Isn't the process which is random the actual mutations? Errors in replication of DNA? Only some of which are advantageous to the organism, and which are then subject to natural selection. So it's not a random process in that sense, as the time sequences involved in the winnowing out of mutations and the gradual development of species are enormous (although there are puzzling anomalies like the Cambrian Explosion in which many diverse species appeared very suddenly in geological scales.)

But I think the deeper questions are why did life begin in the first place - was this, as Jacques Monod claims in 'Chance and Necessity' a 'biochemical fluke', the fortuitious product of an essentially chemical process? That's where I think people feel that the process is random.

Then there's the question of whether evolution was always bound to produce rational sentient bipeds such as ourselves, and, if so, why? When it seems equally feasible that it might have reached stasis billions of years ago as blue-green algae. But then the idea that evolution gives rise to higher intelligence is categorised as orthogenesis, which is a no-go. Or maybe none of those questions are scientific questions per se but philosophical questions prompted by scientific discoveries.

One point I will note, is that the strictly scientific attitude to h. sapiens treats them - or us - as another species, as an object of scientific analysis. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but when that begins to serve as the basis for philosophical or (anti)religious ideologies then it oversteps the mark, and where the science begins to morph into scientism:

There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world's mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then, sometimes from the same person, you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world's major problems, from racism to education to conservation. Consider Edward O. Wilson, rightfully regarded as one of the most outstanding professional evolutionary biologists of our time, and the author of major works of straight science. In his On Human Nature, he calmly assures us that evolution is a myth that is now ready to take over Christianity. And, if this is so, “the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.” — Is Evolution a Secular Religion, Michael Ruse

Buddhism, for one example, has had this creed of "no origin" for a few millennia now. — javra

Buddhism actually has a rather strange and not very well known creation story. The Aggañña Sutta is a discourse by the Buddha, in which he talks to two monks, Vasettha and Bharadvaja, about the origin of society and social classes. In the sutta, the Buddha describes how beings originally lived in a celestial realm and subsisted on joy or radiance. They later became attracted to a substance that appeared on Earth, and as they consumed it, they gradually lost their luminosity and celestial nature. The story goes on to describe the gradual formation of physical bodies and also how social divisions eventually emerged among humans. In Mahāyāna cultures, such as Tibet, there is also the cosmological mythology of Mt Meru, which is the mythological axis of the Universe and the centre of the world. It is of course thoroughly outmoded by scientific discoveries, something which has been a cause of disquiet in Buddhist culltures (notwithstanding the Dalai Lama's frequent expression that Buddhist doctrine must always recognise empirical facts when they're presented, Mt Meru being no exception.)

There have been some fanciful modern folk mythologies attempting to map Buddhist re-birth against evolutionary history, although I don't think they're part of indigenous Buddhist culture, which knew as little about biological evolution as did the West before Darwin. And none of which is particularly germane to Buddhism generally, which, overall, is probably not as susceptible to the apparent threat to their dogmas posed by natural origins.

not everything that can be teleological will necessarily be intentional, — javra

Right - but isn’t there some sense in which even the simplest life forms act intentionally? Not consciously, of course - but a living thing by definition seeks to maintain itself and continue to exist. So I wonder if in some abstract sense whether that adds up to a very primitive intentionality.

That evolution occured and is ongoing is indubitable, but what it means is another matter. (And I don't buy that it means 'whatever you want it to mean', either. :rage: )

London: Former British prime minister Boris Johnson was turned away from a polling station when trying to cast his vote in the local elections after he forgot to bring acceptable photo ID.

Johnson, who introduced the contentious new laws mandating photo ID when voting while he was in Downing Street, was reportedly trying to cast his ballot in South Oxfordshire, where a police and crime commissioner for the Thames Valley was being selected.

SMH

Talk about being hoist by one's own petard. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

What the baffling nature of quantum phenomena reveals to us, is that the reality of the world is very far outside of our current ability to understand it. "Indeterminate" means beyond our capacities to determine, and why he thinks that we ought to be "shocked by quantum physics" is that these "indeterminate" aspects are so significant, and have been shown to be so far outside our capacity to understand, that it reveals how shockingly minimal our current capacity to understand the reality of spatial temporal existence actually is. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I don't think that was Bohr's attitude, based on the books I mentioned in the previous post. Bohr felt that his discovery of the 'principle of complementarity' resolved many of the apparent paradoxes implied in quantum physics. So much so, that when he received imperial honours late in life from the Danish Crown, he commissioned a coat-of-arms that had the ying-yang symbol at its center and was embossed with Contraria Sunt Complementa ('Opposites are Complementary'):



I think what he says is 'shocking' is precisely the implications for common-sense realism, the idea that the world exists independently of the way in which we perceive it. I think that commonsense realist view is innate, the 'natural inclination of the intellect' as Bryan Magee says in his book on Schopenhauer, and that questioning it is often violently rejected, even by the highly educated. But I think Bohr was relatively sanguine about it. He said 'everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real' and 'Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world.' I think he accepted the limitations of knowledge, in a rather Kantian way. (There's an excellent youtube lecture by philosopher of science Michel Bitbol on Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology if you wish to explore that further.)

The problem being that if something is deemed as random, it is in that sense unintelligible. So if something is deemed as ontologically random, and it is considered to be unintelligible, then there is no will to attempt at figuring it out. — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't it possible that the world considered as a physical system is unintelligible (Plato's 'shadows on the cave wall')? That this is why, the greater the discoveries, the bigger the questions! You will recall from the discussion of the Eric Perl book Thinking Being, that intelligibility in the sense metaphysics understood it, was completely different from today's mathematical physics. So much the worse for it, many will say, but then Robert Jastrow did say, in God and the Astronomers,"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

I'll try and find time for that video, the first presenter, Beau Lotto, also figured in a video I attached to the Mind Created World OP. As for 'subjectivism', I almost accept that, with the crucial caveat that we are all subjects of similar kinds, and so the world occurs for each of us in similar ways. The subjective, so-called, is an ineliminable pole of reality, but there's no use looking for it, because it is what is doing the looking.

If minds, instead of mindless genes, might play some role in selection, then, so the reasoning goes, the "firewall" between the world of nature and the world of mind will be destroyed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The Cartesian division of mind and matter, and the fundamental duality of self and world, primary and secondary attributes, Whitehead's 'bifurcation of nature', all stem from the same source. A snippet I often quote from Thomas Nagel: 'Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception - were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world.' The next step is to then account for the nature of mind in those terms - as the product of these objective forces and principles, none of which display intentionality. (I've been reading Terrence Deacon's attempt to bridge this gap but I'm not there yet.)

my guess is we will uncover uses of the notion of intentionality that lie on the ‘other’ side of positivism than the one you would like to champion. — Joshs

:chin: I thought I've always been critical of positivism.

From the perspective of a secure attachment to a religious view, nihilism will seem deplorable, but not experienced as any kind of direct or indirect threat to oneself. — baker

Sure. But you can still be critical of it from a philosophical perspective.

I thought of saying something about the "terminal malfunction of another moist robot," but I was concerned it would be mean spirited as well. But this is how Dan himself talked about his own mortality, and he seemed to think there was a benefit in accepting this view. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I regretted my remark, but the basic point stands. 'Rest in peace' is a superstitious hangover, from the materialist point of view. It harks back to belief in troubled spirits and the like which Dennett would want no part of.

Yes, 'inserting media' was covered in the OP, but I found trying to insert a 'Youtube Short' wasn't working, hence the comment I appended.

Which actually segues back to the theme of nihilism. As far as we're concerned today, life begins at birth and ends at death. And considering the vastness of space and time, it is a mere blip. But that's all there is, and all there can be, as there is nothing on the other side of death, save decomposition, as everything material will always decompose.

It was tongue in cheek, but agree it was in poor taste.

Actually, I will respond in a bit more detail. It was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the recent thread RIP Daniel Dennett. I felt the use of the expression 'RIP', meaning 'rest in peace' was incongruous in the context, as Dennett was well-known as one of the 'four horseman' of the so-called 'new atheism' which maligned and rejected religion, and as RIP is a religious expression, it is unintentionally ironic or ill-fitting. That's all it was a reference to, a point I clumsily tried to make by employing a more scientific expression, namely, decomposition.

Of course! Don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

Yes you’re right. It was inspired by the expression RIP, a religious sentiment that was incongruous in the context, but it was mean-spirited. But the point I wanted to draw attention to was the entry on teleonomy.

They might not be putting people on trial, but people were certainly threatened with having their careers ruined for dabbling in quantum foundations through the 1990s, largely because such work challenged the dominant "anti-metaphysical" paradigm, which was considered to be "anti-scientific." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Totally. There's an interesting article from a few years back, Quantum Mysticism - Gone but not Forgotten (and published in phys.org, not some new-age website) which points out that the pioneers of quantum mechanics - Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr and Pauli, among others - were deeply cultured and philosophical thinkers (product of a classical European education, one might presume). But after the War, the research dollars and focus switched to the US, driven mainly by investments from the military-industrial complex, which is why the pragmatic approach of 'shut up and calculate' won out over 'I wonder what that means'. (Although that did indeed leave a very fertile field open for any number of new-age websites.)

Also an interesting article on a biologist who claimed that oysters somehow synched to the phases of the moon even when transported to a laboratory in the midwest and completely isolated from the outside world. He was ostracised, presumably for daring to proclaim the biological equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance'. There are many such mysteries in biology. (I love the story of the eels in a central Sydney park who, when the conditions are right, leave their ponds and make their way to the ocean, to breed in a marine trench near New Caledonia, 2000km distant, where the elvers mature for a few years before making their way back :yikes: .)

Positivist definitions of objectivity and in-itselfness are held out as the gold standard of existence, of thing's being not "mere illusion." But then evidence that this definition of objectivity is broken is rolled out as somehow being definitive on questions of meaning, rather than simply showing that the definition is flawed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, 100%. As I established in the 'mind-created world' OP, no empirical object can be regarded as having unconditional existence. But then Kant said that in 1781 and most of the world still hasn't gotten it.

@flannel jesus - As regards the question of teleology, also see the wikipedia article on teleonomy, a neologism invented to deal with the fact that all biology is indeed goal-directed. It is said to describe the apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of living organisms, in much the same way as Richard Dawkins talks of the appearance of design, which however is attributable to the 'blind watchmaker' which 'acts' with no purpose or intention whatever. All part of the materialist dogma, I'm afraid (one of whose leading exponents has recently begun to decompose.)

As I understand it, the issue with teleology, goal-directedness and purpose is that it was associated with Aristotelian physics, which was in turn associated with the Ptomlaic cosmology and which was completely demolished by Galileo and the scientific revolution. And I'm sure Aristotelian ideas of the 'natural place' of stones, and that motion will continue indefinitely unless something stops it, are thoroughly outmoded. However the question of intentionality in a general sense is not so easily disposed of, which is why it was used as a wedge by Franz Brentano, and which ultimately gave rise to phenomenology. And the issue of intentionality or at least goal-directedness is also responsible for something like a rehabilitation of Aristotle's 'final causation' which is starting to enjoy a comeback in philosophy of biology. (And really, all 'final causation' is, is 'why something happens', so it's forward-looking, rather than the backward-looking 'physical causation'.)

the point about strictly scientific hypotheses is that they can be falsified (per Karl Popper). But a statement such as 'everything is determined' is difficult to falsify. Although, that said, this is at the heart of the debates over the interpretation of quantum physics. The effect known as entanglement, verified by experimental results, seems to indicate an a-causal relationship between two objects or states. But the 'hidden variables' interpretation, championed by David Bohm, sought to preserve causal determination (i.e one action here influences an outcome there), through the supposition of 'hidden variables' that haven't yet been discerned by science. (I understand Bohm's is a minority view. PBS Spacetime has an excellent presentation on this topic.)

More broadly speaking, Einstein always stood for a realist attitude: that everything is determined by or subject to general laws. That's why he couldn't abide the implications of quantum physics - entanglement ('spooky action at a distance') and uncertainty being prime examples.

I've read two good popular books on this subject - Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar, and also Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science David Lindley - and note the similarities between the book titles, published five years apart.

What Heisenberg had done....was to come up with an idea too sexy to stay confined to the physics world. As Mr. Lindley points out, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is now freely bandied about in nonscientific contexts, from literary theory to television dialogue. He cites an instance when Heisenberg was glibly name-dropped on “The West Wing,” in an anecdote about a film crew’s changing an event simply by observing it.

If Heisenberg’s idea “has become a touchstone, a badge of authority, for a certain class of ideas and speculations,” Mr. Lindley says, perhaps that is because it can be used to make scientific truth sound less than all-powerful. Treated that way, “the uncertainty principle makes scientific knowledge itself less daunting to the nonscientists and more like the slippery, elusive kind of knowing we daily grapple with.”

But the real uncertainty principle is more precise than that. It states that while some phenomena produce a definable range of possible outcomes, it is impossible to infer from the outcome which single unique event actually produced it. This has evolved, Mr. Lindley says, into “a practical, workaday definition of the uncertainty principle that most physicists continue to find convenient and at least moderately comprehensible — as long as they choose not to think too hard about the still unresolved philosophical or metaphysical difficulties it throws up.” — NY Times Review of Lindley

My heuristic is that 'the modern period' is book-ended roughly by the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica at the beginning, and the publication of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity at the other. That, and the discovery of the indeterminate nature of sub-atomic particles, marks the advent of the post-modern period, with the abandonment of the idea of absolute objectivity that characterised the previous period. And notice, those two book titles, the reference to 'debates' and 'struggles' over the nature of reality. Even though Heisenberg's uncertainty is really quite specific in its application, it
is as metaphor that it really captures the zeitgeist, in my view.*

As already argued in this thread, above, the so-called "stochastic nature" of radioactive decay, is best understood as a feature of the means employed to understand it, rather than as a feature of the named activity itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Says you. That is precisely the point at issue! Why do you think Neils Bohr, after presenting a lecture to a sanguine group of positivists, on the radical implications of quantum physics, and receiving only polite applause, said 'if you're not shocked by quantum physics then you can't possibly have understood it!' What do you think he means? I'm sure he doesn't mean that the indeterminate nature of quantum phenomena is simply due to gaps in our knowledge. There is a genuine indeterminacy, ontological as much as epistemological, which is something that a positivist audience, of course, was duty bound to ignore.

-------

* 'Freud remarked that ‘the self-love of mankind has been three times wounded by science’, referring to the Copernican revolution, Darwin’s discovery of evolution, and Nietszche’s declaration of the Death of God. Maybe the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics gave back to humanity what the European Enlightenment had taken away, by placing consciousness in a pivotal role in the observation of the fundamental constituents of reality. While this is fiercely contested by what Heisenberg termed ‘dogmatic realism’ it has nevertheless become an influential theme in modern cultural discourse.'

Yet, the general scientific attitude toward Nature is that nothing is left to Chance. — Gnomon

That's metaphysics not science.

Agree. I think the normalisation of LGBTQ rights and 'inclusiveness mandates' are big factors, but opposing them is to be automatically characterised as racist and bigoted. Hence the drawing power of a larger-than-life figure who makes unabashedly racist and bigoted statements. He provides the 'permission space' by saying what you're really thinking and taking it to the perceived authorities of political correctness, particularly the so-called 'liberal media'. (And I even sympathise to some extent, the mandatory political correctness of the mainstream media here in Australia, especially in regard to gender politics, is grating in the extreme.)

On the other hand, I think the upshot of a second Trump presidency - which I don't believe will happen - will be disastrous in ways that his followers don't anticipate. He could quite literally cause a massive global financial or military crisis, leading to enormous social disruption and poverty, out of pique and aggrievement. They don't seem to see that, or care about it. As I said above, he has no policies as such, nor any idea of what the Presidency or government is about, save as a vehicle for his own ego and interests.

Mathematics was not necessarily about its utility, but about its basis for some form of higher knowledge (gnosis), that was unchanging. This also seemed to be influential in notions of the "Logos" later on with various forms of Stoicism. — schopenhauer1

:100: I think you're making a vital and overlooked point. A snippet I sometimes refer to is this:

Neoplatonic mathematics is governed by a fundamental distinction which is indeed inherent in Greek science in general, but is here most strongly formulated. According to this distinction, one branch of mathematics participates in the contemplation of that which is in no way subject to change, or to becoming and passing away. This branch contemplates that which is always such as it is and which alone is capable of being known: for that which is known in the act of knowing, being a communicable and teachable possession, must be something that is once and for all fixed. — Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra

As is well known, Plato appropriated elements of Pythagorean philosophy, and placed dianoia, knowledge of geometry and arithmetic, higher up the 'divided line' of epistemology, than sensory knowledge (pistis). This became one of the primary sources of Galileo's mathematical philosophy of nature (via Marcello Ficino's Renaissance translations of Plato) which has had seminal influence on modern science.

The Platonist view of the reality of number is part of the general platonist veneration of the ideas or intelligible principles, which was foundational to Western culture. However, and as you say:

the original aesthetics underpinning a theory, that is more abstract, and even in some sense "spiritual" (or at least "metaphysical"), eventually becomes discarded, and what is retained really, are the "useful" things that come about from it. — schopenhauer1

I think that is exactly correct. We retained the parts that were useful (indeed, indispensable) for maths and science, but discarded the aesthetics and metaphysics, mainly because they sound too close to religion for our secular age. This too has enormous ramifications for culture.

It seems the best of philosophers have something in common, which is that they saw philosophy as bringing us to that more aesthetic/holistic understanding of reality. — schopenhauer1

:100: again. Aristotle says in the Metaphysics that it is an art pursued 'for it's own sake' and not for utility or pleasure:

At first he who invented any art whatever that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure. — 981b

//

This is also one of the themes explored in Horkheimer's book The Eclipse of Reason. He shows how the ancient Greeks valued reason for its own sake, but also because it was naturally assumed that reason characterised or permeated the Cosmos:

the Cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries. — David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist

However the modern period dramatically disrupts and breaks with this organic and participatory form of consciousness and instead situates the individual as subject in a realm of objects, caught in the cartesian division of mind and matter, self and other which characterise the hyper-pluralism of post-modern culture.

Surely this has no bearing upon what I love and enjoy or whether it’s worth getting up in the morning? — Tom Storm

I take nihilism to imply apathy and ennui. You may not have an articulated 'philosophy of meaning' but the fact you find your life meaningful would indicate to me that you’re not nihilist in the sense I understand it. But they're obviously difficult subjects to gauge.

But it is intrinsically qualitative. If it were really nothing then it would not be experienced as joy. So, no, I don't think you qualify ;-)

Most of my days are filled with joy despite my position that life is inherently without meaning — Tom Storm

So joy is not meaningful? :chin:

It is not useful to assume spontaneity, just like it is not useful to assume randomness. — Metaphysician Undercover

'I cannot believe that God plays dice', said Einstein, in response to the discovery of the so-called 'quantum leap'. (Bohr used to say 'stop trying to tell God how to manage the Universe'.) But it is a known fact, as is the stochastic nature of radioactive decay. That doesn't mean that maggots spring fully formed from damp cloth, of course, but that there is an inherent element of unpredictability at the most basic strata of nature.

By the way, I've worked out how to embed Youtube shorts. If you follow the usual procedure and embed the raw url enclosed in the media tag:

https://youtube.com/shorts/ywVHFo1na38?si=irPv4yTKSmrOX2Ww

It doesn't display onscreen as video. The solution is to replace 'shorts' with 'embed', and it works. :up:

Surely a lot of these problems go away if you concede that nature contains an element of spontaneity, as well as patterns which we characterise as "laws".

The philosophical point about sub-atomic physics is mainly that it torpedoed the notion of an ultimately-existing material point-particle - 'the atom' of classical thought. C S Pierce, with his 'tychism', would have been perfectly comfortable with the uncertainty principle. But for those seeking the atom as a kind of bedrock foundation of reality - no joy. And it is amazingly difficult for a lot of people to cope with that.

By the way, I love Zizek's take on this. He says that when God was programming the universe, like when programmers create background scenery on a video game, he thought 'why should I bother programming the atom? People are too stupid to see down to that level'. He left it undetermined. But then we out-smarted God - we caught 'God with his pants down', so to speak.

I am unencumbered by dogma — Tom Storm

isn't the reflexive association of 'dogma' with 'transcendence' itself a kind of dogma, or at least a stereotype?

I think nihilism is endemic in today's culture. It doesn't necessarily manifest in dramatic ways, it might just be a shrug, a whatever, a 'makes no difference'. It might manifest as anomie or ennui or in other ways, but it's an afflictive state, as it saps the sense of relatedness to the Cosmos and any real sense that actions are meaningful.

I'm too optimistic to see anything other than the utter collapse of Maga through self-destruction. They're too stupid to function as a revolutionary movement. They're too stupid to uphold any momentum of such actions. — Christoffer

My thoughts also. I'm sure the polling data is misleading and that they will be punished at the ballot box.

It's never been a mystery to me — 180 Proof

Yes, well I guess the other predominant emotion I'm feeling is dissappointment. I thought the US was better than that, although a lot of people here tell me that it's naive.

At the end of the day, while the wheels of justice are turning very slowly, they are turning, and they have a kind of inexorability about them. (In today's hearings, Trump has been threatened with incarceration if he keeps up his insults.)

(Today's) testimony offered another remarkable moment in a trial whose early days have been full of them: a former president and current Republican nominee watching helplessly as two strangers exposed details of a sex scandal that he had fought to keep secret.

It also underscored the wide array of evidence at the prosecution’s disposal as it assembled its case against the former president. On Tuesday alone, prosecutors elicited live testimony from Mr. Davidson and three other witnesses, a string of provocative text messages, videos of Trump campaign events and excerpts from a deposition the former president gave in a separate case — all woven into a story that they say paints Mr. Trump as a criminal. — NYTimes

Have a read of this OP https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7110/how-to-write-an-op

We hear daily that Trump is either leading or tying with Biden in polls. What I can't figure out is, what Trump voters think they're voting for. Trump, in the delusional monologues that pass for his campaign speeches, outlines no policies, presents no ideas, but raves and rambles about his enemies and what he'll do to them. (You'll remember that at the 2020 Republican Party convention, the Party abandoned the idea of presenting a policy platform, in favour of a simple declaration supporting Trump.)

There's a lengthy OP in the Washington Post (gift link) which discusses the idea that the reason for Trump's popularity is that he is harnessing hostility towards liberal principles amongst voters who want to destroy the current system. (This is also Steve Bannon's main focus.)

A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results? What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath,” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6. Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying. .....

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown.

So they don't want a better government, better economic policies, or better anything. What they want, is to bring down the whole system, because they don't accept the principles on which it was founded.

For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.

The fury on the anti-liberal right against what is today called “wokeness” is nothing new. Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism. They have always claimed that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. In the 1970s, influential theologian R.J. Rushdoony complained that the Christian in America had “no right to his identity” but was forced to recognize “all others and their ‘rights.’” And he was correct if a Christian’s “rights” included the right not only to lead a Christian life oneself but to impose that life on the entire society, or if a White person’s “freedom” included the freedom to preserve white primacy in society. In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.

Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”

The most rabid of the so-called Christian Nationalists want to impose a more or less 'Christian Sharia Law' to replace the constitution:

The influential advocate of “conservative nationalism,” Yoram Hazony, wants Americans to abandon the Declaration (of Independence) in favor of a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible. America is a “revolutionary nation,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insists, not because of the principles of the Declaration and not even because of the American Revolution itself, but “because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision.

Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”

When you consider that GOP representatives in multiple states are charged with election interference, and that a sizeable portion of the electorate doesn't believe that the last Presidential election was legitimate - well, there's some very dangerous forces at work here. One can only hope that Trump's track record of 'malevolence hobbled by incompetence', along with the basic common sense of a slightly larger proportion of the electorate, will prevail over this madness.

But it's not guaranteed.

It's a manifesto more than an OP.

Somehow you've managed to attribute nearly all the quotes in your reply to a poster who's not even participating in this thread.

However, I prefer to define the science of morality as:

“The study of why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist". — Mark S

Wouldn't evolutionary psychology, sociology and anthropology be the relevant disciplines for such an enquiry? They're scientific, as far as the social sciences can be scientific, and I'm sure there are many relevant studies. You list some of them under Notes. What would be missing from those sources?

other suggestions for defining the science of morality studies are welcome. — Mark S

I would start by not categorising it as science in the first place. Science at least in the modern context relies on what is objectively, or better still, inter-subjectively observable and measurable. The thrust of the 'is/ought' problem is that what ought to be the case, or what one ought to do, cannot be subjected to quantitative measurement. Hopefully, all can agree on what is measurably the case, but what ought to be the case, is a different matter altogether. So how could it be a scientific matter, insofar as science relies on objective judgement?

Most normative moral systems in civilized cultures originated with the truths of revealed religion (Semitic, Indic, Chinese) or some other form of sapiential insight (e.g. those of the pre-socratic philosophers), which characterised the 'axial age' of philosophy. In the absence of such sources, which are generally deprecated in secular philosophy, how do you arrive at a moral good, beyond a utilitarian definition of 'the greatest good for the greatest number'? (and leaving aside questions of what 'the greatest good' might constitute, beyond an equitable distribution of resources.)

This is why I think the articulation of moral norms is such an intractable philosophical question - because when you introduce religious considerations then you face the intractable conflicts between competing truth-claims, conflicts which generally have no objectively measurable means of adjuticating. But then you've also set aside many of the sources of morality, reflected in the setting aside of the questions you say are fundamental to any proposed 'science' (e.g. 'what is good'? etc).

Seems to me very hard to escape 'Hume's fork'. So is the point of the title of the OP that there can't be a definition of the subject matter of a purported 'science of morality'?

I love the political correctness of 'strawperson'. :rofl:

you cared more about Buddhism and its ideas than you did about smoking. — Janus

No, not at all. It was the recognition of the momentary nature of craving, that it was something that would pass in a few minutes, rather than fixating on the idea that if I could only stop for six weeks, then the craving would pass. It wasn't until later I realised the connection with the Buddhist 'anicca', impermanence, but I thought it a practical application of that principle.

I admit it's a trope of philosophical and scientific thought to think so highly of only the most abstract things we can entertain ourselves with. — substantivalism

It's not that quantification is either simply abstract or entertaining, but that it's exact. Insofar as you can quantify, you can predict and control. One of the prime factors in the success of science is the increasing scope and accuracy of measurement. In Plato there is recognition of the exact nature of arithmetical proofs, which are contrasted with value judgements about the sensory domain, hence dianoia, arithmetical reasoning, being judged higher that sense experience; when you know an arithmetic proof, you know it with perfect clarity and without reference to anything else. The Galileo quote you refer to was 'nature is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to humanly understand a word; without these, one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.' Hence the fundamental significance of quantitative data in science, and the division I mentioned in the earlier post between primary (measurable) and secondary (subjective) attributes.

I sympathize, but your prose:

Given this, it is wiser to assert that the universe came into existence by some manifestation in, per se, a multiverse, than it is to park randomly on the conjecture it just popped up for no reason. — Barkon

needs work. I see what you’re trying to say but it’s a word salad in its current form.

I would put it like this: we generally believe that ‘things happen for a reason’ but scientists seem to believe that the Universe simply sprung into existence with no cause.

Here you’re asking deep questions, which is perfectly fine. Philosophy does ask deep questions but be prepared for deep thinking and a lot of reading. Be thankful that the medium exists in which these questions can be explored.

Hence this aphorism: to learn what it is that endures, first understand what is transient.

you could say this obscurity also pervades modern physics in general and the public is thrashed around as a rag doll in a storm of such poetic expressions which are neither clarified explicitly nor literalized properly to remove any confusion. Perhaps its not just obscure philosophy that needs to do some better PR but also modern physics as well. — substantivalism

That’s terrific writing. I’m really sensing the tension you are pointing out.

The only thing that survives being the math and its practical applications. — substantivalism

I would recommend looking into the origins of mathematical philosophy in Pythagoras. The Greeks had the insight that only number could be completely knowable; the expression A=A (the law of identity) offered an intrinsic certitude that things in the material/sensory world could only aspire to. If you can get hold of a copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, have a look at the chapter on Pythagoras. You might also enjoy an essay - originally a lecture - by Werner Heisenberg, The Debate between Plato and Democritus.

The point is that you cannot simply decide by fiat what will be more important to you. — Janus

Oh yes you can. I was a totally addicted smoker aged about 17 until about 40. Until aged about 60 I was an occasional smoker (= asked other people). When I was addicted I often did things I am ashamed of to get my fix (like, stealing cigarettes.) I was on nicotine gum for a long time (my then-small children called it ‘smoking gum’’.) In the end, the principle that got me off it was Buddhist - I realised that cravings are transient. I worked out that if I could hold off for just as long as it took to smoke a cigarette - about 2-3 minutes - then the craving would pass. That did the trick - before then I was always fantasising about ‘being without for 6 months’. It was the minutes that actually counted.

The last cigarette I smoked was at my 60th birthday, 10 and a half years back.

'Intelligence is the ability to make distinctions'.

Evan Thompson’s work in embodied cognition has interested me in recent times. — Tom Storm

Speaking of whom:

suppose we found that specific patterns of brain activity in Yo-Yo Ma’s brain reliably correlate with his playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. This finding wouldn’t be surprising, given his years of training and expertise. Although that information would presumably be useful for understanding the effects of musical training and expert performance on the brain, it would tell us very little about music, let alone Bach. On the contrary, you need to understand music, the cello, and Bach to understand the significance of the neural patterns.

Excerpt From
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
Evan Thompson

Fair enough, agree with that. Much more like the Scandinavian model of democratic socialism. Although they have the advantage of a highly intelligent citizenry ;-)

Would you be willing to accept a set of principles that increases the prospects of others, even if it means having fewer opportunities yourself? — Rob J Kennedy

You mean, by paying income tax?

It's a very politically-incorrect fact that not all people are equal. All people should be treated equally by the law, and generally should have equal opportunity to participate in the economy. But not every one is equal in respect of their abilities, proclivities, talents, desires and intentions. To try and impose equality ends up being a recipe for totalitarianism, as Orwell prophesied so eloquently.

Dennett's not an eliminativist though. He's a critic of it. — fdrake

But he is included in that same article as a representative of eliminative materialism:

Although most discussions regarding eliminativism focus on the status of our notion of belief and other propositional attitudes, some philosophers have endorsed eliminativist claims about the phenomenal or qualitative states of the mind (see the entry on qualia). For example, Daniel Dennett (1978) has argued that our concept of pain is fundamentally flawed because it includes essential properties, like infallibility and intrinsic awfulness, that cannot co-exist in light of a well-documented phenomenon know as “reactive disassociation”. In certain conditions, drugs like morphine cause subjects to report that they are experiencing excruciating pain, but that it is not unpleasant. It seems we are either wrong to think that people cannot be mistaken about being in pain (wrong about infallibility), or pain needn’t be inherently awful (wrong about intrinsic awfulness). Dennett suggests that part of the reason we may have difficulty replicating pain in computational systems is because our concept is so defective that it picks out nothing real.

(Personally, I think disputing the apodictic reality of pain, because of not being able to form a concept of it, is all the illustration needed of the shortcoming of this attitude.)

Again, Thomas Nagel summarizes the problem he sees with Dennett's views:

According to Dennett...the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them):

"Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second- person point of view of others’ minds: we don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all. "

The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a “version” of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is “an interpreted, digested version,” is that a physical process I can’t describe is going on in my visual cortex.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.” — Thomas Nagel, Analytical Philosophy and Human Life, Chapter 23 - Dennett's Illusions

It is this conviction on Dennett's part that I think allows his views to be fairly characterised as 'scientism', that is, 'the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality', and then to exclude, or eliminate, as a matter of principle, the first-person perspective, because it is not something that science as currently practiced accomodates.

Nagel adds:

There is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of of science. The spectacular progress of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century was made possible by the exclusion of the mental from their purview.. To say that there is more to reality than than physics can can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it it is an acknowledgment that that we we are nowhere near a "theory of everything", and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain. It should not disturb us that this may have radical consequences, especially for Dennett’s favorite natural science, biology: the theory of evolution, which in its its current form is a purely physical theory, may have to incorporate non-physical physical factors to to account for consciousness, if if consciousness is not, as he thinks, an illusion. Materialism remains a widespread view, but science does not progress by tailoring the data to fit a prevailing theory

.

I still say that philosophy itself is one of the casualties of eliminative materialism.

From the SEP entry on Michel Henry, phenomenologist:

If, for Henry, culture has always to be understood as “a culture of life”, i.e., as the cultivation of subjective powers, then it includes art without being limited to it. Cultural praxis comports what Henry designates as its “elaborate forms” (e.g., art, religion, discursive knowledge) as well as everyday forms related to the satisfaction of basic needs. Both types of forms, however, fall under the ethical category of subjective self-growth and illustrate the bond between the living and absolute life. The inversion of culture in “barbarism” means that within a particular socio-historical context the need for subjective self-growth is no longer adequately met, and the tendency toward an occultation (i.e. obscuration) of the bond between the living and absolute life is reinforced. According to Henry, who echoes Husserl’s analysis in Crisis, such an inversion takes place in contemporary culture, the dominating feature of which is the triumph of Galilean science and its technological developments.

Insofar as it relies on objectification, the “Galilean principle” is directly opposed to Henry’s philosophy of immanent affectivity. For Henry, science, including modern Galilean science, nonetheless remains a highly elaborated form of culture. Although “the joy of knowing is not always as innocent as it seems”, the line separating culture from “barbarism” is crossed when science is transformed into scientist ideology, i.e., when the Galilean principle is made into an ontological claim according to which ultimate reality is given only through the objectively measurable and quantifiable.

Dennett crossed that line.