: in most instances it is, in fact, more hateful/harmful to victims not to "imprison criminals" than it is to do so. — 180 Proof

And in a world where abortion is murder and transgender is a moral sickness it is more hateful/harmful to victims (fetuses and confused children) not to punish those involved in abortions and those promoting transgenderism than it is not to do so. Again, what is hateful/ harmful turns on who is determined as just and who is a victim.Hillel’s admonition leaves out the crucial question of how to ground determinations of justice and injustice.

IMO, no one yet, secular or religious, has improved on ...
That which is hateful¹ [harmful] to you, do not do to anyone.
— Hillel the Elder, first century BCE — 180 Proof

Shouldn’t that be changed to UNJUSTLY hateful or harmful? Isnt hate just a strong version of blame? I see billboards stating ‘Jesus says love your enemy’ and ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’. Doesn’t this give us permission to lovingly oppose , restrain, blame and punish those we judge as wrongdoers?
In what sense are these actions not perceived as harmful violations from the vantage of those we find culpable, those we feel obliged to correct and reprimand?

Think of all the forms of blameful thought and feeling that we believe justifies our responding to others in ways that they will consider as harmful to their autonomy, such as punishing, ignoring, shunning, insulting, depriving, demanding conformity to one’s idea of the just.

All forms of blame, including the cool, non-emotional, rational desire for accountability and justice and well as rageful craving for vengeance, are grounded in a spectrum of affective comportments that share core features. This affective spectrum includes irritation, annoyance, hostility, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, anger, exasperation, impatience, hatred, fury, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' or rational anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, anti-social, hypocritical, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, a miscreant. Blame is also implicated in cooly, calmly and rationally determining the other to have deliberately committed a moral transgression, a social injustice or injustice in general, or as committing a moral wrong.

In sum, if justice is in the eye of the beholder, then so is hate and harm.

it assumes a universal ground or standard, the good in and for itself.
— Joshs

OR, perhaps they're merely suggestions that some people will find agreeable, and the people who don't can ignore it. Many people naturally have similar ideas about morality, even if it's not universal and objective — flannel jesus

I agree wholeheartedly that these can be taken merely as non-objective suggestions, but my possibly mistaken impression from the OP was that moral goodness has an objective foundation. Is a common definition of the good possible without such an assumption?

• The vast majority of us simply try to be good, but what it means to be good differs between us. Confusion and misery can follow from this and some of it could be avoided if we have a common definition of how be good and how to seek to be better. — mentos987

You should follow your instincts and your heart and utilize this commandment to remain civil so that you may live in a civilized world. — mentos987

How does our heart direct us to the good without itself being directed by something universal?

This conception comes straight from the definition of god as the in-itself.
— Joshs

You'd have to demonstrate that for anybody else to accept it. — flannel jesus

What Joseph Rouse says about science I think also applies to purportedly non-religious accounts of the good.

I also think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates.

In every other respect, the assumptions underlying your commandments are fully ‘religious’ in formulating an idea of the good that is universalizable. This requires a kind of faith in goodness, the same faith that underlies godliness.
— Joshs

It doesn't appear that way to me. It appears to me like he's offering commandments to people who want to go good. No religious-like faith required for that. Some abusive want to be good people. Well, if you want to be good people, here are some ideas — flannel jesus

The question is how ‘good’ is understood. Let’s say I define moral goodness as my inclination to praise and encourage those whose values I relate to, and my need to correct, punish or righteously condemn those whose values appear alien , and thus dangerous, to my own or those of my community. According to this relativistic definition, what I call moral goodness is not a measure of some universal qualiity floating out there in the world, but how intelligible other people appear to me ( or in the case of my own guilt, how intelligible my actions are to me).

By contrast, what makes the OP’s formulation of goodness religious in the most general philosophical sense is that it assumes a universal ground or standard, the good in and for itself. This conception comes straight from the definition of god as the in-itself.

Good points, explanations, and elaboration. This reminds me of the "silver rule": do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. — Leontiskos

The Golden Rule is a recipe for immorality, because it can be used to justify whatever prejudice one harbors. For instance, ‘if I were a homosexual, I would want you to treat me as abnormal’. That prejudice justifies discriminating against others, without violating the Golden Rule. Do unto ‘others’ only applies to others who are like you in certain key respects that pertain to their humanity. We don’t generally apply the golden rule to livestock, insects or plants, or to any other being that appears to us to be somehow less than fully human in the moral sense. Thus we see how , at various times in human history, those who were regarded as only 2/3 human, evil, barbarian, heathen, pathological or demented were treated differently than we would want to be treated, without the golden rule being violated.

Does the silver rule, simply by using the negative grammatical form, resolve these problems? No, because it merely protects others who, based on one’s own biases, are acting righteously. In other words, we would not want others to mistreat us when we are acting in a way that is morally correct, but when we stray from the path of moral goodness, we deserve to be excoriated, punished, corrected, disciplined, shown the error of our ways, be given a taste of our own medicine, rehabilitated. Isnt the silver rule consistent with how atrocities have been justified throughout history?

This is a thought challenge where I try to form the perfect commandment for anyone that isn't religious. — mentos987

This strikes me as appealing to those who only think they’re not religious, that is, who are not religious only in the sense that they do not actively participate in any formal religious institution. In every other respect, the assumptions underlying your commandments are fully ‘religious’ in formulating an idea of the good that is universalizable. This requires a kind of faith in goodness, the same faith that underlies godliness.

↪Joshs Oh please. A confused little boy like Leontiskos doesn't have the balls to be an authoritarian — hypericin

I dunno. Seems like he’s developing a cult following.

One could of course ridicule such a person for their irrationality and self-contradiction, or respond to their angry outbursts which occur as a result of their self-apparent irrationality. I do not find this to be necessary in this case. — Leontiskos

Some believe that it is best not to assume a direct correlation between a person’s philosophical perspective and their behavior in social situations. Others believe that the latter are a reflection of the former. In this case, I am inclined to argue that Leontiskos’s above personal comments are guided, and limited, by the strictures of their moral philosophy. Depending on one’s perspective, one can take this as praise for the clarity of a foundational morality, or as putting into question the thinly disguised authoritarianism and empathy-blindness that such a fundamentalism generates.

both in the post I was responding to and the post you responded with, you are are preoccupied with rhetorical-pejorative terms, such as "moral failure," "evil," etc. (and this is a little bit ironic given your allusion to Zen).

People shouldn't contradict themselves or make intellectual mistakes. They do happen, and then we correct them (because we know they are bad). "One swallow does not make a summer." But those who contradict themselves with abandon and without qualms, or assert and publish what they know to be false, are intellectually dishonest and intellectually depraved. They have made a habit out of bad intellectual acts, and have hence become unreasonable and untrustworthy in matters of the intellect. I don't really care whether we call this a moral failure. I don't think most people have any precise idea what they mean when they use that term, "moral." — Leontiskos

I’m not sure how you would formally define the concept of blame, but it seems hard to avoid the connotation of blame when one accuses another of being intellectually bad, dishonest, unreasonable, depraved and untrustworthy. Would you use such terms to describe the behavior of someone who has recently suffered a head injury that makes it difficult for them to recall or process information?
I would assume not, because you might point out that that person cannot help their deficits. They are not deliberately intending to contradict themselves with abandon, to lie or misinform. These behaviors are the result of something they has no control over and would not endorse.

What makes a person blamefulness, culpable, responsible in our eyes in an ethical sense is connected to how we understand the concept of intent or will. There are vitally important practical implications associated with how our moral philosophy makes sense of the process of intending or willing. We can see these implications manifested in the free will vs determinism debate. For instance, modern attempts to defang concepts of moral blame begin with moral responsibility, or blame, skepticism, which has historically been defended by Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Voltaire. Contemporary representatives of this group like Galen Strawson, Derk Pereboom and Martha Nussbaum argue that our blame practice is morally inappropriate because we lack free will or a certain kind of knowledge
These approaches endeavor to take the sting out of blame, resulting in a less violent understanding of moral action. For instance, Pereboom rejects the idea of blame as moral responsibility because he claims that:

what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, whether that be determinism, chance, or luck, and because of this agents are never morally responsible in the sense needed to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments—such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment.” “In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.” (Caruso 2018)

I wonder how your Aristotelian-Thomistic approach compares to the position of blame skeptics like Pereboom and Nussbaum.

I can't actually cope with Nietzsche! I tried reading him a few times but found it too emotional. I'm vaguely aware it's the sort of thing he says though. — bert1

Sure is. Especially the part about morality being a trick of the weak to constrain the strong. This is what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

There is only power, interests and negotiation. Morality is a trick of the weak to constrain the strong. Morality is what other people want you to do. Often it's in one's interests to do what others want. Or at least not do what they don't want — bert1

Someone’s been reading Nietzsche.

I am not surprised that you would pat yourself on the back like this, with no account in sight. It occurs constantly. I find your own thoughts on most subjects to be vacuous, and yes, thread-derailing. For example, your post <here> was one of the most unintelligent things I have read on this forum. — Leontiskos

I hadnt intended those remarks on realist and subjectivist morality for you, although it’s true that I figured you would see them. That I find certain approaches to morality unpalatable does not mean that I dont accept their value for those who embrace them, it just means that they don’t work for me. As far as back-patting, I think we should all pat ourselves on the back, don’t you? Each of us feels a secret sense of superiority over others, an illusion born of knowing ourselves better than we know anyone else.

I recognize that your arguments are based on careful reading of the relevant theological and philosophical scholarship. So if I were to directly engage with you on these topics I would attempt to form a bridge between your background and mine. Who knows, the interchange might even be non-vacuous.

As we social primates do, in the heat of the moment I'm prone to see people as evil and act on the basis of such mental projections. However in this era, where dishing out the law of the jungle is seldom well advised, I think it is generally better to recognize one's mental projection of evil, for the monkey mindedness that it is, and try to achieve a more enlightened perspective. — wonderer1

You god-denying heretic

I think conscience is just self talk. People’s conscience also tells them they should have killed that rapist when they had the chance. They should have kept the money they found, etc. We call self-talk conscience when the talk seems to match conventional behavioural expectations as we might find them in church or a popular sitcom. Many people regret not stealing or lying or beating the shit out of someone, although they might find comfort behind a pretence of having done the ‘right thing.’ — Tom Storm

I’m with you here. I find both moral realism and moral subjectivism to be fairly nauseating, but my own touchstones on the subject of morality are so far removed from these ways of thinking that bringing them in would just derail the thread. Of course, that won’t stop me from sneaking in a quote from Ken Gergen:

We commonly suppose that suffering is caused by people whose conscience is flawed or who pursue their aims without regard for the consequences to others. From a relational standpoint, we may entertain the opposite hypothesis: in important respects we suffer from a plenitude of good.

:100: You'll like this, if you haven't seen it already. — Wayfarer

Great video, thanks

Isn't there a duality here of mind and things that matter? Doesn't a deep examination into relationships involve an examiner and what is examined? Doesn't that examination require mind? What is the inherent value of the relationship between humans and blood sucking disease carrying — Fooloso4

Rather than a duality, what is implied here is a reciprocal dependence. Mind is defined by what matters to it, which is contributed by the material relations we are immersed in.

Do you find artistry and spiritual significance in clearing a clogged toilet?

Isn't there inherent value in a quality inquiry that discriminates between positive and negative value? A farmer's ordinary activity of spreading pesticides and petroleum based fertilizers certainly is significant, but by doing so while being present in the moment may sidesteps or short-circuit the ability to see the harm being done. One must be mindful that the ordinary activity of burning fossil fuels, say, to keep that beautifully maintained motorcycle running should not be raised to the level of artistry and spiritual significance. — Fooloso4

What Pirsig was onto was what is now called skillful coping, a contextually sensitive immediate embeddedness of subjectivty in relevant activity with the world. Skillful coping is not some rarified offshoot of cognition but the basis of all thinking. What we call logical, rational reasoning is only a narrow derivative of skillful coping, and one which prevents us from seeing all the relevant connections between the aspects of the world that the dualistic thinking of formal logical reasoning conceals from us.

↪Banno
Not at all. But this is where Wittgenstein was heading - that at some stage the justifications have to end, and we say: "This is what we do!"

But why must it end there? This seems like fleeing from battle while declaring your victory. Admitting that your belief is just an arbitrary dogma gets you points for honesty but not much else — goremand

Not only that, it reveals an implict doubt and self-questioning that directly correlates with the intensity of dogmatic certainty.

Ethics is about what we do, and so it does not rest on argument but on action. — Banno

Aren’t actions themselves forms of questions we put to our world, experiments anticipating a response which may either validate or invalidate the action? Isnt even the firmest statement of ethical principle, and the most confident action in service of it, a kind of pragmatic question? Both thought and action seek justification, the first via further thought, the second through a material response from the world.

1. We have a moral obligation to save the human race from extinction
2. We do not have a moral obligation to save the human race from extinction

We believe that we have a moral obligation to save the human race from extinction. What is the practical difference between us being in world 1 (where our belief is true) and us being in world 1 (where our belief is false).

In neither case do we know that our belief is either true or false — Michael

It may be that in dealing with socially consequential values we are bound up in territory that in by its nature transcends the relevance of truth claims. Value systems are not true or false, and only very subordinate elements within them are truth-apt.

Given your comments, I have a more tailored question: what is the practical difference between a world in which we have a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe and population crash and a world in which we don't have a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe and population crash, assuming that in both worlds we believe that we have such a moral obligation and so act accordingly. — Michael

I’m going to give my argument another try. A notion such as a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe is too important, too complex and too consequential a concept to be equated with a subordinate element of an established empirical theory whose acceptance or rejection as false has little impact on the theory within which its sense as being true or false is intelligible. Such weighty moral stances are more like empirical theories or paradigms than facts within theoretical orientations, and as such they cannot themselves be true or false. If one instead compared two perspectives within the larger umbrella of agreement on a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe, one might be able to locate grounds for truth or falsity that have practical consequences. But then again, in dealing with socially consequential values, we may be bound up in territory that in by its nature transcends the relevance of truth claims

They’re not equivalent. The world being round or the world being flat has practical consequences.
There hasn’t been explained what the practical consequences are of homosexuality being moral or homosexuality being immoral — Michael

You’re ignoring what kinds of significant practical
reorientations of thinking are required in order to arrive at such a changed view. This isn’t a game of computer logic, it’s about how people arrive at and transform their thinking on important issues which are rooted in deeply entrenched social practices. Our attaching the labels of truth and falsity is alway ad hoc and comes late to the party.

By my reckoning we could replace moral facts with empirical facts and end up in the same quandary.

Imagine two worlds:

1. The earth is round but everyone falsely believes that the earth is flat.
2. The earth is flat and everyone truthfully believes that the earth is flat.

Not only does the belief that the world is flat have practical consequences but the belief itself comes down to a pattern of shared practices. It is only when these practices change that, from the vantage of the changed form of life, the former belief in a flat earth appears false. Thus there cannot be a change in truth value without an accompanying change in the practical landscape of social behavior.

On the other hand, given the significant consequences of a shift in attitude toward the moral and empirical facts cited above, these examples might better be conceived as theoretic presuppositions rather than facts. But then there are trivial and consequential facts, so maybe we could say that the more significant the practical consequences of a fact , the more akin to a theoretical
presupposition we should treat it as being. Trivial facts don’t disturb the practical landscape when they are falsified. But falsifying the belief that bisexuality is sinful has all kinds of consequences, since to arrive
at this change in attitude already presupposes a significant change in world orientation.

Is the belief that homosexuality is sinful a moral belief?
— Joshs

Yes. — Michael

And there are no practical consequences to changing one’s view from ‘it is true that homosexuality is sinful’ to ‘it is false that homosexuality is sinful’? Let’s say the person who has a change of heart is a legislator or a parent of a homosexual child.

"Unlike other kinds of beliefs, our moral beliefs being right or wrong has no practical consequences." — Michael

Is the belief that homosexuality is sinful a moral belief?

. I'm saying existence is the foundational good — Philosophim

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who still believe in quaint notions like ‘foundational good’. I wouldn’t say they are simply wrong. I would say that if you delve into the presuppositions such a notion relies on you recognize that what appears as eternal is only eternal within the context of a relative cultural context. Any good implies a choice, and any choice only makes sense within a framework of intelligibility. Change the framework and what is good and what is bad need to be redefined. There is no ultimate frame, so no ultimate substantive content can be attached to a concept like goodness.

This again is nothing more than self-interest. This is not an argument for why humanity ought to even exist apart from its own desire from the reasoning you've given. — Philosophim

This isn’t self-interest, its shared interest, which is not simply the sum of selfish drives. Oughtness doesn’t precede the feeling of oughtness, and the feeling of oughtness derives from what is perceived as coherent. To the extent that the idea of non-existence is repugnant , it is because non-existence is associated with a kind of chaos or meaninglessness. To say we prefer coherence over chaos is a kind of circularity. The sense of identity disintegrates in chaos and incoherence, so of course we perceive existence as ‘good’.

Can we have some explication of how that connection obtains?It feels intuitively sensible to me, but I can;'t enumerate any kind of necessity between our function and morals - which may just be my failing, hence asking for a hand — AmadeusD

Socially shared patterns of coordination express cultural ways of life that we aim to preserve.

Ken Gergen puts it this way:

“Rudimentary understandings of right versus wrong are essential to sustaining patterns of coordination. Deviations from accepted patterns constitute a threat. When we have developed harmonious ways of relating-of speaking and acting--we place a value on this way of life. Whatever encroaches upon, undermines, or destroys this way of life becomes an evil..centripetal forces within groups will always operate toward stabilization, the establishment of valued meaning, and the exclusion of alterior realities. It is not surprising, then, that the term ethics is derived from the Greek ethos, the customs of the people; or that the term morality draws on the Latin root mos or mores, thus affiliating morality with custom. Is and ought walk hand in hand.”

1. What is moral is what “should” or “ought” to be done.
2. Many arguments believe morality is human-centric. Why “ought” this be the case?
3. There is nothing inherent in looking at humanity that shows it “ought” to be.
4. There is nothing inherent in any other identity, race, thing, species etc that “ought” to be.
5. This leads down to the true question of foundation for morality: “Why “should” existence be?
6. Looking at existence, it cannot be destroyed. It simply “is”. There is no “ought” or “should”.
7. Looking at what is, we can come to a conclusion of what “ought” to be. Existence is good.
8. This conclusion is a choice, not forced. Existence could very well one day “not be”. But since existence “is”, and we are composed of what “is”, we act with the will of existence “to be”. — Philosophim

Let’s examine point 4 and work backward from it. Is life to be understood as the mere co-existence of separate parts? Is there no ‘ought’ to be found in the organization of living systems? Let me put forth an argument that life is centered around a central ‘ought’. What distinguishes living from non-living things is that the latter predict and maintain a pattern of interchange with an environment under continuously varying conditions. This means that their function is normative in character. The organism has goals and purposes which it either meets or fails to meet. Human cognitive-affective functioning, including our moral oughts , are elaborations of the basic normative oughts characterizing living self-organization. Moral oughts are designed to protect and preserve certain ways of life.

Form this vantage, for a living thing it is not existence which is good but self-consistent functioning. For cognitive beings like ourselves it is not existence which is moral but intelligible forms of social interaction. The use of truth-apt propositional logic is one particularly narrow way to attempt to achieve moral intelligibility, at the expense of a more expansive and effective understanding of the moral.

I believe this about leftism: whatever its merits may be, it lost. The western world turned away from it. The opposing perspective didn't win by a blitzkrieg, but by giving the people what they wanted — frank

If you don’t live in a large northern American city, move to one. Then the possibility of another Trump presidency may not seem so daunting. In Chicago, where I live, we now have 4 self-declared socialist alderpersons and a mayor who identifies as a socialist ( or at least as a progressive). Of course their actions in office will likely fall far short of any socialist ideal, but I think it’s very cool that there was such willingness among urban voters to support them. I suspect that as millennials and gen Z’ers become the dominant share of voters, this move to the left in northern cities will continue. Since I don’t plan to live anywhere besides a large liberal city, what happens in Oklahoma or Florida is irrelevant to me.

Sorry to break it to you, but you really don't know what you are talking about, in describing science. You might as well be telling a fairy tale — wonderer1

Perhaps. But you can’t know that for sure without familiarizing yourself with some of the scholarship behind my claims. Maybe I’m just doing a bad job of describing these points of view concerning the nature and foundation of science. If you were to give me a short list of the philosophers of science you follow, I would likely be quite familiar with them , and would be able to provide a summary of their thinking that agrees with your understanding.

If , on the other hand, I were to give you my short list (Heidegger, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, Husserl, Feyerabend, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Rouse, Karen Barad), would you be able to summarize their assertions about science? I would be more impressed with your claim that I’m concocting a fairy tale once you’ve provided an adequate summary of the view of one of these writers on science.

We do those things when we actually do them, not when we see something. It's a mere truism to say that we build buildings, roads, etc., and alter the world of which we're a part when we do so. We do nothing of the sort when we see a tree. We don't build it or images of it in our minds when we see it. We merely see it. — Ciceronianus

Do you also want to make this hard and fast distinction between technological and scientific know-how? We build computers but we don’t build concepts like neuron and quark? Or do you want to argue that neuron and quark are constructions, but perceptual achievements like object permanence, depth perception and recognition of chords are not? Let me ask you, how is it that we are able to recognize any aspect of the visual environment as familiar when no aspect of the seen world duplicates its features from moment to moment? Is there not, as Piaget would say, an accommodation of our memory- driven expectation to the novel aspects of what we encounter? Do we not do in perceiving what we do in understanding language, adapt and adjust our rule -based criteria to accommodate the new context of interaction?

This says to me that you don't have enough of experience in engaging in scientific processes to know what you are talking about. It sounds like you have simply accepted a story about science. What basis do you have, for thinking people should believe that you know what you are talking about on this subject? — wonderer1

The Wizard of Oz gave me a PhD.
What your comment says to me is that the company I keep in philosophy of science and cognitive science is far removed from your neck of the woods.
https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer

I wonder though if much of this can be attributed to the selective application and subsequent disregard of metaphors. The claim is made that we "create" or "construct" objects or phenomena in the factory or workshop of our minds as if we carry tiny craftsmen or masons in us, building what we experience. — Ciceronianus

Tiny craftsmen and masons have to allow the material they shape and mold to guide their efforts based on how that material lends itself to , affords and constrains their aims.
Construction, constitution or construing, whichever term you prefer, refers not to a conjuring oblivious to an outside, but a back and forth , reciprocal conversation with a niche which feeds back into our efforts in very precise and specific ways to guide and adjust our direction. A craftsman can’t just use any methods they choose. Only some will get the job done, and this is how the real world shows its face. We build the models, apparatus of measure and observation, and the world responds just so to how we prod and alter it. It only gives up its secrets in the language of the questions we ask of it, and for the purposes we use it for.

Science deals with things as they appear to us (obviously, since what else could it deal with?} but it is not phenomenology, because it is concerned with studying the things and not with studying how we experience the things — Janus

The question is, what sort of notion of a thing do you have in mind, and how was it formed? The original notion of scientific ‘thing’ or object that can be traced back to Galileo, who recycled the geometric idealizations developed in the near East and Greece that were pure mathematical
constructions. He applied these constructions to the messy realm of empirical phenomena and from this synthesis emigres the modern notion of scientific exactitude and the idea of a natural world composed entirely of causally related bodies in a fixed mathematical grid of geometric space and linear time. In other words, the scientific ‘thing’ was seen through the lens of an imposed construction. Putting it in your terms, how science chose to experience the things became the basis of what the things were in themselves.

This sense is neither purely a contribution of the subject nor the object but of a correlation between the two
— Joshs

Yes, the world as we experience it is a function of the interaction between the extra-human conditions and the human conditions — Janus

It’s not an interaction between already formed , pre-existing condtions, but the production of something absolutely original, which is why it doesnt make sense to talk about an independently existing world. What our sciences discover never existed before in the history of the world, which doesnt mean that they aren’t reliable means of navigating that world or making predictions that pan out. But what we are navigating and predicting is not something pre-existing. It is the patterned , anticipatable way in which the world that we interact with changes in response to our interacting with it.

We create human stories, about how we came to be in the world as we experience it, and of course those stories are cultural, historically mediated constructions, but to say they are exclusively constructed by us implies a creative freedom, a pure creative arbitrariness, which is misleading and brings about an anthropocentric illusion that reality is created by us tout court. — Janus

Building an apparatus that channels the behavior of particles is not just a story, it is a material configuration that interacts with and changes phenomena in predictable ways. Our narratives and theories, as products of brains as physiological systems, are also material apparatuses that are not exclusively constructed by us. They are co-constructions that require both our own material constitution and that of our environment. Our theories are not simply in the head, they are engagements between head and world that are composed of turnout of both aspects. New realities are created through this reciprocal relation, not from inside the head.

To my way of thinking your view suffers from excessive anthropocentrism. In a way of course our views are necessarily anthropocentric since we only know things as they appear to us, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to imagine beyond our human-centric understandings, or from realizing that those very understandings should in any case lead us to acknowledging that we are just one tiny part of a vast universe, the actuality of which is not dependent on us. — Janus

You’re right. Recent research shows dogs have better object permanence than infants. But my point isn’t who has object permanence and who doesn’t, but how we and animals like us acquire it, and what it says about how the way we see the world reflects how we move around in it in relation to our purposes. We see based on what and how it is useful for us to see. this is not a fabrication of the mind, but neither does it allow us to assume lawfully fixed contents of a world independent of our dealings with it.

[

I would expect that an infant sees what I see when it looks at a flower, despite it not having any sense of what is socially agreed upon.
— Hanover
This is doubtful, already physiologically.
A human infant's vision is qualitatively different from that of human adults; also, infants have not yet mastered object permanence. — baker

We don’t need to delve into physiology to demonstrate how what we see is importantly determined by how we put together the pieces, and more fundamentally, what constitutes the pieces for us. If we are familiar with an object that is a machine or other human-created thing (chair, computer, car), we scan it with our eyes differently than we would if we didnt know the object was created by humans for some purpose. When we recognize the car as a car, we organize its features ( front and back, tires, steering wheel) in relation to what we know a car does. Without this knowledge we have a disconnected series of things. And what that disconnected series of things amounts to for is itself a function of cultural background. Show a car to a 1st century Roman and they will recognize its parts differently from a Neanderthal.

An infant who has never seen a flower will see what they are already prepared to recognize in terms of shape, color, line, etc, but it will likely be a disconnected series of small objects, not the unified concept of ‘flower’, which is a concoction based on what we know a flower is for. You might say here that they do in a general way see the shapes and colors and lines that we do, but even color, line and shape are a function of what we recognize the total configuration to be for. In the duck-rabbit kind of optical illusion what constitutes a line or point or angle is a function of what we see the picture as representing. It is not enough to point out that even if we don’t see the image as being both a duck and a rabbit we are capable of such due to the fact that ducks and rabbits are available in the same world for all of us to learn about.

Because the duck and the rabbit. like the car and the computer and the flower, are constructions, ways we compose lines and points and curves based on how we interact with that aspect of the world i. relation to our goals and purposes, recognizing objects isnt simply a matter of giving everyone a chance to see a particular object. Perceptual objects are features of language, even for infants who haven’t learned to speak yet. They are language in the sense that they are constructions we put together from the resources available to us in our dealings go with others. Those dealings evolve over time to produce new cultures with new technologies, which changes how we recognize objects. In this way we reinvent how we see over time.

When we throw the frisbee to the dog to catch, do t they see the object we do? Yes and no. For the purposes of playing catch, the dog must see the frisbee as the same object thoughout changes in its movement. They have to be capable of this to track it. But if we cover the frisbee with a blanket will the dog know the same object is still there but occluded? If we cut up the frisbee into two pieces will the dog associate the pieces with the former object? What the dog can and can’t see i. the frisbee will be a function of what it is capable of doing with it. The dog constructs its concept of frisbee in relation to its behavioral niche, which is more or less fixed. The behavioral niche of humans , on the other hand, continually evolves.

↪Wayfarer So, philosophy forums are pointless then? :wink:

There are also a few definitions or conceptions of what doing philosophy consists in.

It seems to me you fail to understand that others do understand your point of view and simply disagree with it. — Janus

I’m not getting the impression you’re grasping what Wayfarer is aiming at here. For phenomenology, it’s not just that the world appears to us as phenomena, it’s that things appear in particular ways, and these particular ways contribute the sense of what appears. This sense is neither purely a contribution of the subject nor the object but of a correlation between the two. Anothern way of putting it is that when a thing appears in a certain way as what and how we take it to be, this is a function not of some ‘raw’ data’ inherent in the world independent of us, but of the web of relations between it and other things in world from our vantage, and the relation between all of that and our own activities and expectations. We tend to distinguish between things we construct , and things that
naturally appear to us, but it is better to understand all appearances as constructions. For instance, take a computer system. If i show you one and ask you what it is, you will recognize it as a unified thing with that name. If I were to travel back in time with the computer and ask someone what it is, they would see a disconnected series of objects that they would name according to what is familiar to them.

In other words, what a thing is depends on how we put its pieces together, and this is based on how we use it. This might seem obvious, but go back to your assertion that there are myriad things in the universe outside of what appears to us. Now imagine that we systematically remove (or bracket off) everything about that data that we contribute to the things, all of the relations of relevance and pragmatic utility that turn random bits of effluvia into computers and cars and chairs. You might say what we have left are the stuff of the universe that physicists and chemists have identified and described. But even such seemingly humanity-independent features of objects such as geometric shape, size, mass and movement make no sense outside of our conceptually mediated relation with them out of which we construct idealizations of shape and form. There would be no sentence we could formulate to describe what exists in itself out there beyond our interaction with things except that it is devoid of everything that our scientific language is constructed of. This is why @Wayfarer says that “nothing can be said in respect of them in the absence of any observation of them”.

The way I think about what is ‘out there’ independent of what appears to is in terms of a potentiality, not a specific set of contents or ‘furniture of the world’. The world is a constant changing flux, but it is not just this or we would have to say that our sciences are fabrications based on nothing. No, our sciences are useful because as the world interacts with us, patterns are produced in this interaction. And over time, we produce from our continued interaction with the world more and more integrally constructed patterns, leading to a progress in predictability.

What would Joshs say about the status of reason.
— Tom Storm

I would guess he would say it's contingent, as postmodernism generally does — Wayfarer

To the extent that I would locate something like a universal aspect of reason, it would be neither in anything external to the mind nor within the mind , but in the structure of temporal synthesis that makes mind and world inseparably co-depdendent. For instance, the pure ideality of a geometric form like a triangle is not universal because it is a form located outside of the mind, but because it originates in a special kind of synthesizing activity of thought upon an empirical substrates producing pure enumeration. In order to know what ‘how many’ means, we have to begin with a multiplicity of things in the world or in our imagination, direct our attention toward noticing individual elements while abstracting away everything about those separately noticed things that distinguish them qualitatively from each other, other than our treating them as empty, generic units of a counting. In other words, number, and the pure geometric forms which depend on it, is universal because it is not tied to anything but itself. It is not a special universal sense but the absence of meaningful sense, thanks to the peculiar intentional relationship to things that creates it.

Science since Galileo decided to adopt this empty mathematical idealization as the model for empirical exactitude. A scientific theory is accurate to the extent that it approximates a geometrical ideal of perfection based on empty enumeration of ‘same thing different time’. The power of a reason that can produce both the empty universality of mathematical objects and the meaningful sense of real objects is in its anticipative construing of never before seen events in terms of likeness and difference with respect to previous experience, rather than in some ready-made internal capacity to apprehend ready-made external forms.

Joshs adopts the atomistic view that we "build" the objects around us from sense impressions or some such, form the "random (sic.) pixels of shape and color happen to impinge on our retinas... construing more complex forms of relational pattern tying one element of a visual scene with all the other elements." More recent work shows that the process is one of prediction rather than construction. — Banno

When Husserl talks about sense data, he is not taking the naive realist position that there are concept or intention-independent features of the world that we incorporate into our perceptual schemes. The sense data are not raw but only appear to us on the basis of association. Rather than the Humean notion, for Husserl association is a synthetic activity based on likeness, concordance and similarity. One could say it constitutes on the basis of expectation.

“The old concepts of association and of laws of association, though they too have usually been related to the coherencies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts…association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a ''psyche" according to the old figure, something like an intrapsychic gravitation….all immediate association is an association in accordance with similarity. Such association is essentially possible only by virtue of similarities, differing in degree in each case, up to the limit of complete likeness.Thus all original contrast also rests on association: the unlike comes to prominence on the basis of the common. Homogeneity and heterogeneity, therefore, are the result of two different and fundamental modes of associative unification.”

And the "pixels" are not "random". We see the flower with four petals because there is a flower with four petals. — Banno

What if one has been blind since birth and only recently acquired sight? Would a flower appear at first as anything other than a random collection of colors, shadings and lines? Would we not have to construct the meaningfully recognizable object called a flower out of a series of sensory-motor interactions we have with it? There is no flower with four petals , or any other visually identifiable object, until we first establish these relational interactions between ourselves and the world. Developmentally speaking, we have to use the flower to see it, and that is intrinsic to its meaning for us.

Are you claiming that the ancient Egyptians and others perceived each other as rigid and depersonalized, expressionless? That the Greeks discovered the inner dynamism of human beings (whatever that may mean)--those before them were unaware that humans could do more than stand and sit (referring to statutes) or could laugh or cry? People before the Renaissance thought children looked like tiny adults--that's why they drew them that way? That before the Impressionists, people didn't perceive all the colors of the rainbow — Ciceronianus

What we see is a function not simply of what random pixels of shape and color happen to impinge on our retinas. It is a function of what patterns we are able to synthesize out of this chaos of sensation. We have to discern correlations among initially disparate elements of the world, and coordinate these with our own movements.
In addition, we have to correlate different sense modalities associated with what we see into a unity.
Perception strives to achieve relative regularities and stabilities in navigating our surroundings, not veridical truths. It is about goal-oriented interaction, not mirroring. That’s why puppies deprived of movement in their early years fail to see objects properly, despite a healthy visual system. And why when wearing glasses that invert our visual field, eventually we come to see the world right side up again despite no change in how the visual information is reaching us. When we hallucinate from Lsd, which fragments the constructed stabilities and regularities, we can learn to re-stabilize the chaotic scene somewhat by adjusting our interactions with it. At the very least, we can eventually learn to separate out the influence of the drug from the changes in the visual scene, just as we figure out the distorting effect of bad glasses.

Sense modalities coordinate with each other, with concepts we have learned about the world and with our movements. And our movements coordinate with the seen world in ever more complex ways so as to produce new patterns where before we saw nothing. Perception sees through interacting. Artists see nuanced gradations of color the rest of us don’t see. Musicians perceive sound patterns others cannot.

Because perception is conceptually mediated, whether we see a random pattern of dots or recognizable letters forming words or a face is a function of what we expect to see. Optical illusions and the ability to understand spoken and written language depends on our expectations filing in shapes that are incomplete. We see a completely formed letter A even though what is there is a degraded and broken set of points. We hear a complete sentence even though some of the words have been drowned out by background noise.

We see facial expression, bodily comportment, posture and attitude based on what we expect in the other’s behavior. The pre-Greek cultures produced art that expressed their ways of interpreting human behavior based on cultural schemes of understanding The Greek enlightenment produced a psychological, philosophical, artistic , literary and spiritual revolution in thinking that was expressed in new expectations in seeing the human form through sculpure. Many art historians have written about the originality of the Greeks in seeing persons as animated by an inner volition or movement absent from ancient ways of thinking.


What the Renaissance brought to seeing was the recognition that the elements of a scene are related to each more radically than simply by the fact that they all fit within the room or landscape. They are tied together in relation to each other and to the viewer by a unified perspective, and by a unified light source. These relational patterns were invisible to previous seers, who only had simpler notions like shrinking size correlates with distance from the viewer. It is not that only the Impressionists saw the rainbow , it is that they were the first Western painters to see that the rainbow resides in all objects that light illuminates. Again , this is a matter of construing more complex forms of relational pattern tying one element of a visual scene with all the other elements than had previously been seen .

The empirical object is something that no one actually sees, because it is a social construction derived from myriad subjective perspectives.
— Joshs

So because our calling it a "flower" is a social construct, we never see the flower? — Banno

As opposed to Joshs, who apparently thinks that since the language we use for the flower is communal, the number of petals is, too. — Banno

Following Husserl, there are different components that contribute to what we see. We perceive the actual flower in front of us but apperceive the empirical ‘same flower for all’. In both cases we ‘fill in’ from memory what isn’t actually in front of us. Parts of the flower may be visually occluded, the outline and coloration may have breaks, and inconsistencies, but we still perceive the whole flower based on what we fill in from many previous experiences of it. In empirical seeing, we also include the socially agreed upon idealizations we have learned, such as pure geometric shapes. Ask a child to draw a desk in front of them and they will try and draw a pure rectangle or square rather than the perspectivally given object presented to them.

A history of art book offers a chronology of changes of socially shaped ways of perceiving. In many respects, this has involved leaning to ‘unsee’ previous socially formed notions of how things present themselves to us. Greek sculptors unsaw the rigid, depersonalized statues of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Mesopotamians when they discovered the inner dynamism of human beings. Renaissance artists had to unsee the inherited idea of a perspective-free landscape, no unifying light source and children depicted as tiny adults. Impressionist painters learned to unsee objects reflecting only a narrow band of colors onto the eye in favor of trees, skies and seas composed of every color in the rainbow. Expressionists taught themselves to unsee scenes in which subjective mood played no part in how things appear., giving us Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Munch’s Scream.