Vaihinger? Buber?Sartre?

The speed of time as psychologically experienced requires the simultaneous having of a horizon of past, a present and a future in awareness . We know it is now because we are at the same time aware of having just moved from the previous moment, but we carry (retain) the memory of that previous moment with us into the 'now' . We also anticipate into the future as part of the present moment. This is how time has the feeling of flowing, of being a continuous stream . We wouldnt be able to enjoy music if the 'now' was isolated from the immediate past. There would be nothing to connect the current note with the past notes to give us a sense of an ongoing continuity in the music.
Do insects have this structure of retention of the immediate past as they experience the now? If not, then time would not be experienced as flow for them, and they would have no perception of speed of time.
As far as human perception of the speed of the flow of time, notice that we only notice time as time when we are interrupted from a task we are involved in. If we are completely immersed in something of interest to us, we often dont notice time at all as a 'thing'. That's when time seems to 'fly'. It is when we are unable to absorb ourselves completely into an activity that time seems to 'drag' because we are impatiently waiting for something to happen rather than being immersed in the happening.
When it comes down to it, what we call objective, or clock time, is only useful to us at certain points in our activities

Time as it is experienced phenomenologically by a living creature cannot be reduced to time as modeled in physics, since the objective scientific model is itself a derivative mode of thinking about time in relation to the more originary phenomenological experiencing of it.

You dont get rid of beliefs, because beliefs arent data and the memory iisn't a filing cabinet. Beliefs are subsets of larger frames of perspective that form our ongoing worldviews. Worldviews are very stable and evolve very slowly. The life work of a philosopher or artist or fiction writer amounts to variations on a slowly changing theme. Beliefs arise out of such themes. You can forget a particular belief but that wont affect the larger background worldview which justified and nourished that belief. The enduring nature of worldviews is the reason we talk past each other when we argue politics or religion. The facts of a situation mean nothing outside of a scheme of interpretation and that's where larger worldvews come into play In arguments over global warming, gun control or immigration facts are just proxies for clashes of worldviews.

Does that mean you disagree with Hilary Putnam?

"Many thinkers have argued that the traditional dichotomy between
the world "in itself" and the concepts we use to think and talk about
it must be given up. To mention only the most recent examples,
Davidson has argued that the distinction between "scheme" and
"content" cannot be drawn, Goodman has argued that the distinction
between "world" and "versions" is untenable, and Quine has
defended "ontological relativity." Like the great pragmatists, these
thinkers have urged us to reject the spectator point of view in metaphysics
and epistemology. Quine has urged us to accept the existence
of abstract entities on the ground that these are indispensable in
mathematics, and of microparticles and spacetime points on the
ground that these are indispensable in physics; and what better justification
is there for accepting an ontology than its indispensability
in our scientific practice? he asks. Goodman has urged us to take
seriously the metaphors that artists use to restructure our worlds,
on the ground that these are an indispensable way of understanding
our experience. Davidson has rejected the idea that talk of propositional
attitudes is "second class," on similar grounds. These thinkers
have been somewhat hesitant to forthrightly extend the same
approach to our moral images of ourselves and the world. Yetwhat
can giving up the spectator view in philosophy mean if we don't
extend the pragmatic approach to the most indispensable "versions"
of ourselves and our world that we possess? Like William James
(and like my teacher Morton White) I propose to do exactly that.'

Its not a question of having a right or wrong view, but that all views , as perspectives, dictate the limits of what can be seen, what counts as evidence. I follow Thomas Kuhn rather than karl Popper in this regard. Truth is relative to perspective and the way in which scientific perspective shifts over cultural history cannot itself be subsumed with an overarching theory of truth as correspondence with the 'way things really are'. This does not mean that we cant talk about development of science in a pragmatic sense in terms of its usefulness relative to our evolving needs, But if you want to think of accuracy as our representing of some supposed independent objective outside you will run into the problem that truth is a useful way of interacting with a world, but in interacting with it, we alter that world, which then alters our perspective. So empirical accuracy is always with respect to a scientific perspective within which that empirical description has meaning . The shift to a new paradigm brings with it a qualitatively different account within which empirical accuracy can function.
Whats most powerful about scientific development isnt its accuracy so much as its capacity, along with the development of philosophy, to enact qualitative shifts in its perspective over time.
Lee Smolen is one of those natural scientists (Ilya Prigogine is another) who would argue that a revolution of philosophical worldview within physics is necessary to keep pace with where philosophy has already gone after Darwin . with respect to temporality. This shift in thinking would not necessitate the invalidation of any of the prior empirical results , but rather a re-envisioning of the significance of those results within a metatheoretical framework that would open up new horizons of discovery.

Absolutely. Heidegger also understood how the way physicists accept uncritically their results, without recognizing the way their truths are conditioned by their presuppositions, leads to statements like the following from MindForged: "General relativity gives us an incredibly accurate understanding of gravity and acceleration."

Heidegger critiqued the notion of time that modern physics inherited from the Greeks.
" Einstein's theory of relativity established the opinion
that traditional philosophical doctrine concerning time has been shaken
to the core through the theory of physics. However, this widely held
opinion is fundamentally wrong. The theory of relativity in physics does
not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of
a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute
measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative,
that is, conditioned.* The question of the theory of relativity could not
be discussed at all unless the supposition of time as the succession of
a sequence of nows were presupposed beforehand. If the doctrine of
time, held since Aristotle, were to become untenable, then the very
possibility of physics would be ruled out. [The fact that] physics, with
its horizon of measuring time, deals not only with irreversible events,
but also with reversible ones and that the direction of time is reversible
attests specifically to the fact that in physics time is nothing else than the
succession of a sequence of nows. "

Heidegger's point is that whether one posits a continuum or discrete units, time as a counting of nows misses the irreversible, creative basis of temporaity. From biology we know that you cannot un-fry and egg, but in physics temporal phenomena are presumed to work just as well in reverse as forward.

Searle was not happy with the results of his encounter with Derrida. He likely would have been as unhappy had he been engaged in argument with Heidegger. Reading your posts concerning materialism vs intentionalty brought that to mind. Analytic writers like Searle serve as useful touchstones for me . They represent for me the one side of a cultural dividing line. Their side upholds the proud tradition of a natural science-based metaphysics owing its origin to the Greeks that, in spite of its Kantian transformations, retains a dualist set of presuppositions concerning matter and form, the material and the intentional, the objective and the subjective, the inner and the outer, sense and content, language and meaning, sign and signified, perception and language, affect and cognition, body and mind.
But what do hermeneutics, philosophical pragmatism , enactive embodied cognitivism, phenomenology , self-organizing autopoietic systems and constructivism have to contribute to the theorizing of physicists? This question is more difficult to answer than exploring what these modes of thinking have to contribute to pseudo-questions like the mind-body problem. Their varied responses to Dennett's proposed solyion to the problem of consciousness is a useful starting point.

" In short, treat any and every criticism of Kant with much suspicion." Do you not have any significant criticism to make concerning the limitations of Kant's metaphysics? I have in mind the problematizing of Kantian thinking by writers like Nietzsche, Derrida, Husserl, the pragmatisits, etc.

Enlighenment science may have gotten rid of one ‘fog of metaphysics’ only to replace it with the fog of physicalism. At least , according to a different and more more encompassing way ofunderstanding metaphysics than just via the issue of whether science can describe all aspects of reality.
According to this alternate perspective, any science , in any era, is always already a philosophical worldview , articulated via a particular vocabulary and methodology that marks it as science according to the conventions of that era.
A hot topic in current philosophy of mind is whether it’s time to jettison objectivist and physicalist presuppositions in the hard sciences, and how such a rethinking would change how science is practiced.
Nelson Goodman recognized the dependence of the objects of science on subjective construction.
“If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”

Here's a blog comment by Evan Thompson summarizing his interest in a post-physicalist science:
"in my own work I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn’t entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that panpsychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don’t think we’re now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

Strawson is among many within the analytic community who have been unable to make the leap to a post-Nietzschean way of construing objectivity, causality and subjectivity. They don’t see that the problem is their reliance on an inadequate formulation of the physical, and an inadequate biological model. As a result, Strawson finds subjective experience to be so qualitatively alien with respect to his understanding of the non-experientially physical that he has no choice but to create a new category of the physical to make room for it. Post-Nietzschean philosophers from Rorty and Varela to Gallagher and the post-structuralists begin from a radical indissociability between subject and object. They typically embrace self-organizing systems approaches that reveal consciousness as emergent from autopeiotic living processes that already have many of the underlying characteristics surrounding of consciousness. It is telling that Strawson’s model of biological functioning Im is not informed by a self-organizing systems understanding.

Strawson wrote:
“Life* reduces, experience doesn't. Our theory of the basic mechanisms of life reduces to physics via chemistry. Suppose we have a machine that can duplicate any object by a process of rapid atom-by-atom assembly, and we duplicate a child. We can explain its life* functions in exquisite detail in the terms of current sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. We cannot explain its experience at all in these terms.”
Post-Nietzscheans would argue that autopeiotic processes of life are not reducible to physics, at least not without a re-envisioning of physics in a direction suggested by Prigogine and Stengers.

If the process is one of endless self-differentiation over time then one would expect to find infinite variation of pattern and structure within cosmology, organismic forms, consciousness and culture.

"Dawkins' conclusion is not a conclusion from biology, and as I said, I don't quibble with the biology. Dawkins' conclusion comes from Dawkins practicing junior sociology on the basis of his biological knowledge."

The problem is, even if we accept the idea that genes code for behavioral traits, our scientific understanding of behavior is way too rudimentary at this point to to be able to agree on operational definitions of things like intelligence, ethics, 'clannishness', etc, much less match them up with specific combinations of dna sequences. So we are all in the same boat as Dawkins. We have no choice but to
rely on our own experience with others to form our ideas in this matter, and thus we all end up 'practicing sociology' . So you may not be wrong in your theory about the relationship between biology and race, but the depth and breadth of your experience with other ethnicities and races is going to be a more important factor in getting at the truth than reliance on the biological literature.

In this regard, in the United States, the popularity of ethno-nationalism is strongest in those communities that are more than 90% white, and least popular among the whites in cities that are the most racially diverse. So those ethnonationalists in the places that are almost completely white literally have no direct idea what they are talking about, in the sense that they have little to no daily exposure to significant numbers of members of other races. What were the demographics of the community in which you grew up, and the one you live in now? If they were the usual overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon mix typical of small and mid-sized English villages (Even Liverpool, the 5th largest metro area in the U.K., has a small percentage of non-white residents compared to similar sized U.S. cities),, then it would appear the depth and breadth of your experience with other ethnicities and races
is quite limited.

Here's a link to a constructivist approach. It may give you a feel for the discourse.
http://www.oikos.org/mairstory.htm

Also, check out Vaihinger's 'As If' philosophy, which influenced the constructivist George Kelly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Vaihinger

Thanks for the response. The challenge in our discussion I think is this: I'm familiar with the history and nature of the ideas you're presenting. Im not saying that I'm familiar with what you believe to be original in your model. But the history of Western metaphysics going back to the Greeks is something that I am well acquainted with, and what you've come up with is, as youve indicated, a variation on the modern scientific metaphysics. So you're prepared to go back and forth on definitions that come from various eras and chapters in that history, picking and choosing among them to build your own approach(I'm not sure how well versed you are in German Idealism or the analytic tradition. It's possible youre reinventing the wheel).

What I wrote you was not coming from that tradition, so all of my definitions will be alien to you, and they would not be something I could explain in a single post. So your response is not just a matter of disagreeing with my assertions, it's not having a sense of what kind of metaphysics ( or post-metaphysics) they're coming from. My terms will essentially be a foreign language to you unless you're well versed in writers like Nietzsche, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Heidegger, Derrida.

For instance, you say there are aspects of reality that language can't describe. In my chapter of philosophy , reality isnt a collection of things, and language is not a tool to describe those things. Language is a transformation.
Imagine trying to insert your ideas into a conversation that is taking place among Ancient Greek philosophers. You would be able to intepret their concepts and state your preferences among their various models, but their unfamiliarity with modern scientific metaphysics, the empiricism of Locke, the idealism of Berkeley, the subjectivism of Kant, would make it impossible for them to make sense of your approach before you taught them this new language.

Because I can understand where you're coming from, I could choose to keep my own terms within the confines of the part of Western scientific and philosophical history you're familiar with. I could choose not to introduce into the discussion this other world of philosophy that is alien to you, where logic, language, reality, objectivity and subjectivity mean something very different than what they mean to you

There is one good reason I can think of to venture beyond your familiar territory, but it depends on the purpose that your model serves for you. What would you say it is intended to clarify about the world?
For instance. If your main interest is offering a new philosophical clarification on how today's physical science(physics, chemistry) is understood, then I don't think it would be particularly useful to you to insert Derrida or phenomenology into the conversation. As far as I'm concerned, your account is perfectly respectable for that purpose and I have nothing to critique in it.

But if you are trying to use your model to get a better understanding of ethics, aesthetics, affect and emotion, the nature of psychopathologies like schizophrenia and autism, biological evolution, the development of culture, social relationships, empathy, then I would argue that you are handicapped by the metaphysical
tradition from which your concepts are derived.

I can elaborate further on this if you could say a few worlds about how your model deals with any of the areas I mentioned above. Also, what motivated you in the first place to create your model? What specifically were you dissatisfied with in the way that other philosophies address the issues above?

"Your life-experience possibility-story is yours only, though all of our stories take place in the same possibility-world. That’s really no surprise: For your story to explain or account for you, there must be a species that you belong to, and it must have other members in your world."


Just out of curiosity, do you have any familiarity with psychological constructivism? Constructivists believe that we use a construct system to interpret our world, a kind of narrative lens. I wonder if we can use this as a bridge to your account.

ok. Sometimes you just want to b*+ch-slap Derrida, with all his preciousness. Do you remember how he refused to have his picture taken for many years because it would suggest the metaphysics of presence or something? You wanted to say 'get over yourself'.

Wanna talk about psychoanalysis( my previous post)?

I was thinking of Heidegger, who argued that Nietzsche was the last metaphysician, and didn't consider his own philosophy a metaphysics. Derrida, on the other hand , said that Heidegger, despite his claim, was the culmination of a kind of Western metaphysics. Derrida didn't think one could simply transcend metaphysics, calling deconstruction 'quasi-transcendental'. Derrida did think that any claim to be doing philosophy proper would have to be problematized, and considered what he was doing to be writing 'on the margins of' philosophy.

If 'Natural Philosopher' is to indicate an acknowledgement of the entanglement of fact and value on the part of scientists , what name should philosophers give themselves in the age of the end of metaphysics?

"I wasn't quibbling with the fact of occasional greater variability within than between, I was disagreeing with the final implications usually drawn from that - i.e. that "We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations."

My quote was from Richard Dawkins. Here's another from biologist AR Templeton:

"Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not. Adaptive traits, such as skin color, have frequently been used to define races in humans, but such adaptive traits reflect the underlying environmental factor to which they are adaptive and not overall genetic differentiation, and different adaptive traits define discordant groups. There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans. Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree. A tree-like structure among humans has been falsified whenever tested, so this practice is scientifically indefensible. It is also socially irresponsible as these pictorial representations of human evolution have more impact on the general public than nuanced phrases in the text of a scientific paper. Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race."

From the journal Science:

"In the wake of the sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s, genome pioneers and social scientists alike called for an end to the use of race as a variable in genetic research (1, 2). Unfortunately, by some measures, the use of race as a biological category has increased in the postgenomic age (3). Although inconsistent definition and use has been a chief problem with the race concept, it has historically been used as a taxonomic categorization based on common hereditary traits (such as skin color) to elucidate the relationship between our ancestry and our genes. We believe the use of biological concepts of race in human genetic research—so disputed and so mired in confusion—is problematic at best and harmful at worst. It is time for biologists to find a better way."

You havent given me any links to biologists who dispute the claim that "We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations(not just as individual opinion, but as showing a consensus)." Where is this scientific consensus you're assuming???

And you never answered the question: do genes code for ethics?
If homosexuals are degenerate, is this a genetic deficiency or a lifestyle choice? I never knew anyone who considered homosexuals degenerate who wasnt operating from a religious morality. Of course, the medical and psychiatric profession once upon a time labeled it as a pathology, but here was a hidden theological element working there,

" I'm still of the Feynman mindset. I'm a fan of Pinker, Dennett, Haidt, My overall metaphysical view has been for a few years now more or less Riccardo Manzotti's Process Externalism,"

You realize none of these people would agree with your interpretation of the biological findings on race, or support your arguments on ethnonationalism. Perhaps you don't understand their theories as well as you think you do. You're better off with Herbert Spencer.

Im not interested in pointing fingers, ,moralizing, accusing people of prejudice. I have a selfish aim in this issue.You could call it technological. I want to create a social 'machine', the ideal environment, that nurtures, stimulates and elevates my intellectual and creative capacities to the greatest extent possible. So what mix of people do I want to surround myself with to further this goal? What are the leading intellectual centers in the world and why? One would think that since the trajectory of cultural and technological leadership led from the mid east to the Mediterranean and onto Northwest Europe and the former Anglo colonies of Australia, Canada and America, it would be a simple matter of surrounding oneself by Anglo Saxons(and Jews, unless you think they are morally suspect due to genetic traits). But if you look at the English language , you'll notice that its the ultimate mutt language, a mixture of all kinds of sublanguages(latin, greek, indo-european). This reflects the fact that Anglo-Saxons are themselves a a European mutt people, kind of a northern version of the Jews.
So already, a complex intermixing of influences that can be unified in some way seems to be connected with creativity.
And within those Anglo countries, its the large cities with their increasing ethnic and racial mix that are hands down the most creative places(Sydney, London, NYC, Toronto). Arguably the most purely Anglo-Saxon region of the U.S., Appalachia , is also the most educationally and economically backward.

You were born into a culture whose open mindedness and creative attanments were a result not of purity, but its opposite, of its supreme muttness, its constant integrating into itself of outside factors. The same is true of biological evolution. Muttness is the key to adaptivity in biology, a constant self-overcoming via exaptation. Thats the meaning of Nietzsche's ubermensch. Purity is a deathnell for organisms. You had a free ride. You enjoyed the fruits of your culture's talents, but want to preserve it by doing the opposite of what made it thrive in the first place. That is likely to turn it into another Appalachia.


There is only one really workable formula for economic vitality these days, and its a globalist multiethnic one.
If youre a high tech corporation and you dont encourage a free flow of diversity, youre going to get outcompeted. And if you're a person who moves to a homogeneously white village, your community is going to be made economically irrelevant.
Interestingly, this demographic recipe is a mirror of what cognitive and tech researchers are discovering about how to make machines smarter. Its about self-organizing distributed nodal networks. Your ethnonational model I think is an inferior recipe for a hyper-competitive elite creative human or machine society. Look at those working at the leading edge of research into robotics and intelligent systems, and see what kind of social communities they choose to surround themselves with, and see what their views are on ethno-nationalism.

How are ethnonationalists supposed to compete if they dont include in their ranks anyone who contributes to the cutting edge of information technology?

"I'm an ex-socialist, and extremely high on the "openness" trait. If you met me without knowing me, I guarantee you I'd pass the "ant smell" test for a liberal. Personally I'm quite happy living with people of any race who are more or less intellectual and moral peers".

Dont take this personally, but you strike me as more timid than open. The ideas you like to emphasize are about avoiding and excluding, cloistering yourself rather than shattering inhibitions and venturing beyond the safety of the family. Sounds kind of boring to me. It s the kind of thing I've fled my whole life.

I dont't impugn your motives. I believe you just want what you think is best for all cultures, not just your own. But I think you and I live in different temporal worlds. Time moves more slowly in your world. Outside races-ethnicities appear more different in your world in ways that you cant fully determine, and don't seem to have any momentum toward assimilating into your culture's values even after a long period of time. So a genetic explanation is a metaphor for the slow rate of cultural intermixing among different groups in your world., and within your region it makes perfect sense to hold the political views that you do.
In my faster world, outside races-ethnicities don't seem that different from me in the first place. Partly that may be because, when growing up, in my neck of the woods all the kids were of mixed European ancestry(although there were few Asians and no Blacks). Billy was Irish-Bohemian. George was Italian-Scottish-German, Jane was Polish-Greek-Russian, Wews was Jewish-catholic, and so on. I dont remember any kid who was simply Anglo-Saxon, and these disparate backgrounds didnt seem to dictate any significant differences in values or behaviour among my peer group. I didnt know there was any difference between the English and the Irish until I was in my teens, because in my suburban melting pot experience English and Irish-Americans were indistinguishable by behavior. Their immigrant grandparents had a very different experience, restricted to partly ghettoized city neighborhoods where they were often treated as intellectually or morally inferior. It wasnt seen how they could ever assimilate into a protestant majority culture..
In my fast-paced urban neighborhood, the newer immigrants from places like Mexico, Asia and India pour in, and are embraced because the community of former immigrants doesnt see them as profoundly alien, and has learned from decades of past experience how quickly their children assimilate into an American urban culture that makes it easy for them to do so, unlike in your slower changing world where they remain outsiders.
In my fast world, the Chinese immigrants remain clannish, but their kids lose almost all traces of this behavior. In your slower world, the children remain like the parents. In my fast world, Black residents with education are attracted to the diversity and opportunity of my neighborhood, and
I cannot tell any significant difference in intelligence between them and myself.
. In your slow world Blacks on average remain at a noticeable disadvantage intellectually compared to Anglo Saxons, to such an extent that beyond an occasional Thomas Sowell, you can hardly think of more than a handful of blacks of your own acquaintance that you can stand face to face with and say that they are your intellectual equal.
Theres no question that slower worlds like yours need the kind of biological account and political approach that you are advocating for in order to retain their stability.
. My concern is that slower worlds have a habit of being made obsolete by faster worlds.
You may succeed in maintaining an acceptable level of insularity for your generation, but you may have a hard time stopping your kids from fleeing to multicultural urban centers where the economic opportunity is.

m

Never mind. Turns out he was just babbling.

If you disagree with the statement I quoted, then your disagreement is only based on science if you can show me evidence that your claim is the scientific consensus, that the consensus disagrees with my statement. A few links will suffice. Not links to individual researchers, but to a source that makes specific claims concerning what the consensus is. Without a consensus there is no scientific fact of the matter, just conjecture.
As far as the rest of your comment, everything that you attribute to genetic differences can be explained on the basis of social transmission as well. That's not surprising, since genetic and cultural mutability are just slower and faster versions of the same process of adaptive development.
So the practical consequence of a genetically driven vs strictly culturally driven origin of social differences would be in how they dictate expectations concerning the capacity of particular ethnic groups to approach the type and level of political and intellectual functioning of other groups.
For instance, use of government incentives to encourage one group to catch up to another would appear pointless if the cause of the inequality was believed to be genetic.
Another way in which our expectations of others are shaped by, or perhaps shape, our determination of the source of their inequality with respect to us, involves our views on diversity and multicultural mixing.
You wrote:"relative ethnic/racial homogeneity in a given region makes for a smoother-functioning society with a high level of automatic trust/predictability in social interaction; whereas a multiracial, multiethnic society is low-trust, with unpredictable social interactions and constant tensions and friction."
Interesting that my experience has been the opposite.And the statistics concerning psychological dysfunction(suicide, opiate abuse) and crime seem to corroborate this.

I live in a neighborhood of Chicago that is about 50% white(that breaks down to equal percentages Italian, German, Polish, Greek, Irish, Scandinavian,Jewish and other) , and equal percentages black, hispanic and Asian. It also has a large gay and lesbian population. The local high school includes speakers of 100 languages. The crime rate is relatively low and its a supportive, energetic, creative and friendly place with 20 theater companies, many art galleries and active political involvement.
I had lived for a few years in a small town that was about 98% white(70% German heritage).
It was stiflingly narrow-minded, and I perceived more social friction there than in my Chicago neighborhood The lack of exposure to different kinds of people made the sheltered, provincial residents less adaptable to novelty. Ethnically/racially homogeneous communities aren't fairing very well these days. Their crime rates far surpass multiethnic places like New York and San Francisco. Of course economic hardship has a lot to do with this, but then economic vitality and cultural diversity are closely linked these days.

So what determines the difference in our views on the relative stability and vitality of more vs less homogeneous communities? My hunch is that your own experience of the alienness of other races preceded and justified your embrace of the genetic explanation. What to you in your dealings with other races seemed a gaping divide in behavior could only be explained by genes. If you lived in my community, I imagine you would have a more difficult time than I in seeing past the surface differences between the residents of my high rise building or my neighborhood in order to arrive at what unifies our community.
Everyone needs the right kind of balance between cultural homogeneity and diversity Too little variety is stifling and anti-creative. Too much is chaotic and destabilizing.
People have an instinctive sense of what that right balance is for them, which is shaped by the type of community they grew up in. Maybe you were raised in a small town and find the transition to a multicultrual urban center too jarring, but the clear choice people are making these days, not just in the urban core but in suburbs and even small towns, is towards greater diversity. Among millennials , that trend includes a dramatic rise in mixed race individuals.
If that trend continues at its current pace in the U.S., you wont have to worry about racial disparities much longer, because there wont be any discernable races to distinguish among.

In sum, I get the sense that what really concerns you about less intelligent Blacks and clannish, non-egalitarian Asians is that you believe their value systems are to an extent irreconcilable with Northwestern European Whites like yourself. You cant imagine thriving in a check to jowl existence with groups whose ethical practices conflict with, dilute and devalue yours. That would indeed be a problem. But do genes code for ethics?

"I do not only see the rose, the rose also sees me."
Sounds like Merleau-Ponty's flesh of the world.

"Sounds like the whining of someone with some agenda they're too scared to lay out so they hide it behind a lot of flowery obfuscation."

translation:I can't make heads or tails of postmodern discourse.

What aspects of reality do you think are not discussable and describable(ineffable?)? Are you referring to a spiritual dimension? To me what is of interest is not what supposedly exists in itself out there somewhere that we cannot see, but how our constructions of meaning change. In that sense, what is indescribable now is simply that understanding which lies in our future. To me talking about what is not now describable is like talking about what range of behaviors an organism isn't capable of now but may be in a differently evolved state.

"Are you saying that science can describe, cover and apply to all issues, topics and questions of Ethics and Aesthetics?"

Remember, I said a postmodern science would presumably treat implicitly the most primordial questions that philosophy would discuss explicitly. That means that many, but not all, aspects of aesthetic and ethical domains will be amenable to a self-reflexive postmodern science.
Keep in mind all of the categories of contemporary empirical psychological inquiry that at one time were branches of philosophy(cognition, will, memory, perception).


"Metaphysics is part of philosophy. Are you saying that science can describe, cover and apply to all that metaphysics describes, covers and applies to?"

Metaphysics used to be the crowning achievement of philosophy. Newer philosophical approaches don't believe in metaphysics any more. In fact, they don't exactly consider that it's possible to do philosophy any more in the strict sense( metaphysics as a beyond which organizes the physis, the objects of the world). By the same token, a postmodern science doesn't consider its role a strictly describing objective entities, having rejected the separation of subjext and object which guided modem science.

"It's now agreed by all that, by the modern meaning of "science", science is about the relations and interactions among the things of this physical universe. In its purest form, that's physics."

Yes, but postmodern science, which at this point only includes a subset of the cognitive science community, rejects this definition. My expectation is that, in order for what are now called the physical sciences to advance beyond a certain point, they will eventually have to reorient themselves as postmodern also by moving past this Cartesian dualism.

"So science can describe, cover and apply to abstract if-then facts?"

Let's talk about abstract if-then facts.
What is an if-then relation? I suppose the 'if' part introduces a starting fact, maybe in the form of a proposition? Is this fact then a concept?
What are we assuming about the history of this starting 'if' , this concept, in the individual's experience? Are we assuming that all concepts are mutually defined by reference to other concepts, like the word definitions in a dictionary?
If so, then can we assume that everyone has their own mental dictionary, so that my 'if' concept may mean something slightly different to me than it does to you?
Also, if the starting ' if' concept of an if-then relation presupposes a prior history or context that defines its meaning, isn't this starting 'if' already a 'then' to a prior 'if'? After all, the starting 'if' doesn't come from nowhere, it emerges out of a background of my ongoing interest, concerns, activities. It is already framed in relation to this background.
Now, when we think of all the ways that meanings can be related to each other, all the different types of causative logics(material, efficient, formal, final) ,
I wonder what are the most primordial observations we can make about an if-then statement.
For my money, more primordial than any of these logics I listed is a simple change of sense. Think of it as a gestalt shift. You know, when a cloud can look like a cat one minute and a horse the next. That's a change of sense. A gestalt shift isnt causative in any formal sense. The cloud-as-cat didnt 'cause' the cloud-as-horse. There is no necessary relation of any sort being claimed between the two.
I dont think that's the way you understand if-then. You want to lock in a formal logic causation.
As an adherent of modern scientific metaphysics, that would be not surprising.

"Being is 'that which knows', never 'the object of knowledge' (a fundamental insight of non-dualism. But this is why it can be said that we 'forget what being is' even though it's always 'nearer' than anything else."

Sounds like Heidegger, except that for him Being isnt 'that which knows' but that clearing which is prior to subject and object, in which knowing unfolds, but not itself a particular being.

"Many people, known as Science-Worshippers, want to apply science outside that valid area of applicability, and have a belief that science describes, covers, applies to, all of Reality".

IF you believe that philosophy can describe , cover, and apply to all of reality, then I would suggest that so can science for the most part. Not science as it has been conceived over the past 400 years by those working within the natural sciences. Science, as it has been conceived since it stopped being considered a branch of philosophy, didnt concern itself with its origins or gounding, but simply took for granted as its starting point certain presuppositions about subject and object. The limits of modern scientific metaphysics have been brought out by figures such as Husserl and Heidegger, but a postmodern empiricism would be a self-reflective endeavor that recognizes its role as inherently valuative and thus ethical(See Francisco's Ethical Knowhow for an example of this direction). It might still be presumed to treat as implicit what is explicity brought out by philosophy, but would be self-reflective in a way that it has not been in the modern era, and I suspect the dividing line that has been assumed as clear between something like philosophy and something like science will also become more ambiguous. Not
'These are things philosophy categorically can do and science can't' , but 'these are things philosophy can investigate with greater depth and rigor than science'.

"It seems like race, biology, etc. are a much more important factors in all sorts of ways than received opinion thought for much of the 20th century".

Do you agree with this statement concerning race:

"It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. "

I hate to break it to you, but there are plenty of religious denominations that don't believe in life after death.

Boredom, monotony, weariness and exhaustion connected with redundant experience would be, paradoxically, of the same species as the shock and trauma of dramatic novelty. Boredom is always a symptom of dislocation and incipient incoherence. As counterintuitive as it may seem, experience is only perceived as redundant to the extent that such `monotonous´ experience disturbs us by its resistance to intimate intelligibility.A situation only bores us
to the extent that its comfortable meaning has begun to fall away from us.

Boredom and monotony are symptoms not of the too-predictable, but of a previously mobile, fluidly self-transformative engagement beginning to become confused, and thus seemingly barren of novelty.

The `too same' and the `too other' are forms of the same experience; the near-senseless, the impoverishment, moment to moment, of the meaning of each new event. It is AS IF the rate of novelty has been decelerated during experiences of crisis. We know that we are no longer what we were in such states, but we cannot fathom who or what we, and our world, are now; we are gripped by a fog of inarticulation. While still representing transit, such a destitution or breakdown of sense SEEMS like an ongoing stasis, a dearth of sense.

So boredom presents a creative opportunity. It is telling us that we have already begun to move into new experiential territory, but we dont have the means to articulate it yet. All we sense(that is, all we can put into words) is the loss of the previous vibrancy of life,

I would hope a feeling can be seen as a meaning.

There are a lot of people (certainly in the U.S.) who protest strongly against what they see as censurious, anti-democratic tendencies among groups aligning themselves with ideologies on the left. the highly publicized incidents of rejection of free speech on numerous university campuses, the witch hunts against those violating tenets of political correctness, etc., are just some examples. But the anitpathy toward these Social justice warriors comes form a diverse group that includes everything from alt-right fascists organizations, evangelical social conservatives, libertarians and even postmodern social constructionsits like Ken Gergen, who wrote a paper in 1991 decrying the moralistic, censurious nature of identity politics, which he referred to as a 'politics of blame'.

So maybe you could help me understand where your own political, scientific and philosophical views fit in here. You referred to "noisy and influential Leftists", said that "a lot of people in the humanities are themselves Marxist shills" , talked about "the fundamental classical liberal principle" and claimed that "academia was gradually taken over by a crabbed, quasi-religious political cult".
This leads me to wonder, are all leftists Marxists? If not, are there leftist political or philosophical positions that you agree with, (that are not part of a 'crabbed, quasi-religious political cult') and distinguish from Marxism? Marxism emerged from the left Hegelians. Would you trace leftist thought(or the sort of leftist thought you reject) back to Hegel, or are there post-Hegelians you identify with(Kierkegaard, William James, John Dewey)? Is Thomas Kuhn a leftist? What about Jean Piaget, who disagreed with Chomsky and Fodor over their claim for a genetic basis of language content? Or Richard Rorty, who who closely aligned with Dennett on many issues?
Val Dusek wrote: "While Pinker and Robert Wright consider themselves liberals, of the New Republic, drifting-toward-neo-conservatism sort, Matt Ridley comes out as a nineteenth century libertarian similar the earlier Social Darwinists, in claiming that biology shows us that a libertarian society with minimal state is best". Where do you fit on this spectrum? Do you consider yourself a Dennett-style New Atheist liberal?

While I agree that anyone who denies any role of biological inheritance in gender behavior is taking an extreme position, it seems to me the interesting debate concerns, as I said in my previous comment, how one defines the precise influence of inherited proclivities on, and inter-relationship with, culture.
It's all well and good to say that gender and intelligence exist, but the challenge is how to define them.

Within the expansive discipline of cognitive science, there is a wide spectrum of views on this subject, ranging from the sociobiologism of Dawkins to the embodied, enactivist, extended cognitive ideas of Andy Clark, Shaun Gallagher and, Evan Thompson. My interest is in the thoroughgoing accounts given by theorists such as Pinker, Dennett, Clark, Gallagher and others of cognitive-affective functioning, including language , consciousness, memory, perception, social process such as empathy and explanation of pathologies like autism. It is at this comprehensive level of modelling psychological and intersocial process that effective understanding of the practical meaning of such terms as gender behavior and intelligence can be obtained.
All political ideology aside(as if its possible to do this), I've been finding more powerful and useful ideas about these issues coming from the embodied enactivist crowd that from Pinker and Dennett, who are beginning to appear a bit long in the tooth and outdated.

The enactivists are not out to appease your 'crabbed, quasi-religious, cultish Marxist shills', but their nuanced and complex research work escapes some of the greedy reductionist tendencies of the Dawkins-Dennett crowd while sidestepping the one-sidedness of social constructionism.

Anti-science could mean ignoring the research entirely. Or it could mean disagreeing with a particular scientific interpretation. Because it seems to me the science is far from settled when it comes to gender behavior. Ideology is thoroughly entangled here, within the scientific community as well as between scientists and
feminists. The debates among Dennett,E.O. Wilson and Dawkins, and Gould, Lewontin and Rose have been fierce, and have failed to settle the question of to what extent, and via what mechanisms, inherited structures shape behavior in general as well as gender specifically.
My own sense is that there is an evolutionarily adaptive biological component to gender behavior, but any attempt to translate this component into specific claims about male vs female behavior will likely stumble,given that they are hopelessly intermixed with cultural norms.
So on this point feminists are mostly right about the socially constructed basis of gender roles, especially given the radical change in westernized women's perception of their capabilities and goals over the past 100 years.

You undoubtedly know that feminism, and in particular that variety which sees gender as socially constructed, would reject all the assertions above, those coming from Nietzsche, the sociology-biological account, and your self-described. common-sense.
But I'm guessing even those allowing for biologically based behavioral differences between men and women would consider Nietzsche to be a throwback to Victorian attitudes.

Keep in mind that the people who believe that reality is like this(James and Dewey, phenomenology, poststructuralism, modernist hermeneutics, Karl Popper, many physicists, constructionism, recent analytic philosophy, embodied cognitive science, etc) mostly dont argue that no sort of scientific progress is possible. Thomas Kuhn certainly believed that science advances. So while they believe that no one view of reality is valid in itself for all time(there is no God's eye view or view from nowhere), they believe that our scientific constructions of reality become more predictively useful over time.

You know that optical illusion where you can see the young woman or the old woman but not both at the same time? There is a sudden shift that takes place, called a gestalt shift, when your perceptual faculties reprocess all the data points from the first image and redefine their relationships such that the second image emerges. It's the same data points, but now their sense has changed since the pattern they belong to now has a different meaning. One could ask of the first image, is it true or false that the young woman in this image is holding flowers? Note that this question presupposes that the young woman is indeed depicted in the image, and one is looking for evidence concerning details within the already assumed relationships of the data points. GIven the starting assumption that the data points depict a young woman, the question would never be asked "Is the old woman wearing a hat?' , because given the focus on finding evidence for validating details of the first image, it has never occurred to the investigator to view the picture as a whole differently, such as to discover an image of an old woman replacing that of the young woman.

Thomas Kuhn would call this move from first to second image, with the consequent redefining of what constitutes appropriate evidence, a paradigm shift at the level of scientific theorizing.

"Are you saying there is no valid way of determining what good testimonial evidence is?"
Yes, there is, within the context of the original presuppositions, the 'paradigm' that is given at outset. Your originating paradigm presupposes a notion of consciousness that can be separated from one of body.
Within that paradigmatic framework one can indeed search for and locate validating or invalidating evidence. One can indeed determine the truth or falsity of questions that fall within the purview of the orignating logic(logics are always relative to starting premises). Once one transcends that paradigm, however, what constitutes valid or invalid evidence, truth or falsity, becomes redefined.Just as in the two images, it is not the case that one image is the true one and the other the false one. Each organizes a corner of the world differently, and wh8ich paradigm one chooses is a matter of pragmatic utility. Which paradigm seems to organize the data more parsimoniously, comprehensively, etc?

What counts as evidence is itself framed by the terms of the question that drives the search for validation. There is no such thing as value-independent(interpretation-free) evidence. Whats most interesting for me about the topic of consciousness is not how dogggedly we can scrounge up evidence to validate a particular proposed conception of the issue, but how many different ways of conceiving it we can come up with, and in the process uncovering new criteria of what counts as evidence.

I highly recommend Shaun Gallagher's work on consciousness:

"How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way? "