A bug's eye view: Would I like to be stepped on with an adidas rip-off housing a malodorous foot?

I recall a conversation I had with the sister of an old friend just yesterday. She brought up her brother while we were talking and I told her how different the two of us were. Her brother had meticulously planned his life right down to the type of girl he wanted to marry and where he'd be working. He pulled it off, hats off to him. As for myself, I informed her, I didn't have a plan for the next day leave alone a strategem for life like her dear brother had.

I'm unsure as to whether my "plan" not to have a plan will pay off at some point but given my present circumstances, I have absolutely nothing to show for it, zip, nada.

The Good Fool, Bad Fool Paradox

A. The 3 Poisons (Buddhism)

1. Moha (Ignorance)

2. Raga (Attachment)

3. Dvesha (Hatred)

B. Intellectual Disability

Although ancient Roman law had declared people with intellectual disability to be incapable of the deliberate intent to harm that was necessary for a person to commit a crime, during the 1920s, Western society believed they were morally degenerate. — Wikipedia

C. Innocence

Innocence is a lack of guilt, with respect to any kind of crime, or wrongdoing. In a legal context, innocence is to the lack of legal guilt of an individual, with respect to a crime. In other contexts, it is a lack of experience. — Wikipedia

The Fool (ignorance) is both Good & Evil!

Epistemic responsibility: The fool is guilty if bad consequences follow from his idiotic beliefs but then he's, at the same time, innocent because he didn't know any better.

Ex-president Donald Trump has been labelled, on innumerable occasions, as a buffoon and that because he makes bad decisions - from climate denial to racism - and I find it very telling indeed that he hasn't been dubbed evil.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity — Robert J. Hanlon

Epistemic responsibility, due to its moral flavor, would mean that Donald Trump is an evil/bad person.

No one knowingly does evil. — Socrates

Fools/buffoons/idiots are generally not considered culpable for their actions, no matter how immoral.

So, are we trying to, subconsciously, absolve evil folk of their fell deeds, choosing instead to treat them as mentally retarded in some way, to some degree?

It seems that fools can get away with anything - they're deemed innocent and therefore, can't be held accountable for their deeds.

Why are Hitler, Stalin and Mao and other genocidal characters also not viewed in the same light, as morons instead of fiends? If Donald Trump is stupid, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao must be treated as vegetables, totally devoid of intelligence, right?

It'd be difficult to maintain both the world is amoral and that the world is immoral.

One or the other. Not both. — Banno

:ok: Correctamundo!

Two ways of looking at it:

1. Non-pandeistically: The world is amoral

2. Pandeistically: The world is immoral

I guess responsibility comes when beliefs have moral consequences.

However, what's usually recommended is logic (rationality) and that's always been bothersome. Doesn't logic literally force beliefs down your throat? Whence responsibility when I had no choice but to accept the diktats of cold, impersonal, logic?

I could easily say, if I'm called out on my beliefs, "It's not my fault! I was simply following the rules of logic!" I'm not accountable for beliefs that I didn't choose freely.

Then there's irrationalism and the all the different kinds of logic that have spawned since Aristotle and Chrysippus first, 2500 years ago, worked out valid argument forms for classical logic.

This I believe is the problem: The mind's ability to grasp/comprehend/understand has been, for the better part of our evolutionary history, been directed outwards and to aid in that enterprise, we've developed concepts/ideas that are too externally-oriented i.e. they were designed to understand the world.

Then, something magical happened, the mind turned its gaze inward, to itself but then it employed/used/utilized those same conceptual frameworks that were fashioned for and adapted to the world, external. The inner world of the mind is an entirely new ballgame.

What could go wrong?

Ego-suspension! Yes! I need to make a note of that!

Update

1. My take on yin-yang is that they are opposites in a mathematical sense, like +y and -y. Bring them together like so: +y + -y and you get 0, nought. This cancelling of each member of a yin-yang pair is what balance/equilibrium is. This is both destructive (extremes are annihilated, +y and -y are gone ) and constructive (extremes are replaced by an in-between state, 0). Don't be fooled by 0, it doesn't mean nothing in this case. It only means, to use a warfare analogy, the two opposing sides are equally matched, a draw so to speak.

2. Yin-yang pairs are an universal feature in nature, in the universe itself. @Possibility mentioned apples, humans, ants, cheesecake etc. don't have opposites.

These objects are subjected to forces that are yin-yang in nature - humans are torn ( :chin: ) between good and bad, apples live and die, ants too, cheesecake are warm and then become cold.

Too, humans vs non-humans, apples vs non-apples, ants vs non-ants, cheesecake vs non-cheesecakes - even a child ( :wink: ) can think of an appropriate opposite for these items, either as a class or singly. Pay attention to what these things are and what happens to them.

Will reply later.

I could entertain the concept that two alien realities once collided, resulting in sound and movement, but I don't see opposites per se — theRiddler

What's your definition of opposite?

Great scene, great cast, great movie. My little brother and I had nightmares all summer long after seeing Jaws at Long Island drive-in with my (crazy) uncle when it first came out. :monkey: :up: — 180 Proof

Good to know I brought back bitter-sweet memories. :smile:

By the way, very Buddhist (anattā).
??? No idea what this reply has to do with my previous post. — 180 Proof

Self-awareness creates the self-other distinction and that, according to Buddhism is the final boss in this game we call life. Ego-death? Ah, but you don't buy into that idea, believing instead in Ego-transcendence or something like that. Do you mind jogging my memory too?

At least when the flesh is healthy (which ignorance makes more difficult.) — hanaH

Righto!

Where have you seen a similar perplexed perspective? — Gnomon

It's everywhere. You just have to be on the lookout for it.

:flower: :grin:

:up: I'll have to take your word for it. Still, as per the Wikipedia article on Schrödinger's cat, there is something fishy going on and that wierdness comes into sharp focus once we causally link the microscopic to the macroscopic (Schrödinger's cat).

What I mean by 'atavistic ... metacognitive bottleneck of self-awareness' is an intelligent system which develops a "theory of mind" as humans do based on a binary "self-other" model wherein classes of non-selves are otherized to varying degrees (re: 'self-serving' (i.e. confabulation-of-the-gaps) biases, prejudices, ... tribalism, etc). — 180 Proof

:fire: Moral of the story: I'm gonna need a bigger boat.



By the way, very Buddhist (anattā).

metacognitive bottleneck "self-awareness" — 180 Proof

? :chin: You say it as if it's (self-awareness) is a bad thing. Why, may I ask?

So that it is made up makes it not truth-apt? But "1+1=2" is true; and so is "The bishop stays on the same colour squares" and "slavery is unjust".

But it might be worth considering further. Let's look at Anscombe's shopping list. If it is a list of all the things she bought, it will be true if it lists all and only the things she bought. If it is a list of the things she is intending to buy, is it still true if it lists all and only the things she intends to buy...? I'm wiling to consider alternatives. — Banno

What I meant was justice or other moral entities are more a thing of human minds, internal, than a thing of the world, external. You will not, I repeat not, find a single instance of justice or other moral rules instantiated in the world save those by us, humans, and that too with the greatest difficulty. The world, the universe, I wish to point out, is not just or good in any sense of that word.

Isn't that the whole point of the is/ought framework of morality. What is is unsatisfactory (dukkha) i.e. the facts/truths as they stand are amoral, even immoral, and hence we make up/imagine a different world in terms of how it ought to be.

The world was/is/will be, by and large, morally indifferent bordering on outright immorality i.e. if there are truths, they all pertain to badness, how cruel the world is - confirmable, empirically, with ease.

Humans came along and discovered, it must've been shocking & disappointing, this and hence, religion, other ethical systems, was/were born as attempts to correct this rather frightening flaw. Only after this, in the human, did good become truths, verifiable in the thoughts/speech/actions of people and people only.

There is nothing good about the world, nature is red in tooth and claw; every moral statement you make - you should do this or you shouldn't do this - is false in the real world. Nobody follows moral codes except under some imagined/cooked up system of ideas, very human ideas.

It looks as though I'm conflating truth-apt with false but, in some sense, that which is not truth-apt and that which is false are both not about our world.

There's an underlying paradox to this issue.

I call it The Right-Truth Paradox

1. People want to be right.

Ergo,

2. People value truth.

3. Challenges to one's beliefs are essential to get to the truth.

4. People don't like their beliefs being challenged.

Ergo,

5. People don't value truth.

6. People value truth AND people don't value truth. [contradiction]

Paradox!

If philosophy is not about conceptual clarification, then it is nothing.

Hence if supposed discussion muddies things further, requesting further explication is good practice.

So it would be wrong, as you say, to reject outright a discussion that is unclear. But it would be worse to accept it. Demanding clarification is then the best response.

If clarification is not forthcoming, or if the reply is equally obscure, then it is reasonable to move on; indeed, in not pursuing an obscure line of discussion, one is not rejecting anything, since nothing has been presented. — Banno

:fire:

Perhaps the reason people have false beliefs is related to a wish to fantasise and fabricate 'the truth' because reality can be so grim and painful. There are all kinds of false beliefs, including ones about oneself. Of course, there may be false ideas which are believed fully or partially, and, at some point, an individual may need to face up to the false nature of beliefs, but as so many aspects of life are ambiguous it is possible to hold onto all kinds of fantastic ideas, even to the point of delusional ideas, or even 'psychotic' departures from accepted ways of thinking. The imagination can play all kinds of tricks, as a defense mechanism against the brutality of painful experience of facts. — Jack Cummins

Indeed. It's as if our unconscious, your domain of expertise, realized quite a long time ago in our evolutionary history, that if we ever learnt the truth about life - short, brutish, and nasty as Hume/Locke put it - people would commit mass suicide and that's one more player shown the red card in the game of life...not good for life, not good at all.

Buddha-Beautician paradox

The Buddha: Expose the truth, dispel the illusion (maya) as maya is the source of our dissatisfaction (dukkha).

The Beautician: Hide the truth, create an illusion (maya) as the truth is the source of our dissatisfaction (dukkha).

I wonder how stoicism relates to antinatalism? The stoic acknowledges the pain aspect of life but I haven't heard of a stoic recommending antinatalism. Why? Perhaps antinatalists suffer from allodynia or hyperalgesia but then it's possible that stoics are lepers, unable/incapable of appreciating the full severity of the problem of suffering. I dunno.

:up: That's a perspective I haven't seen in a long time. Good to know people aren't using their brains for just mundane activities. Imagination is a marvelous thing - there are so many possibilities to think about. Our abject ignorance is duly compensated for by the richness of our hypotheticals.

This just popped into my head. Why do we have false beliefs? This is inexplicable in some sense because the truth is what keeps us safe e.g. back when our ancestors were roaming the African savannah, knowing what a lion looks like and knowing what it can masquerade as will/should keep death and injury at bay...for as long as possible that is.

Why did evolution not stamp out those lineages that had a propensity to believe falsehoods? It's cleary a major drawback insofar as survival is the ultimus meta.

Is this an argument against evolution or will some evolutionary biologist, like a seasoned spin doctor, show us how lies/false beliefs give us an edge over our competitors? Do animals hold false beliefs? Most, if not all, of the times animals end up as lunch are times they've clearly been led up the garden path by stealth, camouflage, and other forms of cunning.

Humans are at the top of the food chain as an apex predator and that could have been because of our mastery of deception but that still doesn't explain why we're prone to believing falsehoods? Shouldn't we be twice as careful being full aware that homo homini lupus?

It doesn't make sense or does it? I dunno!

Just an observation: electrons are not really 'particles' but rather localized excitations in the electron field. — Photios

So, the way out of this maze is to change perspective? I like that. Thank you!

A rhetorical question, but let's spell it out, nonetheless. The ammeter, not possessing a brain, and so without a mind, can have neither intellectual nor emotional response to the electric current running through it. — Michael Zwingli

Note that im the case of vision, specifically color, there really is nothing in the optic nerves, nor in the signals that travel through these nerves and get processed in the visual center that's colorful - everything color is in the receptors (the cones). If color is a qualia, the current doing its thing on the ammeter (a detector) too is one.

I'm rather uncertain whether color is an appropriate property to study qualia.

Yeah, you can see this if you challenge the morality of humans continuing to survive. They you can't use the argument that justice is good for society, since the existence of society is now under question, morally speaking. Which some environmentalists and anti-natalists do on grounds of hedonism or concern for other living species. What possible fact about the world would settle that dispute?

It's just for humans to survive. Is that statement truth-apt? — Marchesk

Noble Lie/Gennaion Pseudos/Pious Fiction: Religion and its baby Morality

:ok:

So, she (Mary) learns something new. We're on the same page then. She experiences redness/color for the first time as she ventures out of her monochromatic room. What she learns is how her eyes interpret light of wavelength 750 nm and now she gains a skil - without measuring the wavelength of light, Mary can identify 750 nm and engage in activities like matching her dress with her shoes.

The eyes, despite some differences, are at the end of the day detectors/instruments. They, as far as we can tell, seem to be the cause for color perception (the rest of the optic pathways right up to the occipital lobe possessing nothing that could be described as colored).

Now, take a ammeter (current detector). Does the ammeter too have a subjective sense of electrical current? It is an instrument and the eyes too are. The subjective aspect of vision (color) is a receptor-dependent.

The hullabaloo is about how to interpret the math, not the math itself. Many Worlds is closest to treating a superposition as a conjunction with the caveat that the opposite spin states are indexed to different worlds: thus no contradiction. — Andrew M

That's what I was getting at. What about Schrödinger's cat thought experiment? I suppose it's a veiled criticism of the Copenhagen interpretation which is open to so-called quantum weirdness.

No, the math doesn't imply a contradiction. Here's an example of a superposition in Dirac (Ket) notation:

|ψ>=0.6|up>+ 0.8|down>

The '+' in Dirac notation is not a logical 'and'. To link the formalism to observation, square the coefficient for a state to calculate the probability that that spin state will be observed (e.g., 0.6*0.6=36% probability of observing spin-up).

You would need additional assumptions to derive a contradiction. See, for example, Bell's Theorem. — Andrew M

Yes, despite my math illiteracy, I can tell, it's safe to assume, that there's no mathematical contradiction. The question then is, why do people, scientists, Schrödinger himself for example, resort to analogies that are frank contradictions (the cat is both dead and alive)?

What's up with that?

I think Banno means if we have a concept of justice, then we can make a truth-apt statement about slavery regarding it's lack of justice, based on whether slavery meets the criteria for something being just. — Marchesk

Indeed but...the fact remains, morality is an anthropic notion having no parallel in the rest of the living world. One might come up with some idea and attendant principles, call it morality, and deduce moral truths from them. However, like Lobachevsky and Bolyai found out with geometry, there really is no need to be stuck in any system of morality no matter how much it feels true.

That doesn't say anything about whether justice is some objective feature of the world. My concern would begin with whether justice was real or just a social construct. I suspect the latter, but tend to live life as if the former were true. — Marchesk

Yes, it appears that social existence is key to the question of morality, gives it some semblance of truth and objectivity but note this is telelogical in character - morality (justice) is needed to run society in the best way possible, its truth is secondary or irrelevant.

This would seem to suggest that there is more than objective facts about color. Which is why we can't say what a bat experiences when using sonar, but we can describe the physics of sonar just fine, and carry out investigations of bat physiology. — Marchesk

Yes, I think so. I can't seem to find the thought experiment that asks the question "is my red the same as your red?" It looks like it's about the subjective aspect of color (red).

Too, I'm puzzled as to why we can see color in the first place. According to best science, color and other nuances of perception are receptor-dependent. In other words, if no receptors for color (cones), no color perception. There's nothing about the brain or the nerves that connect the cones to the visual center and nor anything in the signals (electrical action potentials) themselves that are, well, colorful.

It's like having a light detector connected to a computer with a system that has nothing to do with light. How does the computer (the brain) then detect light? I'm out of my depths at this point.

I wonder how the Mary thought experiment would have gone down if brown had been used in instead of red, since brown is a related color and only seen in the presence of lighter colors, so you you can't just associate with 600nm of wavelength. — Marchesk

I wonder too. As far as I can tell, we needn't worry about that too much. Suffice it to say that there's an objective aspect to sense data that won't change and knowing that is possible only through our higher faculties (reason/rationality). As for the subjective part, that, it seems, needs to be experienced directly. There being no two ways about it.

I also wonder if the thought experiment is modified so that right before leaving the room, Mary's brain is stimulated to induce a hallucination of seeing something red. Does that change things at all? Or what if Mary is exposed to an optical illusion so that she sees a color that isn't there? — Marchesk

You need to read what I wrote in the first paragraph - there doesn't seem to be anything colorful about the brain or the optic nerves or the signals that pass through them. Could Mary hallucinate color, red or otherwise, then?

At any rate, we do end up with the uncomfortable conclusion for physicalists that there is some experience of color not captured in the physical description of color perception. — Marchesk

The jury is still out. I can neither confirm nor deny.

Slavery is unjust' is not a True statement as far as I can tell.
— I like sushi

Why not?

'Slavery is unjust' is true IFF slavery is unjust.

Slave: A person who is the legal property of anther and forced to obey them
Justice: Being fair and reasonable

One person being the legal property of anther, especially after an act of kidnap, is not fair and reasonable.

All this before looking to see if one ought be fair and reasonable. — Banno

I thought your opinion would be the exact opposite. Morality is not observable in the real world - some ants take slaves. Morality is made up by humans like math (see :point: math is made up - your thread)

I prefer Peter Green — I like sushi

Who that?

The issue is only that something was lost in the translation from math to English. Paraphrasing SMBC, "Quantum superposition... It doesn't mean spin-up and spin-down at the same time. At least, not the way you think.
...
It means a complex linear superposition of a spin-up state and a spin-down state. You should think of it as a new ontological category: a way of combining things that doesn't really map onto any classical concept." — Andrew M

Then why all the hullabaloo about Schrödinger's cat? There's something odd about quantum mechanics, that's for sure.

I like the recommendation to introduce "...a new ontological category..." It seems necessary and thereby hangs a tale I suppose.

No — Andrew M

Why? Using only the axioms of math, whatever they are, we've arrived at a contradiction. What's the next step?

To All

There are two important things to consider:

1. Red as what it truly is. 750 nm? [objective, constant]
2. Red, the color, as it is perceived. [subjective, varies]

We can have knowledge of both the objective and subjective aspects of red - we can know that red is 750 nm (as Mary does when she's confined to her monochromatic quarters) and also know what red, the color, looks like (Mary when she actually sees red)

What I've been trying to point out is that Mary doesn't learn anything new in the objective sense. Whatever, Mary perceives when she sees red for the first time, red will still have the wavelength 750 nm.

My linguistic analogy of translations not affecting meaning is meant to convey that particular fact about objective red (750 nm). The color red itself being simply the eyes' way of interpreting 750 nm or something like that.

However, subjectively speaking, Mary does learn something new. Never having seen red and then seeing red gives Mary the sensation of redness; Mary gets to know what red looks like when seen.

I'm not discussing a moral theory. I mean implications here as like Wittgenstein's grammar. Not that we are considering the consequences in making a decision before taking action, but that there are categorical ways in which we must take action for it to be such a thing. When we make a claim such as this, we commit ourselves, etc. That is what it means, what is implied, in the doing of it, being said to have done it. This is the structure I am discussing — Antony Nickles

The New Wittgenstein

A few key points associated with Cora Diamond et al as regards Wittgenstein:

1.,Philosophical problems are symptoms of illusions [betwitchment by language]

2. Therapeutic philosophy [recognizing 1 and doing something about it]

I have a vague idea of what this is all about. Moral claims can't be true i.e. when someone claims everyone is equal, a moral claim, he does not do so because it is true, incidentally it isn't. Ergo, moral claims must be about something else - bewitchment by language? What that something else is...???

Gennaion Pseudos/Pious Fiction/Noble Lie

White Lie

Truth is not the only game in town. Hedonism is a strong contender to the title of ultimas meta. It seems crucial to bear in mind that these rather dubious, morally speaking that is, ideas are closely related to politics, basically dirty games, big and small.

Agnoiology (unknownables)

God of the gaps

Red Pill Or Blue Pill

I'll end this haphazard list with a quote:

Our senses evolved really for one purpose - survival - but survival and the true nature of reality are two different subjects. — Brian Greene (physicist)