That's all you've got? I welcome insight via Popper, but this thread is not the exegesis of scripture, is it? All the great dead philosophers are just meat for the grinder. The theme is an analysis of explanation, in the context of a thesis. Do we postulate necessities, formalize strong expectations? Does an innate trust that the future will resemble the past inform the use and postulation of such necessities-by-fiat?

What would this "balanced" view consist of? Certainly we can't just magically think away our pains and fears. — darthbarracuda

If a certain intense subset of life's pains and fears is the result of simple identifications with the True and the Good, then what I'd expect (from personal experience) is the eventual abandonment or reconfiguration of these identifications. But I don't think there is a "magic" leap. Self-esteem collapses without such identifications. Self-esteem just is identification with some mask of the generalized hero. The young man will almost have to identify with an anti-worldly notion the hero at first, for he is too young to have done anything in the world. He is patricidal. The "father" (worldly, selfish, 'cynical', ironic, laughing) must be profane, illegitimate. Because life isn't funny from the perspective of the humiliated-by-his-worldly-nullity youth.

So he inherits a notion of the absolute, or actually conflicting notions of the absolute. There's an idea of moral purity in altruism, but also an idea of intellectual purity in truth. Obviously we want to hold both absolutes in a single vision. The true is altruistic is the true. But commitment to truth leads to epistmological concerns. Others with other myths/truths bring cognitive dissonance. Some of them look successful. Maybe they do know something we don't. Epistemology becomes "prayer" in a religion of truth. Maybe we don't have it, but we pursue it, and are hence ennobled by the intensity and seriousness of this pursuit. Somehow, all along, the truth must be good-for-all, via conflation of altruism and truth. But our knight of truth-and-altruism finds only lies and selfishness in the world, which is to say disagreement and the assertions of other notions of value. Instead of putting his axioms into question, he projects this impasse as a universal situation. Solving his own problem would be 'selfish' and insufficiently grand orbanal.

So the sough truth seems to be bad-for-all. It's a rigged system, a world run by the devil. How then can our dialectical knight save the good demanded in the true? Simple. It becomes a tool that aids in the renunciation of life = bad. All that can be hoped for the cessation of suffering. The good is now just the absence of the bad, its void-empty negation. Since all happiness is illusion that binds us to the bad, happiness is false and bad. Self-extinction is nobility itself. What a twist! Selfish and bad man can (so it seems) will his own extinction in the name of the good and the true. Because "he who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises." If feeling like a superior person (true and good) demands universal extinction, so be it. But this is violence at its heart, ultra-violence that wants to see itself as the perfection of pacifism.

I agree. It's like looking at the Mona Lisa. One person says "I see a woman", another says "I see a painting of a woman", and a third says "I see paint". They're all correct; they're just different ways of thinking and talking about the same thing. Similarly, one person says "I see an apple", another says "I see a mental representation of an apple", and a third says "I see qualia". They could all be correct; they're just different ways of thinking and talking about the same thing. — Michael

Exactly. Because I think we all assume that everyone else is having the same experience of seeing the woman/painting/paint. I was attracted to pragmatism at first for its dissolution of merely linguistic problems.

This is why I think the substance of the issue – the thing that actually addresses the epistemological question – lies with point 4 above. Do objects retain the properties we perceive them to have even when they're not being perceived? — Michael

We could also reframe the question in terms of action. Do we and should we act as if the apple we left on the kitchen table will still be red and delicious (for us, satisfying us) if we bother to walk downstairs? Can we emit strings of marks and noises that will allow us to work toward common goals successfully? I wouldn't exclude the fun of a metaphysical discussion from the set of such goals. It's actually pretty amusing to switch from the woman to the painting to the paint.

But if you start to ask 'why those principles' or 'why do Newton's laws obtain and not some other laws', then I think you're going beyond the bounds of what might reasonably be explained. — Wayfarer

You're preaching to the choir, brother. That's why I find this issue fascinating. I think Plank is on the right track. We try to contemplate the totality, but that is exactly like trying to see it from the outside. To explain it would be to put it in a relationship with some other object of thought. So we have a triangle. We have the totality, its proposed explanation, and then the "being" of both or our "consciousnes" or awareness of this relation. This is probably where we differ. Any reasonable/conceptual theology looks problematic for the same reason --and indeed, like a sort of science or an extension of nature as a system of necessary relationships between objects in the manifest image and unseen theoretical objects (like quarks).

That's the classical liberal myth. A just society is, supposedly, found in when everyone is entirely equivalent: the "free everyman" without a face. The utopian vision where people transcend difference to live in a world where status irrelevant. — TheWillowOfDarkness

No. I believe I stressed that status variation or hierarchy will always be with us. My vision is hardly utopian. To the degree that I take politics seriously (considering that it's most just fashion, unless one has billions to spend on elections), I'd like gender and skin-color and sexual preference to not be problems for folks. Maybe it'll get better, but we'll probably never escape it altogether. If we leave this planet at some point and meet other intelligent species, that might do the trick. But as a rule we seek out-groups to project our shadow on. For instance, the "colonizer" is an easy shadow projection of a speaker who has a sort of colonial condescension toward the sacred victim. Look to the person who dominates the space with her voice. Politicians and moralizers almost never admit to wanting attention and power. Their motives are altruism and justice, pure and simple, right?

Question of social justice get reduced to things which can be made equal (e.g. laws money), as if that were the extent of improvement which was possible. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Beyond equal laws equally enforced and some kind of economic safety net (also equally distributed), it's hard to imagine what you have in mind if not institutional racism or sexism, etc., justified in terms of a 'benevolent' ideology that others correctly perceive as a threat.

Oppression is descriptive, not causal. Any crippling is a feature of the present (i.e. how the world exists now), not a necessary outcome of what has been done to someone in the past. People should ignore their oppressive past with respect to making their future. It doesn't define their future. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I agree. But is this really the message that's being communicated? We see demands for trigger warnings, etc. Having-been-victimized is currency. I can imagine a person unhappy that nothing sufficiently terrible has happened to them yet. "Well, X was raped and Y survived incest, but I'm just a little square white girl..."

Indeed, it's for this reason that "overcoming" description of past oppression has no relevance in maturity. To say: "X oppressed me in the past" enforces no limit on one's future. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I sort of agree and sort of don't. Oppression that doesn't affect one's future shape is hardly worth mentioning. But, yeah, we can work out the kinks in our soul by acknowledging that the harm done to us wasn't deserved. It was the bite of a dog, human nature, reality. Justice is something we try to carve into this chaos, and our flickering images of it vary --which is much of the chaos, as we bark our fevers at one another.

"To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead."

-- Norman O. Brown.

Metaphysically speaking I doubt the universe has any moral compass whatsoever. But this also means that catastrophes can happen, i.e. a tragedy. So from the perspective of a sentient being, the universe can come across as malignant. Metaphysically speaking the entire cosmos is not good or bad, but it is the case, metaphysically speaking, that sentients exists in such a way as to be affected by the arbitrary whims of the universe. Sentients are thus metaphysical captives. — darthbarracuda

It can be malign beyond expectation and benevolent beyond expectation, terrible and wonderful. We are in the "hand" of an amoral "God" (reality that envelopes us). Or rather that's a dialectically established vision/myth I think we share and act on.. Reality/nature/god transcends/violates human intuitions of justice. And yet works of fiction like Job are new conceptualizations of justice or negative theologies that trade justice for beauty. Ever read Blood Meridian? I think there's a beast in the heart of man, the flip side of concern for that "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering" thing in "Preludes."

On some level we are super-predators, and the religion of our blood is total war. If we give careful, pious justifications of self-extinction with one face, the other is laughing with the gods at (or participating in) the orgy and slaughter that has and asks no reason why.

Can you honestly and indubitably tell yourself that you are happy, or that you are not suffering? Chance are that you will find that you have a general sense of unease. As soon as your tool-using brains stops using tools you start to fumble. — darthbarracuda

There are aches and pains, allergies, inconveniences, occasional thoughts of the body breaking down with age, imaginations of possible terrible accidents or unpredictable violence. I see the world as a collision of narcissism and hunger in the context of threatened humiliation and scarcity. But I still find life good. It's largely about always returning to a state of creative play. Life could become shitty without warning. But there's always the emergency exit. So I live with it. Then there's Blake:

Evil is burnt up when men cease to behold it. — Blake

We get absorbed become-one-with in our finite projects (including this spiel in my case). I'm almost never not thinking/playing. Pain/threat interrupts, is dealt with. I climb back on the hobby hose. I'm pretty damned lucky, so far, really, though I paid my angst-dues in a serious way in my teens and 20s. The altruistic pose is a cage. The finder/teller-of universal-truth pose is a cage. The system of poses falls forward into its contradictions. Until it stabilizes. Then one enjoys detail work at what feels like an end of (personal) ideological history. Or that's my story. I don't need it to be everybody's, but I do like publishing it. The right kind of person will (so the fantasy goes) appreciate the shortcut and hopefully the style.

It is a common and well-established psychological phenomenon (Pollyannism and magical thinking) that people's judgement of their own lives is skewed: from a pre-natal perspective, their lives would not be worth starting, and from a currently-living perspective they probably aren't worth living either but are maintained by the neurotic sense of vanity. — darthbarracuda

But the pre-natal perspective is exactly what I brought up. I can't see how the value of life can be judged objectively. So what is our judgement skewed in relation to? Yet another skewed judgment? Respectfully, how does your position escape being skewed? It seems to rely on the assumption that the "grim" view is more realistic because it "obviously" isn't wishful thinking. But what if this grim view is wishful thinking? What if all thinking is wishful? It's still possibly just the assertion of the self as a hero of truth, darkly beautiful really. I'll grant that vanity/self-love is a big issue. But I embrace self-love and egoism self-consciously. Beyond genuine empathy, there is 'sacred' altruism (Stirner) as badge of superiority. "Give alms in secret." Neurotic vanity would, in my view, be an unstable hero myth in transition. This is spiritual pain itself, in my view. Being caught between incompatible investments/myths. I experience life as an ascent because I feel that I am improving this sculpture of the self for the self. I'm striving for a PhD. That'll feel good. Then I'll strive to write the great American novel or something. The connection to the grand and the heroic is (seems to me) inescapable. I posit it as a necessary structure. We consent to go back to our ignorant, confused state (or I do) knowing that we (I) will re-attain "self-consciousness" or my current myth-system. The dragon's gold is his mirror, his self-recognition as dragon, earned through a series of evolving "alienations" or unstable self-conceptions. (I found this in the Hegelian Stirner after cooking it up on my own w/ the help of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and so many others.) So for me pessimism is a fascinating version of the hero myth, the black dragon. But I like the golden dragon. Maybe it's just my "truth," my "software." Of course. Of course.

You and Apo are both making strong points. Life creates suffering as well as consciousness ("false" or not) of this suffering as useless. And yet intelligence is problem solving. Diagonosing suffering as useless is itself useful as a reason to strictly avoid such suffering, where possible. We don't wait in line if we think the office will close before they'll see us, for instance. If an anticipated personal future is conceived of as a bunch of useless suffering, then euthanasia/suicide is a rational solution.

no future great triumph can justify the plight of an innocent against his will. — darthbarracuda

To me, this isn't axiomatic. One can affirm life/reality in its injustice and guilt. I read Job this way.

I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. — Job

Of course you or anyone else can hold to the impossibility of justifying coerced suffering. I won't say you're wrong. But I think it's a instrument of the problem solving brain, so I ask what's its purpose? It seems to assert implicitly "anti-thetical" or un-worldly values and point away from life's necessary guilt to the cold but innocent grave. There's an old German philosopher out there who thought humanity's consciousness would evolve so that it would willingly go extinct. It's a grand idea. But I think most people (these days, in wealthy countries) would say yes to being born again as the same person (memory wiped) and living it all again.

I just bought a old copy of The Writings of Saint Paul. I'm not a believer, but I like the metaphysical Christ as a resonant symbol. The incarnation myth is profound.

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; — Paul

So there's a creative misreading of Paul as presenting a third option, between (as symbols) the Jews and the Greeks.
There's also some anarchism, etc. in this:

Christ is the end of the law. — Paul

And so on.

To see "..the real mind-independent apple as it is..." means to see it directly. The apple of your mind-dependent experience is the mind-independent apple that you experience. — jkop

I like "direct realism" as an opening move in the metaphysical chess game. But doesn't anyone else see (to some degree) that it's largely just a debate about how we should use words? Don't get me wrong. Style matters. There's a different feel to these positions. But that almost seems to be the point: there's an attachment to some end (or perhaps the middle) of the subjective-objective spectrum. Then there's the annoying pragmatist move of trying to jump off the spectrum altogether...

I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to talk to racists and sexists who at least admitted their racism and sexism. What's creepy about this group is that they are one with their enemy, completely obliviously. The height of ignorance is perhaps belief in one's innocence and in the perfect guilt on one's enemy. As someone wrote somewhere, look for methodical cruelty in those who think they are doing the Lord's work. Some newfangled Inquisition comes to mind. 1984. But they create an equally rabid opposition by their extremeness, so maybe the world won't go mad, after all.

The fact the classical liberal reads status as an irrelevant concern is an indictment on their philosophy. If the social concern is the rights, valuing and authority of individual, how can arguments about status be considered irrelevant? It's what we are supposed to be concerned about. The point has always been to increase the status of indivduals who belong to various groups in society. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Status is always largely going to be earned. I think liberals value the rights/liberties of the individual. But what is this authority? Over whom? We can earn positions in economic/artistic hierarchies by winning the respect and admiration of other free individuals.

There will never be equality of individuals. Some are born smart, beautiful, healthy, etc. Others are not. Some use their freedom to become smarter, more beautiful, more healthy. Others do not. No one can fix that, unless we get Brave New World and create the Model T human to salve covetousness. We'd also need a direct democracy of clones, I suppose, but even in this outlandish fantasy the slightly differing environment would produce superiority. And these superior clones would seek one another out as worthy of friendship, partnership, marriage. They would paint stars on their bellies. (The Sneetches) Life is preference in action. The brain is like an evaluation machine.
We can piously fake an equal regard toward everyone that we do not have, but this implicitly confesses a preference for and the superiority of just that sort of pious person. And it's ridiculous. Who doesn't see the "damned" hanging around the city, broken in spirit

What we can do is strive toward equality before the law as well as economic conditions that allow even the poorest a chance to develop their potential and live like human beings in the meantime. IMV, one of the keys to maturity is to overcome the victim myth and the fantasy that one's past is crippling. Even if one's past was more crippling than usual, ignoring this is perhaps a good strategy.

I suppose I was aiming at the nature of non-trivial explanations. I can agree that many are satisfied by an explanation of X in terms of a familiar but ultimately unexplained Y. There's a very different path if we are looking into meaning-as-use, but I'd really like to look at the best conceptions of explanation.

I bring this up all the time--that it's often not clear what someone is asking for in requesting an explanation, or why what they're asking for should count as an explanation, or why it should exhaust what can count as an explanation. — Terrapin Station

Many are satisfied by a connection of the unfamiliar to the familiar. But I became interested in this issue as I contemplated theological issues and theories of everything in science. It seems to me that the "totality" must remain unexplained, at least if my concept of explanation is intended.

That is utterly incompatible with the assumption of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, and what you were claiming about inducing THEORY from DATA, which is impossible. — tom

I never mentioned induction. I'm basically saying that we postulate uniformity. Now the concepts are related. The caveman sees things go up and then come down, but that whatever goes up must come down adds an extra something. And the caveman projects this onto the past. Whatever went up must have come back down. So stories to the contrary are doubted. Similarly, the caveman makes plans for the future with this "must" in mind. Perhaps you are misunderstanding me, because what you claim is impossible is something that (by my meaning) we do all of the time. The keyword is expectation. We can probably reduce this necessity to strong expectation, but it is also projected backwards. Sort of like this:

I recall well how the key ideas of my idealistic theory of natural laws - of “lawfulness as imputation” - came to me in 1968 during work on this project while awaiting the delivery of Arabic manuscripts in the Oriental Reading Room of the British Museum. It struck me that what a law states is a mere generalization, but what marks this generalization as something special in our sight -- and renders it something we see as a genuine law of nature -- is the role that we assign to it in inference. Lawfulness is thus not a matter of what the law-statement says, but how it is used in the systematization of knowledge -- the sort of role we impute to it. These ideas provided an impetus to idealist lines of thought and marked the onset of my commitment to a philosophical idealism which teaches that the mind is itself involved in the conceptual constitution of the objects of our knowledge. (Instructive Journey: An Essay in Autobiography, pages 172-173) — Rescher

I'm going to quibble about your thesis. A scientific theory *is* a conjectured explanation of some aspect of reality - the explicanda of the theory. The explanation takes the form of a statement of what exists in reality, how it behaves, and how it accounts for the explicanda. So yes, the eXplicanda can be deduced from the claim about what exists in reality, but what is this "postulated necessity"? — tom

The postulated necessity is there in the fixed nature of "what exists in reality and how it behaves." An electron is the sort of thing that "must" be repelled by another electron. We can allow for "motion" within the nature of an object, but the law of this notion is fixed to the degree that we have knowledge about it. Prediction implies expectation implies something like necessity. As I said, maybe we can boil it down to intensity of expectation.

There is no such thing as an experimental test that can logically falsify a theory, if that is what you mean. — tom

I just assumed you were into the falsifiability criterion, with your talk of Popper turning in his grave. I'd say that the epistmology we live by is "irrational" in the sense that it is shaped by pleasure and pain as as consequence of acting as if a given myth is true. Beliefs (postulated necessities, expectations) are "falsified" when they lead to pain and failure. There is also the pleasure of coherence and the pain of cognitive dissonance, so we can sit in an armchair and "improve" our belief system. Call it "radical instrumentalism." Systems of beliefs as a whole are tools in the "hands" of "irrational" feeling. From this perspective, philosophy of science is largely just a "false" foundation, since I think the prestige of science mostly rests on its technological "miracles." Similarly, real analysis can be described as tidying up the cognitive dissonance of a calculus that was already working to satisfy less abstract desires.

You can't use probability calculus with explanations. — tom

Perhaps according to your definition thereof. I think we can project constrains on the future, fit probability densities to data, etc.

So, you have completely abandoned the idea of explanation. That's a shame. — tom

The thesis is that explanation of X is deduction of X from postulated necessity. Now this postulation is the creative act, the myth or element of rationalism. So it's not what I'd call "inductivism." I'm lazy, so here's Wiki:

Popper coined the term "critical rationalism" to describe his philosophy. Concerning the method of science, the term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. — W

Theories (postulations of necessity that allow for the generations of implications that can be falsified) are seemingly going to be stronger and more falsifiable as they are projected across time and space.

Popper and David Hume agreed that there is often a psychological belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, but both denied that there is logical justification for the supposition that it will, simply because it always has in the past. Popper writes, "I approached the problem of induction through Hume. Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified." (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 55) — W

This is also my starting point.

Nor is it rational according to Popper to make instead the more complex assumption that the sun will rise until a given day, but will stop doing so the day after, or similar statements with additional conditions.

Such a theory would be true with higher probability, because it cannot be attacked so easily: to falsify the first one, it is sufficient to find that the sun has stopped rising; to falsify the second one, one additionally needs the assumption that the given day has not yet been reached. — W

This "probability" seems to reduce to economy. Popper prefers more uniformity. Hence it is "irrational" to project "extra conditions." He tries to milk this from convenience of falsification (ease of attack.) But of course we also want a stronger theory for its greater utility (we want our technology to work everywhere and everywhen.) As far as the use of PUN, it looks to be at the heart of any theory worth suggesting. If we can't infer from the past and present to the future, we are lost. We trust theories because they have worked for us and because we assume that this utility will continue. Wh

I also get the feeling that you want to narrow what I mean by explanation to some ideal scientific explanation. But I'm interested in what folks are generally "really doing" when they explain.

I think the DN model is more or less what I'm defending, thoughI'm looking at it in a broader context than physical science. We have a "folk science" of human nature that we use to navigate social situations, for instance. And metaphysicians also seem to explain things this way or mean something like this by "explanation." — Hoo

Identity is a part of appraising the world and society because each person has an identity. No-one is the faceless everyman of classical liberalism.

We are white, black, gay, trans, philosophers, etc., etc. Circumstances which affect an individual constitute a life of somone within an identity. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Rejecting the ideal of the faceless everyman as an ideal looks like regress to me. If there is some "essence" in race or gender, then the racists and sexists are right. If you're only talking about personal histories informing one's worldview, then of course that's true. But don't we strive toward a sort of universality, away from our varied histories? If the transcendence of race/gender/sexuality in some kind of humanism isn't the goal, then what is? It seems like a historical accident that whites did so much colonizing. Or is there a "white essence" that is capitalistic and imperialistic and hates Gaia? Reading some quotes from that lecture, it's hard not to see some magical, utopian thinking.

Are you saying the PSR is a pragmatic and useful way of viewing the world? That only exists in the intellect? — Marty

I'm wondering if it's not just the formalization of expectation. We are future oriented beings, so we want to find relationships in the past and present that help us meet or create this future. Obviously there is some serious structure in the everyday external world. Obviously we trust science, too, at least as far as technology. But why should any event have a cause or (in other words?) have been somehow predictable? Is it because we are helpless against utterly unpredictable events? It makes sense that we would have evolved to look for "causes" or to posit relationships in events. So maybe there's a gut-level itch for a cause and yet no strong argument for PSR beyond economy and instinct.

And can you give me examples of where propositions are fuzzy and ambiguous? — Marty

Sure, I'll try.
"God is love."
"The real is rational and the rational is real."
"If metaphysics is metaphorical, then metaphor is metaphysical."
"The sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: what is it?"
"Being is not a being."
"There's nothing ambiguous about ambiguity itself."
"No finite thing has genuine being. "

The need for a ground is merely to say all unconditioned beings must find their end in something other than themselves. Are you talking about epistemological foundationalism/anti-foundationalism? — Marty

There's a view of the self as a self-reweaving network of beliefs and desires that I find plausible. I think the representational paradigm (truth as correspondence) is great for ordinary life, but I lean toward an instrumentalist view as ideas become more abstract. It becomes less clear that they correspond to anything. But if they bring us pleasure and get us what we want, we learn to trust them, or put weight on the them so that we'll defend them against skeptics or opposite beliefs. Roughly, our abstract beliefs are underdetermined by the social and physical constrains on our behavior. So there's a trial and error process of acting as if and then there's the constant attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance or friction between under-determined ideas as instruments. For instance, this theory is one such instrument, since you've probably been doing just fine without it. So, yeah, common sense with a variable cream on top where religion and metaphysics and poetry live. And must we assume that there is a single truth in abstract matters? Or just differing, useful mind-tools? Forgive the spiel! I was trying to give context...

You are here because countless other organisms have suffered uselessly. You are the product of their combined subjugation by the whims of the environment; a billion-year-old gladiatorial arena. None of this is worthy of praise - it is utterly useless, pointless and morally repugnant. — darthbarracuda

I couldn't help thinking that all this suffering did have a use and is worthy of praise as the cost of our presence. As to moral repugnance, I think that is lessened as one sees the devil in one's self. Part of us likes it exactly this way. So it's reframable as a disharmony in the individual soul?

I didn't mean to imply that you were unhappy or anything like that. I was just reacting to "desperation." But I guess in a non-pejorative sense you are right. We abandon our hope to rationalize reality completely and then look to a (self-consciously) aesthetic justification. "I really don't need an imperishable rationalization of the real. Its apparent impossibility is even better in some ways."

I'm confused by the use of 'totality' as well as the scare-quoted definite article. Why not just 'obscurity?'[/quote]
I know it's been months, but...

I think he's pointing out the assumed unity or singleness of the obscure totality. That is already a sort an a priori structuring. He's got some wild ideas on math and logic. They are indulgent, radical, possibly useless---but fascinating, exuberant. He seems interested in working out (almost as conceptual art) a consistent, maximum skepticism ("cognitive nihilism").

I wish I could say that I think these controversies will decline in intensity, but since the main ingredient which has seen to it's rise is only growing (social media), I think it is likely that more and more people are going to start being drawn into the specifics of this discussion and the ensuing ideological flame wars. — VagabondSpectre

I was going to ask: where do they find the time? But I spend lots of my free time here. So it's really a question of morbidity/resentment. Some of us (maybe not self-consciously) associate virtue with righteous indignation. Others have come to question righteous indignation as a mask for something questionable. Don't get me wrong. I think there is some genuine or respectable indignation out there. But I do see some sort of doomed, "infinite" desire out there, too.

The world will always be imperfect for those who identify with the role of the accuser and/or the victim. I remember the allure of these roles in my 20s. I felt like I significantly evolved when I started to question them as basic investments. Someone should (yes, selfishly) assert their "right" to have a good time down here, or what's the damned point? "Infinite" conscience looks anti-life. Life is exploitation. We are at the very least twisting plant proteins into human proteins. Of course, be nice, at least to the other nice humans. But the desire for purity looks doomed. If we are lucky, we act decently. But to wash one's heart/mind completely of "sin" or the various x-isms? Here's a theory: the victim role is a refuge from guilt caused by the "infinite" conscience. Yes, there are victims and that sucks, at least to the conscious nice guy if not to the news-as-entertainment-consuming horror-monger, but there is also a somewhat optional identification with the victim as hero that I'm getting at.

I feel like he's getting at something like the Being of beings. "There is a there there." Or (Parmenides) "[It] is."

That's a good point. I haven't really addressed probability densities, etc. That was sort of under the hood in the "complex and indirect and torturous ways." Yes, a constraint on the future (or rather our image in the present thereof), not its strict determination. I completely agree. Even if we had a strictly deterministic model that earned our trust, we can only do finitely many calculations. Uncertainty will always be with us, I think, but so will the projection of constraints on our (genuine, living) expectations.

The problem is JornDoe, that 'the beyond' has now become a necessary postulate for many modern cosmologists, in the form of the so-called 'mutlverse speculation', on the one hand, or Everett's 'many-worlds hypothesis' on the other. — Wayfarer

Could not one say that science has always been about the beyond in its reliance on invisible entities? Where is a point mass or a real number? It's as if we translate everyday experience into an idealist realm of mathematically linked concepts, deduce consequences, and translate back. The scientific image is like a video game that runs parallel to life as we live it.

I think the argument is: the PSR is either false or true (LEM). If it's false, then the world as a totality would be without reason, including our very thoughts which are a part of it. But then our very reasons for justification would not have ground. — Marty

The LEM is a little problematic. It seems to assume that propositions aren't fuzzy/ambiguous. But what is a reason or a ground? In our worldly lives, it seems that we naturally postulate necessities, which may just be shared, strong expectations when closely analyzed. As we become more critical thinkers, we become more conscious of what we are doing. We attain some distance and apply criteria like falsifiability, for instance. Then we want our postulated necessities or expectations-as-axioms to fit well together into an economical system. The ground may be (usefully described as) psychological.

As I see it, concepts exist systematically. So the "soul" can only be an object among objects, deriving its nature from the system of objects as a whole, or its relationships. The "experiencer" is also another object in a system of objects. It's describable as an "essential fiction." What is this "I" beyond a way of unifying experiences and tying this unity to a body, also in the system of objects? Don't get me wrong. I also live in the commonsense world of people, places, and things.

My hunch/thesis is that no single thing is "really" anything at all. Or we can say that there are limits to the utility of thinking in that direction.

I didn't say I worshiped or followed Popper. I've just really enjoyed reading him. Here's something I find interesting:

Suppose that Hume is right about how we actually think. So far all we have is a fact about human cognitive psychology. And this fact, however interesting, does not settle the normative question: Is it legitimate for us to proceed in this way? Are the conclusions we reach as a result of inductive inference really justified?

A first pass suggests a negative answer. After all, the inference pattern

(DATA) In my experience, all Fs are Gs

(THEORY) Therefore, in general all Fs are Gs, (or at least, the next F I examine will be G).

is not deductively valid. It is logically possible for the conclusion to be false when the premise is true. So a skeptic might say: In so-called inductive reasoning, human beings commit a fallacy. They accept a general proposition on the basis of an invalid argument. And this means that their acceptance of that general proposition is unjustified.

Now this is not exactly Hume's way of raising skeptical worries. Hume rather takes the invalidity of the inference from DATA to THEORY as evidence that we have failed to make our method fully explicit. That we unheasitatingly pass from DATA to THEORY shows that we accept a principle connecting the two, a principle that normally passes unnoticed because we take it so completely for granted, but which figures implicitly in every instance of inductive reasoning.

Hume formulates this missing premise as the claim that the future will resemble the past. But for our purposes it will be useful to work with a somewhat more precise formulation. What we need to make the inverence from DATA to THEORY valid is a premise of the form:

(UN) For the most part, if a regularity R (e.g., All Fs are Gs) holds in my experience, then it holds in nature generally, or at least in the next instance.

"UN" stands for the "Uniformity of Nature". This is a traditional (post-Humean) label for the missing premise, though in fact it is misleading. For UN is not simply the claim that nature exhibits regularities. It is the claim that the regularities that have emerged in my experience are among the regularities that hold throughout nature. It might better be called a principle or representativeness, for its central message is that my experience, though limited in time and space to a tiny fraction of the universe, is nonetheless a representative sample of the universe.

The inference from DATA + UN to THEORY is valid. Moreover, there is no question for now about our right to accept the DATA. So if we want to know whether we ever have a right to accept a generalization like THEORY, we must ask whether we have reason to believe UN. — link below

https://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/induction.html

Now I suspect you will argue around this via Popper. But I wonder if the assumption UN isn't going to be hiding somewhere. I like the notion that the mind is an expectation machine and that violations of expectation in particular come to our attention. We expect the future to resemble the past (in very complex and torturous and indirect ways as we tame the cruder forms of this expectation). I'd the prestige of science itself is founded on the tools it provides. We use technology. It gives us what we want. We value it because we expect this utility to endure. I don't see how we can deduce this "illogical" expectation without UN. I'm not saying we live by pure deduction, of course. I think we creatively posit necessity and then deduce. But any postulation is sustained first and foremost by a utility that we project from the past and present into the future...

Affirmative existential thinking can potentially justify the continuing of a life in a purely irrational, emotional and aesthetic way (pace Nietzshce) but that does not make starting a life totally fine. Indeed the reason we have to act this way is out of desperation. — darthbarracuda

I think we have to talk about suicide. Because we do have an emergency exit, life is not as irrational as it would otherwise be. We transcend desperation when we see the world or life as a whole that we can annihilate. We consent to suffering as if we were consumers paying to see a future that we expect to be better than our present suffering. If we generally have had pleasant lives (at least in the recent past), this is a "rational" transaction.

But, yeah, life is justified aesthetically, emotionally. I can only speak for myself, but I'm happy more often than not. I've been through the fire, though. These days (for about 10 years?) I'm grateful to have been born. So for me it's about homeostasis, maintaining this sincere gratitude. The dark visions in Ecclesiastes and Job are ultimately tools for this purpose, inoculations against "infinite" desire, a "chasing after the wind" or "cosmic closure."

I agree that there can sometimes be something sexy about pessimism or existentialism in general, but ultimately I think if you are more often than not preoccupied with being suave and fresh with your pessimism then you're doing it wrong. — darthbarracuda

I guess my theory was that there was a self-exaltation beneath the more conscious self-mutilation. It's not suave in the worldly sense. It's tortured and Christian (crucified on the T of Truth) in some complicated way. It's hard to imagine a better monster to wrestle with spiritually than a monster who mocks every spiritual pretension. It's a purified version of violence, an assault on the CPU.

In regards to the compatibility between instrumentality and objectivity, I don't know. I suppose this is one of the reasons I tend to be suspicious of pessimistic metaphysics, which seem more like narratives than insight into the reality of the world (as most metaphysics for that matter tend to be - elaborate fairy tales that trick us into believing that we know something). — darthbarracuda

I agree, except that I'm not sure that there is insight that isn't just more narrative. (I trust science about physical reality, but it's still just a narrative that's earned my acting-as-if.)

There is no assumed uniformity of nature! — tom

OK, but will there be assumed uniformity of nature in 5 minutes?

For me the realm of the spiritual is more or less the realm of feeling and the sensual. I can get behind something like "God is love." I suppose one could describe (from this perspective) spirituality-beyond-feeling as a sort of idolatry. It's a desire to "crystallize" the "spirit" or make a graven image (concept) of what is truly non-conceptual and undoubtedly real nevertheless. Yes, we have a concept of feeling, but this concept is not feeling itself. When the heart is full of love, praise is more natural than questioning, unless the questioning is a form of creative play. That for me escapes the problem of theological foundation and makes no empirical claims. From a Blakean perspective, artists experience such feelings and encode them "sensually" in images and music. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Etc. I'm just presenting this as an appealing option.

The universe is unable to support our dreams, and our novelty interests are merely distractions - objectively speaking there is nothing in the universe worthy of praise, as if the universe is a Spinozistic pantheistic god and whose priests are the pop-science dolts on the front page of Time magazine, proclaiming the wonder of life and universe while systematically ignoring the fundamental instrumentality of being and subsequent suffering this inflicts upon conscious beings. — darthbarracuda

I think you are touching on profound issues. I can relate to everything you say. But if there is indeed a fundamental instrumentality of being (and that's how I see it), then this puts "objectively speaking" into question. How does this grim vision of objective nullity escape instrumentality? I agree that life churns out suffering. Maybe throughout history life has been more sh*tty than not. And maybe most of us are just wired to suffer more than we enjoy. But I see everything you are talking about. I've contemplated it for almost 20 years. One might say that real philosophy begins with the death of god or a vision of life's ugly futility. But I still think there's a dark thrill in this vision. Job is one of my favorite books. It offers an amoral God at the center of things. God/Nature is not on our side. This is still wishful thinking compared to the sense of a God opposed to us rather than indifferent. But perhaps this is a mirror of some lawless freedom in man's dark heart.

I've always loved the notion of the 4D universe. Is this not perfect closure? It's like Parmenides, sort of. I've heard metaphysics described as exactly the flight from time and chance. So the Block is like the central erotic object of the meta-physician.
But even if I "knew" it was true, I would live with the burden of decision.I would constantly make choices that I could not unmake, not knowing what waits further off in the woods in that direction or what I sacrificed in the other direction not taken. So the truth of the Block would only be an abstract comfort, assuming the continuation of worldly hopes and fears. In short, man is condemned to at least feel like he's free, most of the time, anyway. Do we want call our usual state "false", even if in some sense it is ? It's all about this "in some sense," I suppose.

I can relate to all of this. By the instability of "constraints" I just meant the still-in-progress image we have of the possible. Sometimes we are surprised. "What goes up must come down." Then someone figures out how to achieve escape velocity. Also, yes, logic can be viewed in terms of implicit constrains being made explicit. Also "a hierarchy of constraints that traps possibility into a particular state of substantial being" is nice.

Like Kierkegaard said, we quite literally constrain the world to fit our own little neighborhood, i.e. limit the contents of consciousness a la Zapffe. It's human nature just as it is human nature to breathe oxygen. Therefore a key aspect of pessimistic literature is the disillusionment with the world, the idea that there is nothing here for us, that we have been deceived this whole time. — darthbarracuda

I can agree that we close off some perspectives as we embrace others. (I don't see how the world -apart-from-perspectives is useful, though, as we move away from the physical.)

I do think we can simultaneously have a sense of the" emptiness" of all things in one part of our mind and yet pursue "finite" projects. That's the wisdom I find in Ecclesiastes. We have one foot in the grave, and it's a pivot foot. So we can take every finite project lightly, and we can relate to other finite projects than our own more more tolerantly, since, after all, our project is no less empty from the ultimate foot-in-the-grave perspective than theirs.

I have suffered from the pessimistic vision before, intensely even. But it was never just intellectual. I would fall out of love with life. Then I'd fall back in love, without the least bit abandoning my (merely) intellectual position that "everything is [ultimately] empty."

The mistake most atheists make in asking 'who made God, then?' (usually with a triumphant crossing-of-arms, as if it's a knockdown argument) is that it fails to grasp the 'uncreated' nature of the first principle — Wayfarer

It's just hard to find any conceptual "meat" in this first principle. It seems to point beyond the rational/dialectical enterprise. This first principle "doesn't need to be explained" because it is seemingly defined as that which doesn't need to be explained. (I don't think the totality can be explained.)

If we're honest with ourselves, we won't bias our perceptions with ideas that might be fictions, i.e. self-deception. Once again, we have a threat to our dignity, our self of autonomy, uniqueness, value and importance, concepts that are not able to be destroyed without repercussions. — darthbarracuda

Respectfully, I ask why we would we strive to be honest with ourselves? Just to be clear, I have intensely striven for self-honesty for many years, but the irony is that that same pursuit led me to question why I was so fascinated by self-honesty. Is there not a sort of heroism of the truth? I think the scientist is a sort of priest of physical objectivity, and perhaps a philosopher sometimes plays that sort of role on the level of metaphysical/ethical truth. There's a strange mixture of self-mutilation and self-exaltation in smashing one's own idols, but I wander whether any idol is ever smashed except in the name of yet another if not in the name of iconoclasm itself. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." (This is the trans-image, the non-image, the anti-image, the hole in being, etc.)

So horse becomes nothing but a state of constraint. It is constraints all the way down. But now we must realise how out of pure epistemic blinkeredness, we often class accidental constraints along with the actually naturally necessary. Or indeed, vice versa. — apokrisis

I like this. I don't see how we could know that we have the "actually naturally necessary," but I can see that we can and do act successfully as if. I see a spectrum of intensisty. On one side the postulated necessity is just acted upon as necessity in deed. The other side is tentative, the cutting edge of the imagination.
I think this analysis of the horse is the other side of the question, which I've neglected. We need x and y before we can postulate necessity. And perhaps we can view x and y as unstable systems of constraints. Change one entity in the same and you change them all. In basic physics, we have a point mass, which in practice is just a way to use signs. So we translate signs in the manifest image into signs in the mathematical model, calculate, and translate back into the manifest image. I've neglected all of this, but I acknowledge it.

This vocal minority subscribes to the notion that "micro-aggression" constitutes a vast part of how and why west is fundamentally patriarchal (micro aggressions constantly devalue and oppress women). When this idea is combined with a subscription to "identity politics", which states that the experiences of the oppressed are much more valid than the experiences of the privileged, something scary then tends to happen... — VagabondSpectre

Micro-aggressions remind me of sprites and goblins. Sure, they are sort of there, but, yeah, it's perfect for a conspiratorial outlook on the world. I wouldn't say that the world can't be improved, but I don't trust the radically outraged to accomplish much. In fact, I suspect they take a dark pleasure in this outrage and depend on the situation that installs them in their heroic role.

Things are explained by pointing to the constraints that bound possibility. — apokrisis

Then of course Aristotle came up with four kinds of "becauses". We can say a horse is what it is because of the specific constraints in terms of what it is made of, how it came to be made, for what reason it was made, and with what design it was made. — apokrisis

This still seems like the postulation of necessity. Horsesmust be within specific constraints. Our postulates become more specific. But how does one avoid a "If x then y" as a premise from which y can be deduced in the context of x?