Let me also add a subquestion to that and ask to the atheist. If these arguments are all a failure. Is that part of the reason why you are atheist? — DoppyTheElv

I was raised in a religious family, and so in my early childhood held unexamined and innocuous-seeming religious views. I never had a reactionary moment in my life where I strongly rebelled against those. Instead, I slowly grew out of them as I aged and learned more about the world. I was in fact surprised in my adolescence to realize that adults sincerely held those views, and didn't merely teach them as metaphorical stories for children.

Basically to me, God was like Santa Claus. Believed as a little kid, then realized he was just a fictional character, but didn’t feel like I was lied to or something, just that I had grown up and learned the difference between fact and fiction. The surprise to me was that other adults seemingly hadn’t.

I didn’t learn anything about actual arguments about God’s existence until I was an adult, and found them all transparently unpersuasive by then. At best, they might sometimes prove some abstract metaphysical thing that bears no resemblance to the fleshed-out character of God from any holy book.

I don't understand what objective morality means. — Gregory

It means there is some standard, that is not itself simply one person or group's opinion, against which anyone's opinions on what is good or bad can be judged as more or less correct than others.

Just like objective reality means that there is some standard, that is not itself simply one person or group's opinion, against which anyone's opinions on what is true or false can be judged as more or less correct than others.

This general applicability might be taken to look like objectivity. It is however quite different. — Banno

What would "objectivity" be in this case that would be different from that? I mean, what you're describing is what I'd call a claim of objective morality, which claim may or may not be entirely correct. Is that last clause all you mean to distinguish it from being actually objectively moral?

I thought that was a noble effort, but philosophical education seems to me more likely to happen in a conversation in which it is relevant, rather than shuffled off into its own separate thread.

Also, there is already a Questions subforum.

No it doesn’t bother me. That’s how they like to address questions. It is technical but it doesn’t appeal to me. They’re like a group in a dark room trying to turn lead into gold, or the masons; secret hand signals and words. — Brett

I think this is probably why you're missing out on what's new. The exciting advances in science and technology also come from a bunch of people behind closed doors doing what looks to outsiders like incomprehensible magic or nonsense, but then a few decades of that later and I can pull up a live high-resolution view of the entire Earth, as seen from a permanently inhabited spacestation, off a tiny device in my pocket, from almost anywhere. And then talk to it to have someone bring a fully cooked pizza to my house in minutes.

The most interesting discussions that I find here are those technical ones that I can understand, or the "stupider" ones that have participants (or at least onlookers) who I can help bring closer to understanding the technical stuff.

I also have constant hope that maybe I will be one of those lucky people whom someone else can bring closer to understanding technical stuff that's still over my head, but so far that hasn't happened here yet.

I'm not seeing the implications of Ockham's Razor on a bunch of fields, but if you think there are some, I'd like to hear about them.

For a smaller example pulled from my own example views that are now in a different thread: my principle I called "criticism" rules out a bunch of possible views in different topics like a supernaturalist ontology, a dualist philosophy of mind, a ideistic epistemology, a religious philosophy of education, a puritanical account of ethical ends, a metaphysically libertarian philosophy of will, an absolutist account of ethical means, and an authoritarian political philosophy. (By itself it doesn't obligate any particular alternative views on any of those topics, but combined with other principles it does).

I'm not clear exactly what you mean by "specific to each discipline", but I think yes. I'm asking if you have some very general philosophical opinions that then obligate you to more specific philosophical opinions across a bunch of different topics. Or conversely, if there are some general philosophical opinions that, if ruled out, also rule out a bunch of specific philosophical opinions across a bunch of different topics.

You can attain your ‘inter subjective agreement’ through the whole process of experiment and observation. But questions of value are of a different order entirely; there’s no consensus on how to account for them. — Wayfarer

There's not total consensus that questions of reality are to be settled by appeal to observation either: people disbelieve observable things and believe unobservable things all the time.

But regardless of whether there is consensus that we should do so, we can if we choose adjudicate disagreements on moral issues the same way we do factual ones: appeal to our shared experiences. For factual questions those are sensations: sight, hearing, etc. (Instruments are just additional things we're observing, with those same senses; the ways they interact with the environment, etc). For normative questions those are appetites: things like pain and hunger etc.

Just as we can rule out factual possibilities by saying if you go and stand here and do this such-and-such will just look obviously false, so too we can rule out normative possibilities by saying if you go and stand here and do this such-and-such will just feel obviously bad.

The objective truth is whatever looks true rather than false when all different perspectives and circumstances are accounted for. The objective good is likewise whatever feels good rather than bad when all different perspective and circumstances are accounted for.

That does of course depend on people agreeing to base their judgements on such experiences and not just saying "I know it looks false / feels bad but it's true / good anyway", and agreeing to account for all experiences and not just saying "I can't see it right now so it's not real / it's not hurting me right now so there's nothing wrong with it" etc.

I generally agree with the point you're making, that strictly speaking "objective truth" is redundant because if there's any actual truth it must be objective, but because there are some people with the confused notion of "subjective truth" (which should strictly just mean "opinion"), I think it's helpful to include that redundancy for clarity. Redundancy helps clarify in a lot of kinds of communication.

An underlying issue is the fact-value dichotomy, or Hume's is/ought problem. — Wayfarer

That is definitely something that needs to be accounted for, but I see no reason why both types of question can’t be treated separately but equally. Both can be approached in an objective, critical, but open-minded (or “liberal”) way, adjudicating between different possibilities by appeal to the experiences we have in common with each other.

Try “pomo” instead. The zeroes are a mocking tone.

Pfhorrest
Then I don't know what to make of this:
...are these ideas the proper referents of such-and-such words.
— Pfhorrest
because I don't know what the referent of, say, "Democracy" is. — Banno

A process or practice can be a noun. “Democracy“ refers to some kind of political process or practice. Where is the problem?

I think this is the objectivity error in a nutshell. Everything I experience in discussion with another is a subjective experience, likewise for them. Somehow we muddle through without any access to or necessary knowledge of objective truth — Kenosha Kid

Objectivity is just the absence of bias, as subjectivity is bias. If the two of you have shared experiences to refer to, then that is all you need for objectivity enough for the two of you. And total objectivity is just the limit of that process: what accounting for more and more sharable experiences converges toward. We can’t ever finish that process, but there being an objective truth just means that that process converges toward something.

I can't think of a test that can be applied to propositions or beliefs to see if they are true propositions or beliefs that does not involve consensus — Isaac

Check against observations?

I’m not talking about private language at all, but about how we can arbitrary publicly apply short easy-to-use labels to a big long descriptions of things, and then talk about how those big complicated things relate to each other more easily without having to repeat the big long descriptions over and over as we do so — and without having to first decide what is “the right” label for such a big long description.

But even then, there IS still an open question as to whether that big long thing is what ordinary people not there for the labelling will take your use of such labels to mean.

I don’t completely follow you, and I get the sense that you also don’t follow me. I’m wondering, for example, what is your position on political philosophy, and how does your principle that “awareness is key” entail that position (if it does). You seem to be describing how awareness is key to doing political philosophy, but not what conclusion it requires you to take (which perhaps it doesn’t, if it’s not that kind of principle I’m asking about).

I guess I must not have understood the end of your first post. Rereading it now I’m still not following. You’re saying you’re uninterested in architectonics? But more interested in... what, and why?

My only agenda was to make sure we were both talking about the same thing.
— Gnomon

The issue is, that's not were you start in philosophy, it's where you finish. — Banno

Well, there’s at least two things to be addressed in philosophical conversations: do these ideas relate to each other in such-and-such way, and are these ideas the proper referents of such-and-such words. You can define the meaning you want to give the words you’re going to use so you have some way to have the first conversation without having to settle the second conversation first. But then even if everybody agrees on the first conversation, there’s still the open question of the second one.

nationalism, moral objectivity, populism, anthropocentrism, rationalism, religion, and political ideology. — Kenosha Kid

Two of these things are not like the others.

what is it good for?
— Gnome

Who else can't read this without adding an emphatic shout of "Absolutely nothin'"?

Good Lord! — Banno

Say it again!

In that regard, systematic philosophy like Whitehead, Hegel, and Kant have the merit of owning the responsibility of owning the conversation they started. — Valentinus

It sounds like you are familiar with their architectonics. Do you feel up to elucidating what their core principles are, and what stances on various philosophical questions they take those principles to entail? (No need to replicate their entire arguments in between, of course).

Thanks for that. Can you articulate how that principle gets applied on different philosophical topics? Like, for one example, what implications does “awareness is key” have on your political philosophy? But also, like... all of the other topics you have views on too, not just that one.

Postmodern philosophy (p0m0) reduces (1) nonphilosophical cognitivity (truth-values) to philosophical noncognitivity (meaning-uses) and then (2) noncognitivity as such to mere narrative, or textual, form (i.e. institutional norms aka "power") - without warrant, or noncognitively. :gasp: :shade: — 180 Proof

I think postmodernism is poorly defined in general, but the closest thing that fits the label is exactly this kind if “reverse scientism”, reducing talk of descriptive truths to attempted power grabs. I consider it, along with regular scientism, a kind of (for lack of a better word) “cynicism”, that inevitably leads to nihilism, which as you say if self-refuting.

I write on that topic:

The other kind of reductionism that I consider tantamount to cynicism is constructivism, which claims that all assertions of supposed facts are in actuality just social constructs, ways of thinking about things put forth merely in an attempt to shape the behavior of other people to some end, in effect reducing all purportedly factual claims to normative ones. That is to say, in claiming that all of reality is merely a social construct, such constructivism reframes every apparent attempt to describe reality as actually an attempt to change how people behave, which is the function of normative claims. On such a view, no apparent assertion of fact is value-neutral: in asserting that something or another is real or factual, you are always advancing some agenda or another, and the morality of one agenda or another can thus serve as reason to accept or reject the reality of claims that would further or hinder them. This is simply the flip side of the same conflation of "is" and "ought" committed by scientism: where scientism pretends that a prescriptive claim can be supported by a descriptive claim, constructivism pretends that all descriptive claims have prescriptive implications. Constructivism responds to attempts to treat factual questions as completely separate from normative questions (as they are) by demanding absolute proof from the ground up that anything at all is objectively factual, or real, and not just a normative claim in disguise or else baseless mere opinion. So it ends up falling to justificationism about factual questions, while failing to acknowledge that normative questions are equally vulnerable to that line of attack. Thus such constructivism is tantamount to cynicism with regards to factual questions, inevitably leading to metaphysical nihilism. (This is remarkably similar to the concept termed "bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt, which he defines as a kind of dishonest speech that is worse than lying, in that while a liar cares about what is or isn't true and aims to convince people that falsehoods are true or vice versa, a bullshitter doesn't care at all what is or isn't true, and instead cares only about what people can be made to do by making a superficially descriptive claim that was never really meant to describe anything).

But in rejecting constructivism, I am not at all rejecting the employment of social constructs in the description of social behavior. I am merely against the claim that all of reality is merely a social construct, and thus that there there can be no mere attempts (however fallible) at description of an objective reality that are not implicitly pushing some prescriptive agenda. Social constructs are actually defined in a sense by their unreality: to say, for example, that money is a social construct, is to say that there is nothing intrinsic about gold, or seashells, or any other token of currency, that makes it really money, that could be found in a thorough description of the gold or shells or whatever themselves. Nothing is really money in any objective sense; things are only subjectively accepted as money by some people, and to say that something is money (to some people) is really to say something about the people (namely, that they will accept the thing in trade), not about the thing itself, but phrased in such a way as to project what the people think about the thing onto the thing itself. That is undoubtedly an indispensable concept for describing many social behaviors, but to say that all of reality is merely socially constructed is consequently to deny that there is anything really real about reality, or at least to refuse to even attempt to talk about it, or to believe that others are genuinely doing so, insisting instead that all that can be discussed is the things that people think about it.

Also, something I would be interested to hear more knowledgeable people than I elaborate on: I’ve heard both Kant and Peirce described as architectonic philosophers, and while I’m pretty sure I known what Peirce’s core principle is (the Pragmatic Maxim), I’m not completely confident about that, and I don’t know where I’d begin to define a few core principles that define all of Kant. I’d love to hear anyone elaborate on them, or on other famous philosophers too.

Something along those lines could make a core principle—something similar makes up a few of mine—but I’m thinking more of a few clear statements that then entail all the rest of your stances on other philosophical questions.

I gave my own examples in the thread this split off from, but then the discussion there turned into one entirely about those principles and not the general concept of architectonic philosophy, so I left them out here. But if it helps you get started here, you can find mine for an example in the OP of the other thread this split off from.

@Isaac I've repurposed this thread to be about discussion of my principles (since that's entirely what the conversation became about) and made another one for the purpose that this one was meant to be for, so if you want to resume our discussion here we can now.

I voted "other", but I was tempted by both logic and phenomenology.

On my account, logic is not properly a branch of philosophy, but a tool used by philosophy, and a topic investigated equally by philosophy, language, and mathematics, lying at the intersection of all three. Co-equal to it as a tool of philosophy is rhetoric, which lies at the intersection of philosophy, language, and the arts.

And on my account, phenomenology, or at least phenomenalism, is a core principle for how to properly do philosophy in general, along with principles I call criticism and liberalism (which together make up critical rationalism, which is closely related to logic, so there's that again), as well as objectivism. All of philosophy, rightly done, is about how to investigate our phenomenal experiences and the limits they converge toward (the "objects" of them) in a critical and open-minded ("liberal") way.

I group metaphysics and epistemology together as part of the same half of philosophy, and conversely divide ethics up into two separate questions analogous to those two. Both that descriptive (metaphysics and epistemology) side and the prescriptive (ethics) side are co-equally important. Other important philosophical questions generally fall into one side of the other of that: philosophy of mind with the descriptive stuff, philosophy of will with the prescriptive stuff, philosophy of religion and education (which I kinda treat together) with the descriptive stuff, and political philosophy with the prescriptive stuff.

The only things I wouldn't put on one side or the other of that divide, since they span both, are philosophy of language, and the field I don't know a name for that asks questions like "what is the meaning of life?" In different senses, either of those could be considered a "first philosophy": the linguistic meaning-of-words stuff is logically prior, needing answering to make sense of the rest, but the practical meaning-of-life stuff is pragmatically prior, being the reason why any of the other questions matter.

For that first quote: Given classical (bivalent) logic, the excluded middle and non-contradiction are equivalent by de Morgan's laws. But if you deny either of them, you're leaving classical logic, in which case you could deny just one or the other of them, and not both. Intuitionistic logic denies the excluded middle but not non-contradiction (something can be neither true nor false). Paraconsistent logics deny non-contradiction but not the excluded middle (something can be both true and false).

And for the second quote: That's completely correct, since the excluded middle is not, by itself, identical to bivalence. You need both excluded middle ("either T or F") and non-contradiction ("not both T and F") to make up bivalence ("T xor F").

Behavior is best when accounting for the past and the future. Learn from the past and plan for the future.

Experience is best when in the present. Don't dwell in regrets or fears.

Helena Blavatsky was the driving force behind the creation of Theosophy. — Punshhh

Yeah, I looked her up when you asked, but nothing around here is named after her so I hadn’t heard of her before.

Eliminativism is much weirder than modal realism.

Disbelieving in the possibility of philosophical zombies isn’t the same thing as disbelieving in consciousness.

It moves relative to time, which you would be perceiving as another spatial dimension. It doesn't more relative to something else that you're perceiving as time.

I'm getting bored of repeating the same point.

Law of Excluded Middle or the Law of Noncontradiction, from which the former is derived — javra

Not quite. The two together comprise the Law of Bivalence. Excluded middle says it has to be either true OR false. Non-contradiction says it must not be both true AND false. Together they make up Bivalence: true XOR false.

As to "yes" and "no" there is "maybe". — javra

Good point: can't forget about modality.

One of the best ways to raise quality is by not responding to rubbish. This is very hard these days, but worth trying. Ops that get no answers, drop out of sight quite quickly. This could even happen to the Trump thread if we all made an effort. — unenlightened

I think this is also very good advice. I skip even reading most of the threads here; ain't nobody got time for that. I sometimes reply to "stupid" things just to give a simple answer to an obvious question, or sometimes persist for a while in arguing with intractable people when the exercise seems like it could be informative to onlookers, but if it drags on beyond that point I give up and let the thread die -- or hope it does, or else hope someone else continues some kind of useful work beyond the limits of my patience. But if it's just lowbrow theism vs atheism or something else that's been beaten to death a million times? No comment, let it wither on the vine.

So far as I understand, theories of eternal inflation don't claim to settle the question either way of whether time had a beginning; they just open the door for the possibility that it didn't, since the thing that we previously thought was the beginning turns out (on such a model) to not have been. We don't yet have evidence one way or another (even counting the limited evidence that supports eternal inflation) to tell, scientifically, whether or not there was any start to the inflating universe; the model is consistent with either option. It does say that the universe will go on inflating forever in the future though.

Science aside, I don't get the philosophical objection to the possibility of an "actual infinity". As far as we can tell, the universe is consistent with the possibility of it being infinite in spatial extent: it is, at the very least, so big that our current measurements can't distinguish between how big it is and it being infinitely big. Can you elaborate on what would be wrong with supposing that it might be infinitely big (or that it might be infinitely old, etc)?

Issues with the terminology don't bother me, so if you just dislike the words that's fine (unless someone like @Kenosha Kid confirms it's accurate), but as I meant them that is tantamount to the same thing. A proto-quark with no mass and left spin hits the Higgs field and ceases to exist; Higgs field then immediately spits out a proto-quark with no mass and right spin, which immediately hits the Higgs field and ceases to exist; etc.

apparently the Higgs Boson itself has mass that is unexplained by the Higgs field — Mr Bee

Yes that's a good point, I had forgotten that that was also an exception.

And that article is one that I've seen before that helped me learn about this, too! I'm glad you found and shared it.

In a very strict sense, every time a particle changes it is one particle being destroyed and another created, because particles moving at c experience no time and so cannot change.

Even physicists don’t usually speak so strictly though.

I imagine the universals thing ties closely into religion: that the nominalists are naturalists and atheists, and then the Platonists are Christians, and the war over universals is a proxy war over the admittance of non-physical things into our ontologies. First universals, then souls, and gods...

And religion is a proxy for politics...

The best that you might hope for would be a religion that attempted to base itself on science, which to me would seem to be no more than wishful thinking — Banno

Raëlism teaches that an extraterrestrial species known as the Elohim created humanity using their advanced technology. An atheistic religion, it believes that the Elohim have historically been mistaken for gods. It holds that throughout history the Elohim have created forty Elohim/human hybrids who have served as prophets preparing humanity for news about their ultimate origins. Among those listed as prophets are The Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Muhammad, with Raël himself being the fortieth and final prophet. Raëlists believe that since the Hiroshima bomb of 1945, humanity has entered an Age of Apocalypse in which it is threatening itself with nuclear annihilation. It argues that humanity must find a way of harnessing new scientific and technological development for peaceful ends, and that once this has been achieved the Elohim shall return to Earth to share their technology with humanity and usher in a utopia. To this end, the Raëlians have been committed to building an embassy for the Elohim, incorporating a landing pad for the latter's spaceship. Raëlians promote a liberal ethical system with a strong emphasis on sexual experimentation, engage in daily meditation, and hope for physical immortality through human cloning. — Wikipedia on Raëlism

According to this story, 75 million years ago Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs in the volcanoes. The thetans then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to do this today. Scientologists at advanced levels place considerable emphasis on isolating body thetans and neutralizing their ill effects. — Wikipedia on Scientology

Except that no 3D part ever changes its temporal or spatial position. — Luke

With respect to time, they change their spatial position.

Pick a particle. Step outside of time and look down at a 4D model of the universe. That particle will look like some crazy string zig-zagging its way the 4D universe. At some point in time, that string is at one point in space. At other points in time, it is at other points in space. But there is no meta-time across which they can "previously" have been at one place at time t, but "now" they're in a different place at the same time t.

Oh I wasn't addressing that part after the quote of you to you, I was still talking to fishfry, and just quoted you in the middle of that. I figured you already knew all that. :)