Yeah well Posty McPostface that's the problem with framing these problems as logical problems in a vacuum. We start with a method allready build-in, our biology, and are taught language that has allready been develloped over the ages. We never start from a situation like proposed in the problem of the Criterion, it's an imaginairy problem.

The method of F-ing about is how it actually works.

They are based on both. We can't really negate facts in the face of hard evidence (althought some do), but in the end we know to little facts to base an entire worldview on. The blanks often get filled in so that it fits coherently with rest of our beliefs, which are coloured by our core values (which are based on emotions ultimately).

Here's an example, a succesfull entrepreneur will maybe say something like, "succes in life depends on your character, persistence, work-ethics,..." This may well correspond to some of the facts he encountered in life, but in the end philosophically he's not really justified to make such sweeping claims based on the facts alone, because the whole truth will invariably be more nuanced and depending on circumstances. The real reason for this kind of claim is his motivations. He needs that kind of belief to keep going.

Metaphysics is the extreme example of that same proces. That is, by definition, not based on facts, and so entirely based on our motivations.

I just don't agree that "perceptions'' from feelings is of the same type as perceptions from the senses. There's no organ for feelings (like eyes or ears) that recieves information from the world outside of us.

I just write for myself Vraj, i find that it helps me clarifying my thoughts.

Hi Vraj

Yes, Nietzsche spoiled my taste. His writing style is great, and despite his reputation, he is also one of the best philosophers, technically.

What did i do? I stopped reading for a while... and started writing more myself. But maybe i'll give Krishnamurti a try.

You are really stretching the meaning of words there Samuel. We don't really 'percieve' something through feelings. And feelings are never that precise that a fully formed moral rule comes out of it. And even if I would grant you all of this, in what way would a feeling, even if many people have it, lead you to conclude that the golden rule exists objectively. Isn't a feeling a prime example of the subjective, or what else does the term mean?

Either way, i would not agree that all people agree (have the same feeling) on what is just or unjust, which is why we have that group proces I described earlier, to determine morality.

As a side note, i think subjective vs objective is a flawed and confusing distinction philosophically. I think it's more helpfull to speak of individual vs collective.

Progress on individual moral issues means just that, to me that doesn't entail a specific endpoint, like an ideal morality. Since circumstances change, I would hope it will be an ongoing discussion until the end of times.

Metaphysician Undercover,

No i don't agree that concepts or abstractions are metaphysical, if we only use them because they have utility, and don't believe they literally exist. And I think that platonic realism is a prime example of metaphysics because there the concept are seen as real.

And i don't think that concepts in physics are metaphysical for the same reason, because they don't pretend to make claims about what is real. They only really care, or are supposed to anyway, about models having predictive value. The models are just equations, and like a map, they are not the world itself.

Metaphysician Undercover,

Physical time is the concept time used in physics. Physics as an empirical science doesn't make metaphysical claims, but only makes models that have predictive value. The predictions pertain to the empircal world, but models themselves do not necessarily.

How we use clocks and agree upon time, also don't necessarily make metaphysical claims about time. It's just a convention that has pragmatic value if you will. Let's call that conventional time.

We do not experience time as such, we experience change or motion. Anything that makes definate claims about time goes beyond that and is metaphysics, because it cannot be veryfied or falsified by physical phenonoma. That is metaphysical time.

Sapienta,

He was a virtue ethicist, yes, but that is a broad concept and there are many brands of virtue ethics... He was really only thinking of 'moraline-free virtue', or something like the virtù Machiavelli theorised about. That is, manly virtue (from the latin root 'vir', or man) rather than christian or moral virtue.

Cultivation of desire and instinct is meant as in cultivation of or tending to a garden. You work with the material you have, trimming and cutting left and right, on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure it was along these line he saw it, "become who you are", "amor fati" et al... He didn't believe in force changing people to conform to some abstract otherwoldly (moral) standard, he thought it had serious adverse psychological effects in the long run.

As for Heraclitus, yes, Nietzsche liked him because unlike most other philosopher, like Socrates and Plato, he wasn't trying to falsify the world by reducing it to fixed essences. He believed the nature of the world was in the first place change, flow... like Nietzsche.

As i said i think it's important to understand the psycholigical insights he based a lot of his views on. He read a lot between the lines, and if you don't agree with his psychological analysis.... you probably don't follow the rest.

Both are not examples of perceptions, you are using 'percieve' in the case of the golden rule metaphorically, it has nothing to do with the senses.

And the word progress doesn't have to imply any specific goal, it can be the advancement towards any goal... for instance, i don't think we are making a lot of progress towards resolving our disagreement in this thread.

Progress on individual moral issues maybe, as we do get better at arguments yes. But it's not some kind of liniair progression across the board. Also circumstances do change which have an impact on morality. Protection of the enviroment for example used to be a non-issue, in the future i'd guess it will be the most important moral issue.

What morality Heiko? There are many moralities.

And 'equally far developed' implies that there is progression on some kind of ahistorical scale, the question doesn't make sense absent an ultimate standard.

What about slavery then, Samuel, the moral rule 'slavery is wrong' didn't exist objectively 2000 years ago, but it does now?

You shifted your argument in the last sentence from what we see, to what we use. I don't think it's reasonable to infer something exist objectively because we use it.

Heiko, I don't see how you got to that interpretation from what i've said in this thread.

I said that morality is a group thing (social contract theory), no whatever one person deems right. He may try to convince the group to change their minds, with good arguments, rethoric, force or whatever... but there is no ultimate standard, unless you believe in God.

Sapienta,

Nietzsche would disagree. He didn't view austerity, search for wisdom at the cost of all else (his family, his life as a part of society,... ), the application of reason to everything, etc as all that commendable. And he based that on a couple of psychological insights that you may or may not accept.

In short, and probably butchered to some extend, what he valued the most was health and love for life... affirmation of life. That entails, in his view, the cultivation of human desires and instinct, and not the eradication of them. Asceticism, Christianity, excessive use of reason, and giving up on worldly interests in favour of the search for wisdom, he all saw as crude atempts to do away with desires and instincts... with disastrous results.

Heiko, what i meant, and what i think i said, is that there is no one criterium... but many, and it depends on the situation what argument will be a good one. This just to say that it is not that easy to give a definate answer in the abstract.

That doesn't mean that one is as good as the other though. For instance if you make an argument pointing to the implications of a moral rule, and you happen to be factually wrong about these implications, then that would be a bad argument.

noAxioms, thank you very much, that was exactly the kind of info i was looking for. It helped me a lot to clarify my position on this. Not a lot of people in more 'popular' media keep the science (only predictive value) and possible metaphysical implications seperate...

TheMadFool, i don't disagree with that. It's the timing (before actions) and frequency (all actions) that was in question.

Samuel, there no one criteria for what would be a good argument, it's contextual. You could point to evidence of implications of a certain rule, or weigh them against different values and make a case arround that...

I don't see how i should necessarily prove my position because almost every religious tradition had an iteration of something like the golden rule. But anyway, my meta-ethical position is basicly that the legitimacy for morals in a given community comes from a social contract. Because we all have the same human genetic make-up, it shouldn't be all that surprising that some of the morals will end up being similar accross the board. That doesn't imply that morality is unchanging though.

noAxioms, I'm not an idealist, maybe i shouldn't have formulated it like that (eg what exist is what can be percieved). I do assume that there exist something out there regardless of me percieving it. It's just that the only access we have to that outside world is via the senses. If i'd have to put a label on my views, it would be materialism (what exists is the physical). I do try to refrain from metaphysics as much as possible. My goal in this thread was figuring out what kind of view of time physicist are assuming in special relativity, and if the theory is compatible with a non-metaphysical view on time. And additionally, figure out if we still need a notion like spacetime then... That's why i named the thread "SpaceTime?" (questionmark).

noAxioms, there's a lot to consider in your posts, so let's start at the beginning.

What is real to me is what can be percieved. I can see 'space', or rather i can see distances and objects in three dimensions. I suppose space is real in that sense. The units we use to measure that, or x,y,z axis in geometry are abractions, these are not real. We invented those.

So then why is time real? I have never seen time.

Also is defining the measurement of time as the measurement of temporal separation not merely a tautaulogy? I don't get it.

Reason is good. It is the necessary pause before all thoughts and actions. Without it we would be jumping to conclusions and that, despite the healthy connotation of bodily exercise, is bad. — TheMadFool

We do and can not pause and reason before all thoughts and action. This is just not the case. There's so much actions and thoughts that happen habitually and instinctually, like for instance setting one foot before the other. We would simply not be able to function if we were to reason about every single thing we do.

To be clear, I have no problem with abstractions or relations etc... they are usefull to be sure, as long as we don't forget they are abstractions. — ChatteringMonkey
Well, anything we contemplate becomes an abstraction in our mind. This goes for "things" as well as not-"things". — SophistiCat

Yeah, but things refer to something that exists (that we can percieve), and not-'things' do not. If you don't make a difference between the two, you are probably lost for this world.

What is the difference you ask? The idea of timetravel for instance is nonsensical if time is not real. — ChatteringMonkey
Why not? We travel forward in time, obviously, and that makes perfect sense. We also can orient and move in space in any directions, and space is just as "abstract" as time, isn't it? The question of why we cannot (easily) travel backwards in time both makes sense to ask and not trivial to answer. — SophistiCat

We do not travel forward in time, in the sense that is meant in timetravel, that is to some arbitrary point in the future.

We see distances in three dimensions, but we do not see time, we see change. It's not just as "abstract".

If we stick to what we see, and see time (an hour, a second,...) only as a measurement of change, travelling through time doesn't make a whole lot of sense because for travelling backwards in time that would entail that the whole universe changing back to some previous state. Travelling forward in time maybe would be somewhat easier to phantom, in that we could theoretical propel a human being to the speed of light or throw him into a black whole, and he would stop changing while the rest keeps changing at the same rate. But that's not really 'timetravel', but rather something like cryogenic sleep.

Nice find, i knew there had to be one!

We probably agree to a large extend. He was indeed criticising the idea of pure reason in the first place. I do think he was also devaluating reason a bit in general (not denigrating per se) in that he had less confidence in its abilities then philosophers before him.

As for Socrates, yes, it's hard to say for sure how he meant it because we only know him through Plato. I'm not sure it matters all that much, because it's the platonic interpretation that had the most influence historically. Nietzsche was mainly concerned with the influence of that idea.

[off to reproducing the works of Shakespeare now]

Samuel, yes morality is the social norms of a certain time and a certain community, full stop. You can disagree, and argue with the norms of the times, and try to change them with good arguments (or force), as has been done countless of times in history, but there is no ahistorical unchanging morality to measure them to. That's just a rethorical device.

To be clear, I have no problem with abstractions or relations etc... they are usefull to be sure, as long as we don't forget they are abstractions.

What is the difference you ask? The idea of timetravel for instance is nonsensical if time is not real. We maybe don't believe it can be done practically, but we sure theorise about the possibility... Or the block-universe is another one, i just don't see how you get to the belief that all 'points in time' exist simultanuously without a notion of time as something real.

Anyway, i'm not a physicist, and it may very well be that i'm mistaken about how they view time, in fact I think it's very unlikely that I somehow have a better idea than all these smart people, that's why i'm asking.

Hi Preston, Thank you for your response.

I want to figure out if the hypothesis that time is just the measurement of change is compatible with current science, and special relativity in particular.

What i mean with 'time is just the measurement of change', is that time does not literally exist. We do not see time, we see things changing, and at some point invented units to keep track of that change for our convenience. Just like we invented units (or a standard) for measuring distances. A mile for instance also doesn't literally exists, it's an abstraction, or a convention if you will, that allowed us to keep track of distances and communicate them better.

Time (a second, an hour, a day etc...) is the standard. It's not that time 'the units' (in this hypothesis) itself changes really, it's that the normally fixed intervals of jumping particles change under different circumstances (high speed and mass). We measure change by fixed (or so we thought) change essentially.

But that's not really a practical problem (it is for satellites apparantly), because we do not normally live in these circumstances. So i'm not looking for a more stable standard. I also don't think there would be one if einstein was right. I'm looking to do away with what might be a mistaken metaphysical notion of time, as a thing... and am wondering if that notion isn't the cause of some of the weird implication drawn from the theories of physics. Like Spacetime, and the block universe etc...

Samuel,

Argument by definition or tradition is not a viable argument in my book.

There is no such thing as an unchanging morality divorced from societal context. That is precisely the mistake Nietzsche saw Socrates, Plato and other philosophers make. We are beings of flesh and blood, with interests and desires, and live our lives in a societal context. Trying to forget about all of that when we start philosophising seems like a bad idea.

Heiko,

I think you basicly have the right idea. To be a bit more precise, in his view decadence is 'anarchy in the instincts' or 'drives not ordered properly'. When that is the case one loses confidence in himself, and begins to doubt... and turns to reason as a tyrant to subdue that anarchy. He saw Socrates as the prime example of that.

Heiko,

Nietzsche was after 'pure reason', abstracted from societal context and human biology, an idea that started with Socrates and Plato, and propagated with Christianity and by philosophers all the way up to Kant.

Hello Samuel,

I'd say where reason is applicable is precisely the question. I don't think it's that selfevident that reason is all that usefull for determining morality. It has a role to play, but not necesarily in the way Socrates wanted to use it. The way i see it is that a morality of a given society is something that devellops over generations involving many people, trail and error... and an ongoing discussion which does involve reason, but that's only a part of it.

It easy to question the norms of the day like Socrates did, because no one person really knows anymore how it all came to be. It's a bit like an economy in that way, and emergent property.

And, as for your last comment, reasoning about using reason to determine morality, is not the same as using reason to determine morality. There's no contradiction there. Also it's not per se reason in general that Nietzsche was after, it's the way it had been used in philosophy thus far.

There are also balls in tennis: .... i'm sure there is a great comeback arround the word balls, but i haven't found it yet

Point is that reason has it limits. Nietzsche was reevaluating the value philosophers put in reason. It's a way out of the rabbithole Socrates created a few millenia back....

Anyway, i'm a chattering monkey, i'm not supposed to make points.