Are you arguing that "it is nowhere in evidence" that human beings and the societies they create do not seek to flourish and prosper? As a human motivation, it hardly seems "hidden"... — Thomas Quine

No. First, let's make a distinction between human beings and societies: the former are moral agents, the latter are not. Second, let's make a distinction between what one may wish for oneself or for people one cares about and what one may wish for "humanity." Third, the desire for flourishing does not analytically entail the adoption of certain moral norms (not without begging the question), and what I was pointing out was that you have not made a convincing argument that links the two.

Genes propagate when the carriers survive, merely. — praxis

Or more precisely, when the carriers produce viable offspring. Quality of life, which is what we usually associate with "flourishing," does not enter the equation.

most people in most cultures, without being familiar with the philosophical arguments, know that it's the right thing to do, period, but the grounding for this claim is that love and respect for others is essential to human flourishing. — Thomas Quine

See, you are doing precisely what I suspected you of doing: you are working backwards from your thesis (that the foundation of morality is 'human flourishing') to retrospectively rationalize people's moral attitudes. But you also hold up people's moral attitudes as evidence for your thesis! This is a perfectly circular reasoning. (Alleging Confucius's justification as support is neither here nor there, because most people who believe they ought to honor their parents do not adopt that attitude for that reason, as you yourself admit.)

That's my next step but don't want to get ahead of myself... — Thomas Quine

Don't worry, you are telegraphing the standard is-ought move loud and clear.

My next point is that we can actually determine what best serves human flourishing through science and reason. This means if we can agree on the common goal, we have an objective starting point for ethical considerations. — Thomas Quine

Yup...

I don’t mean to present any ethical norm, but to offer what seems to me to be a simple description of human reality: all moral precepts are an attempt to answer the question, “What best serves human flourishing?” — Thomas Quine

Note that I am not of course arguing that all morals past and present actually did serve human flourishing, only that those who adhered to them believed them to do so. — Thomas Quine

That's just manifestly not true. I think you would be hard-pressed to come up with more than a few and recent literary or documentary examples of such reasoning behind moral attitudes. No one thinks about "human flourishing" when they demonstrate a proper filial attitude towards their parents, for example - they do it because it's the right thing to do, period.

Of course, in the absence of firm criteria of how such beliefs should manifest, you could interpret just about any moral attitude to be a confirmation of your thesis. You could assert that human flourishing is the hidden motive, even when it is nowhere in evidence. (I think I see you already engaging in such creative interpretation in this discussion.) But then if anything fits your thesis, your thesis is vacuous.

Does this observation apply exclusively to TheMadFool or does it also range over others? — TheMadFool

Does it matter? Do you hold your intelligence contintgent on the intelligence of people you are arguing with?

Also, proof of a proposition is necessary to claim that that proposition is true. — TheMadFool

You keep saying this as if it was self-evident. Now, if you'd never before encountered this problematic, never had anyone contradict you, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say this. But after ten months and four pages of discussion a thinking person would begin to suspect that the question might not be so straightforward...

So it avoids retorts of the sort "but we just prove [whatever] in a higher system". — Nagase

It's not an interesting retort anyway, because if a formula is true but not provable, we can just make it an axiom in a higher system, so it would be trivially provable.

I don't think you can accurately construe a soul-based theory as reductionism about the self. In what I've read, these types of theories don't say that the self is "reducible to" the soul, rather, it just IS the soul. — Tarrasque

Well, that would mean that the self is a hidden essence. But what we are inquiring about and trying to explain is the manifest self as it is perceived by us via self-reflection. We don't perceive hidden metaphysical essences as such (that is why they are hidden and "metaphysical"). But some would say that they manifest themselves as our sense of self, the integrity of our experiences, the continuity of our memories, the coherence of our thoughts and volitions. (Similarly, God is said to be manifest in his creation, and therefore being in general and some of its specific features are said to be explained by a divine creation "theory.")

I agree with you to some extent. Our society places a lot of importance on personal identity, and this leads us to form the conceptions about it that we do. I believe many people hold false beliefs about the nature of themselves, due in large part to this sort of conditioning. — Tarrasque

It's not just a social construct; I think that much of our sense of self is an innate psychological mechanism. But culture and socialization shape it as well.

I would disagree about social conditioning producing false beliefs about self though. If self just is (partly) a result of conditioning, then how can it be false? I suppose our innate psychology and social conditioning can come into tension, but how is one to say which one of these is truer? How is it even possible to discover the fact of the matter?

And since there is neither a prevailing philosophy nor a prevailing intuition or convention that would apply to such cases, answers vary. — SophistiCat

Which is why it is so interesting to ask the questions! — Tarrasque

It would be interesting if there was a possibility of finding the correct answer. But I don't think that there is one. On my metaphysically thin concept of self, the self just is what we perceive as our personal identity. There isn't any true self lurking behind its outward manifestations. And therefore if you are not sure whether your personal identity would survive teleportation, for example, then there is no fact of the matter to be discovered. At least not at this time; I suppose if teleportation were to become as common as air travel, or at least as common as space flight, we would develop intuitions about it.

I don't think there is a significant difference, as I am a reductionist about personal identity. Many people are not, and would believe that there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the "real them" and a copy of them. They might account for this difference as:

1. The real me is the body that contains my soul, essence, or ego, while the copy does not.
2. The real me is that body from which an unbroken spatio-temporal line can be drawn from it to my origin(in a copy's case, one cannot).
3. In the case of a copy and an original, there is some special property that is only attributable to the original. This special property is what we should be concerned with in preserving our consciousness. — Tarrasque

All of these positions can be seen as reductionist, in that they treat personal identity as a product or manifestation of something more real or fundamental:

• Psychological continuity
• Physical (worldline) continuity
• Structural similarity
• Hidden essence (soul, etc.)

I rather think that personal identity is a psychosocial construct. Consequently, it doesn't have a strict definition and delineation, but rather relies on intuitions and conventions that are to some degree fluid and diverse. This is why even those people who don't already have a favorite philosophical theory of self never seem to have a common opinion on such esoteric thought experiments as Davidson's Swampman, teleportation, duplication, etc. Our intuitions and conventions range over common experiences, which do not cover such imaginary scenarios. When answering these hypothetical questions, people either work out the answer from a prior philosophical commitment, or else answer intuitively/conventionally. And since there is neither a prevailing philosophy nor a prevailing intuition or convention that would apply to such cases, answers vary.

Conceptually, anything can be broken down into smaller pieces. — Olivier5

"Breaking things down into smaller pieces" is not a good way of describing fundamental physics research. Simple mereology works decently well with everyday objects and materials: if you know that something is made of wood, for example, then you know a lot of things about it, such as its hardness, heat capacity, conductivity, etc. So when we want to know more about a thing, we naturally tend to ask: "What is it made of?" If object O is made of A, B and C, and we know some properties of A, B and C, then we will add A, B and C properties together (perhaps accounting for some minimal interaction) and have O properties as a result.

This doesn't work perfectly even with everyday objects, because isolated objects often behave very differently than when they are part of some whole. And when physics goes beyond everyday size and energy scales, the very notion of an "object" with a boundary and and a set of properties that are all its own begins to break down. Subatomic particles behave like "particles" only in a very limited sense. By the time you get to quarks, saying that something is "made of" quarks means very little.

The important difference between what you’re picturing and what I’m actually saying is that on my account we are not merely to base moral reasoning on people’s self-descriptions of their hedonism experiences. Just like we don’t base science on people’s self-descriptions of their empirical experiences, but rather we replicate those circumstances first-hand for ourselves and see if we ourselves experience the same thing. Likewise on my account of morality, we are to replicate others’ hedonic “observations” to confirm for ourselves that it actually does seem bad. So we’re never starting with a description and getting to a prescriptive conclusion. We’re always starting with a prescriptivists experience (an experience of something seeming good or bad), and getting to a prescriptive conclusion.

Of course even in science we don’t all always replicate every observation everyone reports (apparently there’s a bit of a crisis of nobody doing nearby enough replication), and I’m not suggesting we have to do that with mora reasoning either. But in the case of science, when we don’t replicate, we take the (descriptive) conclusion at its word, rather than taking a description of the empirical experiences someone had at someone‘s word and then coming to the same conclusion ourselves on the ground that someone has some experience. Likewise, if we don’t replicate a hedonic experience, we’re just taking the prescriptive conclusion of the person who had it at their word — trusting them that such-and-such does actually seem good or bad — and using that in our further moral reasoning. We’re never taking a description of an experience that someone had and reaching a prescriptive conclusion from it, and so not violating the is-ought gap. We’re just trusting someone’s prescriptive claim, and drawing further prescriptive conclusions from it; or else verifying that claim with our own prescriptive (hedonic) experiences and drawing prescriptive conclusions from them. — Pfhorrest

I don't see how this gets you away from the is/ought gap. If the criterion of moral evaluation of something is whether it seems right or wrong, then you haven't said or proposed anything at all, you've just stated a tautology. However, as soon as you substitute some pseudo-scientific procedure of data collection and calculation for a moral judgement, Hume shows up with his guillotine and demands to know what this procedure has to do with the rightness or wrongness of the thing. The data that you collect is not an ought; it is a record of observations or reports - an is.

Put differently, we've pretty much concluded that events in the future are not fixed by the state of the universe now. Does that invalidate the notion of block time? — Banno

Depends on what you mean.

1. Events in the future are (not) fixed by the state of the universe now. I read this as implying that there is a uniquely correct theory (not necessarily known to us) that describes events in the past and in the future, and that the theory is (in)deterministic.

2. Block time. This is often taken to mean that events in the past and the future exist in some sense.

Setting aside the truth of (1) and the meaningfulness of (2), it is clear that (1) has no implication on (2). One can be a determinist and a presentist, i.e. believe that although future events are fixed by the present, they do not have the same ontological status. Or one can be indeterminist and yet subscribe to block time. The fact that no correct theory fixes the future given the present does not imply anything about the future's ontological status.

Note that I only talk about these positions as actual positions that some people hold. Personally I am very skeptical about the meaningfulness of presentism/eternalism debate, and somewhat skeptical about determinism/indeterminism.

The way to show an intention to be bad, besides simple contradiction, is to show it fails to satisfy some hedonic experience, an experience of something seeming good or bad (phenomenalism about morality) — Pfhorrest

If this statement referred only to your own instantaneous "hedonic experience" then depending on details your theory might be something like emotivism (or a tautology.) But your theory involves some kind of integration over the experiences of all people in all circumstances. At which point those experiences become data and you are squarely in the is-ought transmutation business.

If you’re thinking of the most recent thread where Kenosha, Isaac, and I were discussing my views — Pfhorrest

No, I haven't seen that thread.

Your facts are what you like to call "hedonic" whatsit, which you are supposed to collect, optimize and process and in some way as part of your moral recipe. They are still matters of fact that can be obtained with a sociological survey or something like that.

What is curious about yours and @Pfhorrest's approaches is not their differences but their similarity. Both of them blithely skip over the is-ought gap without even noticing:

Morality [cannot be this way] because that is not what morality really is. — Kenosha Kid

(Emphasis and ellipses mine.) That is, after giving us a quick tour of the natural history, anthropology and sociology of morality - what is - you skip to the conclusion - not about any matters of fact - but about matters of ought.

Except that it is never entirely clear which part of the equation you are addressing. Pfhorrest operates in a more traditional moral philosopher mode in producing a recipe with statements of fact as inputs statements of ought as outputs. With you I cannot tell whether you are even making a distinction between the two.

At first there appears to be a clear exception to the pattern: the injunction against a hypocrisy that is stated as a purely moral rule. But then you hasten to disclaim that that is just a matter of "statistics," that is that too is a matter of fact.

I see quite a lot of people not having issue with infinite regress as objection to the argument. I know very little but WLC seems to argue that ockhams razor would shave off unnecessary causes? — DoppyTheElv

By this logic, Last Thursdayism is the most parsimonious explanation!

Time and causality are some of the most involved topics in philosophy, if nothing else then because they have received a lot of attention from philosophers. So don't be surprised that in response to what seemed like a simple question you got truckload of abstruse concepts dumped on you :) But this just goes to show how naive and superficial typical apologetic arguments are.

Name one truth which isn't mathematical but is absolute. — Gurgeh

Again, you are quoting something but not addressing what you quote.

And again, it is unclear what you are aiming at with your posts. If you are just stating your beliefs, then whatever. If you made a case for or against something, then there would be something to discuss - otherwise we are done.

Empiricism is always to be refined. Every part of empiricism is temporary. Every part of maths is absolute truth. And if it's not empirical, as in theories which you don't test, then you haven't supplied evidence for it. — Gurgeh

I don't see how this is addresses the part of the discussion that you quoted. Also I am not sure what "it" refers to in the last sentence.

Finding out things about the world isn't as important as finding out about structure. — Gurgeh

Finding the structure of what?

With "math is about finding out things about the world" I was referring to the fact that everything in the world is modellable, simulatable and many things are formalisable. — Gurgeh

That is the responsibility of science though. Mathematics in this case is only a tool and a language of science.

moreover anything in maths is applicable to the real world and tells you absolute truths about the real world, and there is no other source of absolute truth. — Gurgeh

Well, that is a very strange thing to say. If this is a personal belief, fine. But if (in the spirit of the OP) this is intended to express a generally accepted idea, then definitely no.

Right, the one is descriptive and the other normative.... which would mean the argument still would apply to talking about what functions the justice system should serve for example, assuming we would want to take into account how people actually act when deciding that. — ChatteringMonkey

Both morality and law are normative. The difference is only in that (in some places) the latter is more institutionalized. But this is a distinction in degree, not principle. To anticipate objections, I don't mean to say that legal and moral are synonymous or coextensive; only that both are normative, and both have axiological origin. Laws can be more or less equitable and inclusive, but they are always intended to be the expression of someone's values, even if it is just the values of the powerful group in control.

Depending on the situation, the law's normative intent may conflict with an individual's wishes; sometimes it may even conflict with the wishes of the majority. This can mean that the law is not performing as intended, or it can mean that the law does not serve the interests of the majority by design.

Now as to the legal principle that retribution is not a function of justice (I am not actually sure that this is exactly so, but I am not a legal expert), either it harmonizes with what most people believe or it doesn't, but if it doesn't, there isn't an inherent contradiction in that. Unlike an economic model, the justice system is not necessarily intended to conform to the actual beliefs of the populace at all times. It is the populace that is supposed to conform to the justice system in the first place. Whether the populace likes the system and how much influence it has on the system is another question.

Doesn't some philosophy often make a similar mistake, especially in morality and justice to name a few... where we expect people to behave like rational (moral) actors. — ChatteringMonkey

I think you are mixing up two senses of expectation. There is expectation as a plausible anticipation, a forward model. We may reasonably expect people act on their strong desires. And then there is expectation as a moral obligation: you are expected to behave morally, even if it goes against your (amoral or immoral) desires.

then maths became a subbranch of science, which is about finding out things about the world from first principles — Gurgeh

Math as such is not about finding out things about the world. Math is about finding out things about math, nothing more, nothing less.

Sure, the direction in which we take mathematical research can be motivated by our desire to find things out about the world by applying mathematics to science. (It can also be influenced by psychology, social pressures, esthetics, or whatever else.) But in that instance mathematics is just a tool of science. Science is still ultimately responsible for what we take to be our findings.

One of the amazing things about ideas though, especially philosophical systems, is that they are perspectival; every well thought out idea is a perspective on the world and generates a view on other ideas connected to it. — fdrake

I don't believe that a philosophy can ever transcend that variation in connectivity; we'd just end up with the same problem but applied to metaphilosophical theses, and a regress occurs. For that reason, being truthful, honest, precocious, exploratory and recognising limitation and fallibility is much more important than doctrine; care how you generate your perspective and the rest will take care of itself. — fdrake

Yes. The more I learn about different philosophical perspectives, the more I lean towards pluralism. They don't even have to be radically different perspectives; they can be for instance different analytical philosophers' take on causality. That doesn't mean anything goes, of course, and a genuine disagreement is possible. But oftentimes well thought out ideas can illuminate and prioritize different aspects of the same world, even when they appear to conflict.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

One's generative core lies closer to the heart than the mind; more ethics and temperament than a set of analytical principles.

its about rules enforcement — DingoJones

Ive always found “feelings” to be a somewhat lacking metric. — DingoJones

I am gonna go ahead and Godwin the thread.

And yet you'd be the first to complain about low quality if we let him post his OPs. — Baden

I would be complaining if he was posting 25 stupid OPs a month (as some do). One OP in two years? Meh. Not worth hurting his feelings.

Btw: Banned MathematicalPhysicist for low quality. — Baden

Meh, the guy had what, 25 posts in two years? Granted, they weren't any good, but there was no pressing need to get rid of him.

Good call about the other three (if my count is right).

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done. — Pfhorrest

Life's particular trick is neither in storing energy nor in reducing its entropy. It's more about the dynamics, which can be expressed in such metrics as entropy production rate, free energy rate, (mechanical) action or (technically defined) information. But this dynamics is not simple, with different, seemingly opposing trends that can be observed at different time scales. An explanation of these issues can be found in this paper: LM Martyushev, Entropy and entropy production: Old misconceptions and new breakthroughs (2013)

Or for a bigger picture check out he works of Chaisson:
Energy rate density as a complexity metric and evolutionary driver (2010)
Energy rate density. II. Probing further a new complexity metric (2011)

But what is evident from the various energy, entropy, action and information analyses is that life exists on a spectrum among a wide range of phenomena, as measured by these metrics, although it tends towards the far end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, if you want to give a sharp definition of life, you probably want a qualitative, not a quantitative distinction.

In any case I don't think there is any bright line dividing theology from philosophy — StreetlightX

I think most of what "Gnostic Christian Bishop" dumps on the forum is a pretty clear case of theology*, and he doesn't even make any effort to disguise it as philosophy.

* Attempted theology, which is not like attempted murder, because it's worse, not better than the real thing.

You already started a thread on this yesterday. Why did you abandon that discussion just to post another OP with the same ignorant tosh?

I find his criticism of universals most persuasive where he attacks the very question. He questions why someone would even suppose that in addition to the meanings of general words - which is how universals appear to the uninitiated - there must be something else besides, something that non-philosophers, as well as a good portion of philosophers, do not see, and that could be discovered (how?)

One might object that there must be a reason for why we have different general words like horse or white in the first place. How do most people acquire facility with the use of such words without much trouble and without any indoctrination from misguided philosophers? But I think he correctly diagnoses the problem with traditional realist/nominalist controversy (at least in the way that he presents it, which I don't know if it is quite fair) and thus understands that providing a positive account for the existence of general words would be missing the point.

Well, you can understand why many people take a dim view of the philosophy of religion if you take a look at the eponymous forum here, which is filled with irredeemable crap. Granted, the same is true of much of the rest of the forum, but not quite to the same extent. Of course, the quality of forum discourse hardly reflects on the academic discipline, but for that you would do better taking a course or reading books and articles.

Morris Lazerowitz was interested in the nature of metaphysics, starting from the hunch that it was not what its practitioners claimed it was (an inquiry into the basic nature of things). — Snakes Alive

Sorry, I haven't read the rest of the discussion. Just wanted to say that your introduction aroused my curiosity, so I read a couple of his papers to get a sense of what he was about. I chose papers on specific questions, because I think they reveal more about a philosopher's outlook than what he says about his own philosophy: The Existence of Universals (1946) and The Paradoxes of Motion (1952).

In these articles he deploys the kind of deflationary, anti-metaphysical, language-oriented analysis that characterized early analytical philosophy, e.g. Russell (with whom he polemicizes), Wittgenstein and Moore (his teachers). I am attracted to that kind of philosophy in general, and find his arguments fairly persuasive.

I have to say though that as far as literary style, he is no Russell. And I don't know about the rest of his output, but these two papers are badly in need of an editor: both could probably be shortened by a factor of four, at least.

In virtue of what are those properties bundled? — GodlessGirl

Well, exactly. If there is nothing to individuation of an entity but the composition of its property bundle, then there isn't any obvious criterion of similarity, let alone continuity between entities. As soon as any property changes even a tiny bit, you've got a different entity, and the one that was no longer exists.

In order to understand why a cup today is the same object as a cup yesterday, in spite of a myriad of tiny differences between them, or why I am the same person that I was yesterday, I would have to supplement a simple enumeration of properties with more structure. But as I add more and more to the initial bundle concept, the project begins to resemble stone soup. Which leads me to think that the very idea of a property is flirting with tautology.

Andras Schiff playing Bach :heart: :pray:

This standard "proof" is of course bullpucky. It's true, but not actually a proof at this level. Why? Well, as you yourself have pointed out, the field axioms for the real numbers say that if x and y are real numbers, then so is x+y. By induction we may show that any finite sum is defined. Infinite sums are not defined at all.

To define infinite sums, we do the following:

* We accept the axiom of infinity in ZF set theory, which says that there is an infinite set that models the Peano axioms. — fishfry

Wouldn't we have to do that to even be able to talk about 0.999...? Or can we somehow deal with "infinite" sequences without the axiom of infinity?

:up:

Why hasn't this shite been consigned to the fairy-story section (or philosophy of religion, as it's optimistically called)? I usually have this stuff turned off so that I can pretend the site is a more serious one than it really is. — Isaac

How do you do that?

Hello and welcome!

While I find the idea of self as a psychosocial construct compelling (as opposed to an indivisible metaphysical essence), the bundle theory specifically has problems. Some problems are definitional, starting with the question of "what are properties?" That is a big can of worms with centuries of controversies attached to it.

Perhaps a more salient problem for the bundle theory is that it is not a good fit for how we actually see personal identity. Every distinct bundle of properties individuates a distinct object - in this case, a distinct self. But we don't think that our personal identity is destroyed every time any of its constituent properties changes, such as when undergoing new experiences and acquiring new memories. Continuity and persistence are essential to our idea of self, so that we think of ourselves as the same person that we were a minute, a day and a decade ago.