God, you really have drunk that progressive kool-aid.

It's not just a matter of a bunch of guys holding onto an outdated ideologies, I think you underestimate 1) how biology played a role into forming these traditional ideologies in the first place, and 2) how their frustrated biological drives now plays into forming post-hoc misogynists rationalization. I bet a lot of incels coudn't care less about traditional norms and values... they're mostly frustrated, and invent stories to make it more bearable for themselves. — ChatteringMonkey

"Progressive kool-aid" just sounds like the normal reaction fallacy you get from these people and it's beneath me to dance by such low quality.

1) Why does that matter whatsoever? We have loads of biological things that we don't blindly follow just because it's biology because we have a society that requires us to function past our mere flesh. To say that biology played a role in forming these traditions (and religious institutional dogmas as well) is of course a correct historical observation, but they have no relevance to modern society and it's no defense of traditions of suppressed women's rights and kept people of color in slave chains. The closest you can get are some minor differences in physical strength in some fringe cases, but other than that it's quite clear that the diversity of all is much more effective when tackling the complexity of modern societies.

2) How come not all have frustrated biological drives? Why are just some men jumping on that bandwagon and not all men? How does that also explain the racist angle that is just as prevalent as the misogyny? You're describing a frustration that is just as easily and more coherently explained by the dissonance between their drive and how society moved away from a society in which their drives could be met. If you ignore the fact that society has indeed changed over the last hundred years and believe that such a change has no cultural impact on people, then I'd suggest looking into psychology.

You argue as if these incels know about these traditional perspectives as some outside observer. They're in it, they live within it, it is part of their reality, their perception. People who grow up in a closed society tend to be formed by that society. To break out of such traditionally formed ideas demands a lot of introspection and understanding of the conflicting perspectives outside of that place. And people generally follow the group, the group thinks. Going against the grain is something very few people do.

So, this is not some Kool-Aid, I think you're dismissing a lot of basic psychology and trying to boil it down to some simple answer that is just a shallow observation of this phenomenon.

Involuntary celibate is a self appointed term to describe men that are celibate against their will because they deem themselves not attractive enough to the opposite sex. They believe this is objective, fixed and unchangeable.

Is this an emerging mental condition? What is fuelling the upsurgence in men that self identify as incels?

Do you think that perhaps the way dating apps are designed has some influence? Are we becoming too objectifying as a society? Is the incel "movement" dangerous? To whom and why?

So many questions on this bizarre subject. — Benj96

Conservative norms vs changing norms with the catalyst of the internet as a radicalization system.



We live in a time that has rapidly transformed what it means to be a man. We've recognized how most of these gender norms are, frankly, pure bullshit. Mostly formed by institutions to control society, mostly formed by the privileged to keep power.

So, just as we've started to wake up from institutionalized religion's dogmatic hold over society. The further effect it has had on society is to disrupt the traditional principles people lived by. Part of those traditional principles is gender norms. How each gender behaves according to the dogma of religious society. So you first dismantle religion and people start to live without that institution since that's basically just a decision in a nation to move power over to governments in a secular manner. But traditions are harder to disrupt in such fast ways, and it changes over generations rather than overnight. And throughout generations of traditions that no longer function in relation to older power structures, people start to notice norms that seem to exist without any rational reason.

It's no coincidence that women in Western societies managed to reach equality in voting around the same time as religious states in the West became more and more secularized.

Throughout the 20th century this awareness of how some norms and gender norms have no real reason other than to function as power structures increased among the people, and because of this change happened rapidly. Equal rights quickly became a moral norm because philosophy couldn't find any reason why not. There was no evidence in science, psychology etc.

When the internet was invented, information started to spread like wildfire. This means that the disruption of traditions that have happened on uneven time scales throughout the world clashed together and erupted into the conflicts we witness today.

These incels come from a traditional point of view of norms that remained in their families and communities. When communities on the internet, like Facebook, forums etc. started to normalize being honest in identity and opinions, these incels started expressing their traditional opinions more openly and since women have progressively moved much further in understanding equality and living by it, there's no place for these incels to express their traditional perspectives on gender and race.

Women simply aren't interested in going back to such a darkly oppressed time of gender norms that these incels ascribe to. But these incels function exactly like anyone else who's locked into unchanged thinking, they project blame instead of doing that change. So they blame women for not being attractive, they blame them on the grounds of old traditional views on norms, thinking that men need to be in a certain way in order to attract women and that women only get attracted by these special men.

It's the whole foundation for the Sigma, Beta male concept they invented.

In essence, it's just a bunch of men who are unable to live in a modern world of equal rights. They've learned, growing up, "to be a man", and had role models of men to be a certain way, and now they can't use any of that because people say those norms are outdated.

Men either go in one direction or the other. Either they change and function normally, they recognize how old traditional norms are bullshit, just like women have, and they change with the times.

Or, they are unwilling to change and they lock themselves in harder with traditional views. They gather together with other men who believe the same thing and form a culture around those outdated traditions.
Why do you think that people like Andrew Tate become such a role model for them? Or the strict "make your bed, clean your room"-daddy-figure of Jordan Peterson?

It is quite obvious where all this is coming from. And they gather in numbers because the internet is such a powerful tool for radicalization and grouping together people globally. It is a global movement that is also, knowingly or unknowingly behind ultranationalist movements such as Proud Boys, nationalist politics, Brexit, Trumpism etc.

They're all part of the same pile of bullshit longing for old traditions.

To be honest, I'd say, let them rot and let women and marginalized people who managed to overcome this historic toxicity reign free and claim power where they can. Incels are a dying breed of men who are just holding on to traditions that the rest of us have already moved away from.

I think you should embrace the animal nature of our basic psychology and stop pretending to be something we’re not. — praxis

Is not all of our society based on us taming the animal nature of our basic psychology? Haven't we all introduced cultural restrictions so as to function past our instincts and desires in order to overcome the horrors of nature? We, of course, do this better or worse depending on the individual, but ascribing to a higher level of self-control does not equal me trying to be something that I'm not, I'm trying to achieve more control than just natural apathy since it is something I can actually achieve through self-control.

Clearly it's you who's acting stupid. Gravity is not "a rock falling". We might say gravity is the cause of the rock falling, but since it always causes the rock to fall down instead of falling up, it cannot be said to be neutral. A cause, since it affects an object in a specific way, and never in the opposite way, cannot be said to be neutral. — Metaphysician Undercover

How are you ascribing "up" or "down" as non-neutral? You still don't seem to understand the difference between two different values and two arbitrary emotional different values. You say "good" or "bad", which means arbitrary values that we humans apply to something through our emotions, everything else is neutral since they don't have such arbitrary values. The thing itself is neutral, gravity is neutral, "up" and "down" is neutral, and there is no value of "good" or "bad" in of themselves for these systems. If you say something is "good", then you are emotionally describing the thing. If you say a falling rock is "bad", you are emotionally describing how you interpret it. A falling rock in itself is not "bad", there's no such description of reality outside your emotional interpretation of it. It is this distinction that I'm talking about and you just never get it, which is a basic descriptive understanding of language. If you cannot understand this, then you cannot produce a functional argument because you have confused together a neutral phenomenon with your emotional interpretation of it.

I argued that if you premise that biases are bad, we must allow that some are good as well, or else we'd have to conclude that thinking is bad, since it employs biases as a base aspect. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I said that bias is a natural phenomenon that is negative/bad for critical thinking.

How many times do I need to say the same thing?

negative/bad for critical thinking.

bias is a natural phenomenon = bias is a neutral system in our cognition, it has not emotional value.

negative/bad for critical thinking. = that this neutral and natural system is creating a negative and bad effect on the ability to conduct critical thinking.

I've described this so many times that it is becoming a farce that you cannot understand this simple sentence. Seriously, it's like speaking to a child. Your entire argument is built upon you not understanding a simple sentence.

Obviously, it's you who is not following the principles of logic. If the effects of a phenomenon are said to be negative, then that phenomenon cannot be said to be neutral in relation to those effects, without contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Just stop it. A falling rock has no arbitrary value of "good" or "bad". If the rock is falling on you, then you can describe that effect on you as "bad" or "negative.

This is a kindergarten level of interpreting things correctly.

It is not a contradiction. If this is so hard for you to understand, no wonder you are so confused throughout everything you write. And the rest of your writing just hangs on this misinterpretation of simple things.

Physics is a discipline, a field of study, therefore it is judged as good. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are you talking about? This is just delusional confused nonsense. I'm talking about the physics of gravity. You're simply unable to understand language it seems.

You take gravity, which is not judged as being good or bad, and you compare it to a human property, "bias" which you do judge as being bad. — Metaphysician Undercover

And on and on and on you are misinterpreting the one simple sentence that your entire argument hangs on. I have never said bias is bad. Bias is neutral, and natural, just like gravity. Do you think your brain isn't part of reality? Just like gravity?

Gravity causes a rock to fall, that is not "good" or "bad", that just is.

Bias causes our cognition to focus our attention towards something, it helps us simplify our perception of reality in order to navigate through it. That is not "good" or "bad", that just is.

Gravity can cause a rock to fall on you, that event can be described by you as being bad for you.

The bias effect on our cognition helps us navigate reality, but when doing critical thinking it produces an unbalanced understanding of a concept due to how it steers our thought process. This effect on our ability to conduct critical thinking can be described as bad for it.

If you are unable to understand the differences here, then you are ignoring simple language understanding.

What you are arguing is to replace one bias (preference) "hamburgers" with another bias (preference) "salad" — Metaphysician Undercover

:rofl: No, a salad is objectively better for your physical health based on science, it is a fact, we know this and it is not up for debate, regardless of your inability to understand simple reality or language. That is the point. If the goal is to eat healthy, then your bias toward liking hamburgers can affect your ability to choose a salad instead of a hamburger. Bias affects your ability to reach a valid conclusion. But it is not bad for you if you try to navigate a forest away from the danger that you assess lurks in the bushes.

The problem here, as I've already pointed out, is that you recognize bias as a "core", and therefore essential part of human cognition. This implies that it is a necessary aspect of all forms of thinking — Metaphysician Undercover

No, no no no no no. You are constantly making slippery slope arguments in which you just continue from not understanding to a conclusion that follows that misunderstanding and it's getting tiresome.

Bias is a core part of our thinking, it is essential for some uses of our cognition. Critical thinking is a method that we as humans have invented in order to think past our biases because biases aren't helpful when trying to assess complex concepts that do not relate to situations where bias has a positive function.

Positive and negative in this context have to do with what bias is as a function. For fast navigation through reality, avoiding dangers; being able to go down a street and not constantly getting hit by other people, or cars; or being able to reach a destination on that street because your mind summarizes information in a way that helps you find what you are looking for. For this, bias has a positive effect on your function as a human with cognition.

But when you are conducting critical thinking, that same bias process that helps you on the street will be negative on your ability to objectively reach conclusions that are valid outside of your subjective preferences (which is the entire point of critical thinking to reach past). Critical thinking requires you to not summarize information based on your unconscious preferences or pattern recognition systems. So for critical thinking to function, you need methods of bypassing biases in your conceptualization. It is the entire point of unbiased critical thinking.

It sounds more like you don't know what bias actually is, or understand these concepts of psychology. You mix together arbitrary values with neutral systems, seemingly without understanding that just because we are humans doesn't mean that we don't function on neutral systems like the rest of nature.

What you fail to understand is that all forms of so-called "critical thinking" proceed from biases, and these biases are essential and therefore good for that critical thinking. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is objectively wrong about what critical thinking is and you have so far not demonstrated any such "good biases".

You simply don't know what you are talking about because I don't think you have read enough on any of these topics, but you continue to insist on interpretations based on such uneducated foundations.

Interesting how nature, once 'the created', is now imbued with the power of creating itself. — Wayfarer

So far, nothing in science says it is impossible that nature formed on its own. If organic matter can form and lead to life, so could the initial form of matter and energy have formed from something else. The something else might even exist as an infinite loop of raw never-ending energy in which the probability of fluctuations is always a given, in which case the probability of something forming from it is always given. And as such, something is not forming from nothing, but from an absolute constant something and there's no such thing as nothing throughout all forms of existence.

This is similar to the problem which I see with Christoffer's approach to bias. Christoffer sees that critical thinking can be very effective for detecting biases which inhere within logical arguments. But then Christoffer has the audacity to insist that the effect which biases have on critical thinking is necessarily negative, without recognizing that this is itself, just a bias. — Metaphysician Undercover

Just stop with your constant misunderstandings and misinterpretations of my argument. You don't understand what bias is in our cognition and you ignore that critical thinking in its very definition of the method is including You simply don't know what you're talking about and thus cannot interpret what I write based on such a faulty understanding of these topics. I have raised many objections and you've just moved goalposts and ignored the problems raised.

This made me consider abiogenesis and natural selection from the notion of bias.
I don't think it's logical to assign bias of any kind to such processes, even through it seems personally intuitive to me, to assign a positive bias to both because I would not be here if such happenstance had not occurred. I asked chat GPT, "Is natural selection biased?" — universeness

There are different types of bias definitions. We can use it as a statistical pull towards certain things like increased mass makes matter biased towards each other forming a celestial body.

Bias is an inclination toward something, or a predisposition, partiality, prejudice, preference, or predilection.

Or something like cognitive bias, which is the one that's negative for critical thinking.

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.

So, in abiogenesis or any form of physical process in physics, there are biases that function, by the definition of the word, to focus together matter so that it forms something else. Think of molecular structures that have a bias between their molecular bonds holding them together.

Natural selection is also functioning as a form of bias. It has a bias toward what functions best in the environment and what needs the smallest deviations to function better. That's why we don't see wild strange and big mutations, but smaller changes that over hundreds of thousands or millions of years reshape the biosphere.

Cognitive bias, however, is a cognitive system that helps us navigate through reality. It is the reason we don't get overwhelmed by our surroundings. It's part of our pattern recognition system which speeds up our ability to interpret our surroundings. This bias has formed to make us adaptive and cognitively fast at evaluating dangers and opportunities in nature, it's why we structure together a knowledge base of knowing that a part of a forest usually has more berries that are good for us and that certain parts of the savanna feature dangerous animals.

So when we face new information, we always process it through our biases. In order for us to be able to conduct critical thinking, we need to actively notice the biases at play in our interpretation. If we prefer something, that's because we've learned through chemical processes like dopamine or serotonin that we had a good experience with it and we unconsciously form a bias towards that good experience. It's our internal Pavlov's dog, basically.

This means that when we face that new information and we start to interpret it and if we are educated in methods of critical thinking, we actively spot our biases that unconsciously play mind tricks on our interpretation and analysis of that new information. We use it in order to not let our natural instincts come in the way of forming a valid conclusion. Just like we don't go around and have sex with everyone we meet or eat anything that could be food, we have overcome our natural instincts through critical thinking.

That this process of critical thinking is not a common practice in everyday life in our modern culture is precisely the argument I've been making in this thread. It is just in these past 100 to 150 years that we've been discovering just how problematic bias is on our ability to be rational beings. So it's harder for us to make critical thinking a common practice, compared to eating food at a table and not screwing everything that could make us experience pleasure. With those things, we have nurtured our instincts to function better as a society, and my argument is that so too can we do with critical thinking. People just don't seem to fully understand the psychology of bias on a broader scale yet. And yet we've had things like critical thinking for a long time... it is just now that we know more about why it functions so well.

I believe that is essentially the case when it comes down the micro-micro level (i.e., quantum mechanics). However, the idea that entities behave or relate to each other relatively to observation (or what have you) does not say anything about what they fundamentally are nor what substance they are of. — Bob Ross

I'd say the opposite, quantum-level interactions have lower relational interactions, and sometimes objects are quantum entangled and essentially behave the same. General relativity acts on larger scales and due to that, everything exists in a relational bond to every other object forming a causality of entropy.

What they fundamentally are is just a separation of molecular structures. Some bonds of matter fuse together better than others and therefore we have chemical elements that can further bond together depending on the situation. An object in space is just an object that has a different molecular structure than the air or space around it. That an object then gets a definition by us, like a chair is chair, a moon is a moon, or iron is iron, is just language and our mind's way of categorizing reality in order to communicate and create a mental model of our surroundings.

What fundamental thing or substance is it that you mean isn't defined?

The idea that there is an actual space-time fabric is predicated on the physicalist metaphysical notion that there is a mind-independent world (and no wonder Einstein, being a realist, tried to explain his field equations within that metaphysical schema). Science proper in relation to spacetime is not that there actually is such but rather that space and time behave differently (in accordance with Einstein’s field equations) than we originally intuited. For a realist though, they will probably be committed (metaphysically) to there actually being a space-time fabric. — Bob Ross

Every prediction Einstein made has been verified in a number of different ways, so what does that tell about a mind-independent world? If everything was just within our minds, we wouldn't have verifications that rely on input data separate from how humans input data. A "field" is just something that has a mathematical value at each point in space, case point, the magnetic field. And with the recent verification of gravitational waves, we have verified spacetime as a field more clearly than previously.

What is it that you are trying to convey?

There has to be at least one thing-in-itself of which you-as-yourself are representing in your conscious experience, unless you would like to argue that somehow you are both the thing-in-itself and the you-as-yourself (i.e. solipsism). — Bob Ross

Yes, there's a difference between how we experience things and how things really are. If you just take our visual representation of the world around us, it only sees a small portion of the spectrum. If we were to see the entire spectrum of light, we would witness a sensory overload of events happening all around us, from infrared to ultraviolet, to radiowaves and cosmic radiation. It is probably the reason why animals have only evolved to see certain parts of the spectrum because to see everything would have no practical application in nature.

We are a limited species in our perception, in order to let us function better for the existence we have.

Everthing in phenonimal experience is connected to each other: but what is your mind fundamentally representing to you (as that is the thing in itself or things in themselves)? — Bob Ross

Our mind does not represent anything accurately. This is why in science we rely on data that fits together in logic and math rather than just looking at something and concluding it to be something specific. We can, however, verify something as being constant to a vast variety of minds by a simple process: Have a room that only has a table and a red apple on it. Let a hundred people go in one at a time, then go out and describe what they observed in the room. Summarize these hundreds of observations into statistics and you can conclude a collective representation of subjective observations, i.e the sum of a hundred minds observing the same thing.

Even then, it is still just human minds interpreting the apple. We don't see the infrared, the cosmic particles flowing through the apple etc. But we know have concluded what we as a species observed.

We can also scan the room using different types of measurements that register data that are outside of our perception. If that data correlates with our collective statistics of observations, then we can crosscheck the differences in our perception to that of other known sensors' reactions inside the room.

But even with all that data collected and formed into the best type of observation we have, both by us and our expanded tools, we are still forming a categorization based on a crosscheck with our memories. We have learned what a room is, what a table is, and what an apple is and use that to verify what we observe either in perception or with external tools. These things aren't much different from language, how we categorize an apple as "an apple". Such categorizations aren't just language-based, but we have the same in our inner representation of an apple, the sum of memories of "an apple" is constantly referenced to our perception of something or a current internal representation of an apple (maybe the memory of the apple in the room, or in this case our ability to visualize that apple in that room through this text).

All of such objects are interpreted in relation to other objects around them and that's how we categorize objects.

In reality, however, these objects are not anything in themselves, outside of our interpretation of reality these objects blend together and are just formations of accumulations of matter through entropic processes. We see a chair and interpret it as such, but the chair itself is just an accumulation of carbon molecules and other molecular structures that sticks together in a bond that dissolves into its surrounding space so slowly that our perception of time makes us observe the chair as solid and still. In reality, its half-life will eventually dissolve it into space, making it into high entropy dust.

If reality could observe itself, it would just experience everything as if it looked like a fluid, with accumulated parts in different places, some denser than others.

All of this is of course a vastly simplified description of perception and reality. The core of it is that our perception is a very limited representation of actual reality, but what we can perceive isn't stranger than a camera able to capture light into a specific value structure that represents a snapshot of how light particles bounced around in the moment of registration. How our minds interpret that isn't stranger than a computer program crosschecking statistics against a reference archive that has been formed by previous snapshots.

In essence, our minds function identically to how these new AI systems do. Not in self-awareness, but in their core functions of crosschecking data input against stored data.

The idea is to question what exists sans your particular experience. If you died, how do things exist in-themselves? Do they at all? That is the question. Perhaps, for you, the thing-in-itself is a giant blur of everything, but that is still a thing-in-itself. — Bob Ross

That sounds more like a dissonance between accepting that blur of reality and our minds desperately trying to categorize reality. This categorization in our cognition that helps us navigate reality through time also makes it hard for us to conceptualize past it and think in purely abstract ways. Because it is hard coded into our ability to function properly.

It may be that some mental disorders tamper with this core function of cognition and makes us unable to function. We could interpret H.P Lovecraft's cosmic horror in this way when people in his stories come to a higher level of understanding of reality they go absolutely insane.

I think that arguments that try to distinguish reality from our perception in a "do a tree fall in the woods if no one is observing it" way, is rather an error from how our minds functions. That our perception relies on an internal categorization of reality and that to fully understand it we instead require imagination based on understanding scientific data. Otherwise, we get caught in an internal conceptualizing loop.

Very interesting. Your view, as far as I understand it, still has then the hard problem of consciousness: how does that emergence actually happen? How is it even possible to account for it under such a reductive method? I don’t think you can. — Bob Ross

I would argue that it happens in the same way as any other complex system going hyper-complex as a holistic system.

Think of an ecosystem. The specific species, plants, and animals within this system are extremely complex organisms in themselves. Even the most basic bacterial system at a microscopic part of this system can have millions of complex bonds and interactions. Scientists have simulated such bacterial spaces perfectly with super-computers, which tells you just how complex such systems are even when we describe them as "simple" in relative terms. Now, take this small bacterial system and go larger, observe how it relates to its surroundings. Now you have a complex bacterial system that has exponentially become more complex just by zooming out and looking at its closest relation and bonds to other parts around it, and we might have only zoomed out to a square centimeter around it.

Now zoom out to observe the entire ecosystem. The hyper-complexity of it is so vast that we have no possible way to conceptualize it all in all that complexity. We witness it in simplified ways and observe the emergent properties of this system, how large pools of animals, plants, water, and geography ebb and flow through it.

This is how we observe our perception and cognition as well. We see the entire ecosystem and observe it in simplified ways in the form of emergent movements and behaviors. We cannot conceptualize or see the hyper-complexity and therefore we have trouble concluding "how it formed". But just as an ecosystem forms by these ebbs and flows, finding an equilibrium in which they function as a balanced system in relation to reality, so does our cognition. The emergent aspects of cognition take on the form of such simple things as our ability to see and interpret visual sensory data into a representation of reality, but the underlying complexity of both registering that visual data and interpreting it is within a hyper-complex system.

It is simply that emergent consequences form when a complex system reaches hyper-complexity. We see it in every complex system in the universe and since our brain and body is part of this universe we are part of this complexity reaching hyper-complexity. An animal brain is extremely complex, but when that complexity reaches a certain level, the hyper-complexity starts to form emergent abilities.

The key here is that instead of looking inwards to try to understand these emergent properties, we need to observe other places where complexity exists and see such behaviors over time. If we agree that there aren't any religious and supernatural aspects of reality, then we are part of nature/reality and we function the same as all other organic matter around us.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like you may be an existence monist? Even if that is the case, then the entire universe (reality) would be the thing-in-itself. There’s always at least one thing-in-itself as something has to be posited as fundamental and eternal, even in the case of an infinite regression. — Bob Ross

I don't think so. What I'm describing is how reality fits together and how we perceive the separation between objects as just part of our cognition's way of making us able to navigate reality. The universe could be an infinite loop or it could be part of a larger system of inflating bubbles of universes. The problem with speaking of concepts outside our universe is that if spacetime and our laws of physics are different there, we have less ability to describe them in a way we can conceptualize. I.e we need to conceptualize through pure abstraction that still holds on to how scientific data predicts back to before the big bang. It means that we need to let go even more of our mind's way of categorizing reality and embrace abstract perspectives, while still keeping us rooted to the data that we have.

It might be that we need to go absolutely insane while still being sane in order to conceptualize it correctly. Even this sentence referring to it as "it" is less abstract than it needs to be and we may have problems even communicating about these concepts since our language is part of the same categorizing principles as the rest of our cognition.

I don’t think it is possible to account for consciousness in this manner because no matter how well we uncover how consciousness relates to bodily functions it fundamentally does not explain consciousness itself. — Bob Ross

In relation to what I wrote above, our consciousness is a hyper-complex ecosystem that is self-aware of being such and this self-awareness is part of the emerging abilities out of this system. But just as an ecosystem, if we were able to trace back how each microscopic complex component function in itself and describe all of the exponential potential connections, relations, and bonds to other components, we would be able to observe just how consciousness works and why the emergent abilities formed and how. But just as an ecosystem, we know a lot about it, and we can even predict and experiment on parts of it with certain results... but forming a perfect holistic view of the entire system with its exponential relations and bonds might be such a colossal undertaking that we need a computer the size of the universe to be able to do it in perfect detail.

I think that the key is that researchers aren't primarily studying the holistic aspect of our brain/body, we look too heavily into detailed parts of us trying to find consciousness when consciousness might only exist with all parts as a whole. Just like when we look at a video on our phones and we experience the result of the holistic system of a phone that cannot be taken apart and still be able to show that video in the way that we experience it, it is the sum of it that produces the ability, not some part, or a few parts, but the whole system, the holistic entity.

Us trying to decode consciousness is akin to an alien trying to decode how an iPhone works. They observe it playing a video and they are going through a deconstruct of all its parts, but they cannot find where the sum of it is, because the sum requires every part to function in relations and bonds to each other. Where a phone could be able to be deconstructed in that way, due to its binary simplicity, our consciousness isn't a binary system, and as such the hyper-complexity is a far greater challenge to be decoded.

I think that science proper is the acquiring of how entities relate to each other and not what they fundamentally are — Bob Ross

Isn't it the modern scientific paradigm that everything is relative to something else? Even the core of spacetime functions on relative terms. So can someone even claim that something is something in itself? Everything in the universe has some connection to each other, energy transfers, everything is entropic. There are no notions that something that is just what it is, separate from everything else. How we define certain things mostly comes down to language and intuitively find definitions as logical hard points. I.e a chair isn't a chair until enough sticks are put on a plate and something is attached to support our backs. But even so, we just utilize parts in a specific structure so that its holistic definition change whenever we move over a hard point in definition. How we define these definitions mostly emerge out of culture through time and our intuitions of definitions become hard coded in culture, society and language naturally through our collective requirement of easy communication. It is emerging from our natural need to make communication effective.

For example, imagine that we are able to build a biological brain and monitor every section of it exactly. We've learned that a particular string of responses equates to the brain being happy. But do we know what its like to be that brain experiencing happiness? No. Another crude way of describing the hard problem is the act of trying to objectively experience another thing's subjective experience. We can only experience our own mind, we cannot experience another's. This is a problem whether you take a physical or mental view of the world. — Philosophim

This is essentially Mary in the black and white room.

Now, sometimes I do hear physicalists rightly point out that an analytical idealist is not actually providing an explanation to consciousness at all but, rather, simply positing it as fundamental without a detailed account of mind (i.e., of how it works) which, to them, is more epistemically costly than obscurely explaining mind in terms of emergence from the brain. To that, I disagree as, although certain aspects of mind may never be fully understood, there are many problems in idealistic accounts of the world that are soft problems (as opposed to hard problems) and I don't see the soft problem of how exactly the mind completely works as more epistemically costly as positing a hard problem to explain it. — Bob Ross

My position is that our consciousness emerged from a simple evolutionary origin of adaptability. To be highly adaptable, you need to be able to evaluate your own strategies, so our self-awareness became an emergent effect out of this process. I'm also working on an idea that our cognition is nothing more than a predictive system, that every aspect and experience that we have is only functioning through a system of our unconsciousness trying to predict reality around in order to adapt and navigate through it. I have not fully worked through every part of this so it is nothing more than speculation, but essentially, what I'm exploring is a concept in which cognition and consciousness isn't at all that complex, only that our emerging experience of an extremely complex prediction system makes us believe or have an illusion of identity or a notion of a self. That in reality, our consciousness is only a system that acts through prediction models constantly tested against a stream of sensory input data.

I still have some nuts and bolts to figure out with this in order to incorporate all aspects of human consciousness and cognition, but the basics of it function well with theories of how consciousness, self-awareness and cognitions evolved.

Of course, I'm mostly reacting to parts in your text, I haven't fully gotten a grasp on a holistic understanding of your text. But in essence I think that the notion in science that everything relates to everything else is fundamental for the universe, maybe even beyond, and that specific definitions of objects core definition of being are made-up by us to be able to communicate better about reality. I then think that our mind, consciousness and cognition needs to be viewed as an emergent phenomena based on an analysis of its original evolutionary function and how our advanced form of experience and self-awareness are emergent factors out of these fundamental evolutionary functions.

Otherwise we attribute something to our consciousness that seem more like what we like our mind to be, rather than what it is and how it relates to our formation process as a species.

The detachment of the sage in philosophy has a different quality to the detachment of the scientist because it is concerned with more than what is simply quantifiable. — Wayfarer

I agree, but it is still an active detachement even for the sage. When I go through everyday life I do not apply the complex thought process I use in philosophy to detach myself from my biases. So it is an active mode that I need concentration for. Of course, I would like to have that concentration more as an automatic thing in my unconscious approach to everything in life, something that I do more regularly, and I'm constantly training myself to be better at it in any situation, even in everyday life, but it has a sense of life long dedication that takes a lifetime to master because it is an act against the very nature of our basic psychology. Just like we do not eat off the ground, everything in modern life is a forced behavior to act against basic instincts of our animal self.

There are fundamentalists in areas other than religion. — Wayfarer

Yes, true.

We come into the world with proclivities, tendencies, traits, character, talents, and so on. These are all characteristics of living beings that are not reducible to physical forces. (One of the motifs from Buddhism, which is said to eschew the idea of soul, is that each individual is actually a 'mind-stream' (citta santāna) that manifests from life to life - a process, not an entity.) — Wayfarer

I'd say that's just nature and nurture, coded information in genetics as a continuum through generations as nature, and cultural knowledge past down as nurture. If that concept aligns with that then it can have poetical value, but for me it's better to call a spade a spade so as to not add confusion into already complex concepts.

I tend to do this because I'm also working with fiction, so I tend to keep philosophy clean of poetry and live out my poetic output in fiction.

But I don’t agree, on those grounds, that it is a meaningless term, or connotes an obsolete or supestitious idea. — Wayfarer

As above, I think the term has meaning especially when working with fiction as the poetry in fiction relies on imagination and as such, something like "soul" has great importance in conveying a story's meaning, but with more interesting paint than the purely factual.

That is typical of fundamentalism, not so much of the classical tradition. — Wayfarer

I have found most religious people to be far more fundamentalists than they even seem to be aware of themselves. Most can be very balanced in conceptual thinking up until a point where they switch into fundamentalism, and that switch can have an almost Jekyll and Hide vibe to it when witnessed during a conversation.

I'm not sure there is a "classical tradition", a religious life seem to be mostly very subjective even if practices as an institution looks collective. The individuals within the same religion can widely rely on very different interpretations and practical use of said religion. Some might be very secular, not even mentioning their belief system, while others carry their personal interpretation as a T-shirt.

You are not getting it Christoffer. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it's you who continuously doesn't get it. You are pretty much approaching this topic in just the kind of way that I described in my analogy of the gallery, being a rigid statue who are unable to see anywhere but one single direction. You are locked into a thought process that makes it impossible for you to understand a simple logical description of bias that is both based in a broad and fundamental understanding of basic psychology and how it relates to the concept of critical thinking, which is a core aspect of philosophy. And your constant repetition of the same obvious misunderstanding makes you constantly repeat the same conclusion over and over, ignoring the faulty premisses you provide. There's no point in trying to explain this to you when you're stuck in such a loop.

Well, if you cannot understand how it is contradictory to say that a neutral phenomenon is bad, I don't see much point in continuing this discussion. — Metaphysician Undercover

Seriously, now you're just acting stupid. A rock falling is a neutral thing, a rock falling on you is bad for you. If you cannot understand that a bias, a neutral psychological phenomena and that this phenomena is bad for critical thinking are two distinct different things. and exist together, you are either purposely just ignorant or you have a serious lack of understanding language or something.

In the end you just ignore everything that doesn't fit your argument or narrative. Your entire schtick relies on my concept being faulty in this neutral/bad logic, so you try to force this notion onto the discussion in order to be able to win the argument. It's petty and dishonest and I don't think it's wort continuing discussing in that manner.

I suppose you're referring to the semantics of deception here, also known in philosophy as sophistry. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it is simple english and logic. A phenomena can be neutral, how that phenomena affects a certain thing can be negative. If you cannot understand how these two coexist you ignore simple logic. Like I said, a falling stone is neutral, a stone falling on you is negative. If you disagree with that, then you are just ignorant.

Clearly no force is neutral — Metaphysician Undercover

You are applying arbitrary values of good and bad (emotional human judgement) onto a thing that is neutral. Bias is neutral just as gravity, in that it does not inhabit any arbitrary human values in the form of "good" or "bad. A neutral force can have a negative or positive effect on something, and that is not the same thing as it inhabiting an arbitrary value of good or bad in itself. Your argument relies on there existing an objective good and bad value that exist outside of human values, and such a claim have a burden of proof to show what these values are, comes from and why they exist. How can this be confusing for you, I don't understand. It is pretty basic stuff.

Yes, good and bad are human judgements, but so is "neutral" a human judgement as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, physics are neutral, there's nothing arbitrary good or bad about them. If you say that "neutral" is a human judgement of physics, then you need to explain how you define physical processes. If they are not neutral in the form of not having arbitrary values, then what are they? If you ignore to answer this you are ignoring a vital part in what holds together your reasoning.

There's no point going further if you do not understand these basics.

By your own description of bias Christoffer. You said that a bias is a gravitation toward what is preferable. Doesn't "preferable" imply what is satisfactory or desired? Since this is the definition of "good", then we ought to conclude that biases are good. Where do you get this idea that biases are bad? — Metaphysician Undercover

"Preferable" means whatever is preferable in your psychology. You are biased towards liking hamburgers, so your thinking while planning dinner might be that you lean (gravitate) towards ordering hamburgers than the more objectively concluded healthy eating of a sallad. If you are unable to understand that this kind of pull towards preferable arbitrary and emotional values of your subjective and individual preferences has a negative effect on your critical thinking when you try to form an objective conclusions of a complex concept, then you simply are uneducated about what bias actually is in psychology, and don't know what it means in the context of critical thinking and also don't understand the importance of critical thinking in philosophy. Which seems obvious based on the incoherent and confused way you have structured premise-based arguments earlier.

Is a potential task of philosophy to question and perhaps dismantle axioms (beliefs, biases) one holds to find enhanced approaches to thinking and living? — Tom Storm

This has been my argument throughout this thread. I think it is the primary task of philosophy to detach yourself from bias when doing critical thinking in order to be able to view a concept in all directions and not just through the filters of what you prefer.

I can't help but find myself in a realm of 'good' biases and 'bad' biases and how this is determined strikes me as needing to be bias led. — Tom Storm

How can you objectively conclude a certain bias to be good or bad? What is a good bias? This question has not been answered in this thread so far and I don't think it ever will be. It is like stating that there are good and bad morals, and so far, moral philosophy has not reached an end point. Anyone claiming to know for certain what is good or bad in ethics haven't gone deep enough down in that rabbit hole.

I asked ChatGPT to list some biases that can affect us in some ways. In critical thinking I wonder if anyone can attribute any arbitrary values to these that would help critical thinking.

• Confirmation bias
• Availability heuristic
• Anchoring bias
• Hindsight bias
• Overconfidence effect
• Halo effect
• Bandwagon effect
• Framing effect
• Self-serving bias
• Sunk cost fallacy
• Status quo bias
• Illusory correlation
• Negativity bias
• Dunning-Kruger effect
• Gambler's fallacy
• Recency bias
• Primacy effect
• Loss aversion
• Selection bias
• Authority bias
• Belief bias
• Blind spot bias
• Choice-supportive bias
• Clustering illusion
• Cognitive dissonance
• Conservatism bias
• Conformity bias
• Curse of knowledge
• Empathy gap
• Endowment effect
• False consensus effect
• Fundamental attribution error
• Groupthink
• Herd mentality
• In-group bias
• Information bias
• Just-world hypothesis
• Mere exposure effect
• Moral licensing
• Not-invented-here bias
• Outcome bias
• Overoptimism bias
• Pessimism bias
• Placebo effect
• Pro-innovation bias
• Reactance
• Representative heuristic
• Salience bias
• Semmelweis reflex
• Social desirability bias
• Stereotyping
• Survivorship bias
• Zero-risk bias
• Anchoring and adjustment bias
• Attentional bias
• Choice paralysis
• Distinction bias
• Functional fixedness
• Illusion of control
• Inattentional blindness
• Base rate fallacy
• Disposition effect
• False memory
• Illusion of transparency
• Optimism bias
• Placebo effect
• Selective perception
• Actor-observer bias
• Availability cascade
• Certainty effect
• Change bias
• Curse of dimensionality
• Decision fatigue
• Declinism
• Distortions of memory
• Empathy gap
• Fading affect bias
• Focusing effect
• Forer effect (Barnum effect)
• Functional fixedness
• Group attribution error
• Hedonic treadmill
• Hyperbolic discounting
• Illusion of asymmetric insight
• Illusion of knowledge
• Illusion of transparency
• Impact bias
• Incrementalism
• Insensitivity to base rates
• Inter-group bias
• Introspection illusion
• Law of small numbers
• Limited attention
• Magical thinking
• Memory biases
• Misinformation effect
• Moral luck
• Naive realism
• Name letter effect
• Narrativity bias
• Negativity bias
• Normalcy bias
• Notable numbness
• Observational selection bias
• Omission bias
• Overattribution
• Overjustification effect
• Pareidolia
• Planning fallacy
• Post-purchase rationalization
• Projection bias
• Pseudocertainty effect
• Reactance
• Regret aversion
• Restraint bias
• Rosy retrospection
• Self-enhancing transmission bias
• Semmelweis reflex
• Serial position effect
• Shared information bias
• Social comparison bias
• Social proof
• Spacing effect
• Spiral of silence
• Stereotyping
• Subadditivity effect
• Subjective validation
• System justification
• Trait ascription bias
• Unit bias
• Von Restorff effect
• Wavelength-as-distance heuristic
• Zero-sum bias

I still think a presupposition or an axiom is different to a bias. I suppose you could say that a strongly held but unexamined belief might constitute a bias. And that there are ‘cultural biases’ that are held by many people who take them as ‘the way things are’. Some will characterize religious attitudes like that but I think the same can be said of scientific materialism. — Wayfarer

While the above list constitutes certain types of biases, I've also focused on those kinds of biases that you mention here. A bias can both be an argumentative bias in reasoning (the thing that is bad for critical thinking), but also be a strongly held but unexamined belief might constitute a bias. Meaning, something that isn't a failure in an argument, but a "pull" towards a preferred perspective that makes it hard to both understand a concept fully and also hard to form a concept objectively or universally.

A core part of philosophy is that what I say needs to have a logic that others can agree on. If the logic of my argument is only logical for myself and in my world-view and through my personal opinions, then it is just subjective opinions and doesn't constitute philosophy.

Philosophy is a form of subjective thinking in an objective form for a collective space.

Actually I guess ‘confirmation bias’ would often be very difficult to expose and often effective as an accusation. See this case of.a biased investigator accusing juries of bias. — Wayfarer

Exactly, it is difficult to spot it and therefore I'm arguing for methods to review one's own thinking when trying to form arguments or concept. And because it is hard, we both need good methods and praxis of structuring our own thinking and also the collective space (like this forum) to shed a light on the biases that still might linger in our arguments. I think that's why the art of discussion throughout the history of philosophy has been a core aspect of philosophy. We need methods for both the subjective and the collective but both are required in tandem for a concept to be fully formed.

I must not be understanding what the discussion between C and MU is about then. — Tom Storm

Me neither, I've tried to point out that his argument is based on a flawed understanding of a basic thing. Bias is an always existing neutral psychological phenomena that is a core part of our human mind and cognition. This bias has a negative and bad effect on the ability to conduct critical thinking (which is not all that people do and therefore the value of "negative" or "bad" is applied to specifically how it affects critical thinking), often taking the shape and form of some error in thinking found in lists like the above. So it is the job of a philosopher to use methods to reduce or remove bias from an argument so that it holds together in a logic that others can agree is logical.

It is the foundation for how we structure deduction, induction or any kind of philosophical thinking. If you cannot convince another through rational reasoning, or at least shown the seed of a valid conclusion that can be built upon by yourself or the other, then you're not doing philosophy and instead just debate opinions. It's the basic difference between "I don't agree with it because I don't like it" and "I don't agree with it because the argument does not show a clear logic or holds together". The latter is not an emotional reaction but a continuation of the thought process from one part to another. If both are good at philosophical dialogue, the first speaker will understand the objections and restructure or rethink the previous argument into a better logic until it can be agreed upon. If the conclusion reaches a point where the conclusion is a basic "maybe this", then both would agree that it has partially shown an internal logic and that it is worth keeping as a concept until further understandings and discoveries add to the building blocks of future progression of said argument.

Even if "logic" is mostly used for analytical philosophy, I'm using the word here more broadly as even the most continental argument requires a kind of logic that makes it objectively relevant for the group that reads it. "I like pasta" has a logic only to you, "I would argue that pasta is liked by a large group of people in the world" is a logic that others can agree upon. And this is not really empirical and analytical, which means that in continental philosophy, especially post-modernists, their logic has to do with a sense of logic, a sense of intuitive structure that holds together. Like "hell is other people", does not have any analytical and empirical core, but it does have a logic to it. In the context it is used, we understand the idea and concept Sartre wrote about.

Everything humans do is a product of culture and society, and always has been. — Jamal

An interesting think when reading psychology is how basic humans are. We are essentially still the animals who evolved cognition as an animal trait to have an edge in nature and that culture and society as we view it today seem an emergent thing coming out of this advanced natural trait of higher conceptualization and adaptation through cognition. So, I think we need to include nature into that, everything humans do is a product of our nature, culture and society. We could, however, also argue that the definition of culture and society can be applied to other animals as well, like a group of gorillas have a form of culture and society. But for the sake of simplicity and importance of remembering that humans are still animals with instincts and intuitions within our formed culture and society.

But not all philosophers have this attitude. Some feel like they've come up with something significant, an important original idea, and so they work to put this idea across to others. — Metaphysician Undercover

An idea without philosophical scrutiny is not philosophy but just opinions. Philosophy requires more than "I have an idea" or "I believe". People in normal everyday life do not conduct philosophy in the way philosophers do and putting these two approaches on equal footing is not correct.

I believe in the reality of the soul, but language is misleading. To claim that the soul is a real thing, is already to misunderstand the subject of the discussion, because there is no such thing in the empirical sense. But then, neither does the mind exist objectively. (One of the unfortunate implications of Descartes' dualism is mind as 'res cogitans', 'thinking thing', which is an oxymoron.)

We can infer that others have minds, but the mind is never an objective reality for us. We only ever know the mind in the first person, in its role as the capacity for experience, thought and reason; even then, it is not known, but what knows (ref.) But what it is that thinks, experiences and reasons is not an empirical question (and indeed that is 'the hard problem' from the perspective of the objective sciences).

The Greek term for soul was 'psyche' which is, of course, preserved in modern English, in the term 'psychology' as well as in general use as another name for mind. There is an unresolvable debate over whether psychology really is a scientific discipline due to the intractable nature of mind from an objective point of view.

So for mine, 'soul' refers to 'the totality of the being' - synonymous to 'mind' in the larger sense that includes the unconscious and subconscious domains. It is more than simply the body although we're clearly embodied minds (and whether there is or can be a disembodied mind is perhaps nearer to the actual question.) But it's also far more than the conscious mind, the aspect of our own mind that we are able to articulate. So by the 'totality of the being', I mean, taking into account all of our history, our talents, inclinations, proclivities, and destiny. That is what I take 'soul' to denote, and I do believe that it is real. — Wayfarer

But the claim that the soul is a real thing, a thing that exists before birth and survives our body death, is something that plenty believe is an actual thing. A thing that either physical or ethereal exists as an entity in which our experiences, memories and sense of being remains and exist outside of us. It is precisely this that has no evidence or support whatsoever and remains in the realm of religious belief, fantasy and delusions.

However, as you view it, soul as something closer to our "mind", in similar manner as one would view concepts like a "mind upload" and what that would mean, for that there is logical support. Which is what I mean when I say that rationalism can provide arguments that have an inner logic even if there's no scientific and empirical support yet. If there is a logical and plausible possibility to upload a mind, that could be viewed as a "soul" that becomes detached from the body. In the most common view on soul, it would be precisely that by definition.

But that is very different from the idea of a soul that exists before birth or something that remains after death. If we are talking about the energy of the body kickstarting at the formation in an egg and the energy flowing away after death as heat, then I would never call that by anything other than what it is, energy, and energy is not a soul.

An objection I have to the use of religious terminology of natural phenomenas is that it uses language to apply a spiritual meaning where there shouldn't be one. It is like when evangelists move their goal posts of what the definition of God is every time a scientific discovery shows that their previous beliefs are clearly wrong, God is in the sky, he is the sun, he is all around us, he is the first cause, he must be whatever is outside our universal bubble and so on. Applying God to whatever fits the scientific understanding of the time and never giving up the term "God". That is a religious bias that forces that person to always include God into a concept of reality. But it is just shifting goal posts to fit the biased religious narrative.

This use of religious language for concepts that really doesn't have to do with the religious concepts of a soul creates unnecessary hurdles in dialogues and discussions of the concept.

What you describe is not something I would call a soul, because that term has too much religious baggage and when you mention a soul, my interpretation goes straight to the religious interpretation of something existing as a transcendent entity of experience beyond our world that is detached from our body, for which there's no support.

What you describe is something I am also ascribing to, that there is a totality of something, a holistic thing that cannot be described as purely a thing of itself. I usually talk about that as emergent effects creating a holistic concept. This primary and overarching concept of being does not really have a name, that I can remember, that doesn't unnecessarily connect to religious concepts and beliefs. In latin, maybe animus corporis, but even that is just "the soul of the body".

My point is that I think religious terminology muddies the waters of understanding certain concepts in better and more precise ways. I think we ought not to use soul for something that isn't specifically religious in meaning.

Of course. I understand that this is part of what is required by the art of philosophical hermeneutic, re-interpreting an ancient text in light of subsequent advances in scientific understanding. — Wayfarer

And I think a problem today is that many take old and ancient philosophy literally because they are considered relevant today, without doing so. Due to this, many think they have solid arguments today based on them, when they are in fact, in their literal interpretation, flawed or not working with today's knowledge.

I view old and ancient philosophy as support for modern arguments. They function as metaphors, analogies, exploratory systems that help navigate the complexity of modern arguments, because modern arguments have a heightened complexity due to how much is explained in science. For instance, metaphysics today requires an almost perfect understanding of physics, to a point where it might be more relevant to just do physics than wander around in metaphysical confusion.

I have agreed with the vast majority of what you have typed on this thread, but I think you are harsh on 'positivism.' Without it, Einstein's theory of relativity would be declared fact. Big bang theory would be declared fact, and this would perhaps mean science would not continuously challenge and scrutinise both. No theory in science is ever declared fact, because of stances such as positivism.
You yourself keep suggesting that empirical testing/evidence, is the final arbiter.
To me that's what positivism asserts as well, it stands as a good, much needed guardian against accepting anything on faith alone. Sometimes there is little choice but to accept something on faith, but positivism dictates that you should remain reluctant to do so, and I think that's a wise stance to take.
Even the fundamentalist Arab muslims like the advice of"trust in god but tie up your camel" — universeness

I was merely pointing out that positivism have a problem accepting things like theoretical physics due to it never using observable testing in its process. I don't think we actually need positivism because science overall is basically what positivism is. What I mean is that positivism is a school of philosophy and in philosophy there's not much observable testing being done, which means that positivists should just do science since there's little difference between them. If analytical philosophy is about exploring concepts through logic and positivists require observable testing, then it's just the same as philosophy and science, rather than rationalism and positivism. The criticism I have to positivism is that philosophy needs a level of exploration to function well and the rigid stance in positivism makes it better suited to just be science instead.

Perhaps an aside but, IME as a born, raised and educated ex-Catholic, the distinction between orthodoxy and Ms. Armstrong's emphasis on orthopraxy lacks much of a difference in so far as in the main, ceteris paribus, religious practices and religious beliefs are strongly correlated. — 180 Proof

That quote was from Wayfarer which I responded to, just so you don't answer me as if I quoted it. :wink:

If you say that biases are bad for rational thinking, you are saying that biases are bad in that respect. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm starting to think that you are just intentionally distorting your interpretation to keep making the same argument.

What you try to force feed into the discussion is that there are good and bad biases. To say that biases are bad or negative for critical thinking is a fact about critical thinking. It does not mean that there are good and bad biases. You need to read up on the psychology behind this concept and how it relates to critical thinking.

No I don't need to give any examples of good biases. I explained why already. I made the demonstration using the premise you provided, that there are bad biases. From that premise I was able to demonstrate that there must also be good biases. — Metaphysician Undercover

No you didn't, you made no actual argument that shows any of that. And yes, you need to give examples of that because if you claim there are good and bad biases, you need to actually show some example of that. You have a burden of proof when you claim this and you have not provided an argument showing that there are any value scales attributed to specific biases. Stop with the nonsense.

Bias is a concept in psychology. If you cannot apply to the definitions of a concept that is widely accepted, then you are just applying your subjective fantasy to already applied terminology. It's like if I was to say that the state of matter that is a liquid is considered preferable to the state of gas and when water becomes gas it goes from good to bad. It is nonsensical.

You are still not recognizing that the problem is with your premise, that biases are bad. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, bias is a neutral phenomena that is bad for critical thinking. This is a well known and acknowledged fact in psychology and you are just wrong trying to force any other interpretation of it just because it doesn't fit the narrative of your argument.

I went through this already, biases are a natural and essential part of the human being. Therefore it is impossible for a human being to be unbiased. And, a person's biases are evident in the premises of one's arguments. — Metaphysician Undercover

You do not understand what critical thinking means, therefor it is impossible to explain the phenomena of bias in psychology and how critical thinking functions to mitigate it.

You keep making this assertion without demonstrating anything, where's the circular argument you keep mentioning. — Metaphysician Undercover

p1 You assert that there are only good and bad biases.

p2 You assert that arguments in philosophy are made by good or bad biases in the premises.

p3 You assert that to reach an understanding of what is a good or bad bias you need to use logic and rational reasoning that doesn't have biases.

Conclusion: Your premises does to function together. p1 is a claim of biases having arbitrary values, without any example or logic behind such a statement. p2 is a claim that premises in an argument functions on values in biases for the premises used, disregarding how deduction and induction actually works. p3 is a claim that in order to know what is a good or bad bias (and which would provide evidence for p1) we need to use logic, deduction, something that is essentially unbiased. This means that p3 counters p2 since we need arguments of unbiased logic that doesn't have biases in the premies, but in p2 you claim there are no unbiased premises. So you need p3 to support p1 but then p3 counters p2 and your final conclusion counters p3.

So no, you are just confused.

See, you want to adopt the proper premise, that biases are natural, and fundamentally neutral. You keep saying this about biases, as if you understand the reality about them, but then you contradict yourself by insisting that biases are bad. — Metaphysician Undercover

Biases are a neutral psychological phenomena. The effect of bias on critical thinking is negative. Critical thinking is the process of removing personal beliefs in the process of deduction and induction. The effect on critical thinking by bias is that it introduces belief and arbitrary preferences to the process, meaning, it has a negative impact on what critical thinking is aiming to do. I.e The effect of bias on critical thinking is negative or bad.

If you cannot understand how these two (neutral and bad) can exist together in this context, then you are either not capable of understanding it or you are just trying to force a a faulty interpretation onto it in order to get your argument to work. But in the end you are just misinterpreting or not understanding the basics and therefor you build an entire counter argument on false grounds.

OK, if "bias is neutral", as you say here, then will you rescind your claim stated above, that "biases are bad for rational and critical thinking". You cannot have it both ways. If they are bad for rational and critical thinking, then it is impossible that they are neutral. — Metaphysician Undercover

A neutral psychological phenomena. Is hunger a good or bad phenomena? Answer me that.
Then answer me this, can hunger be bad for the health of the individual?

If you cannot apply concepts in psychology when we are in fact speaking of psychological phenomenas, then you are just ignorant of the scientific foundation for what I'm writing about.

I really can't believe that you cannot grasp the incoherency in this statement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Oh, the irony.

If the "phenomena of bias" affects critical thinking in the negative way which you describe — Metaphysician Undercover

As psychology describes.

This is all nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

The irony

Right, because I am demonstrating the defects of your theory. I describe your theory in my own words, then show the faults. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly, you describe my theories in YOUR own words, distorting them and confusing yourself to the point of nonsense and ignorance of psychology.

And if you would continue with your "stepping back and observing the automatic self ", you would see that "the automatic self" is the problem, not the biases. — Metaphysician Undercover

You do not understand what I'm talking about. I'm taking the concept of the system 1 and system 2 as a foundation for deliberate separation in mind when conducting critical thinking, so as to internally observe the reasoning being made. If you don't even understand the basics in psychology, I cannot help you.

In no way can gravity be represented as "neutral". Neutral would be like something balanced, an equilibrium, but gravity is a force which pulls in one direction. A force is not "neutral". — Metaphysician Undercover

It's a neutral physical force in terms of your usage of "good" and "bad" as values. When you say a "good" and "bad" bias, you are not talking about a plus and minus, larger and lower, maximum and minimum, higher and lower effect, you are talking about human value systems applied to a neutral force. The force itself does not have good or bad values. "Good" and "bad" are human concepts of arbitrary values, they aren't applicable to gravity as a force. The force itself does not have such values, but the effect of falling from a skyscraper is bad for you. Which is what I'm saying when I say that biases are a neutral psychological phenomena and that how they affect your critical thinking is bad for reasoning.

I'm starting to wonder if you have a problem reading and understanding text overall since I need to explain these basic semantics of it all.

Obviously I cannot understand your writing. It's blatantly contradictory and incoherent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Oh... the irony again.

You my friend, are the one who has positioned good and bad as foundational, by assigning "bad" to bias in relation to critical reasoning, when biases are foundational to reasoning. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, you don't understand simple english and the semantics of my argument. And it's you who have claimed there to be good and bad biases and that philosophy has a purpose in finding out which are good biases and which ones are bad. It is just an uneducated mess that ignores psychology and the entire core of critical thinking, which is a core tenet of philosophy.

OED, good:"1. having the right or desired qualities; satisfactory, adequate. " See, a definition of good is highly possible. — Metaphysician Undercover

You said:

The important point here, is that it is possible to define "good", therefore it is possible to judge biases on the basis of this definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

So, when you answer with the textbook definition of what "good" is, you clearly show that you simply don't understand english or are unable to interpret text correctly enough to understand what I actually asked you to define. I asked you define what good is in relation to how you use the value of "good" to be applied to a "good" or "bad bias.

So, with the textbook definition of "good" that you provided, how do you arrive at a conclusion that a bias have "right", "desired", "satisfactory", "adequate" qualities and not the opposite to those definitions?

All those definitions of "good" are just as arbitrary as the word "good", which means it doesn't matter that you have the textbook definition of "good", you still need to apply the arbitrary value as an objective category for the bias you are evaluating.

In essence, how do you find out if a bias is "right"? If a bias is "desired"? If a bias is "satisfactory"? if a bias is "adequate"? Without it being an arbitrary value for the bias?

Because, as you should know about deduction and induction, the premises need to be true, they cannot be arbitrary opinions or else your argument fails.

It is this simple semantic logic that renders your entire conclusion about "good" and "bad" biases broken and you seem totally oblivious to it.

Right, the photon causes itself to have a wavefunction breakdown. Tell me another, buddy. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I said, you don't understand quantum physics, or you only care for your subjective understanding and won't care for the objective, just as you don't do with psychology. And if you don't seem to understand the simple semantics of the above, then how would I ever be able to explain quantum physics to you?

As I explained, it was your premise that biases are bad, undesirable, or whatever words you used in your anti-bias rhetoric. From this premise I produce the logic to demonstrate that if some biases are bad, then some must also be good. If the logic was faulty, you'd be able to show why, instead of just repeatedly asserting that it is faulty. In reality, it is only the premise which you insist on, that biases are not desirable, which potentially makes the argument unsound. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's a difference between saying that biases are bad for rational and critical thinking, and saying there are "good and bad biases". So you form a counter-argument based on a misunderstanding of what I wrote, which means the counter-argument becomes misaligned in the discussion.

You need to demonstrate examples of good biases and how you deductively arrive at valuing them as good. Otherwise you are begging the question.

I already explained why what you propose is impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are you talking about? I pointed out that your argument requires you to unbiasedly show what is a good bias and what is a bad bias in order to conclude that nothing can be argued without bias.

I pointed out that you break your own logic by saying that nothing can be argued without bias and then explains how we need an unbiased system to know what is good or bad. It is a never ending circular argument.

You are being inconsistent. If you take an anti-bias position, as you do, then you imply that biases are bad. If biases were neutral, then there would be no need for an anti-bias position. However, your description of how we "gravitate toward something", along with the premise that the actions produced from such a gravitation may be judged as good or bad, produces the valid conclusion that biases may be judged as good or bad. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you saying there are no neutral things that we can sense is of negative to us? Death is neutral, but we sense it as negative. Nature is neutral, can it be negative towards you?

Bias is neutral because it is a natural phenomena. This neutral phenomena makes it problematic for us to conduct critical thinking as our basic psychology works against us. Another thing that is a neutral phenomena is our sexuality, but our society isn't built for the type of sexuality that exist in nature. We don't go around and have sex with everything around us. We are able to suppress and behave outside of these biological systems in order to function better in society.

The same goes for bias, it is a psychological phenomena related to how we process reality, it is part of the fight or flight system to summarize our perception and cognition in order to act adaptively faster than what would happen if we were to process each moment by that specific moments summery of information around us. It is neutral.

If I describe how bias is bad for critical thinking then you need to understand what that means. The neutral phenomena of bias makes it hard for our mind to process complex concepts without conforming to presupposed groupings of information. This is the psychology of bias. The bias itself is neutral, the effect it has on critical thinking is bad.

Which is why I say that philosophy's purpose is to remove bias or reduce bias as much as possible when we attempt critical thinking to solve a problem or construct a new concept. Because if we ignore it we will only be able to construct new ideas that are influenced by prejudice in the premisses for the conclusion of that idea.

So, just like some opinions may be judged as good, and some judged as bad, because they influence behaviour in this way, the same can be said for biases. The word "bias" being used to describe how we "gravitate", and such gravitation may be be judged as good or bad. — Metaphysician Undercover

The problem with your argument is still how you judge what is good or bad in the first place. How do you judge it? You need to explain that because it is at the core of your argument.

Unbiased reasoning is impossible. I explained that to you already, and I think Mww did too. You are ignoring this very important fact. Premises are biases, and we cannot reason without premises. Notice the prefix, "pre" in the word "premise". The premise is what we enter the reasoning process with, as a preexisting assumption, a "prejudice". A skeptic might subject the premise to analysis, and a reasoning process, to judge for soundness, but that reasoning process would itself require premises, which would need the same skeptical treatment, and this would create the appearance of infinite regress. Since it is impossible to proceed through an infinity of premises for skeptical analysis, we must conclude that all reasoning is biased, due to the biased nature of the premises. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is not impossible, it is called critical thinking. Mww didn't say that either, if you read our discussion we are more in agreement than I think you interpreted.

What you are doing here is a false dichotomy. Unbiased thinking does not turn off the natural bias in human psychology, it is a process of reducing bias. To remove bias from an argument is to spot the bias you have when conducting critical thinking so you can remove it from the argument. That process is not "being able to think without bias". When I describe a mental process of unbiased thinking I'm describing the process of spotting biases and detach them from the line of thought required to form a concept or idea. It has never been about transcending to a place of non-bias, it has always been about mental tools and methods for being aware of bias and actively excluding them from the argument that is being constructed.

This is clearly wrong. Such a goal is logically impossible to obtain, therefore it is irrational to hold it as a goal. Any attempt to obtain what is demonstrably impossible, is an irrational attempt. When a proposed goal is known to be impossible, we need to dismiss it as a goal, and adopt something which is possible, as our goal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Only if you adhere to false dichotomy about this. You are proposing a black & white error in reasoning by saying this is clearly wrong because you don't seem to understand the concept of unbiased reasoning and summarize it as trying to remove bias completely rather than it being a tool to spot and suppress bias. That you interpret me saying "reduce bias" with "remove bias" shows this false dichotomy in play here.

The method is logic itself. We use logic to assess biases. You need to allow a separation, in principle between the form (logical process) and the content (beliefs which constitute biases). With this separation we have in principle, i.e. in theory, a pure unbiased process, logic. However, such a pure unbiased process would be absolutely useless because it would not be applied, and application requires content. But inherent within the content is bias. You might talk about some pie-in-the-sky conclusions which are totally free of bias, but those would just be meaningless symbols with no content. If we give meaning to the symbols (content), then we add bias to the system. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are not showing how you can evaluate what is a good and bad bias. You are basically describing my own theory of duality in mind for critical thinking, just in other form. So you are basically saying that we need critical thinking, which is unbiased in form, in order to evaluate what is a good or a bad bias? You describe a separation in which one part is evaluating the other through logic, which is the same as what I describe when talking about mentally stepping back and observing the automatic self at a distance, spotting its behavior of biases and categorizing them as blockages of the concept being formed.

This is why I find what you write confusing, because you counter-argue what I write, but then enforce the same notion of critical thinking that I'm already talking about.

This is where you show your inconsistency. You are speaking anti-bias, yet claiming biases are neutral. If you really believed that biases are neutral, then you'd need to jump over the fence to my position, and drop your anti-biased approach, because anti-bias would be unfounded. If biases are neutral, then you have no reason to be anti-bias, and your anti-bias attitude is irrational. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it is you who either doesn't read what I write carefully or misunderstand me so much that you form the false dichotomy that makes you argue against me based on that misunderstanding. I don't have to jump over the fence to anywhere because I've been consistent in what I write, you have just misinterpret it.

However, since you describe biases as a form of "gravitation", which implies an inclination to act, it is really the case that biases, according to this description are not neutral at all. These acts of gravitation can be judge as good or bad, and so the inclination toward them, produced by the biases, can also be judged in that way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Gravity is neutral, how do you interpret gravity as "an inclination to act"? I mean gravitation in its literal sense. But you attribute gravitation to acts of good and bad, I really don't understand how you reason in this? It's basically a wild misinterpretation of what I write and then you form a large concept around that misinterpretation before saying I'm wrong.

You need to start with understanding what I write before counter-arguing, otherwise you will just tumble down in a rabbit hole of confusion. Read what I wrote again:

biases are neutral forms of gravitation towards certain things — Christoffer

Carefully. Biases... are a neutral form (a neutral psychological process that is a part of how our mind works) of gravitation (like gravity in standard physics, pulling) towards certain things (the belief that our mind filter certain information through).

This is your inconsistency. You assert "biases are neutral", yet you describe them as something which can be judged for goodness or badness. If they are inclinations toward action, "gravitation", they can be judged in that way, therefore they are not neutral. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again,

Bias is a neutral process.

The negative effect that bias has on critical thinking makes bias bad for reaching valid conclusions.

I'm not the one who attribute biases to be either good or bad, that is you:

Philosophy is concerned with distinguishing good biases from bad, such that the good can be cultured. And, it may be argued that other disciplines like science and religion deal with culturing biases. Whether such biases are bad or good is a judgement for philosophy to make. — Metaphysician Undercover

Then you describe gravitating as an action, when its use in its literal sense as gravity. It is not an act, it is an event.

So, you are wildly misinterpreting what I write and form large objections out of this misinterpretation.

Your misunderstanding is clear here. You do not acknowledge the reality that it is impossible to argue without bias — Metaphysician Undercover

False dichotomy again. Unbiased thinking is not removal of bias it is spotting bias and reduction of bias when forming an argument or concept.

It's the process of arguing with bias that is bad, not that there are bad biases. — Christoffer

To explain again, the process of arguing with bias is bad, not that there are values attributed to different biases, that is once again your stance as per the quote earlier. In critical thinking, a vital part is unbiased reasoning, this is the process of spotting what biases that appear in your reasoning so that you can tackle them. It is not to be able to reason free of bias. "Unbiased" is a clearly defined term that exists, it isn't made up here by me.

Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation.

This is an expression of your failure to separate the reasoning process (form) from the subject matter (content) being argued. If a person adheres to the proper reasoning process, bias does not manipulate the ability to reason. However, biases will influence the conclusion because the same bias which goes into the content of the premises will be reflected in the conclusions. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it's a failure of understanding my writing on your part. To once again explain my own writing in detail:

"Bias is a natural and neutral manipulation of the ability to reason outside of your own beliefs."

Bias is a neutral psychological phenomena that is manipulating our ability to reason outside our beliefs, because "beliefs" in this psychological definition is describing whatever group of current information that is helping us speeding up our cognition in order to process reality around us based on pre-programmed prediction models through past information. I'm talking about psychology here, how our minds work and what bias means in our thought process. Because of this process we have a constant process of bias being a filter in front of new information, a filter that distorts our ability to produce new concepts that aren't influenced by our own prejudices. These psychological prejudices have the function of enabling us to act fast and not get stuck in cognitive loops whenever we try to do any type of basic task or problem solving in everyday life.

This manipulation and suppression of our ability to reason outside of these cognitive faster lanes of thinking requires us to find methods of suppressing this internal process in order to reason more objectively.

If you don't understand what I'm talking about here, then its no wonder you misinterpret everything I write.

There is no circular argument here, "good" is definable, and as such, that definition will provide a grounding, a base or foundation. That I have not defined it is irrelevant to my argument. There is no need to define it until you accept the reality that it has a purpose, and needs to be defined. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are talking about a universalized good and bad since you position them as foundational, so of course you have to define it. You position there to be a definable good, you propose it to be an axiom that will function as a foundation for all further reasoning. That is a high claim to make and requires you to provide an example.

Can you provide ANY example that functions as such an axiom of foundation?

The important point here, is that it is possible to define "good", therefore it is possible to judge biases on the basis of this definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

Demonstrate it, quote something or whatever, I want to see an example of this since it is over and over the core of what you write. Since you position such a strong "you are wrong" against me I want you to demonstrate that I am wrong by showing an example of forming such an axiomatic value of a bias.

You need to read some of the material I mentioned, or others. It's a lot of reading. Here's the simple form of the argument though. There's two basic premises. 1) A living body exists as an organized body. 2) When a body comes into existence it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else. Do you see that the necessity of 2) requires a cause? That a thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, requires a cause of the thing being the thing which it is. Without that cause there is no "thing", which is an ordered structure, only disordered randomness.

And the cause of a thing necessarily pre-exists, temporally, the material being of the thing. In the case of 1), the organized living body, the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul. Notice that the soul is necessarily non-bodily, or non-material, as necessarily prior to the being of the body. You can rebut by saying that there is no need to label that cause as "soul", but what's the point? We still need to recognize the reality of that cause, so taking its name away is not going to be helpful.

That is an extremely simplified rendition of an understanding of the soul, but if you show an attempt to understand, I will expound for you, if you have questions. — Metaphysician Undercover

1) A living body exists as an organized body. 2) When a body comes into existence it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else. Do you see that the necessity of 2) requires a cause? That a thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, requires a cause of the thing being the thing which it is. Without that cause there is no "thing", which is an ordered structure, only disordered randomness. — Metaphysician Undercover

How is this not just biology? Animals have sex, biology produce a body, the nature of the body is the result of evolutionary changes to form that body. The reason the body is what it is, is due to the genetical information guiding the cellular formation based on previous evolutionary guidance in relation to the environment of past lineage of that species.

These premises have nothing to do with how a body becomes. It is perfectly explainable through biology and physics.

So then:

And the cause of a thing necessarily pre-exists, temporally, the material being of the thing. In the case of 1), the organized living body, the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul. Notice that the soul is necessarily non-bodily, or non-material, as necessarily prior to the being of the body. You can rebut by saying that there is no need to label that cause as "soul", but what's the point? We still need to recognize the reality of that cause, so taking its name away is not going to be helpful.

That is an extremely simplified rendition of an understanding of the soul, but if you show an attempt to understand, I will expound for you, if you have questions. — Metaphysician Undercover

The reason matter forms into the body is because of energy (primarily from the sun) forming into matter through the natural ecosystem. At the stage initial state of impregnation, the matter that is consumed by the mother forms the matter of the child during the growth process, after birth the same process continues but in the child's own form consuming matter.

You boil down to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the premises. Neither of them can be deductively formed into "the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul." That is a perfect example of you using your conclusion in the same form as "because God". It is biased to a belief in a soul, there is no evidence of a soul in this argument you propose.

The cause you are talking about is an invention that precedes the arguments and its premises. You ignore biology and talks about some abstract cause that has nothing to do with the actual formation of a body or consciousness.

You are also not explaining the soul in any common understanding of it. It is neither explained in psychological terms or biological. It is basically the first cause argument that always ends in "because God."

Let's break down the premises

Premise 1: This premise asserts that a living organism is a structured and organized entity. It implies that there is an inherent order and arrangement in a living body.

This is either just intelligent design or just an obvious observation of the state of a physical thing.

Premise 2: When a body comes into existence, it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else.
This premise suggests that when a body comes into being, it takes on a specific identity and nature. It cannot be something different from what it is.

This formation is biology based on genetics and the environment, basically nature and nurture. It cannot be something other than forming from that, it is also just an obvious observation.

Conclusion: The necessity of premise 2 requires a cause.
Claiming that the fact that a body has a specific identity and nature requires a cause. In other words, there must be something that determines and brings about the body's specific form and characteristics.

And this is basically nature, biology, genetics, evolution etc. Nothing in this cause has any connection to "soul". It is basically ignoring what we know about biology and physics, applying a cause that is supernatural in the form of something external to reality, neither proven or supported by the premises of this argument.

This argument is biased to a belief in the soul. It is presupposing a soul before making an argument for it. There is no connection between the conclusion that the "cause" is a soul and the premises and there's no connection between "cause" and soul other than just saying that it is.

So no, you haven't proven the existence of a soul. You have proven there to be a cause of a body's existence, which is not a soul. You have not proven why that existence isn't the result of biological and physics causes.

This is wrong. A photon is not measurable as a wave. Hence the so-called wave function collapse whenever a measurement is attempted. This is analogous to the argument for the soul above. The particle, photon, or electron, is the ordered "thing", the body with material existence. Its existence, through wave function collapse, requires a cause. Without that cause there is no thing, and without the soul there is no living body. — Metaphysician Undercover

You apparently have no knowledge in physics. The wave function collapse occurs due to the photon being affected by itself producing a collapse in different realities down to a single outcome, depending on schools of interpretation in quantum physics. The cause that you mention is itself, demonstrated by the experiment and it is not analogous to your broken argument for the soul. A photon is a boson particle that is a real thing, if you don't believe this, just travel to CERN and speak with people who actually knows these things.

It is stuff like this that informs me why you are so deeply confused by what I write. Your mind seem to wonder all over the place and you have no insight into how broken your arguments are in their logic.

Wouldn’t that be bias in its conventional sense? Or perhaps, if not conventional, then psychological? — Mww

I'd say that's akin to basic confirmation bias, but your previous post described bias pretty well. In the simplest form, a bias is simply a statistical pull towards a preferred state. It can be aesthetical in that I prefer red wine because of taste and therefor I would argue that red wine is better than other forms of drinks. And it can be larger in that I am afraid of the implications of nothing after death so I seek comfort in anything that says there's something after death and because of it I start to defend religious claims of the afterlife.

It is part of normal human cognition and probably normal for any type of physical system as well, purely in statistical terms. But it doesn't have an intrinsic value of good and bad, it is a neutral phenomena. And because it affects all as a natural thing, we need to fight this natural instinct just as we have cultivated other cultural behaviors that took us from an animal state to a societal state. Just as any other instinct that we humans have as animals, we should fine-tune our behavior to be everyday vigilant of how bias affects us and our thinking. Just as we don't shit on the floor, hit someone who stands in our way and do not speak our deepest minds in every conversation, I think people should form a new cultural behavior in being aware of biases. Just being more aware could change how we process new information and interact during conflicts.

That may be true, and you would fare none the worse for it. But you’re forced to admit the possibility of those that do not hold such fear. Makes sense, doesn’t it, that if there is no knowledge, empirical knowledge that is, of something, then how can it be known as sufficient to cause fear? With so much being unknown, just seems quite wasteful to fear it all, so why bother deciding which is worth fearing and which isn’t, when all of it is equally unknown?

Besides, if it be granted knowledge is experience, then to fear the unknown is to fear an experience never had. I’ve been both remorseful and quite happy regarding experiences I’ve never had, but I’d categorically deny being afraid of them. — Mww

I don't think we can change the fear of the unknown as a state since it doesn't really relate to an awareness of the concept, but rather a psychological state of our human condition. It is part of our fight or flight mechanisms, we fear the darkness as we don't know the dangers within. This, as so many other things in our psychology has shaped even our higher levels of thinking. So I've never met anyone who's truly unafraid of the unknown, it is part of our basic psyche.

I get what you’re aiming for, but I submit there is no escape from oneself. There is, not the detachment from, but only the relaxing of, one mental space in order to favor the other, and the space being called upon is determined by the certainty required.

I’ll admit though, that this kind of rationality makes explicit the intrinsic duality of human nature. If one doesn’t accede to such duality, then he’s welcome to philosophize under conditions where it isn’t necessarily the case. — Mww

Yes, we cannot split our brain in physical two, the duality cannot be real, only simulated. But I position it to be such a simulated space. Just like you can run a virtual operating system within the operating system on a computer in order to run tests that are dangerous for the main system, we can reject inhabiting a concept or idea until it has been tested in this simulated or virtual space. Just like Einstein's Gedanken labs we mentally distance ourselves and evaluate rather than trying to inhabit the space.

What are foundational premisses? You will know that foundationalism in physics is a contested issue, due to the many conundrums and imponderables thrown up by quantum mechanics. Foundationalism in mathematics was likewise called into question by Godel. Rudolf Carnap said 'In science there are no 'depths'; there is surface everywhere.' The tendency in 20th century philosophy has been to avoid foundational claims altogether which are typically regarded as the province of metaphysics and idealist philosophy. — Wayfarer

I think you are making semantical connections where there are none. Foundational premisses in this context simply means the foundation of the argument for the conclusion, not an "ism", just the basic structure of an argument. And my point was that rationalism in a comparison to positivism, does not need empirical observation as a requirement for the argument's premisses, but rather that the premisses have a logic in its reasoning.

It is commonplace to disregard all religious texts as dogma from the start. But in the Western philosophical tradition, much of what was great in pre-modern philosophy had been absorbed (or appopriated) by theology, and so has been rejected because of this association. And I would contend that these are the sources of foundational insights, at the origin of metaphysics. — Wayfarer

And this is what I've said as well, just that it is vital to understand such insights as exploratory and not deductive claims about reality. We can have profound insight into the human condition, without there needing to be a scientific realm to it, as long as the claims doesn't conclude as objective facts about reality. We can speak of "soul" as exploratory concepts, but if anyone claims the soul to be a real thing, they have a burden of proof to such a claim and if that proof is simply a religious belief, it is not philosophy anymore, but evangelism.

However, scientific objectivity does not do justice to this idea, as within it there is no room for the subject of experience. — Wayfarer

Yes, there is, as long as that experience is discussed exploratory and not as objective claims that otherwise require scientific evidence. But even so, as I pointed out in rationalism vs positivism, you can still use critical thinking and logic when exploring topics of experience to find inductive arguments which isn't really possible in positivism due to its requirement of factual observations.

Most other traditions prize practice above creedal orthodoxy: Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do — Karen Armstrong, Metaphysical Mistake

If I return to what I wrote in the other thread about "if science will replace religion", it is what I mentioned there that the "do" is an important part that many atheists ignore as an important realm of religion. My position there was that there should be more effort to include the practices of rituals and traditions without incorporating the fantasies of religious belief. That "rituals" and "traditions" are not religious in themselves, but functions as acts that are important for our well being. Rituals, for instance, can be anything repeatable that doesn't need to have an obvious practical reason in everyday life.

Non-religious calligraphy is an example of something that does not require any religious aspect, but still functions as a ritual that can have a massive impact on our mental well-being.

We can "do" without the belief, and I'm a big promoter of such practices as part of everyday life as help ground the mind, lower stress and have the ability to produce a spiritual experience without the belief in the supernatural.

The insights of classical philosophy are not accessible to the common man, the hoi polloi, who are offered salvation on the basis of faith alone. That would appear to be in conflict with Christianity except that, a Christian would say, by the practice of charity and selflessness, those same depths can be realised even by the not-particularly-educated. But when belief becomes the defense of creedal orthodoxy in defense of polemic, then it's another matter. Religious practice is, or ought to be, 'a science of the self'. — Wayfarer

Yes, I agree. The problem is that there's no separation of the institution and the practice for most religious people. Since there's no clear focus on "the science of the self", the religious beliefs promoted by religious institutions become the norm and center rather than the self. Even if someone has the goal of converting to a religion on the basis of self-exploration, they are soon blasted with the "truths" of the institution and learns that they will never be able to reach their wanted goal if they don't accept the fantasy first. Basically, accept the belief dogma, or else never get salvation.

It is basically this that I think needs to change in society, there has to be a place for people wanting to explore the self without being conformed to group think, but religion in society is basically all institutionalized. Even independent spiritualists conform to a group of similar-minded inventing their own religious beliefs rather than exploring the self.

It is to a point so prevalent that I'm thinking it might be impossible to be in such a state without conforming to an institutional religious belief bias. And because of this I'd argue that a true science of the self requires a non-religious approach of self-exploration. In what form is hard to say, but as a personal experience, my exploration of my own self is a journey to understand my own psychology, my own inner workings. I have found that a purely rational and scientific exploration of my self to possess a sense of spiritual sensations without me adhering to any belief systems, institutional dogmas or fantasy, but purely out of a sense of journey to pure understanding my own biological entity and exploration of the experience of being one.

And no, don't agree that the insights of the Phaedo are merely superseded or obsolete — Wayfarer

It is not what I'm saying either, only that the arguments used rely on outdated understanding of the physical world and that the arguments need to be updated to the updated physics we have today, because they are a foundational part of that dialogue. We can't ignore that the claims about the physical world are false by what we know today in physics.

Rationalism and positivism are both scientific tools, they are complimentary imo.
The fork and knife together are better for eating most meals, compared to using the fork alone or the knife alone. — universeness

Rationalism and Positivism are two approaches in which positivism requires only that which can be observed and measured in such ways, which excludes things like theoretical physics. The problem with positivism is that science is just as much about precise prediction as it is about verifying through tests. Positivism is actually quite bad at science in that regard since almost all scientific methods rely on predictions that are later tested if possible. A positivist would have a hard time accepting Einstein's equations before anything was verified and they would likely oppose quantum mechanics, even when we have invented technology that relies on observations that haven't been verified as theories yet.

The main problems arise when folks insist that proposals arrived at via such as theology, metaphysics, personal intuition, or personal introspection, are fact or highly probably.
I think that is the basis of philosophical objections to religious claims, yes? — universeness

And yes, it is basically what I've been argued for, summarizing it as philosophy's purpose being about reducing or removing bias from reasoning. Because bias is a mental lean or gravitation towards a belief that has no actual support and then use that belief as the foundation for a truth claim. Because philosophy doesn't just function as a tool against religious belief claims, it functions against any claim that has a biased belief built into it. And even when it is exploratory it is used to focus our thinking past our basic messy minds through removing our subjective influences, i.e our biases.

individualistic, idealist, and ahistorical arguments for unbiased thinking--which is revealed to be quite biased itself (not to say that it's a bad bias, necessarily). — Jamal

I'd like to hear in what way it is biased? There's been many and long arguments between different points of views so I'd like to hear how you arrive at that summery.

It is also philosophical in nature, especially rooted in Nihilism (or can be from Philosophical Pessimism and similar philosophy such as: Antinatalism, Efilism, Depressive Realism, Promortalism) — niki wonoto

Could you describe in more detail what your specific ideas are regarding your own existential views?

Christoffer - do you have any views on Spinoza’s philosophy? — Wayfarer

I'd argue that I favor Spinoza's rationalism far more than positivism. I would even argue that even if positivists are closely related to science, even in science we have theoretical physics which can arrive at objective discoveries through math without actual observations, which positivists require. Positivists become blocked by their own methods while in science the theoretical and deductive can guide where to look, test and observe in order to verify. So I'd say, that even from a purely scientific perspective, Spinoza's rationalist approach has more practical use and function than positivism.

Perhaps you’re right, but that in itself is a bias, re: embracing a mere comfort, albeit in the negative.

“… Here, therefore, is a case where no answer is the only proper answer. For a question regarding the constitution of a something which cannot be cogitated by any determined predicate, being completely beyond the sphere of objects and experience, is perfectly null and void..…”
———— — Mww

Still, we don't embrace it, the unknown is uncomfortable and emotions is of great importance to the self-programming of our thinking. Which, leads to us seeking out the comfortable ideas that can explain it, even when unexplainable. In essence, we become religious and biased to that religion if we let that fear program us into certain concepts just because they remove that fear and comfort us.

I have never met a single entity that does not fear the unknown. We can be intrigued and curious about the unknown, but it is at the very core of human fear and fear is one of the strongest emotions we have, emotions that program our natural thinking process.

Biases are themselves arguments, properly referred to as conclusions of aesthetic judgements, formed nonetheless in a mental space, a non-cognitive mental space. It is thereby self-contradictory to suppose a bias-free mental space, when it is in a mental space where all biases reside. It follows that the determination of good or bad relative to an aesthetic judgement, itself merely a judgement contingent on the first, still presupposes the mental space in which it occurs. — Mww

That is a good description of biases. But I wouldn't call biases arguments themselves. The process of our mind concluding an aesthetic judgment is as you say a bias, but it is not an argument, it is more related to an emotional response or judgement out of emotions. Just like when I experience art I do not form an argument on why I like it, it is an emotional response that forms a preference.

So yes, we can argue that nothing is unbiased in our normal thinking, but that's not really what I am proposing or describing. I'm writing about methods to avoid bias. Methods to primarily structure your argumentative thinking and thought process so that you become aware of your biases and force yourself to turn the arguments premises or concept around and view everything from another perspective. As principles of a praxis in reasoning so that you do not let your biases shape and form your conclusion.

In the analogy of the gallery, I tried to describe this difference by describing the state of being unaware of your biases when forming an argument as like being a statue in which your identity and your opinions/arguments are one and the same. You cannot view your own neck, you cannot move or look around, you cannot form a holistic view or get closer to other statues. If you instead detach yourself and imagine yourself as an individual who explores ideas and concepts as separate objects that can be studied at a distance, you can force yourself to detach yourself from the emotions that manipulate your reasoning and in so doing, be able to see your biases standing there as their own statues while reviewing all sides of them together with all sides of the statue that forms the argument and concept you are trying to create.

It's a form of stoic approach to reasoning, not just through stepping back from emotion, but stepping back from existing purely as a subjective being, in order to detach yourself from living inside the argument yourself and be able to instead view it from a distance and all perspectives. The better at this a person is, the better they are at knowing themselves and their biases. They can argue for something and understand what aesthetic judgement they instinctively have because they essentially approach their own ideas as if they were proposed by another person.

….. judgement is a peculiar gift, which does not and cannot require instruction but only exercise, biases are often as easily overcome as they are established. — Mww

And judgement is sharpened and fine-tuned and becomes more automatic the more a method of detachement is exercised.

Essentially, as we aren't robots, anyone's initial reaction is emotional. We reject or embrace. The novice falls into either camp through their biases without knowing or understanding how or why. The scholar, on the other hand, understands the concepts of biases and emotions, understands how they function, understands the definitions and concepts of reasoning. But they let all of that knowledge exist in the same internal place, without a defined form, existing inside them without boundaries between them as a single entity. The scholar is almost like Mary in the black and white room, they understand all the details but doesn't know them as there are no separation between them. Then there is the master, who have trained their mind to function in a detached and distant perspective from their emotional identity. They won't reject or embrace anything before a concept has been studied in relation to other concepts. They only acknowledge that something is in fact a concept and idea, never attempting to apply critical thinking to it without it first being detached from themselves and their identity and emotions. Intuitively understands how incoming information is affected by biases and that aesthetic judgement is not the same as critical thinking.

The master is essentially a duality of a person, living with two internal sides; one as the automatic identity, like the unconscious mind moving through time, while the other is the conscious mind, studying. One is emotional, judging, reacting, biased and acting on instinct. The other one is standing back and observing the first and all information that it consumes, it observes how the bias creates judgements, how emotions drive actions, but it accepts this as separate from studying the information. Over time, the second one forms the foundation of the first one by objectively studying the information it consumes and how it reacts as part of pure understanding.

The concept is to split yourself and live with one part that is emotional, biased and automatic, while the other is an invention that you force being an observer and researcher of the first. By letting these two sides internally argue you essentially reach clarity about your own shortcomings and biases. Just knowing about the concepts that limit our ability to form logical conclusions or understand something on a deeper level isn't enough to effectively have a functional internal reasoning, we essentially need to function as two different people who are locked in an eternal argument.

Since the best way to spot our own biases and shortcomings in reasoning is to discuss with another person who evaluate our ideas, we can use this as a mental method and thought process in order to function better in reasoning as an individual, even if it requires to always live in this split form and always internally argue between the two internal sides.

Do you mean not subject to empirical validation, according to the standards of science?

The problem I have is that you're casting your net too wide when you denegrate anything that can be described as 'religious' in those terms. If you said 'fundamentalist' or 'dogmatic', then I might agree. — Wayfarer

Maybe fundamentalist and dogmatic are good descriptions if it summarizes the arguments as being ignorant of valid objections to them. I.e they dismiss reworking the argument based on valid criticism.

It doesn't need to be of empirical scientific validation, but at least logical and hold together without unsupported claims as foundational premises. Writing out poetics and fantasy within an argument is all good and well as long as they aren't functioning as being logical sources for the conclusion's validity.

I really dislike reading pure logic in philosophy, I like the writer to have some skills in painting their idea with some colors, it's just that the internal logic of the argument needs to have some consistency that isn't just within the mind of the writer (i.e biased to that internal belief).

And then there need to be a clarity in what an argument is doing. Is it asking questions, exploring a concept, or is it making a statement, a conclusion. I think many confuse a claim/conclusion with exploration and starts to make conclusions without actual support in the text (in an exploratory text) or make a poetic and exploratory text when they should bind together clear premises for a conclusion (making it muddy, looking at you Hegel!).

Then it is also vital what type of philosophy you are writing about. If we're doing moral philosophy, then the logic has to connect to human behavior and psychology, which can be messy and factual claims can be tricky with the whole ought/is problem. But if we are discussing philosophy that relate to facts about the world, such as physics and cosmology, then there's no point in making claims that have little to no roots in what has actually been scientifically measured and tested. Ignoring that is pure bias towards the beliefs of the writer.

So, we can go into pages of details in this epistemological overview of philosophy, but the guiding principles is that the more scientifically factual a claim, the more empirical it needs to be and the more phenomenological or focused on the human experience, the more exploratory it should be. But regardless of that, bias has a negative play. Even in the most exploratory writings there has to exist some internal logic that can be somewhat universalized and not just function within the beliefs and mind of the writer.

Suffice to say that the aims of the Buddhist teaching are conceived in terms of liberation from the ongoing cycle of death and rebirth (saṃsāra) and realisation of the state of Nirvāṇa. The account of the Buddha's awakening, based on the oral tradition, preserves the record of this as the Buddha is said to have realised it. The realisation of this state is something that subsequent generations of Buddhists are understood to have re-traced and re-capitulated (which is why, for example, the term 'Buddha' is not limited to one individual, but designates a class of being.)

Buddhist cultures have incorporated traditional cosmological models, which are clearly empirically unsupportable in light of current science. But then, the Dalai Lama has acknowledged that "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” However he's also said “What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter.” — Wayfarer

That type of anti-bias is in the realm of philosophy. It recognizes that empirical evidence demands a change to arguments and ideas, which is how philosophy should progress through history. The important part, however, is to distinguish a conclusion/claim of truth based on exploratory reasoning and one based on deductive logic. I'm objecting against making any conclusion or claim that only has exploratory writing underneath, since there are no actual premises in such arguments to support any actual claim.

The first part related to the cycle of death and rebirth is exploratory arguments that cannot conclude with actual claims of death and rebirth in the traditional sense of reincarnation. But they are exploratory in the way they link to ideas about cycles, in nature, in thinking, in history etc. Such ideas does not have truth-claims, but are observable explorations of holistic concepts about the life, death and the universe (and people like Schopenhauer took inspiration from). As long as we view them as exploratory, just like with Phaedo, they are profoundly important as concepts and frameworks of exploration. We could also stretch them to agnostic dialogues about actual reincarnation, but the important part is to be careful not to slip into making truth claims that functions on pure belief alone.

There are elements (I won't call them ideas) within religious culture that are indispensable to the human condition even acknowledging that whatever about them has been shown to be false by scientific methods ought to be revised or discarded. — Wayfarer

I agree, which is why I focus on philosophical claims either changing or are reworked based on new discoveries and understanding in science, or understanding concepts as explorations in thought that doesn't claim truths.

It's when religious truth claims and conclusions are made based purely on the belief biased to that religion that it stops being philosophy and becomes biased delusion. It's when the filter of religious bias or any bias exists as a closed door for further exploration, making someone stand their ground purely based on their belief, or that they become confused as to what is a truth claim and what is exploration in their reasoning.

At back of this debate are conceptions of reality. Does reality comprise physical objects determined by physical laws (that is, scientific materialism/physicalism)? Alternatives include various schools of idealism, dualism, panpsychism, and phenomenology - none of which are necessarily religious in nature. It is possible to argue the case without reference to religion, although rejection of physicalism might often suggest philosophical views that seem close to religion - too close for comfort, for a lot of people. — Wayfarer

In this I have to agree that the line I draw around the definition of philosophy and its purpose becomes more leaned towards certain schools than others. While I think all have exploratory functions and importance for the ability to reach depth in any subject, some schools of thought sometimes goes too far into "anything goes" and in my opinion that just blows up any ability to agree upon any definition of philosophy or for anyone to be able to reach any foundation of knowledge for existence itself. Arguments like the "brain in the vat", for example, while interesting, has become a go to claim that just dismisses the entire fields of neuroscience and psychology whenever someone tries to make philosophical claims based on that scientific foundation.

If there aren't any foundational agreements about how we approach reality (like accepting verified scientific results), then it simply becomes "anything goes". And of course knowing the difference between truth claims and exploration. We can explore ideas about the mind that are wildly speculative and perhaps even spiritual, as long as no one claims truths that have no foundation in verified science about the mind.

It is within confusing this difference between conclusions and exploration that I think most fail in philosophy. Both in writing and in reading.

Yes, this is exactly the issue, how are we to determine good biases from bad. You were talking as if all biases are bad, but now you appear to accept that some might be good. So, on what bases are we going to distinguish good biases from bad biases? — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm asking in a larger critical context. Because there's a faulty logic in claiming there to be good biases and bad biases when such claims are values that essentially requires a detachment from bias in the first place in order to reach a claim of what is good or bad.

Which means that the argument fails by its own logic and becomes circular reasoning. You claim there to be good and bad biases, but to reach those values you need to be unbiased and in doing so you are doing what I'm talking about, unbiased reasoning.

Bias is neutral, there are no good or bad values. In human reasoning and cognition it is merely a description of how the we gravitate towards something based on our emotions or paths of least resistance in our thought processes. Basically because it's part of how our minds work. Our minds seek patterns and summarize reality without rationality, much more than actually understanding a detailed and holistic view that is objective or detached from our cognition. To do that we need to apply a method that we follow and train ourselves to process what we learn and experience in a more careful way.

No, like I explained, biases are a natural and essential part of being human. Therefore it is impossible to be bias-free, and any attempt at "not having a pre-existing belief bias" would be a completely unrealistic attempt due to that impossibility. Such an attempt would just turn into a matter of gravitating toward keeping the biases which one is comfortable with, and eliminating the others, because it is impossible to not have any bias. Then we end up still having biases and no principles for distinguishing which biases we ought to have and ought not have. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, biases are natural, but they are not good or bad as you claim since such values are arbitrary. And if we are talking about knowledge biases, yes, everyone has biases and therefor it is the purpose of unbiased methods of reasoning to improve our ability to reach conclusions and truths that are objective or broad rather than the subjective truths of our stupid minds. Without methods like this we are simply just spitting out opinions that cannot be foundations for concepts that function in a broader context and society, they just become like any twitter thread: a long line of irrelevant noise biased towards each individual subject's beliefs.

I think you are mixing together praxis with bias. Philosophy focuses on unbiased reasoning in order to sometimes reach a praxis that we use in society. That doesn't mean "good bias" or "bad bias", it simply means that something like Kant's categorical imperatives are concepts that he argued for without biases to any beliefs and then we implement them as principles and praxis for how to figure out effective and functioning laws.

Your proposed "detachment from bias" is unrealistic, impossible for a human being to achieve, analogous to a mind separated from its body. It is not the human condition, nor is it a possible condition for a human being, so forget about it, and move along to something more realistic. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is not. It is, as I've been saying, a core tenet of philosophy.

Do you accept as true, the proposition that "perfect understanding" is impossible for human beings to obtain. If so, then you ought to recognize that your goal of being bias-free is not a reasonable goal for a human being. This conclusion necessitates a completely different approach to biases. Instead of attempting to reject all biases as fundamentally unwanted, we need to accept that it is impossible to reject all biases, therefore we need some principles by which we can decide which to reject. Do you see that these "principles" cannot themselves be biases, but more of a versatile, or universal method for assessing biases. — Metaphysician Undercover

The goal of philosophy is to reduce bias in reasoning and arguments. Without doing so, you are not doing philosophy, you are just telling loose opinions and that is not philosophy, that is just normal talk.

Explain what this universal method of assessing biases is, because so far you are just saying that we need to arrive at good and bad biases, but what exactly is the process you propose? How do we arrive at such conclusions? How do you reach them? If you say that we cannot do anything without bias, then how do we reach an understanding of what are good and bad biases? It's just circular.

This is not true. My demonstration that there are good biases came from your assumption that there are bad biases. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm saying that biases are neutral forms of gravitation towards certain things and in doing without knowledge of doing so, it breaks any ability to form objective or universal reasoning that functions as broader understanding or universal truths for the many. It's the process of arguing with bias that is bad, not that there are bad biases. That is a faulty understanding of what bias is as a natural phenomena in human cognition and how it relates to unbiased reasoning.

The rest of your reasoning then becomes faulty because you interpret bias wrong in the first place.

Bias is a natural and neutral manipulation of the ability to reason outside of your own beliefs. Without mitigating it through unbiased reasoning methods, you fail to universalize your arguments to function as broader truths or claims.

Furthermore, all that is required to further this process, is a definition of what constitutes "good". Once we have that, we can judge biases as to whether or not they are consistent with, or have that quality. "Good" would be defined in such a way as to be a principle, to serve as a method for judging biases, without itself being a bias. — Metaphysician Undercover

How do you arrive at good? You just claim us to arrive at that without explaining how we arrive at that? It's basically like saying, "once we have the concept of good acts, we can then form principles of morality that we can follow", and then argue about some ideals that still requires the "good" to be defined. You still don't seem to see that this argument is faulty, that it is a circular argument in which you describe a system that relies on axioms that needs to be argued for and proven absolute, before you propose how to use them. You are only describing how to use them... whenever we arrive at having such axioms.

All that is required is to have a process for judging biases which is separate from the biases, a process being an activity, whereas a bias is a static belief. The process therefore cannot itself be a bias. This is why science is based in a method, "method" signifying a process. — Metaphysician Undercover

So... you are basically describing philosophy and critical thinking for arriving to a place in which you can judge biases? So, basically what my definition of philosophy is and the entire point of philosophy? To be able to do unbiased reasoning.

I think you have entangled yourself further into this circular reasoning.

It appears like you have the idea here, when you talk about a "method". But it is not a matter of acting "against" biases, as you state. Nor is it a detachment from bias, as this is impossible. It is simply a way of acting which recognizes the reality of biases and the need to cope with them. To deny them, or pretend a detachment is self-deception. — Metaphysician Undercover

But, it is not, because the methods are common practice in philosophy. It's how we structure deduction, induction, analogies, metaphors etc. They're based on a systematic framework for thinking and arriving at conclusions that challenge our biases so that we can think past them.

The problem is that you believe that because of the natural state of biases in our cognition, we are unable to work past them through methods and instead need to surrender and incorporate bias into our methods.

You still need to use unbiased methods and critical thinking in order to arrive at a value system for what is good or bad biases. So the main objection becomes, why should we not use such unbiased methods as a primary method for everything we try to figure out, seen as they are neutral and more universalized and doesn't rely on reasoning that is manipulated by biases?

Let me take what you say here about the "soul" ad make an analogy. The concept of "soul" is a very difficult and complex subject in philosophy. It requires great study to understand the soul, Plato's "Phaedo" is a good start. But then there is Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and many others. So when a learned philosopher makes a claim about "the soul as something actual", I would assume that this philosopher has some understanding about that matter. That philosopher probably even understands that Aristotle defines the soul as actual, and explains the logical reasoning why the soul must be defined as "actual". Therefore we cannot say that such a claim is "unsupported". — Metaphysician Undercover

Prove the soul's existence. That is the problem. How is any of what Phaedo describes supported other than through Ancient Greek's factual concepts of reality which were based on undeveloped methods of science? Concepts that are proven false with empirical evidence today.

That a learned philosopher's claim should be considered true because that philosopher has some arbitrary understanding of it, is basically appeal to authority.

"Soul" can be used as metaphor, we can use it as exploratory concepts, just like reincarnation, the cycle of life and death can be discussed as frameworks of broader subjects. But if you are to arrive at a supported claim of an actual existence of a soul, you definitely need to have deductive logic and even more so actual empirical evidence since this is a claim about reality. As I've described, these things change throughout history, but we are at a time in history where science is an empirical field of such accuracy that the demand on philosophy when making conclusions like "the human soul is real" requires a lot more than an "appeal to authority".

Today, Phaedo is not even close to a sound argument. The entire dialogue relies on false assumptions about physics and the universe. It relies on that time's understanding of reality, but that today is nothing more than pure belief.

The problem is that people today take the historical relevance of Phaedo as evidence for it being true in its conclusions. It is through what I describe as the confusion people have today on how to approach much of old and ancient philosophy as exploratory rather than deductive. The claims that are made have faulty logic when updating them today, so they should only be used as exploratory concepts used for metaphorical exploration of the idea about a soul.

A good example of this is Ghost in the Shell, in which the soul is called a ghost and through that the philosophical concept handles the digitalization of the self as a separate entity from the original body. You can use Phaedo when exploring these ideas, but the conclusions it propose are not factual or supported as deductive claims about the soul.

But you could call that a bias if you like. Then however, when a learned physicist refers to a photon as something actual, we should assume that the definitions produced from observations of the photoelectric effect which incline the physicists to speak of a photon as an actual thing, constitute a bias in the very same way. — Metaphysician Undercover

A photon is a real thing. It is measurable as both a wave and a particle in experiments like the wave function collapse in the double slit experiment. We also have inventions and technology that utilizes photons as well as all electronics that use things like electrons. It is not a bias to "believe a photon to be a real thing", it is an empirical truth that would otherwise make the computer you write on to be running on pure belief, which I doubt.

Now the point is that gravitating towards what is comfortable is not necessarily gravitating toward what is good. But people can be trained through good moral education to gravitate toward what is good and this is equally a "bias". In other words, biases can be good too. The issue though is that such training requires effort, and it is a special type of effort. It's the effort of the teacher, which is made for the good of the student, the effort we make to train our children. This effort doesn't bring any good to the one who makes the effort, it brings good to the one who receives the training. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course, but then again, what is good? How can you guarantee that the good that your moral education teaches people actually creates a good bias? What if your moral education isn't forming the good that you thought it would and people are now having a bias that is instead morally questionable?

To say this requires you to already have a bias towards what you believe is good and we are again back in the realm of belief and bias towards such beliefs.

Isn't it then better to have a neutral system of anti-bias so that good is always evaluated by not having a pre-existing belief bias?

I do not see how this is at all possible. Since our biases arise from our training, what we have been taught, they cannot at all be related to the unknown. Our biases are deeply seated in our knowledge, and anxiety toward the unknown is something completely different from bias. — Metaphysician Undercover

Our biases is us favoring certain knowledge over other. We favor those things out of our emotions, our craving for comfort. The comfortable "truth" is the one we defend and form our world-view on. This means we evaluate new knowledge not by their own merits, but by how they relate to the knowledge we favor, that we are comfortable with.

Therefore, detachment from bias makes us better at evaluating the knowledge we have and the knowledge we are confronted with.

And you even describe bias as providing a form of comfort, so how could this possibly arise from anxiety of the unknown? If there is anxiety of the unknown there is no comfort, and vise versa. Bias is related to the known, and if it exists as a sort of comfort, then it is a type of self-confidence in one's own knowledge which excludes one from such anxiety toward the unknown. But just like I explained above, bias does not necessarily direct one toward comfort, biases may direct us toward making an effort, which is clearly not a comfort. If the person is trained to have great respect for the unknown, and this would involve a certain amount of anxiety toward the unknown, then this sort of bias could certainly be good, as motivation toward scientific endeavours and such things which would help us obtain knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

The anxiety of the unknown is the anxiety towards the opposite of the knowledge that is comfortable. A comfortable "truth" is preferable to an uncomfortable horror of nothing. We don't embrace not knowing or non-knowledge as comfortable. So we are desperate to form knowledge, form some explanation. Even if that knowledge is wrong we don't care, it is the only answer we find comfortable in face of the opposite.

Comparably, there's another approach to this in eastern philosophy and that is to embrace the nothing, to apply a positive emotion to it. Rather than falling into bias, it trains you to accept the idea of not knowing as a positive state of mind. However, this is only good for the well-being of the self and does not function well in a progressive society that functions on developing mankind forward. The choice is for people to choose either path.

Bias is an error in perfect understanding. It blocks holistic perspectives and closes the mind to new ones.

You cannot conclude there to be good biases without first concluding an answer to what a good bias really is. And to form such an answer requires you to explore a moral realm without bias, since you would otherwise just apply your own bias of what you believe is good before concluding and applying it as a collective bias that others should follow.

So how would the teacher reach an objectively good bias?

So I think you have this completely wrong. Philosophy is not about countering biases. Biases are inevitable as a fundamental aspect of human existence. Philosophy is concerned with distinguishing good biases from bad, such that the good can be cultured. And, it may be argued that other disciplines like science and religion deal with culturing biases. Whether such biases are bad or good is a judgement for philosophy to make. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, how can you distinguish good biases from bad if you don't form arguments in a mental space where biases do not exist? How can you deconstruct something if it is essential to the human existence? That would imply that all of philosophy is circular reasoning, one bias following the next ad infinitum.

And yes, it is part of the human condition to have biases, it's part of our human psyche, which is why acting against it, understand it and understanding its behavior has been the single greatest method for human advancement. We cannot question the status quo without acting against our biases, without detachment from them.

Think about a society formed by some "good biases" that has been decided by philosophers. How does that society progress? If the good biases is the foundation of all knowledge and praxis in that society, how can people in that society expand their knowledge further and change? Isn't it exactly through thinking beyond biases that philosophers explore concepts further, evaluate previous ones and expand our understanding? This is what I'm talking about, biases locks people down, locks their thinking into a rigid system. And philosophy has always been about exploring concepts beyond the currently knowable, beyond the biases that exist.

Impossible. Can't be done. The term covers such a diverse range of cultural phenomena, that it has no single meaning. There are those who say that the word itself is an impediment. But one thing it's not, is a compendium of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles proposing a testable hypothesis. — Wayfarer

Ok, then let's take a step back here. It may be that I experience you misinterpreting what I'm saying due to us not agreeing on clearer definitions.

What I use the term "religion" for in this context is primarily in claims about reality, i.e in religious beliefs that have no supported claims either in facts or any logical framework. I'm not talking about the use of religious teachings that have been used for thousands of years for moral explorations, phenomenological explorations and existential meditations on the human condition etc. These parts are more linked to what I referred to as the important aspects of religion that society needs to be careful not to eradicate when dismantling institutional religions. There are extremely important parts in religious texts throughout history that are just as important as any continental philosophy exploring the human condition using more poetic representations of such explorations.

Where I draw the line, however, is when specifics are boiled down to something similar to factual claims. If someone speaks of "soul" and actually means some ethereal part of the divine that's trapped in our flesh, and uses this as a factual premise in their arguments, that is an unsupported claim. It's this type of claim that I refer to as biased. It is a bias towards the preconceived belief of the soul as something actual, something part of physical reality or supernatural reality that in itself hasn't been supported either. It's arguments that functions on these biases that philosophy consequently dismantled, if not in the time they were formed (due to historically inadequate methods of actually knowing how the world worked), then in historical times after when more factual understandings emerged.

Are you familar with Plato's dialogues? Socrates, as you're well aware, was sentenced to death for atheism, but the Phaedo, the dialogue taking place in the hours leading up to his execution, is one of the main sources for the defense of the immortality of the soul. Is that a religious dialogue, or is it not, by your lights? — Wayfarer

It is not a religious dialogue because the method of inquiry tried to use factual premises. However, it is a partly religious dialogue in light of what we know today.

What I mean by this is that the problems with asking this about Phaedo is that it excludes what each historical time concluded being facts about the world. In the Ancient Greek things like Empedocles and Apeiron were considered the same as we view electrons or the Higgs field. So just as we conduct philosophy today and rely on science as a source of factual premises when formulating arguments, so too did they in the same manner. This means that the context in which they draw empirical understanding through their dialogue, were based on facts that we know today aren't facts. Their understanding of the soul is therefor different to how we view the soul today, where, if we try to use factual knowledge, we might form arguments around neuroscience, mind upload technologies etc.

This is very important when we analyze historical philosophical texts. We need to understand the difference between a philosophical discussion that relied on factual premies based on what each historical time had as a factual foundation, and those that relied on religious beliefs. They are two different things. The former can survive and change throughout history based on recontextualisation when new discoveries in science adds to the factual foundation that society is built upon. We can take Phaedo and recontextualize the dialogue into a modern framework, discarding or changing aspects of it based on up to date scientific understandings but keep the dialogue's foundation. An argument that has bias towards a religious belief is however locked into that framework. It never gets past the belief, regardless of newly discovered factual foundations.

Phaedo is also not concluding anything, it is a dialogue that at its best forms concepts of duality that we still use today. The concepts that were formed by it has little to do with any support for the soul or the immortality of the soul, but instead were concepts that created a new framework to explore new ideas in. This is something that differs from what I mean by religiously biased arguments which focus on making religious conclusions rather than explore in the form of expanding perspectives.

Are you familiar with the early Buddhists texts and the account of the awakening of the Buddha? What 'wild assumptions' do you think are conveyed in those texts? For that matter, what issue are they addressing? — Wayfarer

In light of what I wrote on Phaedo, you can deconstruct that in a similar manner. What are religious conclusions and what are conceptual explorations in pursuit of further perspectives?

The key is still that bias locks your perspective into a rigid and non-moving framework. It's this that philosophy constantly dismantles.

I'll go with the approach articulated by scholar and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot. — Wayfarer

This:

This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing. .... — IEP

Is basically what I'm talking about. This is fighting bias. This is philosophy. And I think the misunderstanding you make about what I have written is due to misinterpreting (or maybe because I've been unclear), the difference between a formed conclusion and conceptual exploration. Much of what Hadot is talking about refers to a meditation for the purpose of dismantling biases, towards habits, passions and... religion. This is the difference between religious arguments, religious beliefs, religious thinking and... philosophy.

What i think is unfortunate is that we use terminology that is closely linked and somewhat owned by religious beliefs and religious institutions. Spiritualism, meditation etc. This confuse people into mixing everything together, rather than look at the practical implications of expansion of the mind, meditation and ritualistic behaviors to focus thought and reasoning. Neither of these have anything to do with religion in their function, because neither of them require religious belief.

Why did Einstein take daily walks? His habits were ritualistic behaviors that focused his mind. One of the most scientific thinkers in history utilized a framework of rituals, expanded his mind through Gedankenexperiment. Neither of this is religious or belief systems, but mental tools.

My gallery analogy is a form of Gedankenexperiment-type method. Aimed at detaching yourself from your ideas and biases. Aimed at combating the passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits and upbringing.

The philosophical issue with modern science, in particular, is that it leaves no place for man as subject. Science relies on the fundamental techniques of objectification and quantification, and can only ever deal with man as object. It is embedded in a worldview that isn't aware that it's a worldview, but thinks of itself as being 'the way things are'. And there's no self-awareness in that. — Wayfarer

And I have not lumped together science and philosophy, I have held them separated. What I am trying to show is that philosophy functions as a form of guided meditation that requires you to act against bias when forming conclusions. In that sense it is more similar to science than religious belief as religious belief is essentially biased to the religion that is believed. You cannot form rational conclusions in religious arguments since they are bound to a specific pre-existing belief. Philosophy, even in ancient practices, aimed at mentally remove biases, even religious ones, in order to explore everything. This is why real philosophy survives time, while religious claims does not. And this is why there can be real philosophy in religious texts, at the same time as other parts of the same texts can be religious hogwash.

The challenge for the philosopher or any explorer of thought, is therefor to distinguish hogwash from the profound. Metaphor from the actual. Pure belief from the rational, bias from an open mind.

Positivism, again. — Wayfarer

So no, it's not positivism, as you can read above, it is acknowledging historical context, and through that, understand what is and what isn't philosophy. That exploration isn't the same as conclusions and that claims requires an understanding of their historical context as well as what the aim of the claim is.

One problem is that you have labeled me a positivist, so you are now biased towards that label. You read what I write in that context and you will mentally discard what is problematic for the conclusion that I am a positivist. But I guarantee you that I'm not, I'm just more based in the historical context we live in at the moment, in which there are so many scientific explanations for so many things that it becomes irrational to do philosophical arguments without that context being a part of it. That does not mean positivism, it means that I, just like with Phaedo, structure my philosophy based on the history I live in and what factual foundation there is at this time. I explore in this context and form my anti-bias out of it. If someone claims something as a deductive conclusion based on arguments formed in historical times that had factually incorrect understanding of the world and universe, then it doesn't matter if that conclusion has an internal logic that were accepted at the time, it is still incorrect and biased towards that understanding, especially if it's formed through religious belief. If it's however not concluding anything, but opening the door to exploration of a topic, then it's still philosophy, even if it has problematic factual ideas.

The bottom line is that context matter and bias is connected to conclusions. Philosophy fights bias, in order to meditate our thoughts towards better understanding and conclusions that form stepping stones for further exploration. Bias is a quicksand that people get stuck in and drown if they're not careful, and its philosophy's primary function to act against it and has been long before philosophers knew of the concept of bias.

You basically assert that religion can only be based on 'fantasy'. But that itself is bias! — Wayfarer

Define what religious belief is? Is it a proven claim? A deduced conclusion? If something isn't proven or doesn't possess any internal logic, if it is based on wild assumptions, what is it?

Is it biased to define religious beliefs based on precisely the most basic text-book definition of bias? Meaning, a leaning towards something specific, in this case, that religious belief?

How is religious belief not biased?

Are you aware of the phenomena of religious experience, as distinct from 'mere belief', and of the role that mysticism played in Greek and later in European philosophy? That there are experiential dimensions of religious life, far beyond what is presented in religious dogma? — Wayfarer

Yes, I'm not talking about experiences or definitions of religion's purpose for people. I've talked extensively in another thread about the importance of rituals, traditions and the emotional experience that religion can produce (with the bottom line being that if we were to remove religion and not find replacements for these parts we are robbing society of valuable important practices for our well being and psychological balance). Such experiences can also help in philosophy, but the philosophical claims you make cannot be part of such, or else they are tainted by whatever belief you have, i.e based on a bias.

What I'm talking about primarily is that conclusions can't be made through a religious lens without a bias towards that specific religion. Without the ability to prove a religious claim in any logical manner, the conclusion is essentially biased. We can of course use religious metaphors and analogies, but the final conclusion cannot assume religious claims as facts, truths or universalized ideas.

Are you aware that Thomas Aquinas, for example, introduces his arguments with philosophical objections, and then painstakingly addresses those objections before setting out his point? — Wayfarer

Yes, he used Aristotelian reasoning. However, when we speak of the history of philosophy, we tend to pick out the logical conclusions that has a sound philosophical grounding and dismiss the rest of the stuff that was deeply rooted in the religious beliefs of the time. It's not until very recently that philosophical scrutiny reached a point that we usually call scientific in quality. Point being, philosophy has still been about countering biases regardless of which time it was in, it's precisely why people like Thomas Aquinas are well known, due to his careful reasoning and keeping Greek philosophical traditions alive based on Augustines previous work. However, throughout the history of philosophy, the scientific understanding of the time influenced what was considered non-biased conclusions. In the ancient greek the metaphysical understanding of reality, the physics of its time was considered actual scientific conclusions, but that's because the type of scientific methods we see today didn't exist. What was belief and what was truth has been mixed together throughout history, only to begin being dismantled during the enlightenment era when we start to develop a better framework for how to conduct science.

This is why philosophy was considered the scientific norm rather than how it is today with science and philosophy being separate entities. So while the assumptions about reality were affected by a lack of modern scientific scrutiny, philosophy still functioned on an inner logic and rational reasoning. The problem was always that non-scientific assumptions that were considered truths due to the lack of modern methods of science, blinded philosophers from making conclusions outside of that framework. It still managed to poke holes into the biases of religion and it's probably the clash between philosophical logic and religious belief that led philosophy towards the modern methods of science. I.e it is the attack on biases that moved discourse forward and helped arrive at new and alternative conclusions at each era of discovery.

Up until arguably the 20th century, philosophical spirituality was a fundamental current within philosophy itself, very much part of, for example, German, British and American idealism. And as for the idea that philosophy itself comprises empirically demonstrable arguments grounded in facts that all rational observers must assent to - this is very much the kind of argument that positivism tried, and failed, to advocate. Positivism has nothing to do with 'guilt by association'. Positivism is 'a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism'. And that's pretty well what you're arguing. — Wayfarer

Which is what I also described above. The history of philosophy is filled with clashes between its fundamentals and the current time it existed in. But the fundamentals have always been there and it's because of them that we've evolved into what philosophy is today. And I haven't said it should be grounded in only "facts", I've said that arguments in philosophy requires a rational logic that removes biases and presumptions. If it isn't doing that, it's just fiction, anything goes. That doesn't mean we can't use metaphors, story and analogies to tell an argument, it just mean that the conclusion needs to hold together. If the conclusion is anywhere close to relying on "because the spirit" "because God" "because faith", then it is in fact fantasy, it is faith and it is religious belief.

The problem with the way you frame my argument is that you essentially lock it down to a positivist framework almost as a straw man. But we can still make philosophical conclusions in moral philosophy that doesn't have a scientific fact behind them. And they still need to have a logical conclusion that we can agree upon. For example, there's a logic to Kant's universalization and even if there are no actual scientific facts backing it up, and even if there are objections to it, it is a concept that is extremely well argued for, has an internal logic, and can be expanded upon in newer concepts and ideas. This logic doesn't come out of religion, there's no bias to some presumptions, but an idea about the consequences of actions being universalized. It is a non-scientific conclusion that is still logical.

So I don't see how you interpret that as a positivist framework? I'm pointing out how philosophy acts to reduce and remove bias from arguments and how religion functions on a foundational bias towards the specific religion those arguments are formed within.

What 'rigid framework' in particular? Which philosophers or schools of philosophy would you look towards that will produce this ideal, rational society where everyone acts rationally at all times, only taking into consideration the relevant facts and acting with perfect detachment? — Wayfarer

What's the praxis of philosophy? What is it that you actually do when doing philosophy? Is it just looking up in the night sky and have some ideas about reality? Is it just deciding some rules you like about how people should act against each other? This thread's main plot is essentially "what is philosophy?" So what is it? If it's not religion, not science, how do you define it?

You say it depends on the schools of philosophy, on which philosophy you like etc. Is it? Doesn't that then essentially become whatever anyone can think of really?

What is not philosophy? Does it generally exclude approaches that rely solely on faith, dogma, unsubstantiated claims without reasoned argumentation and critical inquiry?

So when I position philosophy being about reducing and removing bias when forming arguments, isn't that generally an overall definition of philosophy's function? Because it doesn't seem to matter which school of philosophy or which philosophers you like, it doesn't matter which time a specific philosophy was formed, there's always the process of eliminating bias and fallacies from the arguments created. Of course, the conclusions then becomes dependent on the times they are formed in, but the general core function still persists, if you produce an argument with a bias that breaks its logic, you have failed at philosophy. That doesn't mean Positivism, that means a dedication to inner logic of an argument. If that argument is about things like morality, there's no scientific facts to rely on, but the conclusion has to have a rational logic, it has to exclude your pure beliefs, exclude your preassumptions about morality, in order to function as a moral idea in philosophy.

This is the conclusion I draw as an observation of the history of philosophy. What is the commonality throughout, the most basic function that we can ascribe to philosophy?

And as of my description of ways of reasoning that is good at removing bias. What opposite "attachment"-based system is it that you position should exist instead? When I say that detaching yourself from bias to be able to argue rationally, what way of philosophy is the opposite to that which is better? I'd like to hear in which way philosophy functions if you attach yourself to bias and wear it as part of your identity? What is the opposite of what I described, seen as you seem to have objections to that method?

I think you ought to distance yourself from this concept of "preferable", and take a look at the way you use it. The word is a relative term, so it only holds meaning in relation to an end, a goal, or a person's intention. So, whenever the word is used, we can ask, 'preferable for what purpose, or what reason?'.

Your phrase "things gravitate towards a preferable reality" doesn't make any sense. If we qualify "reality" with a way of looking at reality, perspective, or ontology, you'd be saying that things gravitate toward a preferred ontology. The problem though, is that it requires effort to achieve ends, goals intentions, so "gravitate" is not an appropriate word here, because it signifies a lack of effort, going with the flow or something like that.

Now your sloppy use of words has left us with a bifurcation in potential interpretations, each going in opposing directions. By "gravitate towards", do you mean a type of going with the flow, which would incline one to proceed toward any random end or goal, as a sort of laziness, or do you mean making a concerted effort toward an identified goal or end? As you can see, these two are completely different, and there is really no way to tell, from your use of "preferable" which you are talking about. Does "gravitate towards a preferable reality" refer to the lazy attitude of ill-defined goals and lack of ambition, or does it refer to the attitude of having specified goals and making effort to achieve them? — Metaphysician Undercover

This can be because I'm kind of advanced in the English language, but it is not my native tongue, so I can end up in semantic traps.

When I say "things gravitate towards a preferable reality," I'm referring to the interpretation of "reality" that makes us feel most comfortable. Such preferences can change, and we can gravitate towards different comfortable realities depending on how our beliefs evolve.

The reality we find most comfortable is one in which we have clear and comfortable interpretations, regardless of their validity. Such bias often arises from the anxiety of the unknown. We tend to eagerly embrace a narrative of reality that offers us the most comfortable existence.

This inclination to gravitate towards comfort is something we all experience, but the primary role of philosophy is to challenge and cut us off from this gravitational pull. It aims to prevent us from falling into comfort, into bias, and keep us rationally grounded.

I hope that clears up the confusion of that sentence?

Not relevant to the discussion. We are not talking about whether people change or not. We're talking about a theoretical, programatic intervention to deliberately build change in thinking, with a specific philosophical approach. We disagree on the feasibility of this project. — Tom Storm

I think you misinterpret what I've meant. It is not a project to force change onto society, it is a mental toolset that people have to evaluate by themselves if it is useful, just as they would with any other system that helps people be better at complex mental tasks and to avoid unnecessary stagnation of progression in solving problems and dealing with complex questions. There are a number of philosophical concepts in existence that would be good if everyone used, and even if not everyone uses them they have influenced history and science.

What I suggested was a system of philosophical thinking that helps fight back against bias, especially when we live in a time when our biases have fused with identity, leading to polarized conflicts in which ideas aren't compared and evaluated, but instead identities clash.

It's not a project of reforming society, it's a mental model that could reform if it was ever popularized as a norm of complex thinking.

That's all. Let's move on. — Tom Storm

And I'm not sure you read it all, but I circled back to the main topic.

Don't you think that might itself be rather a biased judgement? — Wayfarer

Bias is a broad term and it doesn't just mean a failure in an argument or deduction, but also how things gravitate towards a preferable reality. What I meant by religion being biased is that all arguments in religion has a bias towards the specific religion they come from. They (through history) can create great philosophical questions and be highly intelligent deductions, but in the end, as soon as something can't be explained, they always conclude it with a connection to the religious fantasy that was preconceived of the argument.

Philosophy, on the other hand, requires consistency against bias. If the argument requires a preconceived idea to function, it becomes circular reasoning, a confirmation bias and falls apart.

This is what I mean when saying that philosophy isn't for questioning religion as a primary function, because that is a secondary emerging function that simply comes out of the primary function of removing bias from thinking about complex questions.

If you think about all philosophical topics and arguments, they're all trying to do one thing, remove bias and fallacies from an argument in order to arrive at a conclusion that can be agreed upon.

Some arguments may be less deductive and more inductive, and therefore more "likely" than mathematically rigid, but even such arguments function on maximizing the probability of the conclusion being correct.

Any other form of reasoning that includes biases and fallacies without a rigid framework to fight them, fails at philosophy and becomes emotional opinions, fantasies, guru gobbledygook etc.

Even more continental philosophies requires a form of structure, a form of inner logic that doesn't summarize itself and conclude with something preconceived.

The proposal you're suggesting is really like adopting the persona of the imagined 'Mr Spock' character from Star Trek, Spock, the Vulcan, possessed an enormous IQ and encylopedic knowledge, from a terrestrial point of view, but was often caught out by what we would now describe as his lack of EQ (although that term had yet to be invented,) — Wayfarer

I'm not so sure it goes that far. The method I propose is about distance from ideas and concepts in order to be aware of your own biases and be able to understand conflicting ideas and concepts better when evaluating your own. In a way I would say it incorporates EQ far better since it places others perspectives, concepts and ideas on equal positions to your own in order for you to evaluate the idea and concept you have. Essentially, it has an empathic component in removing initial judgement of others ideas before careful measurement.

Becoming more analytical does not automatically equal becoming lacking in empathy. It can also be the opposite, that a lack of empathic intelligence leads to biased thinking since others ideas and concepts are being judged before hand, regardless of them being valid or not. This is also the form of bias that happens with religious thinkers when in a discussion. Other people's conflicting ideas are filtered through their bias towards their religion and they're not empathically evaluating these ideas but instead judge them before any step of actual analysis of their validity. Lesser religious thinkers get stuck in this first step almost instantly. We can see that in the vast amount of theological threads on this forum in which any counter-argument results in them looping around in circular reasoning.

Reading your posts, you're basically coming from the perspective of Carnap and the Vienna Circle positivists, for whom anything connected to religion and metaphysics was nonsensical, and whose sole imperative was to put philosophy of a firm scientific footing. I don't necessarily want to go down the arduous road of trying to convince you otherwise, other than to suggest that positivism was, by the second half of the last century, regarded as a failed philosophical movement. — Wayfarer

I don't draw the hard line as positivist in that sense of "guilt by association" against religion. What I'm focusing on is the existence of bias and fallacy within ideas, concepts and reasoning. These aren't bound to religion, but they are a failure at philosophy. Everyone can do it and religious thinkers can also create arguments that are in fact solid. But I'd argue that they then aren't producing a religious argument, but instead they succeeded at a philosophical one. My point is that bias and fallacies are common traits in religion because of how many arguments fail to go past the "because God" or "because of this religious text". When an argument doesn't rely on that, it doesn't matter if it's a religious thinker or if the concept is more continental in appearance. There are plenty of metaphorical arguments in religious writing that functions as solid philosophical ones, but as I said, they are then technically no longer religious arguments since they don't have a bias towards the beliefs of that religion and instead rely on rational reasoning without biases.

Essentially, if the argument has a bias, if its reasoning is filled with fallacies, then the author of that argument needs to restructure and work to remove those. A primary function of philosophical discourse is to spot each others biases and fallacies, to fine-tune each others arguments. Because if we back up and look at the process with some distance to our opinions: if someone creates an argument that is without bias and is reasoned without fallacies and you cannot find any holes in it, then why would you considered it wrong even if it is against your convictions? True philosophy is basically helping each other to reach that point, and being able to rid yourself from biases and fallacies means being closer to successfully conclude your argument. In philosophy, we're not really fighting to convince others of our beliefs, we are fighting to arrive at some sort of rational and reasonable truth about whatever topic that philosophy is about. So, because of this, I conclude philosophy to primarily focus on fighting biases and fallacies since they're at the dead center of a failed philosophical argument.

I suppose that's why I push against these narratives. We need one another. That's a good thing to recognize. It's also good to recognize that some people use that need for their own ends -- but the solution isn't individualization, because that gives people who are able, who have more power even more power. Masters like being able to spell out the rules to subordinates, and it's much easier to do so when they subordinates are alone. — Moliere

:up:

If politics become a polarized caricature of reality by either just being individuals or either just being one big collective, then so is the ideologies that follow. To recognize that both the individual and the group are equally important is to simply accept reality based on facts. It is basic psychology, we do not exist in a vacuum, our mind is a combination of the self and the social sphere.

So politics should reflect those facts, politics should always reflect facts. Otherwise it becomes opinions from egospheres trying to manipulate society for their own gains and wealth. The purpose of politics is to organize society. If politics become tools for a few to reign power, it is no longer politics for society but instead abuse against society.

there is also the big problem that what you suggest is not going to happen and is effectively like suggesting if we all behaved like Gandhi (or insert idealised human being of your preference), there'd be world peace and love all about us. Which may well be true. But 'if' is a monumental hurdle. Anyway - no point going on about it as it's off topic. — Tom Storm

Why would people not be able to change? Have we not changed behaviors and ways of life, culturally, over decades and centuries based primarily in what people find the best way of life at the time?

But the method is not just positive when used in a broader sense. Would you agree that it can benefit your own thinking process? If so, or if anyone find a positive use for it, then it basically functions just like any other epistemological concept for reasoning. Just like in stoicism where a tenet is to step back and not be overwhelmed with emotion, it is similar in nature but for the detailed process of reasoning without bias.

I would argue that it primarily benefits the one using them and people around them. It can help their ability to solve problems and to discuss complex topics in spaces where emotion often drives the plot. But if society were structured around them more broadly I would argue that they would benefit society exponentially.

And in 2023, we have a problem with identity linking to values, ideologies and knowledge. That people today cannot discuss their knowledge without them handling that knowledge as part of their identity. This have led to a massive spike in the use of biases when reasoning because the emotions that comes out of wearing ideas as part of an identity blocks people from being able to change knowledge when being exposed to conflicting ideas.

For many people today, new ideas that conflict with the current knowledge becomes a threat to their identity rather than just being a threat to the sphere of ideas and knowledge that they adhere to in the moment. Someone questioning their idea is equal to that person questioning their existence.

This is why this detachment framework helps sever the link between knowledge and identity while making it easier to spot the biases that binds someone's knowledge to identity.

So, I think you are simplifying the concept a bit if you view it just as some "Gandhi concept" since the benefits are both broad and specific.

I'd also say that this doesn't really go off topic because the main focus was the question on what philosophy is for and that an answer is for questioning religion. But it's in this that I say that that is just the result of its core function of removing bias from solving complex questions. And in using a method that is primarily focusing on spotting and removing bias we're essentially doing philosophy at its very core.

All other things then becomes a result out of this. Reasoning in religious ways is primarily based in biases. Removing biases and any religious argument falls apart. Religion is also a more long form version of the times we live in now in that religious knowledge almost always binds with identity.
There's no difference between a non-religious topic of discussion that features identity-bound biases and a religious one, they are both analogous of being a frozen bias-statue in the gallery rather than walking freely exploring all perspectives and ideas as external entities.

So to answer this thread's main question, philosophy isn't about questioning religion, it is about removing bias and as a result it becomes a perfect method for questioning religion.

And if we have a method that improves our ability to spot and avoid biases, that would essentially be applied philosophy as an everyday praxis, which I think would be very beneficial to society, but also the individual's well-being and ability to handle reality better.

What is your opinion on the argument? — Captain Homicide

I would ask the question, are there times when killing can be considered morally good? If so, does the grey nature of that morality make killing in video games more acceptable as an action?

It can be applied to other forms of storytelling and entertainment as well. When you see a character in a film killing someone, that character can still be considered moral.

But it seems less possible to put the other acts into a moral grey area. In which situation can you apply sexual assault as morally good? I don't think it's possible to imagine any such scenario.

In essence, killing is a removal of a threat, removal of a problem while torture in itself doesn't have any function other than for the pleasure of the one torturing. Any act that generates great suffering is less moral than killing because it isn't a solution to anything. We can debate whether killing is a solution at all, but I don't think we can argue against inflicting purposeless prolonged suffering being generally worse than killing.

If someone threatens to kill every innocent person in a room and you have the ability to kill that person to prevent that from happening, I would argue that most people would see this immoral act of killing as having a specific purpose of removing that threat of purposeless killing. This is of course pretty anti-Kantian, but it is an act that I would argue can be somewhat morally justified, at least society would not judge the one removing the threat as being morally worse or equal to the one wanting to purposeless kill all.

However, if you were to change out that act to any of the other acts, there is no purpose to them. If someone threatens to kill every innocent person in a room and you instead violently torture this person and sexually abuse him, then you aren't removing the threat anymore, you are acting with purposeless violence yourself.

And because of this I think that entertainment in games and movies consist of some kind of moral line that is unreasonable to cross. This is why we do not have torture scenes other than for the specific effect of making the player or viewer uncomfortable. It's like when someone hits someone else to stop them from doing something bad we can feel it as a justified act, but if they continue to beat them while they are on the ground everyone jumps in to stop that act.

Immoral acts seem to be acceptable as being moral in certain situations as long as there's a purpose to them that can be universalized. If there's no such purpose, if the act is meaningless, then that act can be considered always immoral in any form.

I have a strong intuition that you are unlikely to get very far trying to use reason to talk people out of a position they didn't arrive at through reason. — Tom Storm

Of course, I'm not saying that these mental tools are effective towards changing someone else's perspective and concepts, even though they are probably more effective than other forms of influences seen as they deconstruct and evaluate their perspectives and concepts without emotionally attacking them. But, these mental tools are effective when the entire group uses them. This is why I'm advocating for it being part of a cultural practice, something that is common practice, or at least common practice in situations that benefit from it. If society viewed it as common as a practice as a normal handshake between people, then deviances from it would be considered rude, especially in a sphere of debate.

So while being less observably effective against people that lack in this toolset, it is when all in a group uses it that it reaches its full potential.

You advocate your particular approach of reasoning because this is a fundamental value through which you already view life. Good for you and good luck trying to get others to agree. But are you essentially saying here: 'If everyone thought they way I do, the world would be better?' Don't most people think that, even the prodigiously irrational ones? — Tom Storm

It may sound like that since I used my own subjective perspective as an example, but that was merely to describe the experience of using it as well as the importance of calmness that it produces. The lowered stress levels in situations where people often get riled up and emotionally pressed (which usually also leads to further enforcing biases).

But this way of tackling reality in an internally distanced form is not just my own personal experience, it can be observed in many people. A sort of confirmation of this mental tool was when reading about Bertrand Russel's perspective on the matter. He advocates for a similar detachement and ability to spot biases, using a scientific approach to more areas and topics than just science:

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth 18in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge. Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt. — Bertrand Russel

Trying to reeducate society along appropriate philosophical principles sounds totalitarian (I know that's not how you intended it) and is not going to happen, it's entering a speculative realm where I have little to contribute. :wink: — Tom Storm

But that is of course a valid point. How can society restructure itself without totalitarian powers pushing for such a change? Mostly a non-totalitarian change happens through collectively acknowledging a positive trait and way of life that then influence society and culture naturally and through the people's own will.

I think this is more a form cultural praxis that doesn't in itself hold any opinions or values. It's more of a toolset, a strategy of thinking, something that can be notably positive as a system in everyday use. People in a free society wouldn't just change into following this praxis on someone's demand or recommendation alone. People usually change into a new praxis because they recognize the value of it and then collectively raise children with this praxis as part of their culture. But they would only do so if it had a core positive value that is measurable.

I think that this system would benefit society and I hope that by showing the positive implications on the individual and society, people would want to use this mental toolset or mental strategy as part of everyday life. Not by forcefully reshaping culture, but by simply asking: do you see the benefit of this? Is this something you think would help you navigating the complexity of reality and society better? Is this something you think would benefit a group solving a problem or conceptualizing new ideas? Is this something you think would help mitigating and deescalating conflicts? If you think it might be so, it might be worth a try to use this way of thinking when conceptualizing, evaluating ideas, solving problems, debating topics, deescalating conflicts and forming strategies.

You use the metaphor of someone perusing a gallery at leisure, making calm, considered decisions. Trouble is, this is rarely what happens. Nor is is even ideally what happens. Organisations and individuals are embedded in a world in flux, were circumstances change spasmodically as often as smoothly, but also where the decision made changes the way things are. — Banno

I think the metaphor primarily is about being careful not to become an idea or concept. I.e we attach ourselves too heavily on what we believe, to a point where we are unable to defend the idea without defending our own identity, as well as when we defend our identity we start to defend the idea. Being a frozen rigid sculpture is the final form of our bias, unable to move, only to be easily examined by others. In a toxic debate, everyone is their own statue, some in groups against other groups, but no one is shifting, moving around, looking at each others ideas in different perspectives, we only see things two-dimensionally. Things can change, but nothing fundamentally changes if everyone is rock solid. Society can go through decades without change if no one starts to move around in that space examining all statues.

Take any pivotal life decision, be it moving to a distant city or committing to a partner or accepting a job offer. Everything changes, unpredictably, as a result of the decision. Because of this, while there may be a pretence of rationality, ultimately the decision is irrational. Not in the sense of going against reason, but in the sense of not being rationally justified. It is perhaps an act of hope, or desperation, or sometimes just whim.

And this not only applies to big choices, but to myriad small choices. Whether you have the cheese or the ham sandwich had best not be the subject of prolonged ratiocination.

Most of our choices are not rationally determined; and this is usually a good thing, lest we all become Hamlet. — Banno

It is primarily an approach to thinking when it is possible to be applied as well as something to fall back on when entering chaos. Careful people somewhat already takes a step back, they try to see the big picture and make informed decisions. But they do so without fully understanding how or why they do it, there's no framework for their internal process and it can lead to bias traps. Having a clearer strategy of the mind makes spotting biases easier. Imagine yourself in the gallery when making a pivotal life decision, you might be able to see an unintentional or unnoticed bias when making the choice to move to a new city. You are able to examine the reasons without falling into emotional reasoning since the reasons are there infront of you, not part of your identity. This detachement becomes a sort of inner interlocutor, you examine a statue, ask it questions and compare it to the others. In the pursuit of forming a grander overview and perspective of what the entire gallery is saying.

And of course, small choices doesn't have to be part of this. Mainly because this method focus on larger conceptualizations, ideas and knowledge. Smaller decisions mostly comes out of instinct and intuition that have roots in already established higher concepts.

Many of these instincts and intuitions are trained on the larger internalized concepts, which forms a framework around our identity. If we are constantly distancing ourselves from the concepts and ideas that are always in flux, we become better at changing our instincts and intuitions if they end up needing to be changed. Like, if your health requires you to stop eating too much cheese, people will still have problems changing these habit behaviors. By distancing yourself from how you value health versus eating cheese you might be able to restructure the instincts better and faster than trying by force, which often leads to people falling back on old habits (which in itself is a result of a certain bias).

In general, when and where you need to enter the gallery is a form of intuition in itself. The ability to know when the mental tool is needed is harder than using the tool itself. But a rule of thumb would be that whenever some concept or idea have conflicting parts and risks of destructive bias, training yourself not to initially fall into either of those conflicting parts and instead enter the gallery to review them as the first step in a thought process.

But essentially, this mental toolset is for the higher concepts, the complex ideas, values, ideologies, solutions to complex problems and most critically when approaching others who has conflicting ideas to yours. If you and the one you debate against are together moving around the gallery and examining each other's ideas and concepts, you are both acting as researchers evaluating each others concepts instead of getting stuck in defensive arguments based on each others biases. If you both are equally good at using this method, there won't be any real conflicts, fist fights or inabilities to reach a higher place of understanding. While both might not reach agreement, you both learn and increase a better understanding of not only the opposite idea, but also your own. It is beneficial for both in either way, as well as promoting a calmer way of dealing with conflicting ideas in society. Even being able to acknowledge each others emotional investment in each idea as being their own statues, leads to understanding the emotional aspect of an idea and how it affects each other's reasoning.

The full effect is in play if all participants follow the same mental strategy when existing in conflicting positions.

Then there are heuristics. ↪Jamal is somewhat dismissive of cutlery, but it does make eating easier, not to mention smoothing the social aspects of the table. It's usually not possible to see the bigger picture, to understand the furthest consequences of one's choices, and even when one does, as perhaps was the case with the beginning of the arms race, the problem can be intractable, or at the least appear so. Sometimes the best one can hope for is to be able to sort stuff out in the long run. So we rely on heuristics. — Banno

Cutlery doesn't remove the risk of messy eating, only that eating generally becomes less messy.

Any toolset cannot be the final best toolset. We don't know the final form of the best hammer, only that we have a pretty good concept of what a good hammer is after all iterations so far. The way I think of these mental tools is an extension of Bertrand Russel's ideas, without me even knowing so when I started thinking about them. It may be because his ideas influenced modern science, modern culture, and modern philosophy to the point that as being part of this culture I naturally use his ideas and built upon them.

I can only hope I add something valuable in doing so, something that further iterate on the mental tools he promoted.

↪Tom Storm pointed to the tension between wanting ethics to be taught while being suspicious of the impact of self reflection. Part of the trouble is, despite the pretence, we can not, do not, and ought not make all our decisions only after due ratiocination. — Banno

I think forming an instinct out of knowing when to use the method is key. In general, whenever something is at risk of negative bias, whenever an idea or concept is at risk of being destroyed by bias, it warrants entering the gallery. Like being able to almost feel that bias follows where I'm going, so I can tread lightly so as to not be turned to stone.

I've mentally constructed a space in which the conflicted ideas are carefully evaluated and meditated on in a distance to me as a person. Because I'm fully aware of my biases I almost get a negative feeling when I'm straying too far from balanced reasoning. It helps me go through all the possible perspectives of a topic in order to examine it closer and it helps me listen better to other people and spot when they add a new perspective that I didn't have before, adding it to the internal process of reasoning. — Christoffer

As a follow-up to this, imagine your internal reasoning being a room, a gallery, where you stand in distance from your ideas and concepts that you try to examine and evaluate.

Most people are their ideas. Their identity and their ideas and concepts are one and the same.
In essence, they are the artwork themselves, the sculpture of their ideas:


Instead, detach and construct a mental gallery with all the ideas and concept within, but be your own entity examining at a distance, without ever becoming any of the ideas and concepts yourself.



This leads to the ability to walk through the gallery of ideas and concepts in order to evaluate many different versions of the same concept or idea. Whenever someone becomes and is their idea and concept, they become a rigid stuck sculpture and can no longer walk through the gallery and consequently only be able to be examined by others.

Interesting comments. I'm not going to argue that you are wrong, but my take is that fear and our tendency towards dualistic thinking may lie behind most problems like this. People are frightened and are easily galvanized by scapegoating, quick fixes, sloganeering and appeals to tribal identity (white nationalism, etc). The notion that you are either for us or against us becomes a kind of touch stone for social discourse.

I should think that in times of uncertainty, where fear is brewing and readily activated as a motivating energy (largely thanks to Murdoch in the West) we see people embracing glib answers which promise deliverance and perverse forms of solidarity.

I'm not sure that philosophy as such plays a key role here, but certainly ideas do. — Tom Storm

Would you agree that these glib answers and simplified polarization out of fear can arise out of the lack of philosophical approaches? Aren't they the emerging traits of ignoring such a mental tool? And wouldn't such tools be a way out of these?

What would happen if society were to structure some core tenets of philosophical scrutiny as virtues in rules of conduct between people. Just like we have things like handshakes, "hello" phrases etc. we include tenets of problem solving and approaches to difficult topics where emotions can play a negative role and put us in mental feedback loops.

For example, "when faced with contradictory information, never opt in to a specific perspective until more information and facts have been presented to achieve a logically high probability and consensus for a certain perspective". And further, "does the established highly probable perspective feature any known biases for me or the group following said perspective?". And further "Are these biases leaning towards other established and probable topics and what are those implications?"

In a way always putting our thinking into a feedback process where we question ourselves based on tenets of spotting biases, what types of biases, and in a form of Kantian universalization of the answers we arrive at.

If someone, in a social and economic class that collectively start to blame immigrants for the lack of jobs they believe is their right to have priority access to, were to be pushed to participate in these ideas, they can go through these tenets in order to question the validity of those ideas before surrendering to them. What biases has formed in this collective? What biases do I have within this group, within the larger group of the city, the nation, the world? Where can I get access to information about all perspectives of this?

Never settle based on too few perspectives, never accept without knowing the biases at play, always be aware that your perspectives and opinions are formed by influences, distance yourself from your opinions and examine them.

Of course there's a level of generalization I'm doing to all of this in these "short" writings. To invent or install tenets that functions as virtues in a society, they need to be solid and hard to dispute as their function is a foundation of thought, a foundational tool that we can have built in to our culture of approaching knowledge and information. But I think it is possible to form such a framework of tenets that can be applied in practice not only for people who are intellectuals or philosophically literate, but everyone.

In essence, imagine a society in which people are constantly aware of biases. It's part of the culture, like whenever someone utters an emotional rant, people aren't drawn into an emotional counter-attack but instead lifts the biases at play, not as an arrogant response, but through it being common practice.

I think that this would lead to complicated issues in society that tends to stir up emotions and create negative feedback loops, to be mitigated and bridge understanding between opposing parts far more than the debate-heavy nature of today's society.

The ideas are somewhat continued in Banno and Jamal's discussion

What I think is creating societal problems on a large scale is that our culture isn't formed around questioning yourself and your beliefs. There's no established common method. The concept of cognitive bias is something that people generally are unaware of. Some even have a superficial understanding of it, but to understand just how powerful bias is at blocking us from understanding something on a deeper level, the awareness of bias needs to be as common of a knowledge as how to cook dinner or brushing our teeth. Not specific to philosophers, but to all people.

We somewhat already have this in Kantian universalization. People doesn't realize it, don't know about it, but the tenets are there. If someone commits a crime, kills someone or steals something, a common response to that criminal would be "what do you think would happen if everyone did what you did?" This is Kantian ethics at play, without people knowing they apply it in that sentence.

If similar knowledge of biases and approaches to knowledge were to be implemented in society, such as it becoming a frame of mind just like with with Kantian universalization, then I think it would radically change how people tackle forming new ideas, but it also helps holding every-day problem solving within a more rationally based reasoning that mitigates emotional feedback loops. The challenge is to both formulate tenets that aren't too complex to keep in mind as well as installing them into our culture in a way that isn't forced. To show the benefits to the individual, the collective and overall society in a way that people want to follow them because they feel natural.

In my personal experience, this is how I approach daily life. I do not jump onto ideas and opinions lightly, I don't decide on anything before I have a somewhat objective reasoning surrounding it. What I've realized is that there's a calm to this approach. I can exist inside a conflicted space that can lead some to become extremely biased towards a certain perspective and enforce it with all their energy, but without ever doing so or at least be able to abandon such a position as soon as a rational counter-perspective is added to the mix. It helps me hold conflicting ideas in my head at the same time because I've mentally constructed a space in which the conflicted ideas are carefully evaluated and meditated on in a distance to me as a person. Because I'm fully aware of my biases I almost get a negative feeling when I'm straying too far from balanced reasoning. It helps me go through all the possible perspectives of a topic in order to examine it closer and it helps me listen better to other people and spot when they add a new perspective that I didn't have before, adding it to the internal process of reasoning.

It's this personal dedication to such tenets of philosophy as a mental tool that have helped me understand that there's something in this approach that has a positive function both on well-being in conflicting times, but also in having a balanced morality, better problem solving skills, and better methods of formulating new ideas. Of course, this is anecdotal evidence for its effect, but I've seen similar approaches in other people's reasoning to problems and ideas and witnessed a certain calm and ability to not get stuck in loops of emotional and biased reasoning and responses.

A form of extra sharp conceptualization of our own internal reasoning that detaches us from cognitive bias. Essentially thinking about thinking; thinking about your own thinking, thinking about other's thinking, thinking about past thinking... while thinking about a problem or an idea. This is the thought, why is this thought? How did this thought came to be? What other thoughts are there? Why did they come to be? Are these thoughts similar to other people's thoughts? Why? Are there any biases to these thoughts? Are those biases subjectively mine or collectively society's? And so on.

It is a form of epistemic responsibility, extending from just the balanced morality to ways of approaching all internal reasoning.

In living memory there were genocides and famines, and despite having a really cool philosophical toolbox, humanity is as stupid as ever (QAnon, white supremacy, nationalism, and so on and on). — Jamal

I think that these are the result of either not listening to philosophers, misinterpreting them, or outright ignoring them in combination with enforcing the very problems that philosophy is a tool against. I.e these things emerges out of the chaos of non-philosophical approaches to questions that arrises in history.

If philosophy is such a great mental technology, as you imply, wouldn’t we expect society to have become more rational over time, just as it has become more technological? Why hasn’t that happened?

The view I'm sympathetic to, from Adorno & Horkheimer, is that societies have become more rational, but only instrumentally so; the very concept of reason has been impoverished. You echo this state of affairs in describing philosophy as an instrument. — Jamal

I think history flows in waves and tides, going back and forth between enlightenment and stupidity. After a time of great achievements and enlightenment, people fall into apathy, the knowledge gets boring, people seek new meaning and crave differences, without the necessary work to change things carefully. Right now we live in a time when intellectuals aren't popular, where stupidity and apathy reigns once again. And just like earlier times in history this will lead to a form of collapse. The collapse might be seen in things like the things you mentioned, Qanon, white supremacy, nationalism, but also the Ukraine war and changing global politics and of course the big one, failure to fix climate change.

Such times usually follows an intellectual enlightenment era, in which knowledge once again becomes popular and stupidity and apathy start to be considered embarrassing traits. Such times lead to rapid progress in both technology, science and philosophy. We might see a surge in new thinkers in a few decades, a minor renaissance, like the enlightenment era, post-war era etc.

So I think it's less about society just slightly becoming more rational over time, and more that we historically live in a low tide right now, which feels like we're stuck in progress. As institutional religion keeps falling in popularity, I think rationality will keep on growing. And I think philosophy is a good tool for the mind of anyone living in a society which functions on rationality and reason, but even more so for fighting back stupidity and apathy.

And the tides seem to keep going back and forth faster and faster.

So we have the instrumental reason in science and technology that leads to vaccines, dentistry, washing machines, Zyklon B and weapons of mass descruction. This is based on the use of tools from out of the philosophical toolbox that you describe. So philosophy is there to "guide thoughts and ideas through a forest of confusion" towards ... genocide? — Jamal

The forest of confusion is what leads to genocide, meaning, failure at philosophy leads to genocide. We can invent anything, but only philosophy as a tool can keep our biases and destructive emotions at bay and make us more morally capable of understanding the practical use of technology without it leading to genocide.

For example, how do we keep developing AI safely? Without it leading to destructive outcomes? Philosophy can help us break down consequences, build up scenarios, inform laws and regulations. We see the difference right now, some are confused, act out in anger at the development, and some act out dangerous concepts without any thought as to what it could lead to. But some are rational and calm. They use reason to evaluate the use and outcome of certain AI systems, they keep forming thought-experiment scenarios and possible positive uses, while informing politicians of rational laws and regulations that keep the good aspects of AI and stop the bad.

Philosophy becomes a backbone tool that helps managing problem solving for things that are new in society. It keeps people rational and levelheaded when there are no rules of conduct in place. It's a force against the chaos that occurs when we face the unknown.

To me it follows that philosophy, as eminently critical, has to step in and say wait a minute, do we really want to be doing that? Philosophy often doesn't do that, I realize. I guess I'm emphasizing and celebrating the times when it does, thereby saying it ought to do more of it. This amounts to an attempt to form a richer notion of rationality than the one we have.

All of that's not so much a rejection of your position as an addition to it. — Jamal

Yes, I agree with that. Like I said about the tides of history, it's philosophy that keeps people afloat, especially in darkness. And I think the anti-bias aspect of philosophy as a tool of the mind makes people better at solving problems without those solutions leading to wars, genocide and more darkness. It keeps us constantly making better choices, while ignoring the tool makes us clash with the world, casting it in darkness.

I think it's the job of everyone of us who recognizes the value of philosophy and who understands the positive function it can have, to show others the value of such a tool and how it can be applied in practice. It lets us understand how we think, so that we can think better, morally and in reasoning.

I might have an overly positive perspective on philosophy, but I think that all negatives throughout history mostly shows a deep failure at actual philosophy. A misunderstanding of some philosophical concept or an intentional misrepresentation of it. Many people in power who understands philosophy, but act dishonest towards its foundation, use the lack of philosophical knowledge in people to their own advantage. Like how Hitler skewed Nietzsche's philosophy into a warped mythology for a gullible population, craving for meaning.

Philosophy should detach us from ourselves, so that we can examine our own thinking in relation to the world and other people.

The idea that philosophy is an independent ever-expanding toolbox, ready to apply to whatever exists—this is surely a fantasy. Philosophy is itself historically situated, and part of what it does is to apply its tools to itself, even to its own tools, depending on the social conditions. — Jamal

Since the dawn of writing, has not the pen been developed to be a better pen? A tool is constantly being improved upon and philosophy has undergone iterations of improvements to sharpen its ability to help conceptualize. And just like a pen or any tool for writing, it has the shape of the time it is used in.

But I think the core principles has been valid since people first had critical thought and questioned each others logic. We could possibly argue that even during hunter gatherer societies, there were arguments on how to best hunt a certain prey or where to find the best source of food. And the most successful were the ones detaching themselves from cognitive bias, without ever knowing about such concepts theoretically. This is probably why philosophy and science has been confused together as well as been argued to be different. They share similarities, but form different functions. One is forming predictive truths, while the other is mentally structuring concepts that functions as principles in thought.

Essentially it helps guide thoughts and ideas through a forest of confusion. Speeding up the process of arriving at logical conclusions in situations where scientific facts aren't fully present to achieve absolute predictable truths.

I do think that it can be applied to anything if the general purpose is to detach conceptualization from the mental traps of bias. A self-examination of one's ideas in order to reach higher understanding about something without adding personal fantasy to the mix.

Because when someone propose a philosophical concept that lacks in logic or rationality, on any level, even abstract ones, it is a failure in philosophy, and when we examine such arguments for flaws, we are looking for biases and fallacies as the prime source for their failures.

Those proposed concepts can be about anything, but the framework seems to be consistent throughout time and the level of analytical sharpness is depending on which historical time we are in, just like a writing tool has been a stick with red paint, to an iron rod marking stone tablets, to a feather in ink, to a mass produced charcoal pencil, to a keyboard. It has sharpened the efficiency of writing, and so we have sharpened the efficiency of anti-biased conceptualization.

Few today can propose philosophical concepts without the internal logic being absolutely watertight. If someone today propose a wildly inconsistent concept (that could have been common hundred of years ago and still pushed concepts and ideas about the world forward), it will be broken down and discarded by its lack of internal logic. Biases and fallacies would be pointed out and the one proposing the concept is required to rework that inner logic. Even in continental philosophy, the inner logic is examined closely. Does it have high probability or not?

Time sharpens any general concept of a tool and that tool will always evolve to be better throughout history.

In my own perspective, I view philosophy as a tool for expanding on concepts or ideas with a strategy of thought. It's a toolset of conceptualization in which you can test your ideas while avoiding bias.

I think that the idea that one of its purposes or definitions to "questioning religion", isn't really a primary definition, it is a by-product of philosophy's internal logic.

If a primary function of philosophy is to remove biases and fallacies in reasoning, in order to help conceptualization past an individuals mental traps in logic, then it naturally starts to dismantle religion since religion requires a bias towards the faith.

Anyone who's religious and who starts reasoning with philosophy will either fail at that philosophy reinforcing their religion, or break down their religion through the logic found in philosophy. The only reason why religious people have created philosophical concepts is that they intentionally fail at philosophy at a certain level, concluding it with "because God" or similar.

The reason I argue that it's a form of anti-bias toolset is because before we even had a word for cognitive bias or such a concept formulated, it was part of philosophy. The constant demand to include logic. Even in Continental philosophy there is logic. People didn't read Nietzsche and agreed because of some arbitrary reason, but because there was logic in his observation and conceptualization.

It is a form of abstract observation of reality. If scientists observe actual reality, doing experiments, gathering data, calculate predictions, then philosophy is more abstractly observing reality, doing experiments, calculate predictions but not limiting where the mind goes based on the constraints of physical experiments. That doesn't mean it lacks logic more than science, but that the logical experiments uses analogies and thought experiments as its experimental ground.

So the critical role of philosophy is a framework for conceptualization and true observation that removes bias, when done correctly. And through that, the byproduct becomes anti-religion as religion requires bias to that religion in order to function.

Because of this I don't think the critical role is to question religion, it's just that religion becomes the biggest target for philosophy based on its opposing internal logic. And through history we've primarily witnessed the clash between religion and philosophy because of this.

I made a thread about skepticism and said that we cannot coherently deny that language transmits meaning because by understanding this sentence you have proven that language transmits meaning.

I then challenged the justification for a lot of skepticism. Extreme brain in a vat skepticism has no evidence or warrant for it and does not justify building a world view around it.

I feel that somethings are undeniably true and preserving the truth is valuable and that we rely on truths to negotiate life and I see no value in a kind of "anything goes interpretive relativism" outside of genuinely ambiguous things that have proven good grounds to dispute. — Andrew4Handel

I would answer with practical probability.

I act out of probability in every situation. Truth is that which has the highest of probabilities. It's the same principle as in scientific research, no scientist is ever claiming absolute truth, they are claiming levels of probability. Now, some seem to think that probability means there are no truths, and therefore other probabilities always balance out the highest probability, but that is a false interpretation of it. For example, General relativity has such a high probability that all experiments that have been conducted on it have perfectly verified it, including the latest about gravity waves, which was said to be the last experimentally unverified part of Einstein's predictions. So, in terms of normal speak, it would be considered truth. But in science, it is still just referred to as an extremely high level of probability.

Why I'm usually always bringing up science like this in these types of discussions is that the frame of mind humbles our experience of knowledge. It makes it possible to be certain of some truths without getting stuck in bias. Because even if something has a high probability, there might just be some discovery that flips it on its head, and when such a thing happens, those who are dead certain of truths in an absolutist form will still hang on to those truths, being mentally incapable of change. But if everything is formed out of levels of probability, you will never have a problem changing the "truths" that define your knowledge, if those "truths" were proven wrong by another higher probability.

If the subjective scrutiny of the individual's knowledge is always thorough and with as objective eyes as can possibly be, they will rid themselves of bias and be able to flow through knowledge without getting lost or stuck. They will also be able to interact with others of the same frame of mind in a way that better themselves and the world.

The way for an individual to scrutinize their own personal truths should always be: does it have the highest probability? And is that probability objectively formed or invented by themselves or someone else that they surrendered to?

The star: — Banno

The model: — Banno

It's stuff like this that shows just how much can be extrapolated through scientific data and math and how "it's just a theory" by many anti-intellectuals and anti-science people holds little water when balancing hypotheticals against each other. The abstract nature of science before being verified in ways that can be witnessed through our senses, makes it so hard for some to accept scientific concepts that they don't, and then form whatever nonsense they believe is correct. So in areas that are even more abstract in nature, like quantum physics, no wonder people jump straight into nonsense fantasies when trying to wrap their heads around the actual data.

I wonder, how many would say yes/no, and at what $amount (and doing what). Then there are those on more regular payrolls. The full range of spreading propaganda is broad, not always effective. — jorndoe

A common practice is to exploit weaknesses of any kind. If not financial, then any type of threat of exposure towards something bad that the person has done, like love affairs etc. This is why many working in critical areas of a nation's security infrastructure requires background checks on not only the person working but his/her social surrounding.

As an aside, The Americans (IMDb, Wikipedia) is one of those spy shows, collecting intelligence, recruiting, exploiting the vulnerable, seduction/sex, "role-playing", blackmail, assassination, ..., cold war, USSR versus USA, ... Not quite what I'd call realistic through and through, but sort of entertaining. — jorndoe

I think the reality is much duller, a better example would be "Slow Horses", pretty funny, but also closer to the dull reality of counterintelligence.

The most notable case in Sweden that was pretty high up was in Säpo, Säkerhetspolisen, our equivalent of CIA/MI5. Just last year, after 6 years of investigation including feeding them bad intel all these years as well as having civilian players on board fooling them, they were finally charged. These were considered hired agents who had been infiltrating Säpo many years ago and worked their way up. They used gadgets like car keys that had hidden USB memory sticks and received payments from Russia over the years. It was one of the most notable cases ever in Sweden and one of the longest specific investigations and counterintelligence operations to date.

Suppose someone offered you $500 for parading whatever crap around for a few hours. More? $5000? (What?) However it was imparted (as if a prank? part of a movie? for real?) and payment arrangement was made. Perhaps some known local broker was involved (shady or not), say, last part of the payment to be given by the broker upon being shown appropriate photos/footage. I'm sure something's arrangeable. Easy money.

Would you? — jorndoe

Real recruitments of spies happens this way for much more severe actions by the one hired. In the docu series, the journalists actually get footage of a Swedish guy who was in a lot of dept, being recruited by given $3000 in cash envelopes to smuggle autonomous driving tech details out of Volvo where he worked.

I guess when we also have a world in economical turmoil and people get into money problem there’s not that much needed in terms of financial strength to get a lot of people around western nations into seemingly minor actions that doesn’t even have any real crimes attached to them. So while discovered spycraft leads to legal consequences (the Volvo guy has been sentenced, and “diplomat” from Russia is now doing whatever FSB is doing in South Korea), getting normal people into doing things like posing with signs in front of a camera and maintaining a chaotic presence on online forums and social media by spreading doubt and disinformation, is not able to be counteracted in any way but informing of such risks to the public. It’s an effective way to split the Wests support for Ukraine and according to this investigation, it is massive compared to before the invasion. And absolutely important to adress, even if an effective strategy for it is hard to figure out due to no real crimes connected to it.

Might be but it'd be virtually impossible to distinguish an effective Russian influencer from a genuine forum member as appearing genuine is what would make them effective. Same would go for the other side, incidentally. So this is probably not going anywhere and can be dropped, I think. — Baden

The key thing was to point to the investigation that continues to show an increasing presence of this online and IRL. So it's not really the same "for the other side" as it's a massive disinformation movement by Russian intelligence. And I said it just as you, no one can be singled out because there's nothing conclusive, even if Tzeentch wants to bait me into pointing fingers. It was also sort of an analogy on how evidence for probability is not the same as conclusions by deduction when there's little to nothing functioning as true premises. The point is, I've pointed to investigations that show a probability of something and how that gets twisted into other things by others in this thread and how this can be either two things, deliberate or by influence through those narratives that are being spread. Where this is going is about disinformation strategies and how important sticking to actual evidence, facts, and probability is rather than conjecture, i.e. what is the most probable, not the most wanted conclusion. This has been my point all along and is something that I think is lacking in this thread based on the recent debates.

Yet here you are, conjuring up theories about people on this forum being 'Russian agents', literally using the words 'pretty high likelihood'. — Tzeentch

As you can see, again, you are as always unable to understand the difference between a theory that concludes a deduction, and merely pointing towards facts that exist and probability. It’s this inability to understand what is being written that makes you confused. When I point to facts stated by an investigation, first the one about the Russian ship and then about this, facts presented by rigorous investigation and numerous sources (as I mentioned earlier), but you confuse this with a deductively concluded theory. I have never concluded it being Russia, I have never concluded someone in here being a Russian agent, I have only pointed out factual things that points to a likelihood, a probability. So, either you are unable to understand these differences and just imagine some other text that wasn’t written and then goes into confusion, or you are intentionally changing the concept of the text you are arguing against in order to frame it in another way, often in a strawman fashion. But the fact remains that I’m not concluding anything deductively, I’m talking about probability and facts supporting weighting that probability in a certain direction. And this is the foundational difference in how you look at a problem and how I do it. I look at probability when something is lacking something conclusive, and you form a deductive guesswork for a final conclusion based on very little. You change the argument that someone makes and thereby change the details of that argument and its form, I go by what’s actually said, which when you continue to change how you interpret what is written and use that in your premises, simply makes it dishonest.

Perhaps worst of all, you lack the spine to own up to your words. — Tzeentch

I lack the spine to conclude some probability as factual truth and not simply as a probability and thereby being careful not to point in specific ways? If that is what constitutes a spine in your world, then I guess you think you have one since conjecture is your game.

If there are Russian influencers on this forum, then that is a pretty serious thing as it is part of a disinformation strategy for planting doubt. And since that is a serious thing, I’m not gonna be as sloppy as you with pointing fingers.

Who on this forum do you believe 'might very well be' a Russian actor — Tzeentch

Did you read what I wrote? I’m observing a behavior, a rhetoric similar to these tactics. The problem is, as I pointed out, that what’s observed can be either that or someone falling for those tactics. I’m not gonna point fingers because that unknown factor makes it impossible to know without more info. I’m not gonna do like others do and conjure up theories based on nothing but belief. I just point out that these things are wide spread and the likelihood of a forum like this having either of them is pretty high. Or do you think that this event in the world today isn’t actually appearing on people’s doorstep, in both the real world and online?

If you have accusations to make, make them Sherlock. Otherwise keep this type of low-brow copium to yourself. — Tzeentch

It's just an observation based on facts. These people exist, these people either get other people to believe them by spreading doubt about what is going on, or they are these people spreading doubt. It's part of the disinformation war that Russia is conducting against the West by any means they can do without drawing attention to themselves.

Just look at Russia's latest try at organizing sham protests to keep Ergodan from approving Sweden into Nato.


The people in the images are from protests in Paris and Madrid, but they are working for Russian intelligence. The demonstrations in the background have nothing to do with them or their signs. They're made to provoke Turkey and Ergodan, nothing else. This is part of an investigation done by Dossier Center, SVT, Le Monde, Denmark Radio, Expressen, NRK, Delfi, NDR/WDR, and Süddeutsche Zeitung that has mapped out how Russian intelligence is orchestrating these things around Europe.

One of the key factors for spreaders of disinformation online is the rhetorical tactics they use. If you've seen it in use, it starts to stand out. So, no, I'm not making accusations at all, I'm merely pointing out similarities. And the tragedy that many people fall into this without understanding what they help promoting.

The most interesting thing is that a part of that documentary series dives into similar types of personalities who, when digging deep into their funding and things like their host sites, show to be actually paid by Russia to just keep spreading doubt by always arguing against even the clearest and logical reasoning. And how this undermines regular journalists to the point some have been getting death threats as a result of gullible people following these actors. It is not unreasonable to actually argue that a forum like this might very well have such actors. It is not outside the realm of possibility seen as how they operate and how many they actually are.

I'm not going to read any more of your nonsense. You ignore looking at the investigation that I have been talking about and referred to this entire time. And since you ignore all of that there's no point in having any further discussion. If you're just here to rant and ignore whatever counterpoint doesn't fit your narrative, then it's a waste of everyone's time to be a part of such discussions.

Calm down. You're crossing a line here. — Baden

Sorry about that. But since Boethius will never stop changing other people's arguments into his random nonsense and then just rant on without ever addressing the counterpoints provided I'd better just leave. I think it's frustratingly low quality to the point you get dragged down by it, and it's impossible to write anything in here without him just bombarding everyone with his nonsense. It's the reason most people have left this discussion.