Why create situations of lack, (and adversity) for something that doesn't need to? — schopenhauer1

Right, so in my view, lack is not at all sufficient for moral concern. "Why create situations of lack" is a morally null question, because creating situations of lack is not sufficient for moral concern.

You're arguing that it is sufficient for moral concern. So I'm asking you on the basis of what is it sufficient for moral concern?

What does the concept of thresholds have to do with why suffering period, under the earlier definition, so that needing to do laundry, needing to clean house, etc. count as suffering, is worth moral concern?

Your view is that suffering period, under that definition, suggests not having children at all--the earlier part of the threshold..

My view is that suffering period, under that definition, doesn't suggest any moral stance whatsoever, sof any part of the threshold.

So per what does suffering period suggest anything moral with respect to any threshold?

Um, did you read anything else? — schopenhauer1

Yes, of course. Was the rest supposed to be justifying the basis for why suffering period, under that definition, would be worth moral concern? If so, I'll read it again with that in mind, but it didn't seem to me that anything that followed "Sure it is" was actually saying per what suffering period would be worth moral concern.

Are you taking classes at a continental-oriented university? Just curious which university if so (if you don't mind saying).

Sure it is — schopenhauer1

"Sure it is" per what?

I answered "undecided," but only because there's no "something else" option. I'm decided about my view, but it doesn't amount to Hume being quite right or wrong.

First, and I may have had this conversation with you, "necessary connection" is sometimes parsed as saying something about possible worlds. I don't agree that that's the right avenue to take here. If a billiard ball hits another, and the ball that was struck goes off with a particular velocity after being struck, all that matters is whether in the actual world, given things just as they turned out to be (so no counterfactuals need apply), there was a necessary connection between the first and second ball--that is, only in that actual world, with no counterfactual conditions, the second ball's velocity had to be as it is after being struck by the first ball, or in other words, the second ball's velocity wasn't random, acausal, sui generis.

Aside from that, we could be saying that sans omniscience, we don't actually know re the actual world, no counterfactuals, whether the second ball's velocity was random, acausal, etc. The problem with that is that it's a certainty concern, and I think that certainty concerns are misconceived, especially when it comes to empirical matters.

So yes, causality is real, we can know causality, but no, we don't have certainty for that, we can't know any causality for all possible worlds.

Stylistically, at least, I'm analytic, yes.

I didn't say I had any problem with calling it suffering. I said that if it's suffering, then suffering isn't at all sufficient for moral concern.

The vast majority of what Berkeley said--and Locke, too--was wrong. I could go sentence by sentence through Three Dialogues or whatever and explain what he's getting wrong, the argumentative mistakes he's making, etc., although we're already doing that with a couple other books at the moment.

It's not that the "last time I studied anything" was decades ago. The last time I read much Berkeley or Locke was decades ago. I've never been of the opinion that they were worth much of my time, aside from knowing something about their place historically, including in the history of ideas, of course.

I've been talking/doing and publishing philosophy for decades.

You did a great job bridging utilitarian antinatalism with philosophical pessimism/structural antinatalism. Structural antinatalists (like myself) would say that life is always suffering due to the deprivation of desires and wants which are endless. Satisfaction is short-lived, and similar to Heraclitus' idea that all is flux, we are never in a state of complete satisfaction, but always thrown upon the world in the pendulum swing of NOW needing to work to survive, NOW needing to maintain comfort levels (do laundry, clean our house, etc.), NOW needing to entertain our complex brains (we get bored and have to always look for more novelty, more flow states, etc. etc.). Indeed, even the pleasures may not really be so fully good as the flip side is the deprivation that it reveals in the human condition. — schopenhauer1

If you think that everyone is regularly suffering, and that suffering includes things like needing to do laundry, then suffering isn't something to be concerned with on any moral level. Some subset of suffering might be something to be concerned with, but suffering in general wouldn't be.

"best"/"better" are subjective.

The problem I have with religion from that perspective, though, is that I don't agree with most of its views about "the human condition," about morality, about customs, etc.

Plus the formal ritual most of it is wrapped up in is very distasteful to me, and not agreeing with its morality, etc., I find its influence on law and mores very bothersome.

I'm fine with leaving religious folks to be religious--I'm an extremely laissez-faire kind of guy, but the problem is that religion doesn't tend to be laissez-faire towards different behavior, different beliefs, different religions, etc.

I'm just wondering. How does one access the external? — TheMadFool

Look at it, for example.

After all isn't it true that we only know what our senses (including our minds) provide us? — TheMadFool

You know what your senses provide to you, such as an external, which is presented by your senses to you. The mistake to avoid is thinking that means you only know your senses qua your senses. The mistake is analogous to thinking that a camera can only take pictures of itself. You need the lens etc, to take pictures, so it only takes pictures of what the lens provides it, but it's not taking pictures of the camera. It's taking a picture of something external to the camera.

How am I ever going to confirm that my red is exactly what your red is? — TheMadFool

First of all, if nominalism is true, and in my view it is, then you can know that your red is NOT the very same red as someone else's. Likewise, if you have two copies of the Netflix envelope, the red on one envelope isn't the very same red as the other envelope.

Just how different red might seem to you, phenomenally, compared to someone else's phenomenal experience is something you can't know, but it also doesn't at all matter, it's not important for anything practical.

Otherwise, I’d love to hear your argument on why beauty is 100% subjective. It seems like that claim leads to a bad result: of beauty is 100% subjective, then when I describe something as beautiful, either my sentence is meaningless, or at most I’m expressing something like “when I see that thing, I feel pleasure”. But really, when I see a striking sunset and describe it as beautiful, I mean it really is beautiful, regardless of the pleasure/ aesthetic experience I have when looking at it. If I meant I get a certain kind of pleasure from viewing the sunset when I describe it as beautiful, I should just say that I get a certain kind of pleasure from viewing it. To regiment this into an argument, I guess I’m saying this: — Empedocles

The certain kind of pleasure you get is a feeling that it's beautiful. Hence the utility of the term rather than using some other set of terms for it.

1) if beauty 100% subjective, then everyone who calls something beautiful is wrong. — Empedocles

No, it's neither correct nor incorrect. Those metrics are a category error for subjective judgments. So no one is wrong that some particular thing is beautiful, but no one is right either. They're not telling us something non-personal when they say "That is beautiful." They're telling us something about how they feel about it, what their aesthetic reaction to it is.

and no one is obliged to read or participate in topics that don't concern them. — unenlightened


Voting for this. — Jake

Yeah, same here.

Ah--we're helping you do your homework. :razz:

I can understand that, but I'd need to reread them to be able to help. As I said it's been at least a couple decades since I read much of either. My first year at university was 1980. :nerd: I didn't get my final degree until a bit over 20 years ago (I did multiple degrees in a couple different fields), but still, that was over 20 years ago, and a lot of my philosophy work at university was 25-30 years ago.

That is fine and I respect that but the point of this thread was to discuss the arguments presented by Locke and Berkeley both for and against matter and compare them.
I am very interested in your opinion of that — Jamesk

Okay, but I wouldn't have much of an opinion about that without rereading both. It's been two or three decades since I last read much of either. Maybe some folks' memories are that good, but mine has never been. Heck, I'd already need to reread some of the beginning of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations that I just reread and commented on a couple weeks ago in the reading group thread about that book.

I think it's worthwhile being familiar with Berkeley and Locke because they were major historical figures in the field, and philosophy values its historical figures in a way that science doesn't (science students aren't normally required to read even Newton's works, much less someone like Gassendi), but really, the majority of what both said (and many others throughout the history of philosophy) is wrong, misconceived, etc. So unless we're just interested in historical figures for their own sake, or maybe we want to be amused by how wrong they were, or unless we're required to do so for class or something, I don't see what the merit is to focusing on them for something like this. I'd rather focus on getting things right. And with respect to reading, I'd much rather read current or very recent stuff.

That's great but can we leave your personal position aside — Jamesk

Nope. A fortiori because it's not even possible to have a discussion where we're not giving personal positions. You'd be giving your personal perspective on Berkeley and Locke for example if you were to saying anything whatsoever about Berkeley and Locke. The only way you could avoid that is by simply quoting them (although you still might imply something personal by what you're choosing to quote in context).

Aside from that, I'm not about to start commenting where I feel I need to self-police certain things and not express them just because someone might not be interested, just because they might not want to pursue some particular tangent, etc. That's completely against my disposition, completely contrary to how I want people to communicate with and interact with each other.

If you're not interested in the people you're interacting with on the site for their own sake, I see that as your problem.

I'd agree with Wittgenstein only because if we're talking about reporting our sensations to someone else, we can't do that without having developed a language that we can both use, that we can share in its public aspects (which do not include meaning), and the only way we're going to develop that is by arriving at some agreed upon terms for observables--externals.

See my post above (from 17-18 minutes ago) to Jamesk (re definitions)

It's a useful distinction once there are people who believe that some things aren't physical. We want to be able to have ontology discussions with them.

There are people who think that some things are nonphysical. Hence the utility of the distinction.

Remember that I also pointed out that idealists are really just direct realists. — Harry Hindu

Sigh. but they're not, because you've already said that ideas and external-to-me physical stuff are different.

For an answer how idealists think of ideas, etc., it's best to ask an idealist. I wouldn't want to try to speak for them, because the notion of nonphysical existents makes no sense to me. That doesn't lead to me believing that they're just direct realists, because they're not. I'm a direct realist. They don't agree with me.

Re matter, it's simply saying that a tree, for example, is the relatively hard-to-us stuff it seems to be, with a location, extension, mass, etc. Maybe all of that is incoherent to you, and we'd have to try to figure out why, but also I think it would be difficult to be capable of interacting with the world at all while that's incoherent to you--that is if you don't understand location, shape, or if you'd not understand object manipulation so that you'd be familiar with things like weight, density, pliability, etc.

I'm not saying you'd have to agree with it, by the way, but it would be weird if the notion of it doesn't make any sense at all to you.

Re nonphysical stuff, well, supposedly it doesn't have a location, it's not some sort of material or substance phenomenally, it doesn't have a shape or extension, etc.--all I can say about it is what it's not, unfortunately, because no one ever tries to pin down any properties nonphysicals have to make any sense of them. In fact, people sometimgs say that the whole idea that nonphysical would have properties is misconceived. But I just can't make any sense out of the idea that there would be something somehow with no properties.

Right, we don't agree then. Meaning is an individual mental event (or series of events). On my view, as something mental, it can't be made public/third-person observable.

Meaning is not the same as a definition. Meaning is a matter of thinking about things so that there's an associative connection.

Let's just focus on one bit at a time a la chatting:

It does matter to me, because I want to understand how you determine right from wrong. What mechanism do you use to differentiate a wrong action from a bad action? — chatterbears

So it's not just me, what I'm saying here is what everyone does. Because of ontological facts, all that anyone can be doing, per their foundations, at least, is determining right and wrong via personal "feeling"--their intuitive, emotional response to (the idea of) interpersonal behavior that they consider to be more significant than etiquette.

Once you have some foundational stance (which can be one of many), you can reason from there--so, for example, if it's a foundational stance for you that "one shouldn't nonconsensually initiate violence" it would likely follow for you that "one shouldn't murder," but the foundational stance can't be anything other than a way that you feel.

Well, personally I think that the idea of nonphysicals is incoherent, so I can't explain that end.

Sometimes I get frustrated that the board seems dominated by:

(1) Religious believers or people who want to bring up religion in any event
(2) Idealists, representationalists and the like
(3) People who seem to mostly (or often exclusively) be a fan of continental philosophy

But that's just because I'm the opposite of all three.

On a more charitable view, it gets me thinking about and reading stuff I normally wouldn't bother with.

Fact remains, astrology still concerns deity stuff. — VoidDetector

You said that in the other thread, too, but I've not run into much of a connection between religion and astrology. I'm not sure what you're referring to there.

Well, and another problem is determining just which countries are "more atheist," determining the religious views of the person you're surveying, and determining what their relationship is to what they take to be their religious environment.

Determining someone's religious views can be far more complicated than it might seem to be if one hasn't gotten into a lot of in-depth discussions with others about just how they self-identify and what their religious views actually are. That can take some time to ferret out, and the answer to what their religious views actually are can be quite counterintuitive with respect to how they self-identify.

In my view there can't be "value experts," in the sense of particular moral and aesthetic judgments, because there are no moral or aesthetic facts of judgment/value to be an expert about.

Re laws, mores and the like, I've mentioned this before, so apologies to people who have read it already (and I'm not sure that I didn't even mention it in this thread), but politically I'm a very idiosyncratic sort of "libertarian socialist." Without getting into a big thing about that, on the libertarian side, with respect to moral or general behavioral enforcement, say, I'm a minarchist libertarian. Minarchists are folks who lean towards anarchy, but who don't believe that anarchy is possible, so the goal is a minimal set of restrictions with the idea being to avoid even more restrictions arising.

In practice, we tend to endorse the typical libertarian triumvirate of a prohibition against the initiation of nonconsensual "physical" damage to others (where in my case I introduce the "physical" qualification and a minimal damage qualification), contractual fraud (where I limit that to documentable, formal contracts), and property crimes (where again I have a minimal damage requirement).

Aside from that, most minarchists are also still in favor of a government sourced police-force, court system, etc.

Re that sort of stuff, I'd actually have a government-sourced economy/means of production (and service etc.) overall, as that's the socialist part of the equation for me, but It's the socialist part where I don't resemble any other socialist I've ever heard of, and my socialist aspects would run parallel with a minarchist libertarian approach otherwise.

Could people have their kids taken away in my system? Sure. But pretty much only if they're initiating nonconsensual physical damage towards their kids per what my restriction would be.

I didn't easily find the actual questionnaire online. Do you know where the questionnaire is, plus the data re exactly how many people they polled and how they selected the people they polled?

I'd say we build meaning rather than assign it — Banno

We might not be saying anything different there (as long as you're thinking of it as an individual feat)

So far the only difference you seem to imply is location - external vs. internal. Is that the only difference? — Harry Hindu

First, if you think that ideas and external-to-me physical stuff aren't identical, there's a difference for you between idealism versus realism.

I don't personally posit that at least some things are nonphysical, but idealists do. So that's part of the difference, to them, between idealism and realism. An idealist isn't going to say that the difference has anything to do with location, most likely, at least not via anything like the realist picture, because of course they don't buy the realist picture of things.

Do you believe how you "feel" is a sensible reason to base your moral actions on? If so, do you believe how someone else "feels" is a sensible reason for them to base their moral actions on? — chatterbears

I don't know if I think it's "sensible," but it doesn't matter. It's a fact that (foundational) moral stances are how an individual feels about interpersonal behavior, and that's all they can be.

The love sentence is similar to the Commdore 64 sentence. They're both saying that the medium at hand isn't capable of doing the job we'd like for it to be able to do.

Why would ambiguity/vagueness have something to do with self-referentiality, though?

Say that we boot up a Commodore 64 and start typing text from websites into it. We're stuck with no storage devices other than the Commodore's on-board RAM.

At the start, though, we type, "The Internet contains much more text than this computer will be able to."

Is that self-referential?

It doesn't appear to be self-referential in the same manner that "I love you more than words can say." — Wallows

So then simply referring to language or words when there are language or words in the sentence probably isn't sufficient for something to be self-referential

You're making some assumption that it would have to be done in a particular series of steps, probably. Why are you assuming that?

"Linguistics is the scientific study of language" for example.