Trying to go to sleep but a quick partial response...

The thrust of what I’m saying is that I don’t know who this is for and I not convinced you do yet either. I’m getting mixed messages due to how it is lain out. The ‘set up’ matters a lot because people like to know what they are getting themselves into. — I like sushi

I just gave an explanation of the target in the other thread.

(edit to quote it here for posterity:)

Before I even knew what philosophy was, I was looking for something. Something fundamental. I didn’t know what to call it.

When I discovered philosophy, I thought that that field was the place where I would find what I was looking for, and that that was the name of what I was looking for: a philosophy. The right one.

I didn’t find it. But I found lots of partial attempts at it, and partially successful attempts at it, and generally, altogether, most of the parts of it. They just needed to be shaped and polished a bit, assembled together in the right way, and a few gaps filled in.

That’s what my book is meant to be: the thing I came to philosophy looking for, but never found. And it’s targeted at people like me from 20 years ago, who are looking for the same thing I was, and who have just learned that something called “philosophy” is where something like that may be found, but don’t yet know the first thing about it. — Pfhorrest

My own critique of my critique here would be to say I should really give positive feedback too. I like a lot of the content because I’ve looked at your essays before. I judged you to be someone less concerned with compliments and more likely to take criticism seriously if it was straight up - if you were a student it would be a different matter and I’d likely use a more ‘encouraging’ tone. — I like sushi

Thanks for that, but it’s really not the lack of compliment that’s been discouraging, but how the gist of your critique has seemed less “here is how to do this better” and more “don’t do that, do something else instead”; and also shades of “don’t argue, just do it, or pay someone else to critique this for you”.

I would like to instead explain what I am trying to communicate (which is not arguing with the critique) and get suggestions on how that could be better communicated.

When I have the time at my desk, not on my phone in bed.

Thanks for the feedback. I give an account of what constitutes truth back in the essay on language and the meaning of words. I should probably include a reference back to that essay near the start of that paragraph.

Things that aren’t just somewhere on that spectrum, but about the spectrum itself in its entirety.

I had this thought as I was going to sleep just now, and I was going to post it in another thread, but maybe I’ll just post it here.

Before I even knew what philosophy was, I was looking for something. Something fundamental. I didn’t know what to call it.

When I discovered philosophy, I thought that that field was the place where I would find what I was looking for, and that that was the name of what I was looking for: a philosophy. The right one.

I didn’t find it. But I found lots of partial attempts at it, and partially successful attempts at it, and generally, altogether, most of the parts of it. They just needed to be shaped and polished a bit, assembled together in the right way, and a few gaps filled in.

That’s what my book is meant to be: the thing I came to philosophy looking for, but never found. And it’s targeted at people like me from 20 years ago, who are looking for the same thing I was, and who have just learned that something called “philosophy” is where something like that may be found, but don’t yet know the first thing about it.

Or maybe because you're traumatized and broken inside and fundamentally incapable of enjoying things that should be intrinsically enjoyable.

BTW, if anybody cares to read the abandoned attempt to write this in narrative / dialogue form from about a decade ago, you can find that here:

http://geekofalltrades.org/codex/xindex.php#intro

Be forewarned, I am absolute crap at writing dialogue, which is why that version of the project was abandoned.

Also, the ideas presented in that are not all my current ones.

She straight up says I should ignore you — Pfhorrest

I second that. — jamalrob

That is heartening to hear, thanks.

I will share this one thought I had though, which sounded too defensive to share before but since you're getting impatient for a response:

Throughout the history of human civilization we have found ourselves struggling with numerous questions, be these intellectual, moral and/or socially concerned... — I like sushi

This sounds to me (and my English major girlfriend) like the start of a bad high school paper.

I also asked her to read the new intro I wrote, and she said that it gets a lot better in the second section -- i.e. the section that goes back to the old style that the whole intro used to be in, before I rewrote the first section trying to address your critiques.

All in all this makes me wary of the value of your stylistic critique. (She straight up says I should ignore you, but I can't bring myself to ignore anybody outright; I always try to take something of value away from any criticism).

I haven't abandoned anything, I just have very limited time to do things on the computer these days, and haven't had time to say or do anything productive in response to any of this yet. (Your advice seems to be to scrap the entire project and do something else in place of it, or at least to recreate it entirely in a different style, so I don't know what kind of productive response you expect to see in two days anyway).

You probably just need a tonne more persistence and the resolve to finish a project — I like sushi

I have nothing if not that. I've literally been working on this for over a decade already, and I don't consider it "done". This is just the latest step, after downgrading from the more interesting dialogue with narrative it was originally going to be, to just some essays in my natural voice: seeing how just that sketch of the ideas works so far.

And my other two big life projects, one of them that video game mod and the other a work of fiction, are both things that I've been slowly working on for the past 24 years, and are still in various stages of progress. I don't expect any of these things to be perfect yet, or necessarily ever. Just at least interesting, and worth continuing.

Try writing something about one particular topic in depth first. — I like sushi

The interesting ideas I have to contribute are all about the relationships between different topics, and the overall structure of things. It is the large-scale arrangement of the pieces that is my interest and my value proposition. I don't have a whole lot to say in depth about any one particular topic that hasn't already been said, except for about the relationship between that topic and other topics.

I have this same issue with my work of fiction. The interesting thing that I am looking to create in that is a large, structured network of smaller stories. I haven't completely fleshed out any of the smaller stories yet, because that's not the novel idea behind the work; that's the legwork that needs to be carried out to implement the novel idea properly. I know I have to do that eventually, but it's extremely frustrating when people say "just pick one of these stories and write that" when the way the stories all connect to each other is the interesting thing.

It's like if I made cardboard mock-up of a big planned community and everyone who took a look at it only remarked on how simple and shoddily constructed the first house they saw looked like. Yeah, the real houses will be sturdier and more fleshed out in the end, if I ever get to properly build this thing, but it's the way they're all arranged together, the street layouts and so on, that I'm pitching here. Stop focusing on the little fake houses, I know they're shit, that's not the point, that's why I didn't just hold up one little fake house and say "look at what I made".

Or if I made a sketch of an image I was thinking of painting, with like, a deer on a hill, and a duck on a pond, and a hawk in the sky, and everyone said "pick one animal and fully paint that". I'm trying to get feedback on the general layout of the painting before I go spend tons of time fleshing out any one part of it.

I wonder if either of you have considered condensing your system into something that fits onto a t-shirt? — Possibility

"It may be hopeless, but I'm trying anyway." (My pragmatic maxim).

"No unanswerable questions, no unquestionable answers." (My core philosophical principles).

"From the meaning of words to the meaning of life". (My take on what philosophy is about).

I love catchy little slogans like that, but they basically communicate nothing useful out of context.

The thing is - and this isn't targeted towards you - but philosophers aren't laying out entire systems anymore that aim to cover basically all topics. Philosophy - at least academic philosophy - is very concentrated. I think if you really want someone serious to go through your manifesto you're probably need to pay an expert philosopher for it. Even people with degrees in philosophy aren't going to take time out of their own day to read through pages of technical material and write up critiques. — BitconnectCarlos

It sounds like you meant to address this to me, not Gnomon.

I do know that contemporary analytic philosophy shuns system-building, but while I do appreciate the concentrated and professional efforts they put into particular topics, I still think philosophy as a whole needs some people putting all those refined pieces together, and also some bridge between the professional world and the laity. I actually write about exactly that in my metaphilosophy.

As for my “manifesto”, I guess what I’ve been looking for is something like the response my most successful creative endeavor has seen. That was a free fan mod for an obscure old video game. Fans of that old game enjoyed having some new game content to play, and some of those fans enjoyed creating such content themselves, and both of those subgroups of that fandom checked out and gave feedback on my project, and eventually a lot of us ended up collaborating and creating something far greater than I could have all by myself in a vacuum.

I was hoping to find something like a “philosophy fandom”, that might have that same kind of collaborative creative enthusiasm for “fan philosophical” works. But from what I gather even in contemporary video game fandoms that kind of spirit is hard to find these days, so maybe that kind of hope was always in vain.

(...but I’m trying anyway).

hey i remember you from wikipedia

I never felt pushed into it by a sense of crisis (though I did end up turning to it in times of crisis). It was more of a passion or hunger, an adventurous urge to explore further and further upstream in the intellectual waters and find where they all come from.

That kind of passion and spirit of adventure used to drive everything in my life. It’s sad to think some people might only have come on this journey out of dire need, not just for fun.

Government is to state as education is to religion, and anarchists are only anti-government in the way that atheists are anti-education. (If you do your education wrong and make a religion out of it, then yes, but if you do it right they’re on your side).

You make it sound like the way people act is always out of the honest belief that the act is morally good. — Samuel Lacrampe

Not act, but intend. People often act in ways they wish they hadn’t; that’s what regret is. Regret is a great way to frame this, if we ignore regret from unforeseeable consequences. Someone doesn’t regret something that they honestly meant to do (unless they didn’t foresee some consequence of it). They regret things that they did out of weakness of will, despite intending to do otherwise, knowing that to do otherwise would be the best course of action.

If someone honestly thought that the pleasure of sex was more important than their marriage or whatever, they wouldn’t regret cheating. That they do regret it shows that they thought it would be better if they didn’t cheat, but they did anyway, indicating weakness of will on their part.

It's not poisoning the well to say that a source appealed to is not reputable.

In any case, I'm glad you just stumbled onto them and don't endorse them, that redeems you in my eyes.

Okay, something different entirely then.

Also, BTW, never heard of your source before and just looked them up:

The National Interest (TNI) is an American bimonthly conservative international affairs magazine published by the Center for the National Interest, which is a Washington, D.C.-based public policy think tank established by former U.S. President Richard Nixon on January 20, 1994, as the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom.[1] Nixon's handpicked executive and current president, Dimitri Simes, was named in the Mueller Report as an agent of the Russian government and has intervened in American politics on direct orders of the highest levels of the Russian government.[2] In light of this scandal, the reputation and fidelity of the publication has suffered as a magazine of record.[3] Simes continues to officially and openly serve as publisher of The National Interest.[4] — Wikipedia

Regardless of their fidelity on this particular mostly-apolitical topic, your appeal to them damages your reputation in my eyes, just FYI.

For example, recently a planet "disappeared" from the Universe. Did the planet really disappear? No. It never actually existed. The scientific theory was just wrong. — h060tu

If you’re talking about Pluto, that’s really not an accurate characterization. The classification scheme (not a theory, just an arbitrary convention about how to group and name things) changed, and an object that had fallen into the category of “planet” under the old classification was now categorized as a “dwarf planet” (which is, somehow, not a kind of planet) under the new classification. Nothing about our description of the universe changed or was shown wrong, we just decided to name things differently.

I’m sorry. I’d like to try to improve, if you have any more specific directions on what is unclear, or questions that could help me clarify.

I’m not critiquing your critique, just asking for clarification. I don’t understand specifically which part you find problematic and why.

I welcome specific, actionable criticism, suggestions for how I can do what I’m trying to do better. The only thing I dislike is responding is to “how do I do this better?” with “don’t do that” — i.e. scrap the whole thing.

You hinted at relativism earlier on — I like sushi

Where? I think you might have misunderstood something.

This would turn off the majority of your readers. — I like sushi

What would? Saying that I’m going to talk about metaphilosophy (for one chapter) before all the other philosophy I “teased”? Saying that philosophy is of wide practical importance to everything else, and that I’ll elaborate why? What?

Okay, I tried to punch up the opening a little bit, by combining the elided bit from the last section that I quoted above, with the old first paragraph, heavily rephrased, much more dramatically, and beginning with the same sentence as the last essay ends with:

It may be hopeless, but I'm trying anyway.

Trying to succeed, trying to act properly, trying to live a meaningful life, trying to be the best person I can be. Trying to empower and enlighten myself and others, to bolster and support the right institutes of governance and education, that will best promote justice and knowledge, helping bring ours wills and our minds into alignment with what is moral and what is real, respectively. Trying to understand what it even means for something to be moral or for something to be real, by understanding the language we use to even discuss any of this, be it descriptive language making claims about reality, or prescriptive language making claims about morality — and to understand all that that entails about logic, mathematics, rhetoric, and the arts, as they shape our use of such language.

Maybe that endeavor is hopeless. Maybe life is meaningless, all social institutes are incorrigibly corrupt, justice and knowledge are impossible, the mind and will (if there even are such things) powerless to grasp what is real or what is moral, if anything is actually real or moral at all, if it even makes any sense to try to talk about such things. Maybe that's all hopeless. But just in case it's not, I think we stand a better chance of succeeding at that endeavor, should success be at all possible, if we act on the assumption that it's not hopeless, and we try anyway.

That is the core principle at the heart of my philosophy, that I am to elaborate in the following essays. I consider the general philosophical view supported by that principle to be a naively uncontroversial, common-sense kind of view, from which various other philosophical schools of thought deviate in different ways. In these essays I aim to shore up and refine that common-sense view into a more rigorous form that can better withstand the temptation of such deviation, and to show the common error underlying all of those different deviations from this common-sense view.

Put most succinctly, that common error is assuming the false dichotomy that either there must be some unquestionable answers, or else we will be left with some unanswerable questions. All of the deviations from the common-sense view I defend stem ultimately from falling to one side or the other of that false dichotomy, on some topic or another. In contrast, my philosophy is the view that there are no unanswerable questions, and no unquestionable answers.

Very loosely speaking, that means that there are correct answers to be had for all meaningful questions, both about reality and about morality, and that we can in principle differentiate those correct answers from the incorrect ones; and that those correct answers are not correct simply because someone decreed them so, but rather, they are independent of anyone's particular opinions, and grounded instead in our common experience. Put another way: that what is true and what is good are beyond the decree of any of us, yet within reach of each of us; and that we can in principle always eventually tell whether someone's opinion is right or wrong, but we can never immediately assume any opinion to be such, and must give each the benefit of the doubt until proof is found one way or the other.

That general philosophical view is the underlying reason I will give for all of my more specific philosophical views: everything that follows does so as necessary to conform to that broad general philosophy, rejecting any views that require either just taking someone's word on some question or else giving up all hope of ever answering such a question, settling on whatever views remain in the wake of that rejection.

The core principles I will outline have immediate implications about what kinds of things are real, what kinds of things are moral, the methods of attaining knowledge, and the methods of attaining justice, which will each be covered in their own essays. Those positions then raise immediate questions about the nature of the mind and the will, and the legitimacy of educational and governmental institutes, which will again each be covered in their own essays. All of that requires a framework of linguistic meaning to make any sense of, which will be covered in its own essay, along with attendant essays on the related topics of logic and mathematics, and rhetoric and the arts, each covering different facets of communication in more detail. And with all of that in place, we finally have the background to tackle the most practical questions of enlightenment, empowerment, and leading a meaningful life, each of which will be covered in its own essay as well.

But before any of that that, I must first address the nature of philosophy itself. As I will elaborate, I see philosophy as the most central field of study, bridging the most abstract of topics like language, math, and the arts, to the physical and ethical sciences that in turn support the development of all the practical tools used to do the jobs of all the world's various trades. It is in light of that far-reaching pragmatic role of philosophy that I will begin my approach to the subject. — The Codex Quarentis: Introduction

It's almost even more first-person than before, but I think it's also a lot more engaging. At least I hope.

I also made smaller modifications to the rest of the intro, including removing the mention of my degree, which I agree just kind of sounded boastful.

Thanks for the praise but I don't understand what's courageous. Are other people afraid to systematize their thoughts?

Cut the autobiographical tone then (cut the ‘I’). — I like sushi

I was taught that proper philosophical writing is done from the first person, and lots of (if not most) notable historical philosophy has been written this way. I'm also trying to be humble in my presentation, and avoid sounding like Tractacus-era Wittgenstein, like I did when I was younger: just stating my core premises as facts authoritatively and then deriving all of the consequences from that. I'm also trying not to sound combative, like I'm attacking anyone's worldview, because that is not a productive way to change anyone's mind about anything. (I already rearranged the order of the essays so it doesn't begin with an attack on faith; the old structure was an attack on fideism, an attack on nihilism, attacks on things that reduced to either fideism or nihilism, and then finally my own moderate viewpoint; now I put my view first, and then go into why those alternatives are wrong). I even say in the introduction:

I don't even intend to, properly speaking, argue in a persuasive way that you the reader ought to change your mind in this way or that. Instead, I intend merely to state what it is that I think, and why I think it, and leave it to you to consider the merits of those thoughts and my reasons for them, and what if any impact that ought to have on your own view of the world. I am merely presenting my worldview here for you to try on for size, and see how you like it. — The Codex Quaerentis: Introduction

That is also in keeping with the very philosophy I end up laying out, where the proper method of investigation is not by starting with some kind of iron-clad indisputable foundational principles and then building an unassailable castle of impenetrable reasoning out of that, but instead by starting with a bunch of initially-equal possible opinions and then whittling away at the ones that can be shown problematic.

In the Codex I am elaborating on my views as a possibility that perhaps hasn't yet been considered by the reader, showing what the problems are with broad swathes of alternatives to it, and then further elaborating on how all the myriad of different topics can be accounted for under my view. E.g. my core principles have immediate implications on ontology, epistemology, and normative ethics, which have their own sub-topics that then need to be addresed; but those views on those topics then raise immediate questions about the mind and the will ("but if the world is all physical and causal then is there no consciousness or freedom!?"), educational and governmental institutes ("but if appeals to authority are wrong then are all religions and states unjustified!?"); and issues about language (including logic, mathematics, rhetoric, and the arts) need to be addressed to make sense of all of that; and all of that together then finally provides a ground to answer the big questions people are really looking for answers to, about the meaning of life.

I do say a variety of things like that in several parts of the introduction, both at the very beginning and at the very end:

When many people think of philosophy, the first thing that comes to mind is often a vague question about the meaning of life. Besides that, people will most often think of big social questions regarding religion or politics, or perhaps more psychological questions about consciousness or free will. In these essays I will address all of those topics. But to do so I must first address more general topics about knowledge and reality, justice and morality, and even more abstract topics about the very language we use to discuss any of this, including logic, mathematics, rhetoric, and the arts. And before even that, I must address the nature of philosophy itself, and the different possible ways of broadly approaching it.

[...]

In the essays that follow, I will begin by laying out my metaphilosophy, my take on what we are even trying to do in the practice of philosophy, followed by a picture of what kind of philosophical view I very generally support, and then the broad kinds of philosophical views that I am consequently against. [...] In the rest of the essays that follow, I will lay out more specifically what my positions are on a wide variety of particular philosophical topics, ranging from abstract matters concerning language, art, and math; through descriptive matters concerning reality and knowledge; through prescriptive matters concerning morality and justice; and finally on matters of empowerment and enlightenment, inspiring the pursuit of goodness and truth, practical action, and the meaning of life. — The Codex Quaerentis: Introduction

But maybe I could punch up that first paragraph some (you actually gave me an idea to begin with the same sentence that I end with), and make it more explicit how all these topics relate to each other and what the point of going over them all is. Possibly rearrange and rephrase some of the intro more too. I have a little time this afternoon, maybe I'll give that a go soon.

You start off by literally showing us what you know. It is exactly the style of writing reminiscent of high school students. You’re not writing for teachers. We don’t care about what you’ve learnt we’re reading for US. — I like sushi

The point isn't to show off my knowledge, but rather to not assume anything about the reader's knowledge. I'm picturing trying to explain my philosophy to my (largely uneducated) mom when I write; or, as I said, myself from twenty years ago, when I barely even know what the word "philosophy" meant. As I say in the intro already:

These essays are targeted primarily at a lay audience, one without professional philosophical education, and as such I will be attempting to include a brief education on the arguments that have been had thus far on each topic that I will discuss, definitions of the technical terminology used, and so forth. — The Codex Quaerentis: Introduction

:up:

If you live in a safe state, red or blue, you should be voting third party anyway, because to do otherwise is to throw away your vote.

If you live in a swing state, then not voting or voting third party is tantamount to voting for the opposite of the two mainstream candidates you would otherwise have picked if you had to pick one of them. So even if you think Biden is a pile of trash, which he is, if you live in swing state not voting for him has the same effect as voting for Trump, who is a pile of radioactive trash on fire.

I don’t really follow the question, but if this helps answer it: I think mathematics necessarily has enough descriptive power, because we invent whatever mathematics we need to describe things. To say that mathematics cannot have enough descriptive power is just to say that some things are not describable, and I literally cannot imagine what an indescribable thing would be like — if I could imagine it, I could also describe it, and if I took the effort to describe it rigorously enough, that would be a mathematical description.

There is a bewildering variety of notions concerning reduction and emergence in the philosophical literature, but I think that the sort of hand-wavy weak emergence that you outline is not very controversial. However, anything stronger or more rigorous than that - such as ontological reduction that the OP brings up - is rife with problems, starting with just setting out the precise meanings of these terms. — SophistiCat

I'm not sure if I'm just unfamiliar with this area of ontology somehow or if it just seems so transparently confused to me, but either way I don't really see what problem is remaining. If we can study how (ordinary multicellular) living things work, what makes them alive or not, in terms of the operations of their bodies made of tissues made of living cells, and we can study how those cells work in terms of non-living molecules, and we can study how those molecules work in terms of ordinary particle physics... then what questions are really left? Clearly then life is reducible to physics in that way, so what is still unanswered?

That isn't to say that biology and chemistry are useless fields and we should just be doing physics, just that the things the fields study relate to each other in a hierarchical way, each being an abstraction of aggregates of the objects of another field. Even within physics this is already done: temperature is an abstraction of aggregates of mechanical motion. It's often useful to consider those higher levels of abstraction; nobody (that I know of) is suggesting we should study biology as some kind of gigantic yotta-particle interaction. Those nanoscopic details don't matter at that level, and it makes perfect sense to sweep them under the rug. But that doesn't mean that anything magical happens when particles end up arranged into the shape of a cell: the cell's life is just something the lifeless particles are doing.

I'm curious if you read through this from the beginning, or (if you just clicked into a random essay) if you followed the links back to earlier essays when they're mentioned? The whole thing builds on itself; no one essay is meant to stand entirely on its own, and most of the later, topical essays refer back to at least the essay on Commensurablism or the four Against essays for the primary argumentation to support them.

Not sure what you mean, but I said "blamed" because crazy conspiracy people think that everything that has happened to weaken the church and state since the 18th century is the fault of the Illuminati, despite them not having existed for anything but a tiny sliver of that time. But hey, their agenda continued anyway, Enlightenment spread across the world, so I guess in the eyes of paranoid religious freaks, the Illuminati must have secretly continued in the shadows pulling the strings on all the world leaders ever since their supposed "destruction", since there's no way crazy ideas like critical thinking and freedom could have caught on without some kind of nefarious agenda like that.

Primarily I am writing for someone like myself, especially someone like I was when I had first discovered philosophy and was trying to find, for lack of a better word, "an identity", in the field; I tried on a bunch of different -isms and none of them were really me, for years and decades I couldn't find any existing all-around philosophical position that I didn't find any problem with, so I started writing down what I though the best take-aways from the various different competing positions on different topics were, or my syntheses or new ideas when none of them had anything worth taking away, and how they all seemed to relate to each other, how many positions I found problems with had the same problems as common premises, and conversely all the positions that seemed sound to me in many different sub-fields all had the same deep premises as each other (those being the negations of those ones underlying all the problematic positions).

Can you elaborate on what kind of thing has not been covered, say just on one subtopic as an example? I.e. what questions from that subtopic have not been addressed?

In any case I'm definitely not going to completely change the entire point of this project, which is to present a complete system of philosophy, relating positions on different topics to each other and grounding them all in the same common principles. That relational aspect is the most novel thing in here, e.g. my deontology and my epistemology are just descriptive and prescriptive applications of the exact same general principles.

But if I need to go into more depth some place or another I would like to know what is not adequately explained, and why not. I have tried to err on the side of being less wordy, especially when in many cases there are other authors who have already given much wordier explorations of the same or similar subjects.

Godel’s theorem is not just about sets of propositions, it’s about axiomatic systems and formal languages. And a description of reality is not necessarily an axiomatic system. A description of reality can be a complete description of reality without being formally “complete” in the sense that matters to Godel.

I think it’s weird that particularly religious (Christian) people seem especially worried about the Freemasons, when they are an explicitly Christian organization that won’t even admit non-Christians.

Fun fact: the short-lived historical Illuminati were essentially a secular humanist copy of the Freemasons, and were quickly eradicated by the theocrats of their time, but nevertheless have been blamed by religious nutbars for the rise of secularism and all other “evils“ ever since.

Having studied some physics and chemistry back in the day, from what I recall chemical properties were explained entirely in terms of the interactions of molecules, which in turn are explained entirely in terms of the physical activity of their constituent particles. Chemical properties and phenomena are aggregate abstractions and so weakly emergent from physical properties, but that still means if you modeled all of the particles at just the physical level you would get the chemical behavior out of the aggregate of them all for free. What about chemistry is supposedly not reducible in this way?

Yeah we have a pretty deep disagreement. As I see it, judging something as the thing to do and judging it as morally correct are the same thing. If someone assesses an action as violating the Golden Rule, but also thinks that they should do it anyway for some other reason, then that means they think there are (at least) exceptions to the Golden Rule, and it isn't always morally binding.

That's different from thinking that it is always binding, and they ought to follow it, but then failing to follow it anyway.

It sounds like you're thinking of "assessing moral value" in a kind of quotated sense, as in "assessing what people would commonly consider to be of moral value", rather than assessing what that person themselves genuinely finds of most value (all value being fundamentally moral in nature, morality being all about value).

Consider beliefs for comparison. Nobody believes something they think is false. They may believe things that are false, and they may believe things that they think other people think are false, but thinking that it's true and believing it are the same thing.

Likewise, nobody intends something they think is bad. They may intend things that are bad, and they may intend things that they think other people think are bad, but thinking that it's good and intending it are the same thing.

I am not aware of any known difficulties in explaining the behavior of cells in terms of chemistry, or of multicellular life in terms of cells, and chemistry is clearly reducible to physics, so I don’t see any problem here.

one might as well dispense with the voting and just have a discussion — Echarmion

Exactly, this is why I was talking about consensus vs majority. Consensus means everyone gets to add their thoughts and everyone’s thoughts are fairly considered and a collaborative solution taking into account all sound arguments is worked out. If there is a failure to build consensus then maybe a majority vote is the next best option. But going straight to a majority vote is not the anarchic way.

Also, it is unlikely that people knowingly hold false beliefs, which is why a scientific position would be to consider ideas held as true be viewed as tentative hypotheses that have not yet been disproved. — CeleRate

Agreed.

Beliefs about the same phenomenon or fact? Ex: the creatures of the Earth were placed here by God; they were placed here by advanced aliens; they evolved from earlier forms; they spontaneously popped into existence. — CeleRate

Yes.

Should this be synthetic a priori? — CeleRate

No? That is also an intersection of those two distinctions, but not the one I’m talking about at that point.

But this involves synthesizing information that was obtained through experierience. — CeleRate

That’s why that passage leads into a discussion of analytic a posteriori knowledge: the meaning of words (analytic) is obtained from experience (a posteriori).

In other words, "voting" in anarchism is a tool of collective decision making, but not the only tool (one must have some moral system to decide what to vote on in the first place) and neither do votes create moral authority — boethius

And that’s exactly what distinguishes it from being identical with democracy. Anarchy may sometimes use democratic methods, and when it does it uses direct democratic methods, but you said “direct democracy” was just a modern euphemism for anarchy, when it’s clear even you understand that that is not true.

So the synthesis of Occam's Razor and Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions isn't new to you? Or the etymological grounding of analytic a posteriori knowledge (or the existence thereof in the first place)? Or the application of a Hohfeldian analysis of rights to a deontic take on epistemology (and the grounding of such an approach in the same principles that underlie critical rationalism)?

I'd appreciate hearing about who else has written about those things before, if not.

Do the nonwhites get to vote in your example? — boethius

Yes. This is a hypothetical to illustrate the point. Take the current population of the United States, which is about 3/4 white, and magically make the whole country a direct democracy, in the sense that every person gets one vote, and the country as a whole can get together and vote on whatever they want. If 51% of those people, all of them white, could decide that nonwhites should all be slaves again, then that is not anarchy. But that is direct democracy. So anarchy is not just the same thing as direct democracy, and direct democracy is not just a euphemism for anarchy, which is what you said that started this argument.

For most, perhaps all, "left" anarchists, the risk of centralized managerial structures is mitigated by local organization, not an even more centralized and non-democratically accountable power structure such as a supreme court or central bank. — boethius

That was the point I was making before about stakeholders. The reason why the above is not anarchy is because the whole population of the country aren't stakeholders in the freedom-from-slavery of every other person, so whether or not a given person is or isn't a slave isn't the kind of thing that's up for a national vote, and it doesn't matter if 51% of the country would (given the opportunity) vote that that person should be enslaved. Anarchy doesn't put that kind of thing to a vote in the first place.

(From an anarchic perspective) When a vote is absolutely necessary, a majority prevailing is better than any minority prevailing, but it's far more important to recognize who has any say over what in the first place, and even among people who all have a legitimate say in some matter, to avoid having to come down to a vote in the first place to decide which side has the bigger numbers and so wins over the other side, instead of finding a consensus that lets everybody win.