Oddly enough, I still think of Feyerabend as pro-science. He began as a scientific realist and his ideas ravelled or unravelled as he reflected on that. His last happy marriage was to a physicist. This is from a piece John Horgan wrote about him for Scientific American:

Beneath Feyerabend's rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble it may be, often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it was no more valid than astrology or religion. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized--and was horrified by--science's vast superiority to other modes of knowledge. His objections to science were moral and political rather than epistemological. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, could become a totalitarian force that crushes all its rivals. — John Horgan"

It seems odd to me to want 'more with similar ideas to' Feyerabend. That was then, this is now. Much of science is stunning, if every bit as hotch-potch in its practices as Feyerabend alleged. Some of it like neuroscience has greatly exaggerated claims based on too little sound evidence or thinking.

I too have met several scientists who advocate Popper, but to my mind that's because his ideas represent to them the ideal they like to believe they are enacting, when mostly, they're not.

Any talk of 'a system' disquiets me. I hear a univocalist calling. How are my plural understandings going to harmonise? :)

Do you agree with the following?

“…[E]xcept for the problem of ‘What am I’ there are no other metaphysical problems, since in one way or another, they all lead back to it”
Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator — Mitchell

The 'What' has a metaphysical presupposition in it, for me, about objects and object-ness. Is a single question in itself some sort of presupposition?

Hey McD - did you notice the writings of Karen Armstrong on these issues, about 6-7 years ago now? A couple of short reviews that go to the point you're making:

Metaphysical Mistake

Review of her A Case for God, Alain du Botton.

(Both from The Guardian.) — Wayfarer

Thanks Wayf, I hadn't made the connection with Karen Armstrong's thinking, no.

I'm curious to hear what people on a philosophy forum have to say about their own person theistic beliefs. — JustSomeGuy

Rather to my own puzzlement I've become a sort of religious atheist in these, my latter years. I can rarely make sense of 'arguments' for 'deities'. But I recognize profound feelings in myself and others, including people I know well, and some of these are 'religious'. Such feelings sometimes are judgements: that something is beautiful, or important, or an excellent clue to right action. Insight can arise out of such a mixture of emotion and reasoning.

I also see religion as a practice. There is a drama of one kind or another: a ritual in a church, chanting in a temple, or people getting together to talk or sing or dance. People emerge from such dramas with a sense of deep meaning.

'Belief' seems to me a bit of a gloss on all this, a sometimes clumsy way of trying to make sense of these feelings and experiences in the light of all that's gone before us. I like to read and watch Greek dramas as a guide to all this. Some of us are like Sophocles and take the rituals and the gods seriously; some of us are more like Euripides, doubting the gods make any sense at all, but having a regard for divinity all the same. I think a Euripides would be as sceptical of the strutting gods of analysis as of the weird mono-capitalise-me-Gods that the Middle East bequeathed to us.

When I was born, how did 'nature' conjure up my perspective into this body? Why and how did it decide that my perspective is the right one? These were questions that I asked myself since I was 9 years old. Why am I me? Why am I not my brother? How did 'I' happen to be? — Susu

Welcome to the forum Susu.

What's preoccupied me lately is the I-you relation. We spend a lot of time on this 'How did I get to be me?' question, and the related ones about subjective point-of-view or perspective. And an analytic answer like gurugeorge's expands from that to I-it...'I perceive a this or a that.' No particular quarrel with that. Just that a particular, instrumental idea of the world starts to unfold before you know it.

I feel I experience the world primarily as I-you. Indeed, the 'you' multiplies as the 'I' gets to know oneself.

I think it just happens from birth. One major difference between chimp mothers and human mothers is...chimp mothers expect their children to learn by imitating them...but human mothers also imitate their infants from the word go. Mum shows me how my actions are. I see myself reflected. And at the same time I recognise the 'you' in Mum. The other. There is no 'I' without 'the other'. We are related but separate.

To have intrinsic value is to be desirable in and of itself — Mitchell

To me value is just what we value, not what we desire. The conflation of the two happens, for instance, in some versions of theories of choice, often consumerist ones: as if preferences, as expressed through desires, could be equated to value. This is a pejorative view of value in my world.

For example, to me heroism has 'intrinsic value'. It's one of those words that's in our language and other languages as an expression of evaluative good. Like 'glory'. Or 'good'.

How does one define sound 'mental health'? — Posty McPostface

I did some writing on 'mood' last year. There are reams of writing on 'mood disorder', but strikingly there is next to nothing on what an ordered or normal mood is, either in psychology or philosophy. We know disorder when we see it, seems to be the thinking, even if we can't define what it deviates from.

I've been reading some different corners of Aristotle and thinking about 'eunoia'. It gets (mis)translated as 'goodwill' (which is Cicero's fault for the intervening Latin). For Aristotle eunoia is the feeling one experiences and expresses towards one's deepest friends - the baseline of his Nicomachean Ethics - and in rhetoric it's the emotional connection you make to those you are trying to persuade of something.

I like the idea of it as a kind of baseline for mental sense-making and strength. We could form a society: the Eunoiacs. (could also be a name for a band :))

Aristotle had already looked into chastity (called continence). Nothing is imported and renamed a virtue. Chastity itself is a virtue. And it's not so because of any rules. — Agustino

This is not correct. Continence is not a virtue and incontinence (akrasia) is not a vice; they are ways of dealing with one's knowledge and motives. Neither of them for Aristotle, have anything to do with sexual continence or incontinence. You have just misunderstood, you must be reading Aristotle at second- or third-hand.

It is perfectly possible to argue for a conservative sexual morality from Aristotelian principles, I'm not disputing that at all. Roger Scruton is the popular one that I know. But not by this shortcut you propose.

And what does promiscuity mean if not having multiple sexual partners? — Agustino

You miss my point. 'Promiscuity' does indeed mean having multiple sexual partners. But so does 'free love'. 'Promiscuity' defines 'free love' in a critical way from the outset. It would be like a leftie like me claiming to have an even-handed argument about capitalism by saying our agenda is exploitation and the evil of capitalism: it marks the philosophical card with a deep bias before we start.

his view was that forms could only be known through the form of concrete particulars, or that the universals could only be known in the form in which they took — Wayfarer

Wayfarer, just to prove I am taking your question seriously as well as riffing on it anarchically...

Here's a relevant bit of the Metaphysics, which perhaps helps, although the word 'prior' in the translation does make it more confusing than it needs to be! Obviously 'prior' is not about time in this quote.

...actuality is prior to potentiality in respect of generation and time.
But it is also prior in substantiality; (a) because things which are posterior in generation are prior in form and substantiality; e.g., adult is prior to child, and man to semen, because the one already possesses the form, but the other does not;and (b) because everything which is generated moves towards a principle, i.e. its end . For the object of a thing is its principle; and generation has as its object the end . And the actuality is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the potentiality is acquired; for animals do not see in order that they may have sight, but have sight in order that they may see.Similarly men possess the art of building in order that they may build, and the power of speculation that they may speculate; they do not speculate in order that they may have the power of speculation—except those who are learning by practice; and they do not really speculate, but only in a limited sense, or about a subject about which they have no desire to speculate.

Further, matter exists potentially, because it may attain to the form; but when it exists actually, it is then in the form. The same applies in all other cases, including those where the end is motion — Metaphysics of Aristotle 1050a

I noticed you have this misunderstanding of virtue ethics (at least of the Aristotelian kind) ever since we discussed MacIntyre in another thread. You seem to think that virtue ethics cannot say X is wrong, because that somehow has to do with Kant's categorical imperative. — Agustino

Virtue ethics can't, I feel, import a rule from a rule-based system and claim, without further ado, that it can be renamed a virtue. The medieval Christian compromise was to have the sort of mish-mash that MacIntyre tries to clear away. When I read your responses to others it seems to me that you have the same sort of mish-mash. But I don't believe I've seen you arguing the case from first principles, so obnviously I may misunderstand your view.

I certainly think 'promiscuity is wrong' places itself outside virtue ethics, because it names the type of activity in a pejorative way at the outset, in a way that no Aristotelian would. The judgement has already been made before the discussion begins, by the very naming of having multiple sexual partners as 'promiscuity'. But perhaps this is shorthand for some other more complex argument you have that would fit into the virtue/vice framework, I don't know.

In this transaction, a single item of information has been relayed by various means. — Wayfarer

It's interesting to me how - though I'm not quarrelling with the objective of your example - in a sense this is an oddly 'mechanical' example. All the other things the signallers did while apparently signalling have been excluded from the account to focus on this 'byte' of information. Ceteris paribus is running.

I am thinking of two other options: (a) the anarchic account, where the account-teller missed all the serious meanings of life, as expressed through the marvellous things happening to the sentry and sailors and flaggers and coders, which they turned away from momentarily to transmit this piece of information; (b) the truth-questioning account, where each signaller knows the information they are transmitting is a lie, but they know the systematizers at HQ believe their system can only transmit truth, that this is indeed in its very nature; instead the signallers have their own one-to-one secret systems to tell each others it's all bollocks.

:)

I don't see where it is that we have any disagreement. — Pierre-Normand

It was something you wrote about how there can never be too much virtue, Pierre-Normand, but forgive me if I've misread you, I've ended up reading things rather late and may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

A note on terms. I do think you confuse the Greek ergon with the Greek telos and that this matters. The ergon is the function of something: a cup cups, a crocodile predates in swamps, a human...? It is a puzzle what humanity's ergon is. For Plato it's what only people among animals can do, all this thinking stuff. For Aristotle it's the reasoning part of the soul in practical action. For both of them ergon is linked with arete or excellence alias virtue: Plato is led to arete as dike, usu tr as justice, because it distils what humans are uniquely good at; Aristotle is led to a phalanx of virtuous acts. Telos in all this is the end, which for some is the act in itself (athletes run), and for others is the product of the act (the sculptures of sculptors).

I would have preferred to read Agustino's outline as his own statement: I find these intricate answers very hard to follow when I've got a lot of difficult reading to do in the rest of my life! For instance, 'promiscuity is immoral for x reasons' seems to me the antithesis of virtue ethics, it's importing a rule from a Kantian system itself based on Christianity and then claiming virtue for it. But I don't know that I've understood the basic argument aright as it's only expressed as an answer to an accusation in this thread.

The balance - the middle path. — TheMadFool

This is one area where, while agreeing with Pierre-Normand on the whole, I would differ with him. Aristotle is famous for thinking there is some sort of mean in virtue and vice, with virtue as the mean and vice as the excess, so that for instance he doesn't think anger is wrong in itself: but the virtuous person will have the right sort of anger for the right reasons at the right object. Never to be angry would then be as non-virtuous as being irascible, for example.

There is also a triple underpinning to the Nicomachean Ethics which is never stated as a formal premiss but which is understood as the basis of the whole virtue enterprise. (a) Human beings just do aspire to the good, to flourishing (eudaimonia) which is achieved by practical reason engaged with virtue, using due deliberation which is practical, not theoretical in nature. (b) This good is not the individual good that modern ethical discussion tends to revolve around, it is the good that we aristocrats - Aristotle's audience - will pursue as part of creating and sustaining a good polis or state. (c) There is a social cement linking virtuous people to sustain the polis which takes the form of the philia or friendship between each person and a small number of other people.

My feeling is that life is pointless and absurd, and every day I newly commit to life all the same,
— mcdoodle

Besides not eating/maintaining your body or outright suicide, is there any other way? — schopenhauer1

Yes, there are plenty of other ways, as you then go on to list. In the existentialist way of understanding, there are many inauthentic ways of living, and they are quite different from commitment; you are denying the basic notion of existential faith.

Certainly creating other people is presuming a right to think for another, and now there is a new person who was affected by your act. — schopenhauer1

'Certainly' is erroneous here: this is your evaluation, not a fact. People who make children take responsibility for care and education of a child; in my opinion this is not necessarily the right to think for another. Where I am disagreeing with you is that you assert a right to judge (and find wanting) everyone else who makes a child. I just don't think anyone has that right to judge. You presume you are a superior moral agent to them; you refuse to meet them on a level playing field. I take ethics to be built on foundations of mutual equality. I don't think you make any arguments that demonstrate that you are somehow a superior moral agent to someone who with a clear head decides to make and bring up a child.

When you say 'whats in your heart' are you attempting to imply authenticity, the honesty behind an apology? — TimeLine

Yes. I think there are more grades of coming-to-terms than 'shutting them out', though. Some things matter less once you're out of a situation for instance: the ex you hated for a while may become a perfectly tolerable human being again and you might even remember why you liked them, now that you don't have to live under the same roof and negotiate the same deals.

I like this, especially the idea keeping a sense of self by keeping forgiveness out of it. Do you agree that it works the other way too - that I, as the offending party - might want to keep that sense of self, connection, to the wrong that I did? — T Clark

Welllll...I suppose so. If you stay that connected to it, though, maybe the 'victim' won't want to play. I was thinking for instance of having been bullied. I don't forgive the bullying, but I can engage socially, even in a measure of friendship, with someone who never explicitly apologises for the past bullying.

There's something in Levinas' talk of *time* that has really struck home with me. What matters to both parties is how 'present' the 'wrong' is in the present time - whatever happened in the past. If their past bullying becomes a presence to me now, I don't think I am at all reconciled to them, but if it doesn't become a presence, then I feel we can live together without forgiveness.

There is something in the ritual quality of forgiving that puts me off - I suspect it's a religious residue. Lucy Allais, a South African, writes about forgiveness in a political context, and warns of the pressure victims felt under to forgive, in the reconciliation process, which may not have been a healthy thing.

Have I forgiven her because of my own experiences that enabled me to understand her better or have I forgiven her because she acknowledged her wrongdoing? — TimeLine

I@m reading Levinas at the moment. I think his 'pardon' is generally taken as something very close to forgiveness:

Active in a stronger sense than forgetting, which does not concern the reality of the event forgotten, pardon acts upon the past, somehow repeats the event, purifying it. But in addition, forgetting nullifies the relations with the past, whereas pardon conserves the past pardoned in the purified present. The pardoned being is not the innocent being. The difference does not justify placing innocence above pardon; it permits the discerning in pardon of a surplus of happiness, the strange happiness of reconciliation, the felix culpa, given in an everyday experience which no longer astonishes us. — Levinas

Such a philosophy is clear that pardon/forgiveness is part of a subjective view towards others/the Other. To feel somehow obliged to forgive means that forgiveness is not what's in your heart, or so I'd see it.

Frankly, though, I think I have achieved reconciliation with many people over my life without forgiveness, either by me of them or them of me. In such cases forgiveness would remove a part of me that I wish to keep: a sense of myself, of the wrong that was done to me. I can however love the person who wronged me. Forgiveness is not some sort of pre-requisite to that, not for me.

I am interested, hence a forum rather than a journal. So why put more people into the world? What is gained? Are you familiar with my position? It is not all just contingent suffering (the usual harms people think about when discussing suffering). The idea is perhaps too subtle to be effective, I agree. Relationships, pleasure, being absorbed in physical/mental activities, aesthetics, learning, and achievement (or some variation thereof) seem to be the considerations that people choose. Then a defense of suffering based on some variation of Nietzsche's idea of "suffering makes life interesting" as this makes everyone's life its own unique "work of art". Ideas of absurdity, structural, or contingent suffering are not considered and the relative goodness of relationships, pleasure, being absorbed in physical/mental activities, aesthetics, learning, and achievement are never examined as to whether individuals need to carry these experiences out qua individuals who live and have the opportunities for these positive experiences. — schopenhauer1

I am more interested in the idea of a 'jumping-off point' for existential debates, which you mention to another poster. Although you mention existential terms here, your argument seems anti-existentialist to me, a catalogue of reasons and sub-reasons for a pessimistic rationalist outlook towards one particular topic, an outlook which then permeates, for you, every other topic anyone cares to mention. How do all your reasons add up to taking or not taking a leap here and there?

My feeling is that life is pointless and absurd, and every day I newly commit to life all the same, persistently picking up where I left off because humans are habitual creatures, trying at the moment for instance to understand what Levinas means by 'infinity' in the subjective viewpoint towards the Other, meanwhile doing stuff with other people like singing and guitar-playing game-playing and helping to keep civil society functioning and stopping websites from falling over and loving and being loved - I am enjoying studying analytic philosophy but I'm not ruled by it - I love children but never had any, what's not to like about the little bastards? I can't imagine arriving at a philosophical position where I have a right to judge other people's valuations any more than in the service of affable conversations that may mean little, 'phatic communion' is a nice little phrase for such talk that I just found in a very old Malinowski essay that I like - Other people will go on being Other, but maybe our talk will make things a bit clearer to each other - But I wouldn't want to suffocate my life with reasons for and against this or that, most of my joys have come from giving something unlikely a try - All the best!

Imagine trying to explain neuronal signalling by explaining the energy state changes in atoms – and yet it could be done. — MikeL

What I don't grasp in your outlook is, why you think 'explaining the energy state changes in atoms' would somehow not be done through signs. We exchange ideas in language, which is signs. Our maths is signs.

Like Wayfarer I am no great advocate of scientising. But one needs a firm grasp of the philosophy of science to criticise it reasonably. Any working scientist must heighten the local detail that matters as much as they can, simplify the rest and hold certain things to be not involved with their locality - ceteris paribus - then do their thing. Scientists at different 'levels' will regard the 'detail' they are interested in in a different way. So we have pluralist understandings, from sub-atomic particle to chemical to cell to protein to organism to social facts. I presume we start from this basis.

It's what comes next in metaphysics, or at least in seeking to explain how the pluralities inter-connect, where the trouble starts.

But I think of the opponents in that argument as equally semioticians. Indeed, sometimes the semioticians are the good guys, refusing the reduction, insiting on the necessity of complexity and of pluralism.

Whenever someone brings up the idea of questioning whether existence itself should be continued for future people, a common response is that it is a juvenile topic. — schopenhauer1

I don't recall every saying or thinking it was a juvenile topic. It does however feel terribly restrictive; every philosophical question loops back into anti-natalism, for the anti-natalist. This seems a trap of the anti-natalist's own making, that means all the detail of anyone else's obsession about anything else will look dull by comparison. Each of the 'adult' details you quote derives from an accumulation of human knowledge, developed in cooperation, to solve problems and just for the sake of the satisfying curiosity. So some people are obsessed by concrete, some by maths. Is that so terrible? I'm interested in all that, in what other people do and how other people are. Aren't you? Anti-natalism seems uninterested in other people, it just seems to want to tell the majority of other people that in one fundamental respect they are mistaken in how they value life, procreation and sexual pleasure: it feels more of a lecture than an analysis. Surely if you want to spread the word, you need to enquire a little more into how other people are? That's certainly how politics is done, for instance: tramping round streets, knocking on doors, listening to people's concerns, explaining your views to them.

When we back out of our local level and look at what is truly going on we find the security of semiotic understanding is removed. We begin to search for the fundamental driver of the action. — MikeL

Where is apokrisis when we need him?

In apo's absence...we look like sign-making creatures to me. How do we get to 'what is truly going on'? Isn't that, like, with signs? I certainly don't find semiotic understanding that secure, but maybe I missed the reassuring memo. Understanding looks like semiotics all the way down to me. How did you glimpse the noumenon?

Basically, what I'm asking is whether science can be guided to solve our human needs and problems. Such as cheap and abundant energy instead to let things sort themselves out via the 'invisible hand' with consequences having to be dealt with further down along the road? — Posty McPostface

I think you are positing that science is at present largely unguided. Do you think this is justified? It seems to me already highly guided by governments, sources of finance, and prevalent norms.

Does this mean that objective claims are true and subjective claims are false? That's how it seems to me. — Harry Hindu

Perhaps it is in the nature of objective claims that they can be true, or false, or some intermediate state. What I say isn't a claim: the subjective just is the subjective, that's how I am. It's only susceptible to ideas of truth or falsity if it becomes objective in some way.

Hello, is that the Independent Labour Party? Maybe their time has come :)

Order from Chaos
In Lord of the Rings, one of the hobbits knocks a bucket down the — MikeL

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work. — tolkien

Of course the analogy from Tolkien will lead to intelligent design. By their choice of analogy shall ye know them. I'm puzzled that it's 'materialist' to think i.d. is bollocks, but there you go. Wouldn't just a healthy dose of scepticism drown the quasi-Christian beast?

If you mean to say that there can be a thought form of emotion, then I do not think such a thing exists. I think emotions can only be those biochemical induced states.

If you felt a positive emotion of love or joy, then that would be a biochemical induced euphoric state by dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Negative emotions would be dysphoric states such as feelings of hopelessness, despair, and anger. — TranscendedRealms

Well, I think thought and emotion interact, indeed they are just our labels for certain notions of what happens in ourselves. There's quite a lot of good stuff written about emotion, including a neat paper by Solomon on 'positive' and 'negative'. One example would interest me: fear is usually a good emotion to have, on most readings, in response to an object of fear, because it motivates you to do the sorts of things it's wise to do when faced with such objects. How does fear fit into your schema?

As you can see, the difference between the physical and the mental is that the former is scientifically observable, from a third person perspective, while the latter is inherently a first person phenomenon. — rickyk95

People are often saying this stuff. But on the one hand, most of the science I think I know comes from first person testimony by other people. They say they're experts in one field or another, and I trust them. I'm blowed if I'm going to do all the complicated stuff with machinery and textbooks they've gone through.

On the other hand, there are lots of scientific and other ways we enquire into how other people's minds work. Before we can talk we are studying each other for clues. It's how humans interact with each other. There is a very active and growing neuroscience of mind-reading.

There is enough room in Texas for everyone in the world to live comfortably — Victoribus Spolia

What a striking idea. I gather there are 695,662 km² in Texas and a world population of 7 billion. That's 10,000 people per square kilometre. How will Texans (as we all will be) feel about that? I hear people can be a little rough down there.

Our positive emotions are an objective good and our negative emotions are an objective bad. — TranscendedRealms

The purported division of emotions into positive and negative is useful to simplifiers and psychologists who like things about human beings to add up in neat columns, or look good on graphs. Unfortunately (a) emotions are more complicated than these countable things; (b) emotions segue into different emotions, as grief turns to love, or love to dislike, or joy to indifference, and sometimes these different emotions can be in a person at the same time over the same thing; (c) much brilliant art comes from darkness.

There was a bake-a-gay-cake case in the UK (actually, in Northern Ireland, where the acceptance of homosexuality is less advanced than elsewhere in the UK). The long-time gay campaigner Peter Tatchell changed his mind in the course of the case, for reasons explained here. I agree with him. Freedom includes the freedom to disagree. I don't think a homophobic baker should have to bake a gay wedding cake, but I think the bakers need to make clear (as the people in the UK case did not) from the start that there are limits. The bakers had advertised they would put 'any' message on a cake.

I feel moral objectivity is not going to emerge any time soon, but we readily appeal to one another's 'moral' or 'ethical' sense in certain arguments or discussions and know what one another means. Obviously trolls who think Pol Pot had some good reasons for what he did won't respond well, but most will. :)

Well, I view utilitarianism as the only ethical theory that appeals to a scientific method to derive ethical judgements and moral decisions. — Posty McPostface

In what way is utilitarianism more 'scientific' than other approaches? I was just talking to someone yesterday, oddly enough, who has attempted to model - in a very simplified way - virtue ethics. That seems entirely possible. Nor does Kantianism seem beyond (grossly simplified) analysis. If we are going to develop machines that become quasi-independent, as it looks like we are, then some sort of modelling of ethics would be a good idea, even if philosophically we may always say to ourselves, there is a remainder - an excess - whenever one tries to examine analytically an ethical judgment.

I think that it's increasingly clear that one of the chief political issues of our time is debt and precarity: the collapse of interest rates and the correlative expansion of credit markets has driven the rise of asset ownership among the aspiring classes, and has put people - along with states - into massive debt (which has the related effect of massive de-politicization - no money, no control, no politics). — StreetlightX

I don't understand, though, whether this is an actual increase in indebtedness per capita, or a change in attitude towards indebtedness. What does the data say? One reaction to the crisis of 2008, for example, has been (in my opinion) for right-wing public discourse to problematise levels of public debt that are not at all dangerous. This is a neo-liberal attack on the State, procaliming the need for 'austerity', not an increasing problem of debt.

If you look at countries across the world, the two sorts of countries that have low indebtedness are petro-chemical-rich countries, and poor countries. Globally the poor would be better off with more access to debt on reasonable terms, wouldn't they? And one socialist response to low interest rates would be to invest more heavily at the cost of more debt.

I don't disagree at all about precariousness or precarity, but that's a separate though parallel issue for me: medium-term attrition at labour laws and union rights and a policy of 'flexible workforces' is how much of that operates at the national level, before we look at the international situation a\nd the way capital moves its resources around.

assuming that utilitarianism is what philosophy ought to be, then isn't the problem now to create a calculus — Posty McPostface

The felicific calculus would be a fine thing indeed. Here it seems someone has tried for a modern version: in Lander, South Carolina.

an intent and subsequent action may have quantum origins but the effect is macro-scale (the world we see, hear and feel) and this world is deterministic. — TheMadFool

People often say this. They can't, however, model it.

Planning would be pointless if the world weren't predictable. — TheMadFool

On the contrary: if the world were predictable, there would be no need to plan.

One thing I didn't mention was human, actually life. The mind is, like it or not, a chemical reaction and I see a place for QM to manifest its probabilistic character. However, you already know, minds affect other minds through fixed, definable laws. For instance, if I insult x, x feels hurt and this is a general law, making reactions predictable; in fact, I think, this predictability (requires general principles or laws) is the basis of our social dynamics. So, again, we see that QM and chance doesn't manifest in the world of humans probabilistically. — TheMadFool

Well, obviously, if you have written the book that explains how the general law of insults works, please link me to it. (Indeed I'm surprised I haven't already heard of it as it would be a trail-blazing work) Otherwise I'm going to carry on thinking this is all empty assertion. You believe in determinism, therefore you assert that everything in sight is deterministic; but there are no working models for what might happen next. Indeed the people I know best act with remarkable unpredictability: how can this be? Probably it's just an unscientific weakness in me.

So, is probability an illusion? — TheMadFool

If the world on the human scale, as you put it, is governed by these natural laws, and you know what these laws are, why don't you have perfect knowledge of the future? Why is every moment so riddled with uncertainty?

All you are expressing is some sort of faith in the natural sciences. If only the natural sciences could have predicted what would win the St Leger yesterday I'd be a rich man.

I'm disappointed that all the replies, including Rich who can usually be relied on to be splenetically anti-science, appealed to the natural sciences.

Laws don't govern worlds. It's that when humans investigate certain defined worlds, usually in a laboratory or by imagining some parts of the world away to focus better on the problem at hand, we can make a good stab at understanding how they work, and some of the rules we call 'laws'. Bridges mostly don't fall down, I have a magic telephone, and soon elaborate cars will be able to drive themselves. Still, I have no idea what I or my neighbour might do next, even if my neighbour insists that she lives in a deterministic world. This strikes me as uncertainty.

philosophy master's thesis at S. Peter Pryor College — T Clark

Did you edit the Prior Cryer with Dobie Gillis?

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour — William Blake