If there is no room in the universe for freedom to reason, judge and choose our actions, then each word of this post is not from “me.”

Seems absurd to say that this post is not coming from choices I am making right now, and now again.

But if there is no room in this universe for freedom, no position from which to halt the constant drive of determined necessity and take responsibility for these words here, and here again, and stake a claim as being the sole source of “these words precisely here in this post” as I alone cause them to be, then we are all stenographers. And we have no idea why. Or how. Or why I just said “how”.

If one were to know the truth of a significant matter, would transparency and honesty be owed to the community — Benj96

Who is this “one” who “knows the truth” of a “significant matter?” I want to be that guy.

The “integrity of free will” - doesn’t that rely on truth? How are you freely choosing between A or B if A is a lie or B is something I’m actually ignorant of? There’s no freedom there, just a stone falling down a hill by what forces it knows not.

Are you just saying “what they don’t know won’t hurt them?” In which case what do you mean by “significant matter” because it seems running around the world with no knowledge of a significant matter could lead to harm.

Without an example of how one could protect ignorant bliss in other people, I don’t see why one would keep truth hidden for the sake of the “integrity of free will.”

Seems Orwellian to me, and a recipe for slavery.

Buddha retreated from Nirvana to tell us all the truth. Jesus said he is the truth. US Constitution protects free speech so that all can express their thoughts and reveal what they believe is true.

Truth is like guns. Once you let truth loose in the world, if you don’t make it available to all, those without it will be oppressed. Seems to me hiding truth will hurt any chance at free will.

• The Earth evolves — Seeker25

I have trouble right out of the gate. I don't see that evolution occurs outside of life. The earth doesn't evolve.

We can use the word "evolve" metaphorically to describe a change, but it is just metaphor. You need mutation, so you need reproduction, to evolve. You need survival impulses and the death of weak individuals and reproduction of the strong individuals, to evolve. You need the interaction of living things and their environment for evolutionary forces to bring about new adaptations. Without living things, there is no adaptation. The misshapen form of a planet doesn't adapt to gravity and evolve to be spherical.

In fact, evolutionary forces allow trees to defy gravity. So if the unifying forces of gravity were the ethical law of the land, life and evolution, in trees and birds, would be unethical!

Equating all change with evolution, is like equating all destruction with death; and all emergence with birth. It makes for nice poetry and metaphor to speak of the birth of sun, and to see the destruction of a comet that falls into the sun as the death of a shooting star, but we are not talking science anymore, but poetry. You crash a care into a wall and total it. You don't actually kill the car. The car isn't evolving into some other use for the steal it is made of.

And just like we can't use mere physics and gravity and speed to explain how dolphins evolved to be seafaring creatures from land-based creatures, we can't use evolutionary forces too explain how personal interactions have an ethical component to them.

• The Earth evolves according to tendencies that, thanks to science, we know.
• When we act in the same direction as these tendencies, we foster humanity’s positive evolution. — Seeker25

If ethics is to be discovered in the tendencies of natural world, even absent any persons, in evolution, then all of our human ethical norms become so forced and contrived. Why is it wrong to murder? Because life seeks to beget life and evolution tells us so? No! Life also kills and eats dinner, or males hurt and shun rivals and kill their offspring to prompt new reproduction. Life leads to more miscarriages than births. Sometimes the stronger ones are killed and the weak ones reproduce. From what I can tell, nature and evolution give us no clue as to what is good versus bad, and how one ought to act versus how one has evolved to act.

Ethics is confined to the world that exists between persons. The rest of the universe and all of history before persons is devoid of ethics, innocent of its possible judgment. Since persons evolved to walk the earth, since that time, only persons have discovered a disconnect between how something is and how something ought to be. And we didn't just discover this gap between what is and what ought to be; we made it, when we did what we ought not do. We created the first gap between "is" and "ought". We created the first injustice in nature. We probably started hiding things, leading others to believe something to be the case that actually they ought not believe, because they were hiding the truth that they alone knew. Lies and hiding - words representing nothingness as if it were somethingness - this is the initiation of "ethics." Maybe?

Your question about where ethics resided before life is well-posed, but I don’t know the answer—just as I don’t know where intelligence, life, or consciousness were, and yet no one doubts that all three exist. — Seeker25

My question was actually where ethics resided before persons.

You seem to be saying ethics is imbedded in evolution, or more generally, in life.

Looking at earth’s history, we can say chemical reactions were followed by biological reactions, so from physics, we get something new called life.

And we can say that with life came the evolutionary forces, arising when the first RNA behavior moved into DNA behavior (billions of years ago on earth). So life and its evolution were once new, sui generis. Before that time, there was no life and so no evolutionary forces. There was no “eating” to “grow” or “reproduce” in any strict sense of these words before there were a living things, not just chemical things.

Then we can say the evolutionary forces led to a species that contained the human person, and from this species the universe had something new again, called the person. There were new forces again such as “meaningful words” and “ethics” and “immoral actions” and “ought” “self-awareness of logic” and “math science”. These new forces (words) did not exist prior to persons, like eating did not exist prior to life and evolution.

If we want to talk about “eating” or “reproduction” or “sensation” or “growing to adulthood” we have to look at living things, and if we look only to chemical/physical things, we will never see these things at all. (Not in a non-metaphorical, non-post-hoc, strict sense.). Similarly, if we want to talk about “ethics” we have to look at persons; and if we look only at evolutionary activity and/or chemical activity, we will never see “evil” or “morality” or “something that ought not to exist.”

The entire universe is innocent of ethics. Except for wherever a person is. Just like the entire universe contains no evolution, except where life exists.

How life sparked from chemicals - I have no idea.
How persons sparked from life - I have no idea.
How ethics sparked from persons - I have no idea.

But I don’t see how ethics could skip over the personal and spark from life itself.

Poisoning the blood? — RogueAI

Like I said, conservatives have to confess their evil, lying hearts before anyone who is reasonable would believe an “honest” dialogue on the issues. Racist, facist pigs.

If I was using “blood” as an analogy about the border, instead of the shameful shit Trump says, I’d say America is wounded, bleeding at the border, and hurting Mexico, the Mexican people, and the rest of the world in the process. And America can fix its own bleeding if it really wanted to, but instead it just continues bleeding. America’s border policy is weakening itself, and poisoning the rest of the world.

But that’s all more political headline grabbing bullshit metaphor, poisoning the blood of actual discussions Dems should be having and positions they should be articulating.

A large segment of Republicans is incredibly racist. — RogueAI

Right. Foregone conclusion. No use talking with a racist. All smart people agree on that, right?

But then, how can the Dems talk with Republicans and win them over, and win elections, if all those Repubs are not worthy of any human interaction?

Maybe jumping right into “you’re a racist” in conversations isn’t the best approach? I mean, we all know already, racism has become a feature of the Republican. The media is doing a great job with that. So is that it? Conversation on the merits of any issue is over? Trump only dog-whistles? Full stop?

I wonder if there are a few Repubs who aren’t racist, who find racism immoral. Unfortunately, I’m just as sure there’s “a large segment of” Democrats who are “incredibly racist” as well. So maybe racism grinding every issue into a food fight isn’t productive of expanding a Dem base?

Dems should learn how to express what they want on the border and debate it with Repubs. That’s my point. So do we need an organized border, or not? Dems say “yes” and Dems say “no” (sometimes, it’s the same Dem). Which is it?

Any clear answer to that question will help the Dems. But Dems have trouble talking about the border for some reason. I don’t see why they can’t draw a clear line at the border like they can draw a clear line around a “large segment of” Republicans as racists..

There is something essentially elitist about philosophy, — Tom Storm

That is true and that’s a shameful failure of philosophy. The way I see it, wisdom can and does come from anywhere, from anyone at any moment. It’s always a surprise. Wisdom is not merely some reward for the philosopher, or even the mystic. Philosophers, like scientists, usually (not always) seem to think only the long, methodical path of logic can justify any such claim of “knowledge” or “wisdom”; or the mystic will not settle until there is nothing left of themselves to be settled before claiming a glimpse at enlightenment. But these paths are only necessary because we philosophers and broken mytics make it this way. And then someone accidentally speaks wisdom. It’s the same wisdom whether you struggled to know it or find it given by accident.

Well, śūnyatā is often misinterpreted as a kind of monstrous void, but in reality it's much nearer to the phenomenological epochē of Husserl (who commented favourably on Buddhist Abhidharma.) — Wayfarer

The void is often misinterpreted as monstrous, instead of just being. The one.

I like to think of it as 'going beyond the word processing department' i.e. going beyond the part of your brain that encodes everything in language — Wayfarer

See, interesting, This conversation (these words) sits on an edge between what can be said, and what can’t. At the edge of logic and self. Where Parmenides says “it is the same thing to think and to be.”

It’s because there’s a kind of unspoken prohibition on certain topics or attitudes in the consensus view. — Wayfarer

Interesting conversation.

I liken it all to a jigsaw puzzle. Some like Parmenides worked to put the puzzle together, not seeing the pieces once he saw the whole picture, while today we are told the pieces are all there is to talk about and must not talk about any whole picture. And the consensus today is that we aren’t being scientists anymore when we think we see a whole. (We can’t even do metaphysics if we try, as if we should not trust our own experience, because of the limitations of grammar). But we will never be able to escape the whole picture. It keeps calling us to look at it. We sit, severed from the whole and that is how we know it is there. Somewhere. Some of us will always love to know, to experience truth. Buddhists would have us empty out even the science and the metaphysics to experience truth, and let the whole be whole, where none of the pieces even exist anymore. That is a better way, to move beyond metaphysics, not balk from it before we might experience the whole; try as post modernism may, we will never be convinced to remain here with only puzzle pieces as if there isn’t already a whole and maybe one we can come to know, to be with.

I doubt this makes much sense but good convo.

Right = grassroots media & free speech.
— Leontiskos

When it comes to the airwaves, this is factually wrong. — Fooloso4

But when it comes to the main stream legacy media (three major networks, all major newspapers, oldest cable news company) and their rockstars in Hollywood (99% of movies and TV shows, and the wise and sagacious universities, this is factually accurate. The right has carved out a kid’s table on two cable tv stations, a couple internet sites and AM radio (the kind of radio our grandparents invented).

Dems lose the Make America Great argument because they don’t think America was ever great nor do they really want it to be. The one time Dems are consistently honest is when a sentence has the words “great” and “America” in it - they instinctually insert the word “not” is those sentences.

The dems will beat repubs every time the Dems offer a clear framing of a clear problem the majority faces, and a reasonable, realistic solution to that problem. They don’t even need a solution - if they clearly identify a problem the majority faces.

But instead, the Dems pick problems most people don’t really face everyday (LGBTQ issues, global environment issues, class issues, race issues), and they create solutions that are unreasonable. When it comes to actual solutions, the Dems mostly convert one problem into two other problems, occasionally don’t impact the problem at all, and less occasionally do some good. So when they pick a problem most don’t care a lot about, they look terrible. They need to identify what the real issues are that federal government has some real control over.

One major issue I see keeping people apart is that conservatives have to confess their policy positions and apologize for having them, if progressives will even entertain a discussion. Conservatives have to answer questions like “do you support white nationalism?” And “do you hate immigrants, women and LGBTQ?”

Those questions have nothing to do with most conservative policies. But for some reason, if you support republicans, you must be a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, heartless, greedy pig. And no honest conversation can be had if the repub doesn’t first confess these truths and apologize for them.

And then progressives don’t believe the answers when the conservative says “no” to all of them. Dems are as conspiratorial as the worst maga election and vaccine deniers. They find “dog whistles” everywhere and never take things conservatives say for their face value.

(Here is a tip - Maga has no depth - it is all face value - and the Dems refuse to see this. That is what populism is - taking the populace at face value. The naive want to have the naive discussions.)

Progressives in the media have made it this way. It started in the 60’s. Progressive voices became so loud and were supported so uniformly in all forms of media (movies, TV, news, print) and college/education, now, anything that opposes progressive speech and liberal thinking is seen as only coming from a bad, backwards place. Public speech has now all become virtue signaling political correctness, and the Dems made it this way.

Dems can’t even debate differences of opinion with each other anymore.

So if a Republican wants to talk to a Dem, he or she needs to apologize for all of the wrong words they will use, and apologize for having ideas that conflict with the prevailing wisdom of the brilliant media and college professors.

Believe it or not, the vast vast majority of republicans, like the vast majority of human beings, are not racist. It’s unfortunately true and the Dems don’t want to believe that they might be the ones fomenting racism. Someone who thinks the phrase “build a border wall” is racist may have their own issues with race, and may be seeking a different conversation than border policy.

We all hate racism. It doesn’t have to be part of every discussion.

BTW, Hate and racism have a much cozier home in a party that hates white, patriarchal, colonizing profiteers. A basis for hating a whole group of people based on nothing to do with individual blame but merely because of their membership in a group exists to a much much greater degree in the Dem party (lots of groups of people the Dems sanction hating - there is no reason for a democrat to even speak with someone who likes being white, or a white male, or depending on the conversation any male, or a capitalist big business owner, or a Christian gun owner - none of these groups really deserve a fair hearing, the dems have heard enough from such people back in the 50’s and have moved on, progressed beyond all of those deplorable people.)

So conversations between progressives and conservatives never really happen - they each talk about different things and hurl their insults over each others walls and never hear each other or see each other at all.

For instance, to the average Repub, the issue at the border has nothing to do with the nationality of the people on the other side of the border. No conservative republican cares where you are from (including Trump); if you want to respect America’s laws, apply and enter the country legally, great, welcome aboard from wherever you are from. The border issue is simple: to say “America” and mean it, you need a border so you can point on a map to what you mean. We need a border first to be the country everyone can find on a map so they can leave their country’s borders and come here for a better life. We need to build a better America so that when they cross the border they find the hope they seek. Borders are real and matter for the sake of Americans and the rest of the world. Race and nationality of an individual person has nothing to do with this issue, save for one nationality - American - which nationality only exists inside a border (once there is a border). Republican policy at the border is for the sake of people of ALL nationalities creeds and colors who are legally American.

This a reasonable, debatable position. There is much to say in support and in opposition to this that need never use the word “race”. It’s insulting and betrays weak analysis to raise race with every issue.

Questions like: “why do you only want to help the rich while exploiting the poor?” Many poor people now see through this loaded question in all its forms in the media. People registered dem and repub, rich and poor, actually think that if they can make some of their own money, save to build their own security, they can freely create whatever society they want here in America, already. They don’t need or want government to figure out what bathroom signs should look like, or how many Asians or women are on boards of directors. At least not now, when they can’t save any money at all. They want to be able to run their own lives and communities.

The biggest divide between Dems and (real) Repubs is over the size and role of the federal government. Repubs are supposed to create results for people by limiting the role of federal government to its strengths (national security, foreign policy and trade, interstate issues) and cutting it down to the minimum size necessary (lower taxes) to address those limited things. Repubs try to create conditions within which people can identify and solve their own problems, not tell them what the problem is and take their money to solve it for them. Dems think the feds in Washington will be better suited to tell people in a small town in Wyoming and big city New York, and the big corporations and the mom and pop business what they need, how to get it and how much it should cost, and what is good for their business and what is good in the public square. And that has never worked once in 100 years.

The Dems over-promise and under deliver, in my view, because government is inefficient and will never provide the resources to improve society. It’s a necessary evil, not suited to knowing and managing what people need.

Progressivism really is like a secular religion, complete with the Paradise of Power to the People through Big Brother Federal Government. Republicans are the party of the immoral, selfish and stupid. Dems are the party of the morally upright, the community based, and the brilliant thinkers. Yet they still lose. Maybe they don’t understand anything at all about the people who didn’t vote for them. And God forbid, maybe their ability to identify and solve national problems aren’t as brilliant as they thought. Maybe the poor uneducated white man has a good idea once in a while.

My question is, with the media and higher education deeply in the back-pocket of progressive supporting Dems, why is it Dems could possibly lose any election? How could anyone, let alone a whole country, elect a racist, sexist, raping, felon nazi (all synonyms for Trump) if the dems are really for the people at all? It’s because Dems take the people for granted, and misjudge them. And instead of focusing on the people, they’ve given up on the people’s ability to help themselves, they don’t even want people to help themselves, and think the answer to any problem might somehow magically be found in bigger government dominance of all facets of life, as if there is one way people should be, as if the problems Dems see as priority are the biggest problems we all must see, as if the solutions they devise to address these problems are the only way.

Humans have only existed for 0.004% of the Earth’s lifespan. Before formulating principles, it is essential to consider what occurred during the remaining 99.996% of that time. — Seeker25

I take it evolution is a word reserved primarily to describe living things. We could say that the earth evolved from star dust into a fiery ball, but that is metaphor. So before there was life on earth, there was no evolutionary process on earth; evolution happens where living things happen.

Similarly, ethics is a word reserved to describe personal activity. Ethics didn’t exist on earth before people did.

But life and evolution existed before people did. So for ethics to derive from or be bound to evolution, you have to show where ethics lived before people evolved. Life, and for that matter physics, seems to be equal parts generation and decay, hunger and murder before satiation and peace. So it is not clear to me that when ethics arose it was a necessarily related to evolution, just like it is not clear to me that life and evolution arose following a model that could be found in chemistry or physical things that don’t live.

Life is sui generis, arising out of physics/chemistry, but unlike physics/chemistry. With life there arises its own driving forces, namely evolution. Evolution did not arise outside of or before life.
Then humans arose or evolved, and then ethics came to be. Ethics, it seems to me, is sui generis, arising through the evolution of human beings but once ethics came to be it created its own driving forces, namely good and bad and free agency between them. Just like we can’t look to only chemical reactions to understand “eating” or “reproduction” or “genetic information” found in evolution, we may not be able to look to evolution to explain “murder” and “bad killing versus good killing” in ethics.

I disagree that Republicans destroy any more so than any other ideological movement destroys. Conserving by nature seeks to preserve the status quo, so destruction it would seem, is more useful to a liberal than a conservative. Liberals by nature seek to overthrow (destroy) existing institutions, mores and customs.

But I knit-pick. I agree with most of your post.

Save for reproductive rights being a good issue for liberals. It’s a loser issue for both sides. The sides have hardened as ‘protecting the baby by destroying the mother’ versus ‘protecting the mother by destroying the baby.’ Losers all around. Both parties should figure out a way to start that conversation over. Conservatives should abandoned government intervention and focus on charity if they want to change minds and save unborn babies from being aborted, and liberals should be less spastic about slippery slopes - abortion is legal all over the place. Make some laws and deal with it (many of the abortion protection measures won a greater majority than Trump did, showing that many “conservatives” or people in general, are going to keep on protecting or extending abortion rights.). On current terms proposed by either side, abortion is a loser issue lodged deep in each party’s respective base so it is useless to move any needles.

Hating white men is just a bad idea, and it contradicts human rights. Maybe just hate the bad white men, for the sake of all good people, which includes the good white men? The whole line of liberal thinking about the hetero paternalistic white male has to be reevaluated. It’s just too simplistic, too reductive, too brittle when challenged, and any white dad who sees value in hating white dads because they are white and a dad is kidding himself.

Hating guns and gun owners - another loser like abortion. Guns and gun owners, like unwanted pregnancy and abortions, are here to stay. Figure it out, regulate it, set limits, argue to change minds, but do not ban. Here, the republicans have to get over the slippery slope bullshit. Homeowners don’t need nuclear weapons. Find some lines, adapt them as technology changes, but recognize government will always need to regulate this.

I don’t think it is moral to see any individual as you might see a stereotype. Talking about “liberals” and “conservatives” helps move conversations in big steps, which is fine. But to hate me personally, for instance, because I am a “conservative” or a “white male”, to even think that you know someone because he said he was a conservative, is just wrong. Our politicians, leaders, and media, and most of all, you and me, do this all of the time. We ignore the individual by seeing only some stereotype. Politicians and media want to rally voters or sell ad space, so they dramatize stereotypes of evil-doers and throw whole groups of people in them. It’s immoral, or simple-minded, or childish, or simply ignores the texture ad complexity that actually exist.

We all need to remember the people in our lives that we know and love who also happen to vote for the other party. We have to humbly accept that our own opinions may be the wrong ones and listen. Just listen to the other side and sift through all of their stereotypical bullshit for some semblance of a good reason they might think differently than you do.

Both sides need to listen to each other. Because I love some people who vote democrat and some people who vote republican I asked how it can be that I can see polar opposites at the same time as I see the same love and friendship? How are liberals good? How are conservatives good? I came up with this analogy: picture a baby in a small tub of dirty water. Conservatives see the baby and say “look at how cute babies are, we may want to do something to clean the water but no matter what we need to preserve that cute baby.” Liberals see this and say “look at how ugly that water is, we may need to do something to protect that baby, but no matter what that water has to change.” Conservative impulses are to preserve the good; liberal impulses are to change the bad. Both are needed.

Everyone is looking to do good. But we are often mistaking two different conversations (baby or bathwater) for two different ideas of what “good” means. No one wants to actually listen to each other. Most don’t think the other side is worth listening to or capable of listening to our side, because of stereotypes bombarding us by the media and the politicians.

We should never think of our political party of choice as anything more than a convenience. We de-humanize ourselves when we buy into the categorization of whole groups of people as “deplorable” or “vermin” or even simply “they”. They is our own family, our neighbors and friends.

Emptying oneself of everything, that the grace/Word of God may manifest, sounds eerily similar in practice to these other meditative traditions. — Nils Loc

I agree with that and have grown very interested in Buddhism these past few years. “Not my will, but thine be done.” We cannot become filled with God until we are emptied of ourselves.

Good stuff!

My point here is that, from what I can tell, the Yogic and Buddhist traditions do not make appeal to anyone or anything else to help the individual become empty. Assistance with obtaining enlightenment might actually be seen as a hindrance to enlightenment.

So I agree I must be empty to receive God or enlightenment fully, but, because of the impossibility of the resurrection that nevertheless actually occurred, I think we are shown that I will never find salvation/ enlightenment myself unless it calls me toward it, unless it raises me from the dead, and this reaching out is grace. This reaching out to me is God acting, not me acting, and this grace is essential before I can give my self up. The final step taken to achieve enlightenment is not taken by me; it is when the last bit of myself is taken by God, or taken by ultimate reality for the Buddhist. I have to serve myself over to God or ultimate reality, but it is not up to me whether what I serve will be taken. Salvation, total self-denial and union with reality/God, enlightenment, is unattainable by our own hand, our own self. We who would deny ourselves completely, affirm ourselves as deniers just as instantaneously. “I deny myself, therefore, I am still a self.”

So any moment of final enlightenment must be a gift, something we could not have made of our “selves”. We can’t be self-made empty selves. We can participate in making of our salvation, but we can’t complete it alone.

The resurrection as an actual historical event (an impossible physics that nevertheless stood in the light of day), means to me I need the supernatural to overcome the natural - I can’t raise myself from the dead without grace, just like I can’t achieve enlightenment without grace.

So belief in the actual resurrection may not be essential to a belief in the need for grace, but it is maybe the clearest sign that we must seek grace, let God do the final, ultimate work.

And I don’t know for sure if Buddhism and Hinduism truly deny grace. It’s just my current sense of them. In any event, my point is that, for Christians, the resurrection and proclamation that we all can be raised from the dead, makes clear that we must need God before we might be saved (or enlightened). So if someone says they are a Christian but doesn’t think the resurrection actually occurred, they might not understand what grace is and that there is no salvation without it.

good summary — T Clark

:cool:

As much as any idea could be mine alone, it’s all yours now.

We’re all familiar with the idea that philosophy operates at a level of discourse than which there is no higher, in some structural sense. What does this claim actually amount to?

First, a clarification: The idea I’m referring to doesn’t denigrate poetry, or fiction, or prayer, or paying compliments, or any other non-discursive uses of language. — J

Interesting discussion.

I certainly recognize that philosophers attempt to address everything and anything that was, is, will be, actually or potentially, in reality and in illusion, for all persons and other things, be they mindless or omniscient Gods or somethings else; and philosophy incorporates logic (math and language), poetry (aphorism), fiction (thought experiments), physical objects and theoretical impossibilities, and more in order to do its work. But that said, there is no need to think of any type of discourse as "higher" or "highest". I think such gradations may actually get in the way of what philosophers are trying to do (so all of the many philosophers in history who placed themselves above, instead of just apart, from the rest of us, were wrong). Philosophy, in a sense, is a leveler of discourse, always relentlessly sifting through the illusory for the reality and trying (mostly failing) to speak of the sifting; philosophy makes all discourse "discourse" and recognizes only a rankings like "valid or invalid" or "true and false".

The subject of the philosopher is everything, just like separately, the subject of the philosopher can instead be anything; but the subject of the philosopher is not just everything or anything over there, it is these things as they relate to or include the relator, the subjective experiencer; everything that is for me, with me, from me, and not for me, but moving away from me, from somewhere else - it is all of these at once that makes the topic of philosophy.

That said, philosophy is the science of scientific thought and language. It is a science. Reason or logical process is nearby, if not thoroughly infused within, every word of the philosopher. It is the discourse on discourse. It is the science of the self-aware being, being self-aware about scientizing.

Philosophy cracks open and destroys everything in its path, from Gods to atoms, in order to see if anything must remain bound, indestructible. It seeks to know what knowing knowledge means.

Philosophy is also born of love and desire, intention and focus, and is creative. This is to say, philosophy is one of the arts. (Maybe discourse on "art" is the highest discourse then?) The poet sees the meadow and builds something new out of it, with words, that can find their way into the minds and hearts of other people (other poets), so that something of the meadow and of the poet might now exist in the words and further in those who cannot see the meadow. Like the poet sees the meadow, the philosopher instead sees "seeing" or "being" or "minding" or "speaking" and builds something new out of it, with words, that can find their way into the minds and hearts of other people (other philosophers), so that something of this "being" or "minding" now exists in the words and further, in those who can only see for themselves.

The philosopher constructs, or creates, something new, in order to reveal to others for the first time in their lives, something that already is.

Philosophy is a doing, and not just the words that are constructed. Priests, poets, politicians, nearly all of us at some point, do philosophy during our lives. But the philosopher proper does philosophy on the philosophic itself; philosophizing is a self-aware activity (which is why it can be skeptical of its own existence).

The philosopher who speaks is conducting a never-ending test on speaking itself; they subject everything to such tests, such as what priests say when they say "God is one" and test what poets say when they say "we have the infinite within us" and test what politicians say when they say "This is the way forward, towards 'the good' and 'the just'." Philosophers must test every word of every sentence before they will say that something has been said at all. Philosophy is a testing (that is the science of it).

But if all of the content and art produced by the philosophers, all of their words, might be empty and hollow (still talking about "everything" as you can see), there is still great value in doing philosophy. Say what you will about the content of Plato, of Kant, of Nietzsche, of Buddha, of Heraclitus, of Wittgenstein, of Russell, of Derrida, of Aristotle, Lao Tsu, Descartes and Hegel..., in doing philosophy, we learn how to think. We learn how to recognize bullshit (illusion) faster. We learn to probe for our own biases and learn ways to shatter them as well as anything can be shattered. We practice logic. We practice clarity in discourse and precision in focus.

Philosophy is rarefied scientizing, in need of no matter, no particular clay, as it carves and molds nonetheless.

In the end, I would say that philosophy is only the highest discourse to those of us who have fallen in love with the mysteries of human experience - philosophy is the only activity, the only discourse, that might requite this love. Physics and biology may in the end satisfy this love, but it would still take the philosopher to notice our philosophy has been mistaken all along, so the philosopher would remain, abandoned and alone. "Desire is the cause of all suffering." So by some accounts, the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, are the sowers of their own suffering. Seems undeniable, given that after 3,000 years of advances in the science of all things, we still can't say anything about everything.

if Jesus didn't physically ascend, then it completely changes the nature of the Christian faith
— Wayfarer

Yes, I think that's right. — Leontiskos

I agree as well. People can certainly believe what they choose (that’s the nature of belief), but it seems to me the most important difference between Christianity and all of the other major religions (Jewish, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others) is that for Christians, the one God became a man, died, and rose again. Without these three facts believed as a part of human history, Christianity offers nothing more (and maybe even less) than some of the others. If you don’t believe Jesus, who is God actually became a man, died, and rose again, then much of the New Testament is either lying or foolishness; and why listen to liars and fools when you could look to Buddha or to Hinduism for more depth, more honesty and more practical application?

The other important difference between Christianity and some of the other religions has to do with the resurrection, and that is our need for grace from God to be saved. Christians believe we can’t save ourselves. Whereas Hinduism and Buddhism place it all in our hands (or place the task of removing our hands from the picture, losing one’s self as up to us alone) and don’t speak of grace from God. So if you don’t believe in the resurrection, the proof of salvation and biggest out-pouring of grace, you may still believe in the need for grace and salvation, but you’d probably be better off pulling in some wisdom from the Indian, Tibetan region, and/or Buddhist histories that aren’t waiting around for grace and claim to have already connected with the other side of the shore line on their own.

Babies and adults have qualities that match my concept of ‘person’. — praxis

What are those qualities, besides Caucasian, and hair? If Caucasian and hair matter at all towards a definition of person, all people from India, Asia, Africa, along with zygotes, are off your list of persons.

I assume by not not answering that you do not recognize the image on the left as a person just as I don’t recognize it as a person. — praxis

Come on, let’s stay with you for a bit more. I don’t want us to have to talk about my crappy reasoning yet, I’d rather we get back to your crappy reasoning.

I assume by not answering my questions you have no idea why you regard the image on the right as a person. You just do. It’s cute and cuddly. A zygote is slimey, so it can’t be a “person”. Is something like that the best we got?

We can see many personal things about the baby in the picture. It looks caucasian, has light hair, etc. — praxis

We can’t use “Caucasian” to identify a person, because what about other non-Caucasian organisms? Making “caucasian” have anything to do with being a “person” sounds racist. I know you didn’t mean that, but I don’t know how referencing the race of a person tells you anything at all about why a newborn is a person but a zygote is not.

“Light hair” - what about bald babies? What about bald adults? What about dark haired babies? Again, this provides no insight into why an adult and a baby are both persons, but a zygote is not.

I regard a properly functioning individual human being as a self-sustaining organism with certain physical and intellectual capabilities, including a sense of self. — Relativist

I absolutely agree with that. I don’t think that is enough, but “sense of self” is a good one when talking about “person”.

The phrases “I regard” or “I recognize” have no explanatory powers here, because I recognize and I regard a human zygote as and individual human being and you seem to think I must be blind or need my powers of recognition and regard checked. The question is WHY would either of us recognize distinctions or similarities?

A newborn baby isn’t self-sustaining. It won’t eat unless other things feed it.
A newborn baby has no intellectual capabilities.
A newborn baby has no sense of self.

So is a newborn baby a person or not?

Let’s be careful and precise. We are philosophers here.

I recognize the image on the right [new born human baby] as a person. — praxis

So an instance of a “new born human baby” (which can be depicted as you’ve depicted it), equals an instance of “a person”. Recognizing a new born baby is recognizing a person.

That answers one of my questions directly and I appreciate that.

But the question isn’t really answered without some of your reasoning because if a human zygote is NOT recognized as a person, but a new born baby IS recognized as a person, you must have some sense of what a “person” means in order to not recognize those meanings in a human zygote. So what does a “person” mean such that you recognize these meanings in a new born baby but not a zygote?

Basically, why do you think a new born baby is a person? What “personal” things are you recognizing about a new born baby?

If you say no the newborn is not a person, that seems consistent with saying a zygote is not a person either, as both of them are nothing like an adult human that we call a person. If you say yes, a newborn is a person, that seems inconsistent with saying an adult is a person but a zygote is not, so if you say “yes” I’d appreciate your reasoning. — Fire Ologist

We don’t need to go through every aspect of personhood do we? — praxis

Absolutely not. Probably a bottomless pit.

But, won’t you just say, whatever the qualities are that make whatever a person is, a newborn baby is (or is not) a person?

If you say no the newborn is not a person, that seems consistent with saying a zygote is not a person either, as both of them are nothing like an adult human that we call a person. If you say yes, a newborn is a person, that seems inconsistent with saying an adult is a person but a zygote is not, so if you say “yes” I’d appreciate your reasoning.

Your question about two identical twin human zygotes and whether they can both be persons if there is no way to distinguish them is a good one and interesting. But if you would:

You said person is like intelligence
[or as you put it “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition”] . Ok, so a fetus can’t structurally have “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition” until it has a certain brain and that brain does certain things. [so a fetus can’t be a person yet]. True [consistent], but let’s consistently apply the working theory. If a person is the happening of intelligence [or “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition”], then is a baby a person? Am I a person when I am sleeping and not dreaming? I think the consistent answer has to be no. When I am sleeping, I don’t have an intellect [or “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition”]. I don’t even have an “I”. Without consciousness, the brain isn’t doing that which generates the activity or process or intellect labeled as “person”. The person already is not there, not yet formed, when consciousness isn’t turned on for any reason, so that human body is not a “person” anymore.

So can you explain how the distinction between person and human being discussed above is wrong, or wrongly applied to sleeping babies for instance, or, if not, refute that it is inconsistent to point to a baby or an unconscious human body or a human zygote, and say that it’s a person? — Fire Ologist

Basically, the same question from way way back that I’ve asked multiple people over and over to directly address in any way: If a human zygote is not a “person” and a human adult is a “person”,is a human newborn baby a “person” and please explain your answer either way in light of the above quote.

Did you really need someone to explain that? — praxis

No. I relied on it to make my point and ask a question that hasn’t been addressed. I bolded it so you wouldn’t miss it:

person is like intelligence
[or as you put it “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition”] . Ok, so a fetus can’t structurally have “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition” until it has a certain brain and that brain does certain things. [so a fetus can’t be a person yet]. True [consistent], but let’s consistently apply the working theory. If a person is the happening of intelligence [or “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition”], then is a baby a person? Am I a person when I am sleeping and not dreaming? I think the consistent answer has to be no. When I am sleeping, I don’t have an intellect [or “aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition”]. I don’t even have an “I”. Without consciousness, the brain isn’t doing that which generates the activity or process or intellect labeled as “person”. The person already is not there, not yet formed, when consciousness isn’t turned on for any reason, so that human body is not a “person” anymore. — Fire Ologist

How is that not consistent? Babies aren’t people either then? Which is fine if you want to be consistent.

And what do you mean by “aspects”? “Aspects of existence”? How is that meaningful to you? And what is “individual recognition” anyway?

When does “individual recognition” become an “aspect” of “existence”? Something adult persons do in their sleep?

I'm not interested in teaching you English. — Michael

Am I being unreasonable or something? Is this forum only a verbal boxing ring? Everyone more interested in connecting with punches.

Can’t we make something more of it?

These could be good conversations. Maybe 200 years from now some grad student writing a thesis on when essentialism finally died will cite “Michael, from TPF, circa 2025 - On the ‘Human’” because you made such a good argument.

Is an English lesson really all you think I need, or are you just shrugging me off? Or what did I do wrong again?? Or what is wrong with you?

I am actually interested in how you and others think.

And before sending me away from the forum to get the English class I needed, you didn’t even attempt to make an argument. It’s your forum.

You may be right that I can’t say the things I say about a person and/or a human being. You may be right, along with Witttgenstein, that seeking “essence” is a wrong turn, a linguistically caused misunderstanding, and think that any pregnant woman who would ask you when you think her fetus might have to be considered a human being would be better off rethinking her question instead of trying to answer it.

You might be right.

But I don’t think it’s that simple, at all. And just asserting things isn’t doing philosophy, and isn’t having a dialogue. This is a forum to dialogue, correct?

I admit, I am emotional and come off as belittling sometimes. So maybe it’s my own fault that I get treated like this (ie - “I’m not teaching you English”), but I think I’m mostly being reasonable, and my rough edge is usually in response to people treating me like a fool. (ie, showing me pictures of a an adult human being and a clump of cells and telling me if I can’t see that the whole abortion debate is thereby resolved, I need my eyes fixed.). Give me the slightest break.

This is the perfect scenario for you to educate, in arguments, about what you know, or what I need to unlearn, or to show me how I never knew what I thought I knew. Or just try to exchange ideas. Why smack that down with insulting shrug offs?

Cash your arguments out. I’m listening for it. I think this is fun and interesting and important.

——————-

So back on topic, “human” and “swimmer” mean different things.

Got it on its face. I speak English natively too. I am swimmer and I’m not a soldier. “Human” can be used many different ways.

But when you say “mean” do you simply mean they are words used in different contexts for different purposes? Or do you mean, they point to or name different objects, or types of objects? What do you mean by “mean” when you say these words mean different things?

(Also, to be clear, “swimmer”, “person” and “soldier” are fairly strictly nouns, whereas “human” can also be used as an adjective, so I assume you meant to say “a human being and swimmer” mean two different things, or “a human and person” mean two different things. I don’t want to misunderstand you because of a typo or small lack of clarity.)

Are you just saying human is an adjective and person is a noun? (Sounds like English class!)

But back to “mean”.
Can I say: “we use the word ‘swimmer’ to point to or refer to or mean a being in the physical world, like a fish or a dolphin, or Michael Phelps”? Swimming is a physical activity, and a swimmer is a doer in the physical world. Would you say something similar to these things? “Mean” here means “point to in the physical world.”

The reason I ask is, if you would use “swimmer” only in reference to physical states of affairs, does “human being” point to something in the physical world too? Or no?

How about person - is that physical (likely not). I don’t think “person” is a “thing” to you, like a “dolphin” or “Michael Phelps swimming” might be a thing in the physical world to you. But if we name a “human being” and point to some being, is that a being in a physical sense?

Or is it only some kind of category only, like “homo sapien”? In which case a human means something different than a swimmer, as one is a universal type categorization device and the other is a thing in a pool?

I’m trying to get at what is the best word to use to have this conversation to point to the adult thing that gets pregnant in her physical sense. She may be more (and I may not know all of the things about her be they physical or whatever), but we need a word we can both agree on that refers to all pregnant women in their full valuable state. We need a word for all that matters about adult human person thing. Or else what are we talking about and how are we talking about it. What word do you want use here?

I have been using “human being” and “person” interchangably because, the point I’m trying to make, is that the whole abortion debate is about bodies acting on bodies. A distinction between “human being” and “person” only matters if you can physically kill or not kill one of them because it’s a body, and not possibly physically kill the other because it is not a body. (Kill because of the abortion context). I’m not interested in something that can’t be killed because it is not a body. If we can’t use a knife to isolate and kill the mind, or cut the intellect or the “person” or the “category human”, then all those things are not relevant to the physical act of abortion or any physical act. Abortion, under my argument, kills a human body (whole organism, not like just a kidney which isn’t an organism), and killing a human body is killing a person’s body, or killing a human being.

The body part of the equation subsumes person/human being distinctions for me, and makes them functionally equivalent terms. What do you want me to call the organism?

What is the fetus is a biological question first. Abortions are physical acts first. What is the adult is biological question. There are no adult mountains (see, I speak some English). Only living biological entities, without metaphor, can be called “adult” or “fetal” at the time of abortion. So I don’t think it is relevant to discuss “persons” if they are souls, or intellects, or minds, or bundles of attributes, or functions of a brain, or happenings in adult brains, unless you can show that this “person” thing comes later than the “human being” thing, and some human being things are not persons, or not yet persons. If you want to make a distinction between being a person and being a human being, IN THE FETUS OR THE ADULT (not an alien or other hominid because those are not at issue) that’s fine, but then you need to show where in the physical world, the world of abortions, this person fits in.

When does “person” or “human being” happen so that it matters in discussion about abortion. That’s the money time period or moment.

Maybe you have said this. You said person is like intelligence. Ok, so a fetus can’t structurally have an intellect until it has a certain brain and that brain does certain things. True, but let’s consistently apply the working theory. If a person is the happening of intelligence, then is a baby a person? Am I a person when I am sleeping and not dreaming? I think the consistent answer has to be no. When I am sleeping, I don’t have an intellect. I don’t even have an “I”. Without consciousness, the brain isn’t doing that which generates the activity or process or intellect labeled as “person”. The person already is not there, not yet formed, when consciousness isn’t turned on for any reason, so that human body is not a “person” anymore.

So can you explain how the distinction between person and human being discussed above is wrong, or wrongly applied to sleeping babies for instance, or, if not, refute that it is inconsistent to point to a baby or an unconscious human body and say that it’s a person?

I am trying to have an honest conversation for my part. I am interested in challenging my thoughts and my reasoning. That should be obvious to you as I keep throwing out all of this content hoping for the reasoned, philosophical counter point. I see someone who thinks differently than me, like you and others, and I want to see how they might be reasonable too, which challenges me to question why I think what I think.

English class. Really? All we all need is a good dictionary and the abortion discussion is over?

"Human" and "solider" mean different things.
"Human" and "swimmer" mean different things.
"Human" and "person" mean different things. — Michael

Here is what is so difficult: how do you know they mean different things? Can’t you use words to define them in some way?

e.g. if it is an alien, — Michael

I hate to say it, but this is a non sequitur. A straw man. You are just pointing to more undefined, ambiguous “things”.

My claim is that being human has no unambiguous set of necessary and sufficient conditions. — Michael

So you will say “human” means something different than “soldier”, which means to me you must be able to set out some condition, even just one condition would be sufficient, to show a difference between what “human” and”soldier” mean - you can do that - but for “being human” you can’t even begin to define it. Although you know a human zygote cannot be called a human being.

The gradual evolution from non-human to human was just that; gradual. — Michael

Agreed, although I’m not sure what method you used to identify some “non-human” bunch of beings that gradually grew into “human beings”.
By raising evolution, you really just restate the problem over a longer period of time. You need some necessary conditions that allows you to put beings into those two different buckets.

Instead of millions and hundreds of thousands of years, what if the life of a human being was 15 seconds long? Pregnancy lasted two seconds and boom the infant pops out, grows through childhood to old age and dies in 15 seconds. Would it still make sense yo draw a line between whatever such a being is at 1 second compared to whatever you want to call it at 10 seconds? Would we still want to say this creature didn’t start its short life until sometime after 2 or 3 seconds?

We can say at one extreme that we are human and at another extreme that Homo heidelbergensis were not human (if by "human" we mean "Homo sapiens"), but in between there's a large grey area where any designation as being a member of the one species or the other (or some intermediate species) is arbitrary. — Michael

Spreading the same issue out over millions of years and just replacing the ambiguous zygote with the ambiguous Homo heidelbergensis, and replacing the ambiguous adult human being with what you now refer to as any human being that evolved, doesn’t really help your point.

I get that we have a starting point where there is no human being, and an end point where we clearly have a human being, and that the motion from non-human thing (like some pre-hominid ape) to human being (like Mrs. Smith), is a gray swirling mess of ambiguity, but, since people are asking me about when we can or maybe can’t terminate pregnancies, about when was the time period that we get critical mass, I press on into the gray swirling mess.

It just seems weird to be able to say you obviously value a pregnant adult woman, and obviously do t value her human zygote, but then say there are no conditions you will make necessary in defining “human being” when you wrap your arms fully around the woman to hug her in a tough time, and wrap the scalpel fully around the human zygote being.

It’s a dance that takes advantage of the gray motion of biological growth, here in order to assert things like there is no essence, or a “human zygote” means something totally different than a “human being” and human beings are organisms whose beginnings are gray enough that it makes sense to you to honor and value it as an adult, but kill it without any concern when it is gray.

It’s all just full of holes to me. Life is ambiguous. 2+2 may always equal 4, but we don’t see all the equations. In the meantime, new adults pop on the scene. When does that happen - probably sometime between 16 and 30 years of age, depending on how you define “adult”.

And in the meantime, pregnant women want advice from their doctors - should I get an abortion, what is the procedure like, how long does it take, will it hurt me, what do you do with the fetus afterwards, what is the law on time frames - these all need answers. Some women ask whether the fetus will feel pain, or is it a human being, or when does it become a person even. They want to make a fully informed decision and, since their own moms carried zygotes to term once, they think it’s a legitimate question.

Your answer to these latter questions seems to be “who the hell knows, that’s up to you to figure out, I mean intelligent aliens would be persons, and Homo Heidelbergensis is in the mix, but just look at a picture of a zygote - an ugly clump of cells. I won’t conjecture when that clump might begin to be personal or human or intelligent or a soldier. But you, Mrs. pregnant Smith, you are certainly a valuable human being and a person with intelligence - for some reason, I can say that much.”

Brutal.

It's not the amorphous nature of the concept that makes it essentialist, it's the immortal nature — praxis

Things that don't change are dead. — praxis

Are you saying immortal equals unchanging?

Why is that?

But doesn’t seem relevant to essentialism either.

Do you think essences immortal or something?

How will any of this move the ball regarding what abortions you like and which ones you don’t?

the words "human" and "person" mean different things — Michael

Can you say this without using the word “things” because that makes me think you might be able to point to a person, and separately point to a human being.

They mean different things. Are they each a thing at all?

The distinction between human being and person may to you be like a distinction between “an organism with 46 chromosomes” and “intelligence”.

All you “person” people have to do is admit there is no “person” present in a newborn. That’s fine. Would be consistent. You can still love and value your babies, but to call them “persons” if that means “intelligence” is bullshit.

In this context — Michael

A doctor identifies a 7.5 month old fetus meeting specific criteria so that he can remove it without removing too much more during an abortion.

A prosecutor says the doctor violated the law and murdered a person, because the law says after the close of 6th month the fetus shall be treated as a person, having met the criteria of being a human fetus more than 6 months old.

The doctor defends he hasn’t met the necessary and sufficient criteria for “murder” because he only intended to save the life of the mother…

Roe v. Wade case spent a lot of time considering this.

And it’s not a taxonomy question.

The only reason anyone cares at all about the abortion procedure is because people think it’s a person, think it’s not a person, or don’t know.

The only reason people think it might be a person is because biologists and doctors show us before we could walk and talk, we used to be a zygote.

Saying the metaphysics are linguistic problems will never help the doctor defend a charge of murder or the lawmaker, or most women who haven’t decided yet what they think about abortion.

Why can’t souls be as amorphous as whatever else we are talking about?
— Fire Ologist

I think they can be. — praxis

:victory:

Ok, just above, you said Catholics have to be essentialist because Catholics believe in an immortal soul.
I then said that this doesn’t follow as there is nothing about the amorphous term soul that requires belief in essentialism.
You agreed they can be amorphous.

So then are you agreeing with me that you did not make a good enough argument about Catholics and essentialism? Maybe Catholics are essentialist, but you haven’t shown that yet, correct?

You willing to acknowledge me as a partner in a conversation?

That would be a victory for us both, and for this thread.

…souls..be as amorphous as whatever…
— Fire Ologist

I think they can be. — praxis

Your words. Agreeing with my words

You either just concede on this tiny point, or you should provide a lot of ‘splaining on how you still made a point despite the amorphousness of the “soul” concept, which is fine if you want.

But I hope you just agree because I really don’t think the Catholic/soul speak will be fruitful here.

You believe that using words is essentialism? — praxis

No. But can you say otherwise? I presume you can’t because you won’t say what essentialism essentially is.

And there is no logical connection between essentialism and belief in a soul - what are you talking about? That can’t be why a Catholic cannot reject essentialism. Why can’t souls be as amorphous as whatever else we are talking about?

Maybe Catholics really are essentialists, but you need to do more to support this.

You keep getting nowhere with me, or towards advancing any interesting point.

Essentially, — praxis

:rofl: So you are an essentialist too! Like the Catholics.

How about starting with whether or not you reject essentialism? — praxis

I’m not doing anymore work for you.

Define essentialism. Tell me how it is relevant in your mind to a conversation regarding abortion.

Roman Catholicism
The Roman Catholic view is that baptism is necessary for salvation and that it frees the recipient from original sin. Roman Catholic tradition teaches that unbaptized infants, not being freed from original sin, go to Limbo (Latin: limbus infantium), which is an afterlife condition distinct from Hell. — praxis

But I am speaking with you now. So, this is utterly meaningless drivel and I wouldn't even know where to start to take another step in such a conversation.

Catholics have an idea and you claim to be a Catholic. — praxis

That’s dumb. No they don’t.

We trust God on the issues we can’t use our own reason and senses to sort out.

Where do souls go? They remain in God’s hands as they are all along.

Do you think you know me, or Catholics now? Have I said anything that has meaning to you? Doesn’t seem like it.

Again, what is your point in speaking to me?

Where do the souls of aborted babies go? What would a soul of an embryo frozen for centuries experience? — RogueAI

In this attempted conversation regarding whether we can or even need to identify a functional use for the word “human being” that is relevant to the question of why someone would be pro-life, I don’t think the introduction of the term “soul” is going to be anything but a catastrophe.

My answer in the context of this discussion is - I don’t have any idea if “souls” ever “go” at all, let alone where or how they would go when bodies die, as in when a fetus is destroyed in an abortion.

In this context, I would just think of a soul as a euphemism for “person” as in “how many souls went into the water when the Titanic sunk.” We are still trying to come to terms with “person” or “human being.”

Fair enough?

you’re an essentialist wrt to fundamental particles. — Johnnie

I keep telling these guys there are fairy essences hiding in the assertions they are making. I think it is because they are not being careful with their language mostly. But ultimately, I think it’s because they are dealing with mind-independent facts, like fundamental particles, for instance, like the rest of us are.

You don't seem to understand what essentialism is if that it your response to that particular use of the term "essential". — Michael

True, you wouldn’t be able to put a box around what I understand from that one sentence - it could mean anything.

But the last line of the article comparing early and later Witt:

“In other words, the grand question of interpreting
Wittgenstein, i.e., the question of continuities or
breaks, remains at the forefront of understanding
Wittgenstein.”

The question of continuities or breaks.

Remains.

Maybe Wittgenstein didn’t really know what Wittgenstein meant either. And if that was his point, we all need more therapy, because the questions remain for many of us who have read Wittgenstein.

Resemblance requires something like the black, the white and the grey to be used meaningfully, or to have use if that makes you feel better about my adherence to proper grammar found in this game.

I don’t know why you think I’m not in the same game with you here. As if if a mere assertion “you don’t know what essentialism means” deserves nothing more. As if none of what I said is not specifically what Wittgenstein was trying to address.

In the opening of the article: “…the Augustinian picture of language which might be correct but which is, nevertheless, strictly limited because it ignores the essential role of action in establishing…”

Painful. Wish those making non-essentialist points would stop making essential distinctions.

I studied Wittgenstein. But I’ll keep reading if it is for the purpose of continuing the discussion. After all I said above, are you just fed up or unwilling to teach me yourself, handing me over to Wittgenstein?

beard vs being clean-shaven. What's the point at which whisker growth constitutes a beard? — Relativist

Spot on, great discussion.

What process did you use to identify "beard"? Or "clean shaven"? In order to look for the gray, fuzzy relationship that may or may not exist between the two, you demarked a clear, black and white difference between a bearded and a clean-shaven face. What did you do there? That process is what I am trying to apply to the concept of "me" meaning a bi-pedal hominid stinking up the earth.

You invoked "beard" and "not-beard" and pointed in two different directions with these invocations. What allows you to do that and convey any significance to some third party like me who has to look for differences and make my own demarcations all by myself? You can't say "clean shaven" is more like "not-beard" and "beard" is more like "not clean shaven" without saying "beard" and "clean shaven" are different, otherwise you would not be able to point to a gray fuzzy relationship between "beard" and "clean-shaven", AND, I couldn't see what you are saying if there was in fact, no difference between a beard and clean-shaven, OR, I couldn't see what you are saying if you were not constructing a black and white difference between beard and clean-shaven in your language.

You acknowledge the concept is fuzzy, and yet you think it should be possible to identify a point at which a human life begins. — Relativist

I'm not saying fertilization doesn't occur in time. There is a fuzzy border at every turn for us. If it sounds like I am somehow relying on the notion that persons pop into existence in an instant, I'm not. I have been calling it "the moment of conception" so I can see why you might think the temporal duration is important to my argument. But that time can be longer and include some additional steps besides fertilization. I am positing my own counter-arguments that allow for the development of the person from not-person over time, but in order to do that, I have to say what a person is at any point.

At some point in time we no longer see the gray, and black or white emerges, or we never get beyond the gray. We either see clearly that an animal such as a human being, is different than a hurricane, or we don't and the black and white swirls back to gray. But the way I see it, in order to have black, we also need not-black; in order to have gray we need black; in order to have white we need gray; in order to have black and white and we need gray; in order to have gray we need black and white; in order to have white we need black.... Or is there only gray? In which case a beard and a clean-shaven face are both a zygote, which is a person, or an ice-cream truck?

You have a sperm with 23 chromosomes and an egg with 23 chromosomes before fertilization. After fertilization you no longer have a sperm and an egg (like no more clean face), and instead have a 46 chromosome new thing (like a beard). While the first two chromosomes of the sperm attach to the first two chromosomes of the egg, and the third chromosome of each is beginning to attach, can we call it a sperm or an egg anymore? Do we have a half-human/half non-human thing?

And with that, I've just deconstructed of the notion of "moment" of conception for you. There is a duration of time during which any change occurs and we are talking about the change in our history from things that are not people (like zygotes in many arguments) to things that are people (like Mrs. Smith). But because duration is a reality and "moment" is a fabrication, have I deconstructed my whole argument? I don't think so. There is still a difference between a growing zygote (black) and an adult person (white) that I need to explain (unfortunately, always using gray terms).

I'm open to an argument that the gray fuzzy period of time could be from conception to brain-stem formation, or from conception to consciousness formation, or self-awareness formation, or language formation, or concept formation, or adult conversation formation. Maybe it takes 20 years for a "person" to come to be in time. Lay those arguments on me.

But I can't abandon the notion of a "person" entirely and make any of these arguments. And neither can you, and neither are you abandoning the concept of "person".

Banno and Michael, and now you with the beard and the clean-shaven face, keep pointing to differences. Nobody is arguing that there is no difference between an adult organism and a fetal organism. (There are many differences between two adults.) So we all seem to agree that there is "difference" in our experience. I certainly agree with all of you that there are differences.

I think we would disagree that saying "there are differences" is a metaphysical statement, and that metaphysics is science, and that science is a pursuit of objectivity we share. But I agree with you that there are differences in the world in itself.

An essentialist, to me, takes those differences and tries to apply them to substances hiding on either side of the demarcation line now called the difference. They see some fuzzy line between a beard and clean-shaven and say things like: "the essence of clean-shaven is no whiskers visible, allowing for direct slapping of the skin when the face is being slapped" for instance. They think they don't need to compare "clean-shaven" to anything else or refer to the beard at all, and think the essence of clean-shaven can be found with the in-itself of the clean-shaven face. The essence of clean-shaven-ness. A non-essentialist, to me, takes the differences and sees them only by the comparison. There is no way to look at just the clean-shaven face, and understand what a clean-shaven face is; you have to hold it up to its context to even begin to see why we might say "clean" or "shaven", and see the beard along with the clean in order to proceed to identify a difference between the two. The default is everything is the same one, and the break from that lies in between multiple same ones, not some fairy essence in the multiplicity.

But the different approaches to meaningful speech (essentialist or non-essentialist) about face maintenance are, to me, semantic. Both types of discussion are recognizing the same fact of difference between one thing and another thing, they only place the significance of that difference in a different location - an essentialist sees it in the two things, a non-essentialist sees it somewhere between the two now amorphous "things". Same meaning to the same topic of the same discussion, just two different semantical devices to get there.

I happen to think the non-essentialist process is the better process. It is why we rarely find a clear line between anything. It is why Heraclitus was the wisest of them all. It is why Aristotle is easy to dismiss (although he was the second-wisest). It is why Kant's phenomenal veil will always be pulled over our eyes. It is why Hegel may be the third wisest. It is why eastern thinkers who take essence and show how it must implode as it crystalizes are also wise...

But there is no speaking, no significance to any word, if we don't acknowledge gray, fuzzy lines of difference. It is easier to talk in essentialist terms, so essentialism is more like a tool of language.

You have to sound like an essentialist to say "beard versus clean-shaven" at all. To avoid essentialist speak is to conduct tiresome linguistic acrobatics to bring us to the same place anyway - the difference between this and that.

What I don't think, is that, because the line between beard and clean-shaven is fuzzy, there is no such thing as "beard" or "clean-shaven" either. At least for a time, for some duration, differences hold between face and not-face, or clean and not-clean. I don't abandon the mind-independent, physical, objective, world just because I have such epistemological and metaphysical difficulties, as well as perceptual difficulties of sensation, with grasping or even just experiencing it. I still see difference, (like you all keep seeming to see as well), and I see more to that difference on either side of the difference. The line between beard and clean-shaven, as well as the beard, and the clean-shaveness, these are all fuzzy. But in order for me to maintain the concept that a "a beard is, and it is different than clean-shaven" I have to admit I am recognizing something clearly, in black, not-white, as well.

And if I want to talk about this at all, I have to sound like an essentialist. Like you did when you simply pointed to "beard." Here is an example of sounding like an essentialist:

Essentialism is false. — Michael

There must be an essence to essentialism in order to put a box around it and file it under the "false" category of judgment, or in order to just say "essentialism is". OR, non-essentially speaking, there must be a comparable difference between essentialism and something else (anything else, everything else) in order to point away from whatever essentialism is to some thing else. Otherwise, there is no significance to saying "essentialism" at all, and nothing has been said.

We need the differences in order to make any moves, both when crossing the room, or laying out a sentence.

Don't call the significance of these differences anything "essential" if you want. Instead, take the effort to have a conversation otherwise, but you haven't refuted the fact that there are persons in the world, independent of us all, who are distinct from grapefruit and soda, and that only by recognizing black and white clear differences can you say this, or make sentences that attempt to refute it.

There is a lot more to say before the above could really be recognized as an important part of the abortion playing board, but the prosecution will adjourn for lunch.