I'm taking "self-blame" as a synonym for "guilt." I've read through the responses to your OP (original post). People have discussed ethical, social, and psychological factors. My personal take is ethical. As I see it, guilt, saying "I'm sorry," and asking for forgiveness are cheating. They represent an attempt to get oneself off the hook by accepting and possibly wallowing in the "punishment" of self-reproach. Here's what I see as the proper response if one causes unjustifiable harm to someone else. 1) acknowledge and take responsibility for the act and it's consequences; 2) to the extent it's possible, make things right; 3) express remorse if it's likely to help the person affected; 4) accept any reasonable punishment; 5) don't do it again.

Of course in our life as humans we single out a particular cause or a small number of causes that are useful to us and help us navigate the world. — litewave

I think this issue highlights the fact that few events have a single important cause that we can isolate from the background rough and tumble of the world we live in at all scales.

Have you ever watched space shows or movies and wondered about some oddity? — Vera Mont

To quote noted popular culture critic Joel Hodgson - "If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts, just repeat to yourself 'it's just a show, I should really just relax.'" That being said - some thoughts:

• Steam punk - what's up with that?
• What if Einstein was right? That would make 33.4% of science fiction pretty silly.
• If time travel is possible, where are all the future people?
• As others have noted, if drones are about to take over warfare here in the 21st century, why are they still fighting with personal weapons millennia in the future?
• Why are space ships that will never enter the atmosphere so often depicted as aerodynamic?
• Why is Jean Luc Picard bald. Certainly they will have cured that by hundreds of years in the future. And while we're on the subject, why does he have an English accent when he's French?
• How can we hear when space ships explode?

You would not be the sole cause though. For example, planet Earth would participate in the causality too. If planet Earth didn't exist you would not be able to stand here, let alone punch anything. But we take it for granted, so we don't mention it. — litewave

Agreed, and that's one of the arguments against causation. From the perspective you describe, every event has an almost infinite number of causes. If my father hadn't met my mother on a train from New York City to New Haven in 1948, I would never have been born. Did my father's decision to take the 3:17 train instead of the 5:42 cause my birth? When a billiard ball strikes another, is the cause me, the pool cue, the tree that provided the wood for the cue, the elastic nature of the ball, the intermolecular forces that transmit the force between the balls, the fact that my girlfriend had to call off our date so I decided to go to the pool hall instead, my father's decision to take the 3:17 instead of the 5:42...?

For me, the (deductive) inferential theory of causation seems the most elegant. It says that the structure of our spatio-temporal world contains regularities in the distribution of matter in spacetime called laws of physics — litewave

Or then we could dispense with the idea of causation completely except at scales where we humans live. If I punch you in the face and your nose bleeds, I caused the bleeding.

Indeterminism can be true and also merely relative. The full weirdness of "the quantum realm" is never observed, as at every point since the Big Bang, it has been thermally decohered to one degree or another. The weirdness has been constrained towards its classical limit by the Universe becoming a history of past thermal events. — apokrisis

I don't think you need to consider the quantum realm to find indeterminism. Reality is equally indeterminate at classical scales. People have been arguing about it for centuries.

A quote from Chapter 4 - the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP), which compares our perception of objects to the icons on a computer interface. — Wayfarer

I hadn't heard of Hoffman before this thread, so I looked him up. Sounds like what you are describing is multimodal user interface theory, which makes some sense to me. That's sort of like how I thought about this issue originally. Now I find myself questioning whether that is the clearest way to think about it.

If you look and see a spoon, then there is a spoon. But as soon as you look away, the spoon ceases to exist. Something continues to exist, but it is not a spoon and is not in space and time. The spoon is a data structure that you create when you interact with that something. It is your description of fitness payoffs and how to get them.

This may seem preposterous. After all, if I put a spoon on the table then everyone in the room will agree that there is a spoon. Surely the only way to explain such consensus is to accept the obvious—that there is a real spoon, which everyone sees.

But there is another way to explain our consensus: we all construct our icons in similar ways. As members of one species, we share an interface (which varies a bit from person to person). Whatever reality might be, when we interact with it we all construct similar icons, because we all have similar needs, and similar methods for acquiring fitness payoffs.

Not preposterous maybe, but I think it's misleading. Yes, I know Hoffman is a cognitive scientist. Of course the spoon doesn't cease to exist. It seems to me it exists in the same sense it does while I'm looking at it - at the interface between my mind and the external world. The quote also seems to ignore the extent to which reality is a social phenomena. Even if I'm not looking at the spoon, somebody else is or might be.

Very similar argument to 'mind-created world'. — Wayfarer

Seems to me any philosophy other than strict materialism/physicalism/realism could be described as concerning a "mind-created world." I wasn't sure what you meant by that, so I looked it up. You'll be interested to know that the first link on the Google page was from a thread you started eight months ago.

It's called 'scepticism'. — Wayfarer

We don't cotton to your gol'darned metric "scepticism" here in the USofA. We'll stick with our good old American customary units skepticism.

A question I have is, what is 'truth' as distinct from 'perceived reality'? — Wayfarer

Truth only applies to propositions. Most of what we perceive and know about reality doesn't fit comfortably into propositions. If I have 1,000 data points generated by measurements, what can I say about them that is true? If my understanding of reality is based on thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of informal observations, where is the truth in that if I can't or don't want to put it in the form of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of propositions?

In this framework, 'objective truth' represents the underlying reality that exists independently of observers, akin to Kant's noumenal realm or things in themselves. Our perceptual reality, on the other hand, is the subjective experience generated by our sensory systems, tailored by evolutionary pressures to help us navigate our environment effectively rather than to accurately reflect this objective truth. — Wayfarer

It is a respectable metaphysical position that there is no underlying reality that exists independently of observers. This is Verse 40 from Gia-Fu Feng's translation of the Tao Te Ching.

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being. — Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching Verse 40

The ten thousand things are the multiplicity of things existing in the world. Not being refers to the Tao, the inconceivable, unspeakable unity.

I wonder if the Amazon writeup is decribing what Hoffman is arguing for accurately. — wonderer1

I assumed that the writeup was provided by the author or publisher. If so, it is consistent with the provocative language in the title.

We need to take our perceptions seriously, because they are the result of interactions within reality, but there is a lot of benefit to understanding that things are a lot more complex than our perceptions suggest, and we can benefit from being cognizant of that. — wonderer1

I'm ok with that. One of the reasons I like the Lorenz book I've been referencing is that he gives concrete examples of the ways that reality is "a lot more complex than our perceptions suggest." Those examples are supported by the results of scientific observations and experiments. He then goes on to examine the philosophical implications of those results.

Lorenz, on the other hand, explicitly stated that our understanding of the evolution of mind in humans and animals demonstrates that there is an objective reality.
— T Clark

I wouldn't say "demonstrates", — wonderer1

I might agree with you. I'm still thinking about it. But that is what Lorenz wrote and I found it substantive enough that I didn't dismiss it out of hand.

I think at stake is Capital T Truth. — Wayfarer

Of all the metaphysical entities, I think Truth is the most misleading. It takes up too much of philosophers's attention and distracts from issues I see as more central to our lives.

'Whatever works' becomes the measure. — Wayfarer

No, promoting human values is the measure. If "whatever works" can achieve that, I don't see any reason to object.

A pragmatist might argue that this amounts to a definition of truth anyway- that which is useful for certain purposes (Rorty).

I guess the meaningful quesion that emerges from this position is what the nature of truth might be. The notion of truth like our 'desktop reality' may just be a useful heuristic rather than anything linked to an objective reality or even, dare I say, it a transcendent realm. — Tom Storm

A pragmatist might also argue that truth is irrelevant, maybe even meaningless. All that's needed is to know what to do next.(T Clark)

His 'theorem' - and there are objections to his use of that term in this context - is precisely that 'fitness beats truth'. — Wayfarer

My comment wasn't clear. I wasn't questioning your characterization of Hoffman's position. I was offering an alternative I think is more consistent with what Konrad Lorenz wrote in the book I referenced. I think you might still judge that it puts too much weight on biological determinism. I'm not sure which one I like more or, I guess, dislike less. Either one makes me rethink some questions I thought I had answered to my satisfaction.

As a result, the way we perceive reality might not be a true reflection of it, but rather an adaptive construction that helps us navigate and thrive in our environment. — Wayfarer

This is an issue I raised in my first post in this thread. Nobody seems to agree on, or even have a good understanding of, what reality really is. If I don't think the idea of an objective reality is a useful one, what difference does it make whether what I perceive is a true reflection or just an adaptive construction.

Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features.

Lorentz would disagree with this, but I don't. Or at least I don't think I do.

I guess the main quibble I have is that his ‘fitness beats truth’ puts too much weight on biological determinism. — Wayfarer

Maybe not fitness beats truth. Maybe fitness shows us the truth. Or at least that there is a truth to be shown.

The problem with all of this material is we seek undertaking in a few paragraphs, when deep study is probably required. — Tom Storm

Yes. I'm in the middle of the Lorenz book and it's having a big effect on my views in this area. I definitely need to think more on the subject.

The real question is how useful is such a theory - it's a bit Kantian - we only see phenomena (the human dashboard or 'interface theory of perception' versus the noumena (the world we don't and can't see). — Tom Storm

Lorenz explicitly connects his views with Kant. As I noted, the title of the paper I linked is "Kant's Doctrine Of The A Priori In The Light Of Contemporary Biology." In contradiction to my initial impressions, Hoffman's position doesn't seem that far off.

The consequences of being run over by a bus on Main Street if we are not looking while we cross remains an ontological danger. It just isn't what we think it is. Evolution has programmed us with a 'dashboard' of sense experiences, a kind of a simulation of reality - this realm still holds risks and threats and rewards and experiences, it's just that we do not see them for what they really are...

...I may be wrong but as I understand Hoffman he also acknowledges an objective reality. But he contends that the reality we experience is not that objective reality. According to him, evolution programs us to survive by using practical shortcuts. The reality we perceive with our senses is one of those shortcuts, a vastly simplified version (perception as heuristics) with many gaps. — Tom Storm

I think Lorenz would say it is an image of reality, not a simulation and I think, or at least I think Lorenz thought, that's an important difference. We see things the way they really are, but we don't see everything. I have a metaphysical prejudice against the idea of objective reality, so I have some sympathy for Hoffman's perspective.

The conclusions don't seem so much in opposition to me. It seems to me that the following two sentences are just different ways of expressing a similar understanding. — wonderer1

Yes. After I wrote my post and then read some of the other comments, I started to come to the same conclusion. But it was a set up job - I was framed. The title of the book is "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes." The first line of the writeup in Amazon is "Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally." But it seems, as you note, that that's not what Hoffman was saying at all. Lorenz, on the other hand, explicitly stated that our understanding of the evolution of mind in humans and animals demonstrates that there is an objective reality.

The work of Donald Hoffman, and especially his book "the case against reality", has been discussed on this forum before, so I'll assume you know something about it. Basically he says evolution has not provided us with tools to truly see reality. — Gregory

I think the whole "what is reality?" question is insoluble because all the answers aren't really answers at all, they're definitions. We can define reality as anything we want, and philosophers do - over and over again - back and forth ad infinitum. Hoffman isn't wrong, he's just defined reality a bit differently than you and I do. You probably mean something different than I do. My personal favorite definition for everyday use runs along same tracks as @unenlightened's. It's what we can see (or taste, or feel, or smell, or hear, or maybe even think of) truly enough to truly live in the real world without getting extinctified by the truly really real predatory reality. It's, you know; apples, electrons, my wife's new hip, tree frogs, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, Donald Trump Jr., and maybe Sherlock Holmes and love.

I hadn't heard of Hoffman so I looked him up on Wikipedia. I've been thinking about the evolution of mind and it's relation to reality recently, so this caught my eye:

Hoffman argues that natural selection is necessarily directed toward fitness payoffs and that organisms develop internal models of reality that increase these fitness payoffs. This means that organisms develop a perception of the world that is directed towards fitness, and not of reality. This led him to argue that evolution has developed sensory systems in organisms that have high fitness but don't offer a correct perception of reality. — Wikipedia

Right now I'm in the middle of Konrad Lorenz's "Behind the Mirror" which also focuses strongly on evolution and objective reality but comes to a completely opposite conclusion.

This is the basis of our conviction that whatever our cognitive faculty communicates to us corresponds to something real. The 'spectacles' of our modes of thought and perception, such as causality, substance, quality, time and place, are functions of a neurosensory organization that has evolved in the service of survival. When we look through these 'spectacles', therefore, we do not see, as transcendental idealists assume, some unpredictable distortion of reality which does not correspond in the least with things as they really are, and therefore cannot be regarded as an image of the outer world. What we experience is indeed a real image of reality - albeit an extremely simple one, only just sufficing for our own practical purposes; we have developed 'organs' only for those aspects of reality of which, in the interest of survival, it was imperative for our species to take account, so that selection pressure produced this particular cognitive apparatus...what little our sense organs and nervous system have permitted us to learn has proved its value over endless years of experience, and we may trust it. as far as it goes. For we must assume that reality also has many other aspects which are not vital for us.... to know, and for which we have no 'organ', because we have not been compelled in the course of our evolution to develop means of adapting to them. — Konrad Lorenz - Behind the Mirror

Lorenz's book is great. It's changed my perspective on a lot of issues that I've been contemplating for a long time. I plan to write more about it here later, but I'm just in the middle of my reading. For a shorter read, you can try his paper "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology." Here's a link:

https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz

I am not yet a subscriber. — SophistiCat

I haven't watched movies much for the last 15 or 20 years, either in person or at home. I just lost interest and found most of them unsatisfying. I subscribed to Criterion back in January and it has changed my habits. I still don't watch a lot, but there are so many movies and so little crap I've been able to find interesting choices. About $11/month is a reasonable price. I would drop Netflix if it were my choice, but my wife likes it. With Amazon, I like free shipping.

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
Down by Law (1986)
Night on Earth (1991)
Dead Man (1995)
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
Broken Flowers (2005)
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) — SophistiCat

I subscribe to the Criterion Channel. That's an artsy-fartsy streaming service in the US. It has a lot of these available.

One of my favorite Jarmusch movies. — SophistiCat

I don't usually pay attention to who directs what. Can you recommend some others by Jarmusch.

As usual, your recommendations are appreciated.

As soon as you can write the sentence as one that contains the pattern K(#S), i.e. a property of a statement, it is philosophical. — Tarskian

That doesn't make any sense. No need to take this any further.

I don't understand you responses to my statements. Seems like you're just stretching your definition to fit my examples.

Some more philosophical statements that don't meet your standard.

• The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao - Lao Tzu
• God will not have his work made manifest by cowards - Emerson
• All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason - Kant

As I just commented to @Moliere, the only potentially workable solutions we've come up with are post-apocalyptic. Looking at the choices, the old hunkering down in the US of A and only letting enough immigrants in to keep our economy growing option seems like, not the best choice, but the inevitable one.

Not sure any of that amounts to an essential nature. The fact that we interact with our environment and try to survive (like most creatures) is true. I'm not sure human nature is a useful frame. — Tom Storm

I didn't take this any further because I've been wrestling with these issues and my thoughts are not together enough to make a coherent argument. That being said, here is a quote I used in another thread earlier today. I don't mean this as an argument against your position, but it's a different perspective I thought you might be interested in.

The simple answer is that the system of sense organs and nerves that enables living things to survive and orientate themselves in the outer world has evolved phylogenetically through confrontation with an adaptation to that form of reality which we experience as phenomenal space. This system thus exists a priori to the extent that it is present before the individual experiences anything, and must be present if experience is to be possible. But its function is also historically evolved and in this respect not a priori. — Konrad Lorenz - Behind the Mirror

Are there examples of large scale, politically effective anarchist organizations. It seems almost like a contradiction in terms.
— T Clark

How large scale are you thinking here? At a certain point I already admitted that the answer is simply no: states are larger than functioning anarchist organizations. — Moliere

Earlier in this thread, @apokrisis wrote about sustainable agriculture and estimated it might work with a world population of about a billion. It strikes me that the kind of anarchist system you are talking about might work at a similar scale. That means that both are post-apocalyptic scenarios.

If enough people agree then they can pursue it -- I'm not sure if we're back where we started with that, though. Recognizing that agreement is allows collective action makes agreement a worthwhile pursuit, which gets along generally with how I think: It's more about building relationships regardless of the philosophical ideas we might be thinking about in doing politics that orient us when it comes to the doing of politics. — Moliere

Yes, this is the way democratic politics is supposed to work, but is certainly not how it is working now.

I'm currently reading "Behind the Mirror" by Konrad Lorenz, which is all about just this issue. I'm just a little way in, but I think you might find it interesting. An example:

The simple answer is that the system of sense organs and nerves that enables living things to survive and orientate themselves in the outer world has evolved phylogenetically through confrontation with an adaptation to that form of reality which we experience as phenomenal space. This system thus exists a priori to the extent that it is present before the individual experiences anything, and must be present if experience is to be possible. But its function is also historically evolved and in this respect not a priori. — Konrad Lorenz - Behind the Mirror

But in my thought experiment, we have everything: there is no noise, all the information is relevant because it's an isolated system and the particles are the most fundamental. — Skalidris

This is not and never will be possible in even the simplest system. There is no place to hide from the noise and we will never not have to decide for ourselves what is signal and what isn't.

The basic wrong assumption here is that knowledge is information accumulation rather than information discard. The world is complex. And so the mind seeks to simplify.

That is how science works. It extracts the measurement minimising laws of nature. General equations that can make good enough predictions employing the fewest data points. — apokrisis

That was one of my main technical jobs as an environmental engineer - to take a large number of data points and boil it all down to a few parameters to use for calculations and computer models. That's really what statistics is all about.

Short is good.
— Banno

Not according to the Site Guidelines and How to Write an OP. — Leontiskos

OPs must be more than 500 characters. — Leontiskos

You made a clear and reasonable presentation of your position in 264 words.

I've looked around the web and I've never found any philosophy forum as good as this one. I think there are a number of reasons for that - good moderating, a decent set of contributors, my personal contributions, etc. Maybe highest on the list is the level of participation. If you post something here, it generally gets responses and often a bunch. Those often turn into long, interesting discussions. I think your suggestions will lead to a reduction in participation. Sure we get some dog bones, but the moderators will step in if it's too bad. As Aristotle wrote - Good enough is good enough.

I found it to be an enjoyable read, although I'm not very knowledgeable on comparative translations. Certainly worth checking out. I enjoyed the "outer chapters" as well. — Maw

I'm glad you liked it. It has meant a lot to me.

I'm not sure human nature is a useful frame. — Tom Storm

A difference of opinion then, or at least perspective.

No. The human condition is what we deal with on this earth. You may say that all of those centrisms are part of the human condition, but that is not the point that I am going for. Arendt, in her book, discusses the different phases of man's progress and industry and artifice as part of the human condition, but I want to discover the human condition of successful autochthonous humans on this earth. We have tech that is able to solve more problems than we are. Why aren't we? I think the failure is due to (in the past ethnocentricity has hurt people and benefited a few) technocentricity. If we discover the method of success for the several hundred thousand years before civilization, we may be able to deal with climate change, tectonic plate shift, vulcanism, etc. — isomorph

I don't know if you've seen it, but there is another discussion now on the forum that addresses some of these issues -

The ethical issue: Does it scale? — apokrisis

Meanwhile other more ecologically-savvy agricultural practices – permaculture and regenerative farming – haven't scaled as they too directly challenge the Big Business status quo. — apokrisis

Could they scale economically and technologically without that resistance? Could they close those gaps in food production factors you identified previously?

And then this. The US choose to continue growth at all costs. It had only propped up world trade and Middle East oil deliveries to get the world out of its cycles of European and Asian wars. US was its own well-resourced and well-populated continental market. It did not need world trade itself. It is uniquely blessed in its geostrategic position. — apokrisis

There's a lot of talk these days about the gap between the very rich and the rest of us. Worker's pay hasn't really risen since the 1970s while the richest gather a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. How much of that has to do with globalization? To what extent does globalization lead to improvement in the standard of living for people in Asia, Africa, and South American at the expense of those in North America and Europe? If the only path to a new golden age is the dilution of the western way of life by spreading it around to the rest of the world, what realistic political strategy will lead us in that direction? As you note, the US has a viable alternative - fuck em all.

A really big game is being played by the US that no-one ever seems to talk about openly. Under Trump, Biden and whoever is allowed to follow them. The idea is that is scaling is it is time to bunker down as a nation. Canada comes along for its resources, Mexico for its cheap labour. Japan, Taiwan and Korea get to pay to stay in the club. The UK and Australia are useful to a point. — apokrisis

We'll save Australia, wouldn't want to hurt no kangaroos.

Upon making "doing good" advantageous, the people seeking advantage will start doing good.

But then when "doing good" changes, because the world always changes, they'll insist that the old "doing good" is the new "doing good" — Moliere

I guess that's where politics and ethics comes in. We need everyone, or at least enough of us, to agree on what doing good means in this context. And then we're back where we started.

There are many examples of anarchist organizations, — Moliere

Are there examples of large scale, politically effective anarchist organizations. It seems almost like a contradiction in terms.

It's not different. I am saying that humans have confused what their human nature is. Some philosophers have talked about 'authentic personhood', etc., which seems to be an ideal, while autochthonous humanity is what humans are along the whole continuum of human capabilities, i.e., both good and bad, altruism, prejudice, and so on. — isomorph

Beyond my interest in human nature, I have a strong interest in the works of Taoist philosophers Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. They both are seen as philosophical opponents of Confucius. Taoism has the concept of "Te," translated as virtue or intrinsic virtuosity which I connect with my idea of human nature.

Are you saying that what you call our human condition keeps us from seeing our autochthonous humanity, our human nature?
— T Clark

No. The human condition is simply our circumstance on this earth. I do say that humans are under a cloud, ethnocentricity, anthropocentricity, technocentricity, etc., that covers our nature which made humans successful for several hundred thousand years before civilization came about, — isomorph

I'm not sure I see the difference between what you call the human condition and what you call the cloud. Aren't ethnocentricity, anthropocentricity, technocentricity, etc. part of the human condition? I'm not sure it makes sense to harken back to a past golden age, although, to be fair, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu tend to do the same thing. I guess everyone does.

What some consider to be human nature seems to me to be a product of social and linguistic constructs rather than a set of inherent traits. — Tom Storm

Careful. Don't make me bark.

I don't disagree that much of what we are is the product of our interactions with the world outside. On the other hand, I think it's important to recognize that much is also built in to us physically, biologically, neurologically. To oversimplify, we humans are creatures of instinct as much, more, than we are of learning and socialization. We are born with the capacity and drive for language. Our minds are structured by evolution to perceive, learn, and act in the world in a way that keeps us alive. I'm reading an interesting book right now - Konrad Lorenz's "Behind the Mirror." In Lorenz's view, it makes sense to look at ourselves as a chain of genetically connected organisms rather than individual creatures or even species. In that sense, the action of evolution over billions of years is us learning to be in the world as much as us sitting in a classroom studying math. I'm trying to decide if I like that way of thinking, but either way, it has forced me to reexamine how I look at all this.