Comments

  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Michael
    Was she not participating in an armed mob unlawfully storming the Capitol building? I don't know if she herself was armed or personally threatening violence on anyone, but I would imagine the driver of a getaway car from a different kind of terrorist activity would still be considered to be engaged in that activity.
  • The Road to 2020 - American Elections
    ↪Michael
    :clap: :clap: :clap:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    No, this was certainly not a terrorist. — Benkei

    Don't most terrorists think that they're doing the things they do for just and righteous political causes? Why would this unfortunate woman's belief likewise absolve her of the label of "terrorist"?

    I like that you show sympathy for how these people have been duped and manipulated, since that "war for hearts and minds" really is where the battle needs to be fought; but lots of people fighting for lots of bad causes have been duped and manipulated into thinking they are good causes, and that doesn't make their actions okay.
  • What is "gender"?
    ↪Outlander
    That’s sex.
  • What is "gender"?
    ↪Welkin Rogue
    This is why I propose not using an “internalist account of gender”, but rather acknowledging something differently from gender entirely, which has been confusingly conflated with it.

    There are people who were born into bodies that they feel uncomfortable (dysphoric) about, people who find the idea of having a different body makes them feel good (euphoric). When the difference between those two body images is about sex, we call that “gender” dysphoria or euphoria.

    It’s perfectly easy to communicate the fact of these feelings in public language terms that don’t involve saying “I am a man/woman” — we communicate our feelings about all kinds of things, such as who we find sexually attractive, all the time — and it’s perfectly reasonable that people should want those feelings respected and to be allowed to take actions on them as they deem appropriate without condemnation or censure.

    But mixing that up with gender the social construct and insisting that others use language contrary to the way they have learned it to respect those feelings just creates unnecessary conflict. I imagine that if instead of saying “I am a woman” when someone is uncomfortable with having a penis and more comfortable with having a vagina, people said “I want to be a woman” or “I like being a woman” or something else that made it clear that what they’re communicating is something about their state of mind, there would be a lot less pushback against them.

    There would still be some of course, just like men who unambiguously communicate that they like having sex with other men still get some pushback from bigots anyway. But why create more tension with people who would otherwise be allies just over this comparatively trivial linguistic and ontological issue?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    everything Trump says is a projection — Wayfarer

    I've been saying this about the right in general for a long time. Pretty much everything they ever accuse anyone on the left of is something they themselves are even more guilty of. (Not that the so-called "left" they're usually focusing on, the Democrats, are so blameless themselves).

    ↪Tobias
    ↪StreetlightX
    :100: :up:

    You couldn't get away with fiction this on the nose. — StreetlightX

    And to top it all off, today's crowd of insurrectionists storming the capitol were lead by some lunatic cosplayer running around shirtless in a buffalo-horn hat and face paint. What the even fuck I can't.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    ↪StreetlightX
    That’s good to know, thanks. In light of that I think most uses of “the public language argument” that I’ve seen have been in error, since they usually seem to be attacks on language “usage” that’s idiosyncratic to one person, but could in principle be more widely adopted.
  • What is "gender"?
    The term "social construct" doesn't only have one meaning in sociology, but if nothing's changed the most common usage tends to come from phenomenology. Husserl - Scheler - Schütz. I think the most-cited text could have been Berger/Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality when I graduated in sociology in the early 2000s, but I'm not sure. It's definitely a defining text, though. It's not really that important here, and it's also not the whole academic picture. I'm just mentioning it in case your interest runs deep enough so you have a place to start your research, should you want to. — Dawnstorm

    I would be interested if you wanted to start a thread talking about the philosophy of social constructs more generally, since it's an area I'm lacking in formal education and a discussion of it would be informative.

    I'm particularly interested in something that seems to be implicitly believed by many of the kind of people who usually talk about social constructs, but not explicitly claimed so far as I'm aware: that not only are some things merely socially constructed, but everything is, there is no objective reality at all, and (most to the point I'm curious about) that all talk about things being some way or another is therefore implicitly 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 seems to reframe every apparent attempt to "merely describe reality" as actually an attempt to change how people behave, which is the function of normative claims. In other words, that no apparent assertion of fact is value-neutral: that 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.

    I'm interested in that because it looks to me like the flip side of the same conflation of "is" and "ought" committed by scientism: where scientism supposes that a prescriptive claim can be supported by a descriptive claim, constructivism seems to suppose that all descriptive claims have prescriptive implications.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    But unspoken thoughts in the form of inner dialogue constitute conditions in which language can be had in a way that is not properly public.

    Consider for a thought experiment a writer along the lines of Tolkien, who invents a language for fictional characters to speak. Before he tells anyone else about this invented language, can it really be called a public language? It exists only within the writer's mind, even though in that mind it's imagined to be used in discourse between different characters.

    Now remove the explicitly fictional context of that thought experiment, so instead the "different characters" are the interlocutors of one's normal inner dialogue. Can not one use language in that inner dialogue in a novel way that has not yet been made public, a way that exists only within one's own mind, even though within that mind it is being imagined to be used in a discourse between "characters", so to speak.
  • Kant, Lies, Murder And Dialetheism
    However, deontic logic supervenes, if not in entirety at least in the part that's got to do with relationship between possibility and permissibility, over modal logic, right? — TheMadFool

    "Modal logic" isn't just alethic modal logic, the logic of necessity and possibility. Alethic modalities are just one kind of modality. There are different kinds of modalities, and they don't necessarily have to have any relationship to each other; as in, it's not baked into the logic itself.

    I don't see and context-sensitive assertions being made. :chin: — TheMadFool

    Yes, and that's the perplexing thing about Kant on lying, because his system generally seems to permit maxims that take context into account, and in other opinions (such as about capital punishment) he seems to take context into account, so why not on lying?
  • What is "gender"?
    In what sense does he have a female gender? — bert1

    If people look at that person and think "that's a woman", and they treat that person as they would treat a woman (however that is), then that person has a female gender in the sociological sense, because that sociological sense is all about societal perceptions.
  • Kant, Lies, Murder And Dialetheism
    You're all over the place at least that's how it seems to me. Can you break up what you said into two sections 1) Modal logic and 2) Deontic logic and then explain how it's weird that diamond operator should refer to possibility? — TheMadFool

    There's nothing weird about the diamond operator meaning possibility, in an alethic modal logical, wherein box means necessity. What's weird is if you mix alethic and deontic modes like you suggest.

    If diamond means possibility, then box has to mean necessity -- alethic necessity, not deontic obligation -- or else you get problems like the example I gave, where nothing you can do is forbidden.

    Conversely, if box means obligation, then diamond has to mean permission -- deontic permission, not alethic possibility -- or else you get the same problem.

    It's still possible to argue about whether or not obligation requires possibility, but you can't just mix together deontic and alethic modes like that to "prove" it without causing strange consequences like "nothing you can do is forbidden".

    It's not possible that (you shouldn't lie AND you should save your friend) — TheMadFool

    The way you've phrased it, that's not so. It can be the case both that you shouldn't lie, and that you should save your friend; intuitively we'd usually agree it is, both of those "should" claims are true, since those are both good things, and since they are both true they can be both true.

    But it simultaneously might be the case that you can't both not lie and also save your friend. Note the absence of "should"s here. Maybe it can't be that you don't lie and you do save your friend. "Do", rather than "should".

    It's possible for both states of affairs to be moral (for both "should" statements to be correct), but it might not be possible for both states of affairs to be real (for both of the corresponding "do" statements to be correct).

    There is still room here to argue about whether or not the impossibility of that combined state of affairs means it must be an omissible (non-obligatory) state of affairs too, but you don't get the conclusion that it does for free just out of the structure of the logic.

    One hint, One word, universalizability. — TheMadFool

    Universalizability means that it applies for all similarly-situated moral agents.

    Or to quote Wikipedia, "the most common interpretation is that the categorical imperative asks whether the maxim of your action could become one that everyone could act upon in similar circumstances".

    The circumstances can be accounted for without compromising the universalizability.
  • What is "gender"?
    Welcome! Coincidentally my very first discussion here was also on this exact same topic. Summary of my thoughts from there: there are (at least) two different things that get called "gender", one of them a social property (about sex-delineated roles, presentations, performance, identification, etc), and one of them a psychological property (one's feelings about the sexual characteristics of one's body). The social property has priority on the word "gender", which I think has been misappropriated to refer to the psychological property, to the detriment of everyone involved because of the confusion that that has caused. And I propose using the term "bearing" to refer to the psychological property instead.
  • Kant, Lies, Murder And Dialetheism
    Please visit Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy. — TheMadFool

    I have, many times. Do you have a particular part in mind?

    Also why would it be "weird"? Really why? What makes it weird? — TheMadFool

    On a broad level, it mixes "is" with "ought" in a way that doesn't normally fly. For a narrower example, it would imply that nothing that can (possibly) happen is wrong (forbidden), since "P is forbidden" = "[]~P" (if [] is deontic) and "P is possible" = "<>P" (if <> is alethic), and <>P iff ~[]~P (in all forms of modal logic), which would read as "it is possible that P if and only if it is not forbidden that P", if <> were alethic and [] were deontic.

    Take a moment to consider the situation if someone did tell you that a certain action x is impossible but that x permissible. Impossible means you can't do it and permissible is you may do it. That you may or may not do something makes sense only if it's possible to do that thing, right? In the simplest sense, permissible implies that you have an option but impossible implies that you have none! — TheMadFool

    But in very different senses of "have an option". It makes perfect sense to me to say that it would be morally okay to do something (that if someone did it there would be nothing morally wrong with that), but also, that nobody is actually able to do it. I think this is very clear when we're talking about practical rather than in-principle possibilities: say someone is about to drown or get hit by a car or something else deadly, and nobody is in a position to act quickly enough to save their life. That doesn't mean that it would be wrong (impermissible, forbidden) to save their life, just because nobody (possibly) can. It just means that a morally okay thing (even a positively morally good thing) is beyond our capabilities.

    So, you're of the opinion that Kant's notion of moral duties came with caveats, conditions that made room for his pro-death stance? — TheMadFool

    I see no reason why moral duties couldn't be context-sensitive. That wouldn't make them merely conditional imperatives rather than categorical, because a conditional imperative is conditional on the end in mind, not on the context: "(if you want) to achieve X, do Y, otherwise do Z", not just something like "(regardless of what you want) do Y whenever X is the case, otherwise do Z", which as I understand it would still be categorical.

    And supposing that Kant had a context-sensitive duty in mind regarding killing seems the simplest way to explain his pro-capital-punishment stance. "Kill people whenever [they deserve it some way or another], otherwise don't kill anyone."

    That just raises the question of why the duty not to lie can't depend on context too. "Lie if necessary to save a life, otherwise don't lie", for example. If everyone followed that maxim, it wouldn't destroy language the way "lie whenever you feel like it" would, and so wouldn't result in the contradiction of will that supposedly makes lying categorically impermissible.

    The only way Kant's pro-death views make sense is if it's a moral duty to execute murderers. — TheMadFool

    Or at least, if it's not a moral duty not to execute murderers.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    :up: :100:
  • Kant, Lies, Murder And Dialetheism
    You're talking about deontic logic but it's an offshoot of modal logic, the latter subsuming the former as it were. Ergo, if something goes wrong at the level of modal logic, it wouldn't work in deontic logic too.

    Think of it.

    Modal Logic: If necessary P then possible P

    Deontic Logic: If necessary P then permissible P

    If deontic logic were independent of modal logic then it should be possible for a proposition P to be impossible and yet permissible. That doesn't make sense, right? The permissible supervenes on the possible.     — TheMadFool

    Deontic logic is a type of modal logic. The usual type is called alethic; there's also temporal, doxastic, and probably other kinds. The formal structures within them are all basically the same, []P iff ~<>~P, and <>P iff ~[]~P, but what exactly [] and <> mean differs between them.

    In alethic modal logic, [] is necessity and <> is possibility.

    In deontic modal logic, [] is obligation and <> is permission.

    There's no modal logic I'm aware of that has [] as obligation and <> as possibility, and it would be really weird if there were. But that only means that possibility is not logically entailed by obligation. It might still be the case that "ought implies can", and Kant certainly thought so, but it would just have to be for other reasons than logical entailment.

    (I don't think that's the case myself. I think it's totally possible that things that ought to be might not be possible, and that'd just mean we're stuck with a shitty situation. The practical upshot of "ought implies can", that there's no point blaming or punishing people for things beyond their power to avoid, still holds on my view, but not because of any relationship between obligation and possibility.)

    I didn't know Kant supported the death penalty and Wikipedia describes it as an "extreme position". Noted! However, does it follow from his ethics? I'd like to see how it does if it does? Any ideas? — TheMadFool

    I don't know off the top of my head of Kant's own justification for his pro-capital-punishment position in light of his broader ethics, but I would expect it would be something along the lines of the full context of an act mattering for the general duty you're following. Instead of "never do X", a duty could be "never do X when Y unless Z". So he might have thought the general rule was "never kill someone who's not actively trying to kill someone else unless as punishment for attempted murder" or something like that. If so, he could just as readily have endorsed a more sophisticated duty regarding lying, and it seems irrational of him to have instead bit the bullet and just insisted that all lying is always wrong all the time no matter what.
  • Kant, Lies, Murder And Dialetheism
    This conclusion is derived from modal logic, one axiom of which goes like this: □P -> ◇P = If necessary that P then possible that P. Duties are necessary (obligatory) only if it's possible for them to be fulfilled. — TheMadFool

    In deontic logic the diamond operator means “permissible”, not “possible”, just like the box operator means “obligatory” rather than “necessary”. So it follows that if something is obligatory it is permissible, and if it’s not permissible it’s not obligatory, but that doesn’t say anything at all about alethic possibility: it might be that morally obligatory things are impossible so we’re just fucked.


    I do like that you’ve noted the connection between dialethism and morally intractable situations though. I’ve noted that before myself, in my earlier thread on mood operators and their implications on nonclassical logics, where I wrote:

    The use of these mood functions also facilitates something superficially resembling the motivations for non-classical types of logic such as paraconsistent logics and intuitionist logics, without actually abandoning the principle that differentiates classical logic from them: the principle of bivalence. The principle of bivalence is the principle that every statement must be assigned exactly one of two truth values, "true" or "false", no more and no less. Intuitionist logics allow for statements to be assigned neither of those truth values, while paraconsistent logics allow for statements to be assigned both of them at the same time.

    With these mood functions, similar things can be constructed without actually violating the principle of bivalance, because there is nothing strictly logically prohibiting it being the case that neither is(P) nor is(not-P), if for example P were some kind of descriptively meaningless statement; it is merely necessary, to preserve bivalance, that either is(P) or not(is(P)), but not(is(P)) doesn't have to entail that is(not-P).

    Similarly, there is nothing strictly prohibiting it being the case that be(P) and be(not-P), if for example there were some morally intractable situation where both P and not-P were required, and so any outcome was unacceptable; it is merely necessary, to preserve bivalence, that either be(P) or not(be(P)), and be(not-P) doesn't have to entail not(be(P)), so could be compatible with be(P).

    Fleshing out the philosophical implications of things like descriptively meaningless claims and morally intractable situations is beyond the scope of this particular essay on logic, other than to point out that a logic of this form is in principle capable of discussing things that are, in a sense, "both true and false" or "neither true nor false", without technically violating the principle of bivalence.


    But I don’t think any of this is really necessary to make sense of Kant. He was just being inconsistent. Surely his categorical imperative would generally prohibit killing, but Kant was fine with capital punishment, so sometimes killing must be okay, by his reasoning. If killing can sometimes be excused even though it’s generally wrong, surely the same must apply to lying.
  • Fictionalism
    The laws of natural sciences are made up too. It’s being useful that makes them anything other than arbitrary. They are useful as descriptions of the world. Ones that describe the world well are better in that way than ones that don’t.

    Normative laws are not useful as descriptions of the world, but then, describing the world isn’t what they are trying to do in the first place. What are they trying to do? Might any of them be more or less useful than others towards that end? And wouldn’t that measure of usefulness be equally a basis to decide that some are better or worse than others, more right or wrong? In a different sense than is used of descriptive laws, but still a sense, which is all you need to salvage normativity from nihilism or other relativism.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    I wasn't sure if I had heard of this Lin Wood person, so I just googled them, and the top result was:

    Pro-Trump Lawyer Lin Wood Said He 'Might Actually Be' Second Coming of Christ
  • There is only one mathematical object
    Tegmark's mathematical universe — jgill

    :100:

    The concrete world is an abstract object: it's just the one that we're a part of.

    Because you can make abstract objects from collections of other abstract objects, then yes OP, you can say that there is just one abstract object of which all other objects are parts, and that one all-encompassing abstract object is the entirety of existence in the broadest possible sense.
  • New Year's Resolution
    About a decade ago I resolved to focus on continuous resolve rather than saving it all up for one big high-pressure event at the start of each year. It's been working well for me so far (if by "working well" we mean I'm actually making material improvements in my life; if by "working well" we mean leading an easygoing carefree life, definitely not).
  • The role of conspiracy theories in the American right
    Thus, there are four Ethical theories in competition today: Virtue Ethics, Utilitarianism, Rights systems, and Marketism. — Garth

    I don’t see how your “marketism” stands apart as its own thing, especially if you lump Rand and Marx both together under it. Market evaluation is a function of either (or both) a utilitarian evaluation (whatever most people want the most is most valuable) or(/and) a rights-based system (whoever owns a thing, whoever has a right to it, gets to decide what it’s worth to them, and so what they would sell it for).

    Also, both Kantian ethics and rights-based ethics are part of the same category of deontological ethics. Kant is all about duties, and rights are analyzable in terms of duties. Nozick is also firmly in that camp, too.

    I do think you are on the right track about there being four kinds of ethical system, though. The usual three taught in ethics classes are aretaic (virtue-based, like Aristotle), deontological (duty-based, like Kant and rights theories), and consequentialist or teleological (outcome-based, like utilitarianism). I think the fourth, that doesn't usually get studied per se but is visible in effect around the world and across history, is political, as in, what is good is to comply with the commands of the correct authorities, be that in Christian divine command theory or Chinese legalism, or others.

    I also think that rather than competing methods of answering the same question, these are all better seen (and reconciled with each other) as concerning different questions entirely: what is the nature of functional moral judgement, or will (the aretaic question), what are the proper methods by which to exercise that (the deontological question), what are the ends to aim for with such methods (the teleological question), and who are to conduct and oversee this process (the political question).

    I see these as analogous to four other philosophical questions more concerned with reality than morality: questions about the nature of the mind and consciousness (analogous to the will-focused aretaic questions), epistemological questions (analogous to deontological ones), ontological questions (analogous to teleological ones), and questions about academics, as in who is to conduct and oversee this process (analogous to political questions).
  • The role of conspiracy theories in the American right
    ↪Athena
    ↪hypericin


    With regard to the influence of education here, that is why I think that it is important to have public educators going out and contesting falsehoods in the public discourse, making sure there is an argument about them and they don't just go unchallenged, even as dangerously close to authoritarianism as that might veer, because freethought is by its very anti-authoritarian nature paradoxically vulnerable to small pockets of epistemic authority arising out of the power vacuum, and if that instability goes completely unchecked, it can easily threaten to destroy the freethinking discourse entirely and collapse it into a new, epistemically authoritarian regime; a religion in effect, even if not in name.

    In the absence of good education of the general populace, all manner of little "cults", for lack of a better word, easily spring up. By that I mean small groups of kooks and cranks and quacks each with their own strange dogmas, their own quirky views on what they find to be profound hidden truths that they think everyone else is either just too stupid to wise up to, or else are being actively suppressed by those who want to hide those truths from the public.

    Like all these conspiracy theorists.

    Meanwhile, those with greater knowledge see those supposed truths for the falsehoods that they are, and can show them to be such, if only the others could be engaged in a legitimately rational discourse. But instead, these groups use irrational means of persuasion to to ensnare others who do not know better into their little cults; and left unchecked, these can easily become actual full-blown religions, their quirky little forms of ignorance becoming widespread, socially-acceptable ignorance, that can appropriate the veneer of epistemic authority and force their ignorance on others under the guise of knowledge.

    Checking the spread of such ignorance by challenging it in the public discourse is the role of the public educator. The need for that role would be lessened if more people would actively seek out education, but not everyone will seek out their own education and so some people will continue to spread ignorance – and even those who do seek out their own education may still accidentally spread ignorance – and in that event, there need to be public educators to stand against that.

    But that then veers awfully close to proposing effectively another "religion" to counter the growth of others.

    I think there is perhaps an irresolvable paradox here, in that a public discourse abhors a power vacuum and so the only way to keep religions, institutions claiming epistemic authority, at bay, is in effect to have one strong enough to do so already in place. But I think there is still hope for freedom of thought, in that not all religions are equally authoritarian: even within religions as more normally and narrowly characterized, some have their dogma handed down through strict decisions and hierarchies, while others more democratically decide what they as a community believe. I think that the best that we can hope for, something that we have perhaps come remarkably close to realizing in the educational systems of some contemporary societies, is a "religion", or rather an academic system, that enshrines the principles of freethought, and is structured in a way consistent with those principles.

    What semblance of that we may have once had in America sure seems to be failing nowadays, at least.
  • A thought experiment in reality
    It is pragmatically irrelevant whether the new “reality” you find yourself in is “really real” or not. Proceed as though it is real in either case. If it’s not, you will find out eventually. If it is... you will never be sure, but that is the nature of all knowledge. You can never be sure that you are currently right, only that you were previously wrong.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The real villain here is McConnell, not Trump. The Democratic house quickly agreed to Trump’s demands to increase the stimulus check, but of course the Republican senate wouldn’t agree to that.
  • The Plague of Student Debt
    Taking those course offerings off the table completely would be bad. But not offering loans to people who are unlikely to be able to pay them back is just basic lending sense.
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    On a presuppositional view, one cannot evaluate a sentence as true or false when the subject term has no referent. For a programming analogy, to attempt to evaluate it is like attempting to dereference a null pointer. — Andrew M

    It occurred to me tonight that while you cannot access the data in a null pointer, you can still evaluate the attempt to access it as true or false.

    I mostly only do web programming, but in that domain there is an awful lot of testing for the existence of features along the lines 
    if (object.method) {do stuff} else {error handling}
    . If there is no such object, or the object has no such method, evaluating "object.method" will return false.

    So 
    if (france.king.hairstyle == "bald") {polish his head} else {do nothing}
    will result in nothing being done, because france.king.hairstyle is a null reference (since france has no such property as king) and so comparisons against it universally return false.
  • A Monster Question: Is attachment a problem and should it be seen as one?
    The flip side is that while suffering comes from unfulfilled desires, enjoyment comes from fulfilled desires – not merely the absence of unfulfilled desires, for fulfilling a desire one has and having none to go unfulfilled are different states – and so in giving up on desiring things, one does not only avoid all suffering, but also all enjoyment; just like dying would not only end all suffering but also all enjoyment. So there is some practical wisdom to be found in such philosophies, but it must be taken in moderation.

    Emotionally giving up on the pursuit of good things and just living through life indifferently until it at some point it stops of its own accord is effectively the psychological condition of depression, which is widely regarded as a bad thing by those who suffer through it.
  • Is anxiety at the centre of agricultural society?
    ↪Welkin Rogue
    Sounds right to me. :100:
  • Is anxiety at the centre of agricultural society?
    Which takes me to the Fall. Other creatures in similar circumstances presumably would have moved on from the area and/or endured forced population reductions. Humans, with an extended range of foresight and ingenuity, decided to fight nature, but thereby increased their burdens, their anxiety, their suffering. — Welkin Rogue

    Right, this exactly. Humans are adapted to an environment that doesn't exist anymore: the savanna of eastern Africa as it was during the Pleistocene for hundreds of thousands of years. Around 12,000 years ago that environment disappeared, and by all normal rights humans would have disappeared with it, except that we had the unique cognitive ability to figure out how to adapt our memes -- in the Dawkins sense of units of learned behavior -- instead of just adapting our genes. And now we are masters of pretty much every environment on the planet, most of which were are terribly adapted for on a genetic level, but we make up for it on the memetic level. That memetic adaptation being: think about all the ways that things could go wrong, and act to minimize them, even if everything is fine right now.

    ↪darthbarracuda
    I think it's more that an agricultural lifestyle enabled state coercion than that state coercion created the agricultural lifestyle. If you didn't need agriculture, if you could just walk away from an abusive society and live comfortably in the wilderness with no loss to yourself, the state would be powerless over you. The state has to have something you need, and that's control of the capital you require to make a living. A true post-scarcity world would dissolve the impetus for capital and state alike, and likewise, a pre-scarcity world (like the Pleistocene environment we're adapted to) would have no impetus for them either. It's only when times get hard and people have to band together and figure out how to make the most out of scarce resources or else die that the strong men who can horde those resources to themselves unless you do what they say have any power.
  • Does the "hard problem" presuppose dualism?
    Do you think this is the case with meditation, inner dialog, imagination, hallucination and dreaming? — Marchesk

    Yes, because by "behavior" I'm not speaking only of gross motor functions, but all of the stuff that our physical bodies do, including subtler internal behaviors. The particulars of our experiences -- including mediation, inner dialog, imagination, hallucination, dreaming, etc -- correspond to particular things our brains do.

    One solution that is a monism is a kind of panpsychism. Perhaps all matter has an experiential facet. The various cognitive abilities and functions depend on the complexity and structure of the matter, but at some base level there is interiority in all matter. So, consciousness is not some exception, but rather a facet of matter and there is no need for dualism. — Coben

    Exactly this.
  • Is anxiety at the centre of agricultural society?
    I think this is on the right track. And further, I think that that kind of anxiety about the possibility of failure, the realization that everything won't necessarily be all right but could go horribly horribly wrong if we're not careful, is at the root of all philosophizing, in the broad sense of the quest for wisdom, where wisdom is the ability to discern true from false, good from bad, etc. And furthermore, that the realization of the need for such wisdom is the loss of "innocence" in the religious sense of the word.

    I cannot say with any reliability that this was the intended meaning, but I think a plausible interpretation of the moral of the Abrahamic story of "original sin", where the progenitors of humanity Adam and Eve lived in paradise and "did not know death" until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, is not that they were immortal and faced no other hardships, but that they literally did not know about death, or any of the other horrors of reality, and so lived in blissful ignorance; and that by gaining knowledge, being able to differentiate good from evil, to recognize evil when they saw it coming instead of being ignorant of it, they lost the bliss of their former ignorance and so were metaphorically ejected from their previous state of paradise.

    That is to say, that story may be a metaphor for how the origin of suffering is not just having desires, as the Buddhists teach, but also realizing that they might not be fulfilled; for wanting for things and ignorantly assuming that they are coming to you eventually is no suffering compared to the realization that you may never have them. In this story, the state of the protagonists before gaining knowledge of good and evil is described not as ignorance, but rather as innocence, so perhaps the popular idiom would be better and less controversially phrased as "innocence is bliss".

    At least, until your life is suddenly and unexpectedly wrecked by things you could have prevented if you had thought ahead about them.
  • To understand the world, we must understand piece by piece of it
    I agree. I hold that the relationship of philosophy to the sciences is the same as that between administrative fields (technology and business) and the workers whose tools and jobs they administrate. Done poorly, administrators constantly stick their nose into matters they don't understand, and tell the workers, who know what they are doing and are trying to get work done, that they're doing it wrong and should do it some other, actually inferior, way instead, because the administrators supposedly knows better and had better be listened to.

    But done well, they instead give those workers direction and help them organize the best way to tackle the problems at hand, then they get out of the way and let the workers get to doing work. Meanwhile, a well-conducted administration also shields the workers from those who would detract from or interfere with their work (including other, inferior administrators); and at the same time, they are still watchful and ready to be constructively critical if the workers start failing to do their jobs well. In order for administration to be done well and not poorly, it needs to be sufficiently familiar with the work being done under its supervision, but at the same time humble enough to know its place and acknowledge that the specialists under it may, and properly should, know more than it within their areas of specialty.

    I hold that this same relationship holds not only between administrators and workers, but between creators (engineers and entrepreneurs) and administrators, between scientists (physical or ethical) and creators, and most to the point here, between philosophers and scientists. Philosophy done well guides and facilitates sciences, protects them from the interference of philosophy done poorly, and then gets out of the way to let the sciences take over from there. The sciences are then to do the same for creators, they to do the same for administrators, they to do the same for all the workers of the world getting all the practical work done.
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    Pragmatics is neither syntax nor semantics. — Pfhorrest

    Yes, so it's not enough that "the present king of France is bald" is grammatical and meaningful. There also needs to be a context such that it is evaluable.     — Andrew M

    What I meant was that the strict logical content of a sentence doesn't always include pragmatically implied information. Hence the examples about all of my zero children, etc, as well.

    We wouldn't usually bother saying anything about the King of France unless we thought there was such a person, so saying something about him does pragmatically presuppose there is such a person (i.e. in saying it in practice, you're acting as though you think such a person exists), but that doesn't make the sentence have some kind of indeterminate truth value, because its strictly logical content can still be evaluated to false.

    In the same way that "all of my children are dead" pragmatically implies that I have had some nonzero number of children, all of which have died, but strictly logically equates to "there does not exist any x such that x is my child and x is not dead", which is true because there does not exist any x such that x is my child.
  • Does the "hard problem" presuppose dualism?
    I am firmly anti-dualism and I find a usefulness for Chalmers’ distinction.

    However I do think the answer to the “hard problem” proper is trivial, and all the actual hard work is in answering the “easy problem”. And that the substantive question of why we have the specific kind of first-person experience that we have, rather than the trivial question of why we have any first-person experience at all, is bound up in the “easy problem” as well, because experience and behavior are inseparably linked.
  • Incel movement and hedonism
    Quick question before I get into it: How many of us posting on here about incels being such and such or having this or that perspective either are, or have been, an Incel? — Book273

    The notion of "incel" didn't exist back when I was younger, but I had what felt like a long period of hopeless-seeming loneliness in my late teens and early 20s. I remember friends in similar circumstances at the time saying things that now sound retroactively like proto-inceldom, with which I at least superficially agreed at the time. At the time I thought that I was exceptionally unlovable and unlucky in love, that I and those friends like me were a special underclass of losers. In retrospect, I think my experience (my actual love life as observed from the outside, not my first-person interpretation of it) was probably pretty typical.

    My current girlfriend of the past 8 years has really driven that last point home to me, as she hadn't had sex or a real boyfriend at all until we met at almost-30, so from her perspective my past whiny teen self -- who lost his virginity (depending on how you reckon that) 10 years before she did and only missed out on 3 or 4 Valentine's Days in the 12 years of adulthood before we met -- sounds like an entitled little brat who doesn't know the first thing about what real loneliness is.
  • Debate Discussion: "The content of belief is propositional".
    I'm not really intent on participating here, but the sentence "the present king of France is bald" does express a proposition -- that there exists exactly one x such that x is presently king of France and x is bald -- and that proposition is false, because there is no x that is presently king of France.

    The negation of "the present king of France is bald" is not just "the present king of France has hair", but "the present king of France has hair or there is no present king of France", which is true because there is no present king of France.

    Also, I have not stopped beating my wife, because I never began beating my wife, because I've never had a wife.

    And all my children are dead, yet I've never lost a child, because I've never had any children, and 100% of those zero children I've had are dead, while 0% of those zero children I've had have died.

    Pragmatics is neither syntax nor semantics.
  • Incel movement and hedonism
    ↪Outlander
    It seems like you didn’t read past that first line of my post, as the conclusion was all about finding a source of meaning independent of external factors like that.
  • Incel movement and hedonism
    Meaning is importance. Feeling like there is meaning in life requires feeling like you matter to the world, like you are valuable. Romantic love is one source of that feeling of being valued. So is financial success. People’s inclination to believe the just world hypothesis tends to make hedonic suffering seem reflective of self-worth: “I’m suffering therefore something about me is wrong to make me deserve this”.

    Feeling worthless is an impediment to success in any of these endeavors. The challenge then is to find another source of self-esteem, both instrumentally as it will help you to better achieve all those things, and intrinsically as a substitute for the self-esteem that comes from those things and (largely) makes them valuable to begin with.
  • Does anyone know about DID in psychology?
    Folks wondering if mental illness is real have obviously never encountered anyone suffering from one. — tim wood

    In case it somehow came off that I was saying that, I wasn't. I wasn't saying "exaggerations" as in the person calling something an illness is exaggerating about a normal thing that everyone has, but rather, as in that they have an exaggerated (more severe, more intense, etc) version of something that everyone has a more subtle form of. Like, everyone's brains do the same basic things, but some people's brains do some of those things too much (or too little), and that is what constitutes a mental illness.

    (Also to be clear, I'm not claiming that the above is the case, but wondering whether it might be the case).
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