I said, "different than some conventional usages, although of course you don't have to care about that."

You said, "And I do have to care about that if I ever hope to have coherent communication with others"

The contextual implication there is that if you ever hope to have coherent communication with others, you need to be concerned with, if not use, the conventional definitions of terms.

To which I responded, "When we use highly idiosyncratic definitions we can simply define them for others."

So in other words, one can use a highly idiosyncratic definition ("highly" as in perhaps one is the only person to use the definition in question), if one simply makes the definition explicit. I was merely addressing the logical implication of "I do have to care about that if I ever hope to have coherent communication with others"

Regarding how I use subjective and objective, which isn't that unusual, I simply use them so that "subjective" refers to mental phenomena (that is, that subset of brain phenomena that is mental phenomena), and "objective" refers to everything extant that's not mental phenomena. (I've given those definitions on the board quite a few times, so apologies to folks to whom I'm repeating myself yet agin.)

I assert that this is the case, though it doesn't seem to be the case. If this is what you mean, then logic often convinces us that what seems to be the case is not actually the case. — Metaphysician Undercover

Logic convinces us that p.

Therefore, p seems to be the case, no?

"I've been convinced that this actually is the case." Well, that means that it seems to be the case to you. "I've been convinced that this actually is the case. Yet it doesn't seem to be the case to me." That would make no sense.

"Seems to be the case" is simply another way of saying, "I believe this to be the case."

What do you assert is the case, what doesn't seem to be the case? That would be a novel approach, at least.

Had I suggested that a definition might be both idiosyncratic and in the dictionary?

I assume you didn't watch the video, or you would already know the answer to this question, but I'll be more specific:
What do you believe about the universe? — Tomseltje

One thing I'd say I believe about the universe is this: it's big.

Again, if it's in the dictionary, it can't be idiosyncratic — Harry Hindu

Sure. And you're pointing that out because?

Let's just do one thing at a time and see if we can get past anything:

Here's how I interpret what you say here. Empirically, everything seems to be physical, therefore everything is physical. This is what you are stating as the premise of physicalism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Physicalists are asserting what seems to be the case in the world in their view, yes. I hope you're not thinking that's controversial. Isn't that what everyone does?

It isn't very different from some conventional usages. — Harry Hindu

The word "some" is different than the word "all."

The definition I'm using isn't different than all conventional usages. It's also different than some.

That doesn't really matter though.

And I do have to care about that if I ever hope to have coherent communication with others. — Harry Hindu

When we use highly idiosyncratic definitions we can simply define them for others.

Re this, by the way: "I was just saying something purely factual/descriptive--we're using different definitions"

That is indeed factual. We're not using the same definitions.

Wich in many cases is the equivalent answer self proclaimed atheists give when asked about their beliefs. They seem to conflate the question with another question : "do you believe the same as I believe", — Tomseltje

I can't say I've knowingly run into that, but maybe some people do that. I don't know.

The point for me was simply to understand HarryHindu's usage. But I'm also going to note my own different usage. I'd not at all push for everyone to adopt my usage. I just want to understand a different usage so that I can understand what someone is saying. I wouldn't participate on a board like this if I weren't interested in understanding different individuals' views, simply because they're those individuals' views. I'm interested in and value other people for their own sake.

It's not just my usage when that usage is in the dictionary. Is yours? And is yours consistent with the rest of what you know? — Harry Hindu

I wasn't saying anything about popularity or idiosyncrasy, and I especially wasn't implying anything normative about that or implying a value judgment in general. I was just saying something purely factual/descriptive--we're using different definitions.

And yeah, my definition is consistent within my views, if you value that.

I was talking about my usage of subjective/objective, not your usage. We use different definitions of the terms.

But the other way around makes no sense. If we allow that the physicalist defines what counts as "physical" then everything is physical, because that's the assumption of physicalism. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not that everything is physical because it's an assumption of physicalism. Physicalists are physicalists because everything seems to be physical empirically, where that's not defined by the field of physics, because it's in no way parasitic to the field of physics.

If there is something which is not physical, then physicalism is denied, so it is not a physicalist making this claim. — Metaphysician Undercover

"So it is not a physicalist making this claim" doesn't seem to fit there.

And if everything is physical, as physicalism claims, then why shouldn't physics, which is the study of that which is physical, study everything? — Metaphysician Undercover

Whether it should or shouldn't isn't my concern. I don't buy normatives like that. I explained why the divisions would probably be the same above. In any event, I'm not in the PR department for physics, so what physics as a discipline decides to do or not do isn't my concern as a philosopher.

So it doesn't make any sense at all to allow a physicalist ontology to define what counts as physical. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not a matter of making sense or not. It's a matter of what we're doing, or at least what some of us are doing. We're not a cheerleading squad for field of physics, period. That's not at all what we're doing. And figuring that that's what we're doing is just going to amount to not understanding us. That's up to you, though. Do you want to understand what we're doing or not?

you must allow for the possibility of something which is non-physica — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure. It's just up to folks positing nonphysical existents to make any sense of just what they'd be ontologically, and then to offer any good evidence for buying that there are such things.

this would contradict physicalism, which denies the possibility of anything non-physical. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's like you're dedicated to not getting anything right. We're not denying the possibility. We're saying there are no non-physical things, because there's no good reason to believe that there are, including that to some of us, the idea of non-physical things doesn't even make much sense. That doesn't mean that someone couldn't make sense of it, but let's find that person and then examine what they have to say.

Have you ever used the terms in a way to refer to someone's biases and implied that the biased view is an inaccurate view, as opposed a more objective (accurate) view? An objective view would be a view from everywhere, while a subjective view is one from somewhere — Harry Hindu

Re my usage, it's not possible for someone to have an "objective view"--that's an oxymoron on my usage.

Yeah, I agree that it's almost always used with a religious connotation, but it wouldn't have to be. Simply arguing for a necessary being shouldn't be sufficient for that. Folks should have to do extra work to support that the necessary being would be anything like a god and not just a physical field or whatever.

Duplicate

But this doesn't really answer the question. How would you define "physicalism" such that the entirety of reality would not be subject to being understood by physics? — Metaphysician Undercover

First let me clarify what I was disagreeing with:

One, I was disagreeing with the idea of supporters defining physicalism as "that which is studied by physics." That makes physicalism basically a "parasite" on the discipline of physics per se. I think it's ridiculous to define physicalism that way. To physicalist ontologists the discipline of physics is NOT king and it doesn't get to define what counts as "physical."

Rejecting that definition doesn't imply that the subject matter of the discipline of physics couldn't be coextensive with what physicalism posits ontologically, but in practice, the subject matter of physics is NOT coextensive with physicalism. Chemistry, for example, is a separate scientific discipline from physics. But what chemistry studies is also covered by physicalism's ontology. Likewise with geology, astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, computer science, philosophy, music, visual art, etc. None are what is studied by physics, but they're all part of a physicalist ontology.

Could physics study everything more or less in the manner of those other disciplines? Sure, if there were a major paradigm change in the academic world regarding how to divide up fields, so that everything was simply considered physics. But that's extremely unlikely. Especially because it would be kind of stupid to do that, because you're not going to major in physics and spend years just studying sociology. But you need to study just sociology for years to get degrees in it/to be an expert in it. So there would still be a need to make a division, and there would be no utility to all of a sudden deciding to say, "Okay, well, we're going to say that all this is under the field of physics anyway."

Another reason that physicalism is not defined by what is studied by physics is that it wouldn't be impossible for physics to posit immaterial phenomena somehow, including positing real abstracts. Physicists have already posited a huge amount of nonsense, and arguably a majority of physicists buy real abstracts, because probably most are mathematical realists/platonists. Since physicalism isn't simply the cheerleading team for physics, we're not endorsing that sort of nonsense, which isn't part of physicalism's ontology.

So it's not at all the case that physicalism is defined by what is studied by physics.

Two, I was disagreeing with the comments about explanations/descriptions. I've gone into this in some detail in a few posts on different threads recently, including back and forth with you (in other threads).

Explanations are merely sets of words (or mathematical symbols, etc.) that an individual interprets so that it quells some of their "mystery to me" feeling. This, of couse, means that it's a matter of psychological factors. It means that what counts as an explanation for something is a subjective issue. The individual's beliefs, biases, intellectual capabilities, and so on, all have a significant bearing on whether any particular set of words scratches that "it's a mystery" itch for them. That makes whether something counts as an explanation interesting primarily for what it tells us about the person in question's psychology.

What's not going on is that the set of words is "really" explaining or not explaining whatever it's about. Whether an explanation is successful is always a subjective judgment.

So for some people, maybe right now, physics can already explain everything. For some people, maybe physics can explain nothing. And then you get every opinion in between those two. Neither opinion can be correct/incorrect. It's just a matter of whether something psychologically satisfies your "mystery to me" feeling for whatever it is.

When I say that everything, including consciousness, is physical, my aim isn't to get you to think that something is explained. Depending on the person, I often couldn't care less whether they (say they) feel that anything is explained. That's a matter of struggling with someone's psychology, and it's often not worth doing that, depending on their biases, their stubbornness, the degree to which they can seem to be willfully "difficult," their knowledge and intelligence, etc.

Yeah, the paragraph after the one you quoted sorts that out.

this would akin to a tu quo fallacy, in concept and his thought experiment would actually not have been invalidated — NakedNdAfraid

It's not the tu quoque fallacy--that's basically the "hypocrisy fallacy." No one is claiming hypocrisy here.

And no one is saying that just in case someone wants to minimize or reduce their suffering or pain in any way possible and reasonable, and we suppose that god is going to punish gays, then converting to straight wouldn't be merited. That definitely follows from that hypothesis. We're not saying that it doesn't.

The problem is that we can just as easily say that just in case someone wants to minimize or reduce their suffering or pain in any way possible and reasonable, and we suppose that god is going to punish straights, then converting to gay would be merited. That definitely follows from that hypothesis.

So if a hypothetical possibility merits action, then we have the problem that two contradictory courses of action are merited for every situation.

On HarryHindu's view, subjectivity is a subset of objectivity. Anything subjective is also objective. And in his view, objective things are the same as true or factual things.

Here is a debate between Prof. Ahmed and Prof. Feser over two different arguments for God. The first half of the debate goes over the argument of change; can anyone tell me what the definition of "actuality" and "potentiality" are? In the first half of the debate, time is spent trying to answer that question and it was still hard for me to grasp the definition. — Walter Pound

Feser (after Aristotle) isn't using the terms "potential" and "actual" in any novel manner. The sticking point is that there are some unclear metaphysical claims going on re just what the reality of potentials is prior to them being actualized. It's basically the same question as whether unrealized possibilities exist and in what sense do they exist--what sorts of things are they supposed to be, exactly?

Maximizing the rights and well-being of sentient creatures — chatterbears

Again, I wouldn't even say that that is a moral stance. But sure, we can just state it as "It is morally obligatory (or whatever one would want to say like that) to maximize the rights and well-being of sentient creatures."

For one, I'd say that that can't be true. No moral stance can be. I'm a noncognitivist. Moral (and aesthetic) utterances are not the sorts of things that can be true or false. True/false is a category error for moral and aesthetic utterances.

But let's try to ignore that and imagine either that they are the sorts of things that can be true or false, or alternately, just say that "Joe could adopt 'it is morally obligatory to maximize the rights and well-being of sentient creatures' as a foundational moral stance, even though Joe doesn't actually feel that way."

One problem I have with that is that insofar as someone isn't engaging in stances that they feel are right/wrong judgments about interpersonal behavior, I wouldn't say that they're actually engaging in ethics period. It's imperative in my view, for it to be ethics/morality, for the person in question to personally endorse the stances they're espousing. That's because the whole nut of ethics is making certain types of value judgments. Well, if you're not making value judgments, then you're not engaging in it. It's just like aesthetics, which is all about making another sort of value judgment. If you're just repeating someone else's "Frank Zappa is a better composer than Mozart," you're not actually doing aesthetics.

But let's imagine that we don't require that.

Well, what's to stop Joe from instead adopting "It is morally obligatory to NOT maximize the rights and well-being of sentient creatures" as his moral "axiom"?

If you're simply making the point that people can adopt arbitrary moral axioms that they don't agree with, then okay, but why would you be making that point?

Then correct me if I am wrong, but it seemed like this is what you were implying. This is what the line of reasoning seemed to be.

I stated: Many systems have axioms, including logic. Such as the law of noncontradiction. You have to accept these axioms as self-evidently true, before you can move forward. The only way to accept something as self-evidently true, is what you personally prefer.

You said: Accepting the law of noncontradiction as true isn't about personal preference, it is about conceivability.

I then asked: Why should one value conceivability? — chatterbears

First, it's not a matter of valuing conceivability or coherence. You couldn't choose to engage with something that's inconceivable or incoherent to you--by definition you can't conceive of it and/or it makes no sense to you!

Regarding axioms, with respect to fields like logic and mathematics, they're typically seen as simply stipulated--rather in the manner of setting up the rules of a game. "Here's how we're going to play this game." And there are different ways to play different games. There are different species of logics, for example, with some of them incompatible with each other. (For example, paraconsistent logics allow at least some true contradictions.) Or re mathematics, re geometry, for example, we can play the game with Euclidean axioms or with Riemannian axioms,

You do NOT have to accept the axioms as true--at least not in any "extra-systemic" way--in order to play the games in question. You're just operating with them as givens. It's just like you do not need to accept that it's true--outside of the context of the game, at least--that there is or was a Colonel Mustard to play Clue.

Finally, something seeming self-evidently true to someone isn't at all about their preferences. They might very well prefer that things were otherwise. They might prefer to believe something else. Or maybe they have no preference about it.

"Right" is the 'ought'. What one 'ought' to value as correct/right/etc... Essentially what you just said, which is "one should do this because." — chatterbears

Okay, so normatives. Normatives are preferences, yes. The problem is this:

- In the case of noncontradiction, you are essentially saying, "One should do this because it is conceivable." -

Where is anyone "essentially" saying that? Can you give an example maybe?

I want to just address this first, because I see this as a highly controversial claim. (Also, I'm not personally a fan of normatives, by the way.)

If we all agree that it is preferable to lie about somethings, sometimes then those type of lies become a universal law. It works when we all do it, not just when one or a few of us do it. — Jamesk

You were going good until the Kant fetish emerged. ;-)

And my argument back would be that in many of these cases the real objective of the lie is for the benefit of the liar and not the one lied to. — Rank Amateur

That simply depends on the liar's comment. It depends on how they're thinking about it. The liar could easily be thinking about their own benefit just as much (maybe "I don't want to have to deal with my wife being upset if I say she looks fat," for example).

The examples I gave are examples of lying, even if you parse them as not being moral issues. (I do, but you might think about it differently than I do.) If you don't parse them as being moral issues, then you need to modify your view to acknowledge that not all instances of lying are moral issues. (Or you'd need to modify your definition of lying, though it probably wouldn't be plausible as a standard usage of the term in that case.)

For moral questions, you seem to say that all moral perspectives/stances/etc... are based on "feeling". Would you say the same thing about health, logic, English language, math, etc...? — chatterbears

Insofar as you're making value judgments about those things. That's what I'm talking about--value judgments. Ethics and aesthetics are the two major fields of philosophy focused on value judgments per se.

Outside of making value judgments we're doing other sorts of things.

Re your examples, I'd need to clarify how you're using "right." Presumably you're not using "right" in a moral sense, are you? If you're using it in a normative sense--"One should do this because . . . (whatever the reason(s) would be)" then that's ultimately going to come down to preferences, which are "feelings" in the sense we're talking about.

You can use this type of thinking for pretty much everything we can know or understand. — chatterbears

With respect to saying that "such and such is 'right'" in either a moral or normative sense, sure. Why anyone would say that something like the principle of noncontradiction is right in a normative sense, I don't know. That's a rather weird thing to say. The crux of the principle of noncontradiction, for example, is usually conceivability/coherence. To the vast majority of people, the notion of "obtaining contradictions" seems incoherent/it's inconceivable. That's not anything about feelings/preferenes. It's about conceivability, which is different.

Other things, like spelling conventions, are just that--conventions, and we follow them for the sake of understandability.

It's important to understand the distinction between making value judgments and doing other sorts of things. "Right" seems to be a sort of value judgment in your examples, although I wouldn't guess that the sense of "right" being employed is the same in each example, and unless we're saying something pretty weird, we're not talking about a moral sense of "right."

you can still make objective assessments based on the subjective criteria you agree upon. — chatterbears

Re that, I definitely agree with it. But we don't agree on whether it's morally permissible to eat animals, especially because for me, that functions as a moral foundation. We can't go a "level down" to see if we agree on what "it's morally permissible/impermissible to eat animals" is based on in my case, because it's not based on some other moral stance (and remember that only moral stances imply other moral stances. Something that's not a moral stance can't imply a moral stance).

I not only think that some lies are permissible, in some cases I think it's much better to lie than to be honest.

Re the neutral comment, it can be neutral with respect to establishing trust. Establishing trust is simply a matter of whether actions result in a feeling of trust towards the person in question.

One example I gave already --re "pleased to meet you." Re that, I believe that responses like that are actually more likely to build trust. But I didn't mention that earlier because I wanted to stress that you were suggesting a false dichotomy.

An example where I think it's recommendable to lie- -it would be morally worse to tell the truth--is when your wife asks you, "Do I look fat in this?" and you think she does--and basically you'd think she looks fat in anything, but you know that if you say she looks fat in it, it will affect her negatively--so you answer "No."

All your friend needed to say is, "Hypothetically, there is a god, but his view is that everyone who isn't gay will burn in Hell for eternity."

(Also, as SophistiCat said, "Why can't we?" You can't just stipulate dibs on hypotheticals, lol. His hypothetical just as well avoids ours.)

The moral of the story is that for every hypothetical proposed, we can propose an equal and opposite hypothetical, so there has to be more to this than just considering a hypothetical.

how does is add to trust of make informed decisions easier ? — Rank Amateur

Something wouldn't have to add to trust in order for it to not diminish trust. It can simply be neutral.

Polite lies are usually performed for the emotional benefit of the recipient.

I wouldn't want to just turn it into yet another idealism vs realism thread, though. We've got enough of those already.

To define it first:
A lie communicates some information
The liar intends to deceive or mislead
The liar believes that what they are 'saying' is not true

Lying is bad – immoral because –

If diminishes truth in the world – and therefor diminishes trust
If one believes truth and trust are good – things that diminish them are bad

The liar is treating those lied to as a means to an end

Lying makes it harder for those lied to to make an informed decision

Lying corrupts the liar - (a gateway moral wrong to other moral wrongs) — Rank Amateur

Even if we go with all of that, how would a lie like "Pleased to meet you" (when the person doesn't actually feel like being social at all at the moment) diminish trust or make it harder to make an informed decision?

There are tons of "polite" lies that fit the definition you gave. But it's difficult to say how they'd dimiish trust etc.

I didn't mean to imply people necessarily cogitating. "Deduction" was emphasized in the initial post, too.

Common definitions of "being" include simply "the quality or state of having existence" or "something that actually exists."

Lying is always an immoral act — Rank Amateur

I know a lot of people think that, but I can't say I understand why (outside of possibly it being decreed by their religion . . . but then why did the folks inventing the religion think this?)

Sure, I think you can "get reality right" via deduction.

Re the quantificational questions ("how much"/"are they equal"), it doesn't really seem plausible to me to quantify this.

By the way, I'd phrase the first question as something like, "What is the balance of perception versus conception in our picture of reality?" I'd want to be careful not to suggest that reality in general somehow hinges on us/our activities (such as our perceiving and conceiving things).

Someone pointed out, what looks like a lot of anger is actually fear. Now these are macho young men raging and beating the stranger or fight with that other gang, and hell would freeze over before they admitted their behavior is about fear. — Athena

I know it's going to seem like I'm just trying to be disagreeable :grin: but I strongly disagree with comments in this vein. (Re being disagreeable, I simply have a lot of views that are not the "normal" views.)

What makes anything "about" something is how the individual in question is thinking about it. When we're talking about something that a lot of people are doing, it's not going to be the case for anything that everyone is thinking about it the same way. The only way we can know what something is about to an individual is to ask them. They may not give us an honest answer, but we can't know better than they do whether their answer is honest.

So re people wanting a border wall, for example, there are probably tons of different motivations there--it's just going to depend on who we ask.

Re the highrise comment, that's not "living with nature" if we're making the distinction man-made/versus not man-made. But then no construction is living with nature in that sense (and anything we do wouldn't be nature in that sense, since we'd be making our activities the demarcation criteria).

But this contradicts the objective fact that mass delusions exist and that large groups of people can take fiction as fact. Take the belief that the Earth was flat and the center of the universe, for instance. What is factual isn't what is normative. What is factual is that norms exist and can be maintained for a long period until more efficient norms are established. — Harry Hindu

"Normative" in this usage is another word for "shoulds." It's not denoting statistical norms. "People should ideally agree with things that are true or that are factual" doesn't imply that they in fact do agree. The idea is just that ideally, they should.

But that isn't to say that they aren't part of the world. Your mind is part of the world and anything your feel would be an objective fact. — Harry Hindu

I agree with that up to the "would be an objective fact" part. But I'm using a different definition of subjective/objective than you're using..

Re this topic, if you enjoy comedy films. if you don't mind something with a prominent atheism bias, and you haven't seen it yet, check out the Ricky Gervais film from 2009, The Invention of Lying.

Well yeah. What are you talking about when you make any claim about how things are?

If you were to type "I feel happy.", do those scribbles refer to a real state-of-affairs, like your emotional state, that I can glean accurate information about some state-of-affairs independent of my own mind? If they do, then you are speaking objectively. If not then your are speaking fiction, or lying. What is subjective is your arrangement of sensory data that makes up your conscious state (working memory). Your view is subjective because it is unique. The world (objectivity, truth, the way things are) is made up of subjectivities in a sense, which is why I said they are subsets of objectivity.

If you were to type, "Harry Hindu is wrong.", do those scribbles refer to a real state-of-affairs, like me actually misinterpreting my sensory data, your intent, etc. where my mental representation of the world isn't accurate, or truthful? Another word for my worldview would be "fictional", maybe even "delusional". — Harry Hindu

I wouldn't say it can't work to divvy up the terms that way, but it's very different than the definitions I use. (And it's very different than some conventional usages, although of course you don't have to care about that.)

One thing that's unusual about divvying up the terms that way is that usually something being a fact and/or being true is seen as normative, in the sense that people should ideally agree with things that are true or that are factual.

On your view, where subjectivity is a subset of objectivity, which is the same as truth/fact, a comment like "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" is thus objective, is true and is a fact. As is "Mozart was a better composer than Frank Zappa." If something being true or a fact implies that we should agree with it, then we should agree both that "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" and that "Mozart was a better composer than Frank Zappa." Although of course, agreeing with both of those "facts" poses a bit of a problem.

You could circumvent this, though, by simply saying that "Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart" always has an implied "<Harry feels that> Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart," and I'd agree with that idea--there's always an implied <so-and-so feels that> with statements like that. On that view, what one should agree with, given that it's true/a fact, is that "Harry feels that Frank Zappa was a better composer than Mozart."