The conscious mind cannot produce emotions nor feelings. Emotions and feeling are produced by the vast-over mind and are, as you state, very different one from the other. (There may be problems with the word "Feeling". It seems to have more than one meaning or definition). — Ken Edwards

It sounds like you’re making all this up , because it runs directly counter to current research on the relation between consciousness and feelings. Can you cite any research from psychologists supporting your view?

I want get back to what you wrote last week as an example of a moral assessment:

Someone I know was beaten and robbed in the street. That person suffered a concussion and a broken bone as a result. I hold the perpetrators morally responsible for what they did, because (a) they did it, and (b) what they did was wrong. Whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point; all that matters, as far as me holding people morally responsible, is how I relate to the incident.

Once I have given a moral assessment of an act, it would simply be incoherent for me to then say that no one is morally responsible for it. An act can only be morally charged if it is performed by a moral actor, and a moral actor is morally responsible by definition. No one would be morally responsible if the person in my example was mauled by a bear instead of being assaulted by hoodlums. But that is why we wouldn't qualify that as a moral act - it would be an accident.

is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy?
— Joshs

I intentionally led with an example that was not of this sort (I think we can all agree that violent street criminals are not "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.") — SophistiCat

My favorite psychologist George Kelly argues that individuals always make what he calls the elaborative
choice when faced with any kind of decision. This entails always choosing what enhances ones ability to anticipatively make sense of a situation. You may wonder what this has to do with moral acts. For Kelly, sense making is inherently in the direction of the greater good in that it entails our acting not only in our own best interest in situations but also in the best interest of other as far as we understand their intent , motive, point of view and needs. So from Kelly’s vantage , the other can’t do wrong morally. Every situation is like that of the bear mauling. Our blaming the other is just our failure to understand his actions from his own point of view.

I realize from your vantage this is an extreme model that jettisons the concept of moral wrong, and thus you would be inclined to label it either pathological or hypocritical. I mention it , though, because even though Kelly makes the point of choice as personal, unique to the individual, his construal of choice in terms of his model of the elaborative choice is theoretical. That is, if Kelly is the one making the elaborative choice, the reason he will refuse to think of it as assessing moral blame is due to the theory that informs his understanding of it. More broadly, the theory’s understanding of the nature of human motive and affectivity , and how these relate to the overall organizational dynamics of human cognition, enter directly into how any situation of choice of whatever kind will be construed by Kelly.

In your terms , how he relates to any particular incident , such as being beaten and robbed, is not just a function of the circumstances , but how the circumstances are interpreted in relation to what Kelly understands about the nature of human choice and motive.

Kelly wouldn’t label the act as ‘wrong’, ‘criminal’ because he would believe that from the robbers’ perspective the act WAS sufffused with a sense of ethical primacy.

He would argue that there are many ways we justify our own acts of violence against others as morally defensible , and these are not mere rationalizations. For instance: The victims deserve punishment , they are responsible either directly or indirectly for our bad circumstances. We needed the money and didn’t intend to harm them but things got out of hand and we panicked. We were raised in an inner city environment of survival of the fittest, etc, etc.

You say that in a moral act , “whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point”. But objectivity, and universality do come into play in our very definition of wrongdoing and blamefulness. For instance, in your example of the robbers, your assessment that what they did was wrong pre-supposed not only that the robbers did the act , but that they intentionally meant to cause harm and to steal what wasn’t theirs. So your definition of wrong implies intent. Many older tribal cultures did not include intent in their definition of moral wrong because their psychological understanding did not grasp the concept of intent. It is a more recent empirical discovery . So a certain culturally and scientifically informed notion of wrong as requiring psychological intent is not beside the point in your example, but an important part of your definition of blameworthiness. I assume that you would not recommend that body parts be cut off of the robbers or that they be executed for their crime of robbery and assault But that’s how religious fundamentalist cultures have commonly dealt with such crimes. If both those cultures and you believe that robbery and assault is wrong and worthy of blame , what accounts for the difference in method of punishment? Could it be that a fundamentalist worldview understands the notion of moral blame in a different way than you do, which includes a model of human psychology, motivation and will that also differs from yours? Is such a difference in assimptions about what is objectively or universally operative in human behavior besides the point or is it directly pertinent to the very notion of moral blame?

In our era, there are all sorts of debates between conservative and liberal factions over what sort of response to crime is just or appropriate , whether harsh measures or more leniency is called for, whether rehabilation is useful , etc. And these debates reflect differences in larger frames of understanding concerning what is objectively true concerning human behavior.

So there is a wide range of viewpoints on what constitutes moral wrong , from blame with a capital B to notions of blame as a small b, that consider it always mitigated and complicated by the way each of us is socialized And as I mentioned with Kelly, they are even approaches that don’t find the notion of blame useful at all.


Given the fact that in an important sense, Gergen , Foucault and a host of other postmodern thinkers do believe that all acts of criminality are performed by actors with a sense of ethical primacy, and you clearly disagree with that position, I made the tentative guess that you do not identify with philosophical
postmodernism , or at least not with social constructionism and poststructuralism. Generally , those who are not postmodernists are modernists, and that usually entails a commitment to some form of realism( if not ‘moral realism’ then at least scientific realism. ).

You can correct me if I’m wrong, or just throw sarcastic hostility my way. Whichever makes you feel better.

What is common among PC culture is what Gergen is accusing it of , a blameful moralism based on a belief in a normative standard that is claimed to be superior or preferred to standards of other normative cultures.
— Joshs

This is confused. A belief, whatever its nature, origin and grounding, is always held to be superior to alternatives, however tentatively or transiently. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be a belief. (One can take a pluralistic stance on some issue, but then any isolated strand within that pluralistic web would not be an accurate representation of the whole.) — SophistiCat

Gergen has a belief, or more precisely a theory, called social constructionism, the view that all truths are contingent constructions of local cultures, including his own theory. Does he think it is superior to alternatives in terms of its implications for how people treat each other? Yes. Does he think that people who don’t hold that belief are morally wrong? No. Then how is his belief superior if it isn’t ‘t making a moral claim?He realizes it is only superior from his perspective and he has no reason to assume that it will or should be perceived as such by another community. Thus, he isnt claiming that others who don’t hold his belief are presenting a moral failing , because he realizes that it is his responsibility to attempt to offer his theory to towers and allow them to determine if it appears superior to them. It is not his judgement to make but theirs, or more precisely, its value is to be decided via intersubjective negotiation.

I am curious, if you are actually reading my responses, what in what I wrote made you think that I am a moral realist? — SophistiCat

How don’t we save a little time here and you just tell me as succinctly as possibly what philosophical position on morality you hold. If you could also mention just 4 or 5 philosophers ( within the past 2 centuries, including living writers ) whose general framework you most closely identify with that would be helpful too.

Right, the only way to remove fuel - not just for violent retribution, but for any moral action, good or bad - is to renounce moral beliefs altogether. But, except for a few psychopaths, no one is actually willing to do that, whatever theories they espouse in public. — SophistiCat

Probably a better way to put this is that you reject philosophies which claim to go beyond moral thinking. Would you put Nietzsche’s Geneology of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil in this category? How about Foucault? Or Richard Garner? ( https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Morality_The_Final_Delusion )

To simplify , let’s just say that you reject postmodern philosophies in general , to the extent that they all claim to go beyond morality( Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty).

The conscous mind can only deal with words or symbols like math symbols. It is the part of the mind that you and I are using now. It can talk but it can't feel. — Ken Edwards

On the contrary , contemporary research in cognitive neuroscience and consciousness studies both point to the idea that the notion of unconscious feeling is incoherent.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says “ it’s very important to separate emotion from feeling. We must separate the component that comes out of actions from the component that comes out of our perspective on those actions, which is feeling. Curiously, it’s also where the self emerges, and consciousness itself. Mind begins at the level of feeling. It’s when you have a feeling (even if you’re a very little creature) that you begin to have a mind and a self.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/06/17/172310/the-importance-of-feelings/amp/

If Wittgenstein is right, is there any value in philosophy as analysis as opposed to description? — Welkin Rogue

Since you mentioned Heidegger , I might suggest that he would find the idea of philosophy as description problematic. Description implies a neutrality that is absent from the disclosive basis of being in the world. He prefers the notion of interpretation to description, since it implies the projective anticipatory character of disclosure. .

the "is" amounts to an objective account of who someone is with respect to normatively. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It’s only an objective account if the person formulating the account is an objectivist.

In this respect, we have a moral realism, just grounded on the signifcance of an individual's existence rather than a transcendent force or encompassing standard. — TheWillowOfDarkness

We have a moral realism if we , like Sophisticat, are a moral realist. If we are Gergen we are a moral relativist .

The ought becomes a feature of the contingent being-- "this is an existence which ought to be treated in this way"-- and grounds questions of how to treat them. (and versions of this are common amongst "PC" culture because it's frequently about respecting and valuing a given individual for who they are, for the fact they are an existence which is valuable). — TheWillowOfDarkness

What is common among PC culture is what Gergen is accusing it of , a blameful moralism based on a belief in a normative standard that is claimed to be superior or preferred to standards of other normative cultures. Homophobia is a pc term that implies that accepting homosexuals as part of normal culture is better than not doing so, because such acceptance is superior and can be justified in its superiority based on a higher or more universal grounding than that of contingent convention. The accusation of homophobia doesn’t justify itself merely on the basis of the fact that it just so happens in this particular era in this particular part of the world there is a normative community that prefers to treat homosexuals the same as heterosexuals. Homophobia implies that homosexuality is wrong. ‘Wrong’ implies that the standard of this particular community in this particular era happens to be a better standard in some objective sense than that of another community in another era. This is what give pc its polarizing force, the fact that those who do not buy into its standards believe that they will be ostracized and condemned as deplorable.

This is not Gergen’s position and that is why he rejects pc language.

But then, the "meta" end of value is just this ineffable "property" or as Moore put it, non natural property. Putting value into its contexts, theoretical, practical, invites discussion about everything BUT value. Is value Real? Then, what is real, and then follows the categorial move to "totalize" (Levinas borrowed from Heidegger, I think) which is away from the truly mysterious nature of value (that is, the pains, joys, miseries, celebrations, fascinations, interests, anxieties, terrors, and so on). — Constance

Value is not ineffable any more than the ‘objective ‘ is transcendentally true. Moore was a Kantian, still caught up in a subject-object , feeling-thinking split. Value cannot in any shape or form be separated from that which would supposedly be understandable or existent independently of it. The same is true of the relation between affectivity and intentional meaning, which is what we’re really talking about here anyway. Heidegger realized precisely this, which is why he didn’t think of ‘value’ as mysterious in some way that cognition or perception is not. Value is befindlichkeit, how we find ourselves in the world, how things have pragmatic meaning and significance for us.

The philosophical problem with Darwinism - and this has nothing to do with its veracity as a scientific theory - is that there can only ever be one ultimate in it. And that ultimate is survival. It’s the only meaningful criterion in Darwinism qua philosophy. As soon as you begin to question the meaning of surviving - which is something that only h. sapiens can do - then you’re out of the scope of Darwinism, per se — Wayfarer

Yes, but it’s only fair to look at Darwin in a larger philosophical context. Even though I assume he didn’t read Hegel, darwinism belongs to the Hegelian era. If we look at heirs of Hegel and Darwin , such as Marx , Nietzsche , James and Piaget, we see that survivalism has been replaced by perhaps a truer interpretation of the dialectic: not survivalism but becoming, fecundity, diversification. Piaget’s darwin-inspired project intended to bridge the gap between science and religion without leaving naturalism. The direction of cognitive evolution is from a weaker to a stronger structure. It is a continual
self-overcoming which becomes ever more meaningful
as it becomes ever more integrally diverse within itself. q

Our metaphysical haunt is not, good lord!: Dualism or Monism or whether ideas subsist in the Real, or if human consciousness is reducible or derivative; it is value and its meta-value consummation. — Constance

Yea, but these are inseparably intertwined. Value isn’t an ineffable internality, it’s a function of intersubjective patterns of relation , and questions concerning dualism and monism, the real and the relative are directly relevant to questions of value.

This is a classic naturalistic fallacy, an instance of is/ought confusion. The natural origin of morality is not the same as the grounding for moral claims. A constructivist may believe (rightly or wrongly) that normative beliefs come about as a result of social construction. But that is neither here nor there as far as what that same constructivist believes ought to be the case. — SophistiCat

What I’m talking about , what the whole
point of the OP is, is that how people ground their claims in terms of what ‘is’ has everything to
do with how violently and punitively they treat other who violate their standards of what ought to be . What a person assumes ‘is’ in terms of an ontology of nature , the physical or the human, is profoundly connected with how they formulate their ‘oughts’ and the level
of tolerance , the violent and punitive character of the enforcement of those oughts. No evolution of moral thinking can take place without a parallel evolution of one’s understanding of what ‘is’. You can’t devise standard of what should be the case for human behavior without knowing what is possible for human behavior. So how we think others ‘ought’ to act is profoundly tied up with our psychological understanding of such issues as the nature of the will, what it means for it to be free or not free ,how social or biological conditioning contributes to human intentions , whether intent can ever be evil. All of these considerations of the ‘is’ of human functioning will determine our sense of how likely it is that we can shape others behavior and what methods are necessary , appropriate or ‘moral’ in order to do so.

The Enlightenment ideal of human moral
perfect ability was a direct consequence of the Enlightenment scientific formulation of a rational universe. Every scientific revolution leads to new formulations of moral standards and new ‘oughts’. One can trace pc and cancel culture to post-Hegelian and Marxist- inspired models of what ‘is’.


Gergen’s version of social constructivism does away with the ‘fuel’ forviolent retribution and punishment , for righteous indignation , by removing the ability to believe that another’s choices were a deviation from a correct path. There is no ‘ought’ for Gergen for the same reason that there is no factual realism. They are social practices that have a temporary stability to them, a temporary ‘isness’ and there are always ways that emerge of reconstruing these practices.I suppose that is an ‘ought’,but an ‘ought’ with no moral force, because for Gergen the only true ought is continual reinvention of social practices with no final aim. So what Gergen believes ought to be the case, an attitude of openness to continual social reinvention , is inconceivable without a prior belief that what ‘is’ the case is radical
contingency of moral practice based on a Nietzchean notion of reality as self-overcoming.

When European culture cast off its religion, what was left was a sense of the immensity of the Universe, devoid of anything resembling intent or intelligence, within which life arose as a result of the fortuitous combination of atoms. — Wayfarer

I could argue that quality remains for both the religionist and the atheist. The difference is that the religionist wants to ‘fix’ the quality as THE intent or THE intelligence. Atheistic philosophy began from a hunch that such a view of intent and intelligence as devoid of history doesn’t present us with a very remarkable notion of intellect, since it is being in history that gives knowing its intimacy with itself. Strangely enough, even the Darwinian idea of living complexity and human knowing as a self -ordered stream of fortuitous events is in its way a more intimate view of being human than the ahistorical religious view.

But the point is, quantification allows for precise measurement, whereas the qualitative is only ever a matter of aesthetics and ethics. — Wayfarer

Isn’t quantification simply an act of measurement itself?
What is it that allows for precise measurement ? It seems to me that the only requirement is that whatever it is that we are submitting to measurment must remain self identical during the measuring. The self-identity is itself a quality with respect to the calculation that proceeds from it. That is, the objects we measure are defined entities with attributes and properties. They are not themselves numeric. They form the basis of enumerations. Quarks. gravity waves, apples are all qualitative with respect to bow we manipulate and relate them to other qualities mathematically. Of course , a quark is assumed to be qualitative in a different way than a subjective feeling. The quality of being a quark is not only self -identical over time, but supposedly publicly available ( to intersubjective experience).
A personal feeling, by contrast , is said to be private. One could count episodes of the experience of a particular feeling but it couldn't be counted publicly.


I suspect what the OP really want a to say is that the universe is like a clock, a static set of numeric relations between qualitative components.

I thought you were a fan of Nietzsche.

In any case, in the non-dualist framework, the apparent divisions referred to above no longer hold sway; the world is no longer divided up that way. — Wayfarer

While I agree with your geneology of the origin of the modern scientific split between objectivity and subjectivity, I don’t think one even has to go down this path in order to point out the problem with claims that the empirically observed world is completely quantifiable.

In itself calculation is qualitative. To count is to abstract away all else from the items to be counted in order enumerate. Counting is a special kind of activity designed for a purpose, an activity that requires a developmental grounding in object permanence, reciprocity , etc. And beyond a simple noting of ‘same thing different time’ , operators such as addition, substraction , multiplication introduce new qualitative concepts to mathematical
logic. Even if we were to ignore this fact and subsume all of mathematical logic under the heading of simple quantification , we would be left with a single
meaningless category to describe all of reality, that of numeric relationship. What makes a scientific description useful is not that it makes everything else about the subject matter it describes other than an empty counting disappear, but that it finds a way to unify an internally differentiated phenomenon. If differentiation is itself reduced to nothing but quantitive difference, then the world vanishes. quantity without quality eliminates the world it would purport to describe.

People will, of course, act to achieve success because they want it, but this doesn't ground the action a preferable or the rational option. It's just describing how people exist acting to get what they want. That one has "the might" and uses it does not amount to an action being preferable, either in terms of ethics or the rational. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Bringing this back to the theme of the OP, what is your view of Gergen’s social constructionist treatment of ethics? Do you agree that moral claims cannot justify themselves to the extent that they attempt to ground themselves on the basis of anything outside of contingent normative practices? And does this fact not deprive would-be enforcers of moral norms their justification for blameful finger-pointing?

A constructive feedback certainly exists between physical modeling and introspective phenomenology: each new development in either domain gives its complement a better idea of what to look for on the psychological level. They should be collaborators, not rivals, and may one day merge. — Enrique

I certainly agree with that sentiment.

My opinion is that an account of subjective consciousness based on quantum physics will not diminish the sense that subjective experience is real or important in any way because subjective experience is nonetheless a causal aspect of reality. If anything, it will dissolve the sense that mind is intangible and objects are tangible to create a synthetic concept of tangible substance as both mind and matter. It overcomes an antiquated philosophical duality that gives rise to our materialist/spiritualist divide, not the cognizance of causal multiplicity and separate theoretical/practical domains. If anything, it will be a cool additional facet of self-knowledge. — Enrique

I think it is fair to talk about a divide within theories of consciousness that runs parallel to that within cognitive science in general . On one side are those writers, like Daniel Dennett , who adhere to a representationalist or computationalist model of cognition. On the other are researchers in autopoietic self-organizing systems theory( Francisco Varela, Thompson) and 4EA cognitive psychologists (embodied, enactive,embedded, extended and affective).

The latter group abandons representationalism
and computationalism for a more radically interactionist foundation. Their inspirations are phenomenologists like Husserl , Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger , and Wittgenstein. This group doesn’t belei e that subjective experience is a causal aspect of reality because they reject the very model of causation that is implied by talking in this way about the relation between the subjective and the objective.

Heidegger pointed out that quantum theory rests on philosophical pre-suppositions that amount to a method originating with Galileo establishing what is knowable empirically as what is objective , and establishing objectivity on the basis of identities in motion within a time-space frame, a geometrical mathematical space. Even though what constitutes objective entities for physics has changed much since Galileo, the field has maintained these pre-suppositions , which is why almost all physicists today declare themselves to be realists, and many of them still believe that time is only a added human subjective dimension that isnt intrinsic to the physical world in itself.

key questions concerning what it is that consciousness does, what are its variations and its biological origins , how to understand pathologies of consciousness ( aphasia, autism, amnesia , etc) , how to model the relation between affect and cognition : these are all determined by which model of cognition one adheres to.
Penrose almost completely ignores the most vital and promising work by people like Damasio, Gallagher and Noe, which isnt surprising given that his background is not psychology. What we would end up in terms of a model of consciousness by following Penrose’s route is what we started out with , a quantum calculating machine.

From the vantage of enactivist thinking. , you cannot understand consciousness in all its richness without recognizing its bias in the dynamics of the self-organization of living systems , the fact that body-environment interaction has the feature of structural coupling in which the organism alters its world
at the same time that the world affects the organism. This reciprocity between inside and outside not only is key to understanding of consciousness but indicates that at some point physicists will find it necessary to alter their own models of the ‘physical’.

Indeed, but it is not simple intersubjectivity, a simple matter of perception. The general criterion is what has been called the "adversity" index. — David Mo

I looked up adversity index and couldn’t find anything about it. It sounds like you’re talking about the fact that our perceptions and cognitions are shaped by constraints and affordances offered by the world that we encounter. This is what keeps us from a radical relativism. Some ways of perceiving the world are more useful than others because of these constraints and affordances. But I don’t agree with the naive realist position that it makes sense to talk about an object as if those constraints and affordances are perceived identically by everyone , that is, that they are a pure function of objects in the world rather than a relationship between the knower and the known. This is not to say that we cannot achieve intersubjective pragmatic agreement on the objectivity of objects in order to do science but it is important to recognizes that the ‘same object for all’ is only a useful abstraction , and subject to change as science evolves.

A stone is always a stone and it is there. It is an immediate fact that only a fool -or a philosopher- would question. — David Mo

The other groups that would question the coherence of making subject-independent claims about objects are researchers in autopoietic self-organizing systems theory( Francisco Varela, Thompson) which includes biologists as well as psychologists, 4EA cognitive psychologists (embodied, enactive,embedded, extended and affective, Shaun Gallagher, Jan Slaby, Di Paulo, Andy Clark, Matthew Ratcliffe ) and workers in perceptual psychology ( Alva Noe ) and AI( Riccardo Manzotti:

https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/philosophies/philosophies-04-00039/article_deploy/philosophies-04-00039.pdf )

You should take a peek at their research.

I like Evan Thompson’s way of putting the issue.


“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive
dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.

Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James's thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10). The hard problem gives epistemological and ontological precedence to the impersonal, seeing it as the foundation, but this puts an excessive emphasis on the third-person in the primordial structure of I–You–It in human understanding. What this extreme emphasis fails to take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other. The upshot of this line of thought with respect to the hard problem is that this problem should not be made the foundational problem for consciousness studies. The problem cannot be ‘How do we go from mind-independent nature to subjectivity and consciousness?' because, to use the language of yet another philosophical tradition, that of Madhyamika Buddhism (Wallace, this volume), natural objects and properties are not intrinsically identifiable (svalaksana); they are identifiable only in relation to the ‘conceptual imputations' of intersubjective experience.” (Empathy and Consciousness)

To be fair , I’d need to go over the thread you linked to. I would only preliminarily say that anything reminiscent of Roger Penrose’s formulations of a quantum basis of consciousness is barking up the wrong tree.

Did I grasp your meaning accurately? — Enrique

I’m still working on my grasp of your grasp of my grasp of your grasp.

[

The bacterial theory of disease, plate tectonics, evolution, the nitrogen cycle, heliocentrism, the electromagnetic spectrum, photosynthesis, thermodynamics... need I go on? — counterpunch

No, it’s my turn. If you read carefully in the history of science, you’ll find that it is not a cumulative enterprise , as if there are fixed truths floating out there in the world and all science does is scoop them up and add little by little to our store of knowledge. That’s a 19th century view of science. Science creates a theoretical framework within which to make sense of observations, but this framework shifts over time in qualitative ways , so that, for instance , relativistic physics is not simply an addition to Newtonian physics , and Darwinian evolution is not simply an expansion of Lamarckism biology. Every scientific fact that you think is certain now who’ll likely be understood in a qualitatively different way 100 years from now.

I’ll quote my favorite psychologist , George Kellly:

“ If the scientist is one who imagines himself accumulating nuggets of ultimate truth he will place his primary research emphasis on the unassailability of his
fragmentary findings. If he supports something at the .05 level of confidence he is encouraged; if he pushes it to the .01 level he is gratified; if it turns out at the .001 level he is ecstatic; and if it reaches the .0001 level he wonders how one writes an application for the Nobel prize.

The research objective of such a man is to nail something down, once and for all. His eternity is in his data. If he is a psychologist he will regard mankind as an accomplished fact, not as a current enterprise.But if the experimenter sees himself exploring only one of many alternative
constructions of man, with the best ones yet to be devised, he will be on a continual lookout for
fresh perspectives emerging out of his research experience. What values he places upon his
hypotheses will lie in the fertility of the experience in which they engage him, rather than in the certainty and parsimony of the explanations they offer. He will design his experiments to make his experience an optimal one. Thus he can not lose sight of the fact that he is himself the principal subject of his own experimental intervention.

His psychology will not then be so much
a study of what inescapable state impales man at this immature moment in history as it will be an
exploration of what man may next become. He will approach his task with the horizon-scanning
vision of a constructive alternativist rather than with the squint of an accumulative fragmentalist.”

We now know more things with more certainty t — counterpunch

What do we know with certainty?

recognising that facts have a causal and functional truth value is important to the continued survival of the human species. — "

How bout , recognizing that facts are pragmatic hypotheses that are subject to continual revision and that can lead to better ways of making sense of the world , not because they copy reality, but because allownusntoningeract with a changing world more effectively. That allows for scientific progress within a subjective model of truth.

The issue of how consciousness can be physically modeled — Enrique

I think you got that backwards. You dont want to model subjectivity on the physical but show how models of the the physical emerge out of subjective
processes.

I was thinking about the history of philosophy and how in all it's history philosophers haven't really solved a single important question. — Thinking

If you understood philosophy the way I wish people would , you would realize your claim is exactly the same as saying that science hasn’t really solved a single important question.

. It's why your first impression is so often the correct one (depending on how focused you happen to be). — synthesis

First impressions are no less biased than later impressions , in fact they are more so. With regard to understanding and getting along with others, relying on first impressions is often disastrous. Getting to the truth about other people takes work and is a never-ending process

Concepts are a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, we can say that some concepts are very objective or less subjective than others. We trust the objectivity of those concepts that have been repeatedly tested and distrust the objectivity of those that do not meet rigorous criteria. — David Mo

Saying they are a mixture doesn’t make things clear.
Objectivity is a matter of intersubjective agreement on events which appear in different guises to each of us. We learn to treat our own vantage on an event as just an aspect of the ‘objective’ object , the ‘same’ object for all of us, when in fact it is never ‘same for all’ except as an abstraction, albeit a very useful abstraction. What is certain is that for each of us experience of that world is shaped by constrains and affordances such that some ways of interacting with the world are more useful relative to our purposes that others. The criteria of objectivity change over time as cultural an scientific practices change.

The government and the medical system expect you to view yourself as an expendable cog in the system. As such, how do you still trust them? — baker

First talk to your neighbors in your local
community. Most likely the government and the medical system are making the choices you mention with the support of a substantial segment of the people around you ( unless you live in a conservative part of the country, which is why you probably posted this).
People have attacked government for requiring mask wearing, but in my city, government enforcement of masks pales in comparison to peer pressure from my neighbors. My friend calls it ‘mask shaming’. I wouldn’t get two blocks without someone pointing to my face motioning me to mask up.

Electrons, for example, are too small to be seen but can be inferred. In the unique case of consciousness, the thing to be explained cannot be observed. We know that consciousness exists not through experiences, but through the immediate feeling of our feelings and experiences. — alphahimself

Actually, objective reality is a derived product of subjective construction. In essence, we trick ourselves into believing that the empirical entities we study as scientists can be focused on independently of the conscious process that constitutes them. But even though we are not aware of it, when we study an object ‘out there’ in the world , we are always implicitly studying consciousness. Studying consciousness is not a question of switching our gaze from the outer to the inner , but from the generic and superficial to the intricate. Phenomenology provides a method for doing this.

Naive realism is the belief that when we perceive the world we take in data that comes to us in a pure form from the outside world. But this is not what current research in perception tells us. The world, even down to the simplest sensation, comes already per-interpreted by us. There is no immediate access to an independent outside, because perception is a system of interaction between subject and world, in which each reciprocally affects the other. Also keep in mind that the more insignificant and simple the level of sensation we are are talking about, the more meaningless it is to us. So the 'portal' to profound an exotic experience is going to be a doorway to richly interpreted and subjectively mediated experience.

Mediators concentrate on this moment and often find it to be a portal to another place altogether. — synthesis

I think it's a portal to Naive Realism.

What I don't understand is why you think that holding someone morally responsible requires a commitment to moral objectivism. I haven't picked up any clues from what you've said here. — SophistiCat

Give me an example of what it could mean to hold someone morally responsible without a commitment to moral objectivism. More specifically , give me an example of what it would mean to hold someone morally accountable if we follow Gergen’s perspective:

is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? — Joshs

Can we hold someone morally accountable if we believe that they acted with the best and most noble intentions , and that their ‘failing’ was not one of bad intent but rather of a limitation in their worldview that they couldn’t have been expected to recognize? This is Gergen’s perspective and one I agree with. Do you agree with it? What I’m asking is, can we hold someone morally blameful if we completely sympathize with their intent and know that anyone would have done the same in their shoes? Does the issue of blame even come up here?

I wonder if pornhub has a discussion section.

QM can predict the activity of something that is a millionth of a millimeter in size with the accuracy of someone guessing the distance from Paris to Rome within the precision of a single hair. — Gregory

Yes, but this impressive feat is the result of rigging the deck to some extent. The method of physics restricts
the criterion of ‘activity of something’ so it can achieve great precision within a limited arena of human functioning. But such precision is useless for making sense of the behavior of phenomena that require different accounts , such as biological and psychological entities. One can use a qm description here , of course, but that would eliminate the subject matter whose activity it is supposed to predict.

Great story. Ok, here’s an idea that comes to mind. It may or may not apply to your friend , but I think it gets to the heart of at least one aspect of homophobia. Males brought up in our society are encultered into an ethos of masculinity and I think this explains an apparent double standard with regard to attitudes toward male homosexual behavior vs lesbianism( or I should say, the idea of two women having sex, which is not necessarily the same thing). I think it also explains what a number of women I’ve known have told me, which is that even though they consider themselves heterosexual, the idea of sex with another woman was not repulsive to them. This runs directly counter to what most self-declared heterosexual men I know feel about the idea of sex with another man, which is that the idea horrifies them.

I think the reason for this is that the idea of masculinity engrained in us sees affection between two men as a sign of weakness and a violation of that manliness , whereas two women being affectionate with each other doesn’t violate the conventional idea of femininity. So it’s possible that your friend was instinctively offended by male to male anal intercourse and relationship for this reason.
One way to test this out with your friend is to ask him whether he is more comfortable with a male who ‘tops’ another man anally as opposed to the one being the ‘bottom’.

That's merely a claim that the reasons I give are not my true reasons and what you think my reasons are are the true ones. — Kenosha Kid

No no no. I believe they’re absolutely your true reasons. I’m not saying you’re making anything up or fooling yourself. To demonstrate what I mean we’d have to make this concrete. Give me an example of a homophobe who is acting hypocritically with regard to rules and I’ll try and suggest what I think you may be missing about how they are interpreting their rules, and thus why their are being consistent even as they act in ways that appear oppressive or harmful.

Even as a construct, it's the same construct everywhere. The laws of logic are independent of opinion, even if they're arrived at by consensus. — Kenosha Kid

But logic is meaningless apart from the opinion( axiom) that it applies to. Your axiom or hypothesis concerning certain others is that they are espousing rules but holding themselves or others as exceptions.

I mean hypocrisy in its strict sense, e.g. espousing rules but holding themselves or others as exceptions. That's not really a subjective opinion; it follows from logic. — Kenosha Kid

But I suggest you may be led to this hypothesis by your exasperation over not being able to fathom how they could justify to themselves in good faith certain behaviors towards others. The key here is your interpretation. of how they are perceiving the rules. If the rules mean the same to them as they do to you, then yes, they would be hypocrites. But the source of most moral and political conflicts , like those ripping the world apart today, is that the world views by which rules are interpreted are incommensurable with each other.

That's not really a subjective opinion; it follows from logic. — Kenosha Kid

I’ve heard tell that logic is grounded in intersubjectivity.

No, I don't. These traits are examples of hypocrisy: the people who do them wouldn't have them done back to them also. — Kenosha Kid

We tend to accuse others of hypocrisy when we are unable to understand their thinking from their own point of view. It’s one of the favored words of blameful
politics, which is why it is used so often both on the right and the left.

The historic reason for identity politics is that some social constructs regarding people are harmful. Racism, misogyny and homophobia attempt to establish a natural order with straight white heteronormative people at a supremum and different people at lower strata. Such schemes are oppressive. Since these people are not open to integration and will support the perpetuation of oppressive structures, usually while denying they exist, the oppressed reassert their identities as positive qualities to challenge normalised constructs with negative connotations. — Kenosha Kid

Would you say that your characterization of those who are named by categories such as racism, misogyny and homophobia is compatible with Gergen’s
characterization of ‘those we excoriate’? Do you mean such terms as oppression and harmful in a way that takes into account that from their own perspective , those who are ‘guilty’ of being oppressors act from intentions as noble as we feel our own to be, and that inevitably, our own preferable perspective will appear to another group in a future era as oppressive?

is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? — Joshs