I am saying that a choice or a decision only properly exists when it is a consequence of deliberation or ratiocination. — Leontiskos

So if I've understood, what the ass does should not properly be called making a choice, because the ass does not indulge in ratiocination or deliberation.

And yet we would say that, for instance, the ass chose the trough on its left.

So I'm suspicious. It looks to me as if you are obliged to discount the ass's choice in order to avoid your thesis being falsified.

Suppose grandma asks me to pick one of two cookies that she offers, and they appear to me identical. I enter into deliberation or ratiocination for a number of seconds, trying to decide. In the end there is nothing to decide given that there is nothing to differentiate the two. I say, "Grandma, I can see no difference. Give me whichever one you like." I am letting grandma flip the coin in this case, but whatever form the coin flip takes, it is not a consequence of deliberation. The deliberation had no effect on the outcome (except perhaps in an indirect way, by failing as an exercise of deliberation). — Leontiskos

The suggestion that you must "enter into deliberation or ratiocination for a number of seconds, trying to decide" strikes me as contrived. I bet you just pick one of the cookies, without the "deliberation or ratiocination".

But maybe that's just me. Or just you.

I suggest that we do make decisions - even most of our decisions - without such "deliberation or ratiocination". Our justifications tend to be post hoc.

Moreover, I contend that rationality is less about following rules and more about seeking consistency.

Hence, making decisions is not always algorithmic.

Yep.

I might add that, even if determinism is true, what we do next is still undone... and so we do not know what we will do. The choice remains to be made.

And so, the need to examine what we ought do, remains.

Enough with the bully tactics — apokrisis

:rofl:

But also as previously mentioned, not even Searle's conditions (7) and (8) require one to actually be placed under an obligation; — Michael

So you think that S can intend that the utterance T will place him under an obligation, and utter T, but not thereby consider themself under an obligation.

How odd.

, , back to spitting.

You do not do yourself a service.

My own non-religious philosophical worldview is based on the notion of a "self-organizing logic" that serves as both Cause and Coordinator of the physical and meta-physical (e.g. mental) aspects of the world. For material objects, that "logic" can be summarized as the Laws of Thermodynamics : Energy ->->-> Entropy --- order always devolves into disorder. And yet, the Big Bang has somehow produced a marvelous complex cosmos instead of just a puff of smoke. — Gnomon

This is why I thought Apo's approach might appeal to you. I hope that I've shown that how things are is not sufficient to tell us how they might be, and that there are broader issues here.

I've already answered over a dozen posts this morning alone, and have five more in my "in tray", so please forgive my terseness... :wink:

So your claim is that things are thus-and-so and so must always be thus-and-so.

But that does not tell us what to choose. At best it is to pretend that we have no choices. And so it leaves the whole issue of what we ought do unaddressed.

And in the end, that is most unsatisfying.

Maybe what I was thinking of was the is/ought problem. — Tom Storm

They are not unrelated.

But "naturalistic fallacy" is headed the way of "begging the question", losing its original meaning and so reducing our capacity to express fine distinctions. A bit sad.

I, by contrast, have pointed out that an asymmetric distribution of boxes is what would constitute "fair and equal" as a powerlaw thermodynamic balance – the one of a growing system. While a symmetric distribution is "fair and equal" as the Gaussian balance of a no-growth system. — apokrisis

You've made the claim. You have not presented a case. Nor have you shown why we ought adopt - what is it, a "powerlaw thermodynamic balance" over a "Gaussian balance of a no-growth".

But this is tiresome.

So you will neither make sense of nor defend your claims? OK. — Michael

That's not what I said. If "...it isn't clear to (you) what obligations are" and you do not think there are such things as obligations, then you are not going to understand what is involved in making a promise.

"I did indeed promise to answer your question, but I am under no obligation to do so".

You don't see this as problematic? Then I need provide no answer.

Except we have to live together in the actual world — apokrisis

Sure.

So what does thermodynamics tell us about the distribution of boxes?

It seems to me that your description of how things are does not tell us how they ought be.

Unless you claim that how things are is how they must be, that we cannot change what we do. But that does not seem correct.

So this tells me only that you will not be held to your promises.

OK. You are not a man of your word.

Do you think that one can sincerely say "I promise to answer you but I intend not to answer you".

I'll let you work through it.

I drink Darjeeling, or Russian Caravan, ordered from my man in Melbourne.

The case was put. The burden is on you to explain how it does not. — apokrisis

I was waiting for that. The next rhetorical move, after abuse and ridicule, is to claim that you already answered the question.

You still have not shown how thermodynamics helps with ethical issues. How does thermodynamics tell us what we ought to do?

Ok. That's the pop understanding of "naturalistic fallacy".

I'm not enamoured with the description of "nature red in tooth and claw", with the emphasis on competition. I think it a culturally driven narrative. Studies of ecosystems also tell a story of cooperation. This is the bit of @apokrisis' account that perhaps has value.

The naturalistic fallacy in philosophy "is the claim that it is possible to define good in terms of natural entities, or properties". Saying that the good is what is pleasurable, or what makes the greatest number of folk happy, and so on.

Again, I'd analyses this in terms of direction of fit. Saying how things are - that they induce pleasure or happiness - is very different from saying how they ought to be.

I don't want to know.

Do (a) and (b) mean the same thing? — Michael

The linked paper sets out an account that shows how sometimes uttering "I promise to do this" is placing oneself under an obligation. They are not the same thing.

While I don't want to invoke the naturalistic fallacy, it's hard for a human to look at nature and think that we inhabit a fair world. — Tom Storm

Hmm. I'm wondering what you think the naturalistic fallacy is. It is not an appeal to nature.

You probably agree, but I thought I'd check.

If he is an Immanentist regarding abstract concepts --- God being just the most common example --- any reference to something transcendent may be meaningless to him. — Gnomon

It's your thread, so your response is welcome.

I would not describe myself as an "immaterialist". I've argued that what are sometimes called abstract concepts are better understood as institutional facts. They manifest our intentions, so to speak. The "our" here is important. And the issues involved are complex.

I think the issue you raised in the OP can best be thought of in terms of direction of fit. The term comes from Anscombe, but has been developed by others, including Searle.

There are two directions of fit. The first is that we find the things around us to be in such-and-such a way. We can set out how things are in our theories and language, changing our minds to match what is going on around us. This is more or less the process of science. The second direction is that we can change how things are to make them as we want. We alter how things are in order to match our theories and language. This is not the province of science so much as of ethics.

We can change the words we use to set out how things are. And we can change how things are to match the words we use.

I take this to be what lies behind ideas such as Hume's guillotine and the is-ought problem and the naturalistic fallacy.

So a description of how things are, even if complete, does not tell us what we ought to do about it.

But you have to clear up why your saccharine image illustrates anything in the first place. — apokrisis

I'm sorry if the image shows you nothing. For others, it shows the difference between equal and fair. There is considerable literature on this topic - you might be familiar with John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum. But of course these are but two in a multitude.

Your trivialising them does not do you proud.

This is a quite normal political question. Any fool would say we want a society that is balanced, fair, equal and just. The question then becomes well which version of a society is that which you have in mind? — apokrisis

The question then is "What do we do?". Answering that might well involve being clear about what is "balanced, fair, equal and just".

My repeated question to you is, how does thermodynamics help us here?

And while you have presented an interesting account of why economics might benefit from considering thermodynamics, you have not explained how this helps with equity, fairness or justice, nor shown how physics helps with the ethical problems commonly discussed hereabouts, such as antinatalism, run-away trams, and keeping promises.

There are profound and important issues here that remain unaddressed by mere thermodynamics.

Is unfairness or injustice really just the product of human action? — L'éléphant

I've been thinking along similar lines since my last reply to

There’s also a sort of latent animism in some of our expressions in that we do attribute intent to things around us as well as to people. — Banno

Human actions are what we have control over, and so we ask what we should do.

So do we only address those unfairness caused by human actions? Or do we also address those that are the products of the natural world? — L'éléphant

The only way in which we can "address those that are the products of the natural world" is by human action.

Are you suggesting that "I promise to do this" means "I am obliged to do this"?
Are you suggesting that "I promise to do this" entails "I am obliged to do this"? — Michael

Well, yes. Except that your rendering misses the direction of fit. That is, "I promise to answer you" places me under an obligation to answer you, and "I promised to answer you" entails that I am obliged to answer you.

Is "I promise to do this but I am not obliged to do this" in some sense a contradiction? — Michael

Yes. In promising you place yourself under an obligation. It's much the same as "I promise to answer you but I will not answer you".


See Searle, "How to promise, a complicated way"

Does "promises exist" mean the same thing as "people say something like 'I promise to do this'"? — Michael

More than that. "Promises exist" means that there is an illocutionary act that involves placing oneself under an obligation. Such an act occurs in the world, not in some other domain.

Not seeing any ambiguity.

Try this:

First up, logic does say that balance is what emerges from the very possibility of a dichotomy or symmmetry breaking. If you have a dividing, this in itself brings the further thing of a mixing. There has to be a unity of opposites as the final result. The action going both its way has to arrive at its own equilibrium average state.

So forget good and evil for a moment. This just is the logic where a symmetry-breaking must play itself out to become a symmetry-equilibrating. The wrinkle then is that the equilibrium balance is then itself a new ground of symmetry – now raised a level – that can once again be broken and equilibrated.

Hierarchies of structure can arise in openly growing fashion as each level of symmetry-breaking below it becomes some closed and stable balancing act.

This is a tricky kind of causality to contemplate. It is not the reductionism of "cause and effect". But it was already where metaphysics started with Anaximander and his pre-socratic cosmology.

So there is a general metaphysical model of division and its balancing. And then the further possibility of stacking up these "phase changes" on top of each other in hierarchically complexified fashion. A rich cosmos can emerge from its simple dichotomous origins.

And then we get to the vexed issue of good and evil. Which is problematic because it replaces the complex systems causality of the natural world with the polarised story of a cause and effect world. A mechanistic viewpoint. Instead of a pair of actions that are complementary – as in a dichotomy or symmetry breaking – we have just a single arrow from a here to a there. There is a high and a low, a good and a bad, a wonderful and an awful. There is a place to leave behind and a place to approach.

So we have now the reductionist causality that seeks to encode reality in terms of a one-way traffic system. If you discover that two directions exist, one of the ways has to be the correct way, the other thus the opposite of the correct.

But the systems approach says the only way anything is caused to exist is by it going in both its directions in a symmetry-breaking fashion, and the place that this dichotomising "leaving behind" then approaches is the symmetry-equibrating thing of its overall dynamical balance. A holistic state of globalised order ... which then can be the ground of departure for yet another rung of hierarchical complexity in the form of dichotomising~rebalancing.

So in terms of human moral social order, good and bad would be arrows pointing between some lower level and some next step level of stabilised equilibrium balance. The arrows wouldn't be the simple and brutal monotonic ones of reductionism. One path mandated and the other path forbidden. The arrows would point the way from one state of naturalistic balance to the next more complexified state that might be attained.

The lower level isn't intrinsically bad as it has proven itself to be a stable platform for some kind of higher aspirations. But the goal is to break it as symmetry so as to step up to some higher equilibrium state – that likewise is good to the degree it can prove itself a stable platform for steps even beyond that.

So in that organic or thermodynamic context – which moral discussions can at least dimly grasp in terms of a Maslovian hierarchy of needs – good is to be building community to a degree of stability that creates the potential of further steps, and evil is the back-sliding destabilisation of the teetering house of cards that already exists as the relatively stabilised platform on which we stand.

Good~evil is tarred jargon as it does speak to the simplicities of reductionist models of causality. But we can sort of get what the terms are getting at from a systems perspective and its ecosystem style, richness constructing, hierarchical complexity.

There is no need to climb an endless ladder of complexity or goodness of course. But for a natural system that must exist in an uncertain and destabilising world, there is a value in maintaining a potential for taking next steps as situations demand. We have to be able to step up because there is a reserve to spend.

This trade-off between stability and plasticity in organisms that live and act is certainly yet a further wrinkle in the whole causality deal. But who says metaphysics has to be simpler than it actually is? — apokrisis

It seems that all of this might indeed be the case, and yet we still would not be able to say if the real world is fair and just, or if it isn't.

Yet you seem to think that this somehow answers .

How?

What you are not answering is which equilibrium do you have in mind? Gaussian or scalefree? — apokrisis

I'm happy for you to choose. After all, it's you who claim that they are relevant.

More spit.

Can you explain, clearly, how it is that thermodynamics helps in understanding fairness?

Clean out your ears. — apokrisis

More spit. Much as is to be expected on your history.

Have you read the story of the emperor's new cloths? I think folk hereabouts are not too keen on your garment.

That's all very clever, but tells me very little.

Are you claiming that the difference between fair and equal is the same as the difference between a normal distribution and one that follows a power law? If so, then some further explanation is needed. If not, then what are you claiming?

So far as I can see you have yet to explain the supposed connection between fairness and thermodynamics - you've just made the claim that they are connected, again.

More generally, there is a difference between what is the case and what ought be the case that also remains, so far as I can see, unaddressed. I know I have made this point to you previously, and I take it to underpin much of the comment on your posts at Pragmatism Without Goodness and elsewhere.

Supose science demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the universe is such that thermodynamics is a model of self-organising growth, or whatever it is you are espousing. How does this tell us what we ought do?

I've tried to hand you a simple example, for you to show us how this would work. How does it show us that we ought share the boxes in this way? You can choose another example, if this is too difficult: Why ought we keep promises? How does thermodynamics help with the trolly problem? How do scale-free equilibrium distributions apply to antinatalism?

You advocate pragmatism - show how thermodynamics helps with practical issues.

...justice as transcendent truth independent of its material basis — apokrisis

Not something I recognise. Of course justice takes place in the world.

I'm just pointing out that it is not obvious how thermodynamic considerations enter in to the situation pictured here:


The boxes seem quite material, their distribution being the issue. Nothing here appears transcendental, but it's unclear how you are using that word.

There is nothing that exists beyond the act. — AmadeusD

Well, seems to me that the obligation exists beyond the act of making the promise. That is, to make a promise is to place oneself under an obligation.

Now that obligation is not physical. It is not "floating around". But it does exist.

But it is a mistake to think of the promise or obligation as "nothing, of itself." It is a promise, it is an obligation. So "...the promise was a singular act and quite clearly doesn't exist as 'an' anything" Isn't right, either - the promise exists as a promise; as the undertaking of an obligation.

So to this:

if both parties to a 'promise' forget that it was made, the there aren't even these brain states and te claim that the 'promise' still exists becomes risible to the point of perhaps being an indicator of sillygooseness. — AmadeusD

If both parties forget about the promise, what is it that they have forgotten about? Not nothing. They have forgotten about the promise. Hence, there is a promise to be forgotten about, and again the promise exists.

...brain states... — AmadeusD

I gather that you would like to argue that promises are brain states? What would that look like? Is the promise the brain state in the head of the promiser, or the promisee? Or both? What about those who hears about the promise - is the promise the sum of all the brain states of everyone who has heard of it?

Or is the promise a similar structure that each and every person that has heard of the promise has in their brain? Could that be made coherent?

And what ab out written promises, or audio recordings - are these also promises? And how does the promise move from one page to another? If it is a physical state, then the nature of that state is quite irresolute.

The promise seems to be something quite apart from any such physical state. Isn't it more a construction, put together by people using language to get things done? Isn't it a way of undertaking an obligation in a social and linguistic context?

But why shouldn't we talk of such things as existing? Along with money, property, friendship, and so much more. We live in a complex of social constructs.

So we ought only post arguments that make people feel good?

Meh. Your last dozen posts have had no philosophical content whatsoever. Mere invective.

Here again is what I have argued: People make promises. Therefore there are promises. Therefore promises exist.

I'll offer you now the opportunity to agree with this.

Not much here with which i might disagree. Certainly the ass will not starve, so it chooses.

The last word.

I've never denied the existence of "abstract objects" - although I would not use that term! You are very confused.

See for example the thread on Searle where I present his discussion of the construction of social reality. Social reality consists in what you call abstract object.

And the thread on Austin, in which the hegemony of the physical is overturned.

Or the threads on Midgley, where talk of what you call abstract objects is central.

:roll:

Another half-statement from you,

Your implication is that abstract objects do not exist. The backdrop here is presumably a belief that only physical objects exist. This is simply muddled.

"There is an x such that x is a promise" is true. Therefore promises exist.

Nothing in this says that promises are physical objects.

Again, really, really basic stuff. Not everything is a physical object.

No, he didn't. Stop with the provocative crap. — frank

Frank, he said:

"the promise" does not exist. — AmadeusD

Therefore he thinks there are no promises.

If you can only read three words out of a post... — AmadeusD

You are really not very good at this. I read the whole post, and chose the bit that was most ridiculous. Your claim is that there are no promises. That speaks volumes for your comprehension of the discussion here. It shows us why we should not pay heed to you on this topic. Your repeated vindictive and lack of substance reinforce the opinions already expressed by .

says there are no promises.

Laugh and walk away.