And "fuck off" is not a normative utterance, I suppose — Leontiskos

A mere pleasantry. Are you expecting honesty, rationality, or good sense? Reject my argument, but don't then complain when you see the consequences.

I'll take your moral indignation as a sign that there is an implicit 'ought' in your account. — Leontiskos

There is no moral indignation. Just the end of communication.

"Society ought not collapse" — Leontiskos

Cool! Fuck off and die, then.

I'm not clear how this relates to Ryle's use of the idea. — Ludwig V

When considering the parents' duties, we have no doubt that they are to blame if they do not mould their son's conduct, feelings and thoughts. When considering the son's behaviour we have no doubt that he and not they should be blamed for some of the things that he does. Our answer to the one problem seems to rule out our answer to the other, and then at second remove to rule itself out too. — Ryle

Can you not see the same shape in this description as in my first Bateson quote about the lying Cretan? Two mutually undermining claims tied together in a knot like "the set of all sets that are not members of themselves".

Our moral judgement is made to judge itself unfavourably.

There can be non-moral obligations. I ought to brush my teeth otherwise they will fall out, but it's not immoral to not brush my teeth. — Michael

Yes it is, but I am not going to argue that right now. But you ought not argue that it is not immoral to lie, because you are undermining your own argument when you do so. Your bullshit undermines this site; It is a performative contradiction. It is not immoral for a-social beings like the cat that walks by himself to lie. It is immoral for humans to do so. And also in the quoted post, I indicate that it is not immoral for a stick insect to pretend to its predator to be stick. because they are not in a social mutual relationship. But humans are.

This to me is a good example of an anti-realist account. Morality is a conventionalized system devised to punishes uncooperative behavior and reinforce cooperative behavior. If moral claims are to be considered "true", they are only true in terms of this system. — hypericin

It's my anti-antirealism. The reality is that communication happens, and is advantageous, and can only happen in a largely truth-telling community. The summary of these facts is that one ought to be honest, because otherwise communication ceases, language is useless, and society collapses. This a physical reality.

I'm not sure if this will be helpful, but Bateson derives a notion of 'category error' from Russell's theory of logical types.

One of the first things that Russell and Whitehead observed in attempting this was that the ancient paradox of Epimenides - "Epimenides was a Cretan who said, 'Cretans always lie' " - was built upon classification and metaclassification. I have presented the paradox here in the form of a quotation within a quotation, and this is precisely how the paradox is generated. The larger quotation becomes a classifier for the smaller, until the smaller quotation takes over and reclassifies the larger, to create contradiction. — Bateson

For the abstract presentation, consider the case of a very simple relationship between two organisms in which organism A has emitted some sort of sound or posture from which B could learn something about the state of A relevant to B's own existence. It might be a threat, a sex­ual advance , a move towards nurturing , or an indication of membership in the same species. I already noted in the discussion of coding (criterion 5) that no message, under any circumstances, is that which precipitated it.
There is always a partly predictable and therefore rather regular rela­tion between message and referent, that relation indeed never being direct or simple. Therefore, if B is going to deal with A's indication, it is absolutely necessary that B know what those indications mean. Thus, there comes into existence another class of information, which B must assimilate, to tell B about the coding of messages or indications coming from A. Messages of this class will be, not about A or B, but about the coding of messages . They will be of a different logical type. I will call them metamessages.
Again, beyond messages about simple coding, there are much more subtle messages that become necessary because codes are condi­tional; that is, the meaning of a given type of action or sound changes relative to context, and especially relative to the changing state of the relationship between A and B. If at a given moment the relation be­ comes playful, this will change the meaning of many signals. — Bateson

[My bold]

Emoticons are very often just such metamessage qualifiers that can indicate irony, or hyperbole, or indeed playfulness.

Like all revolutions of the past, we often start with the intention to enforce the foundation that 'all people are equal, and must be treated as such,' and we end up with 'all people are equal but some people deserve more resources and power than any other person.' When the people get rid of a nasty system, they often fail to prevent their good work from getting corrupted by the nefarious that still exist amongst them. — universeness

Oh dear. This is not a good analysis. If all people are morally equal, then it is an error to divide them into the nefarious and the righteous. That is what must result in the inequality, when the nefarious are brought down and the righteous exalted. Because it follows, after the revolution that the righteous are in charge and deserve all the benefits. So the revolution just turns round and round getting nowhere, because the righteous become the nefarious - there is no difference.

So make a law that the people in charge of every institution must live in the accommodation for the homeless, and receive the minimum wage, and have no private wealth at all, and as long as this law is enforced you will never have a greedy politician, banker, or company director, and the wealth will be very well distributed.

As for information in DNA, that is your burden to defend. I think it's just your mental projection. It might be an abstraction but not physically fundamental as brain state is. — Mark Nyquist

My position on DNA is that it used to work just fine even before that woman discovered it and some blokes stole her idea and got the Nobel prize for it.

No. I see that my seeing anything requires me. But my finitude and mortality entails that information does not depend on my knowing it

indelible? Questions — Bella fekete

Your English is a bit off, but not too badly. Basically a lie can only work in a community that expects truth. Clearly there is no community of 'predator and prey', so there is no conflict between the individual interest and the community interest.

But I think there is a lesson here for humanity that in order for everyone to put the community before self interest, everyone must benefit from the community, and not only the dominant members. Someone has put it this way - that the most dangerous person is someone with nothing left to lose. Like that monkey. So with the morality of truth must also come the morality of fairness, and equality.

So a society that is stratified by race or class in a totally unequal way becomes more like a predator/prey arrangement where morality breaks down because society is fractured.

I'm not familiar with falling abacus, but mindless computers do process information all the time unobserved... and present the results to us at our convenience. Indeed modern computers process information in ways that humans do not fully understand, and programs develop abilities that are unexpected by programmers.

The footprint can only become information if there is a mind — RogueAI

Literally not so.There are footprints millions of years old, from dinosaurs that predate humans. The print of the foot is literally preserved in what becomes rock and informs minds millions of years later. The mindless rock preserves the information until the curious ape evolves to think about it. The necessity of the curious ape so long after the event is patently absurd.

Actually, — JuanZu

Actually, not. We disagree. Can you accept that in your ontology?

Well, the only evidence of information you have is not the footprint, but something that you represent to yourself and assign more or less a truth value to. That is, information is the content that you have in your head (so to speak) and which you could transmit to another person. — JuanZu

Yes you express very clearly what I disagree with. Information is not all in my head, but all in Google. Well not actually all in Google either, because I have faith that tomorrow another fossil will be dug up and some of the information it contains of a time before humans will be seen, interpreted and disseminated to interested parties, information that is new to humanity but millions of years old in reference. I have evidence that this has happened before, but no evidence, obviously, that it will happen again in the future.

Information that is in my head I tend to call knowledge, or habit, or superstition, or some such; not identical with all information, that can be found in books and timetables and DNA, and rock strata. I don't think this is a particularly obscure or idiosyncratic usage. Even the information that comes out of my head is not entirely in my head. I cannot remember exactly, even my last post in this thread, never mind the thousands of posts prior to that.

The corresponding problem with government is that it cannot distinguish itself from a Mafia. The ordinary decent man has a free choice as to exactly what to call how he is fucked. :mask:

The information was born from your relation with the foot print, the relation of interpreter-interpreted. — JuanZu

I'm afraid I flatly disagree. The information is there in the sand, literally imprinted as a record of the shape of the foot that trod there. And this is the case whether I or another, or no one has a relation to it of seeing, interpreting, or knowing. The information is born of the relation of foot and sand, and only introjected by the interpretation of an observer.

Perhaps some light could be shed if the question is reversed.

What characterises the mindset associated with dishonesty? My first impulse is to notice that the mindset must typically include a notion that some advantage will accrue, either personally or tribally.

Consider the deceptive body of a stick insect. It (metaphorically) declares to the world and particularly to its predators "Ignore me, I am a stick." The Blind Watchmaker learns to lie, and simultaneously in the evolution of the predator, tries to learn how to detect a lie. Such is communication between species, in which morality plays no role. Nevertheless, the advantage of deception is obvious.

Imagine a tribe of smallish monkeys in a jungle environment; they have various calls of social identification, and perhaps some to do with dominance and other stuff, but in particular, they have two alarm calls, one warning of ground predators, and one warning of sky predators. One day, one rather low status monkey, who aways has to wait for the others to eat and often misses out on the best food, spots some especially tasty food on the ground, and gives the ground alarm call. The tribe all rush to climb up high, and the liar gets first dibs for once on the treat. This behaviour has been observed, but I won't trouble you myself with references.

Here, one can clearly see that dishonesty is parasitic on honesty. Overall there is a huge social advantage in a warning system, but it is crucially dependent on honesty, and is severely compromised by individual dishonesty. Hence the social mores, that become morality. Society runs on trust, and therefore needs to deter and prevent dishonesty. And this cannot be reversed because the dependence is one way, linguistically. If dishonesty were ever to prevail and be valorised, language would become non-functional. The alarm call would come to mean both 'predator on the ground', and 'tasty food on the ground'. that is, it would lose its effective warning function and its function as a lie.

Any idea why he had to go that way in CPR? — Corvus

Kant was trying to save rationalism from Hume's sceptical challenges particularly wrt causation. Empiricism as hume developed it starts with something like, "Life is not an argument. Shit happens and minds have to try and make sense of it, get used to it and hope the sense will continue. " Rationalism always wants certainty in its ordering like an obsessive compulsive: retreating from reality precisely in order to make it conform to the logic of the mind - hence the contortions admirably laid out by @RussellA.

So serious scientific minds that are dedicated to the idea that it is explainable in physical terms say we cannot do so. While that is not evidence that it is not explainable in physical terms, it is certainly not evidence that it is. The Hard Problem is hard, and unsolved, according to the experts on opposite sides of the fence. — Patterner

But we fools rush in...

I asked a chatbot. — Wayfarer

I asked the ice, it would not say
But only cracked or moved away,
I thought I knew me yesterday
Whoever sings this song. — The Incredible String Band

Ducks on a Pond.

But this fool will declare, if anyone cares to attend, that just as marriage is not to be found in a man or a woman, but in a relationship, which is an ongoing process of dance, back and forth, so consciousness is a relation between an organism and an environment. ChatGPT is a materialist's teddy; a comfort-blanket/imaginary friend.

...meaning that appears does not precede the relationship that actualizes it. — JuanZu

Footprints mean feet, dinosaur footprints mean dinosaur feet. The Earth holds memory of the past as much as any brain. the information is there just as this post is here, but it is first in the writing, and later across the world in the reading that it becomes conscious. Or rather, a post is firstly a product of consciousness, and secondly an object of consciousness, or a content of consciousness. And to the extent that something of this is understood by another, we are 'of one mind'. This is called communication. There is a sameness produced when you see what I mean or I see what you mean. And, "where is this sameness or when is it?" are misleading, foolish questions.

I thought I knew me yesterday, because all knowledge is memory, but whoever writes this post is conscious, and that is not knowable, because it is presence, not the past.

A paper for COP OUT 28 that they will not be hearing because the authors cannot be bothered to go.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/Miracle.2023.12.07.pdf

I think everything should be legal. — NOS4A2

Your wish is granted, including that it is legal to make laws and enforce them. The fundamental problem with anarchy is that it fails to forbid government.

This has got to be the one of (if not the most) off topic discussions I can recall. :rofl: :joke: :lol:
an hour ago — EricH

We have the best words.

This is writing, not talking. I’m writing to you. Such a simple mistake that it’s no wonder your grasp on this and other topics is lacking. — NOS4A2

And literal minded as well. That I have already noticed. I'm sorry, I wasn't really addressing you to be honest.

There are no voices in my head, no. Do you? — NOS4A2

That goes a long way to explaining the curious sensation one has in dialogue with you that one is talking to no one; that text is produced according to some algorithm that is entirely unaffected by the process of the dialogue.

Now me, when I look at the screen with your post on, it is as if you are talking to me. but it seems from what you say, that I nor anyone is talking to you.

evidence — Angelo Cannata

You are only going to get words and pictures on this site. That much is evident, but my finding it so is not evidence to you, just more barking. Seemingly nothing is evident to you; that's rather sad. Because even a dog's barking is more meaningful and communicative. A bark can be playful or warning mournful or aggressive. but you wouldn't know that I suppose.

It's odd, I had you down as more substantial than this blanket unassailable scepticism. Never mind, I'll know better next time even if you won't.

Thinking that it works, even just a little, means that we have some ability get access to the truth, to reality, to how the world really is — Angelo Cannata

If I believed you, I would be rather more quiet. It is only because I do not believe your self-undermining pontifications that I am inclined to produce my own contrary ones. But why are you barking so loud?

in the illusion I do not see what my eyes see. — Art48

It's not an illusion, it's a picture. It's not chequer square and a vase with a shadow, it's a picture thereof.

At no point do you or I actually see or think we see an actual vase or chequerboard. But one might for a moment mistake a picture for reality.

Your eyes, and my eyes do not see something other than what we see, because it is part of the act of seeing to make sense of the light entering the eye. And sense one makes, of "squares and shadows" is one that discards the irrelevant sameness of A and B in favour of the understanding that one is in shadow and the other in light, and they represent the different colour squares. To see them as the same is to misinterpret the image.

In the sense that seeing is remote, one gets news of the world indirectly by sampling and sorting the ambient light, one is not in direct contact with - not the chequerboard because there is none - but the screen, or the paper. But nevertheless, one sees what the artist intended; a chequerboard in which A and B are different colour squares. When you cut up the squares and destroy the image, you end up with diamond shapes about which one can say what one likes. Put one in a shadow, and they will look different again; turn one over and it will probably look white. One is not looking at the image, but at scraps of paper.

But how come you can cut up what you cannot see? How come you can then see the sameness that you cannot see. How for god's sake have you been convinced by a pile of mere words that you cannot see what you can perfectly well see?

Words don't have the power you pretend they do.
— NOS4A2

Of course they do, and you know it. Why do you continue defending Trump if words do not have power? — Fooloso4

The judges' words seem to have some power though. Otherwise @NOS4A2 wouldn't be criticising them, would he? It really is a most fatuous argument that has unfortunately undue influence on the hard of thinking. The whole attraction of power is that what one says can and does change the world, and if it were not so no one would bother to speak at all.

Good grief! where do you find the time?

I'm not sure, (because what the fuck was all that?), but I think I am going in the opposite direction. I want to be biased - in favour of kindness in favour of care, and small birds, and this and that, tasty food, good music. I want to be angry when children die needlessly, I want to cry at all the terrible things humans do, and cry again for joy at all the beautiful things they do. I don't want to be some super chat robot.

a degenerative sub-species of homo erectus. — Benkei

The race that speaks with a forked tongue? :gasp:

could you please explain more. I think you are perhaps referring to a person’s judgement of their emotions? — 0 thru 9

What I'm getting at is that one looks at the world and oneself from the perspective of one's feeling. No one ever claims to look through rose tinted specs, they get accused of it by someone else. Necessarily so, because if one felt over-optimistic, one would automatically, in being aware of their optimism, make an adjustment to a more realistic attitude.

The same thing happens to me sometimes here on the forum, I write a response to a post and when I read it back, I discover that I am really pissed off with this idiot - and then I edit or delete, because as soon as I see my anger, it is over.

I think there's something inherently wrong with allowing people to be endangered by false and inflammatory public language. — Relativist

Yes. it's dangerous, for a start. And false and inflammatory.

Is it to be expected that there will be much, or anything, common to all emotions?

It does seem to me that I discover my emotional condition from outside. When someone says "I feel angry", they might do so with sadness, or with surprise as often as they say it angrily. The tone of the discussion is thus far neutral to the point almost of indifference, as if emotion is too near, even for the most myopic self observer to bring into focus. Rather as one has to take off one's spectacles to see whether they are rose tinted or some other colour. As the old joke has it, when two psychologists meet on the the street one says to the other, "How am I?" - "You're fine, how am I?" That's not much of a bridge over troubled water, is it?

Is it even possible - and this is a heresy - but has philosophy any business to have a view at all? Might one not be just slightly inclined to tell Sophia to butt out of one's sensibilities and mind her own business?

I would have thought that any legal process would involve arrest, detainment, mandated appearances and questioning, imprisonment, or any combination plus many other possible abatements of freedom including confiscation of snake oil and possibly fraudulent papers, and a rather strict ban on blackmail, threatening behaviour, slander and libel. So annoying, so unfair.

Or, here is a talk that starts off with brain talk, and answers your question only in the last minute.

https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false

What have intellectuals ever done for us?

They have no idea how to save humanity from itself. None!

But they sure know how to make themselves seem indispensable.

OK. I'm gonna imagine for a moment that we all know that Brexit is nonsense, that Trump is inane and insane, and we support stupid just to fuck you off, because you have fucked up the world so completely there is nothing else to be done.

So get out of that without moving!

For all the old hippies, a requiem for humanity. Headphones for preference. Not ashamed to cry.

A subtle distinction? — Janus

Mere semantics? — Janus

They can look similar. — unenlightened

Do you think we are going to arrive at more clarity with these questions? I think I explained things clearly enough. A goal that leads somewhere, and end that is a becoming? Yeah, mere semantics.