Yeah, your thesis is going to be on something more specific, but the degree would be in Applied Ethics. You didn't ask him what his thesis was on, though.

We’re feathers on the wind, — I like sushi

I think Kansas wrote a song about that.

It was never clear to me why existence is supposed to be a "problem" in the first place.

There are schools that have applied ethics degrees:

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=applied+ethics+degree

The European who cannot see colour, the male who cannot see the need for feminism, the Cis who cannot see the need for gender pronoun reform, the able who cannot see disability. — Banno

If "Europeans" aren't/weren't seeing color, then an argument that they are or were a culturally dominant group exhibiting racism wouldn't make any sense. The only way that racism from Europeans would make any sense is if they are/were seeing color and making decisions based on that.

Similar comments go for the other examples.

Descriptions of what it's like are analogies. — Janus

?

"What it's like" in this sense/context isn't supposed to refer to analogies. It's a way of saying that there's an experiential quality, or a quale, with respect to something.

Don't folks have to do English composition or rhetoric in school any longer? Do they not still teach how to write a concise paper where you state your premise at the start, and then logically structure the rest of the paper as a support for the premise? Where you also learn to revise, and where part of that is learning how to take out superfluous or irrelevant (to the premise) material?

Most stream-of-consciousness rambling isn't that entertaining to read. And most literature that reads like stream-of-consciousness rambling isn't really stream-of-consciousness rambling. It was rather carefully composed to read that way.

:up:

Don't know how we got onto Mary's Room or what point was being made with it, but like most arguments of that sort, it rests on a very stupid notion. Propositional knowledge doesn't exhaust knowledge in general, including "physical knowledge." It's not the same thing as experiential knowledge/knowledge by acquaintance or how-to knowledge. That they're not the same thing doesn't at all suggest that experiential/acquaintance knowledge or how-to knowledge are not physical.

"In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries." — StreetlightX

That's one of those extremely silly things where someone figures that everyone is going to feel, interpret, think about something in the same way. That's not actually what people are like. They don't all feel, interpret or think about anything the same way as each other.

Seen elsewhere:

If morality requires choice And empathy is involuntary, Then empathy is not a basis for morality. — madebyjimbob


My initial thought was that "Made By Jimbob" might change it to this for validity:

if morality requires choice and empathy is involuntary, then empathy alone is not a basis for morality


But, what do you folk think? — jorndoe

You wouldn't even need to change it to "empathy alone is not" or "empathy is not the sole basis."

A basis for x is never identical to x. Necessarily, something else goes into x to make it x.

People frequently misunderstand this when they're dealing with fictions and artworks in general. They get annoyed that the subsequent work departs from the basis in various ways. But they're simply misunderstanding what a basis conventionally is.

It seems to me that the "driving force" of consciousness would be mutations in earlier species that made it difficult to survive purely by unconscious/automatic reactions. The most rudimentary consciousness would appear at first as a fluke--something that is just a byproduct of particular materials, in particular structures, that undergo particular electrochemical processes, where it initially has no survival value, but it's not a significant survival detriment, either. But as mutations appear that make "automatic" survival difficult, it turned out that consciousness could help an animal survive long enough to procreate--so animals with enough conscious abilities to overcome the handicap of decreased automatic abilities are the ones that survived to procreate. That gives an opening for further mutations away from automatic survival, and it biases development of consciousness as a necessary crutch to survive non-automatically.

where everything is made up equivalently of energy or information as its fundamental substrate, — Pfhorrest

Energy or information as ontic simples seem incoherent to me.

So the first place I'd balk at this, or at least want a lot of clarification, is that it seems like it's maybe realist about capacities as abstracts. That is, so that maybe you're not just talking about capacities as a manner of speaking about other sorts of ontological facts, but where you'd say that capacities are a real thing that people somehow have, a la talking about potentials as if they're some sort of real, abstract thing.

If, however, this simply amounts to saying that people can do (and not do) different things in different contexts (you can't go on Disney's Haunted Mansion ride in the middle of the ocean, but you can if you're at Disney World; you can't swim in the middle of the Sahara desert, etc.). And that you can have done to you (and not done to you) different things in different contexts (you can be given a surprise "backstage tour" of the Haunted Mansion if you're at Disney; you can't if you're in the middle of the Sahara). And that crowds can and can't do unique crowd things in different contexts (they can riot at a concert if they're at a concert, they can't build a new Haunted Mansion in the middle of the Sahara if it's a crowd of people who are all in a coma), etc.--and it seems like maybe that's the gist of this, then that's pretty noncontroversial. Talking about it in terms of "subjectivities" is going to be misleading, though, because it's a very novel usage of that term. You'd have to explain it every time you talk about it.

in the abstract, no I have no real inclination or intuition about whether it is wrong, I can and would only face this question if it presented itself to me in the micro. — dazed

Sure, but when you think about this stuff, part of intuiting how you feel about it is doing thought experiments. That includes thinking of various personal, "micro" scenarios and trying to figure out how you'd feel about each. Are your feelings consistent? What's making the difference in each scenario? Etc.

I'm not saying that you're going to realize your dispositions about it in two minutes. You have to do "hard thinking" about it. That takes some time and some brain power.

Where does he refer to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? — petrichor

He doesn't explicitly, but it's what he's alluding to re "The self-referential incompleteness of physics."

I assure you he knows this territory. — petrichor

Right, as he should. So then why is he writing something so ignorant?

If you're saying that something else he said makes the quoted bit here not ignorant, then you can present it and I'll look at it. I'm not going to start reading everything he ever wrote in the hope of making his case for him or anyone else.

That was the number one definition of "person" in my OED, "an individual human being". That's why I chose it. For "personhood" I find "the quality or condition of being an individual person". What else did you have in mind? — Metaphysician Undercover

We're on a philosophy board, ostensibly discussing philosophy, from the perspective of that discipline. Personhood is a core concept in ontology. There's a philosophical tradition of discussing personhood under ontology, just like there are traditions of disccussing things like identity in general, time, ontic simples, etc. I directed you to the philosophical ideas if you're not familiar with this.

Seriously, it's like talking to a wall to try to interact with you.

I think this is an interesting kind of... inverse, maybe?... of my view on supernaturalism. The way I would define "natural", everything is necessarily natural, so the very concept of anything supernatural is simply incoherent. — Pfhorrest

On the one hand I agree with you, but I think that these two distinctions make sense:

(1) Natural/artificial, or natural/made by persons, which is self-explanatory

and

(2) Natural/supernatural, where "supernatural" is simply denoting unusual, perhaps very rare and difficult-to-experience phenomena that we presently have no plausible natural explanation for. So "supernatural" would be relative to common, educated (mostly scientific) epistemological beliefs, and by its nature, it would be more dubious than natural phenomena until better-confirmed.

A consciousness which is not any instance of first person experience, but some notion of a necessary type which makes our experiences possible. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah, I don't think that makes sense, either. What makes experiences possible, where we're talking about the first-person, phenomenal/subjective flow of data, is simply that it's a way that brains can work. Maybe it's a way some other things can work, too, but at the moment we don't know whether that's the case.

You don't think makes sense that we construct our own intentions? (Or are you thinking that it just doesn't make sense that we intentionally construct our own intentions?)

He asked about your familiarity with Husserl.

Yeah, it's frustrating. I can understand to some extent that people might conflate "stuff that most atheists I encounter (usually by 'debating' with them online) seem to believe" with atheism in general (even if they really shouldn't make that conflation--maybe read/look stuff up a bit more often?), but once you point out that the definition of atheism only has to do with a single issue, they should be able to get it.

That's not true — Ron Cram

Yeah, it is true. Atheism only refers to the lack of a belief in gods. You can think that evolution--or even all of science--is complete hogwash and still be just as much of an atheist.

?? I quoted the beginning of the "Ontological Proof" section, and I asked specific questions about what I quoted from Sartre in that section. I wasn't asking about what you quoted from the very beginning of the book.

What do you think? Is this argument flawed? — Matias

It strikes me as oddly ignorant from someone who would be a well-respected mathematics professor. I would expect that argument from someone trying to piece all of this stuff together on their own via participating on message boards like this and then looking up stuff on Wikipedia etc. and not really understanding it.

For one, he seems to be appealing to that ridiculous literal misunderstanding of what a "theory of everything" refers to. The desire for a "theory of everything" is primarily a desire for a single theory that reconciles general relativity and quantum theory.

And then he appeals to the ignorant metaphorical usage of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, seeing as an upshot of that that physics would be trying to, but would not be able to, make predictions about psychology and sociology.

Physics doesn't focus on intentionality in the same way that physics doesn't focus on, say, chordate evolution or biome distribution or Etruscan pottery or how to make Mexican bean salad. Those are different fields.

How does he not know this?

I'm lost. What are we defining, first off?

Well this one is starting out well.

I don't know about that. I think that Heidegger, Derrida, etc. are worse.

I also think it's because they're awful writers.

At any rate, so if we're not supposed to just not bother in too much detail with what they wrote, why are we ignoring the questions/issues I had with the part you want to discuss?

So am I supposed to not worry about what's actually written by Sartre in too much detail, or?

:lol:

what feels right for me in any given situation is ultimately linked to patterns of behaviour that arose in the context of a judaeo christrian faith. — dazed

What feels right to you would be linked to innate dispositions that you have. There are probably some aspects of Judeo-Christianity that you felt uncomfortable with. That would be because those things were contra your innate dispositions.

So if you introspect whether you feel that abortion is okay or not, don't you lean one way or the other?

So I found that section. I'm pretty much lost from the beginning:

"Being has not been given its due. We believed we had dispensed with granting transphenomenality to the being of the phenomenon because we had discovered the transphenomenality of the being of consciousness."

I have a number of problems with especially the second sentence there.

First, I had to look up again what the heck "transphenomenality" is supposed to be. According to wiktionary, at least, "transphenomenal" is defined as "of or pertaining to a process, nature, or realm which cannot be directly experienced using such human faculties as conceptualization or perception by means of the five senses"--that's clear enough to me if that's how Sartre is using the term.

But then I get stuck on the phrase "the being of the phenomenon." What is "the being of the phenomenon" saying that simply "the phenomenon" wouldn't say? Is it a way of saying "the noumenal reality 'behind' the phenomenon"? I don't know. I read "being" as referring to existence (or we could say an existent), and so when we talk about the existence of a phenomenon as such we'd be talking about ontological facts of the phenomenon as a phenomenon. So "the being of" wouldn't be adding anything. But if we're saying "the noumenal reality 'behind' the phenomenon." then the phrase "the being of the phenomenon" seems like an awkward, misleading way to write that (and hence the sorts of stylistic problems I have with most continentalism).

At any rate, so I'd need to straighten that out.

Next, "the transphenomenality of consciousness" makes no sense to me if the definition of "transphenomenal" above is what Sartre had in mind. Also "The being of consciousness" doesn't make much sense to me if the phrase "the being of" refers to "the noumenal reality 'behind'."

And finally, what would discovering the "transphenomenality of the being of consciousness" have to do with the transphenomenality of the being of the phenomenon, implicationally (so that it suggests dispensing with granting the latter) or not?

I don't recall it offhand. I'd have to look at it again to find what the "ontological proof" in the intro is supposed to be. Is it long? You could retype it here.

I haven't paid much attention to Being and Nothingness since I was in school, and that was a long time ago. I didn't care for it very much then. I'm not a big fan of most continental philosophy, especially due to the style of it (the writing style).

First, I'm just trying to figure out if you calling the whole of the book, Being and Nothingness, a "proof"?

Indeed it's the act of replacing those principles that has evaded me for some 20 years. A simple example: Abortion was clearly wrong when I was a believer because it would be termination of soul embodied human life that was sacred and in clear violation of the ten commandments.
In my current intellectual landscape, there is no clear answer but rather a set of competing arguments about what constitutes human life, when human life can justifiably be terminated, what sorts of obligations does one human owe another?
There are no clear answers in a world of indeterminacy and random chaos. And so I avoid such discussions. — dazed

If you're trying to do morality from a purely "intellectual"/"reasoned" perspective, you're doing it "wrong."

Ask yourself if abortion seems acceptable to you. Why does it or does it not seem acceptable to you? When you're intuiting whether it seems acceptable to you, there are a bunch of facts you need to consider, but the facts aren't going to tell you whether it's acceptable to you. You need to access how you feel about it to know. It's self-determination (of your morality).

I am trying to understand what motivates people to behave morally. — Seeking Wisdom

Morality is all about your personal preferences (due to dispositions, intuitions, emotional reactions, etc.) with respect to interpersonal behavior that you consider to be more significant than etiquette.

If there's some moral "theory" you subscribe to that's not of your own devising, (a) you're going to defer to it because it's the one closest to your personal preferences, and (b) you're going to interpret the theory to recommend whatever your personal preference of action would be in a particular situation.

What I consider the most common, a person is an individual human being. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's not a common definition of "personhood."

That's why I said any definition is fine, but it has to be a common definition of personhood.

As I've been trying to explain to you, beings other than persons create and do things with intent. So I find your assertions to be unacceptable. One does not have to be a person to create by design. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what common definition of personhood are you employing?

Morals, normatives, purposes, etc. arise in individual dispositions, intuitions, emotions, etc.

Those aren't actually chaotic. There are some very common dispositions, where they stem from an evolutionary basis.

The leap you need to make is from being told what to do, where you instead embrace self-determination. What feels right to you? Keeping in mind that we're talking about dispositions that involve interacting with other people, so you need to think about what feels right to you in that context of interaction.

Now you say that one is free to define "person" however one pleases — Metaphysician Undercover

No. I specifically did not say that. I said that any of the common definitions of personhood would do.