any philosophy which tries (per impossibile) to leave it out entirely becomes thereby one-dimensional, even incoherent. — Janus

How could a philosophy not 'leave it out'. It can't be said. What would a philosophy do to 'leave it in'. Wink at it?

who or what is making the tea? The milk? The tea-leaves? The kettle? Not a single one of these, or any combination of these ingredients, can cause tea. — NOS4A2

No, they are not sufficient causes, they are necessary causes. Another necessary cause is a human tea-maker, or a machine. It doesn't make them not causes, otherwise nothing could ever be caused.

It’s true; I would not respond to something that is not there — NOS4A2

Exactly. So, in terms of speech legislation, if I wanted to stop you responding, then removing one of the necessary causes (my post) would do that. Of course, in the real world we must usually talk about minimising chances rather than outright prevention because the number of sufficient causes is very large.

This is because your post isn’t the cause of me responding anymore than it is the cause of no one else responding. The causal chain of your language ended wherever you have left your words, and there they will sit until some agent comes across and chooses what to do with them. — NOS4A2

You've just ignored what I previously said rather than counter it. That is not the public meaning of the term 'cause'. You'll not find such a meaning in any dictionary. It is not necessary for a cause to be sufficient in order for it to be a cause. My post was not sufficient to result in your reply, but - this is the important bit - nothing is. So if we reserve the word 'cause' for only those factors which are sufficient we have to accept the absurd conclusion that nothing has any causes.

Leaves are a cause of us raking them. They're just not a sufficient cause, they are a necessary one.

Again, the importance for free speech legislation - remove the leaves and you remove the raking, because they are a necessary cause.

No, I could care less about jargon. — NOS4A2

Alright then. Without the 'jargon'. In order to make tea I must boil the kettle, add the tea leaves and add the milk. Each of those things cause tea to be made. Without one of them there's no tea. But with only one of them, there's still no tea. All three are required for tea. If we say then that boiling water is not a cause of tea, we must say that too of the other elements (since none have primacy over the others). Thus we reach the absurd conclusion that tea has no cause. Since that option is absurd, we label them all causes, and divide them in those which are necessary (without which there'd be no tea - all of them in my example), and those which are sufficient (the group which, when all present will cause tea).

It's flat out wrong to say "The only thing you or your words have caused is the movement of some air and some sound waves." Had I not written my previous post, you would not have posted your reply, so my previous post was a necessary cause, without it your response absolutely would not have happened.

If you want to go about using words Humpty-Dumpty like to mean whatever you want them to mean, then you crack on, but it's stupid to post on a public forum and not adhere to the public meanings of the words you use.

Your just skip a variety of preceding causes to the event you described—hearing, understanding, trusting etc. — NOS4A2

Do you really not know the difference between proximate and ultimate causes, between sufficient and necessary causes?

The "you'll believe whatever you want to believe" part sounds like you think there is no way of correctly figuring out for sure which of several different beliefs that several different people all believe for that slew of different reasons is more or less correct to believe. — Pfhorrest

That's what those slew of reasons are there to do. Help you work that out.

When the question of "how should we do such-and-such" comes up, your answer is always "people do so-and-so". Okay, yeah, and? That's an answer to a different question entirely. It's like you just flatly refuse to express any prescriptive viewpoint at all, and go out of your way to try to read every question about one, or proposed answer to such question, as descriptive instead, so you can give your descriptive answers that I've little doubt are quite accurate but are nevertheless totally non-sequitur. — Pfhorrest

It's not a flat refusal, but we have to set the parameters first. If you asked "how should I get to the pub?" and I answered "Just fly", or "Wish that you were there" or "Click your heels three times and think of beer", I think you'd quite justifiably say "No, how do I really get to the pub?", meaning that my answer about how I should behave needs to be within the parameters of how humans actually do behave. No matter what you say here, no matter what you think ... unless you are some Buddhist master, you are going to process moral dilemmas in the ways I've outlined, you can't not. So any solution to how we should carry out that processing must be within the parameters of how that processing is going to take place regardless of what we think.

If we all just think what we respectively think and there's no sorting out who's right or wrong, then there's no point in arguing — Pfhorrest

I don't see how that follows. Why would the only point in arguing be for me to change you from something right to something wrong? I could, for example, offer alternatives. I could help you strengthen your argument so you feel more confident about it. I could resolve internal contradictions which would otherwise cause cognitive dissonance.

a way of metaphorically poking an anthill for idle fun, to watch the bugs react. That's the definition of an internet troll. — Pfhorrest

I don't see how that follows either. I could enjoy the game (like chess, which is equally combative, but both parties benefit). I could have a passionate academic interest in how people defend their beliefs and how that approach has been changed by online social media...

So if we think different things, and do different things about that disagreement, and neither the different things that we think nor the different things that we do to sort out that disagreement are any more or less correct than the other, where does that leave us? — Pfhorrest

Pretty much the place human(-like) social relations have been for the past few million years.

The kind of responses I would find most pleasant to get would be "oh hey that's a neat similarity you've observed there, never noticed that before" or "huh that's an interesting approach to that problem I've not heard of before". I'm not looking for people to tell me that I'm right, like you always seem to suggest, but just for people to find the approaches I mention curious, interesting, and worth further consideration — Pfhorrest

So "well done you" then?

premises are definitionally assumptions made at the start of argument, so saying I've assumed them is kinda missing the point — Pfhorrest

I specifically said 'hidden assumptions'. The interest is in being shown the ones you didn't even know you had.

you seem to take my starting premises to mean something much stranger and less plausible than what seems a quite natural reading of them would be — Pfhorrest

Think about that. How are you judging 'natural reading'? I'm not the only person here who's taken your comments this way, that thread you started on epistemology had Janus, Banno, Srap and a few others all take your comments in this supposedly 'strange' way, and you judge it to be 'strange', how? Because it's not how it seems to you? Well, duh! That's why we present these things to other people, precisely because thing always seem clear to you, if they're the things you're saying, the point of putting out into the public is to see what they mean to others.

the whole conversation on my side then becomes trying to figure out exactly what other weird background assumption you're reading into my views that enables you to interpret what I'm saying in a way that would entail such obviously wrong conclusions that I am in no way endorsing. — Pfhorrest

Again, if you're simply assuming that my reading of background assumptions and the wrong conclusions they would lead to are erroneous, then you've just assumed you're flawless from the outset. I don't see the point of engaging in those conditions, but hey, it's your output.

if I handed you an apple and you said “yuck! I hate apples!” that would be one thing, but if I hand you what I’m sure is an apple and you say “yuck! I hate eggplants!” then I’m going to be very perplexed about what is going on here. I hate eggplants too, but... this is an apple. Isn’t it? I wouldn’t offer you an eggplant, I agree those are gross. Why do you think this is one? — Pfhorrest

Why would you be perplexed. It's obvious what's happening there. One of us has made a mistake identifying apples. Difficult to believe with actual apples...very easy to believe with something as complex as philosophical frameworks. In fact I'd go as far as to say it should be the default expectation.

The most straightforward way of clarifying that differentiation is to consider first purely descriptive assertions.... in parallel to that... — Pfhorrest

This is a repeated tactic in your thinking and I've not understood it from the outset. Simply saying that X is like Y does not make X like Y, yet this seems to be the substance of your argument. You say "like with perception and reality we can..." I've given probably half a dozen reasons why moral talk (or moral thoughts) are not like perceptions and models of reality, yet this seems to have had absolutely no impact on your use of this strategy. So, is there a thing that is not like perceptions and reality, for you? Can everything be likened to it, just by saying so, do you have any criteria at all for these analogies?

I'll try again.

If I tell you "sequoias are a species of tree native to the California Sierras", my aim is not just to get you to believe that I believe that, but to get you to believe the same thing that I believe. — Pfhorrest

Yes, because we're hard-wired to assume a shared exterior source of our sensations, so our common language uses that when making declarative statements.

if I tell you "a doctor should not kill one healthy patient to harvest his organs to save five dying patients", my aim is not just to get you to believe that I disapprove of that happening, but to get you to disapprove of that happening — Pfhorrest

No, because not being hard wired to expect an external source for our hedonic affects, our language does not make use of that, and we do not make moral declarations with that in mind. Some people might sometimes want you to disapprove, other times they might not care if you disapprove so long as you comply, other times they might simply be informing you and be indifferent to your reaction, other times they might be identifying their own values for group identity.

If you accept my assertion, for whatever reason -- if you decide to agree with what I said to you -- then what you end up with is not just a belief about what I believe, but a belief about sequoias. — Pfhorrest

Yes, because we expect sequoias to be something which exists outside of ourselves, to have consistent properties which do not vary depending on who is looking at them.

If you accept my assertion, for whatever reason -- if you decide to agree with what I said to you -- then what you end up with is not just a belief about what I like or dislike, but a dislike of doctors doing that thing I'm talking about. — Pfhorrest

No, because we do not expect our likes and dislikes to be set by values external to ourselves which are invariant between people. Firstly I could 'accept' your assertion in any of the contexts mentioned above, only one of which would result in my disliking doctors doing that, and second, my likes and dislikes, being internally sourced, are not something which is generated by higher thoughts like understanding what my friend has said about their view. Unlike perceptive models which areinfluenced in that way because we expect shared external sources of them.

I'm not just trying to talk to you about my mind, in that hypothetical speech-act, but about sequoias. — Pfhorrest

Yes, because we all believe that sequoias are external-to-us objects with properties that do not vary depending on our physiological state.

'm not trying to talk to you about my mind, in that hypothetical speech-act -- nor about anybody else's minds, for that matter -- but about doctors murdering healthy patients. — Pfhorrest

No, that would be to assume the rightness or wrongness was a property of the doctors not of the mind perceiving them and we do not assume such a thing. So you can't talk about the 'badness' of an event without including in that the state of mind {feeling bad about it}. You can talk about the 'tallness' of sequoias without including the state of mind {thinking that sequoias are tall} because we expect tallness to be an invariant property of sequoias in a way that we do not expect 'badness' to be an invariant property of doctors killing people

You can't just claim things can be treated the same without addressing the ways in which they are different and showing those ways to be irrelevant.

If you tell me you're feeling sad, do you expect that I merely take that as a description of some externally observable behavior you're doing, rather than remembering the way I feel when I describe myself as "feeling sad" and imagining that you feel that same way? — Pfhorrest

Sometimes, yes. You overestimate the narrative of what you think you're doing. But that wasn't the point. The point was that we cannot do this with thoughts that have no external behavioural reference because it would make them impossible to learn. What's the external behavioural referent which distinguishes thinking X is morally wrong and not wanting anyone to do X?

yes, you could in turn have desires about your desires about your desires, ad infinitum, the more you thought over your decision-making process. — Pfhorrest

If so, then how? Presumably you agree that all of this takes place in a physical brain, so if you want to assert that this is possible, you'll need to posit a mechanism.

You can perceive a pond of water in the desert, but because you know about mirages, disbelieve that there is actually a pond of water in the desert -- but that doesn't make you stop perceiving it. — Pfhorrest

It really does.

If I say "murder is wrong" and you say "oh yes of course, murder is horrible!" but then think to yourself "mental note: don't let Forrest find out about any murders I do", that's clear that you don't actually agree with the moral claim, — Pfhorrest

Again, you're assuming your conclusion in your argument. You've not established that this is what moral claims mean, so how can you say that I wouldn't have agreed with it on those grounds? If the moral claim "murder is wrong" is to mean "murder is something which people will generally punish you for" then me thinking "don't let Forrest find out about any murders I do" is exactly me having agreed with it.

Just like in my epistemology — Pfhorrest

I get it, but just like in your epistemology, you're underestimating the degree of underdetermination your method yields - namely that none of the views you'd want to eliminate will actually be eliminated by it.

the Vatican ... takes many steps to ensure that bogus or doubtful claims are eliminated — Wayfarer

Priceless!

But it is complicated - and not just because sociological investigation is methodologically suspect in the very best of conditions. There would necessarily be an awareness that the data would seek to inform government policy on universities - with regard to freedom of speech, a fundamental human right that - institutionally marxist sociology departments are politically opposed to. The last thing post modernist, politically correct left wing academia want is free speech. They've dedicated the past 60 years to gradually closing it down, and that's who you want to conduct this research? — counterpunch

damn sight more robust than your uneducated guesswork. — Isaac

I think free speech is a matter of principle — counterpunch

So? What has what you think is a matter of principle got to do with the laws of the democracy in which you happen to live?

cases in which it is at issue need to be judged on merit, — counterpunch

I agree, yet every time I mention it you seem to think that their individual merits are unmeasurable and so I'm confused as to how you propose to do such judging. Oh yes, I forgot the solomonesque wisdom of what you personally reckon might be the case.

The individual circumstances of any particular case make it different from every other. — counterpunch

Again, I agree, yet you seem to be saying that we do not need any empirical data about the individual circumstances of each case, that you can simply judge them tout court.

I don't expect ensuring free speech means abandoning hate speech legislation. — counterpunch

Well it does - I mean literally hate speech legislation is a restriction of free speech for exactly the reasons universities are claiming exist to restrict the speech they're now restricting - ie the harm (the reduction in liberties) it causes the communities affected by it. If you agree with hate speech legislation then you agree on principle that speech which has the effect of causing such harms should not be 'free'. This means that your entire distinction hinges on the empirical matter of whether or not the speech concerned causes the harms claimed.

I don't think it's possible to gather objective data on such issues. — counterpunch

Then why do you support hate speech legislation? Maybe the speech thereby banned doesn't cause the harms claimed. If there's no way of gathering the data, how would we know?

If as you say, it's an empirical matter, explain how you would gather such data. — counterpunch

It's not that complicated - sociological research, interviews, questionnaires, measures of equality in segregated communities, historical analysis...there's tons of ways we can gather data. Maybe not very robust data, but a damn sight more robust than your uneducated guesswork.

OK - I'll ask. Many other liberties? What do you mean by that? — counterpunch

The argument against the sort of language that is being opposed it that it creates an environment in which the subjects of that language are less free to pursue their lives than they would be in the absence (or at least less pervasive use) of that language. That, for example, someone expressing racist views at a university has the effect of making those views seem more legitimate, which in turn encourages more open expression of those views in people's actions which in turn restricts the liberty of the subjects of those views.

This either does happen or it doesn't. Whether it does or doesn't is an empirical matter.

There is no right to not be offended in the declaration of human rights. — counterpunch

Who said anything about being offended?

This is a theoretical problem to which we have a ready answer. Ensure everyone has freedom of speech. Why is that a problem for you? — counterpunch

Because ensuring it clashes with many of the other liberties we want to ensure everyone has.

How do you propose to measure liberty? — counterpunch

How do you propose to ensure equality of you don't? What would equality mean in an un-quantified variable?

So your view is that there is no way at all to judge one belief to be better or worse than any other, and all there is is the fact that people believe different things and so whatever it's not like any of them are any more correct or incorrect? — Pfhorrest

I don't know where you'd get that from, it's literally in the quote "You'll believe what you want to believe for a whole slew of incredibly complex biological, psychological and sociological reasons". Does that sound like "no way at all"? I'm struggling how you can read "a whole slew of ... reasons" as "no way at all".

Why are you arguing about anything then? — Pfhorrest

I'm not arguing about anything. I'm critiquing your position. I assumed that's why you posted it. I haven't posted anything, not a single thread.

My beliefs are different than yours, but it seems on your view they can't be any worse, they're just different, and there's nothing to do about that. — Pfhorrest

I didn't say there's nothing to do about that. just that there isn't one single correct thing to do about that.

It’s as though I was to tell an anecdote that began with “So I was at the store one day...” and you objected that I presume there exists only one store because I said “the”, and then we spend weeks arguing about what articles mean and the ontological commitments behind them and then maybe we eventually move on to whether it was really “one” day given that it was simultaneously a different day in America than it was in Australia and... — Pfhorrest

So you wouldn't find it weird if I came to you with a mathematical proof and you said I'd made a mistake in step one and I said "I don't want you to say anything about step one, I know step one is right, I just want your view on steps two to ten"? My suspicion is that you'd just say "Why come to me at all then, if you already have an infallible means of checking the soundness of your steps?"

This is a perennial problem I see with a vast proportion of the threads here. Logic is not that hard, pretty much anyone with a graduate education (or intelligent enough to get one), can follow through the logical consequences of a position, from given premises. It's the premises that are interesting. You're an intelligent person, and you've clearly given this a lot of thought. I very much doubt you've made any glaring errors in following the logical consequences of your premises, I suspect, had you done so, you'd have spotted it yourself on the second reading and corrected it. But the hidden assumptions in your premises are a lot harder to spot, we all have our own blind spots for what seems right to us because the mental effort of dealing with cognitive dissonance is something we're programmed to avoid. The help other people can be is that they have different blind spots to you, so they can show you yours (and you theirs). These are all in the premises, these are all in imported assumptions, right at the start.

It's like you're presenting "if A then B, A therefore B" and you want us all to 'get into the meat' of "therefore B". Any stoned undergrad can do that. Hell, you can program a computer to do that bit. The bit that matters, the bit where others will have something interesting to say is "if A then B". Right at the start.

If you're just going to assume that every problem raised is a 'strange presupposition' or 'uncharitable reading' then you've simply assumed you own premises. Well then the rest follows flawlessly - well done.

You're arguing that that there are two apples in one bag and two in another, therefore four apples altogether, and when I challenge that claim you direct me to Peano's axioms. I'm not challenging the method by which you added the two quantities, I'm challenging your method of establishing those quantities in the first place.

In order to ensure equal liberty you must a) measure the liberty each party has, and b) establish how much liberty the action in question removes/gives to each party. Both are empirical matters.

We do create private language all the time , for instance
when we create new theoretical ideas.
‘ Private’ here is a bit of a mis-nomer though. — Joshs

...as is 'language'.

I think you’ll find writers like Clark and Barrett declaring much closer allegiance to the pragmatists than to Skinner and Watson. It only took the field 80 years to catch up .The problem wasnt empirical validation , it was making the conceptual shift. — Joshs

I agree. I used to take a behaviourist approach way back at the beginning of my academic career (methodological, not Skinner), and over the course of it I've shifted to a more cognitive approach. That there are such conceptual shifts can be used as justification for any potential one though.

In that light, I have another link for you, — Joshs

Thanks. I'll have a read (with hopefully an open mind!), but your quote does sound like more of the same vague philosophical readings as in the previous piece. I don't object to these views at all (I'm on a philosophy forum after all), but they are only frameworks, not models. They don't have predictive power and their utility is not universal, it's personal. If you personally find that framework useful, then that's great, it does sound like it's not inconsistent with the empirical evidence (at least not universally so), but I don't think we should confuse the framework for the matter being framed.

I’m not going to let you get away with this ( he said half in jest). As a good empiricist you should know better than to pronounce a verdict on a theory without first demonstrating that you know what it is saying. — Joshs

Yes, fair enough, but that cuts both ways. Would you like to stand by a claim that your understanding of the neuroscience behind active inference models was better than my understanding of phenomenology?

The point is these are not two equal fields of enquiry. Both have methods and aims about which it is possible to be wrong, but science also has a body of knowledge about which it is possible to be wrong. There's no such body of knowledge in phenomenology.

I notice you didn’t comment on my observations concerning the incommensurability of rival meta-theories concerning agreement on what constitutes empirical evidence. Maybe you could start there. Would you be able , for example, to justify the Kuhnian claim that one scientific theory ( for example, phenomenologically oriented enactivism) can replace a rival one without invalidating -disproving any of that rival theory’s empirical predictions? — Joshs

If you'd read any of the arguments I've had about epistemology on here you'd see that I've already done so (to the best of my ability). I have no problem at all with underdetermination, I regularly make that case. What I dislike, however, is the move (often made) from approach A, with all it's empirical evidence, cannot found it's own premises, cannot demonstrate the validity of it's own frame...therefore approach B. It doesn't follow. None can. Yet we still must choose, and I'll take the one yielding the results.

Then what events are words the cause of exactly? — NOS4A2

If I give you the wrong directions to the pub, and you go that way, my words have caused you to do so. It's not that hard.

I know when you’re struggling when you begin to pad your arguments with ridicule. — NOS4A2

It wasn't ridicule, it was insult. You should recognise the difference.

I suggested, that when we argue this out, we will ultimately arrive at the principle of greatest equal liberty — counterpunch

Yes, and I asked how you are to measure liberties lost and gained in populations far removed from your own without any empirical information about them.

When everyone's interests and rights are taken into account and averaged out, that's what we end up with — counterpunch

Again, how to you measure the interests of populations far removed from your own without any empirical information about them?

You're basically just suggesting that you should sit in your ivory tower and pronounce "We shall ban speech A because I've had a bit of think about it and I reckon it will have the effect of removing liberties to too great an extent, but we shall allow speech B because (after a coffee) I had another little think and it seems to me that it won't have that effect". I know this will come as a deep shock to you, but we're all just a bit reluctant to run the world based on effects an uneducated layman reckons might come about...

There's no need to establish what is, empirically the case. — counterpunch

You said it was a balance of harms. How do you propose to establish harms if not empirically? Guesswork? Shall we do an augury? I'll get the sheep's entrails...

If you threatened me with fines for not promoting free speech, using the exact same words as the government, I’d laugh in your face. Same words, different result. How do you square that circle? — NOS4A2

I don't have any trouble with the notion that words have effects, so it's not a difficulty for me. I'm not arguing that words are the sole cause of any event in which they play a part. I'm just pointing out how laughably transparent your 'argument' is that words don't have effects. Honestly I think you'd get more respect if you just had the guts to stand by your convictions. Not...you know...much, as those convictions are pretty repulsive, but better than this joke of presentation.

that we can ... narrow down the range of possible theories... — Pfhorrest

...is what I was disputing. We can't, as my example shows. Same will be true of parsimony, elegance, explanatory power, or any other such system you care to come up with. You'll believe what you want to believe for a whole slew of incredibly complex biological, psychological and sociological reasons and you'll come up with whatever post hoc rationalisation is required to make you feel comfortable with it.

You are the sole reason I don't engage here as much as I otherwise would. — Pfhorrest

That seems an odd thing to say. I can't think why you'd want to post your ideas on a forum and then complain about them being discussed. Did you just want everyone to say "wow, well done you"?

I'm not claiming that the meaning of any particular word just is identical to a psychological state, but only that some of the many different things you can do with language generally, with your combinations of words, is to convey to someone else an understanding of what you think or feel about something, as well as try to get them to think or feel likewise, — Pfhorrest

Right, but this is what you denied earlier, which is why I'm getting confused about your argument. You specifically said that moral language was not just providing the other person with some facts about the world for them to do with what they will, yet if moral language is just as you say above, then all it is doing is exactly that, providing facts (about the speaker's state of mind). So which is it?

We also have words that refer to mental things, emotions like joy, anger, sorrow, calm, and states like certainty, doubt, and yes belief, and intention. — Pfhorrest

No we don't. That would require a private language which would be impossible to learn. We have words which refer to public effects of what we take to be 'emotions' which we use to convey our own propensity to those public effect. If there were no mediating public effects we could not possibly learn the words. The relevance of this to our conversation here is that the word 'ought' can't be learnt as "the feeling I have in my head that wants X to be the case" because we could not possibly have ever heard such a relation in order to learn it. The word 'ought' can only, like emotions, be learnt by reference to a mediating public activity. So what is that activity? It's paying the grocer when he delivers your potatoes, it's helping the old lady across the road... Social conventions you see all around you being referred to as stuff yu 'ought' to do => "Oh! That's what 'ought' means".

Then Alice says "But that shouldn't happen." Those words, plus the pre-established image of people killing each other they're referring to, prompt Bob to understand that Alice is also asserting that people ought not kill each other. — Pfhorrest

Yep. No problem with the language telling Bob what it is that Alice thinks in terms of their shared language.

she thinks the picture of people killing each other painted by the words "people killing each other" is unfit for use as a blueprint for how to remake the world, and that she suggesting that Bob think likewise.) Bob agrees with that too, so he says "Yeah, it's bad. People shouldn't kill each other." — Pfhorrest

No problem here either - Alice is still just providing Bob with facts about the world (her attitudes - both to the blueprint, and to Bob's agreement with it) for him to do with what he will.

in any case that's the sense that I mean, so please understand the words I write in that sense and not another. (Also please keep in mind my own technical differentiation between "intent" and "desire" in my philosophical system that we're discussing. If you have suggestions for better words to encapsulate the difference between them, my ears are open.) — Pfhorrest

It's your technical definition that I'm trying to work with. It was this which distinguished intent from desire. I desire state X, I intend to do Y to get it. If intend refers to the state we want to be the case, then what's left for 'desire' to do?

But if one of those facts about the world is about someone holding a prescriptive attitude toward some state of affairs, and the other fact is about the odds of that person's attitudes towards states of affairs being the correct ones to hold, then what you end up with is the adoption of a prescriptive attitude toward a state of affairs — Pfhorrest

People are not automatons. Those two factors alone would not be sufficient to end up adopting the belief. We have a thousand other factors coming in to play at once.

You, Isaac, talk here like you are not capable of understanding "what's in the box", so to speak, or even that there is anything in the box, but I can't imagine that that could actually be the case and yet you somehow manage to function well enough in society to live the life it sounds like you've lived. Instead, I can only speculate that you're willfully refusing for ideological reasons to talk about what's in the box, and insisting on treating the box like it is the content rather than just the packaging. — Pfhorrest

And it didn't occur to you that it's because of the life I've lived? "what's in the box" is a matter of psychology, yes? I'm a professor of psychology. I'd like to think it's quite obvious from my posts that I have at least a better than average understanding of "what's in the box". the problem is that you don't. It's way, way more complicated than you're making it out to be, we don't even know ourselves what we want most of the time, there's half a dozen competing desires at any one time, none of which are compatible with each other, the winning desire is not the one we 'rationally' work out (that's almost always rationalised post hoc), our physiological state changes what we think best from moment to moment, an idea you think ideal when you're hungry will seem unattractive when you're not (judges deliver harsher sentences before lunch that they do after it)...and we haven't even got on to language yet, there's no simple relationship between our spoken words and the thoughts which prompt them, we change our language in different social environments, we process whole sentences which are often only 'checked' by the rational brain, not formed by it, we say things for any one of scores of different reasons, many of which, again, we only rationalise post hoc...

The picture you're trying to paint of moral judgement not only is woefully simplistic, but even as a goal it would be throwing away millennia of evolved, finely tuned mental processes in hubristic favour of something you came up with.

It is simply not true that when we use moral language we aim to transfer some picture of how the world should be to some other person. Absolutely, categorically not what's happening. It may, on some occasions be a part of what's happening. And as a goal it's like throwing away Deep Blue in favour of some moves you worked out on the bag of a fag packet.

's entirely reasonable for me to ask what you consider to be a reasonable limit on free speech. — counterpunch

I didn't say it was unreasonable of you to ask, I said I had no interest in answering.

I reckon it is not reasonable, because of the principle of equal liberty. — counterpunch

Which depends on the extent to which it restricts liberty...which is an empirical question about reality (real people having real liberties, actually restricted). Since you've no interest in establishing what is empirically the case, there's little point in pursuing that line is there?

but you do look for a theory that affirms all of everyone's observations. — Pfhorrest

We've already been through this. Literally any theory at all can be made to match everyone's observations by the addition of another 'coupling' theory.

"The earth is flat".

"But the images from space show a round earth".

"OK then, the earth is flat, and the space photos are faked".

"So you can't hold the theory that the earth is flat, and the space photos aren't faked".

"No, but that wasn't the theory in question".

"OK, let's make it the theory in question - The earth is flat and the images from space aren't faked - that doesn't match all observations".

"Well, now that's the theory in question, sure it can - The earth is flat, the images from space are not faked, and a forcefield changes the apparent shape of the earth when looked at from a distance"

"Alright, but you can't hold the theory that..."

...and so on, ad infinitum.

Do you think that a reasonable limit on free speech? — counterpunch

I'm not actually commenting with the intention of discussing the matter with you, you've shown yourself to be completely uninterested in any empirical facts or rational argument therefrom and I've certainly no interest in hearing a fifth reading from your 'Stuff I Reckon'.

My comment was only aimed at showing how the use of polemical terms like 'free speech' is unhelpful when what we're really talking about is just balancing harms, like any other question of social activities.

One can listen to a speech and fear what he comes to understand are the intentions of the speaker. This is a rational deliberation, not something forced into the mind by words. — NOS4A2

Well then he ought rationally deliberate the opposite, it would be far less problematic. Unless, of course he couldn't, in which case the words would have inevitably caused him to think that way...but since words can't do that apparently, he's free to deliberate whatever he chooses to in response to those words.

The classic example is shouting fire in a crowded theatre without cause. It would cause panic, and unambiguous harm. It's not controversial to accept this would have no free speech defence. Any advocate of free speech would accept this limitation. Child pornography is another accepted limitation. Accepted limitations generally revolve around the harm principle. — counterpunch

So why the song and dance about free speech? The issue clearly has nothing to do with that. You think the speech in question does not cause sufficient harm, others (in the universities) think it does. So what's needed is statistically significant evidence of the harm in either case to make an informed choice (or reasoned speculation in the case that such evidence is unavailable). You've given nothing but a single anecdote in evidence of harm for your case and mentioned nothing whatsoever about the harm against which it is to be weighed. Is that the really scientific method as you understand it?

Thompson seemed to be pretty thrilled when he announced on his twitter feed a research paper which he co-authored purporting to show that predictive
processing can’t account for affective selection bias.

He wrote:
“ Exciting news: predictive processing theory can't explain affect-biased attention: “

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001002772030189X?via%3Dihub

As you would expect, defenders of pp almost
immediately denied that the paper represented
any sort of refutation of the model as a whole. I’m just pointing g out that , while Andy Clark hopes that active inference models will unite representationalist and dynamical, non-representationalist factions within the cognitivist community, phenomenologically-oriented enactivists like Thompson believe that active inference suffers from the drawbacks they associate with predictive processing. — Joshs

That's fair enough, if those are the arguments you're making (It didn't seem to me that this is what you were arguing - your style is somewhat opaque for me). My comment was really about the prevailing trend, not the complete absence of outliers (Thompson's article has 4 citations, Seth and Friston's latest article on the same topic has 86 - to give some idea of the take up of these ideas in the community)

Needless to say, I think the paper does not show what it purports to. Thompson Gives a good summary here.

there are two points that speak against this solution. First, it faces a similar problem as that of endogenous attention. We should not have a high precision expectation that our decision to attend will lead to the sighting of the dog, given the infrequency with which it is actually in the yard. Second, following the arguments of Ransom, Fazelpour, and Mole (2017), PP theory does not provide a coherent account of voluntary attention. Any increased precision in the sensory input will be merely a consequence of attending,rather than what is driving attention. This is because, while it is true that attending to something will, by a sort of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy,’increase the precision of the prediction error associated with that hypothesis, it cannot be a precision expectation that is driving the decision to attend to that particular object. We will have equivalent precision expectations for all objects; no matter if we attend to this or that object, the precision will be enhanced in either case. So precision expectations cannot be what is responsible for driving voluntary attention (c.f.Clark,2017). There is therefore no way to explain the selective orientation of attention in terms of precision expectations, given the current PP conceptualization of attention.

Firstly, he's misunderstood the scale of surprise-minimising perceptive attention. Most studies like Seth and Friston's are dealing with individual saccades, not large-scale decisions. It's about where to move focus in the next saccade to minimise predictive error about the object (of even just edge/corner feature). It's not about a decision to look into a yard to check for a Doberman.

Second, he's misinterpreted the position on voluntary actions (which is about looking into a particular yard to check if there's a Doberman). No-one in active inference is claiming that a reduction of surprise in a single model can account fo any macro scale behaviour. So defeating such a claim is defeating a straw man. Friston, for example, is abundantly clear that "There are multiple hierarchical models all interacting to produce the final action state". And when he says multiple he means literally hundreds, not just two or three.

As I said before, this is the problem with phenomenological approaches. They confuse the effect, as it seems to us, with the mechanism that produces that effect. That it feels like we're paying attention to the yard with the doberman in it, doesn't therefore mean there's this single property of our brain called 'attention' which is somehow neurologically directed to the single entity called 'yard with a Doberman in it'. That's how we experience it. Theories like active inference are trying to understand the mechanisms, they means by which the brain makes us feel that way. To simply assume the means must be representative of the end result is naive at best, if not downright lazy thinking.

No. There's no free speech defence for closing down others. You don't get to delegitimise, shout down, drown out and de-platform other people - and claim that doing so is only exercising your right to free speech. If you appeal to free speech you have to respect that right for others. — counterpunch

So there are limits to free speech. On what grounds?

I don’t trust that a “free speech champion” should compel people to advocate for free speech under fear of fine and sanction. — NOS4A2

Why would they have any fear? The new rules have only so far been communicated with speech and apparently speech has no effect whatsoever on other people...so if these people fear fines as a result of some speech, that's their problem.

she was demonised and twitter mobbed. Had it been anyone but an independently wealthy author, she might have been drummed out of her job - because the employer doesn't want the negative publicity. This same kind of politically correct terrorism is going on in academia. — counterpunch

Isn't all that 'speech'? Wouldn't preventing it require some kind of restriction on free-speech?

When I talk about what it means to be of some opinion or another, I mean to talk about how to analyze the (phenomenological) state of mind of assenting to some proposition; which consequently is the same thing that that proposition means, since asserting that proposition is an attempt to get someone to adopt that same state of mind. — Pfhorrest

That's then not speech act theory or meaning as use. It's claiming that the meaning of a word is the psychological state it somehow embodies. Just because sometimes I might use a word to get someone to an intent, it doesn't make the meaning of that word the same as the intent I'm trying to get them to adopt. Let's say you're right and the meaning of the expression "do X" was the same as my intention 'do X'. How would I ever learn how to use the expression "do X"? I can't see inside other people's minds to compare intents, I can't show people my mind and ask them if I'm using the term correctly. So how could I possibly know that "do X" would refer, in conversation, to the intent 'do X' in my mind?

My take on assertions of all kind, descriptive and prescriptive, is that they are trying to show the listener what attitudes toward what states of affairs the speaker holds — Pfhorrest

How? As above. If I wanted to do this, how would I ever learn what words to pick to achieve the task?

It sounds perfectly natural to my ear to speak either of desiring or intending to do something oneself, or desiring or intending that something be the case, including that someone else do something. — Pfhorrest

I agree, but that's not what you said. Desiring that John do X is not the same as intending that John do X. If I desire that John do X I might intend to persuade him, show him, or force him, but I can't simply intend that he does. Intent is a plan of action, it can only refer to that which is in my control.

I'm curious if your (apparent) understanding that intent can only be to, not that, is paralleled in your understanding of desire. I.e. as you understand the words, can you only "desire to" do something, not "desire that" something be the case? — Pfhorrest

Hopefully answered above.

That's all I mean by "communicate" it. To convey to them what it is that you believe. And also, in the case of assertions (rather than merely expressions), to pressure them to believe likewise, though of course that's not going to magically force them to believe likewise. — Pfhorrest

Right. But earlier you expressly denied that such moral language only gave the listener fact for them to do with as they will."what it is that you believe" is just a fact about you, as is your trustworthiness. So all we have is facts about the world.

My entire philosophy of language hinges entirely on speech act theory. And my epistemology of analytic a posteriori facts, i.e. facts about the meaning of words, is heavily about use as well. — Pfhorrest

See my opening paragraphs for why I don't think your approach fits with either philosophy.

I don't see how you can infer from "it is not the case that humans tend to do this" to "it is not the case that humans should try to do this". — Pfhorrest

Relatively straightforward answer to this...ever come across the well-quoted definition of madness?

If this was true it would seem that science should be impossible. — Pfhorrest

See below about the difference in what we expect. we expect a shared world as an external source of perceptions, we don't expect a shared external source of hedonic satisfaction. It's a simple as that. We're born that way (or at least as far back as we can test - six month old so far).

Do you think that we do not expect to be pleased and displeased by those same kinds of things, or are you also affirming that in those cases we do also expect it? — Pfhorrest

Yes, we learn to expect it, but it's not hard-wired like the expectation of an external source of sensory inputs seems to be. The expectation can take as much a three or four years to develop.

we see someone else undergo something that would hurt us and expect that it also hurts them, rather than just expecting that they're a different person so maybe they don't mind a fastball to the nose like we would. — Pfhorrest

Many two year olds would expect exactly that (the latter), yet none expect that, say, nociception is caused by their skin and not by some external object interacting with it.

The existence of colorblindness and tetrachromaticity doesn't undermine the objectivity of visual observation, it just means that we have to take note that the same things appear differently to people with differences in their vision. — Pfhorrest

Those differences are not fully systemic though. People with colour-blindness still have the same occipital cortex areas linked in the same way to object recognition and spatio-temporal areas, which, in turn are linked to motor control areas to interact with the external world. they're still wired to assume a shared external-world source of their greyscale scene. so when people talk about colours and seem to act differently to what appears to be the same shade of grey, the colour-blind person starts to assume they're missing something. Which is how colour-blindness became know as a condition. Otherwise, how would the colour-blind person know there was anything wrong?

This is not the same as difference in affect valence targets. There's no connections to sensorimotor systems with the intent of manipulating some external-world source. we expect, and are wired to expect, that these are internally caused, specific to us, not necessarily shared, and so we've no cause to assume our desires in that respect have any source other than our own bodies.

It's actually not an objective fact that a certain apple looks red simpliciter, it's only a fact that it looks red to people with certain kinds of color vision, but that relationship between the people and the apples is objectively real. Likewise, in my moral system it would not be correct to claim that for anyone to undergo some particular event is always bad simpliciter, but only that it's bad for certain kinds of people to undergo those things, when they are the kinds of people who are hurt by undergoing those things. But it's still objectively bad for those kinds of people to undergo those kinds of things. — Pfhorrest

The difference here, and it's really important, is that the apple looks red to certain people on account of some property of the apple (in this case the response of its skin to light). This si not the case with the bad event. the bad event does not feel bad to certain people because of some property of the event. The event is largely immaterial. It feels bad mostly because of the response of the person at the time. It might easily have not, even to the same person. There are parameters which are very likely to feel bad to all people (though to different degrees), but calling them 'bad' on this basis would be arbitrary. Why not call our response to them 'bad'. why change the events and not our response? we don't care if the apple is red or blue, so changing our response to believe the apple to be blue (this can actually be done with some senses), is pointless. Not so with negative hedonic responses. We've an incentive to avoid them, but we've two methods available to us. Change the event, or change our response. How do we choose which?

Empirical experiences tell us what looks true to a person like us. Hedonic experiences tell us what feels good to a person like us. Being objective about either just means giving an account that fits with all those different kinds of experiences of all those different kinds of people, in all their different situations, etc. — Pfhorrest

No. See above. There's neither the incentive nor the 'wiring' to change our response to empirical experiences such that things feel true. The feeling of truth is aimed at predictive success. There is both the incentive and the 'wiring' to feel 'good' about whatever hedonic experiences we're exposed to, rather than simply accept their first impression.

That doesn't prevent us from judging those desires to be the wrong ones to have, in others or in ourselves. — Pfhorrest

It does really. What would a 'wrong' desire be other than a desire not to have that desire?

Or else, on second consideration, it may be something like my take on the assignment of ownership, part of the deontological level of my ethics (which we haven't gotten to yet), which is parallel to my take on the assignment of meaning to words in my epistemology. A part of that deontology deals with what we might loosely call "analytic goods" (not that I actually call them that -- I say "procedural duties", but that's not important right now), which hinge entirely on the assignment of ownership, in the same way that analytic truths hinge entirely on the assigned meaning of words. — Pfhorrest

No. But an interesting read nonetheless. I won't comment on it her as it's off-topic.

If you and the grocer agree to trade some potatoes for some money, you have agreed that upon delivery of the potatoes the money becomes his property, so when he delivers the potatoes, the money now just is his property, "analytically" (by analogy), and you have no claims over it anymore. — Pfhorrest

So this is true, but...

If that's what Anscombe means — Pfhorrest

Not only that, but that the word 'ought' picks out this naturally/culturally occurring state. what we mean by 'ought' is that state. Thus the question often asked of naturalist ethical approaches "yes, but did we 'ought' to behave that way, just because it's social convention that we do" is dissolved. The question makes no sense because it's using the word 'ought' whilst at the same time claiming to not know what the word means.

Can a variable outside a markov blanket be defined by a property in an objective sense, the way we would define a physical stimulus in terms of its own properties, independent of its interaction with a specific organismic system — Joshs

No. The act of definition would only be possible by inference and so be dependent on the last variable node inside our Markov blanket. This doesn't prevent us from assuming it in our models though.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of structural coupling , but it specifies that the environment with which an organism interacts , including all of the outside variables that it can surprise an organism with, cannot be defined independently of the functioning of that organism. — Joshs

Yes, I'm familiar with the approach, but there's a difference between definition and nodal location in a systems model. Active inference approaches are not trying to define hidden states, they are assuming their existence as a model of how we interact with our environment.

Do you agree with the above? — Joshs

I can't say as I can make much sense of the above, but I'll have a go

living systems seek equilibrium, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence; when the [system] . . . executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself. — Joshs

...this seems to be laying out active inference, just in a more philosophical sense. The system seeks equilibrium, not with hidden sates (it can't access them) but with interpretations of hidden states, using Bayesian models.

whereas physical structures can be expressed by a law, living structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms: “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium,”and every living being “modifies its milieu according to the internal norms of its activity.” — Joshs

...sounds like social constructivism. again, I don't have much of a problem with that, but our models must interact with something, they must be initiated by something, and so that something's properties will be somehow imprinted, even if neither accurately nor exhaustively.

“...autopoiesis (in a broad sense that includes adapativity) is the “self-production of an inside that also specifies an outside to which it is normatively related,” and thus that autopoiesis is best seen as the “dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority.” “the (self) generation of an inside is ontologically prior to the dichotomy in- out. It is the inside that generates the asymmetry and it is in relation to this inside that an outside can be established.” — Joshs

...same caveat as above, we act on something to do this and that something will leave it's print. This is not idealism.

if you do disagree, do you think most cognitive psychologists also disagree, based on ‘empirical evidence’? If so, you should also keep in mind where the embodied approach to cognition that researchers like Barrett embrace got its start. One of its key inspirations was the 1991 book, The Embodied Mind , co-written by Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, who happen to be leading the segment within the cognitivist community advocating for the changes in psychological modelling I’ve described. — Joshs

I don't read Thompson as advocating anything in opposition to people like Feldman Barrett and Seth. enavctivism is almost exactly what is being described in active inference approaches to perception, and the embodied mind concept is referenced frequently by Feldman Barrett. I've read Thompson, I'm just not seeing the differences you seem to be seeing.

I can direct you to papers by enactivist researchers like Francisco Varela , Matthew Ratcliffe and Shaun Gallagher — Joshs

I've read some of Varela's work, but if you've anything relevant I'd appreciate it. The other two are philosophers. Not that that's a bad thing, but we were talking about predictive hypotheses arising from Kelly's model which have been successful in some way, so we're not going to get that from philosophers are we?

These are not examples of selective disruption of affectivity, — Joshs

No. That's not what you asked for. You asked for "an example of what it would be like to have a conversation with someone in this situation".

Why would they care if the word brought them a cup? Because they wanted a cup. — Joshs

Asking for a cup in consequence of wanting a cup is not the same as caring about getting the cup. If I program a computer to make the noise "battery" every time it's low on power, it will have the effect of ensuring the computer remains powered (assuming a compliant human listening). The computer may or may not care whether it gets power, depending on how it's been programmed.

This is a central issue I have with phenomenological approaches. they take, quite unreasonably, the starting point that they way one thinks one's mental processes function, is in some way informative of the way they actually do function. I just don't see any good reason for that assumption.

are goals and desires ever devoid of affectivity — Joshs

I don't see any necessary link, no.

Kelly has a peculiar definition of anger. He says that it is a response to someone who disappoints us by violating an expectation we had of them — Joshs

It isn't. The whole reason why Feldman Barrett began her investigation is that there was no empirical support (despite decades of effort) for the concept that any emotions come from any particular triggers, social ,psychological nor physiological. there's just no consistent pattern of relationship with any factor or set of factors that have been tested for.

I would argue that almost all of what is essential in what we call feeling is already in this assessment, and all that has been lost is a certain bodily supportive energetics that aids in accomplishing the goals that the anger is directing us toward. — Joshs

Yes. I have some sympathy with that way of looking at it, so I suppose in that sense one could say that if an 'emotion' is a combination of cognitive a physiological sates, then just as we could remove the physiological states and say the emotion is no longer there, we could do say and say it is (on the grounds that most of it is). I supposes it just depends on how many component parts you're willing to lose. A ship without a sail is still a ship, but without a sail, a hull, a rudder and a deck, it's starting to look less and less like one.

If your model defines emotion exclusively by reference to the peripheral reflexes and endocrine changes that accompany and serve the needs of affective assessments — Joshs

It doesn't. You've either misunderstood or misread Feldman Barrett. The point is not that emotions 'are' these endocrine states, it's that emotions are our models of the causes of them, and crucially, interactive models - ones which themselves modify those states to better fit the model as much as the modify the model to better fit the states.

which is about the meaning of that prescriptive opinion that A holds — Pfhorrest

Opinions don't have meanings, their just not the sort of thing it would make any sense to ascribe a meaning to. Words have meanings. Art has meanings, even actions sometimes have a meaning. Opinions don't.

But what does it mean to think (or say) that you should do X? — Pfhorrest

Another previously hidden crux of difference. It 'means' a completely and utterly different thing to think something than it does to say something.

What I'm on about is that the content of that state of mind being communicated is not itself just a reference to a state of mind. — Pfhorrest

It's all starting to fall into place now. Let me guess, you've either never read Wittgenstein or were unmoved by his arguments, yes?

Words don't transfer the contents of a state of mind. They do things. When I speak words to you it is with intention that they have some effect on you, not that they faithfully carry the contents of by state of mind like some binary code. It would be categorically impossible for them to do s because if they did you wouldn't know what they meant. It simply doesn't make sense to talk about words transferring anything.

My position is that the content of the thought "you should do X", or more generally "X should be the case", "X is good", etc, just is the intention that you do X / that X be the case. — Pfhorrest

You've either mixed subject here or this doesn't make sense. The thought "you should do X" seems to be referring to a second person, like "John should do X", but then you say it is equivalent to having the intention. One cannot have an intention for another. I cannot intend for John to do something. I can only only hope or strive to get john to do something. It doesn't make any sense at all for me to intend for him to, I don't control him.

To assert that something is the case is to communicate a belief that X is the case — Pfhorrest

No. To assert that something is the case is to act on a belief that it is, not to communicate it. Your audience may or may not adopt that belief. all you do is tell them that you have such a belief. you can do no more, your words don't magically contain the belief, to be injected into your audience's ear.

If you're trying to talk with other people to sort out which of all your differing thoughts and feelings about what's true/false or good/bad are the correct thoughts or feelings, you could just ignore everyone whose opinions disagree with yours, but that'll never get you anywhere toward agreement. Or you could instead look at each other's reasons for thinking and feeling the way you all do -- those experiences you're each stuck with as the only things you have to go on, as above -- and try to put together some picture that's consistent with all of those. That has a chance of reaching agreement, if you can figure out which picture fits that bill. — Pfhorrest

I can go along with all that you've said above this, and I think I understand why we disagree as to the function of moral language (you either haven't heard of or disagree with things like speech act theory and meaning as use)...but the above is also another, separate area of disagreement. I think you just don't understand how people form beliefs. It's not a field in which evidence is very robust, so I'm not going be as assertive as I might be with neuroscience, but it is the case that almost all the (weak) evidence we have collected to date tells us that humans do not form beliefs via the process you outline here, so your assertion that it is the best of the available methods is as wrong as such assertions can ever be in this pseudo-scientific area.

People do not assess their own reasons for thinking and feeling the way they do in a consistent manner, and they do not do so outside of influences like the very fact that you're speaking to them about it. You do not judge their given reason in a consistent manner, nor is that judgement unaffected by outside influences such as your opinion of the person's social status. Basically, any such assessment is unlikely to yield anything other than the conclusion you wanted it to yield at the start, you'll simply interpret all the evidence you thus gain in a way that supports your initial feelings. I'd be very surprised if, after some global effort to do exactly this, a single person changed their behaviour as a result, certainly no large number would.

The trouble is desires and affects are not at all like perceptions and sensory inputs when it comes to social interaction. I already expect other people to see and hear the same things I do. It's hard-wired into my brain to expect that. so when I use their judgements as to what's out there to inform mine, I'm doing so according to a paradigm which is deeply embedded in my psychology. There's no such equivalent with desires and affects. I don't expect other people to have the same physiological state as me, so I've no reason at all to trust their judgement on it, we're not sharing our desires (judgements as to the cause of our affects), we are sharing our perceptions (judgements as to the causes of our sensory inputs).

We expect to be pleased and displeased by different things. We do not expect to see and hear a different reality. To the extent we are pleased and displeased by the same things, then I think there is some ground for ethical realism, but that's basically ethical naturalism. the argument goes "I have very strong evidence that you will feel better if you intend X so I advise you to do so".

In addition I think you're mistaken to imply that it is only at the level of affect that we can no longer easily intervene. We have hard-wired desires too. Many of the methods by which we think we'll most likely reach our target affect levels are either hard-wired from birth or are wired in very early childhood and practically impossible to budge later. In some cases this extends even to intentions (to use your terminology). It's this physiological reality which I think virtue ethics seeks to encapsulate.

Lastly, there are many intentions that are simply the result of society's mechanisms - emergent properties, and this is what the naturalism of people like Anscombe seeks to capture. You ought to pay the grocer after he delivers you potatoes, not because of any hedonic reason whatsoever, but because that's what 'ought' means in that culture. It means the position you're in after the grocer has delivered the potatoes. It's a function of culture, not of individual hedonic values.

It is an external source of surprise, but it is never fully independent of that anticipation. — Joshs

Then it is not an external source of surprise. Variables outside the Markov blanket are defined by that property. Anything which is not independent of that variables in question in the direction we're concerned about is inside the Markov blanket. You cannot have surprise if nothing is outside of that blanket (it's a fully knowable system), so you need hidden states. It doesn't matter how far you push them back, the boundary (the edge of the Markov blanket) is the edge of the system.

the central question is, exactly what from a phenomenological experiential vantage is the endocrine activity contributing to the meaning for us of something like an emotion? — Joshs

The fact that you haven't read the research on this is not that same thing as the central question remaining. It may remain to you. To most neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists it doesn't remain because they've read the vast acres of research which has gone into resolving that exact question. I realise that there seems to be some great difficulty among lay philosophers to grasp this point, but scientists are not idiots, they too can think "It might be that these things are just correlated, not causally related" It's not genius-level revelation, it's a basic realisation anyone remotely intelligent would have, act on and test. Which is why that possibility has already been had, acted on and tested. That's basically what the decades of study in the field have been doing.

The point he was making is that many different empirical accounts of a phenomenon can all ‘work’ , that is, satisfy predictive hypotheses. — Joshs

What predictive hypothesis has Kelly's model made and had empirically supported. If you can supply the papers I'd be interested to read them.

If we sever certain connections between brain and body , can we eliminate certain kinds of emotion? — Joshs

Yes. Without a doubt. Although no study to date has knocked out all emotional states, all the evidence from lesion studies seems to indicate that it is theoretically possible although it would require hundreds, if not thousands of lesions.

given me an example of what it would be like to have a conversation with someone in this situation. — Joshs

Tourette's, echolalia, Wernicke's aphasia induced logorrhea, Progressive Jargon Aphasia...

Describe for me what someone would sound like, how they would be motivated , what their words would ‘mean’ to them without emotion, what you think meaning without emotion could possibly be like. — Joshs

There's no simple single answer to any of that.

Motivation can occur by a single neurotransmitter. Adjusting the serotonin levels in flatworms gets them to behave with different apparent motivations than untreated flatworms in the same environment, and they don't even have a brain, so motivation sensu lato is certainly not emotion-driven.

Words 'mean' what they do, so I would imagine if someone learned that the word 'cup' brought them a cup then that's what the word would 'mean' to them. A simple computer could do this. again, I don't see how even a brain would be required, let alone emotion.

That A intends for me to do X (i.e. "thinks that I should do X"), and that A is a person I expect to have the right idea of what I should do, constitute a reason why I could decide that I should do X / intend to do X, but it doesn't say what it means to think that I should do X. — Pfhorrest

Right. But I didn't ask that. This and the following long-winded explanation of it have nothing whatsoever to do with my question, so either your reading comprehension is terrible or you're avoiding it for some reason. I asked how 'trusting A' caused me to intend X when A says "Do X" without my simply drawing a conclusion from descriptive facts [A has said "Do X"] and [A is knowledgeable in this area].

even if we were 100% in agreement on all that, there would still remain the question of when (and why) someone on the other end of such a speech-act should go along with it, should agree with what someone tells them ought to be. — Pfhorrest

Yes, I agree. Which is why I'm trying to get you to explain to me how their deciding to do so is not just a pragmatic decision based on descriptive facts (and their own desire/intent). You're claiming that the speech act "Do X" does something more than simply communicate the fact about the speaker's state of mind, that it somehow communicates something more. I'm asking what that more is and by what mechanism is affects my intent.

to think something is the case is to have an "idea", a mental "picture", not just a simple 2D visual picture but a complex immersive multisensory "picture", that you are treating as a depiction of the world;

- while to think that something ought to be the case is to have a similar such "idea", or mental "picture", that you are treating as a blueprint for the world. — Pfhorrest

I don't agree that this encompasses all that there is to thinking something ought to be the case - and I can present a wealth of cognitive science to prove that, if you're interested. But I can agree that this might sometimes be what it means to think that something 'ought' to be the case.

But that's utterly irrelevant to the discussion about moral speech acts because they are about the method by which my having a blueprint caused you to have a similar blueprint without simply presenting you a set of descriptive fact. You've invoked some other magic essence I somehow transfer in my speech act which is not a descriptive fact but which nonetheless somehow might get you to adjust your blueprint to more closely match mine. I'm asking what that thing is and how it works.

in the second case, if you can "walk around" that idea in your mind and examine it from all different perspectives and from every perspective it consistently matches your appetites, as well as any that you personally haven't replicated but trust others' reports that they have had. — Pfhorrest

I completely agree, this is something you could do. But

a) it would not, by that method, be able to effect your desires beyond their physiological boundaries - the frontal cortices simply don't have that level of control over the endocrine system, it's not physiologically possible. It's like saying that if you thought it was a good idea for your heart to stop beating, or for serotonin to no longer act as neurotransmitter you could just think it and make it so. You can't.

b) The fact that I could do this has absolutely no bearing on whether I should do this, nor on whether moral language actually is trying to make me do this in common use.

Keep in mind that both Australia and New Zealand have low community infection precisely because they locked down heavily and quickly. — Banno

Absolutely.

IF 'merica or the UK were to lock down now, they could do the same. — Banno

Well that's the matter in question. I'm not overly wedded to one position or the other on this, but from the WHO briefings alone, this is definitely a moot point. The trouble is the we can't lockdown everything. Lockdown just means lock down unnecessary stuff, if there's sufficient endemic load that even those essential services represent vectors along which the virus can travel (without meeting a dead end), then there will be no less a source population after the lockdown than there was before.

In order to eliminate a virus locally all current live host populations have to be unable to reach a new viable host before the time either their host dies, they are eliminated by their host, or they are killed by environmental conditions outside the host.

We can do this by reducing the number of viable hosts (immunity, vaccination), or by reducing the chance of a potential host passing by a current host's vicinity within that crucial time window (lockdown).

The problem is that the time window gets reset every time the virus moves to a new host, it gets to start the clock again, If the original endemic population is small, the total number of successive successful moves (moves where the virus does meet a new viable host in that time window) prior to a failed move (one where it doesn't and so dies out) is small.

In a high endemic load the total number of successful moves a virus population makes before finally making an unsuccessful one is much larger because not all current hosts are going to recover/die at the same time, so their windows of opportunity are offset slightly.

At some point in endemic load, especially within essential services which are not locked down, the sum total of all those offset time-windows adds up to more time than the lockdown can feasibly last.

Which brings us back to the point I made to Andrew originally. If you only look at the advantages of an approach it's obviously going to appear attractive. Lockdowns in populations with high endemic loads have to be much longer to have any effect (for the reasons I've outlined above). Lockdowns have serious life-threatening consequences (as I've shown with my previous citations about TB, vaccine programmes, access to development aid, medical services, community health services etc.). So at some point there will be a threshold where the endemic load is sufficiently hight that the duration required to achieve elimination would cause more harm than the elimination would prevent.

Fucksake, the UK is only now thinking of isolating international travellers. — Banno

Yes. Not just shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but after it has bolted, reached a new farm, settled down, had foals, gone lame and been turned into glue.

the immediacy of revelation/self evidence/unmediated cognition. The it "just seems this way to me" brigade vs the wealth of evidence for the self as the internal documents of a vast bodily bureaucracy. — fdrake

Yes.

In fact I'd add 'the self' itself. As in 'true to yourself, 'not being yourself'... As if there were some sacred fixed point from which certain feelings rebelliously deviate.

The answer to all those questions is, as I said in my last post, trust — Pfhorrest

OK, so what do you think trust is, psychologically? We have this input (the words "Do X") and an output (an intent to do X). How does trust get us from one to the other without importing any descriptive facts? As I see it we've still got [A says "Do X"] and [A is a trustworthy expert in X-types-of-thing]. Those still seem to be two descriptive facts about the world which I might use together with my desire (not to get these types of thing wrong), to arrive at the pragmatic conclusion to intend X. Which is exactly the description you rejected (supply of facts for me to do with what I will).

As a side issue, I'd also like to know how someone might squire the status of trust within the field of these ethical pronouncements. You've laid out quite clearly why we might trust someone in their descriptive statements, but you left out the equivalent in your paragraph on proscriptive statements. Everything else you mirrored sentence-for-sentence, but you left that out, why?

I'd probably have to agree with

The lie has the function of convincing someone pulled by the hideous strength of life's currents that thrashing their arms and legs in the roil counts as "swimming" and thus helps them stay afloat. The deeper truth is that the lie must nevertheless be believed on pain of drowning. — fdrake

...as the biggest. So the second biggest

That the things people say actually reflect in one-to-one correspondence some picture of the world as they believe it to be.

Related - that the things people do actually reflect a one-to-one relationship with some picture of wordly mechanism by which those actions have the desired effect.