I was thinking of someone printing out "Times New Roman" in Times New Roman and 8.5"x11" paper, putting it up in art museum and claiming "that's art!" — Moliere

I would say that would absolutely be art. As soon as you put it in a museum, it becomes an object to be appreciated, contemplated, and reacted to, rather than used. Even if the reaction is "This is bad because it doesn't look like anything, and my 3 year old could print it", that is a reaction to art, not to a utilitarian object. To escape this, you would have to react with something like "Why is that there? Is someone testing their printer?", but that is just a misunderstanding of its context.

In truth, the actual reaction would probably be a rolling of the eyes, because that kind of gesture has been done before, and would be seen as trite and cliche. But again, those reactions, "trite" and "cliche", are exclusively reactions to art.

I might put doubt on a printed paper using Times New Roman saying "This is Art", but painting letters is part of art at this point. — Moliere

Yes, I agree that painted letters might not be considered an art at all but rather a writing technique. Nonetheless, I read about Japanese Shodō, and most of the people who do it are regarded as artists, but the 'Shodō' itself is not considered an art, paradoxically. :sweat: — javi2541997

Even Times New Roman, I would consider art, but art that has crystallized into use. The creation of Times New Roman involved innumerable choices, building off the templates of previous fonts. If you look at TNR compared to a list of random fonts (I see this for instance when I choose a font in paint.net), TNR looks quite "normal" compared to many of the others, but that is just a choice collectively made: TNR is in the spectrum of "neutral" fonts, for us, in this time. It is just like accent: "accent" is just a deviation from the dominant accent, but there is nothing privileged in the dominant accent, outside its dominance. It is just another way of speaking. Seen from 300 years ago, TNR would look quite eccentric, and hence, "artistic".

I don't buy this idea that paintings, and art in general, can be equated with narrative. Narrative rather seems like one form painting, and art, can take.

Representational painting may aim at specific narrative. More often, it is the viewer filling in narrative gaps themselves. A painting may not aim at narrative at all, it may capture the feel of a place, a time, or a mood. It may symbolize something other than what is literally depicted. With more abstract paintings, like the example you gave the idea of narrative seems pretty hopeless.

What if, art is just a human created object that is meant to be enjoyed and/or pondered, rather than merely used? So, games would be art, and this seems pretty natural to me: games, like other art, start not from a creative void, but from existing genres, which the creator then varies to their liking. Food, to the extent it is meant to do more than nourish, is art. I'm even willing to admit sex toys as art. If so, paintings are just one of many culturally defined genres or categories of art.

Duchamp showed that what is art ultimately rests on cultural context. If you take a prosaic item and place it into an art-context, it becomes art. This is not just some abstract theory, everyone directly experiences it. The urinal transforms from a thing you piss into, into something about which you ask questions like, "but what did he mean?", or say things like "that's brilliant!" or "that's ridiculous!"

I don't think that's true. — Janus

This is not true either — Janus

Fair points, honestly that post was half-baked.

What is a painting, as opposed to a drawing? — Moliere

I think a painting is a type of drawing. The medium, paint, is the most obvious and least interesting distinction.

Paintings are always aesthetically oriented, while drawings might be doodles, diagrams, even words ( which are so specialized and so woven into the fabric of life that those drawings get their own category). A painting is art by definition, a drawing may or may not be.

Paintings are prestige, high art. Drawings, far less commonly so. Kings commission paintings, not drawings. We build temples (aka museums) to honor and worship paintings, not "drawings". If the painting on your wall is not museum worthy, it is because it is "low art", not high; but, it's still on the spectrum, whereas a mere drawing may not be on it at all.

is there a category which painting and drawing shar — Moliere

Drawings are 2d and represent something other than the literal markings themselves. Paintings are a certain kind of drawing.

Sorry you are going through depression, mate! I've been there. It sucks.

In order to have a philosophical perspective on depression, you first need a philosophical perspective on emotion. What are they? My take: emotions are how the unconscious brain communicates with the conscious brain. What is the unconscious brain? Just the vast majority of the brain whose workings we are unaware of, including everything that is instinctual. The conscious brain ultimately decides what to do, taking all inputs into consideration, including all emotional inputs from the unconscious brain.

Usually, what the emotions "mean" is clear by context. Snake, danger! She's hot, I like her. That guy creeps me out. I'm so worried about my kid's future. But, not always. Why? The unconscious brain is not linguistic, it cannot communicate concepts, only feelings. Words, concepts, ideas, that is all conscious stuff. And so, sometimes you are left perplexed about where emotions come from. If this was not the case, therapy would not be a profession.

Compare depression with some of the other negative emotions:

Frustration: This is useless, I'm pissed! (escalate or abandon inefficacious action)
Boredom: I want to do something else! (abandoning fruitless activity/inactivity)
Anger: I've been wronged, I need to do something! (restoring social equilibrium)
Anxiety: I'm so worried, I need to do something! (avoiding future negative events)
Fear: Run! (reacting urgently to a present danger)
Hopelessness: There's nothing more I can do (abandoning futile goal)
Grief: It's gone, I'm so sad. (reconciling with permanent loss)
Depression: I'm... miserable... (???)

The first 5 emotions urge you to take action of some kind. Hopelessness urges the abandonment of futile action. While grief and depression don't seem to demand action at all. One has to ask then, what purpose do these emotions even serve?

Grief, I believe, is about mental and emotional readjustment, about reframing one's goals and one's self of self after suffering an irreversible loss. One cries, one ruminates on mistakes made, on the bleakness and emptiness without the lost someone or something. Then, somehow the psychic wound begins to heal, and we move on.

But with depression, all seems futile, and the emotion itself useless. The depressed can ruminate all day, spend entire days in bed, filled with vague fears and doubts and psychic pain, and they get absolutely nowhere. The emotion seems totally maladaptive, even lethal in the most severe cases.

My theory: depression is a pathological state, composed of some admixture of grief, hopelessness, and anxiety. These emotions, once meaningful, are unresolved, and have become divorced from their original context, so that the patient no longer knows where they come from. Or, if they think they know, they are wrong, more often than not. (If they aren't wrong, then perhaps they aren't truly depressed, but experiencing one of the healthy, contextualized emotions). Negative emotions, instead of stimulating action or healthy readjustment (impossible, since the depressed don't know why they are there), stimulate negative thoughts, which in turn stimulate more negative emotions. It is the worst kind of vicious circle.

I'm going on... does this make any kind of sense?

I cannot see how this would be 'moral' in any sense other than taking 'moral' to mean 'other-regarding' and simply widening it out without any actual analysis. — AmadeusD

It is not merely other-regarding. There are multiple ideas here:
* The purpose of our moral intuitions is to facilitate cooperation.
* The moral intuitions consist in concepts around fairness and justice.
* These concepts are largely consistent across time and cultures.
* Differences in moral regimes primarily consist in differences as to whom these concepts are applied, and to whom they are not. Who is the in-group, who is out?
* What is commonly regarded as "moral progress" consists in a widening of the in-group circle

The above seems a subjective, hypericin-centered goal. That's fine, and that's how morality works on my view but I don't think this gets us anywhere near a reason to strive toward that goal, or any other tbf. — AmadeusD

Personally I'm interested in describing what morality is, how it works. Not in providing purported reasons for some individual to be moral. Yet, I am inclined to strive to treat every moral agent with fairness and justice. As an animal endowed with moral instincts, I am predisposed to do so. As a reasoning animal, I conclude that many of the delimitations defining in-groups are culturally bound, and largely arbitrary.

'Progress' is such a stupid term for moral workings. — AmadeusD

Tell that to a woman or to a descendent of a slave.

Well, how about that.

I see that Peter Singer is maybe even the founding figure in the animal rights movement. Someone actually translating philosophy into social change is rare indeed, impressive. Sadly, animals remain firmly in the out group of the overwhelmingly predominant animal species. At best pets gets in group treatment.

Perhaps the logical endpoint of moral progression is when not only all humans, not only all sentient animals, but future generations of humans and animals, are all accorded in group status. I'm afraid we are not going to make it there.

To me, what is “actually moral” is closer to the subset of descriptively moral behaviors (cooperation strategies) that” do not exploit outgroups as they increase cooperation in ingroups” — Mark S

Or, what about a cooperation that does away with the notion of out-groups entirely?

I've long had the idea of morality as cooperation strategy without knowing it has had any scientific validation. To me, the core of morally as cooperation has remained more or less fixed over time and space, what changes is who is in the in-group, and who remains in the outgroup. Our halting and uncertain moral progress over the centuries, if we really have had it, has consisted in an expansion of the in-group concept. When we regress, the in-group contacts, with typically tragic consequences.

If it was lawless there’d probably be no life and no one to ask these questions… — kindred

If there are many universes, some lawless and others not, this answers the question. Structure like ours can only arise in a lawful universe, lawlessness might look like a soup of random micro events.

I don't feel free. Do you feel free?

Here are some things I have done, currently do or will do even though I don't want to do them:

1. Breathe
2. Eat
3. Drink
4. Sleep
5. Dream
7. Pee
8. Poo
9. Fart
10. Burp
11. Sneeze
12. Cough
13. Age
14. Get ill
15. Get injured
16. Sweat
17. Cry
18. Suffer
19. Snore
20. Think
21. Feel
22. Choose
23. Be conceived
24. Be born
25. Remember some events
26. Forget some events
27. Die — Truth Seeker

I think this is a misunderstanding of freedom. Freedom does not mean freedom from the constraints of existence. That is death.

Think of it like a game of chess. You are not free to move pawns backwards. You are not free to move bishops sideways. The only way to do these things is to not play the game. And importantly, you are not free to win every game. But within the constraints of the game, you are afforded the freedom to choose any move you wish, so many choices that even the most powerful computer cannot explore them all.

Sometimes I feel free. Even when I do, I am still profoundly constrained by the environment, and by myself. Nonetheless, life affords a vast scope of choices. This can be agonizing, and wonderful.

Great topic. This is something that plagues me as well. In fact our stories are not dissimilar, I too took psychiatric medications that have caused me a lifetime of regret. I too wonder what life could have been had i not made this terrible choice.

Sartre said that man is condemned to be free. We, me you and others with these thoughts, feel this condemnation in this way. Life can seem a nightmare welter of decisions. Every moment a decision, both ones we make directly, and the many more we make passively, by omission.

There is a kind of horror to it. Our minds seem woefully inadequate to the task of computing the myriad of factors that are necessary to decide peven relatively trivial things. For instance, you mentioned choosing where to live. A good choice grants relative happiness, thriving, tranquility. Whereas a bad choice can cause discomfort, unease, unhappiness, a relative failure to grow and thrive. A weighty choice, never made with adequate information, nor with a mind capable of accurately extrapolating this information into the future.

And that is mundane and inconsequential. Consider how magnified the decisions of whether to marry, with whom, whether to have kids are. And these are still routine decisions on the scale of individual lives, which most of us must make. All these are lifetime inflection points. On one side lies one life, on the other, another life. One might indeed be vastly better, happier, more fulfilling. But which?

Welcome to the human condition.

While freedom is a curse, it is also life's greatest blessing, and I say this with total sincerity. Llfe truly wouldn't be living without freedom.

Much more to be said, but what do you think of that so far?

So sorry to hear this! Terrible news. I appreciated her grounded, wise posts and excellent fiction, and her generous constructive criticism to other writers. She will certainly be missed here.

[TPF Essay] Dante and the Deflation of Reason - @Count Timothy von Icarus
[TPF Essay] What Does It Mean to Be Human? - @Vera Mont
[TPF Essay] The importance of the Philosophical Essay within philosophy - @Jack Cummins

hypericin: Bubbles and Styx (I noted some particularly adept descriptive language that I think is characteristic of his work.) — Baden

You're on to me, I can't slip by you anymore. And thanks!

No, I meant hypericin. I'm annoyed with myself. It happens every time. Apologies to hypericin.
Will you ever forgive me? I should have recognised the brilliance but you blinded me with ice-cream. — Amity

Oh, pshaw!

But it's always appropriate for a philosopher to suggest that some example of language use could be ameliorated. — J

I guess when it comes to language I'm in the "describe, don't prescribe" camp. Which is not to say that ordinary language use doesn't conceal a raft of errors.

I would go further and say there is nothing whatsoever included in the notion of belief that it be consciously considered at the moment:

"Are you currently considering that the earth is round?" No.
"Do you believe the earth is round"? Yes.

You might ask the same person these two questions in a row, and they are likely to give these answers. This is not bad language at all, rather it is bad philosophy to confuse the one for the other, or to insist that the second mean the first.

don't know what “does no good” means. Maybe you mean that because they are not quantifiable, they are not objective? — Jamal

Meaning it doesn't help to answer the question. Not only are these not objectively quantifiable, they are not objectively evaluable at all.

but the former involves shared standards. — Jamal

Except the standards are likely not shared at all, hence such arguments are interminable.

Disagreement doesn’t disprove objectivity; it presupposes it. — Jamal

It might presume it. But that presumption can easily be a mistake, precisely the kind of mistake philosophy should aim to correct.

I think the best you can do is consensus of experts. Or, consensus of the general population. This is not quite objective, but not subjective either, they are social realities which share properties of both.

If moles generally prefer to mate with big eared moles, this is an objective fact of mole behavior. Big ears are objectively attractive: to moles. Yet, there is nothing intrinsically attractive about big ears.

A good novel often has the following:

Diversity of interpretations
Distinctiveness and mastery of style and structure
Powerful, unique, and effective narrative voice
Technical skill (prose, description, pace, plot)
Depth of characterization
Moral complexity
Emotional depth, power, or maturity
Staying power
Formal innovation
Where there is symbolism, it is thematically important — Jamal

This does no good when not one of these itself can be objectively measured.

If it is a p-zombie of you, then presumably it wouldn't snort fentanyl either, just get shitfaced.

So can we always seperate out the affective and cognitive aspects of a belief? Is there a method, rule or algorithm that does this for us? I'm thinking not. — Banno

Maybe not a failsafe rule. But I think we can reasonably analyze many cases.

Anna cognitively believes her husband is an impostor, in a way that is inflexible to evidence. But affectively she does not, since she does not behave accordingly.

Balthazar cognitively believes the skywalk is safe. But affectively, at least when he is on it, he does not.

Charu cognitively and affectively believes their lover, despite evidence.

David cognitively and affectively believes in his god, despite evidence.


But generally, no. That is why we pay therapists for years to try (and usually fail) to figure out this kind of stuff.

Would a rational AI, one with a programmed “drive” for self-preservation, ever choose to do something totally reckless—like snort fentanyl—knowing it could likely die from it? No. Not unless it was explicitly programmed with some bizarre override to ignore its self-preservation "instinct". But if that’s the case, you’ve stopped modeling a rational agent and started writing sci-fi code. That’s not a human—it’s a toy robot with bad instructions. — RogueAI

AIs simulate, they aren't rational agents outside their ability to simulate of agents who may, sometimes, be rational. If we made AIs that modeled the range of human behavior, there would absolutely be AIs that snort fentanyl.

unrelated — Banno

That is too strong. Nothing in the same brain is unrelated. Affective and propositional attitudes inform one another, and they coincide with one another more often than not. Rather than"unrelated" I would say "distinct".

The following examples point to states which are difficult to characterize given the standard view: Anna, who suffers from Capgras syndrome, believes her husband is an impostor even though she has no evidence for it and much against it; she also fails to take the kind of actions one would expect with such a belief such as running away or calling the authorities. Balthasar believes the glass skywalk is safe and yet trembles as he tries to walk on it. Charu believes that their lover will keep their promise to not betray them again even though past evidence indicates that they will, and David believes that the God as described in the Bible exists, though he is aware of the evidence suggesting that such a God does not exist and claims his reasons for believing are not based in evidence.

To me the natural conclusion from examples like these is that we have propositional attitudes and we have affective attitudes, and these do not always coincide. To say that beliefs are emotions just muddies the water. We just don't always feel the way they think, humans are built such that these are autonomous enough to disagree sometimes.

"Belief" sometimes refers to propositional attitudes, and sometimes propositional and affective attitudes together. But that's is nothing essential, it's just how we use language. Beyond mere language use, affective attitudes are not propositional attitudes, as these examples clearly indicate.

I keep trying to picture my pzombie equivalent getting shitfaced after a stressful day and not being able to. I get wasted because it feels good. — RogueAI

Think of an AI simulating human behavior. This ai would get shitfaced, because humans get shitfaced and it's been trained to do what humans do. Somewhere internally to the AI there is a decision being made, the neutral network takes in all data and internal states, and this time "get shitfaced" comes on top with the highest weight. So the AI goes to the liquor cabinet and starts doing whisky shots. All without the slightest affective state.

we are driven by affective states, but why is this necessary? It's not for AI, it's not for amoeba, and presumably it's not for p zombies.

:up:

My quote is taken out of context. It was in reply to Jamal:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/991864 — Amity

Ah, I didn't notice we were supposed to be doing full anonymity with this one.

We just don't know if that's the case, right? — Baden

Since @Moliere did not make this explicit in the rules of entry there is no reason to suspect anyone would have this expectation. The private thing for the symposium is far from common knowledge.

what is unfair about making the essays public? That is just the basic expectation of posting in a forum. I think few if any of the posters were even aware of the public private thing. I knew just because we ran into the same issue during one of the writing contests, and I had long forgotten it.

I would say, unless one of the entrants actually wants their entry private (for some reason I can't even fathom now) let's make them public as @Jamal suggests

@Amity The discussion group is all back-and-forth, no time for reading. I was wanting to give interested people a chance to read before we began the discussion. It is too long for me to post on the group page. The history of @Jamal making this private was so he could try publish one of his own stories. I don't think anyone minds at this point if this content is available to non-members of TPF. If someone truly wants to publish in the future and its availablility is actually an obstacle (I think less common for academic papers than fiction?), I guess we can make it private again.

Authors are supposed to be kept anonymous until 16th June. — Amity

Nothing to do with author anonymity. The only difference is that non-members of TPF can view the essays as we can.

@Moliere Could you make the essays public? I have an IRL philosophy group that I attend on Friday evenings, and the topic this week is actually the topic of my entry. I'd like to share it with them. Thanks!

The problem I have with the essay is that it fails to distinguish between a notion of necessary truth as a relative, contingently stable structure of meaning (Wittgenstein’s hinges, forms of life and language games) and a notion of necessary truth as a platonic transcendental, which is how Godel views the necessary ground of mathematical axioms. — Joshs

I think I had a similar thought. But the essay works in spite of that distinction. Functionally, there is a parallel. On both sides, you have the objects of discourse, and you have the unquestioned background. Both linguistic and mathematical discourses need both. And, what counts as object and background is relative in both cases: relative to the language game, and relative to the mathematical domain.

I like this one a lot, very readable and compelling. Not a dry survey, we take a brief and personal trip with the author on a search for meaning.

One strength the author may not realize: these little summations made me more sympathetic to these thinkers than I might have otherwise been. Even if the author found their answers to the question of human meaning wanting, the author succinctly made it clear to me that they all capture something significant. All answers are different, all are worthy, and all are incomplete.

Do we have to conclude with the author that

perhaps no existence has a meaning beyond its simple, stark reality. — Moliere

? Not necessarily. What does 'meaning' mean, anyway? My take: properly speaking, 'meaning' is the significance in a sign-significance relationship. So properly speaking, it is a category error to ask of some thing that is not a sign, 'what is your meaning?'. But it is the most productive kind of error, the kind that makes thought rich and endless. "If human life as a whole were a sign, what would be it's significance?" There is no answer out there waiting to be discovered to such a question, any answer must be constructed by the asker. Hence the rich diversity of answers, and that no one answer can be wholly satisfactory.

These are my thoughts, not the author's. But that's what a good essay should do, stimulate your own thinking. Thanks, and well done!

I feel attacked!

I might be a few hours late. I assume nobody minds, since this is not a contest. I'll definitely be done by midnight my time (UTC -7)

Ah, my real concern was that the essays were going to be hidden from the main forum. I see that is not the case.

I will submit something. I suggest we post them to the main forum, maybe with a prefix like [PF Essay]. They are topical, after all!

No argument. Would you go so far as to say that there is no correspondence at all between the notation and the actuality of the situation? — noAxioms

I think that goes too far. Minds are adept at formulating concepts, and matching instances to these concepts. For something to be notated a member instance of a concept biases toward the fact that the thing does indeed match the concept. And while the relationship between concept and reality is not simple, it similarly goes too far to say there is no relationship at all.

I think there is a subtle conflation here between an attribute and it's notation.

That we notate something as existing depends on a mind to do the notation. With the weak anthropic principle, this means that worlds conducive to minds are liable to be notated, and worlds not conducive will not be notated. This absolutely biases the notation towards only those worlds that can support it.

But this doesn't have a logical connection to mind independent reality, itself. Both types of worlds may exist independently of minds, regardless of the fact that only one may be so notated.

So, in one short week, the Moron has:

* Crashed the stock market
* Crashed the bond market
* Crashed the dollar
* Alienated all of our allies (except Russia)
* United the entire world against us (except Russia)

And these are just the immediate effects of his malignant imbecility. Longer term, we can expect surging inflation, factory closures, exploding debt, recession at minumum.

I hope all the Trumpies are happy!

You see, the interest on the debt is already a higher spending issue on the budget than defense spending. At that, no DOGE or whoever can touch (even if they tried), because not meeting the interest payments is default.

The interest on the debt is on the average now 3,3% which is over 1% higher than five years ago. Just an additional 1% of interest and the whole debt thing is worse. Think if it would be double, 6,6% which is on the long run quite normal. That would basically double the expenses. And let's remember that we have come from literally from the lowest historical interest rates of all time and now the cycle is going up. — ssu

Believe me I am aware of this. You might be under the misapprehension that the Republicans in this country are actual public servants working for the public good. Maybe from outside the country, despite Trump, it is hard to perceive how bad it really is. Not only do they not give a shit about the debt (despite endless bloviation to the contrary), they thrive off it. The goal is to redirect as much of the non-military budget to their wealthy donors as tax cuts. That is all. The debt is a tool to that end. Even before Trump the debt was likely to fall into a death spiral. Studies have shown that, without the Bush and Trump I tax cuts, revenue would have been better than neutral. THEY DO NOT CARE.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

And no they will likely never default. Instead, they will debase the currency to meet the debt. In fact they have been floating this idea for years now.