I cannot understand "choice-worthy" as anything other than an expression of preference. Nothing besides seems to arbitrate what would and wouldn't come under that head. — AmadeusD

If we do stick with ordinary usage, we can find examples on both sides. Sometimes we say, "This non-dairy ice cream is worthy of my choice because it's especially creamy and gooey and that's what I like." Or we might say, "You betrayed your partner. That was not a worthy choice, and you shouldn't have made it." I don't know how far we can push this kind of analysis, other than to point out that the "worth" part of "worthy" can, and does, have more than one meaning.

"Preference" is problematic in the same way. You can stipulate that it means "something I like to choose," or you can say it means "what I do in fact choose, regardless of my personal preferences." You'll find usages supporting either interpretation.

I'm not sure I buy it either. I want to put the best possible construction on it, though. I think we have to understand "worthy" simply to mean "ought to be chosen." If that's not what it means, then the whole attempt to elevate "choice-worthy" into the ethical lexicon wouldn't make sense.

But granted that its proponents do make that equation, we can see how the pieces are arranged on the board. I wouldn't say it's wrong, just not very perspicuous.

Your question, I believe, is more from the point of view of ordinary language: How come something that's worthy of choice therefore ought to be chosen? Don't we need an additional factor to take us over the bridge between "worthy" and "obligatory"? If "choice-worthy" isn't defined as above, then I agree with you.

Understood. Or the way I would say it, calling something "worthy of choice" is the same as calling it "good" or "right," but focusing on the action of choosing rather than the content of what's being chosen. So it doesn't inform us as to the values involved, only that they are "worthy" and therefore ought to be chosen.

I think J is on the right track. — AmadeusD

Thank you, but although we agree that "choice-worthy" isn't helpful, it doesn't follow from this that:

arbiters of 'good' and 'bad' are literally nowhere to be seen, except within agreements between people. — AmadeusD

That's a whole other question.

To understand what is meant, we need to consider the context. The PSR says that everything has a reason. So "unknowable" in this context means having no reason. Having no reason would make it fundamentally unknowable. — Metaphysician Undercover

The context is helpful. You’re not concerned so much with things that might be unknowable in principle, such as the complete decimal expansion of pi. What you want to know is, Is there a class of things that a) have reasons which b) must remain unknowable by us? And if such a class exists, how would we know what the members were? I wonder, though, whether you’ve defined such a possibility out of existence, by stipulating that the PSR is and must be true, so that the idea of a thing without a reason is already impossible.

I guess I’m not sure whether you’re offering this connection of reasons with what can be known as a demonstration that the PSR must be true, or as an entailment of what must follow if the PSR is true.

BTW: There’s a provocative book called No Way: The Nature of the Impossible, edited by a mathematician and a physicist, that collects instances of the debate over what’s possible (including in epistemology) from a wide variety of disciplines, from medicine to music. With a question as big as this, it’s really helpful to hear from people who’ve encountered the problem in a specific situation related to their expertise. Well worth finding a copy if you can.

OK, I did think that by "unknowable" you meant "unknowable by us humans". I admit I'm confused about what "unknowable, period" or "not capable of being known by anyone or anything" might mean. Could you clarify that? Would, for instance, the decimal expansion of pi be an example of this? Or, as your post seems to suggest, do we need to understand what alien forms of life might be capable of knowing? That seems an awfully high bar to settle the question.

How do you think it could be possible to discover that something is not knowable? I think it is impossible to know something as not knowable. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, a valid question. Depends how much certainty you want to pack in to the concept of "knowing" something. I can say I'm certain that my cat will never comprehend general relativity (I barely do myself), though I can't prove it. Likewise, we may discover the limits of our own comprehension -- not provably, perhaps, but beyond a reasonable doubt. We would then know that something is not knowable.

I bolded "is" and "as" in your quote because I think what you're pointing to may be the idea that to know "something" as unknowable, is already to know something about it, hence a sort of contradiction. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, but there are other ways of being unknowable.

The philosophical mind seeks knowledge of all things, and the proposition that some things may not be knowable implies that philosophy is misdirected. — Metaphysician Undercover

This statement caught my eye, looking over this thread. Isn't it too strong? If philosophy should discover that some things aren't knowable, at least by us, wouldn't that be worth knowing, part of "all things" philosophy is interested in? Maybe the word you want is "limited" rather than "misdirected."

I thought that was probably what you meant. What other values, then, other than "life is good," would we need in order to generate an ethics, do you think? The problem is that we can't promote all life, unequivocally. Choices have to be made, preferences shown. My very first philosophy teacher opened our first class by asking, "Why do you believe your life is worth more than a Swiss chard's?" Lively discussion ensued! But no one, as best I recall, was willing to argue that there was no difference in value.

"Life = Good" — James Dean Conroy

Whose life?

(And welcome to the forum!)

A correct expression according to my theory would be, "In-form me!" — JuanZu

Sure, that makes sense. I was trying to disambiguate the uses of "information" as a noun, based on @wonderer1's comment, which I understand wasn't the main thrust of your OP.

The interesting question now becomes, if Joe and Jane are both "in-formed" in the same way, or with the same result, what fact about the interpreted (document, e.g.) allows this to be so?

I think @JuanZu's idea is that information only comes into existence in the context of someone for whom it is information. You can of course use "information" to refer to the things (such as electrical charges) that bear the information (on @JuanZu's understanding), but then you're just disagreeing about what terms to use. Both uses of "information" are common in everyday speech. "Give me the information!" i.e., Hand over that document! vs. "What information does that document contain?" i.e., What do the symbols mean?

On a personal note - — Wayfarer

Thank you for this. I believe many of us have had similar experiences and journeys. It points up something important -- the choice of a specific spiritual path may have less to do with an exclusive truth than with a constellation of images and associations that unlock the deepest parts of ourselves. And that will be different for everyone.

Just to be clear: I'm using "spiritual path" very broadly, but not so broadly as to include, say, ethnic cleansing. The word "spiritual" has to carry with it certain presumptions about values. But not necessarily about God or gods.

My feeing is that deity is ‘personal’ only insofar as not being not an ‘it’ or an impersonal force or mere principle — Wayfarer

That's my view as well, but I still want to add "conscious" because this force has to have, at the very least, the same capacities I do. The Suzuki passage captures this very well: "a willing and knowing being, one that is will and intelligence, thought and action. . . . an inexhaustible fountainhead of love and compassion."

If more personalism is wanted, there are many spiritual paths that emphasize a relationship with an avatar or bodhisattva, Christianity being the most familiar example.

I think we need to pose C. S. Lewis's question: Is it conscious?
— J

Not ‘it’. That is what the (regrettably gender-specific) ‘He’ is intended to convey. — Wayfarer

Fine. I used "it" to avoid gender also, but it sounds like this definition of God is intended to describe a conscious being -- a person, for lack of a better term.

Still, if the Rawlsian lottery were extended to the entire Earth, I'd still pick the year 2025
— J

Presumably being born into middle-class society in the developed world would have some bearing on that. Being born into Gaza might be a different matter. — Wayfarer

Yes, but the lottery doesn't allow that kind of choice. We're supposed to calculate the overall odds of winding up in a life-enhancing situation, given everything we know about planetary conditions everywhere. And even so, I think I have better shot in 2025 than at any other time.

, through a sort of neat accounting trick, we have decided that the slaves mining metals for Westerner's phones, the child laborer who sewed their clothes in a sweltering Dhaka factory, or the migrant workers who picked their food out in the fields, are each not "part of the Westerner's society. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A valid point. Still, if the Rawlsian lottery were extended to the entire Earth, I'd still pick the year 2025. I think I'd have by far the best shot at a decent life. Remember, odds are I'd be born a woman. Up till, generously, 100 years ago, that would have been a kind of chattel slavery, with death in childbirth all too likely.

Hart's definition - and it's a word that should be treated with extreme caution in this matter - is that God is 'the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.' — Wayfarer

OK, but I think we need to pose C. S. Lewis's question: Is it conscious? Or perhaps Hart meant this to be obvious by including "omniscient".

I agree that totalitarianism is bad per se, but is mechanization bad as such? Are humans not material beings with needs and goals, some of which are arbitrary and others pretty much necessary (and by necessary I don't mean the need for consolation, I count that as one of the "arbitrary needs")? — Janus

Yes. I was thinking of mechanization as an improper model for understanding how humans -- and other forms of life -- coexist with each other. Otherwise, it has its uses. Technology, as you say, is neither good nor bad.

. . . modernity, for all of its marvellous progress, has a shadow side — Wayfarer

Amen. Totalitarianism, mechanization, and, as you discuss so well, the tendency to treat humans as sophisticated bits of matter with "needs" and "goals" that must be arbitrary.

Interesting. Then you certainly know more about it than I do. I see the connection with hermeneutics.

This is a little risky on TPF, but I'll go ahead and say that my main reason for standing a bit aloof from the historical-analysis perspective is that I associate it with various pessimistic (and moralistic) accounts of the decline of Western civilization, which I disagree with. ("We gave up the Greeks and we gave up Catholicism and now we're fucked!"). I see the opposite: intellectual and moral progress (often up-and-down, of course), astounding flourishing of the arts, to say nothing of the incomparably higher quality of life and education now available to the average denizen of Western civilization. (And denied, shamefully, to all those millions who are still "below average."). But this is a vast and controversial topic. All I can say is, if I were offered a Rawlsian "original position" lottery, and asked to pick a time and place to be incarnated over the past 3,000 years, while not knowing my sex, ethnicity, amount of economic power, physical health, education, et al., the choice would be obvious to me: right here, right now ("here" being understood as any European country with universal health care and good public libraries :smile: ).

Good, this all provides a much more nuanced view, and helps me understand what you're saying. In particular, you're right that popular views, or assumptions, about what "science says" often lag behind philosophical accounts but are still very influential.

Concerning the Nagel quote, it sounds spot on to me, concerning analytic vs. continental, and of course I respect Nagel's views enormously. But I don't think we should reduce this question to "who's got a religious temperament." That longing for something to replace the religious consolations may be an important marker of those philosophers who aren't satisfied to be "modern" (using that word as I think you do), but it's not the whole story. For me, any philosopher who is unwilling to accept the apparent consequences of physicalism or reductionism, who wants an account of subjectivity that is at least as compelling as our beliefs about objectivity, should be considered part of a long tradition. For every Mill, there is a Schopenhauer. For every Carnap, there is a Cassirer. Point is, chronological analysis seems quite unimportant to me in this story. But as I've said before, I know others find more to ponder here than I do.

I admit I'm congenitally opposed to thinking in terms of what's modern or not, so perhaps there's something to it. But I dunno, "a certain sort of Protestant theology"? (I realize that's Count T, not you.) "Only what can be encountered by the senses (or the instruments that amplify them) can be considered real"? So you're exempting the Fregean/Quinean/Wittgensteinian tradition from modernism? Along with most phenomenology and existentialism? And Cassirer and Popper and Langer and . . . So who's left, the logical positivists and Daniel Dennett? :smile: Oh and maybe the Churchlands too! Besides, if you can include Schopenhauer among those who challenge what you're calling modern, what does that make him, pre-modern?

Well, it's not of great importance. As I say, I realize others get more out of this kind of classification than I do; just a matter of taste, no doubt. The issues, in contrast, are very alive and interesting to me. Most of my favorite philosophers are modern, in your sense, and they all seem to care very much about disputing the "out-there-somewhere-ness" of the objective mindset, as I do myself.

2nd Position Held: "We should bring back man before any extinct animals. — Unnamed

Could you explain this? I don't understand the context.

And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. — David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist

This quote is very important and insightful. I think it expresses an intuition or a longing that motivates most if not all philosophy. So I don't think we should be so rigid about what is "pre-modern" and "modern," especially if modern is understood as "everything since Descartes." Just as a for-instance: What is Frege's philosophy, if not an attempt to demonstrate this very thing, the mysterious "third realm" of thought that underlies all logic and science? Whenever we ask how it can be that reality/appearance, object/subject, are not separate, we're trying to understand the unity of thinking and being. Most "modern" philosophers take that question seriously. It may be that Descartes, in raising the question in the way he does, gave the impression that res extensa and res cogitans were eternally separate in nature, and to that extent I guess that is a chimerical picture, but I don't think it characterizes most philosophy since. Or, at most, it's the starting point from which, being dissatisfied with it, we try to improve and clarify our understanding.

No examination by a human is ever done from the outside, but always and only from the inside, re: himself. — Mww

I might be missing the deeper point here. Couldn't we just as well say that every examination by a human (of anything external) must be done from the outside? "Inside/outside" is relative to whichever point of view we adopt. I can say, "I'm examining this turtle from the outside" meaning "outside the turtle," or "I'm examining this turtle from the inside" meaning "inside myself." Both are true, though the latter is far less common. But perhaps you could say more about why this seems important.

All I meant, in this context, was that it takes more than "being inside a human being" or "whatever we do is done by us" to establish a meaningful sense of subjectivity.

True, but the problem….problem here indicating reason’s aptitude for putting itself between a rock and a hard place….being there is, as yet, no possible way to reduce either to each other. — Mww

Right. I know I make this analogy a lot, but imagine trying, pre-Einstein, to explain how energy and mass are related. If the concepts you need just haven't been discovered yet, you can't get very far.

Sounds good. It's just the word "seeming," which so often implies a lesser way of comprehending experience. But I understand that's not how you're using it.

Why is the "seeming" of a mental process less actual than the "reality" of a neural process?
— J

It isn’t. — Mww

Right. As I said, this is just physical reductionism. There's no required way to reduce either the mental or the neural to each other.

….when they are examined from the outside, scientifically….
— J


Surely you realize the contradiction. To do anything scientifically is merely to do something in a certain way, but no matter what way it is done, it is still only a human that does it. — Mww

This would only be a contradiction if we accept a very stringent definition of "objective" as meaning something like "untouched by human perception and thought." Which would pretty much rule out the concept. If you're saying that there's no such thing as objectivity, that's certainly discussable. But then we'll need a different word for whatever is the stance that science takes -- for there's a marked and important difference between the methods and discourses of science and those of, say, music criticism. Likewise, when we study neural processes, we're trying to do something very different from phenomenology. I'm not super-concerned about validating a particular use of "objective" or "scientific" -- we can even deny objectivity completely, if you really want to -- but the problem of how science is different from phenomenology will remain. "Doing something in a certain way" is, sorry, not nearly enough of a description, nor is it enough merely to notice that everything we do is done in a certain way by us. That doesn't necessarily make the point of view subjective.

By a nice coincidence, I was just reading an essay by Theodore J. Kisiel called "Phenomenology as the Science of Science" and came across this:

This is not to deny that the cognitive acts of representation, judgment, proof, etc. have a psychological origin, but there are more than psychic events involved here. Terms such as "knowledge," "thought," "judgment" etc. are equivocal, referring as they do both to the subjective and objective poles of the process. And the identity of the logical laws of thought with the psychological laws of "thought" serves to perpetuate this confusion. — Kisiel

This is the same distinction we were making between "reasonings" and "reasons" -- between some individual, hence psychological, instance of thinking, and the rational or objective content that it may represent. Kisiel is mainly explicating Husserl here, so we're in good company. (It's also the Fregean difference between "utterance" and "propositional content," I think, translated into thought-talk rather than assertions.)

We are 'blind' to neural processes in vivo, so of course mental processes don't seem to us to be neural processes. I think this "seeming" is what causes all the difficulties. — Janus

I think I know what you're getting at, but . . . if you use a word like "seeming," you're inevitably faced with the question, "Then what is it really?" Do you want to reply, "Neural processes"? Why is the "seeming" of a mental process less actual than the "reality" of a neural process? This sounds like another version of physical reductionism.

Or put it this way: Could we equally well say that mental processes seem to be neural processes when they are examined from the outside, scientifically, but are really mental? If so, then I think we're back on the right track. We need to separate the idea of "seeming" from its cousins such as "illusion" or "appearance." Neither the mental nor the physical is any more actual or fundamental than the other.

So I agree with you that reasons (as distinct from reasonings) are not necessarily correlated with neural processes. — Janus

That's a good way of making the distinction -- "reasonings" for the particular mental events, "reasons" for the content of those events. And yeah, "content" is terrible but let's not get into full-Frege mode. I think we both know what we mean.

"Running in parallel" is close to what I mean by supervenience, though the phrase does suggest that there are two separate processes. I think the truth will turn out to be even weirder than that, but I'm just guessing. If we come to understand the hard problem, we will have some new concepts for understanding what we now call "mental" and "physical," concepts that will probably make us laugh at the idea of "dual aspects".

Again, words like "correlated with" or "accompanying" are OK for now, because they help us be clear that this is not a causal model. As I said in a previous post, the phenomenon of consciousness itself, as a biological thing, may well be caused -- in fact, I'd be surprised it if weren't. But that doesn't mean that an individual thought (or "reasoning") is caused by the brain's wetware. Likewise, we don't have to postulate mental causation as somehow closing the loop and making changes in the neurons.

Objectivity is the criterion for natural science and many other disciplines. Philosophy is different in the sense that in this subject, we are what we seek to know. Continental philosophy recognises this in a way that current Anglo philosophy rarely does. — Wayfarer

Very true. And part of what I think Continental phil is better at, is recognizing that the objective/subjective pair is not nearly as straightforward as we might like it to be. So I would take issue, slightly, with the assertion that philosophy has to have this self-reflexive character, which would remove us from objectivity as commonly understood. There are many ways of doing philosophy, with more, or less, reachable stopping points. Understood as logical or conceptual analysis (a forte of Anglo phil), we can ask for results that are as objective as anything in the natural sciences, I think. But of course philosophy is unique in that, having said this, we can't leave it alone; we have to go on to ask, But how objective is that? And if you want to say that, ultimately, the grounding questions of philosophy take us back to self-knowledge, I wouldn't disagree.

Do you think it is plausible that we could entertain reasons without that being correlated with neural processes? Say one reason or reasoning leads to the next and say the first reasoning is correlated with some neural processes and the reasoning that follows is correlated with further neural processes. Do you think it is plausible that there are causal connections between the neural processes, just as there are logical connections between the reasonings? — Janus

Yes, all this is plausible, because we've allowed ourselves the placeholder term "correlated". But what else can we do? We don't know the right word yet.

The first question, if taken broadly, requires some qualification. I would find it implausible that there is no relation whatsoever between neural processes and reasons (or any other thoughts). But this conceives of a "reason" as a particular event that occurs in my mind at time T1. If the "same reason" occurs to you as well, it isn't actually the same reason, on this understanding, because it's in a different mind at a different time. But the more usual way to think about reasons puts them in a rational world of meanings or propositions, so that you and I do indeed share the "same reason" for X. Taken in that sense, it seems more plausible to me that reasons are not necessarily correlated with neural processes.

That doesn't necessarily mean that whatever "gives rise to" consciousness itself has to be non-causal as well. — J

To say this better: We can talk about what causes consciousness in toto, as a phenomenon, without committing ourselves to the thesis that every individual content of consciousness is caused by some one-for-one physical process. There's plenty of room for reasons.

Also, the so-called hard problem of consciousness seems much more intractable, because it attempts to deal with the question of how processes in the brain, which can be understood in causal terms, can give rise to subjective experience, which, if we are to accept that subjective experience is just as it seems to us, and to phenomenological analysis, cannot be strictly understood in causal terms, but is better understood in terms of reasons. — Janus

Yes, good statement of the problem. When we have a scientific way of filling out the phrase "give rise to," we may be a lot closer to understanding all this. I suspect it'll involve supervenience rather than causality, but we just don't know.

One point: The processes of subjectivity are indeed not strictly causal, often involving reasons. That doesn't necessarily mean that whatever "gives rise to" consciousness itself has to be non-causal as well. Part of what makes all this so difficult and, for now, mysterious, is that we don't know how to describe the relations that might obtain between a (causally governed) physical level of description and a (reason-governed, often) mental level of description. Even trying to write that sentence gives me a headache because it's so terminologically awkward. It's like we're groping for a third mode of activity that is neither causal nor rational, that we can call upon as an explanation for how the first two modes relate. Just words, for now, I'm afraid, and I bet none of them will turn out to be good enough. Imagine trying to understand general relativity before Einstein.

What parts of objective knowledge do you think would have to be given up if it were decided that an objective account of consciousness is impossible? — Janus

I think the nature of consciousness is a largely scientific question, one that we're far from answering. If/when we do answer it, it will be in the same terms that any other scientific question is answered, and with the same degree of objectivity, whatever that may be. The fact that the object of our investigation is presented to us as subjectivity itself, shouldn't distract us from its amenability to being understood objectively. Consider dreams -- we wouldn't say that, just because no one but me will ever experience my dreams, all objective investigation of dreaming is at an end, would we?

So, if this entire model is wrong, it will be wrong on much larger and more troubling grounds. It will be the entire "objective" scientific project itself that turns out to be faulty; objective knowledge about consciousness won't be any harder or easier to achieve than knowledge of anything else, but the whole project may prove impossible. That's what I meant about having to give up a great deal of what we believe counts as objective knowledge. In short, consciousness doesn't present a special case of the failures of objectivity. If it fails, it fails tout court.

One last thing: The phenomenology of consciousness -- how we do experience subjectivity -- is an entirely different matter, one that science is powerless to speak about. For that we need philosophy.

it is a kind of trigger word for yours truly — Wayfarer

:gasp:

Yeah, I see that! I think we need supervenience in our lexicon, but as you say, that's another thread.

I'm not sure Spinoza had the last word on this, but yes, supervenience involves different levels of description. Where it gets tricky is to give an account of why a subjective description has the characteristics it does.
— J

Would an account of why a subjective description has the characteristics it does not simply be another subjective description? — Janus

A huge question, but it boils down to whether there's anything at all that can properly be called "objective." In the conversation about mental/physical, supervenience, the nature of consciousness, etc., I think it's generally assumed that an objective account of all this is possible. If it isn't, then a great deal else that we consider objective knowledge would also have to be given up. This might be the case, to be sure, but to consider it would immediately open a different conversation. For myself, I do think we can talk about subjectivity from a subjective point of view, and still discover truths about it that are general and open to reasonable investigation -- which is all the objectivity we're likely to get.

Are you familiar with the work of Jaegwon Kim? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Definitely. I'd urge anyone interested in supervenience and/or a reasonable version of physicalism to start with Kim.

Do you know Galen Strawson's work in this area? He put out a book called Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? that is quite brilliant. It includes dialogues with other philosophers, as Strawson defends his very unusual version of panpsychism.

It's still the case that first-person subjective experience has to emerge as something new from what lacks it. Seemingly, the only way around this (while keeping to the supervenience framing) is panpsychism, which has all the problems noted above, and which also seems implausible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's fair, but check out Strawson. He makes it plausible, at least to me.

I think this is what ↪J is getting at. We would like a description of why consciousness is like it is, and this would include the apparent non-conciousness of some things, as well as how and why minds are discrete. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that's the idea. With my usual caveats about how little we really know about consciousness as a biological phenomenon, I think some kind of dual-aspect/supervenience theory will carry the day. But to do so, it has to dissolve these apparent antinomies between what is physical and what is mental, and explain the enormous variation in how these aspects manifest in the world. We grope for terms like "materialism" or "panpsychism" but it's unclear -- to me at least -- whether these are even good words for the dual aspects.