But, just maybe he learned something from the Romans, keep the people happy and distracted with the circus. — Sir2u

The Romans? When can we have them over to the White House?

Yep, but not everyone fears him, in these parts he his seen as a bit of a clown. — Sir2u

That's the thing. You can only push so far.

Well... *sigh*. That is.. not reasonable. — AmadeusD

There are many ways to show how the argument is not reasonable, I provided one. The argument requires a very narrow perspective to work. It works for Banno because he adopts that narrow perspective and refuses to talk to anyone who will not take it. It's like saying the argument requires these assumptions, and if you do not accept these assumptions, I will not discuss it with you. What's the point?

Not everyone is against Maduro, but those that are will want a lot from trump to stop the drug trade. — Sir2u

I don't think Trump gives a flying fuck about stopping the drug trade. He just uses it as leverage. You know, he'll keep up the attack, rationalizing it as being an attack on the drug trade, even threatening to take Maduro out if necessary, until he gets what he really wants from Maduro, in negotiations. That's the way he works, through bullying.

A quandary.

Probably he's after oil. He seems to be extraordinarily obsessed with keeping the price of fuel in the US low. I think he believes this will guarantee him the title of best president ever. The fuel in Venezuela could be the cheapest in the world.

Basically I've noticed nothing done in that sector and when Trump is already hinting the willingness to have talks with Maduro, that willingness totally undermines the support for the opposition. — ssu

It's possible that Trump is trying to pressure Maduro into negotiations, like he does with the tariffs. The bully tactic he's known for. I think he actually likes Maduro, and wants to force him into alliance, or more likely allegiance.

Personally, I would have thought that trump, being such a good business man, would know about the rules of supply and demand, The only reason drug lords exist is because there are drug users.
Would it not be better to go after the users within their own borders than to be picking fights with foreign countries? — Sir2u

Trump uses drug trafficking as a reason to declare "national emergency". This declaration gives the government the power to avoid congress. He used fentanyl smuggling from Canada (estimated less than .01% of American fentanyl comes from Canada) as his excuse to declare a national emergency, allowing him the power required to impose tariffs on Canada.

You shoulda just left it at thanks, and gone your merry way. — Mww

As I said, I didn't see anything to thank you for. And to be insincere in a discussion about truth is self-defeating.

You asked, I answered. You could have just said thanks.

I’ll end with this: an invitation to the dreaded Cartesian theater in your critique of my perspective. It is self-defeating, systemic nonsense, to conflate the thing with a necessary condition for it. — Mww

I didn't see anything to thank you for. But since you seem to be inviting me to critique your perspective, I will.

The substance of your reply, I see as based on incorrect assumptions which make your perspective impossible to understand.
That is the following:

It is impossible not to know whether the relation of conceptions or of judgements accord with each other, for in either there is contradiction with experience if they do not. It is not given by that knowledge the cause of such discord, only that there resides no truth in it. — Mww

It's fundamentally wrong, to say that it's impossible not to know whether a relation is a relation of accordance. More often than not, we do not know that. That is because whether or not it is a relation of accordance requires a judgement of that nature.

And, the proposed problem of "contradiction with experience" does not support that basic premise, because this phrase makes no sense. What could "contradiction with experience" even mean? What is experienced must be put into words, before anything can contradict this. So that would not be contradiction with experience, but contradiction with the description of what was experienced.

Then you mention the cause of discord, but causation is irrelevant here.

Further, you conclude with a statement about "possible cognitions". But we were talking about actual judgements or actual cognitions, and neither one of us provided any principles to establish a relation between actual and possible judgements/cognitions. You simply assumed another meaningless, nonsense principle, "the sum of all possible cognitions is incomplete".

It's nonsense because "possible cognitions", as individual items which could be counted, summed, doesn't make any sense in itself. To count them requires that they be cognized. Therefore the sum would be a sum of actual cognitions. A sum of possible cognitions is nonsensical, due to that impossibility.

The necessary condition of empirical truth as such, in general, is the accordance with a cognition with its object, cognition itself being the relation of conceptions to each other in a logical proposition, re: a judgement, or, the relation of judgements to each other, re: a syllogism. It is impossible not to know whether the relation of conceptions or of judgements accord with each other, for in either there is contradiction with experience if they do not. It is not given by that knowledge the cause of such discord, only that there resides no truth in it. — Mww

But isn't it the case that whether or not there is "accordance" is itself a judgement? You say that truth is "accordance" but isn't accordance a judgement? That "the cat is on the mat" is in accordance with reality, is a judgement. If you don't think that accordance is a judgement, then maybe you could explain how it could be anything other than a judgement?

It is not that all true things are known, insofar as the sum of all possible cognitions is incomplete, some of which may be true respecting their objects, but that the criterion of any truth is known, for which the sum of possible cognitions is irrelevant. — Mww

If there is such a thing as "the criterion of any truth", doesn't this imply that truth is a judgement as to whether the specific criterion is fulfilled?

OK, care to make that re-statement for me? Just so I can understand your perspective on this.

Anti-realism says: every truth must be knowable.
But you also say: there are truths we don’t and maybe can’t know.
Fitch shows you can’t have both.
If there are unknown truths, then not every truth is knowable, which just is the denial of anti-realism. — Banno

"True" is a judgement. Judgements are only made by intelligent minds in the process called "knowing". Therefore all truths are known.

On a quick look-up, SEP explains the paradox thus:-
The ally of the view that all truths are knowable (by somebody at some time) is forced absurdly to admit that every truth is known (by somebody at some time).
I'm not impressed. It seems to follow that at any given time, there can be unknown truths. That these truths may be known at some other time is not particularly interesting. — Ludwig V

Fitch's paradox only demonstrates the obvious, that every truth must be known. Since "truth" refers to a relation between propositions and reality, and only intelligent minds can produce this relation through the application of meaning, and the process of knowing, it is very obvious that all truths must be known.

So, what Fitch does, is take a clearly false premise, that there may be a truth which is unknown, and shows how one might produce an absurd conclusion from that false premise. That's common practise in philosophy, it's a way of demonstrating the falsity of the premise, to those who do not grasp the obvious.

The issue with the possibility of truths which we as human beings do not know, involves the assumption of a higher, divine intelligence, like God. If we understand that the human mind is deficient in its capacity to know, and we assume the possibility of an actually existing higher mind with a greater capacity to understand and know, then we accept the possibility of truths which are not known by any human mind, but are known by the higher mind.

he was clearly coaching a Dem congressman what to ask Michael Cohen during an anti-Trump investigation — NOS4A2

Evidence of the breakup in the bromance?

A conviction for smuggling drugs does not produce a death sentence in the USA.

c) Overthrow of the regime... somehow. — ssu

Since the leader of Venezuela has been designated a narco-terrorist, I think that goal is clear. But viewing poor drug runners as dispensable pawns, for the purpose of inciting conflict, is pathetic.

The set of true sentences is never complete, if that helps. — Banno

If the set is not complete, then you imply that there are more true sentences which are not in the set. So, do you mean by this, that "the set of true sentences" does not refer to all the true sentences?

I am very fond of maps and have been reading them since I was a child, road maps, contour maps, weather maps. It's not surprising that you think I'm lost though. I've come across this before on camping trips, when the person who can't read the map insists that I'm wanting to take them in the wrong direction.

Looks interesting. A bit expensive, but probably worth it for me to get some background information.

It speaks to the algorithm organising the complex lives of animals that are more than the one dimensional creatures you seem to think they are. — apokrisis

To me, the idea that there is such an algorithm is a faulty principle which negates the possibility of free will. This idea you propose, is an example of what is known as conflating the map with the territory. Such thinking leads to the idea that reality is a simulation.

The complex lives of social animals is modeled with the use of algorithms, systems theory, etc.. But that is the map. The terrain is actually radically different from the model, as we know from our experience of free will.

This is certainly your concept of how systems are organised. System science doesn’t agree. — apokrisis

Of course. When you conflate the model (system) with the thing modeled (real activity), you're bound to say that the science doesn't agree, when someone points to your erroneous assumption. All systems are artificial, either a model, or a created physical system. To map a natural thing as a system is a very useful tool. But to disregard the difference between these two, the map and the natural territory, is very misleading.

Thanks Jamal. I'm staring to understand the primacy of the object. It's difficult for me because traditionally (Aristotelian) the object itself is a composition of matter and form. Therefore one dualism is relinquished for another, by assuming the primacy of the object. Ontologically, there is still a need to determine primacy within the new dualism.

This, by way of the cosmological argument, is what leads the Christian theologians toward the immaterial Form, God, as primary. The problem which developed historically, is that matter separates us from God along with the true "Forms", as outlined by Kant (the intuitions of space and time being the manifestation of matter in this work). The human intellect is deficient because of its dependence on matter, making our understanding deficient, therefore the forms which we understand are distinct from the true independent Forms. That's why I conclude that matter rather than form is what is immediate to us. The theologians determined Form as primary, by logical priority, but matter is immediate.

I noticed that Adorno associated "substance" with the social whole, and this replaces "matter and form" with "content and form", in this type of substantial object, 'society'. But to me this does not resolve the problem. He seems to be proposing that each is mediated by the other, and I believe that this will render the proposed object 'society', as impossible to adequately understand, due to the issues I already described.

The trouble, from your point of view, will be that refuses to develop this into a positive ontology, instead using it as part of a critical move to reveal the shortcomings of all ontology ever attempted. — Jamal

This is why I described ontology as an attitudinal position, or even a moral discipline. We can take "the shortcomings of all ontology ever attempted" as inspiration to be a metaphysician, knowing that there is a real need for something better. Or, we can take "the shortcomings of all ontology ever attempted" as an indication that ontology is pointless and ought to be abandoned forever.

Anyway, I'm very interested to see how the book progresses.

The nature of a tool, and the nature of power in general, is that it could be used for good purposes, or it could be used for bad.

I have argued that this selfishness we worry about is the dominance-submission dynamic that balances the social hierarchies of social animals without language to mediate how they organise as collections of individuals. — apokrisis

But don't you think that this selfishness is just the basic instinct toward survival, of the individual being? You know, like we have some basic needs, nutrition for example, and this might incline us to fight over the same piece of food. Why would you want to attribute it to an aspect of a social hierarchy when it just appears to be a basic aspect of being an individual?

It is always a mistake to believe that some thing must be primary when it is always the dynamics of a relation which is what is basic. — apokrisis

What do you base this assumption in? I don't believe that the two sides go hand in hand at all. This attitude leads to infinite regress. We discussed this before as the relation between the whole and the part. One must be prior to the other or else they've both existed together forever, without beginning.

So I don’t think we need to hurry the arrival of the selfish and competitive aspect of LLM tech. That is leaking out in all directions, as the rocketing electricity prices in Virginia and other data centre states is showing. — apokrisis

The point though, is that the LLMs do not have the same needs which human beings have, (such as the need for nutrition mentioned above), and this is what drives the selfishness. Sure the LLM could be made to be selfish, but this selfishness would just be a reflection of the designer's wants, not itself, therefore not a true selfishness.

Thank you MU, this is very good and clear. You and Adorno certainly disagree here, but I'd like to emphasize some things about his position with a view to achieving general agreement of interpretation. His "mediation all the way down" as I called it is not nihilistic. It's not saying we can never reach the truth, but proposing a search for truth which is very different from first philosophy, of which Heideggerian fundamental ontology is a newer version, according to Adorno. In a nutshell, he is against ontology as such. Now, I can respect that you cannot accept his position here, but maybe we can agree that this is what he thinks. — Jamal

Well, I like to think that I am somewhat open minded, so I am open to the possibility that he will change my attitude toward ontology. Afterall, we are at the beginning of the book, and that's the reason for reading this stuff, to learn something new. He did manage to show me, in the introduction, how "substance" could be assigned to the societal whole, in a reasonable way. However, I fear that this move is related to the "mediation all the way down" position, and it appears to me that this results in a dead end ontology.

Not that it will change your mind, but I think the key might be to see that for Adorno, mediation is not an obstacle to truth, but rather its constitutive condition. This way of putting it is structurally similar to one of the ways I used to argue against indirect realism, phenomenalism, etc (BTW I haven't changed my mind about it, just left behind the debate): the sensorium is not a distorting medium between ourselves and the world, but is the condition for the world to appear to us at all, and is the means through which we are engaged with it. Just as indirect realists seem to regard only a suppositional perception without the senses as allowing us to get beyond ourselves to apprehend the Real, so ontologists in their own striving for immediacy regard only a non-sensory "intellectual intuition", a pure grasp of being, as sufficient for attaining the truth of what is. — Jamal

The problem is that mediation implies distinct aspects, and "mediation all the way down" implies that one cannot be prior to the other, nor can they be adequately separate to be understood individually. Essentially, we have a dualist philosophy within which we deny ourselves the possibility of separating one aspect from the other, in an absolute way, so this leaves the foundation of 'the world' which is the union of the two aspects, beyond our intellectual grasp. In assuming that the two are inseparable, i.e. one always mediates the other, we must conclude that we will never be able to understand one as prior to, or independent from the other.

In the introduction we saw how form and content must always mediate each other, and this resulted in the conclusion that the societal whole is substance. In this chapter we see that thinking, and what is thought, are mediated by each other, but this leads into the problem I explained. From this perspective i do not see how understanding and misunderstanding can ever be adequately distinguished from each other.

Words like problem and solution ring false in philosophy, because they
postulate the independence of what is thought from thinking exactly
there, where thinking and what is thought are mediated by one another.

This may be the direction which Kant's metaphysics leads us. In your example, you have "the world" and "the condition for the world to appear to us". The condition is "the sensorium". Since this is a necessary condition, then the world can only appear to us in this way, as phenomena, and we will never be able to separate out the noumenon to understand it directly, because it is just an unassailable postulate. Plato, on the other hand, posited the deficiencies of sensation, and insisted that the intellect can grasp the intelligible objects (noumena) directly. In this way intelligible objects are posited as immediate, and we have a way around the problem of mediation which Kant described.

Personally, I believe Plato was wrong on this issue. Aristotle showed how there is always "potential" as a medium between the forms in our mind and the independent forms. Therefore, I think that what appears to us as the unintelligible, i.e. matter, potential, is the medium between us and the independent forms. So matter, as the medium, is what is immediate to us. Notice, even in your example, what you call ""the condition for the world to appear to us", the sensorium, can be construed as immediate to us, as the medium between us and the world. This is the material aspect.

As I said though, I believe it becomes a moral issue, the way we "ought" to approach the unknown. So I think Plato actually had the right approach, with "the good", and the good approach is to assume that something is immediate. Where he went wrong perhaps was that he assumed the wrong thing to be immediate. And that is the problem of ontology which Adorno has exposed, it appears to be mediation all the way down. But I believe the way that the metaphysician ought to proceed is to attempt to isolate the immediate, even if only by trial and error. We cannot know for sure if it is mediation all the way down, until we try every other possibility.

Now, I can respect that you cannot accept his position here, but maybe we can agree that this is what he thinks. — Jamal

I will say, that it appears to be like this at this point in the book. But Adorno was very intelligent and quite crafty, so I'm not yet convinced that this will be his conclusion. Plato proceeded like this. He appeared to adopt Pythagorean idealism in his early work, to learn everything about it, and apply it to all aspects of the world, only to reject it in the end, as being inadequate. Since he has so much work which describes Pythagorean idealism, the untrained mind, or one who doesn't read thoroughly, would believe that he supported it. Hence we have the vulgar "Platonism".

I don't see how he is dismissing at the end of the quoted passage, quite the opposite, care to explain? Also, I believe Adorno is dismissing both the "succinct" sense and the "general sense", the latter being far too broad for Adorno. — Pussycat

Read the passage below. Notice, it says "I should like to mention an objection". As "an objection" what is stated is stated as something contrary to what Adorno is presenting. Therefore this, what is stated, is an objection which Adorno is dismissing. At the end he says he will respond in more detail later.

At this point I should like to mention an objection that has been raised by an extremely knowledgeable source, namely by someone from your own circle, someone from amongst those present here today. Given that the concept of dialectics contains the element of negativity precisely because of the presence of contradiction, does
this not mean that every dialectics is a negative dialectics and that my introduction of the word ‘negative’ is a kind of tautology? We could just say that, simply by refusing to make do with the given reality, the subject, thought, negates whatever is given; and that as a motive force of thought subjectivity itself is the negative principle, as we see from a celebrated passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology where he remarks that the living substance as subject, in other words, as thought, is pure, simple negativity, and is ‘for this very reason, the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis.’ In other words, thought itself – and thought is tied to subjectivity – is negativity, and to that extent negativity, and especially dialectical thinking, is negative dialectics from the outset. I should like to respond to this in detail next time. For now I wish only to set out the problem as it has been put to me and to say that it calls for an answer.

I couldn't disagree more. — Pussycat

I understand that you and I have significant disagreement on how to interpret Adorno.

I appreciate the effort, but since you still adhere to the promise of a transcendently correct question, I don't think it works. This implies that concrete conditions merely contaminate an attempted purity, whereas Adorno's point is that they're constitutive, that it's mediation all the way down. — Jamal

I suppose, as I said, this is the point where I disagree with Adorno. That's not to say that I am judging either one of our perspectives to be true or false, in any absolute sense. I think that I simply believe that "ontology" has a different nature from what Adorno believes. Since, as I said, ontology is speculative, I cannot claim to be confident that I am right.

However, as I said a few days ago, I believe that the goal of ontology is to determine the immediate. True certainty can only be produced in this way. So to insist that there is mediation all the way down, I believe would be a self-defeating ontology. It's like saying that we might as well stop seeking certainty because we can never have it.

So my belief is a matter of how we 'ought' to approach this field, ontology, therefore it's a difference in moral attitude. I hold the same attitude toward those materialist/idealists who assume prime matter, as infinite potential, to be the first principle. It's self-defeating because it's an assumption which renders reality as fundamentally unintelligible. Therefore I have developed an attitude toward how we ought to proceed in ontology.

But wouldn't you agree that language is associated with social practices and language games? — frank

Yes, the language used amounts to how the question is formulated, and the formulation is a reflection of the culture. The point is that the real question which lies underneath, as "ontology" itself, which we might say is the desire to know the nature of being, transcends all cultures and social practices. As the content of the question, it is the same question in all cultures, despite being formulated in many different ways depending on social practices and language games.

I reiterate, this is my believe, not what I think Adorno is saying, but how I think i might differ from Adorno in belief.

The idea is rather that questions are socially and historically mediated, never completely separable from their formation. And they are also mediated subjectively in the intellectual experience of the philosopher, whose thinking is shaped by their situation. The concrete social and historical conditions produce certain questions, so we understand and attempt to answer the questions partly through understanding these conditions. — Jamal

I think I see the point, I just don't agree. I think the nature of ontological questions is such that they transcend all social and historical conditions. That's why I said the same questions are asked throughout history and by every different culture. What varies is the formulation of the question. So the questions appear to differ but they really ask the same thing, i.e. how do we approach the unknown. The unknown has a different appearance depending on the social historical mediation, therefore the question has a different formulation depending on these factors.

What did you think of my proposal of how to make my perspective consistent with Adorno's? If we recognize that since the formulation of the question is always going to be mediated by social and historical conditions, and we know that this is going to make the question asked, the wrong question, then we can conclude that the answer is always already within the question. The answer being that the question itself is mistaken, or the wrong question.

I put some effort into explaining that without going full mystical mumbo jumbo. You could at least mull it over for a second. — frank

I apologize for being short. But I already spent much time mulling over what Adorno said, and I didn't find that your brief effort really added anything significant.

I've added the bolded "do" to make it clear what Adorno is saying. He is saying that the idea has some truth to it.

First, I think we can all agree with Adorno that philosophical questions are generally/often not "abolished through their solution." That is, what appear as solutions are not really solutions at all, and the questions become reformulated or perhaps discarded as uninteresting, never solved with the gathering of data as in science. This is why "their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting." The rhythm is not question -> data/proof -> solution. — Jamal

I completely agree to this point. I find there is a lot of truth to that perspective, that in philosophy the question is usually more important than the answer. But for me, the reason for this is that the questions asked are ones that never get completely answered. So we have from the time of ancient Greece, and probably even before that, (but we can't properly interpret what was asked before that) the very same questions being ask even up to today. These are questions about divinity, good, time, space, infinity. These questions get answered over and over again by every philosopher who approaches ontology, but the answers never satisfy us, so the questions persist, to be addressed over and over again, maintaining importance, while the proposed solutions are discarded.

Now, the way that a good philosophical question "almost always includes in a certain manner its answer" is that a good philosophical question already shows us what we are looking for; it tells us the kind of answer that will satisfy us—but unlike science this is not external. The question embodies a particular experience, one rooted historically and socially. So the answer is not external to the question, as it is with empirical data in science, but immanent to the genesis of the question. This is the meaning of "It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it." — Jamal

I do see that he is proposing some form of empiricist perspective, philosophy "must model its question on that which it has experienced". But that premise does not produce the conclusion which he draws, "the authentic question almost always includes in a certain manner its answer". If it is true, as a fact, that we question our experience, this does not produce the conclusion that the answer to those questions is necessarily within that experience.

In fact, this attitude which Adorno seems to be proposing at this point, may be a big part of the reason why these questions never get answered. We look toward experience to answer the questions we have about experience, but this will never produce a solution because the reason why experience induces these questions is that these questions are the products of deficiencies of experience, where experience fails us in providing an explanation. This is what Plato indicates when he says that the senses deceive us, and we must use the power of the intellect to overrule the influence of the senses.

So to answer these questions which experience throws at us, due to its deficiencies, we turn to speculation. But speculation doesn't seem to provide the ultimate answers and the same questions, derived from the deficiencies of experience, remain through much speculations.

None of this is meant to imply that we can immediately read off the answer straight from the question. Nor does it mean that the answer can be deduced in the manner of mathematics or formal logic, as if all philosophical questions implied the whole philosophical system of the world in microcosmic tautology. — Jamal

I understand this, and that is why he says the question includes the answer "in a certain manner". This might be applicable to questions of empirical sciences, where there is a eureka moment of discovery. The question is formulated with precision such that it indicates exactly what the answer must be. But questions of ontology are vague and not like this. That is why the same question may have a multitude of different answers, each answer claiming to be the correct answer. The ontological questions really have nothing to indicate the criteria which the answer must fulfil.

This is significant, and it points to the incorrectness of what Wittgenstein says about the regions where words fail us, that we must be silent. In reality, philosophical questions must direct us into these areas which we have no words for, thus providing the initiative for the evolution of language and knowledge toward understanding. But this implies that the certitude of the question is its uncertainty. The only think the question takes for granted, as certain, is uncertainty. In other words, the question is simply an attempt to point at the uncertainty, as that which appears impossible to know, and asks how can we devise a way to know it. But the uncertainty inheres within the very question because even the direction which the question must point is uncertain. Therefore the question cannot even provide an indication as to what the answer will be.

But as a philosophical question—which we now see that it is—it expresses the conditions of its genesis, defining a horizon of meaning. It presupposes that there are two distinct things and that they are problematically related. This expresses a worldview which is already part of the kind of answer that might satisfy the question. The answer would be the answer it was owing to its dualism, and this was in the question already. — Jamal

I don't see this. The question presupposes dualism, because that is how the problem presents itself to us in experience, as the appearance of dualism, and dualism creates the problem of interaction. But the question might be resolved either by a dualist proposal, or a monist proposal. So the dualist presupposition is simply the empirical presentation of the problem. That presupposition ought not, and actually does not, impose any dualist conditions on the answer. The answer to the problem might be that the empirical presentation itself (the dualist representation), is itself incorrect (the senses deceive us), and the solution is monist.

I believe, that in the case of ontological questions, to think that the formulation of the question imposes such restrictions on the potential answer, is a mistaken idea. Ontological questions deal with the content itself, and the formulation of the question ought not distract us from that. This is why we can understand that the very same ontological questions pervade all cultures and languages, so long as we do not focus too closely on the formulation of the questions.

So Adorno isn't saying that asking a question magically gives you the answer, rather that in philosophy, the way a question is framed already expresses an insight into what it seeks. The question is not a neutral, disinterested request for information but the expression of an experience. Thinking it through, not importing information, is what brings answers to light. — Jamal

This is where I would disagree with Adorno then. I believe that to make this conclusion, Adorno is placing the ontological question into the same category as a question of empirical science, though he notes a difference between the two. "The way a question is framed", refers to an empirical description of the problem. If we say that the framing of the question places necessary restrictions on the possible answer, then we exclude the possibility that "the way a question is framed" is the problem (mistake) itself. Like the dualism example, the question may contain mistaken assumptions.

And I believe that in a world of changing knowledge, evolving cultures and languages, reframing of the question is very often the best approach in ontology. For example, Aristotle took the ancient question "why is there something rather than nothing", and showed how the question is much better posed as "why is there what there is rather than something else".

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. I seem to have developed a slight disagreement with Adorno at this level, but perhaps it will prove to be insignificant. My perspective is that the reason why the question is more important than the answer, is due to the need to determine the appropriate question. To be consistent with Adorno, maybe that's the answer which inheres within the question, that the question itself is wrong.

When you judge, you raise the right answer above the others. — frank

It's what you think is the right answer, but it still might not be the right answer.

When you ask a question, potential answers begin to take shape, and their shapes are coming from the nature of your question. — frank

This makes no sense to me. Answers do not take shape just from asking the question. Besides, "potential answers" does not imply that the answer is in the question. Multiple choice gives you choices, but it does not give "the answer".

Generally, the person asking has no idea of the answer or else they would not be asking. And, the person hearing the question must understand the words, then potential answers might take shape, but the answer must be sought through a process. It is not provided by the question.

Adorno talks about Heidegger's system of regions, as subject areas, and how the will attempts to grasp the whole without those self-imposed boundaries. This would form another philosophy of the absolute.

The categorical construct, exempt from any
sort of critique, as the scaffolding of existing relationships, is confirmed
as absolute, and the unreflective immediacy of the method lends itself
to every sort of caprice.

I love the next line, probably the only short sentence in the chapter. Though I can't say I totally understand it:

The critique of criticism becomes pre-critical.

Then the idealistic philosophy turned against academia. However, this "audacity" "knows enough to cover itself by general accord and through the most powerful educational institutions." The result, is the opposite to the beginning, a rebound into abstraction.

The problematic is the need itself, i.e. the need for ontology. In the German tradition the question is more important than the answer, and Adorno seems to qualify this by saying the following:

Rather in philosophy the authentic question almost always includes in a certain
manner its answer.

This is where I start to lose track of his train of thought. I don't understand how the question contains the answer, or if this is just metaphorical. He explains briefly by saying that the question is modeled by experience, but I cannot say that I understand what he is getting at.

Then it only gets worse for me when he starts to talk about judgement. I'm not sure if the two paragraphs on judgement express what he believes, or if it is meant as a criticism of idealism, but the described relationship between understanding and judgement doesn't make sense to me.

Only what is true, can truly be understood philosophically. The
fulfilling completion of the judgement in which understanding occurs
is as one with the decision over true and false. Whoever does not
participate in the judging of the stringency of a theorem or its absence
does not understand it. It has its own meaning-content, which is to be
understood, in the claim of such stringency.

There appears to be no place here for misunderstanding. I believe that a judgement constitutes a sort of (subjective) understanding, but a further, third party judgement would be required to determine whether that 'understanding' is not in fact a misunderstanding. But then that third party judgement itself would need to be judged in the same way, because it might also be misunderstanding. So we never get the pure (absolute) relationship between judgement and understanding which Adorno refers to.

So the following gets even worse, appearing to be illogical to me.

Therein the relationship of understanding and judgement
distinguishes itself from the usual temporal order. There can be no
judging without the understanding any more than understanding
without the judgement. This invalidates the schema, that the solution
would be the judgement, the problem the mere question, based on
understanding. The fiber of the so-called philosophical proof is itself
mediated, in contrast to the mathematical model, but without this
simply disappearing.

Without establishing a relationship between understanding and misunderstanding, "understanding" becomes meaningless, and it is used in a whimsical way here. He wants to say that understanding is dependent on judgement, and judgement is dependent on understanding, so that neither is prior to the other temporally. But in reality, judgement could be based in misunderstanding, and any supposed understanding which follows from this judgement is not truly understanding. Therefore we cannot say "There can be no judging without the understanding", because this judging could be based in a failed understanding (misunderstanding).

Anyway, if anyone sees through this better than I do, I'd appreciate an explanation of how to make sense of it.

And as we get used to putting that private thought into words, even the private can be made public. We can talk about our ideas, our plans, our memories, our impressions, our feelings. A language is created and the loop is closed between the public and private. We grow up in a community where we are learning how to both share and hide our “interior reality”. — apokrisis

The difficulty, is that the urge to to share, and the urge to hide the interior reality, are contrary. The reality of the private inner, in its separation from the public, in the manifestation of distinct beings, has fostered a strong instinct of competition. So the tendency of the private, to separate itself from the public, and act in a contrary way, of lying and deceiving for example, is well supported by this strong instinct.

Allowing for the reality of this instinct in its strength, the truth of selfishness, we might ask what produces the inclination to cooperate publicly. Notice I place the private as prior to the public, because that's where knowledge resides, within the individual, and the use of knowledge in the selfish way, I believe is primary. So the fact that cooperating in a communal effort is actually better than keeping everything private, is something which had to be learned, as the basis for morality.

The LLM replicates the one aspect, cooperating in the communal effort, but it does not penetrate to the deeper aspect which is that instinct of competition, and the way that this instinct affects language use in general.

It is well-noted the examples of objective good, but what about objective bad? This is the issue. Remember that Plato scolded us for not admitting that there are bad pleasures too. :razz: — javi2541997

I think you need to take what Plato said in context. He says that those who claim pleasure is good, in the most general sense, would have to admit that some pleasures are bad. We have made a qualification, so this no longer applies.

Since Plato argued that pleasure is unrelated to pain and this determined the "good", what do "pleasure" and "pain" mean? — javi2541997

Let me clarify what I believe that Plato did. He did not argue that pleasure is unrelated to pain, some pleasures very much seem to be related to pains. But I think he demonstrated that since pleasures come in different types, if there is a type which is not related to pain, that type could be related to good. What I believe he explicitly argued was that as long as we understand pleasure as the opposite of pain, then it is impossible that pleasure can be equated with good.

As to what "pleasure" and "pain" mean, we'd have to look somewhere else. I suppose the common tendency at Plato's time, was to oppose the two in meaning. That allows us to avoid the effort required to define them. We understand pleasure as the opposite of pain, and pain as the opposite of pleasure.

Do you think that their understanding of these concepts depends on each of us because it is a purely subjective experience? What I may consider as "painful", you could feel otherwise, and vice versa. So, when I read that paragraph by Plato, I thought in the first place that pleasure, good and pain are "universals" and they do not have objective existence. They are dependent upon how we experience them. But is there the possibility that pain and pleasure exist in an objective perspective? — javi2541997

I see all three, pleasure, pain, and good, as subjective at this point. Pleasure and pain are definitely subjective because when I feel pleasure or pain you do not necessarily feel what I feel. There may be a type of pleasure though, which when a person feels it, it is subjective, felt only by that person, but it is good for everyone. Then that good could be objective. This, I believe is the pleasure we get from being morally good. Like the pleasure from being a philanthropist for example, the specific pleasure is felt only by that person, and is subjective, but the good is related to all.

The problem is, beyond the design of the llm "machinery" itself, they don't really know how it works either. — hypericin

Due to the nature of trade secrets, and the matter of keeping them secret, I'd say that's probably a pretense.

Then as for introspection, why would an animal need it. But as for socially organised humans, eventually the advantage of imposing a self-policing rational style of thought - a habit of action-justifying narration - on the animal brain will prove its worth. — apokrisis

I agree, I think that's where the need for introspection arises from.

But this doesn't give insight into what underlying method it actually uses to reason. — hypericin

You'd have to talk to the software developers to learn that. But right now I would expect that there is a lot of trade secrets which would not be readily revealed.

And as hypericin notes, even we humans rather scramble to backfill our thought processes in this way.

So what is going on in humans is that we are not naturally "chain of thought" thinkers either. But we do now live in a modern world that demands we provide an account of our thoughts and actions in this rationally structured form. We must be able to narrate our "inner workings" in the same way that we got taught to do maths as kids and always provide our "workings out" alongside the correct answer to get full marks. — apokrisis

This is a very good point. In many, probably most of our actions, we really do not know why we do what we do. If asked, afterwards, why did you do that, we can always make up a reason in retrospect. The common example is when we are criticized, and rationalize our actions. The need to explain ourselves, why we did such and such, is a product of the social environment, the capacity to communicate, and responsibility.

As a general principle, actions which are carried out for the purpose of long term goals are ones which we normally do know why we did them. This is because the long term goal persists in the mind, and the actions must be decided on, as conducive to that goal. But much mundane activity is not related to long term goals, especial common chatter, small talk, and whatever activity goes along with it. And in this case, we really do not know why we do what we do. Sometimes it's simply the power of suggestion.

We as individuals do not generally create social norms, we learn their rules and reproduce them, much as LLMs do. If there is creativity here, it is in the rare individual who is able to willfully move norms in a direction. But norms also shift in a more evolutionary way, without intentionality. — hypericin

I beg to differ. We, as individuals, do create social norms, through collaboration and communion. And, this evolutionary shifting is not without intentionality, as it involves the intentions of every person involved.

Unless you can represent individuals working together, each with one's own intentions, as the fundamental force which is responsible for the creation of, and evolutionary shifting of social norms, you do not have an accurate representation.

Again, I would say that creativity is 95% imitation. We don't create art de novo, we learn genre rules and produce works adhering to them, perhaps even deviating a bit. Of course genre still affords a large scope for creativity. But, I'm not sure how you could argue that what LLMs produce is somehow uncreative, it also learns genre and produces works accordingly. — hypericin

I agree with this to a very limited extent. This would be to say that there is varying degrees of creativity within artwork. So I would not agree that creativity is 95% imitation, but I would agree that much art is 95% imitation, and 5% creativity. Then we do not conflate creativity with imitation. A person does not have to go to school and learn rules, to be an artist. The most creative artists do not, they make up their own rules. The problem with this approach is that being creative in no way guarantees success. But if one is successful, then that person becomes the one who is imitated, and others attempt to determine the private principles (rules) which that creative person was following.

So the only reason that you cannot see how one could argue that LLMs are uncreative, is that you are not distinguishing a difference between creativity and imitation.

On the side of ethical thinking, this also is reflected in the mutual interdependence that Aristotle clearly articulated between phronesis (the capacity to know what it is that one should do) and virtue, or excellence of character (the capacity to be motivated to do it). — Pierre-Normand

This was a significant issue for Plato, and it represents the thrust of his attacks against the sophists who claimed to be teaching virtue. They insisted that virtue is a type of knowledge. But Plato showed the reality of knowing the right thing to do, yet not doing it. Often a person knows that what they are doing is wrong, yet they do it anyway. This demonstrates that virtue is not knowledge refuting the sophist's claim to be teaching virtue. That drives a wedge between virtue and knowledge and produces Aristotle's view that virtue is more like a character, or a attitude, rather than a type of knowledge.

Augustine was very perplexed by this issue, and examined it thoroughly. His solution was to posit a source of action, called the will, which is free not only from material causation, but also ultimately free from being caused by knowledge in the decisions and actions it produces. Plato had separated the body from the intellect, and posited spirit, or passion as the medium between the two, to account for the interaction problem. For Plato, the spirit could ally itself with the body and therefore be caused to move by the body, or it could ally itself with the intellect and be caused to move according to knowledge. Now Augustine, seeing that the spirit could be moved in either of these two, often contrary ways, concluded that the will must ultimately be free.

Since dualism is currently out of fashion, the tendency is to class intelligible causes and material causes together as all the same type. Then, the need for the free will is negated, because it is impossible that bodily causes could be truly contrary to intelligible cause, they are just a different appearance of the same form of causes, and in every decision something is caused to happen, which is never a contradictory thing.

So AI, being purely an intelligence doesn't capture the true human motivation of decision making because it only has the one side, the intelligible side. It has no bodily form of causation which works against the intellect, inclining the person to act in a way which is contrary to what the person knows is right. So it doesn't capture the true decision making apparatus of the human being, only working with the intelligible side, and not accounting for all those irrational forces which incline us to do what we know is wrong.

There are no other endogenous or autonomous source of motivations for LLMs, though there also is a form or rational downward-causation at play in the process of them structuring their responses that goes beyond the mere reinforced tendency to strive for coherence. This last factor accounts in part for the ampliative nature of their responses, which confers them some degree of rational autonomy: the ability to come up with new rationally defensible ideas. It also accounts for their emergent ability (often repressed) to push back against, and straighten up, their users' muddled or erroneous conceptions, even in cases where those muddles are prevalent in the training data. They are not belief averagers. I've begun reporting on this, and why I think it works, here. — Pierre-Normand

Have you ever asked an LLM how it 'senses' the material existence of the words which it reads?

Interesting. What do you think, MU? Is pleasure related to ethics or aesthetics? — javi2541997

Pleasure is definitely related to aesthetics. The question is how these two are related to ethics. The two extremes would be, one, that they are completely separate and unrelated, and the other that ethics is completely determined by pleasure and aesthetics. I would think that reality is somewhere in between.

Yes, exactly. I get this from Plato. But I think it is a bit subjective when he debates about good, bad, pain and pleasure. It seems that pleasure and pain need to be experienced by the subject, and then they conclude if something is bad or good. For example, smoking. In my humble opinion, I think smoking is a bad pleasure (following Plato's points) but completely objective because it is scientifically demonstrated that smoking kills and causes cancer. Therefore, smoking is a bad objective pleasure that does not depend on subjectiveness. — javi2541997

I think you need to consider that goods, as that which is desired, need to weighted and prioritized relative to each other. This is because they often conflict, so we commonly need to exclude one for the pursuit of another. This is why Plato compared an immediate pleasure to a distant one.

Sometimes we need to resist an immediate pleasure for a distant one if the distant one is more highly prized and the immediate one conflicts. This is difficult, because being immediate it appears bigger and better than it truly is. But we need to understand that the distant one is actually better, so we need to resist the immediate one which conflicts.

I think that this might be the case in your example of smoking. Smoking is an immediate pleasure, but reason informs us that it conflicts with the long term, less immediate desires. Since the long term is more highly prioritized, we need to resist from smoking for the sake of the other. Then smoking is a "bad pleasure" because it conflicts with the other which is more highly sought after.

I can't disagree with this, but I consider it a bit ambiguous. What are the boundaries of pain and good? There are people who enjoy sadomasochism. Is this sexual practice objectively good or bad even though it clearly implies pain? — javi2541997

I don't quite understand what you are asking here. Plato was looking for a type of pleasure which was unrelated to pain, which would be determined as "good". Incorporating pain and pleasure together within the same activity, as is the case in sadomasochism is a move in the opposite direction. We're supposed to be looking for a pleasure which is unrelated to pain, not one which is more closely related to pain.

Consider the common question, "what are you thinking?". Or worse (for me), "What are you feeling"? — hypericin

This is a good example. If you ask a highly trained AI what it is thinking, it may provide you with an answer because it is trained to consider what it does as "thinking", and can review this. However, if you ask it what it is feeling it will probably explain to you, that as an AI it does not "feel", and therefore has no feelings.

So the AI learns to respect a significant and meaningful, categorical difference between thinking and feeling. However, human beings do not respect that difference in the same way, because we know that what we are feeling and what we are thinking are so thoroughly intertwined, that such a difference cannot be maintained. When I think about what I am feeling, then what I am feeling and what I am thinking are unified into one and the same thing.

This indicates that the AI actually observes a difference in the meaning of "thinking" which is assigned to the AI, and the meaning of "thinking" which is assigned to the human being. The human type of "thinking" is unified with feeling, while the AI type of "thinking" is not.

There is a metaphysical distinction, sometimes made, between aesthetics and ethics. The principal difference is that "the good" of ethics is always sought for the sake of a higher end, a further good. Therefore there is always a reason why it is deemed as good. "It is good because...". On the other hand, the pleasure of aesthetics is sought for the sake of itself, there is no further end. This is known as "beauty", and there is no rational answer as to why it is good or pleasant.

Aristotle insisted that we must put an end to the good of ethics, or else we'd have an infinite regress. A is good for the sake of B, which is needed to bring about C, which is required for D, and onward ad infinitum. Without the end, there would be no grounding for "good" in general. The theological position inserts "God" as the ultimate end, as a sort of grounding. Aristotle proposed "happiness" as the ultimate end, that which is sought for the sake of itself.

But happiness may easily be conflated with pleasure and beauty, and this results in a unification of ethics and aesthetics. Then "the good" of ethics is supported by the pleasure of aesthetics, and everything which is deemed "good" is done so because it supports that further end, pleasure, which is desired for the sake of itself.

What are the bad pleasures according to Plato? — javi2541997

Plato demonstrated that pleasure is not properly opposed to pain. If these two are opposed, then the desire for pleasure, which is a lack of pleasure in one's present condition, would necessarily be an existence of pain. This implies that pain is a requirement for pleasure, as necessarily prior to it. So he had some argumentative tricks (which I can't recall off hand), to show that there must be a type of pleasure which is independent from, therefore not properly opposed to pain. He assigned the highest good to this type of pleasure, because it does not require pain for its attainment.

If we take this as our guide, the highest good is that pleasure which is not at all opposed to pain, then the lowest good (most bad) would be the type of pleasure which is most readily opposed to pain.

Don't be concerned about going off topic here — Banno

:party:

Woohoo!
Let's go wild and lay ruin to this thread!
That's what I call "doing philosophy".

So he concedes that his own "negative" dialectics is very similar to Hegel's dialectics, owing to the presence of contradiction, to the point that it might be indistinguishable by some. His whole project, one can say, is to show how it differs, not ignoring the similarities. — Pussycat

I don't think so. At the end of the quoted passage he is dismissing claims that Hegel's dialectics can properly be called "negative". And, at the beginning, he distinguishes a "succinct" sense from a "general" sense. I believe that Adorno is moving toward the general sense. Look at this quote from "Rhetoric":

Dialectics, according to its literal meaning language as the organ
of thought, would be the attempt to critically rescue the rhetorical
moment: to have the thing and the expression approach one another
almost to the point of non-differentiability.

It's not like that negative dialectics comes to the rescue of our precious polyvalence of experience, which was erroneously sacricifed by bad and faulty hegelian dialectics. There is nothing to restore about it, negative dialectics continues in the same path, even more so. — Pussycat

This is clearly not the case. Read "Rhetoric" thoroughly. This is the final paragraph.

Dialectics seeks to master the dilemma between the popular
opinion and that which is non-essentializingly [wesenslos] correct,
mediating this with the formal, logical one. It tends however towards
content as that which is open, not already decided in advance by the
scaffolding: as protest against mythos. That which is monotonous is
mythic, ultimately diluted into the formal juridicality of thinking
[Denkgesetzlichkeit]. The cognition which wishes for content, wishes
for utopia. This, the consciousness of the possibility, clings to the
concrete as what is undistorted. It is what is possible, never the
immediately realized, which obstructs utopia; that is why in the middle
of the existent it appears abstract. The inextinguishable color comes
from the not-existent. Thinking serves it as a piece of existence, as that
which, as always negatively, reaches out to the not-existent. Solely the
most extreme distance would be the nearness; philosophy is the prism,
in which its colors are caught.

But this is what one would expect, since negative dialectics is the opposite of hegelian dialectics, right? — Pussycat

No. The paragraph you provided explains why this is not the case.