But that is not the claim here. Good and evil, these are just analytic terms that emerge out of what is there in the giveness of the world. Put plainly, ouches and yums actually exist, but they're not things "at hand". — Constance

It sounds like you're coming close to saying good is pleasure and evil is pain. You could build a moral system from that. The quest to discover what ethics really is would be completed?

I think there are advantages to occasionally looking at the world through an amoral lens. Judgment and understanding stand in opposition. The more you judge something or someone, the less you understand, because once the judgement is made (that was evil!), there's no reason to look further. Understanding requires putting judgment on the shelf. For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations.

Remember the Shakespeare play where everything started off great, everything went well, and then there was a happy ending? There was no such play because it would have put the audience to sleep. The mind seeks out the painful because it's dramatic. The story arc requires pain in order to have something to overcome. Consciousness itself is a story arc. This is Schopenhauer's pessimism.

I'm sure that's true, but the control he presently has isn't so much his doing. People flocked to him with lists of supporters to plant in government jobs, like project 2025? You think I'm overthinking it?

But that pain in my kidney cannot be second guessed — Constance

Sure, but is it good or evil? Or neither? It's the intellect's job to answer that. You can't go wrong spending a little time with analytic philosophy, especially if your mind has a tendency to take flight like a bird. AP is slow and humble.

The whole thing is political theater. — Relativist

I agree. I'm just trying to see the point. Trump says crime is out of control in DC when the statistics say the opposite. He then sends in the National Guard. Whether this is the point or not, it gets people used to the idea that a military body is rightly used for domestic issues.

What do you think the goal is?

Streams are discrete, meaning that they aren't all experiencing one another at the same time. They have a subjective point of view, hence they have an identity. At one point I was an atom, experiencing the world as an atom, and then I was merged with other atoms to form a nervous system. — Dogbert

Sounds like you have boundary issues. :smile:

There are possible worlds where my stream of consciousness remained at the level of commonplace matter. — Dogbert

What unique properties do you have such that it makes sense to distinguish you from the rest of the universe? In other words, what makes it your stream of consciousness?

Being human is an essential property of you. There aren't any possible worlds in which you're something else, so you had a 100% chance of being human.

I don't see it. Put plainly, when you have an ethical issue, the ground for this takes one away from structure and into the value dimension of the world. The prima facie prohibition against stealing something dear to you is the fact that it is dear, and this dearness is not a structure of anything, Saying what it IS has a structure, but the bare phenomenality has none of this; and yet, if this phenomenality were to be absent, the ethicality would be absent as well. Thus, what it means for something to be ethical defers to the manifestation of what is important, and importance here is a nonformal (non structural) actuality. Ethics has its determinative ground here. — Constance

I think dearness as a concept only exists relative to its opposite: worthlessness. I've already talked about some of the ethical structures we've inherited: progress, health, and covenant-based. It's clear to me that structure is primary, so I guess we'll agree to disagree here.

See the issue: ask me what a dog or a cat or an interstellar mass IS, and language is forthcoming; and ask what this explanatory language IS, and more language is forthcoming; and this circularity has no end. But what of the "presence" of what is there? This is "apprehended" IN language, yet stands entirely apart from it. — Constance

And yet what you've said here is a manifestation of the structure of human thought: that a signifier implies something signified. You're giving voice to structure. Is it the structure of the mind? Is it the structure of the world? Is it both? You don't have any vantage point from which to answer that. Whereof one cannot speak..

To establish what ethics IS, we do not look to good this and that, for this begs the foundational question: what is the nature of something being good...at all? This is the determinate question amid the prevailing indeterminacy of purposes and uses in which the good is embedded. — Constance

You want an answer as to what goodness is beyond the uses the word is put to. That's why you're ending up needing a transcendental basis. I think you're begging the question.

Not structuralism. — Constance

Why not structuralism? It's a candidate for answering what ethics is.

his is a hard question. To say what happiness is IN a context of relations, uses and purposes is one things, but then, what about "out" of these contextual indices? — Constance

The ancient Persian answer is that goodness is the direction we're reaching out toward. Evil is what we're pushing away from, so a good person is in motion, or progressing. In this view, it doesn't matter what your present condition is, if you're progressing, you're good. If you're stationary, you're evil.

The ancient Jewish answer is that goodness is clear for all to see in your health and well-being because obviously God is blessing you. A similar outlook is Roman stoicism, which aligns goodness with Nature. It's in a tree's nature to grow toward the light, if it fails to do this, it becomes sick. Sickness and evil are basically the same thing: a failure to abide by your nature. I like the the Roman view because it's efficient.

If you notice, both these views allow flexibility in what actually counts as good. We may discover through experience what really constitutes progress or health. On the other hand, they conflict in whether goodness shows up on the surface, or if it can be hidden. Our present worldview is a fusion of ancient views.

And he keeps trying to use the military for domestic crime issues. I wonder if that will feel normal in 2028.

We basically won't have a CDC in 2028. Aaaaaaaah!

I agree, excluding the occasional nuclear war. — MoK

People absolutely have to provoke one another to see if nuclear warheads will show up. They can't just sit there and act like they have some sense.

I'm not confident that I will be dead before things spiral out of control, and I'm an old man. — BC

Have you ever known a time when things weren't on the verge of spiralling out of control?

I think the US will contract into a Western Hemisphere alliance (including Greenland) and leave the rest of the world to themselves except for the occasional nuclear war.

We are in dire need of good leaders in this "West". I see danger all over and escalating. Let's hope it doesn't spiral out of control. — Manuel

It will eventually, but probably not in our lifetime.

I don't see why we should believe that discourse of the "West" (whatever that means) can no longer be given. — Manuel

I think the conventional wisdom among political scientists is that the US is in decline, so therefore China will continue to grow out of regional power status into super power status.

As for liberalism, everybody is capitalist. Everybody has fairly centralized authority. So the scene will be primitive social dominance, gorillas in the jungle.

Reactive fury is a counterfeit of power: it shouts, it strikes, and all the while it gnaws its own heart — praxis

yep.

How would you have heard of the ones that withered life? The morality that endures is life-giving. Lashing out is lashing in.

, I can say for myself with a high degree of confidence that the former USSR and the USA were not so different states in the mentality of their citizens (which may sound like wildness now), — Astorre

They're similar in that they're both given to apocalypticism. They're both looking for signs of the end of the world. Over-simplified, the Cold War was two cultures seeing each other as the anti-Christ. Is that what you mean?

It sounds like you're asking what normativity most fundamentally is? And you sound like a structuralist. You're looking for a answer that explains all the disparate pieces, like the two-dimensional people building a theory from watching a spoon pass through their plane. All they see is a dot that turns into a line, and back to a dot. What is it?

I read a book by a structuralist who focused on gnostic myths. The typical myth goes like this:

In heaven, all was silent because nothing is undone in heaven. Then, out of the silence came the first question: what is this?. God turned to the questioner and said: "Silence yourself. There are no unanswered questions in heaven." The questioner understood and complied, but something about this event caused a part of the questioner to fall out of heaven, and this part is known as Sophia. In time, Sophia gave birth to a blind god named Samael. Samael's body is our universe, but everything that happened in Samael took place in blindness. There was murder and violence, but it didn't mean anything. It was like a play with no audience.

Sophia felt sad when she looked at her son, who couldn't see her. So she whispered into his ear and what she said pervaded his body and coalesced in humans. Humans awoke and began to see their world for the first time. They felt guilt and shame. They had become their own audience. And they turned to see beyond their world, to heaven, where all questions are answered.

For a structuralist, a story like this could be about something that is always happening in the present, maybe below the surface.

I think this thread is finally coming to a close. — Sam26

I think you should have considered the possibility that NDE is a result of hypoxia. The brain goes without O2 and a weird memory is created.

What are the chances that near-death experiences are the result of hypoxia?

If the probability is, say, 50/50, I would agree, but the probability is high based on the evidence. Most of our knowledge is probabilistic, but we don't say "It may or may not be true." Moreover, we don't claim "to know" if the probability is relatively low. I'm claiming to know that the conclusion follows, not, obviously, with absolute certainty. — Sam26

What exactly is the probability of life after death? Ball park?

Are we truly entering an era of multipolarity? If so, what are the philosophical consequences of a world without a dominant cultural “center”? — Astorre

The US is declining, China is rising. It would be fair to say we're headed toward multipolarity. On the one hand, two superpowers make the world safer than one. On the other, it's unfortunate that that safety comes at the price of wasted energy (undermining one another) when the species now has an opportunity to take control of its energy needs to avoid climate change.

On the other hand, war, even cold war, has a tendency to drive innovation. I believe there were Romans who claimed it was a mistake to destroy Carthage because without an enemy, Rome would become weak. I think this is true. Existence becomes pointless for a superpower.

I guess the philosophical issues I see are:

1. That conflict makes us more innovative.
2. Conflict creates meaning and identity.

Could this shift lead to a new "Iron Curtain"—a bifurcation of global norms, technologies, and values? — Astorre

I don't see a big rift in terms of values. It will be more a competition for influence. Is there really a big difference in the values of the US and China? I mean fundamentally? Russia is a different animal. It's kind of inexplicable, but hasn't it always been?

The ethical question I have is THE ethical question: What is the ground of ethics? — Constance

What difference does it make?

Therefore, it is probable that consciousness survives bodily death in some form, preserving enough continuity for veridical representation. — Sam26

I think this is the same as saying it may or may not be true.

You could say Augustine was a naturalist because he warned not to go around explaining everything with miracles, but to look for natural causes. If he understood what natural causes are, I don't know why it would be strange to you?

Naturalism is about causation. It posits that we should proceed with the assumption that natural causes are there to be found.

And British empiricism died a long time ago

All these objects emit different wavelengths.

How do we learn that object X has the same redness as a postbox, Northern Cardinal and sunset when it will be emitting a different wavelength. — RussellA

Because we don't learn to associate the word with one wavelength. We associate it with experiences, but those experiences reflect both physiological predisposition and cultural conditioning. Right?

Nelson Goodman proposed that "red" doesn't name a universal redness, but just applies to an object:
Red = {postbox, Northern Cardinal, sunset} — RussellA

I guess he isn't familiar with discussions about color itself, but they're pretty common. I think we just learn to associate a certain word with a certain range of visual experiences?

Yea, but the OP wasn't saying that the set of red things is a definition of red. It was saying the set is redness because it has all the instantiations if it.

but we can talk as if there were an abstract thing {a,b}. — Banno

The hallmark of rationality: speech.

If anybody has any ethical questions, they can just ask me.

And I hope has the sense not to ditch it yet? — Banno

Why do you say that?

That's why nominalists (e.g. Quine) didn't like taking it for granted in logic. — bongo fury

Mary Tiles (a philosopher of math) says she can imagine mathematicians ditching set theory someday.

The set of all of our theories of set theory is public, but here we are attempting to figure out what the members of that set are. — Moliere

:up:

Everybody in this thread has their own private set theory. :lol:

Except me.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. The mainstream view among mathematicians is that sets are abstract objects. You can see them with the mind's eye, but not physical eyes.

@litewave seemed to be suggesting that people know firsthand about sets because they can see them. That is incorrect. You can't see a set.

I don't think that's at odds, per se, with defining a set as a collection of objects, or individuals. — Moliere

The point is a set isn't something you can see, anymore than you can see infinity.