish in the United States. Even the revolutionary war was disagreed with by a significant portion of the population.



I am a leftist. Or, an anarcho-communist. Or, a libertarian socialist. Or whatevs -- I understand that the names of ideology can obscure individual beliefs, and that it's a bit silly to think that there is some kind of platonic form of an ideology which our beliefs imitate. These are historical artifacts full of accident and even caprice.

This set of names accurately describe my political beliefs, in an ideal sense. Being able to identify my values and beliefs actually gives more room for compromise and negotiation, at least any that is meaningful, because it delimits what I'm willing to concede on. Or, it gives more clarity to action, when I am unwilling to concede.

But, I would note that I don't think I would use the phrase "identify with" -- in particular, the "with" indicates that these names are somehow a part of my personal identity. My political beliefs are, and they fit such and such a category, but I don't feel particularly attached to the nominations -- if the categories were to become something else, then I don't see my moving just because my clan moved (unless provided with good reason, of course)

Also, I'm not exactly certain what you mean by "ideology" since you're differentiating it from "ideals" in your opening. From what I laid out here you can see that I think of ideals and ideology as, if not identical, certainly not different from one another. Perhaps ideology is composed of ideals, or some such -- I'm not sure of the relationship. But your formulation seems to make them exclusive to one another.

I don't think the man off the street thinks in terms of realism, idealism, physicalism, monism, etc.

But I wouldn't then say they have no metaphysical beliefs, either. If we're talking about practical metaphysical beliefs of the every day, then I think it would be wrong to think in those categories. God, soul, freedom? Definitely a concern of pretty much everyone. But the fundamental nature of these things, whether they are material or not? Nah.

But God, soul (or mind, if you will), and freedom are certainly metaphysical topics -- they are dominant parts of the nature of reality. And they are the sorts of things which influence the way people behave, too (or, at least, are connected to -- I think the direction can go both ways, i.e. when people stop believing in God they start to behave differently, and when people stop believing in libertarian free will, they begin to judge differently)

It can help to write out some thoughts. Why not give it a try?

People will be more amenable to conversing with a post of substance and exchanging ideas if not in the form of an obvious class essay question. (And, hey, if you're actually reading the articles and discussing them, you wouldn't even be cheating -- just getting feedback).

Yes, I think so.

Though when you say:

I was thinking more about idealism, materialism (either of which can be eliminative or reductive), neutral monism, etc. — Mongrel

I'm less inclined to believe so. Or, at least, I believe such beliefs can have practical effects, but it wouldn't be easy to ascertain. @The Great Whatever pinpoints why -- such beliefs are not so easily separated from their practical effects, and we may choose metaphysical beliefs after the fact because of the type of person we are, rather than come to believe such and such metaphysical position and then come to find its practical consequences.



But what I would call a pop-metaphysics, or a folk metaphysics (to borrow a term from phil-o-mind), would be much broader than these particular theses on the ultimate nature of reality. It would include beliefs about the soul, beliefs about how minds work, beliefs about the existence or non-existence of various institutions, beliefs about the self... it doesn't seem to be a closed set. From self-described spiritualists performing Tarot readings to self-described rationalists consulting therapists, to use one pole that seems to be part of pop-metaphysics, one can find many variations on beliefs about the nature of reality and the reasons for the beliefs about said reality.

Hrm. I guess the semester has started up again, hasn't it?

:D

It seems to me that the OP sets the initial 'boundaries' of a discussion, and that the author of said OP has the priority to alter those boundaries over others.

If I'm stepping into someone else's discussion then, albeit unsuccesfully at times, I will try to stay within what I perceive the author to be interested in.

If I were to introduce something, then it seems that the relation would have to go "downwards" -- meaning, the OP sets what is most general and topic for this discussion, and we can introduce things that are more specific, but it wouldn't make much sense to go upwards in generality (at least, generally speaking).

Yes and no at the same time and in the same way — Sapientia

Obligatory obfuscation.

I think I can safely assume that just because homosexuality is innate doesn't make it 'justified' (aka naturalistic fallacy, or appeal to nature.) — NukeyFox

The twist here is that you're taking away one of the main points against homosexuality -- that it is not natural. If you believe the one is committing the naturalistic fallacy, then you'd believe the other is doing so as well.

Innateness does not a justification make -- but the reason people argue this has more to do with objections to homosexual acts.

What most people mean when they say it is innate isn't as much about whether it conforms to nature, though. I'd say that people mean that there is no choice in the matter. People don't choose their sexual orientations. This is also a counter-point to one of the reasons homosexuality is considered immoral, since it goes against God's law and we all have a choice whether or not to follow God's law.

These appeals are more counters to reasons why homosexuality is wrong than they are justifications for homosexuality.

Think -- how would you justify heterosexual acts? What, precisely, is it that makes heterosexual acts permissable? Surely you see the difference between heterosexual acts and, say, psychopathy? No?

Right, but then that was the plan all along. The communist male milking facilities are clearly a historical necessity demanded by the dialectic.

I'm in no way homophobic (I'm bi myself) but this issue really bugs me. So what do you think? Is there a way we can justify homosexuals? — NukeyFox

What, exactly, needs justifying?

It strikes me that those who believe homosexual acts are morally wrong are the one's that need to justify their statement. This is because, in general, all acts default to "permitable" in a free society, and we at least purport to live in or desire such a society.

At that point it seems rather clear. There are roughly two reasons given for homosexuality'simmorality. That it is against nature, or that it is against God. The former is dubious, given the plethora of purposes which sexuality is put towards (thinking of the procreation argument, here), and that animals, in fact, engage in homosexuality (since, for whatever reason, people believe they don't and think this justifies the claim that homosexuality is against nature). For the latter, give the context of a free society, one can claim to follow a God who forbids homosexuality, but it's understood to be a personal commitment rather than a broad social commitment. This granting the already dubious belief that humanity is able to put down in writing what the greatest of all possible beings cares about, and that the greatest of all possible beings really cares about the sexual mores of a particular grouping of humans who will, in God's timeline, be a blip on a blip and is soon to pass away.

I do believe jorndoe is riffing off of St Anslem's proof of God.