I won't let you escape that easily.. Zapffe's paradox... — schopenhauer1

Explain please.

Yes. Who are you to decide for another that non-paradisical existence is thus good in itself or for that person? — schopenhauer1

I think there's a case to be made, that it's a reasonable concern. But it's like wanting world peace. I'd like people to be nicer to animals. I disagree with factory farming. But I really don't think that they (other people at large) give two squirts of the brown stuff for my perspective.

The search for more laws of nature and technological application doesn't produce any more "meaning" than anything else. — schopenhauer1

We probably agree that there's an abyss beneath all things human. But lots of people do in fact put on various heroic costumes and lose themselves in the role. I personally like the Shakespeare costume. But Socrates is fun too. Others want to be Bezos or Elon or a hot little influencer selling overpriced makeup.

Why are we putting more people and pressing them towards the survival-game-through-technological-innovation-and-maintenance? What's the point? It is a cycle without justification. — schopenhauer1

Why do germs fill a petri dish if given food ? Have you given Darwin much study or thought ? Evolution is almost tautological once conditions for it arise. Justification is the kind of thing one talking primate offers another for taking the last plum from the icebox.

Quakers didn't procreate, right ? Some humans don't replicated. I haven't. But I'm a freak, a parasite. Or I'm a recessive type who makes memebabies. Hardware is too fragile. I'll flee death by identifying with software, ignoring somehow the coming erasure of the heat death.

What you do make of the heat death ? Won't we be snuffed out anyway ? Is that a comfort ?

No, it's the opposite. It calls into question the whole enterprise, especially the violence, aggression, and unjustified and unquestioned assumptions — schopenhauer1

I see (let me emphasize) that it's gentle on the surface. It's like euthanasia for those who are not even zygotes yet. Out of disgust for violence, it wants to destroy the possibility of violence. But that means life itself should not exist if it is to be vulnerable. Life is (the implication seems to be) only justified if it's safe and clean and decent. Give us paradise or nothing at all. No compromise. No trust in progress (transhumanism of Pearce, etc.)

Whatever else one might think of Kierkegaard, he saw the demand from a person to follow Christ as a direct requirement even if the metaphors were unclear. — Paine

I think he's a hero, all things considered. It seems to me that Heidegger tried to generalize Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard was to Christianity as Heidegger would be to philosophy, a rebel voice calling it out for its complacent industriousness, calling it back to its terrible and wonderful roots. (?) Why is an excavation necessary ? There's too much plaque on the cross. If all the respectable people are Christians and philosophers, then none of them are. Foolishness to the Greeks, madness to the complacent knowledge industrial complex.

Kierkegaard wrote somewhere that the way he was treated by the Christian intellectuals of his day was as or more important than what he himself said. He was a questioning protagonist who forced them to reveal themselves as phonies, faint memories of the real thing ...

But is the real thing good ? Maybe the problem wasn't that they weren't Christians but only that they pretended to be.

It's easier to worship Jesus than to become Jesus so if you call him a god you are making that goal unreachable and then go your usual way. — TheMadMan

:up:

That's what an idealized Jesus might say: take up your cross !

Thinkers that warn us against idolatry tend to become idols. There seems to be something deep in us that demands this transference of responsibility. We hide behind daddy. But there's also the project of becoming our own father, undoing our having been thrown (O heroic impossible hope !)

Jesus becomes an excuse to crucify. What myth is more extreme than the public humiliation and execution of a god by the ruling church and the state ? What is said here about an individuality (?) that transcends everything worldly and respectable ?

It doesn't mean that I know what either of those things mean. They are with literally meaningless terms for me. I just know of them, and that, whatever they are, they're contradictory. — Michael

I'd say that learning about what they mean would be learning more structural facts like the one you do know. I started a thread on the being of meaning because I think it's deep endless question. If structuralism is true (which I think it mostly is), then meaning is not concentrated in a single term. Nor is it directly Present to some Inner Eye or intuition. The idea of 'mental experiences...which are the same for all' is arguably the foundational myth or superstition of philosophy. It's a generalization of platonism , probably a necessary theory or stepping stone. The assumption was that one could work from the inside out. But we primates are trained from the outside in. 'I' am mostly inherited software. Monkey hear monkey say. I am thrown into the world and learn how to join the dance which will outlive as it preceded me.

If everyone in the tribe was blind what would they know about color? — Fooloso4

Assuming a tribe could survive without eyesight (maybe they live in a system of caves), I don't see why they should have a problem learning about the color concepts in the English language. They could understand that a man got a ticket for running a red light.

We can also use aliens without noses here. They could infer that one character in a play was frowning because another farted.

The latest chatbots know more about color than either of us.

I burn my hand. I feel pain. I am told by my parents that I must be in pain. I learn to associate the word "pain" with the feeling.

I don't understand what's difficult to understand about this. — Michael

Bornblind people can tell you that an object can't be all red and all blue at the same time. We live in the age where chatbots are becoming able to explain jokes.

Saussure's structuralism is decades old now. I'm not saying anyone has a final answer, but the interpretation of meaning in terms of attaching labels to secret immateriality (Locke?) has been pretty well debunked, it seems to me. It's hard to see, given the motte and bailey entanglement. I'd say read Ryle's The Concept of Mind and see if you don't change your mind.

As I said before, nobody would ever learn to associate the word "pain" with the feeling that causes them to smile and laugh. — Michael

Wait a minute, though. So they learn what 'pain' means from other people ? But haven't you been saying (basically) that it's a label on something immaterial and internal ? That it refers to some state of an immaterial ghost ?
But how could a parent ever check if the child was labelling states of that ghost correctly ? The whole theory of the ghost as the ground of meaning is like the idea of phlogiston or the ether. It plays no real role. 'Pain' is a mark or noise that a little talking primate might make to be comforted or medicated. We should imagine how meaning could evolve and develop on the outside, between cooperating members of a group, and then 'into' the personality.

From The Blue Book (Witt)
******************
What would it be like if human beings shewed no outward signs of pain (did not groan, grimace, etc.)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word 'tooth-ache'."—Well, let's assume the child is a genius and itself invents a name for the sensation! —But then, of course, he couldn't make himself understood when he used the word.—So does he understand the name, without being able to explain its meaning to anyone?—But what does it mean to say that he has 'named his pain'?—How has he done this naming of pain?! And whatever he did, what was its purpose?—When one says "He gave a name to his sensation" one forgets that a great deal of stagesetting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone's having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word "pain"; it shews the post where the new word is stationed. 258. Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign "S" and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation.——I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated.—But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition.—How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation—and so, as it were, point to it inwardly.—But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign.—Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.—But "I impress it on myself" can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right'. Are the rules of the private language impressions of rules?— The balance on which impressions are weighed is not the impression of a balance.. "Well, I believe that this is the sensation S again."
...
What reason have we for calling "S" the sign for a sensation? For "sensation" is a word of our common language, not of one intelligible to me alone. So the use of this word stands in need of a justification which everybody understands.—And it would not help either to say that it need not be a sensation; that when he writes "S", he has something—and that is all that can be said. "Has" and "something" also belong to our common language.—So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.—But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described.

You mean like ChatGPT? Not sure. It's a good question. I think probably not, although the matter in the chips that run the program is. — bert1

Yes. OK, so the matter but not the bot.

If someone is crying it is appropriate to say that they must be sad. But we're wrong, because they're just acting. — Michael

There are two issues here, though. Imagine a person is not acting and still insists, while smiling and laughing, that they are suffering 'excruciating pain.' If they 'have' to be acting or not understanding English, that just supports my point.

I'm simply saying that it can be appropriate to say one thing, given the evidence available to us, even though that thing is false. — Michael

Oh, well yes. I agree that we can have warranted beliefs that turn out to be incorrect.

Imagine a tribe where no one feels pain. The would have no idea what you are talking about. — Fooloso4

I suppose those born blind don't know anything about color ? Let's ask the latest chatbot.

The grammar is based on the fact that I don't feel someone else's pain. — Fooloso4

I'm frankly surprised to hear that claim from you. I thought you were down with Wittgenstein.

It is, but only because we experience pain. There would be no conventional and public concept of pain in a tribe where no one experiences pain. — Fooloso4

I don't think you've understood the beetle and box analogy. Do you believe in demonic possession too ? Phlogiston ? See what I mean ? Talk alone is not a case for the existence of something mysterious.

***********************************
If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
***********************************
https://web.stanford.edu/~paulsko/Wittgenstein293.html






'Pain' is not (does not make sense as ) the name of an invisible beetle. It's the name for a situation approached with aspirin and Novocain and hugs.

Can I deny 'Inner Experience' ? Probably not, because I don't know what I am supposed to mean by it.

"Correct" in this sense means "appropriate" or "justified", not "true". — Michael

You seem to be hinting at truth apart from language, but to me that's a round square. Statements are true sometimes. Or we take them to be true...to express what is the case, etc.

Inferentialism is a semantic theory. Meaning is normative. That's the idea. So a statement can be true in the first place because it's meaningful within a community. I don't believe that words are connected independently to some divine mind. The tribe's tongue is fundamental software.

Pain is "radically private" in that when I am in pain it does not hurt someone else. Pain is public in that we know from our own experience what it means to be in pain. — Fooloso4

It's the grammar of 'pain,' yes, that it tends to belong a particular person.

But we don't know from our own experience what it means to be in 'pain.'

In other words, the concept is conventional and public.

When our nerves are stimulated in certain ways, we feel pain. That pain, even though an "internal" thing, indicates that something is going on outside us, and we react accordingly.

When our temperature is lowered sufficiently, we feel cold. That cold, even though an "internal" thing, indicates that something is going on outside us, and we react accordingly.

When our eyes are stimulated in certain ways, we see red. That red, even though an "internal" thing, indicates that something is going on outside us, and we react accordingly. — Michael

What if we cut out the middle man ? 'Seeing red' is acting accordingly, etc. We wise others decide that you saw red because you stopped at the light. (Stopping at the light is part of seeing red.)

Excellent quote.

Great line. — Tom Storm

:up:

Thanks!

Ambiguous use of the word "sense" here — Michael

I agree you could come up with some context where it makes sense like that , but hopefully you see the point. There's an average kind of use.

The "ordinary" use of pain is to refer to that private, mental phenomena. — Michael

I agree that it's private and mental in a certain ordinary sense. But I insist that we have public criteria for when it's correct to assert someone is in pain. We would not believe someone who was smiling and laughing and telling us how excruciating their migraine was just then. We'd say they didn't know that pain was, didn't know what 'pain' meant. But on your view we couldn't say that. Because your view allows for that person's pain to be what we call ecstasy. Ryle gives other examples like this.

I think philosophers can be too vague (as you mention) and therefore leave us cold.

Fear of life and fear of death look to be the same thing. It's like the fear of going backwards. Loss of comfort, power, freedom, status, safety, reputation. Fear of loss.

Learning how to die seems to be like becoming so ripe that one is willing to drop from the tree. One way to see this ripeness is as the realization that one is not really trapped in a particular dying primate. There are other close-enough copies of the softwhere in other dying primates who have the joy and terror of making still more.

If you happen to have a brother then I am talking about him, and if he happens to be older than you then what I say is true. — Michael

Just want to note that these are nice everyday concepts. 'Conscious' appears as both motte and bailey.

The dead don't exist any more. But as a good panpsychist I think that the rotting corpse is conscious. Just not conscious of very much. — bert1

OK. How conscious are the latest famous bots ? Do they have selves ?

It does not matter if it is the same or not. What matters is what caused it and how to alleviate it. — Fooloso4

I would like to emphasize that you seem to be quoting my paraphrase of another poster in order to correct me. (?) I offered that paraphrase in order to criticize it.

I'll be glad to discuss this issue with you if you can get a sense of where I am coming from (later Wittgenstein, early Heidegger, Ryle,...)

I don't need to know that something is the case to talk about it, or be right about it. — Michael

If that is so, and I pretty much agree, then it's because concepts are public and their applications are governed by public norms. Brandom's inferentialism is good on this. Sellars makes a distinction between thermostats and parrots on the one hand and philosophers on the other. To use a concept is not like emitting a beep or a recorded sound. It's to operate in the space of reasons. To use the concept red involves understanding (for instance) that red objects are also colored objects. To use the concept 'pain' involves understanding that animals avoid it (their own). The idea is that it's impossible to understand one concept without understanding many, because concepts are inferentially related.

Here's what doesn't make sense : "It really hurts to chew broken glass, so he stuffed another handful in his mouth."

"Private experience" has its own curious role in the system. "You can't know if my red / pain is your red / pain because seeing / hurting is private experience."

It's a drive, something pushing, pulling. Seems like it's probably innate. Babies are curious. Being curious certainly has value - A curious animal is one that is familiar with it's surroundings. — T Clark

:up:

Yes. I feel that drive. When I find a new thinker, it's like when I was kid and me and my friend would find an abandoned house in the woods. There's just a little bit of fear at the edges of the familiar, which is like the bitterness of dark chocolate.

I imagine this is one of the many things we enjoy because it helps us replicate. It's good for the persistence of the pattern.

When I’m in pain it’s pretty obvious. — Michael

I think this is a motte and bailey situation, where the motte is the ordinary use of 'pain' and the bailey is the dualistic metaphysical version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

But that it’s possible isn’t that it’s true, and if it’s not true then it is both the case that I can talk about and understand your pain and the case that your pain is private to you. — Michael

Let me try to paraphrase this. If 'pain' does not refer to different private experiences but rather to the same private experience, then I can sensibly talk about your pain, because it's the same as my pain.

How is this not a version of : if I happen to be right, then I happen to be right ?

For what it's worth, I'm not trying to deny something like raw feels but to make vivid how semantically tricky they are. The OP wants to exclude neuroscience from being able to help here. Pain and redness and maybe the meaning 'in' words and 'pure information' are all put inside the ghost that wears the machine. Both the ghost and the machine, removed from their complement, lose intelligibility, it seems to me. Radically private immaterial pain. Radically hidden reality-in-itself. Each the shadow of the other.

His teachings become like someone’s great-grandmother’s bone china dinner set, entirely too rare, valuable, and historic to actually be used at a dinner. — Art48

Excellent points. Reminds me of someone I've been learning about recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

Let's say that I listen to sermons for years and hear all the great bible stories. One day God finally calls me to sacrifice my son. Just to make sure I'm not crazy, I check with my pastor. He tells me I am indeed crazy and calls the police. So did the pastor ever really believe in Abraham and Isaac ? Or were these stories all along more like magic spells, incantations ? Like Jesus walking on water. Like his mother becoming pregnant as a virgin. Now I'm thinking of a story that the pastor's daughter might want to tell....

It doesn’t have anything to do with grammar. I can be in pain even if I don’t have a language. It’s not as if pre-linguistic humans never had headaches. — Michael

But, respectfully, philosophy isn't the study of your private sensations. It can't be. What you want to say, I think, is that we can be in pain without language. That is of course quite plausible, but you are assuming a referential semantics. You are assuming that 'pain' is like a label somehow pinned on something simultaneously understood to be radically elusive and ineffable. You seem to ignore the difficulty of fixing meaning in a (private) dualistic framework and lean on the ordinary, successful use of the word in practical affairs.

I really don’t understand this devotion to Wittgenstein and this obsession with language. — Michael

Wittgenstein is just one of many excellent thinkers on this. Ryle is another obvious choice, especially since he presents his points more directly. Personally I'd stress de Saussure's structuralism. Imagine that we only had 26 symbols to send over the wire, back and forth. How would those 26 symbols refer to otherworldly radically private stuff ?

The 'obsession' with language is just caring whether we know what we are talking about. What was Socrates up to ? It can also be framed as an obsession with concepts. Painters take care of their brushes.

I can be in pain without talking about it or taking aspirin. — Michael

Yes, that's part of the grammar of the word. And I 'know what you mean.' For me the lifeworld does not exclude that kind of thing. So it's not about denying consciousness but tying everything together. A certain kind of 'materialism' (whatever you want to call it) says that the world is not really colored and does not really smell like anything, etc. But I don't agree with that. The scientific image is a map that depends on the lifeworld for its intelligibility.

Perhaps there thereness of the world is what some people mean by 'qualia.' We can see that the rose is red and say that the rose is there.

For me, philosophy isn't about being more rational or educated, it's about being more self-aware. I'm not interested in being more self-aware in order to improve or enrich myself, I'm just curious. Not off-hand curious; real, deep, intense, urgent curious. — T Clark

:up:
Fair enough. But what is this deep curiosity ? Do you have any thoughts on it ? On its source ? Is it good for the species ? Is it innate in us ?

Also, for me self-aware involves education and enrichment, because I experience myself as inherited softwhere with a meat suit to run around in. (I think the softwhere is embodied 'here', but it's pretty much the same softwhere that's in lots of other people.)

I'd like you to string them together:
Science (and technology), minutia-mongering, meaning — schopenhauer1

Science is about power and glory and wonder, a chip off the old block? Is philosophy not the superscience of being or overmetascience or neometatheology? Minutuiamongering is just a means, a necearriy evil, which may be becoming less necessary. Bots are going to revolutionize this world.

You ever see the image of a donkey with a carrot tied in front of its eyes and mouth ? For humans that carrot is an updating screen. Thrown chasers after projections.

We aren't simply beasts in loops. Our softwhere is getting more and more compact and selfreferential. Is all this still vanity ? Are we orange flowers at the funeral of the sun ?

I think this is muddled. It's not consciousness that ceases, but the self. — bert1

So the dead do or do not have consciousness ?

It might be that my first person experience of pain depends on and is caused by such an arrangement of atoms, but it doesn’t then follow that they are one-and-the-same. — Michael

If your pain is radically yours, radically private, then I cannot 'rationally' comment on it at all. It's like talking about a private ineffable walk with God. It's 'designed' to slip like wind through the nets of every inquiry.

Perhaps you are implicitly assuming that I have the same pain beetle in my box, but assumption is parasitic on ordinary criteria for being in pain, such as talking about it or taking aspirin. The pain itself is like the hole in a donut. It plays and can play no role in a public concept.

I’m not convinced by the claim that my first person experience of pain just is some particular arrangement of atoms (and other particles). — Michael

Neither am I. I don't think 'pure' matter is anymore intelligible than 'pure' mind.

We live together in something like a lifeworld with includes claims about that world and norms for rational discussion. I suggest that first-person talk be examined in the light of the social role it plays.

Also, how do primates generate a complex language from one that is less complex ? Etymology suggests that metaphors became 'literalized' (as if lifted up to an 'immaterial' abstraction) so that concepts like causality and sensation and soundness were added to our system.