Good for you. Retired Ob/GYN here. — LuckyR

:up:

That sounds reasonable.

Idealism itself only becomes problematic when ideas are objectified, reified, as I explained is the case with common Platonism. — Metaphysician Undercover

But we know Plato grooved on the dialectics, so would he have really gotten mired in what Adorno calls idealism?

Because it doesn't tell us what we want to know (in the infinitesimal cases it cannot be understood immediately on-sight. Rare indeed). This doesn't even require that I have a position on it, either. It is simply not helpful. Susan Boyle might be caught up by that. Jeffery Starr would likely be (on converse sides to "sex") where there isn't an ambiguity for the person involved. Seems that this would lead to the exact problems the objections of the kind "What, you're going to check genitals at the door?" seem to point out (and reasonably) — AmadeusD

True. What's your opinion on pronouns? Do you know anyone who goes by "they"?

Because it leads to ambiguity, and some people find ambiguity intolerable. Fear of coming on to a ladyboy, perhaps? — unenlightened

I know you're tri-sexual. You'll try anything. :grin:

using visually-represented phenotype to determine sex is bonkers. — AmadeusD

Why is it bonkers?

What do you think happens at delivery? — LuckyR

I work in an emergency department, so I'm present at deliveries. :grin:

Yup, it's personal. That is your insistance on using karyotype to determine biological sex. As it happens medical personnel (unlike your personal definition) don't use karyotype to determine biologic sex at birth, they inspect the baby's genitalia. — LuckyR

Do they? :lol:

. I believe that a proper understanding of concepts reveals that there is no necessity of a corresponding object, and this lack of object is not a fault of the concept, but a feature of its utility, versatility, and infinite applicability. This is what we see in mathematics for example, conceptions produced without corresponding objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno agreed with Lukacs that the perspective you're describing is embedded in human consciousness, and its origin is in the concept of exchange value (basically the abstraction we call money). So he would totally understand what you're saying, but would warn that it leads to the conundrum of indirect realism.

By the way, this alienation of subject to object (or concept to content) is what Adorno is calling idealism.

One YouTube summation said that Family Guy and South Park have both expressed their condemnation of Disney's pandering. If The Simpsons does as well, it will be the final satirical dump. Disney will have lost credibility because of the standing of the Simpsons.

In the meantime, it appears Disney has lost somewhere around $800 million. The high figure is partly due to Disney's decision to animate the dwarves instead of using real dwarves. The loss is due to a global rejection of the movie. It's apparently boring and twisted.

Then we agree at the least that faith is to be restrained, and keep it's place amongst the other virtues. — Banno

There's no way to control that.

I can live with that. — unenlightened

'Every wind in the river sure makes its own way down to the sea.'

concepts ...

... are no longer measured against their contents, — Jamal

I think when he says "contents" he's talking about real events that stand as examples of concepts. Like with music, the score is the concept (or form), and a performance is the content. He said it's a mistake to fail to see the way the performance is its own entity, each moment arising out of the history of the performance, and propelled onward from there. The score is literally nothing in the absence of the performance (and vice versa).

That would relate to the mind as when people think of mind as a domain or vault of some kind. They're separating mind from the living flow of events that are the content of the concept of mind.

The nature of the complaint is also ambiguous. :grimace:

Basically in your personal lexicon "biological sex" is identical to karyotypic sex. That's not uncommon and perfectly fine, yet is not universal, far from it. — LuckyR

Not personal. Medical personnel need to know what your sex was at birth. That's not ambiguous, unless it is.

I think we're fond of doing that with individuality, noting in various ways how the very idea of an individual arises against the backdrop of society.

With consciousness it seems like we're bumping against the limits of language. I don't have a vantage point on consciousness.

Dialectics seems to leave everything in a shadowy state. Every property seems to contain it's opposite. We could interpret Hegel as suggesting that we reach the truth by way of synthesis. A higher truth, anyway. So we imagine a pending resolution is a gate to something substantial. But if we take synthesis that way, we've forgotten the point of dialectics, haven't we? Our synthesis is really just another thesis, containing its own negation.

It's in that state of associating satisfaction with synthesis that the act of reification dwells.

The average object is a reification isn't it?

The resolution of conflict. It's not a static thing.

No. We'd have to start by explaining what's meant by negation of the negation. It's Hegel.

Adorno knew the guy who invented the term reification. The negation of the negation is a reification. Remembering that is what negative dialectics is about.

More AI art.

I guess the point was that there are rare cases where biological sex is ambiguous. The vast majority of the time, it isn't.

And there are people who have neither an XX nor an XY karotype, therefore according to your own definitions there are people who are neither biologically male nor biologically female. — Michael

Right.

So “biological male” means “has an XY karotype” and “biological female” means “has an XX karotype”? — Michael

Pretty much

You seem to be saying that even though the vast majority of biological men have an XY karotype and that even though the vast majority of people with an XY karotype are biological men, there are exceptions — Michael

I don't there are exceptions to that.

So what does “is biologically male” mean? — Michael

XY.

For most people it's straightforward. If someone has XY chromosomes, there's a long list of predictions we can make about their biology.

In the other cases, we don't just give up and say we don't know which biological sex they are. We might have a different set of predictions due to a certain condition, but it's still a male or female that has the condition, and that remains significant.

I guess there could be a total gestational screw up where there's no way to tell, but I doubt that thing would be compatible with life. If it is, we'd just give it its own category.

Which means what? — Michael

I don't understand why you're asking that. You really don't understand what it means to be born male?

Then what does it mean? — Michael

It means the person was born male. For a doctor, there are a lot of implications, which is why a patient's biological sex is listed at the top of a patient's electronic chart along with weight, height, and birthday.

Also, the term "biologically male" is ambiguous. — Michael

It's easy enough to pin it down.

Sort of (I can't immediately override an existing value), but yeah, that seems to be what morality amounts to to me, so I'm not perturbed by that. — AmadeusD

As long as you act out of love, it's ok.

It's just that there isn't much power in your should because you can change it anytime you want. There's no should. It's just you doing whatever you do.

My 'morality' is a system that says those values inform my actions. — AmadeusD

They inform your actions? What does that mean?

Do you experience morality that way? Can you change your morality notions on a whim?

I understand they seem to, but there's no way to assess this beyond "people influence each other". — AmadeusD

There is though. It could be that aliens are beaming the moral thoughts into your head. "People influence each other" is just a stab at satisfying a particular worldview.

So leaving behind what we don't know (just read Plato's apology, it's all about acknowledging what I don't know), all we have is that morality seems to have an external ground. It doesn't seem like something I'm making up, it's more something I become aware of through experience.

We can just leave it at that. No need to make peace with a worldview. Is there?

you can't make the guilt go away by changing your morals, right?
— frank

Yes. I was a sociopath for several years, partially to achieve this. — AmadeusD

You shouldn't have to do that if morals are a choice. Morals seem to come from outside, that was my point.

But guilt hurts, right? It can really hurt. Up to a point you can chose whether you're going to face it or not, but you can't make the guilt go away by changing your morals, right?

I feel like "mysticism" is not the best term here though. Really what bothers modern sensibilities is just metaphysics and the transcendent in general. Philosophy need not appeal to any sort of mystical experience to fall afoul of this bias in contemporary thought (particularly analytical thought). Which I feel is unfortunate. I think "anti-metaphysics" tends to actually just assume a very particular sort of metaphysics, and then this position essentially just "cheats" on justifying itself by pretending it is "just the skeptical, agnostic position." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well said.

- Adorno's unfettered dialectics ... eliminates ontology altogether. His rejection of any
ontological stipulation in favor of an infinite dialectics which penetrates
all concrete things. and entities seems inseparable from a certain arbitrariness, an absence of content and direction ... — Kracauer, History, p.207

I think this is a typical reaction by those averse to dropping ontology. It seems to leave one floating on air?

Cool, thanks. — Jamal

:up: As for what Adorno made of it, I'm still trying to formulate that. He spent a lot of time sunk deep in the quasi-mystical. He tried to learn Hebrew because one of his friends became an expert in Jewish Kabbalah. But what I notice from Buck-Morss's outline is that while others around him are tipping over into lunacy, he keeps his head. For Adorno, truth is about facts. Hegel would have said we only ever encounter partial-truths. The final truth would reside in the Absolute (sort of).

I think when he describes the descent of the spirit into human life (which is what that lecture portion you quoted is about), he's describing what Marxists around him believed. He's explaining what's wrong with the picture the Marxists are embracing. The reason Lukacs stifled himself was this belief that they were cruising into this great mystical reunification between the subject and the object, between humanity and the Absolute. God was waking up and looking out onto a human world. That's what the Proletariat was supposed to be. This isn't just about emancipation. In fact, as Adorno shows, it's not about emancipation at all. This is a religious vision. Adorno wasn't buying it.

What did he really believe about the universe? I think he would have said we need to temper the drive to answer questions like that.