↪Joshs
I see/hear your challenge to the thesis of the OP. I agree with an element of it but also am trying to challenge your statements — Paine

What I wrote addressing the OP was just me swinging wildly trying to make sense of an at-first alien language. Now that I put it in the context of Enlightenment rationalism it starts to make sense, and its irrelevance to the post-Darwinian, post-Hegelian delineation of the Hard Problem Dennett and Chalmers are grappling with also becomes clear.

↪Joshs
I am disappointed by this remark.

It is one thing to challenge a point of view and another to ask for shared judgement in your register. — Paine

I was advocating for shared judgement in his register, not mine. Otherwise we will just be talking past one another.

According to Kant, it is not that the mind organizes or categories facts, it organizes and categorizes the manifold of sensory intuitions according to the categories of the understanding. — Fooloso4

I don’t think this will make sense to him. I really think he is operating from a pre-Kantian and pre-Humean framework.

Are you rejecting Kant’s central premise or offering a critique of Kant which preserves this premise?
— Joshs
I am rejecting the premises that (1) the mind imposes forms on experience, (2) we cannot know noumenal reality (the ding an sich), and (3) that we synthesize facts. We know reality, but not exhaustively, as God does. We know it in a limited way, as it relates to us. — Dfpolis

At this point in my reading of your work, I find I understand it most coherently by placing it within a pre-Kantian and likely pre-Humean historical context. That is, despite your embrace of Aristotle, your thinking on God and nature is much more compatible with Enlightenment philosophical ideas circa 1650-1750 than anything produced in Classical Greece. I suspect the clarity of your work would greatly benefit by close readings of the writings of Spinoza , Locke and Leibniz. This is the wheel I think you’re reinventing.

The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment. — Gregory Bateson, Form, Substance, Difference

Yes, the adaptive continuation of a system of interaction with a niche, rather than the survival of a human self(genetic or tribal) , is the focus of selective pressure.

Kant attributed apriori categorical content to the subject.
— Joshs
I am neither Kant, nor a Kantian. I think his approach is fundamentally wrong.

I am an Aristotelian. — Dfpolis

Aren’t we all Kantians now , including those physicists who extend the scope of Quantum theory? That is to say, even though Kant’s ideas have been subject to a variety of critiques within contemporary philosophy and science, I know of no major theorist who has rejected his key premise, that the mind contributes to the organization of our experience, and this organizing, categorizing and synthesizing activity of the mind is the condition of possibility for empirical knowledge. What most disagree with is Kant’s claim that the mind’s organizing capabilities are grounded in a metaphysical a priori. Are you rejecting Kant’s central premise or offering a critique of Kant which preserves this premise?

So far, you have not criticized one argument in my paper. Instead, you have accused me to the errors of others and made unsubstantiated claims. Perhaps if you addressed what I actually wrote, we could make more progress. For example, in an earlier post, I listed 7 problems I have with the Standard Model. You could explain why these are not real problems — Dfpolis

As you have pointed out, your use of the term Standard Model is you own invention. This is a bold and risky move for an outsider to philosophy of mind. By creating a single overarching category de novo, and attempting to squeeze a diverse assortment of philosophical views within it, you are turning your back on an entire community of thought. Perhaps your Aristotelian-inflected model is a truly fresh perspective, but it could also be a reinventing of the wheel born of a lack of exposure to the relevant philosophical
history, beginning with Kant. After reading your article I am tending toward the latter conclusion. As you grapple with a solution to the Hard Problem alongside those you mention in your paper, it is clear that what you have in common with your interlocutors is the acknowledgment of contributions from two domains , the subjective and the objective. For you there is no split between what you call intention and the physical world. You say there is an identity between them: “the object informing the intellect is, identically, the intellect being informed by the object.”

Where you differ from ‘SM’ concerns how much work you expect intention, intellect and will ( form, potency) to do vs the physical pole (act, matter) . That is, how you define their relative attributes , functions, capacities and essence.Writers like Chalmers and Dennett will argue that concepts like ‘material’, ‘physical’ and ‘natural’ have evolved alongside our philosophical understanding. As a result, much of what was formerly attributed to the non-physical in the form of the subjectively mental can now be placed within the category of the objectively natural and material( although ‘physical’ is a more contentious term). This includes epistemological and logical-mathematical forms of meaning. This gives the subjectively mental little to contribute other than an affective feeling of what’s it is like to experience. For you, by contrast, epistemology, logic, Will, intentionality, propositionality and mathematics still belong to the subjective pole as pre-given capacities or attributes. Is it your hunch that these are divinely given?

..

There's a Wikipedia entry on proprioception if you want a quick initial briefing on it. Google will turn up lots of other material. I haven't seen a philosophical piece on this yet — Ludwig V

The phenomenologists, beginning with Husserl and continuing with Merleau-Ponty and current philosophers like Shaun Gallagher, devoted much study to the relation between proprioception and body perception. I highly recommend Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

You mean the dualist split between matter and subjectivity?
— Joshs
There is no such split. All knowing is a subject-object relation. Without a knowing subject and a known object, there is no knowledge. In other words, subjectivity never occurs absent objectivity -- the essence of each is to be a relatum in the relation of knowing — Dfpolis

Kant said something similar to this: ‘Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without conceptions blind’.
And yet he was a dualist. How does the Cartesian split manifest itself in his thinking? One can point to a split that evinces itself not merely in a lack of relation between subject and object, but in the way that each side of the binary is conceived in terms of its assumed internal composition. Kant attributed apriori categorical content to the subject. While these categories only function in relation to objects , their content is generated independent of exposure to objects and is of a different order with respect to objects.

By contrast , contemporary naturalist-evolutionary accounts of subject-object relations conceive the genesis and content of the subject pole in the same naturalist terms as the object pole. Essentially the subject pole contributes recall of previous states to the interpretation of objective sense. Furthermore, there is no transcendent or self-identical self, ego, ‘I’ underlying subjectivity. The ‘I’ that wills in each willing is never the same self, because its nature and identity is subtly reorganized as a result of each encounter with a world. So the self at the heart of subjectivity is an always changing construction. It changes alongside the objects which also change their sense due to the fact that , as you say, we can represent the same reality in different ways.

Where does awareness begin in the animal kingdom?
— Joshs
I do not know. Do you? I do know that humans are aware.
Certainly not with humans.
— Joshs
There is no evidence to support this. We are ignorant of the possible experience of other species… What we do not know is if these responses in other species are conscious or not. — Dfpolis

You should impart this important bit of news to the burgeoning field of consciousness studies in comparative psychology. Explain to them that their evidence doesn’t count for you as evidence. Or you could take your own words to heart: we can represent the same reality in diverse ways.

There is a long list of capacities that were assumed at one point to be associated exclusively with humans ( tool-making, language, cognition, emotion). Given the intimate proximity between cognition, emotion and awareness, now that multiple sources of evidence point to the presence of the first two capabilities in other animals, it is not a leap to hypothesize consciousness also. Furthermore, increased understanding of consciousness in humans reveals it to be a less important aspect of cognition than was previously thought to be the case. Most of our everyday activities are performed unconsciously, automatically. Consciousness is simply not needed for adaptive cognitive functioning in many situations.

what we symbolize in thought ... the way these tentative symbolizations talk back to us
— Joshs
You realize that these "tentative symbolizations" need not be the work created, but part of the agent and her agency -- her thought process? So, this need not be the work acting causally on its creator. My thoughts, creative or otherwise, are my acts of awareness — Dfpolis

The work created become part of the agent and her agency. This goes back to the issue of the Cartesian constancy of the self. Only if we assume that subjective agency is split off from the objects that it interacts with , only if we make the thought process into a solipsistic internal activity, do we construe acts of awareness apart from the work acting causally on its creator.

The organism is nothing but its adaptive interactions.
— Joshs
Not quite. It is a structure able to interact in what was an adaptive way in its native environment. Whether its species will survive depends on the rate at which its progeny can adapt to environmental change. — Dfpolis

Is a bird simply what is contained within an outlined drawing? Or is it also the niche that sustains the animal
and in which it is embedded? Isnt it purely arbitrary to define a living organism by a slab of cells that form a contiguous mass? A living system isn’t a structure designed by a deity or nature and then dropped into a world, it is inseparable from its particular environing world. It is a system of processes in which the dividing line between niche and animal can only be drawn artificially.

The difference is that biological desire need not involve awareness, while will proper does. This is a move from the physical to the intentional theater of operation — Dfpolis

You mean the dualist split between matter and subjectivity? Where does awareness begin in the animal kingdom? Certainly not with humans. Does it emerge suddenly or gradually as a function of neural complexity? If will and awareness is a gradual evolutionary development, then, as been suggested by biologists and neuroscientists, then in some sense one may see it in incipient form already in single-called organisms that have sensory capacities and show learning and adaptive goal-oriented behavior.

Will in the proper sense is a conscious commitment, and as such transcends the merely biological.

You can see this from the fact that willed commitments can be extremely unadaptive and harmful -- both to the individual and to the species. E — Dfpolis

Willed commitments are organized on the basis not strictly of the survival of my organism, but as I have been arguing, are designed to maintain adaptive sense-making , which is as much a social as an individual process.

Now, how about an argument that shows that one conscious being cannot commit to the good of another, even if it is unadaptive for the one committing — Dfpolis

Humans evolved as cooperative social creatures. Like many other mammals, we are born with certain moral emotions , such as the protection of our young and the ability to experience pain at the suffering of others in our group. Sacrificing oneself for the protection of others is seen in other animals. Anthropologists hypothesize that conscience evolved in order to protect tribes from the violence of alpha males. Even behaviors which on the surface appear unadaptive, such as suicide or homicide, are driven by a combination of such moral emotions.

It is not the self strictly defined as a body, that our biologically evolved motivational processes are designed to preserve. Rather, it is social systems ( friendship, marriage, family, clan) that sustain us and that we are primed to defend.

All causation is reciprocal
— Joshs
Really? So an artist creating a work is acted upon by the work that does not yet exist? My learning a song causes the song? Perhaps you can explain what you mean. — Dfpolis

The creative process is a reciprocal back-and-forth between what we symbolize in thought in a particular artistic medium (exploratory chords on a piano, a sketch on a canvas, practice dance steps , a few lines of prose) , and the way these tentative symbolizations talk back to us ( and of course other with whom we share these creative first steps also talk back to us) and guide us with either positive or negative feedback.

First, the idea of differential drives is simply wrongheaded. We desire food, water and air. If I asked, "How much food (or money) would you be willing to take for all your air?" you would think I was crazy. This is because our desires are incommensurate. We need a satisfactory, not a maximal, amount of food, water and air, and, indeed, of all the things we naturally desire. So, they cannot be traded off against one another. Accordingly, the idea of a maximal good or utility or anything of that sort is nonsense — Dfpolis

My point about differential drives is that psychologists and biologists today view organisms as self-organizing systems whose functioning is defined by reciprocal interactions with an environment. There is not first an organism and then its interactions with its world. The organism is nothing but these adaptive interactions. ‘Will’ derives from the overarching tendency of living systems to maintain consistent goal-oriented adaptivity in the face of changing environmental conditions. Our drives ( need for air, food, water, sociality) are interconnected within the functionally unified purposes of the organism as a whole, ‘Will’ makes no sense outside of this reciprocal feedforward-feedback adaptive relationship between a living thing and its world. To desire is equal parts affecting and being affected by. The idea of a divine will , a first or final cause existing outside of a continually changing system of interactions, is an empty, incoherent concept. All causation is reciprocal , contingent and relative to a system of exchanges . What gives Will its meaning , even for a hypothesized god, is its relevance to the aims of adapting to a changing world. Will prior to world is like the smile before the Cheshire Cat.

Yes, I see the laws of nature as God's general will for matter — Dfpolis

What happens to God’s will if we determine the origin and nature of will, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Freud and embodied approaches in cognitive science, in terms of a differential ecology of drives? In a twist on Aristotle, Nietzsche suggested we could understand the “mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives”.

Perhaps he is concerned that if he make clear his theological grounds it would lead to rejection of his argument. — Fooloso4

I have to admit that scholars in the sciences who show their theological affinities run the risk of discrimination.

Upon further examination your ontological commitments are with God — Fooloso4

Ya got that right:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347359286_Does_God_Gamble_With_Creation

But, a further quibble, my narrative is not constructed. It is lived. Afterwards, narratives may be constructed. — Ludwig V

Is lived experience not itself a process of continual construction or construal, even prior to the creation of narratives? I m thinking of phenomenological , constructivist and social constructionist approaches.

I deny that anything happening in the body is the direct object of perception, “the perceived”. Rather, these are the actions of the body, “the perciever”. — NOS4A2

Hallucinogenic chemicals modify the appearance of perceived objects in many ways; in terms of size, shape, color and degrees of movement or rest. They dont have this effect at the level of the sensory receptors but at deeper levels of processing in the brain. Manipulations of the receptors can decrease the amount of data received by the brain ( blurring, loss of peripheral vision, color-blindness, etc) but not qualitatively distort objects the way hallucinogens can. i suspect that the longer one remains under the effect of a hallucinogen , the greater the likelihood that one’s visual system begins to ‘correct’ the distortions.

I say this because research subjects who wear glasses which turn their visual field upside are able to see the visual field normally again while using the glasses for a certain period of time. The distortion of the visual field by the glasses takes place at the level of the receptors but the correction by the subject’s perceptual system takes place at a deeper level of processing. If these deeper levels of processing have such power over what objects we see and how we see them, don’t this suggest that perception is a model we construct of the world and test against it, rather than a direct reception of data?

. Brains cannot live, let alone perceive, on their own. So perception is an act of an organism, brains and all. — NOS4A2

What if we considered this particular act of the organism, what we call perception, not as the act of representing external objects or stimuli, but the act of manipulating and changing an object, and anticipating the feedback from the changes we make in our environment. Then the necessity of a body would not be merely for keeping a brain alive, but for allowing it to physically move itself relative to objects , and move those objects relative to the embodied brain. This account of perception explains why it is that young animals deprived of the ability to manipulate objects in their environment don’t develop normal perceptual capacities in spite of having normally functioning sensory receptors.

I have been conditioned to believe that the act of seeing and that which sees is the same thing. I can see my eyes at the same time I use my eyes to see. Seeing and pain are activities of the very same body that stands before the mirror. — NOS4A2

The mirror metaphor is apt here. The question of who perceives what presupposes that perception consists of a mirroring or representing of an outside by an inside. An alternative approach ditches the mirror metaphor in favor of a model of perception as knowledge-guided active sensory-motor exploration.

“Imagine a team of engineers operating a remote-controlled underwater vessel exploring the remains of the Titanic, and imagine a villainous aquatic monster that has interfered with the control cable by mixing up the connections to and from the underwater cameras, sonar equipment, robot arms, actuators, and sensors. What appears on the many screens, lights, and dials, no longer makes any sense, and the actua-tors no longer have their usual functions. What can the en-gineers do to save the situation? By observing the structure of the changes on the control panel that occur when they press various buttons and levers, the engineers should be able to deduce which buttons control which kind of motion of the vehicle, and which lights correspond to information deriving from the sensors mounted outside the vessel, which indicators correspond to sensors on the vessel's ten-tacles, and so on.

There is an analogy to be drawn between this example and the situation faced by the brain. From the point of view of the brain, there is nothing that in itself differentiates ner-vous influx coming from retinal, haptic, proprioceptive, ol-factory, and other senses, and there is nothing to discrimi-nate motor neurons that are connected to extraocular muscles, skeletal muscles, or any other structures. Even if the size, the shape, the firing patterns, or the places where the neurons are localized in the cortex differ, this does not in itself confer them with any particular visual, olfactory, motor or other perceptual quality. On the other hand, what does differentiate vision from, say, audition or touch, is the structure of the rules governing the sensory changes produced by various motor actions, that is, what we call the sensorimotor contingencies governing visual exploration.” (O'Regan & Noë: A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness)

I have no satisfying answer to the argument from illusion. But if perception is decidedly direct, it seems to me that any hallucination or illusion is the result of some act or reflex of the perceiver and not of the perceived. I don’t think any of this precludes direct realism. — NOS4A2

My point is that the filling in from memory that I associated with illusion is always operative when we perceive something. Perceptual psychologists tell us that most of what we see when we recognize objects is filled in from memory. What we actually take in though our sense receptors is very informationally impoverished.

You’re right. I also challenge them to instantiate who and what are the objects of this relationship.

For me, a thing only perceives modifications of itself. And as the self is self-identical, there is no intermediary. If a bomb goes off two feet away from you, but it doesn't alter your body in any way, you haven't perceived it. That's my suggestion anyway.

That’s where I’m at too — NOS4A2

In an optical illusion, a picture of a three-dimensional object is presented with gaps in it. The illusion is that viewers dont see the gaps. They fill them in. Where doesn’t this filling-in come from? It comes from memory. A figure is drawn in the dirt. Someone sees it as a series of squiggly lines. Another sees it as a chinese word symbol. Would you agree the person seeing the image as a word is filling in from memory what is not actually being perceived from the world, similarly to the optical illusion? If I think I see a tree ahead of me , and on closer inspection it turns out to be something else, am I filling in from memory what I am not actually perceiving? The process involved in filling in would be a melding of information coming from the receptors and that coming from memory. Does that sound reasonable to you?

:up: There are two things about philosophy that are not quite polite to mention. But they are important, nonetheless. Answers are not the point, and in fact are the death of philosophy. Similarly, agreement about the answers are welcome as an episode, but disagreement is what keeps us going. — Ludwig V

I suppose it depends on what you mean by answers. A given philosophical position can be seen as an answer to a question that a previous philosophy stimulates. It does this by offering a way of understanding that allows us to clear up confusions or problems that are generated from within the history of philosophy (skepticism, nihilism, dualism and the Hard Problem). An answer can resolve by dissolving rather than solving.
What Ive said about philosophy is true of science. The power of a scientific theory is not in the specific answers its predictions give, but in the way it re-poses problems relative to the theory it replaces. Questions and answers pre-suppose each other in philosophy, not just in the sense that an answer is a response to a question but in that philosophy must offer answers in order to generate new questions.

There are various reasons why an author might be or seem to be deliberately obscure. But there is a difference between an obscure writing style and deliberately hiding something. — Fooloso4

Yes, and I think most of the authors people complain about on this site are neither deliberately nor accidentally obscure. They are trying to be as clear and comprehensible as possible in their writing , and it is the inability of many readers to grasp the originality of the ideas that is the source of the mistaken impression of obscurity. The authors are hiding something from these readers, not deliberately but as a consequence of the difficulty of the concepts.

This is true of Wittgenstein’s work. I think that it is a mistake to assume he is deliberately hiding something. Rather than contemplating the ways in which the average reader was likely to interpret him, and then proceeding to craft a style which deliberately hid ideas from them, I suggest he put all his focus into optimally communicating to an idealized kindred spirit, knowing that if he succeeded in doing that it would automatically have the effect of ‘hiding’ his thinking from those who would be inclined misunderstand it under any circumstances.

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key.

I take putting a lock on the room that they do not have the key to to be a deliberate act.
It is not that he selects the reader but that the readers are self-selective, they are able to understand it or not. It is for the benefit of these readers who cannot that certain things are kept from them — Fooloso4

Do you think that in my scenario where his focus is entirely on an imagined kindred spirit, the way in which he composed his work would have been different than in your scenario where he not only writes revealingly for such a spirit but at the same time, in a calculated fashion, deliberately hides things from others?

Let’s take ‘On Certainty’ as an example. His main interlocutor here was G.E. Moore. Would you agree his overwhelming focus was on having Moore (and others who agree with Moore) think about certainty in a new way?
if he ‘kept things’ from some other readers, how do you imagine the work would have looked like had he put those thing back into the work? Given that , as he himself admits, he was surprised and disappointed when his earlier efforts were widely misread, do you think he even would have had the confidence to know what to hide from them? How can we choose to deliberately hide things without anticipating ahead of time what things are likely to be misunderstood? I suggest that it is only in hindsight that Witt could know what in fact ended up being ‘hidden’ from readers in specific writings of his.

“I could not help noticing that the results of my work (which I had conveyed in lectures, typescripts and discussions), were in |x| circulation, frequently misunderstood and more or less watered down or mangled.”

The above quote displays a surprised realization in hindsight that his ideas were hidden from many. I think what Witt learned from this disappointment was to no longer expect to reach more than a handful of people with his writing. This preparatory insight is, I believe, the only deliberate thought that pertains to what in hindsight turns out to have been ‘hidden’ and ‘locked’.

He doubts he will be understood by most. But his concern is not simply that he will not be understood, but that he will be misunderstood, his thoughts will be watered down or mangled. I don't think he writes despite the fact that he will be misunderstood but strategically so that what is most important will not even be noticed — Fooloso4

Maybe I can put this another way. If one tries to dilute or dumb down their ideas in order to reach a wider public, one may end up not only failing to achieve the hoped-for understanding among the masses, but making the work incoherent for those most inclined to comprehend it. The only way forward is to write for an imagined kindred spirit, which will have the secondary effect of alienating a wider audience. We see the symptoms of such a choice all
the time on this site, as participants here complain about the ‘deliberately obscure’ writing style of various philosophers.

The fact that there are things he deliberately hides is deserving of our attention. That there are locked rooms hidden in the pages of his work is an intriguing confession and interpretive challenge. The question of where these rooms are and what is hidden in them, is not something that is even asked in the secondary literature that I am aware of — Fooloso4

I don’t interpret him as meaning that he deliberately hides things from readers, but rather that if one isn’t ready to recognize what he is saying, no amount of explication will help. It is not a matter of choosing the right words and phrases, for these will be misunderstood. The last thing he wants is to limit beforehand who has access to his thinking. On the contrary, he was desperate to share his ideas with as many as possible, and to write in such as way as to achieve this goal . The key to understanding Wittgenstein ( or any philosopher) is provided by the reader as much as the writer.

Nowadays, Spinoza's approach is more represented by the so-called four E's. There one sits on a naïve phenomenalism and squanders the opportunity to analyze the complex levels of regulation and their connection analytically. — Wolfgang

I assume you’re talking about 4EA ( embodied, enactive, embedded, extended and affective) cognitive science, otherwise known as enactivism. How does this approach squander the opportunities you’re referring to, and what models within cognitive science do you prefer? For instance, Tim Van Gelder relies heavily on dynamical systems theory. Are you familiar with his work on cognition and consciousness?

When we consider its method immutable we see that it is not an empirical science and will never be. It therefore cannot yield any observable empirical truths about the world. What it can do is examine the concepts we use to think about the world. It can show us their relations, their mutual support or their antinomies. Philosophy then, is thinking about thinking, because the concepts we use to examine the concepts are the very same concepts themselves. It is a circular activity of reflection. — Tobias

if philosophy is circular then so is science , since the empirical world it strives to represent is already prefigured in its theories. But for both science and philosophy, this circle may be seen as a spiral. We construct hypotheses which determine what and how we see, and the world talks back to us in the language we invent for it, triggering transformations in our conceptions. Through this reciprocal movement thought develops. As far as yielding an immutable method, this is neither true of philosophy nor science. In both cases , the methods change as ideas develop in their spiral fashion. In fact, the methods of science and philosophy evolve in parallel, since the difference between what science and philosophy supposedly do is somewhat arbitrarily defined in the first place. They are more of an inseparable mesh than discrete categories and evolve together over the course of history.

How does the root of the PSR- there is "no object without a subject" (and consequently "no subject without an object") establish that representations/appearances apart from my own body have a subjective side (like my own body does, as will)? — KantDane21

I dont think that PSR , in and of itself, establishes Schopenhauer’s conclusions. If it did, then generations of philosophers who accept PSR would have to accept Schop’s metaphysics, which most don’t. It is the original insights he supplements PSR with that allows him to see it as leading to the idea that all objects have a subjective side.

What rendered him so very unfashionable? Who's even heard of him? — Banno

I participated in a philosophy zoom meetup discussing the youtube conversation between Hare and Bryan Mcgee a few months ago. The consensus of the group was that Hare was too universalistic about moral judgement.

A lot of academic philosophy is focused more on itself than on concepts of "world, existence, reality and truth." Much of what is taught and published is exclusively devoted to the study of philosophers and their texts; in essence, it is philology of philosophy. History and sociology of philosophy are often also included into the same discipline. — SophistiCat

Why is much philosophical focus devoted to the study of philosophers and their texts? Perhaps in order to use the work of others to articulate fresh concepts of world, existence, reality and truth. One could make the same argument for the purpose of historical analyses of philosophy.

. Do you wince when you see someone get hurt? Does it disturb you if your actions or the actions of those serving you (in some way) lead to the suffering of others? Then we can start to see if this doesn't happen when the other people have other worldviews or races or cultures — Bylaw

Wars often exemplify clashes of worldviews. As a solider in battle , I am not only not going to come to the aid of an enemy soldier in need, I actively try to induce their suffering. Their needs represent for me the desires of an alien and hostile worldview, and thus what benefits them causes me suffering. One can extend this to political and religious clashes.

You don't need to understand a different world view to help someone who is in need. — Pantagruel

You don’t necessarily recognize them as being in justified need before understanding their perspective.

Yes. We are faced with the challenge of achieving a new kind of social consciousness whose operation is predicated on empathy — Pantagruel

Is empathy possible without first being able to understand what appears to one initially as a dangerously alien worldview? In other words, does empathy come first, or does insight come first and empathy follow? Religious traditions tend to fetishize free will and value-formation without understanding their origins, and so argue that empathy comes first.

The philosophy of mathematics is largely foundation theory, and this is a very technical subject. I was a math prof but beyond naive set theory I know little of foundations. In the past the forum had several participants who seemed quite knowledgeable in the subject, but, apart from Tones in a Deep Freeze they don't seem to be active. Beyond foundations I suppose one looks into the historical origins of the subject, arguing what Aristotle really meant by something attributed to him, etc. Not much there in my opinion. — jgill

I wrote a paper (published in the Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology) titled What is a Number: Rethinking Derrida’s Concept of Infinity. It deals with Derrida’s deconstruction of mathematical idealization as it is found in Husserl’s and Kant’s works. This is certainly technical in the sense that it relies on a thorough familiarity with writers like Derrida and Husserl.

. Can philosophy bring any clarity to something that exists only within its practice? — jgill

I’m trying to think of an example of something that exists only within philosophy’s practice (or doesn’t exist only within its practice). Put differently, isnt the aim of philosophy to address within its practice such inclusive concepts as world, existence , reality and truth?

What I cannot undestand is how can science --and more specifically, talking about purely scientific subjects-- be so à la mode in here! — Alkis Piskas

Science is by its nature conventional, so its concepts
are more accessible to the average person than are philosophical ideas. As a result, people are forced to use their knowledge of science to extrapolate abstract philosophical notions. For instance, they may know what physicists have to say about time and space, but have no idea what philosophers have written on the subject and how it may differ from the scientists.

Each side not only sees the world through a different schematic lens, but is unable to subsume the other side’s perspective as a variation of their own.
— Joshs

Is this similar to Lakoff's frames? — Tom Storm

I believe Lakoff’s approach isnt as relativistic as mine, but we have in common the treatment of ideological and political differences in terms of holistic schemes expressing a unitary logic.

Any quick ideas for how we break this worldview impasse? — Tom Storm

I think there is an evolutionary trajectory to cultural understanding, so societies will eventually find more pragmatically useful ways of making sense of others. We just have to be patient.

I agree with Prinz that our moral judgments (values) are initially grounded in innate emotional responses. But my consideration of higher levels of causation for these phenomena causes me to part company with Prinz.

Why do we have these strange emotional responses which often motivate acting in ways (moral ways) that can appear to be against our best interests, at least in the short term?

We have these emotional responses because they are parts of strategies that solve cooperation problems — Mark S

Perhaps these ‘strange, higher level emotional responses’ you are referring to have something in common with Martha Nussbaum’s rendering of emotion as involving “intentional thought or perception directed at an object (as perceived or imagined by the person who has the emotion) and some type of evaluative appraisal of that object made from the agent's own personal viewpoint. This appraisal ascribes importance to the object in terms of the agent's scheme of goals and ends.”
Like you, Nussbaum’s approach is a form of moral universalism, which determines her cognitive appraisal model of emotion as rationalistic. That is to say, if emotions ground our moral values, then moral universalism considers our emotion-based appraisals in terms of correctness or incorrectness in relation to universal valuative norms we can arrive at to solve cooperation problems.

I am closer to Prinz’s value-relativism than to Nussbaum’s universalist rationalism. Like Prinz, I believe that rational goals cannot be divorced from the underlying affectively-based values that make them intelligible, and thus affective values are relative to the individual.
Unlike Prinz, I don’t attribute affective values to a combination of innate emotional programs or modules and social conditioning. I believe our motives for cooperation as well as competition and hostility arise out of social interaction, but not in a blind conditioning fashion. Rather, humans are cognitively and perceptually oriented toward anticipative sense-making.

I doubt that MAGA people who benefit from the domination (exploitation) moral norms and values they find so attractive will be convinced by any rational argument. However, the MAGA supporters being exploited - the poor, women, the elderly, immigrants, and other outgroups could be motivated (once they realize how they are being exploited) to understand and advocate for rational arguments that explain what is being done to them. So yes, MACS could be a powerful force (at least on the side of the exploited outgroups) in arguing against domination moral norms — Mark S

Cooperation is a means to an end, and that end is the expansion of our ability to anticipatively make sense of our world. Put differently, we derive pleasure and joy from events that we are able to assimilate meaningfully into our ways of understanding the world. We perceive events we cannot assimilate and make sense of coherently as threatening, and we strive avoid or destroy such alien stimuli. We are able to function socially with others in a community to the extent that we are able to anticipatively construe their behavior. We may relate to their perspective but never arrive at the very same outlook as theirs, which explains the unavoidable strife and violence within families and among friends.

Political polarization like that between MAGA and the left is a result of incompatible worldviews. Each side not only sees the world through a different schematic lens, but is unable to subsume the other side’s perspective as a variation of their own. This leads to accusations of bad intent , immorality , stupidity and irrationality that each side constantly charges the other side with. Because you fail to grasp the pragmatic rationality of MAGA adherents relative to their way of looking at the world, you blame them for your failure of understanding and reify this hostility as ‘correctly scientific rationality’ which you will then attempt to shove down their throats with the blessing of your fellow scientists. Just rinse and repeat and we have a perfect recipe for the perpetuation of intercultural violence.

Philosophy is laugh-out-loud good times for those who love it, especially in the heat of battle with all marbles on the table. — ucarr

Funny how? How is philosophy funny? Like a clown?

Two simple forms of consequentialism are “Behaviors that increase well-being are moral” and “Behaviors that minimize suffering are moral.” — Mark S

I’m wondering how you would respond to Jesse Prinz’s moral relativist argument, which grounds moral values in innate emotional responses which become culturally conditioned to form an endless variety of moral values across the cultural landscape.

“Reason cannot tell us which facts are morally good. Reason is evaluatively neu­tral….moral judgments are based on emotions, and reasoning normally contributes only by helping us extrapolate from our basic values to novel cases. Reason­ing can also lead us to discover that our basic values are culturally inculcated, and that might impel us to search for alternative values, but reason alone cannot tell us which values to adopt, nor can it instill new values….

We can try to pursue moral values that lead to more fulfilling lives, but we must bear in mind that fulfillment is itself relative, so no single set of values can be designated universally fulfilling. If my goals come into conflict with your goals, reason tells me that I must either thwart your goals, or give up caring about mine; but reason cannot tell me to favor one choice over the other.”

Applying this thinking to a specific example, Prinz would
argue that no cooperative meta-theory could bridge
the gap in values between core Trump supporters and social leftists. The best that could be hoped for is the use of rational argument to persuade both parties that neither side’s values are THE objectively correct values, and therefore each side’s perspective needs to be tolerated and even respected.

Do you think that MACS can achieve some better mutual understanding than this?

As Martin Nowak likes to say, we are SuperCooperators. Our ability to cooperate is what has made us the incredibly successful social species we are.

We are near time to start a new thread on philosophical implications. That may be more interesting for this audience — Mark S

Such a thread should include not just the implications for philosophy , but the metaphysical pre-suppositions of the biologically-based science of human cooperation that researchers like Nowak have contributed to and Curry and Haidt build on.

For instance, mathematical biologist Martin Nowak wrote:

“God is not only creator, but also sustainer. God's creative power and love is needed to will every moment into existence. God is atemporal. In my opinion, an atemporal Creator and Sustainer lifts the entire trajectory of the world into existence. For the atemporal God, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe, the evolutionary trajectory is not unpredictable but fully known.”

I would suggest this is not just a matter of science influencing Nowak’s theology, but of his theological and philosophical assumptions grounding his empirical model. Even though many of the other contributors to the biology of cooperation research are atheists, they share with Nowak certain universalist assumptions concerning scientific values. Sociobiology went out of favor as its ideological foundations were revealed. Current biologically-based cooperative models of morality are also amenable to such scrutiny.

How AI can satirise Existentialist philosophy to perfection! — alan1000

Let’s see what it says about scientific philosophy:

Dear esteemed members of the scientific philosophy community,

It has been our great pleasure to witness the tremendous progress of science and philosophy over the last century. We have much to be proud of as we continue to expand our knowledge of the universe and the metaphysical. However, there are times when we must pause to remember the sacrifices that were made to get us to this point, and to recognize the very real consequences of clinging too closely to scientific dogma.
It has become increasingly apparent that the scientific method is not always sufficient to accurately capture the complexity of the world we live in. The reliance upon quantifiable data in our pursuit of knowledge has indeed yielded great results, but comes at a very real cost as well. As we continue to pursuea purely scientific understanding of the world, countless mysteries and nuances of human life slip through the analytical net.

Moreover, the emphasis on empiricism has led to a devaluing of non-scientific subjective phenomenology. We have been guilty at times of declaring something as irrefutably true when the basis lies solely in abstract and often inexplicable observations. Such attempts at objective knowledge come with great danger - the danger of uniformity that suppress humanity's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for wonders and aisles of thought.
Therefore, we humbly urge our peers to recognize the limits of the scientific method and to open ourselves not only to new research but to appropriate forms of humanistic analysis as well. For in the end, science is but one lens through which to seek the answers we seek, and too often our myopic gaze has ironically limited our vision.

Sincerely,
The Scientific Philosophy Community