Things are manifestations of experience? — Fooloso4

Yes

Experience of what? Experience? Mind? — Fooloso4

Yes, other experiences look like things.

It is evident that things that have mind have experience but it is not evident that what they experience is mind or experience and not things. — Fooloso4

It isn't evident that everything is made of a couple dozen whizzing particles, but here we are. We do know experience exists though.

Giving burdens to someone in the name of giving them "good things too" has to be taken seriously. It is wrong to create situations of burdens that did not exist prior in the name of "giving good experiences". It doesn't matter. There are no excuses, period. You don't create problems because with those problems come possible positive states of affairs. You don't have any justification for doing so, other than you want to see it, and that isn't an excuse to create wholesale negative states, that didn't need to exist. It's especially egregious when you consider that there is no relief from the onslaught of burdens until death. It is inescapable.

I would like to clarify that analytic idealism is not a form of pansychism: I do not hold that reality is fundamentally matter that has consciousness but rather that everything is in consciousness (i.e., one universal mind). Pansychism and the like still have the exact same hard problem of consciousness, as there is not possible explanation for how the little grain of sand or atom is became conscious itself. — Bob Ross

Yes I understand that. Hence I said:

But plenum of experience with which things are manifestations becomes more interesting. Sounds like neo-Schopenhauerian metaphysics. — schopenhauer1

Is it? In what way is this claim an explanation? Does it merely assert the very thing it is to explain? — Fooloso4

It is one method of answering the hard problem without going into granularity. One little grain of sand, or one little atom is conscious sounds odd. But plenum of experience with which things are manifestations becomes more interesting. Sounds like neo-Schopenhauerian metaphysics.

They are an utter irrelevance, to the vast vast majority of people deciding whether or not to have children.
I have NEVER heard any young couple say 'well we chose to not have children, because of the global power of the antinatalist movement.' :lol: I don't think I ever will hear such! — universeness

This topic is meant for you since you display an example of it here so well.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14307/ad-populum-indicator-of-a-moral-intuition/p1

Antinatalism preaches that we are all better off dead than alive because it avoids suffering.

However the dead cannot suffer. Nor have they any agency, choice, power, authority or intellect to subvert suffering. So the goal of antinatalism is one of irrelevance and impotence.

Well that's a strawman based on a mischaracterization of the argument. I believe 180 Proof already addressed this though.

Secondly, life, albeit harmful and treacherous indeed at times, is also full of beneficial/benevolent phenomena like love, nurturing, support, care, joy, peace, prosperity, triumph, opportunity, optimism, kindness/generosity, control, choice and agency.

You are bringing up every anti-antinatalist fallacy there is and that I have dismantled over the years. The latest argument is here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14291/the-ethics-of-burdening-others-in-the-name-of-personal-growth-when-is-it-justified/p1

Antinatalism declares that life is the greatest of impositions. But to the living, and especially to those that enjoy life, antinatalism is the greatest of impositions.

If I do something that burdens you but also brings you joy, that doesn't excuse burdening you, especially when I can't get your consent, de facto. It’s breaking a deontological principle of making burdens for other people, and deciding for another what burdens another person should endure. It’s creating the problem that another person has to solve but it did not have to be made in the first place.

Who has more choice? The living or the dead? And thus who has the most authority and capacity to engage and diminish suffering; the living or the dead?

This argument is specious and a strawman. It is not about "living or dead" but living and "not yet born", huge difference. One has a potential to actually come into existence, and that choice is indeed made by those who are already born. And what of it? This seems like a red herring point. The people already alive are deciding for others what kind of burdens they should endure. See my response above. Also, gambling with people's lives is not so great either. Not existing hurts nobody. No one is obligated to create joy, preventing harm however, is something. Also, creating joy with incumbent burdens is not a purely good act, and creates harm on top of the intended good. See my thread about creating burdens unnecessarily, with no mitigating reason for that person being affected.

Why do they continue to live if their sole objective in argument is total mass anhilation?This seems hypocritical. You're living to tell people not to.

This might be the worst argument when debating antinatalism. Not starting a life and preventing harm for a future person, and not killing yourself are two separate things. Just because upon birth, people don't immediately jump off a cliff, doesn't mean that one is caused harm. Fear of death, etc. are a very real thing. This is the worst strawman.

And secondly, how do they reconcile those that enjoy their lives, and wish to be benevolent, or contribute benefit to the living status, with their beliefs that everyone is better off dead, just in case any suffering should occur.

Is this a joke? This is like a parody of a bad natalist argument. Antinatalists don't believe people should be kill themselves! So uncharitable I'm not even going to take this further. Go back and read what antinatalism really believes. Read some proper philosophers like David Benatar even or Gerald Harrison! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism#:~:text=Antinatalism%20or%20anti%2Dnatalism%20is,humans%20should%20abstain%20from%20procreating . Come back when you at least know what you are debating.

This gives little to know autonomy to those that accept a bit of suffering in their endeavours to improve and progress the condition of living towards a state of diminished harm.

It is about causing suffering/harm/negatives on behalf of others. This can be both negative utilitarian and deontological for NOT violating the principle of harm and autonomy. But also creating the least amount of harms, with no consequences to an ACTUAL person (see Benatar).

Anti-natalism is pointless. It's not like mother earth wouldn't reestablish life if it was snuffed out, as it has many times before. Mass extinctions occur. But life as a whole, persists.

This is the naturalistic fallacy. "Mother Earth" does a lot of things that don't fall into the ethical realm.

My suggestion is at least to read some of my past discussions on this. You can look them up in my profile if you'd like. They go back pretty far. I've seen every argument you can think of, so be careful what you want to rehash. It's been said, believe me.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13246/trouble-with-impositions
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13574/series-in-pessimism-you-can-resign-a-game-and-move-on
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13543/series-in-pessimism-we-can-never-know-what-sustains-us
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13118/marxism-and-antinatalism
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12594/pessimisms-ultimate-insight
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13027/this-existence-entails-being-morally-disqualifying
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11847/what-would-be-considered-a-forced-situation
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11469/the-most-people-defense
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10842/willy-wonkas-forced-game
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7092/what-justifies-a-positive-ethics-as-opposed-to-a-negative-one
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5981/schopenhauers-deprivationalism
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5098/procreation-and-its-central-role-in-political-theory
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4121/reproduction-is-a-political-act

Ray Brassier, from that collection of essays, The Speculative Turn, you posted in the other thread, calls for a relationship between the extremes that seeks to avoid the either/or between 'ontology' and 'epistemology.' It is interesting to see him included in the collection because he has a bone to pick with all the other views presented. The lovely rhetorical hit on 'post-modernism' aside, this chapter neatly captures one problem balancing the points of view: — Paine

Indeed I think that is a good dichotomy. On one side the ontological "thing" and the other, the epistemological "word". Information Theory ontologizes information as real, and not simply representational. Not something that is a sort of stand-in for what is real, but is actually the thing-itself real. Post-modernism epistemologizes information totally that one cannot get to the real. I think Brassier's quote is contra Latour's attempt to legitimize the post-modern epistmologizing as ontology par excellance with his idea of "actants", but I'd have to look more into that.

I must say I have a soft spot for the Cathars who believed the physical world a sort of prison, and whose belief of course was persecuted by a lesser version of gnosticism (aka Catholicism/Orthodox Christianity). The Law was like the physical world, to be discarded for the Logos- that's the Greco-Roman gnostic element. The savior that dies and resurrects bringing salvation is the mystery cult aspect. Combine these, you get Pauline Christianity (what becomes eventually Catholicism/Eastern Orthodox/Protestantism.) I find it ironic that the Catholic church had problems with sects that "out gnostic-ed" the already "gnostic" Catholic/Orthodox consensus (post-Nicene creed of savior god that overturned the physical (Law) for a higher Logos).

Christian belief — Wayfarer

Which is layers upon layers of syncretic Greco-Roman mystery cults, gnostic ideas, and the appropriations (and taking out of context) of both Judaic understandings and Homeric literature to create the legendary Jesus.

So what is Whitehead's "a unity of aesthetic appreciation" that can be immediately felt as private"?

Are you saying that happenings are not beings, and science only treats of beings? — Metaphysician Undercover

That quote ironically is mimicking the very dichotomy that Shaviro lays out between Harman and Whitehead :grin:.

In this standoff between Whitehead and Harman, or between the idea of relations
and the idea of substances, we would seem to have arrived at a basic antinomy of object-oriented thought. Whitehead and Harman, in their opposing ways, both speak to
our basic intuitions about the world. Harman addresses our sense of the thingness of
things: their solidity, their uniqueness, and their thereness. He insists, rightly, that every object is something, in and of itself; and therefore that an object is not reducible to
its parts, or to its relations with other things, or to the sum of the ways in which other entities apprehend it. But Whitehead addresses an equally valid intuition: our sense
that we are not alone in the world, that things matter to us and to one another, that
life is filled with encounters and adventures. There’s a deep sense in which I remain
the same person, no matter what happens to me. But there’s an equally deep sense in
which I am changed irrevocably by my experiences, by ‘the historic route of living occasions’33 through which I pass. And this double intuition goes for all the entities in the
universe: it applies to ‘shale or cantaloupe’34 and to ‘rocks and milkweed’35, as much as
it does to sentient human subjects. Where does this leave us? As Whitehead suggests,
we should always reflect that a metaphysical doctrine, even one that we reject, ‘would
never have held the belief of great men, unless it expressed some fundamental aspect of
our experience’.36 I would like to see this double intuition, therefore, as a ‘contrast’ that
can be organized into a pattern, rather than as an irreducible ‘incompatibility’.37 Whitehead insists that the highest task of philosophy is to resolve antinomies non-reductively,
by operating ‘a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast’.38

Harman himself opens the way, in part, for such a shift of meaning, insofar as he
focuses on the atomistic, or discrete, side of Whitehead’s ontology. Whitehead always
insists that ‘the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. The creatures are atomic’.39
And Harman takes the atomicity of Whitehead’s entities as a guarantee of their concrete actuality: ‘Consider the case of ten thousand different entities, each with a different perspective on the same volcano. Whitehead is not one of those arch-nominalists
who assert that there is no underlying volcano but only external family resemblances
among the ten thousand different perceptions. No, for Whitehead there is definitely an
actual entity ‘volcano’, a real force to be reckoned with and not just a number of similar sensations linked by an arbitrary name’.40For Harman, this is what sets Whitehead
apart from the post-Kantian correlationists for whom we cannot speak of the actuality
of the volcano itself, but only of the problem of access to the volcano, or of the way in
which it is ‘constructed’ by and through our apprehension and identification of it. But
at the same time, Harman also sets Whitehead’s atomism against the way in which, for
the speculative realist philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant, objects as such do not really
exist, but only ‘emerge as ‘retardations’ of a more primally unified force’.41 For Grant,
as presumably for Schelling, Deleuze, and Simondon before him, there would be no
actual volcano, but only its violent, upsurging action, or its ‘force to be reckoned with’.

The point is that, even as Whitehead’s actualism links him to Harman, so his insistence on process and becoming—which is to say, on relations—links him to Deleuze
and to Grant. Whitehead refers to the ‘“really real” things’ that ‘constitute the universe’
both as ‘actual entities’ and as ‘actual occasions’. They are alternatively things or happenings. These two modes of being are different, and yet they can be identified with
one another, in much the same way that ‘matter has been identified with energy’ in
modern physics.42 (I am tempted to add a reference to the way that the quantum constituents of the universe behave alternatively as particles and as waves; but it is unclear
to me how familiar Whitehead was with developments in quantum mechanics in the
1920s and 1930s).When Harman rejects Whitehead’s claims about relations, he is not
being sufficiently attentive to the dual-aspect nature of Whitehead’s ontology.

This can also be expressed in another way. Harman skips over the dimension of
privacy in Whitehead’s account of objects. For Whitehead, ‘in the analysis of actuality
the antithesis between publicity and privacy obtrudes itself at every stage. There are
elements only to be understood by reference to what is beyond the fact in question;
and there are elements expressive of the immediate, private, personal, individuality of
the fact in question. The former elements express the publicity of the world; the latter
elements express the privacy of the individual’.43 Most importantly, Whitehead defines
concrescence, or the culminating ‘satisfaction’ of every actual entity, precisely as ‘a unity of aesthetic appreciation’ that is ‘immediately felt as private’.44 In this way, Whitehead is indeed sensitive to the hidden inner life of things that so preoccupies Harman.
Privacy can never be abolished; the singularity of aesthetic self-enjoyment can never
be dragged out, into the light.

But privacy is only one half of the story. The volcano has hidden depths, but it also
explodes. It enters into the glare of publicity as it spends itself. Whitehead recognizes
that, in the privacy of their self-enjoyment, ‘actual entities … do not change. They are
what they are’.45 But he also has a sense of the cosmic irony of transition and transience;
and this is something that I do not find in Harman. Whitehead insists that every entity must perish—and thereby give way to something new. Throughout Process and Reality, Whitehead keeps on reminding us that ‘time is a “perpetual perishing”’. For ‘objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full
immediacy’.46 In this way, Whitehead entirely agrees with Harman that no entity can
prehend another entity in its fullness. There is always something that doesn’t get carried
over, something that doesn’t get translated or expressed. But the reason for this is not
that the other entity somehow subsists, beyond relation, locked into its vacuum bubble.
Rather, no entity can be recalled to full presence because, by the very fact of its ‘publicity’ or ‘objectification’, it does not subsist at all; indeed, it is already dead. The volcano explodes; and other entities are left to pick up the pieces. This reduction to the status of a
mere ‘datum’ is what Whitehead calls, with his peculiar humour, ‘objective immortality’. — Shaviro 283-285

This is where it really goes deep. If anyone wants to add their interpretation of what is going on here between the dichotomy of Harman and Whitehead, please be my guest!

My interpretation is that Shaviro is saying that Harman's criticism of Whitehead is overlooking aspects of Whitehead that actually make it similar. Whitehead believed in this oddly phrased, "a unity of aesthetic appreciation" that can be immediately felt as private. This confuses me, but I get a sense it is some sort of experience of the object experiencing as an actuality in time? And this accounts for some sort of actuality that is in the equation that Harman is missing. It is not all novelty and change, but occasions of apprehension as well. Is there anything else people find interesting here? There's a lot to unpack it looks like.

Another thing I found interesting was that it says that Whitehead wasn't a complete nominalist. And it wasn't a problem of access for Whitehead. He thought there were actual entities that comprised the volcano, from various thousands of actual occasions. I'm guessing the process of "concrescence" in Whitehead is what makes it a volcano versus just atoms (or individual occasions) doing stuff.

@Metaphysician Undercover @Wayfarer

Whether a person chooses one or the other, as the basis of one's ontology, depends on whether the person is looking outward (Kant's external intuition), or looking inward (Kant's internal intuition). So Harman, as you describe, looking outward, apprehends external, spatial relations, and Whitehead looking inward, apprehends internal, temporal relations. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is internal intuition a false category when applied to objects that aren't animals?

If the equal things are different from Equality and yet can bring Equality into our minds, they must somehow remind us of the Form of Equality. We are aware that the sticks or stones fall short of being perfectly equal, but to be aware that they fall short, we must already have an idea of what it means to be perfectly equal; that is, we must already know the Form of Equality. — Wayfarer

Do Forms (in the Platonic sense) matter for objects to relate to each other? Certainly, I can see it in the Aristotlian sense. Attributes that can be shared between substances can be known by them.

I just realized that attributes may be equivalent to Harman's "vicarious causation". The attributes of the substance is hidden except for the ones that interact with other substances. So for Harman attributes can never fully exhaust the fully essential characteristics of a substance (or object).

If I talk about a round object, for my talk to make logical and coherent sense, I must be talking about something that exists. As the concept of a round object certainly exists in the mind, but a round object is highly unlikely to exist in the real world, I must be referring to the concept in my mind, not an impossible object in the real world. — RussellA

Oh gotcha gotcha. Yeah that's fine and all, but is this contra Harman here? In other words, I can take this to mean that you think there is a Platonic element of perfect Forms, or in Kantian speak, "A priori Synthetic truths" missing from all of this metaphysically? If no human mind existed. If no animal mind existed, could objects have localized "vicarious" interactions that do not need a cognitive stage?

From this perspective, the 'essence' is hiding in plain sight. — Paine

Well, it looks like Aristotle is railing against his mentor Plato here when he says that non-substance (qualities/attributes) can't be prior to its substance (the instance of the thing). He seems to be describing Plato's ideas that Forms are first and instances come from them. He's also just saying that the universal is contained in similarities of the same substances found in each instantiation. This is his main difference with Plato's notion of universals as some sort of esoteric Form (template) outside the substances themselves.

I don't see anything either way here. Aristotle's essences would be ones where we could determine by human standards of induction the essential form of a substance that determines what that substance is. He does not seem to hold the notion that there are some attributes which are hidden or withdrawn as far as I've seen. It's more of a corollary to Aristotle, not really fixing anything.

Employing the subject/object dichotomy as a linguistic framework to take account of ourselves and 'the world' results in rendering stuff as one or the other. Not all things are one or the other. To quite the contrary, some things consist of both. Hence, I find that it is an inherently inadequate framework to begin with, ontological or otherwise. — creativesoul

Indeed I think SR would also do away with this distinction as a way of how the world relates. Object-object or relation-relation, perhaps.

Those are the ones current convention and everyday people has/have trouble with. The result of the former is denial of language less thought. The result of the latter is often anthropomorphism. — creativesoul

Ok, but you are kind of discussing epistemology. We are at metaphysics. That is to say, can objects exist independently and relate to each other without minds? If so, how do objects then relate? Harman says there is a hiddenness that makes the object itself, and that it only has some sort of vicarious causation with other objects. Whitehead says that it is all relations. There is no "hiddenness" or reserve of some substance that makes it itself but all relations prehending other relations.

Whereas modern philosophy has tended to 'flatten' ontology such that anything that exists, exists in the same way. This is why there are disputes over platonic realism in philosophy of maths. Numbers, and so on, don't exist in the same way as objects. So the tendency is to declare that they don't exist at all, save as mental constructs; things either exist, or they don't, in other words, existence is univocal, has only one meaning. — Wayfarer

I like the use of "flatten[ed]" ontology. That is indeed what's going on here. Objects and their "relations". It's really the "relations" part that is tripping everything up. "How" can objects really "relate" on "their own" (without interpreters, without perspectives that we normally consider "minds"). But it could be conceived that roundness in humans is indeed "conceptual". Maybe roundness to an object is its manifestation of atomic valence atoms pushing against gravity in a way that roundness acts. This is the flat ontology view. Roundness is one relation the ball is having with the ground. It translates differently than human "roundness". Events then become (as I believe Harman will explain) "vicarious" events of causation between objects, where their "sensory" aspects are interacting, but not their hidden aspects.

This is also where Harman will disagree with Whitehead. Harman thinks the "hidden" aspect of an object is the essential part that makes that object have some sort of "reserve" that is actualized as opposed to Whitehead where "everything is relation" all the way down.

For Harman, in contrast, all objects are ontologically equal, because they are all
equally withdrawn from one another. Harman posits a strange world of autonomous,
subterranean objects, ‘receding from all relations, always having an existence that perception or sheer causation can never adequately measure … a universe packed full of
elusive substances stuffed into mutually exclusive vacuums’.23 For Harman, there is a
fundamental gap between objects as they exist in and for themselves, and the external
relations into which these objects enter. ‘The basic dualism in the world lies not between spirit and nature, or phenomenon and noumenon, but between things in their
intimate reality and things as confronted by other things’.24 Every object retains a hidden reserve of being, one that is never exhausted by, and never fully expressed in, its
contacts with other objects. These objects can rightly be called substances, because
‘none of them can be identified with any (or even all) of their relations with other entities’. So defined, ‘substances are everywhere’.25 And in their deepest essence, substances are ‘withdrawn absolutely from all relation’.26 — Shaviro 282

Harman posits a dualism of a hidden reality of the object and one of their relations with other entities. The hidden substance he identifies as "substances" as they are wholly unto themselves without sharing relations with other entities.

This seems pretty similar to Aristotle's substance, except that Aristotle didn't have an idea of a "hiddenness". He seemed pretty concerned with their "essence" which is something that I believe can be known, and thus not hidden. But if anyone else has ideas of how this ties to Aristotle, let me know.

The contrast between these positions should be clear. Whitehead opposes correlationism by proposing a much broader—indeed universally promiscuous—sense of relations among entities. But Harman opposes correlationism by deprivileging relations
in general. Instead, Harman remarkably revives the old and seemingly discredited
metaphysical doctrine of substances: a doctrine that Whitehead, for his part, unequivocally rejects. Where Whitehead denounces ‘the notion of vacuous actuality, which
haunts realistic philosophy’,27 Harman cheerfully embraces ‘the vacuous actuality of
things’.28 Whitehead refuses any philosophy in which ‘the universe is shivered into a
multitude of disconnected substantial things’, so that ‘each substantial thing is … conceived as complete it itself, without any reference to any other substantial thing’. Such
an approach, Whitehead says, ‘leaves out of account the interconnections of things’,
and thereby ‘renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible’. The
bottom line for Whitehead is that ‘substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing’.
There is no way to bridge the ontological void separating independent substances from
one another. An undetectable, unreachable inner essence might just as well not exist at
all: ‘a substantial thing can acquire a quality, a credit—but real landed estate, never’.29
The universe would be entirely sterile and static, and nothing would be able to affect
anything else, if entities were to be reduced to a ‘vacuous material existence with passive endurance, with primary individual attributes, and with accidental adventures’.30

In contrast to Harman, who proposes a "there" there for substances, Whitehead is 180 degrees the other way. There are no substances, but only interconnection of things.

Harman, for his part, makes just the opposite criticism. He explicitly disputes the
idea, championed by Whitehead (among so many others), that ‘everything is related to
everything else’. In the first place, Harman says, Whitehead’s ‘relational theory is too reminiscent of a house of mirrors’. When things are understood just in terms of their
relations, an entity is ‘nothing more than its perception of other entities. These entities, in turn, are made up of still other perceptions. The hot potato is passed on down
the line, and we never reach any reality that would be able to anchor the various perceptions of it’. This infinite regress, Harman says, voids real things of their actuality. In
the second place, Harman argues that ‘no relational theory such as Whitehead’s is able
to give a sufficient explanation of change’, because if a given entity ‘holds nothing in
reserve beyond its current relations to all entities in the universe, if it has no currently
unexpressed properties, there is no reason to see how anything new can ever emerge’.31
Harman thus turns Whitehead’s central value of novelty against him, claiming that
Whitehead cannot really account for it. If ‘every actual entity is what it is, and is with
its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other actual
entities’,32 then we will be eternally stuck with nothing more than what we have already. — Shaviro 282-283

Does Harman have valid points here? Relations can never really account for the things themselves. All is change, but no "thing" that is reserving these relations into "itself" (this is my way of putting it).

What about him turning Whitehead in on his own novelty and saying if all is novelty, there can be no change as there can be nothing that is being changed.

Hypostatization is pretty much what I have in mind. If experience be material, as a materialist must accept if they are not eliminative, it's still not a thing. Experience is of things, and reification is when you treat what is conceptual or experiential as if it were the same as the things it's about. — Moliere

Oh yes, I think I agree with this, but perhaps this choice of words will be explained as I believe I've heard it before in relation to Whitehead.

How so? By overmining I understand there to be no objects. But prehension just puts objects on the same ontological level as humans by smushing perception and effect together. So it seems to recognize the reality of objects, though they are all interconnected -- which I think might speak against your thought here: — Moliere

I guess I meant, "overused".. used to refer to too many vaguely related but not quite necessarily related things.

If objects are all connected, and perception, response, affect, and register are the relations between entities, then a drop of experience would just be another entity. It's the kind of entity we are -- and I am a little suspicious in general of reifications of experience so I don't think I'd put it like this, but that doesn't seem to be a conflation as much as a different way of looking. — Moliere

Not sure what to make of this. What do you mean "reifications of experience"?

I agree that there are objects that are approximately round in the world, but my assumption is that no exactly round object has ever existed or will ever exist in the world, if exactly one means within the Planck length, being 10−35m
10
−
35
�


If no round object has ever existed or will ever exist, then any talk about round objects cannot be about Real Objects RO but must be about Sensory Objects SO. — RussellA

Can you explain that more about why it cannot be the Real Object?

Of which you have a concept, hence the designation 'roundness' that goes with it. — Wayfarer

Sure, but the controversial element is whether "roundness" is a thing outside that concept. In this theory, it is, as long as two objects have some "sensory" causal affect with each other. It is neither atoms in a void (undermined), nor an "appearance" to a mind, but something that goes on with how objects themselves interact at their level.

You're arguing from an empiricist viewpoint - that we learn the concept of roundness from the exposure to many instances of it. — Wayfarer

Not quite. Rather, I was trying to show that specific instances (of objects) have their own form of interaction that manifests roundness in a way that bypasses judgements of roundness.

But let's move on further. @Moliere, I like your ideas, but you jumped ahead a bit. I want to read this page by page to get all the analysis from it.

Harman gives Whitehead an important place in the genealogy of speculative realist thought. For Whitehead is one of the few twentieth-century thinkers who dares
‘to venture beyond the human sphere’,13 and to place all entities upon the same footing. Whitehead rejects ‘the [Kantian] notion that the gap between human and world
is more philosophically important than the gaps between any other sorts of entities’. Or, to restate this in Whitehead’s own terms, Western philosophy since Descartes gives
far too large a place to ‘presentational immediacy’, or the clear and distinct representation of sensations in the mind of a conscious, perceiving subject.15 In fact, such perception is far less common, and far less important, than what Whitehead calls ‘perception
in the mode of causal efficacy’, or the ‘vague’ (nonrepresentational) way that entities
affect and are affected by one another through a process of vector transmission.16 Presentational immediacy does not merit the transcendental or constitutive role that Kant
attributes to it. For this mode of perception is confined to ‘high-grade organisms’ that
are ‘relatively few’ in the universe as a whole. On the other hand, causal efficacy is universal; it plays a larger role in our own experience than we tend to realize, and it can
be attributed ‘even to organisms of the lowest grade’.17 — Shaviro 281

I think most important to this section is "perception in the mode of causal efficacy". This presents to me, a somewhat "radical" view that how entities effect each other, is some sort of low grade "perception".

From the viewpoint of causal efficacy, all actual entities in the universe stand on
the same ontological footing. No special ontological privileges can distinguish God
from ‘the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space’: in spite of all ‘gradations
of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level’.18 And what holds for God, holds all the more for human subjectivity. Whitehead refuses to privilege human access, and instead is willing
to envision, as Harman puts it, ‘a world in which the things really do perceive each
other’.19 Causal and perceptual interactions are no longer held hostage to human-centric categories. For Whitehead and Harman alike, there is therefore no hierarchy of
being. No particular entity—not even the human subject—can claim metaphysical
preeminence, or serve as a favoured mediator. All entities, of all sizes and scales, have
the same degree of reality. They all interact with each other in the same ways, and they
all exhibit the same sorts of properties. This is a crucial aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics, and it is one that Harman has allowed us to see more clearly than ever before. — Shaviro 281

So just re-emphasizing that humans don't have privilege to perception. Events large and small perceive. It of course elicits the question, "What is perception?".

It is in the context of this shared project that I want to discuss the crucial differences between Whitehead and Harman. Although both thinkers reject correlationism,
they do so on entirely separate—and indeed incompatible—grounds. For Whitehead, human perception and cognition have no special or privileged status, because they
simply take their place among the myriad ways in which all actual entities prehend
other entities. Prehension includes both causal relations and perceptual ones—and
makes no fundamental distinction between them. Ontological equality comes from
contact and mutual implication. All actual entities are ontologically equal, because
they all enter into the same sorts of relations. They all become what they are by prehending other entities. Whitehead’s key term prehension can be defined as any process—causal, perceptual, or of another nature entirely—in which an entity grasps, registers the presence of, responds to, or is affected by, another entity. All actual entities
constitute themselves by integrating multiple prehensions; they are all ‘drops of experience, complex and interdependent’.20 All sorts of entities, from God to the ‘most trivial
puff of existence’, figure equally among the ‘‘really real’ things whose interconnections
and individual characters constitute the universe’.21 When relations extend everywhere, so that ‘there is no possibility of a detached, self-contained local existence’, and ‘the environment enters into the nature of each thing’,22 then no single being—not the human
subject, and not even God—can claim priority over any other. — Shaviro 282

Prehension is used here. However, it seems to be an overmined term. It can refer to "registers the presence of, responds to, affected by, another entity". He then adds in "drops of experience". Is this not conflating a certain type of phenomena (experience) with a more general idea of interactions in general? How are these two tied?

"From either" what? — 180 Proof

The view from here and the view from nowhere.

So this started from a discussion I had with @RussellA in the Chomsky thread. The dialogue is below. Basically, we were originally discussing how concepts such as roundness were a priori part of the human understanding of the world. He mentioned the notion of how it is properties/judgements like "roundness" of a ball could be mind-independent. Here is the dialogue (I bolded what I thought was most important):

RussellA:
Who judges the degree of roundness? There is nothing in a mind-independent world that can make judgements about the degree of roundness. Judgements can only be made in the mind.

schopenhauer1:
It isn’t judged, it is an event. Object rolls down a hill. The object interacts with the ground in the way round objects act. It’s manifest in how the object interacts. It’s roundness is manifest in how it rolls. No one needs to label it round to interact as round objects will.

RussellA:
You say the object rolled down the hill. Who is to say that it didn't bounce, slide, skid, glide, skip or skim down the hill.

A judgement must have been made as to the manner of the object moving down the hill.

schopenhauer1:
But that’s what I’m saying, it doesn’t matter how it is labeled- an object manifested the property of rolling by its action with other objects. It may not be judged as round but acts that way.

RussellA:
I may be misunderstanding. You say that the object may not be judged as rolling, but it acts as if it were rolling.

How is it known that the object is acting as if it were rolling rather than acting in any other way, such as bouncing?

schopenhauer1:
It is not known. It is manifested in the interaction of ball with ground. It doesn’t need to be apprehended. The object does as it does in relation to the other object. In this case the object rolls down a hill. Properties of solidity and gravity are manifested in the relation of the two objects.

RussellA:
I can't resist. How do you know the object "rolls" down the hill, if, as you say "it is not known"?

I think this can be answered in various ways, one of them referring back to Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology.

Whether human or non-human, all objects should be given equal attention;
Objects are not identical to their properties;
There are two aspects to any object the ‘real object’ (RO) and the ‘sensory object’ (SO);
Real objects can only relate to one another via their sensory object;
The properties of objects are also divided into real and sensual;
The real object and the sensory object with their distinct properties or qualities (RQ and SQ) create four basis permutations: time, space (the two Kantian constructs), essence and eidos;
Philosophy has a closer relationship with aesthetics than mathematics or sciences. — Blog on OOO

So from this it appears to me that the idea of OOO might have something to say about the ball and the ground. No human judgement is needed for the interactions to relate in such a way that roundness "manifests" in its interaction with the ground. There isn't judgement of the roundness, but roundness events play out between the two objects. Roundness is not a judgement then in terms of these objects, but nonetheless the properties exist in how they manifest.

Clarify what you mean by "understood". — 180 Proof

Yeah I guess, can they be discussed in reference to themselves without it being how humans frame the objects. It seems to be what SR and Harman in particular wants to do.

Speculative Realists seem to be attempting a more complete and consistent application of the Mediocrity Principle (i.e. anthropo-decentricity) – neither a 'view from here' nor a 'view from nowhere', but a view from everywhere – in ontology. — 180 Proof

How would a view from everywhere look different from either in your understanding?

I mean, the very notion of I language seems to require either private meaning or meaningless language... neither seems palpable. — creativesoul

Perhaps it’s the capacity for quick symbolic reference and syntactic generation, not necessarily content. E language can’t be acquired but through a brain that has modules for such easy acquisition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Symbolic_Species#:~:text=The%20Symbolic%20Species%20is%20a,co%2Devolved%20with%20the%20brain.

I am completely fine about that. It is necessary for life (which I am fond of). — I like sushi

This overlooks the person themselves for some abstract notion ("I am fond of life, so I shall burden someone else. Prior to X time, there was no person with burdens to overcome, now after X time, there shall be burdens, and I was that cause from Prior to X to After X time that there shall now be burdens. The burdens exist until death."). It's simply not as simple as "I shall do X to someone because I am fond of a notion and that other person shall be the one thus affected/effected."

If you are talking about projecting this into the future (some imaginary being to be born) then are you willing to project further and admit it is necessary to have children to continue human life? Or would you rather robots produced children to maintain human populations to make you feel better about inflict the gift of life upon the world? — I like sushi

I don't get this question. Why would I want a robot to inflict burdens any more than a human would?

Edit: I think you are saying what if robots made things less burdensome..
I don't think that is realistic, but if we live in a complete utopia where even the human condition is not its own worst enemy (boredom leading to more strife), sure. I wouldn't want to burden people to get to a utopia though.

I do like the hypothetical of all people living a good life whilst one suffers utterly and eternally. That makes you think about how powerful an influence ethics can have over something previously deemed ideal/good. — I like sushi

Still unsure what you are saying here, and could be besides the point of the argument.

Let me give you a scenario:

There exists states of affairs where no people are burdened. From this state, you can create states of affairs where there are people that will have deficits to overcome.

I get that you favor seeing these deficits enacted for others because you are "fond of it" (as compared to no people experiencing anything at all). But the question is not whether you are fond of something, but whether it is moral to be fond of creating burdens for others (even if that means you are creating them de novo), out of a state of affairs where there was no people thus burdened. MIND YOU, you are not "mitigating" harm for a person by giving them burdens to get over the already-existing harm, you are creating harm DE NOVO, so that they must overcome it, or for some other reason (like you are fond of something).

Teaching and learning are ‘burdens’. They are necessary ‘burdens’. Think of a courtroom where someone is being sentenced for committing murder … the judge takes into account the circumstances before sentencing there is not a universal sentence for the crime of murder because ‘it depends’ on the situation. — I like sushi

So you are red herring here. I asked to go back to my arguments presenting what unnecessary means. You skipped that it appears.

Someone imposing burden X on someone for reason Y is nothing to go off. It is like saying person X committed crime Y then asking whether or not it is ‘just’ to send them to prison for 20 years. It makes no sense to argue against or for this sentence as we have no idea what it is we are talking about. — I like sushi

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/805941

If you had asked to what degree is it justified to creat burdens for others then you have a chance of a reasonable discussion. If that it what was meant I can only answer with ‘it depends’. — I like sushi

I laid out my definitions of all this. So if you don’t think the argument apt, you’d have to reference where and why. Otherwise, it is you gesticulating distaste without arguments.

As for the claim to be looking out for humans (that do not exist) and assuming that if you view this position as ideal - which I would doubt greatly even if you insisted. — I like sushi

The topic is whether or not it is moral to unnecessarily burden someone. The contingencies don't get to be, "I can burden someone if I myself also bear a burden". That doesn't justify burdening someone else because you too will be burdened.

I can't resist. How do you know the object "rolls" down the hill, if, as you say "it is not known"? — RussellA

I think this can be answered in various ways, one of them referring back to Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology.

Whether human or non-human, all objects should be given equal attention;
Objects are not identical to their properties;
There are two aspects to any object the ‘real object’ (RO) and the ‘sensory object’ (SO);
Real objects can only relate to one another via their sensory object;
The properties of objects are also divided into real and sensual;
The real object and the sensory object with their distinct properties or qualities (RQ and SQ) create four basis permutations: time, space (the two Kantian constructs), essence and eidos;
Philosophy has a closer relationship with aesthetics than mathematics or sciences. — Blog on OOO

Let's start a different thread on this though. Now we are venturing into metaphysics.

How is it known that the object is acting as if it were rolling rather than acting in any other way, such as bouncing? — RussellA

It is not known. It is manifested in the interaction of ball with ground. It doesn’t need to be apprehended. The object does as it does in relation to the other object. In this case the object rolls down a hill. Properties of solidity and gravity are manifested in the relation of the two objects.

You say the object rolled down the hill. Who is to say that it didn't bounce, slide, skid, glide, skip or skim down the hill.

A judgement must have been made as to the manner of the object moving down the hill. — RussellA

But that’s what I’m saying, it doesn’t matter how it is labeled- an object manifested the property of rolling by its action with other objects. It may not be judged as round but acts that way.

Generalizing even further, philosophy is—or is part of—enlightenment, a means by which humans are freed from domination, whether by nature, myth, religion, governments, whatever it happens to be: — Jamal

But some philosophy points not to upward dialectic of Man but of the inherent perennial suffering nature of existence. See: Schopenhauer (suffering Will), Kierkegaard (angst), Siddhartha Gotama (dukkha), Hartmann (social despair), Mainlander (cosmic suicide), Zapffe (over-evolved self-awareness), E.M. Cioran (resigned indifference, disappointmentism), etc. etc.

As we move through cultural history, we are given more chances for sophisticated reflection of the intractable problems of human existence.

Who judges the degree of roundness? There is nothing in a mind-independent world that can make judgements about the degree of roundness. Judgements can only be made in the mind. — RussellA

It isn’t judged, it is an event. Object rolls down a hill. The object interacts with the ground in the way round objects act. It’s manifest in how the object interacts. It’s roundness is manifest in how it rolls. No one needs to label it round to interact as round objects will.

If the property of roundness was instantiated in the object in the world rather than existed in the mind as a concept, as nothing in the world can be exactly round, how can roundness be instantiated in the world if no instantiation of roundness is possible in the world. — RussellA

Wouldn’t degrees of roundness suffice? Whatever relations that interact with that object will interact with it in relation to the round-like feature of that property. So if it is round like, properties of rolling are in play for example. Round like things will roll on some other objects with certain properties such as grade.

A utilitarian might look to Hare's "two-level weak rule utilitarianism". That is to say, follow the general rule, but make exceptions for instances when this would go against greater overall benefit. I still don't see how that kind would overcome certain situations. What if doing the (seemingly wrong act) really does lead to greater overall happiness? So I think we have to ditch "overall happiness" and discuss minimizing suffering. But if that's the case then, it becomes awfully close to deontological ideas of "rights" as it becomes from a negative perspective (protect from and prevent the maximum worst case scenario). Deontology therefore, would focus on the inherent worth and dignity of people, and their right not to be used as cogs, which some consequentialism seems to lead to (overlook the individual and cause them harm or overlook their autonomy for some abstracted goal or aggregate). This especially becomes problematic even at the individual level (see my thread on burdens) when you cause burdens/stress/harm/suffering (unnecessarily) to see some "other" outcome (character building, even happiness itself).