At its worst philosophy is a self-contained solipsist game. You define your terms, your rules - and your logic doesn't need to be flawed at all, and still nothing you argue has much value or any value. You just win your solitaire.

Evict? — Agent Smith

Banish?

Yes, there seems to be. We can't tell with absolute certainty, and never will. Next question?

When I argue with scientists I just get so angry about their know-nothingness about philosophy, like can it mend a fuse - who cares that's what engineers and scientists are for. And I reply that the questions, the requirements are really essential, really central. And then there are these endless 17th century questions which really essentially are rather meaningless. Should we maybe just vacate the 17th century from modern philosophy? God and Aristotle and Descartes and Spinoza and Leibnitz, subjects and objects shuffling this and that way in a static universe and, last but certainly not least, the most absurd and complicated metaphysical constructions - should we just let them all go?

What I presented was an argument. — Bartricks

You know, it's actually a pretty well known position, has been for quite a while actually... And it will remain essentially meaningless, empty of any power of logic or empirism. It's profoundly uninteresting and doesn't add anything of real value to any debate about morality and ethics. You can shout (and you really do shout, one has to add) and plenty of religious people do shout, but all the noise and emotion in the world will simply not change any of this.

This was the argument I just made:

1. Morality is made of God's attitudes
2. Genocides have never been right
3. Therefore genocides have never been approved of by God — Bartricks

1. Morality may be made of God's never communicated attitudes
2. We liberal humanists see that genocides are wrong
3. Maybe God agrees, who knows - he remains stubbornly mute, stubbornly non-existent, not here, nor there

I don't really see that you have an argument there, just a non-proven premise.

Yeah, circular. And anyway, God could start approving genocides any moment - he can do what he pleases, change systems of morality like underwear etc. Or are you saying he is constrained by nature, by some natural morality? What does God add to any moral argument, apart from often a lack of argument, of rational explanation?

"Yeah, but some people think God wants genocides. So there!" — Bartricks

Yeah, but that's what happens when you use God as your ventriloquist puppet - it adds nothing to the argument but makes any system of morality unstable. And I was speaking about the God of Christianity as the guy is the best known fiction of the kind for me. God based moralities are especially shifty and relative. They are flighty buggers.

I should actually re-read it - I was 19 for the first time and likely did not understand much. Now, 35 years later it surely would be rather sense-making... The title though, pure sex :smile:

Why don't you answer my question? Do you think genocides have always been wrong or that they were right sometimes even though they are wrong now? — Bartricks

Why woud that matter - isn't this thread about God's morality? Obviously I think that genocides are never justifiable, even if the Canaanites or Ukrainians or Jews are really sketchy (and they are not anyway). But for God, sometimes, genocides are fine. And maybe sometimes then not? Who could tell. It will be up to him - or rather up to those people who make up these wild, inconsistent stories about him.

What were you trying to say? What is your off the peg criticism of divine command theory?
Do you think genocides used to be right, or were they always wrong? Clarify that first — Bartricks

No, I was just pointing out that genocides are fine for God in some circumstances, as are rapes and ethnic cleansings. So, that kind of God based morality is rather contingent, depending on God's current will - now for example, many people argue, abortions are wrong, but at the time it was completely fine to slaughter pregnant Canaanites and Jerichoans, sort of instant abortions of not only tribes and nations but of unborn babies. So, this sort of God based morality seems to be pretty pragmatic and relative as regards concrete actions by humans in this world. Surely you don't disagree?

They have good ideas in the east.

Now, once more, what were you trying to say? — Bartricks

Hmm, I think your quote misfunctioned?

So what are you saying? — Bartricks

I'm saying you are very circular :)

Well, God once commanded ethnic cleansing, rape and genocide. He would have a total authority to command a machete attack to a daycare and it would be a just and moral act. Or would he have that authority and would it be a just and moral act? Maybe humans could have better morals than God - who is to say? Maybe God is bound by some natural morality that makes it impossible for him to command a machete attack to a daycare? (I mean God very likely doesn't exist but for the sake of the argument.)

Idealism is "true" (or internally coherent some such thing) and most often rather irrelevant to our human experience of being in the world. Materialism is often quite crude and illogical and most often utterly relevant and practical to our experience of being in the world. Anyway, pox on this dichotomy. They both are pretty true and coherent approaches, simultaneously and easily. There is no true contradiction between idealism and materialism. There cannot be.

Whether you "could debauch and murder through life and get to an eternal paradise via deathbed conversion" is not something one can attribute to Jesus. This is more the approach of a corrupt bureaucracy (aka holy mother church). — Bitter Crank

Well, be that as it may - Jesus apparently left pitifully few instructions after himself, so they had to do the best they could. Jesus might have originated the church, but it was de facto created by others quite long afterwards and when we think of Christianity we really do think of the church(es), not Jesus directly. Paul was the main begetter but even his thinking was profoundly reshaped by later church organs.

Of course they edited those texts - it clearly seems that Jesus' contemporary followers expected him to return to the world in their lifetimes. They had to think of something when the Second Coming stubbornly kept not happening. Of course, this is based on the wide academic consensus that an actual Jesus figure did exist though very little is known about him except via the church tradition of posthumous texts, some canonical, some not.

Well, compare Christian and Greco-Roman pagan afterlifes - heaven is a huge selling point, like marketing gold. And you didn't really need to do anything very difficult to get there. Whereas even if you led a very exemplary, virtuous life without any lapses you really didn't get much of a pay-off in the dismal and dispiriting pagan life after death. A Christian could debauch and murder through his life and get to an eternal paradise via deathbed conversion. Which policy would you buy in those dismal pre-modern conditions?

Anyway, if one thinks about this obsolete dichotomy, then idealism appears the rational and logical alternative - and materialism the more emotional and intuitive counter reaction to all that logic. And I guess that most us tend to feel intuitively that materialism is true: that we exist as subjects in this independently existing material world, so cold to our passions, so indifferent to our will. But obviously it's infinitely more complicated than that. Pox on both their houses and that irrelevant debate.

It's a beautiful poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach

I think the difficulty in grasping it is that idealism requires a kind of perceptual shift - something which Schopenhauer has also stated in the Preface to his book. — Wayfarer

I'm not the least bit interested in the idealism vs materialism wars. Basically in very few of the famous conflicts that arose from the 17th century philosophy when Christianity collided with history. But often you get a sense of malleability from idealism - that if there is no "independent outside reality", then the world really should be your oyster and be humbler and more obedient in front of the all defining mind (or will). And also of course that natural science should maybe work less nicely and impressively in this ocean of subjectivity.

That last bit somehow reminds me of Dover Beach :)

Well, you can define "machine" in the way that it automatically excludes anything organic - sounds rather categorical and artificial though. Anyway, a human brain can, I believe, be seen rather analogical to a machine and as for feelings residing in enzymes, or what was it, we are not even very sure of that, or at least of the actual process - and maybe one day feelings can reside in various other places too. I just don't see any reason for absolute segregation, permanently, between biological and digital entities. At the moment there is a chasm but it is rather reasonable to assume that it will one day be bridged.

True. But neither one is a robot. — Cuthbert

I think it would be pretty easy to see us as robots - bit more complicated that insects, having rather messy and contradictory code and even doing a bit of self-programming.

Eventually I think true AI is bound to happen, barring the collapse of our techological civilization. I doubt if I will be around to see it but I absolutely hope I would. Would be interesting to finally have intelligent company.

Or rather, savage irony.

For me it would be quite enough if we couldn't tell the difference. And it's not like we would be very clear even about the existence of our own minds. But sadly this doesn't sound like the ticket. I have a friend who has written a couple of papers about malevolent AI, but I think that rat is already out of the box, so why not bet in beneficial AI, of course having made as sensible precautions as possible. But likely it will one day be more or less accidentally and disastrously created in a weapons lab or by some (definitely soulless) tech giant and we will be in for some ride (Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went etc).

That is what transcendence has always sought, through philosophical discipline and askesis. Not that I expect that will be understood. — Wayfarer

I think our only hope is to stop being ourselves and start being intelligent, thoughtful and kind. We need a fundamental transformation and while blind technological change is probably not a realistic hope at all, it's among the most realistic. Once out of nature we should not take etc.

Cats are obviously the highest life form here. Of course the competition is not very stiff but still.

Anyway, apropos, sometimes it appears to me that many people interested in philosophy have rather a sketchy, quite basic idea of natural science. I would say that the best thing humankind has to show for us is our literature and art but that theoretical physics (et al) gives it a real run for the money. I guess Friedrich maybe could be given some grudging honorable mention - or Hume or Kant).

It would be great if we would one day have actual intelligent machine minds - this planet could do with intelligence. And the moment our species could leave our biological bondage, we should do it instantly. Things could hardly go worse than they already have. Blind technological progress is probably not a very realistic hope, but it's one of the very few we even have.

From cats. The laws of physics come from cats.

In the name of logic, reason and truth you yourself may be inclined to demonize certain right wing political views ( Trumpism, Qanon) that you believe are
either irrational, illogical or false. But do you really understand why they hold those views, where they came from, and how similar that process was to the formation of your own ‘rational’ views? — Joshs

I will answer more thoughtfully later. But, no, I'm not really interested how my rational views might be similar to fascism - I'm sure they at least partially are as they are specifically anti-fascist, so to some degree probably mirroring various stuff. I just don't see any ideal situation in history, in our human society with our animal impulses where we would sit around in ironic, sceptical friendship, lions and sheep alike, deconstructing hegemonic power structures, hand in hand. I don't know if you will accept this observation but our human history seems to stubbornly avoid such ideal situations being slaughter and exploitation instead.

It is more like a value system
that is produced by being disseminated among a culture, from one to the next to the next. They don’t demonize groups but aim to establish interchange. — Joshs

That sounds admirably highminded - but, talk about being a liberal :) - it seems that human societies can be pretty easily reduced to who, whom. In the absence of reason, logic and empirism that is - power structures tend to work as power structures without some civilizational, enlightened constraints. The worst will always be full of passionate intensity while the best might be continental postmodern philosophers idling about in Sorbonne.

But what happens when you replace supposedly nailed down content ( God, categories of the understanding, independently existing empirical objects, deterministically causal mechanism) with process? This is what postmodernists do. They see patterns of always intricately changing belonging where others see the arbitrariness of fixed mechanistic causation. The former finds an intrinsic relationality between events, the latter only find extrinsic pre-assigned causation. — Joshs

I don't know. I guess I will have to remain unconvinced - and I very early rebelled against the modern concept of identity, some weird, arbitrary cage for being. But almost invariably postmodernity seems to lead to reaction, to anti-progressivism, and being a liberal, as vaguely as I can muster :) that will not do. In the absence of "objective" (or rather objectivish) concepts, power will dictate truth values and truth (however imperfect it will always remain here) should be independent of power.

What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical
point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique. — Joshs

I really don't get this point - where does it arise from? Could you maybe clarify a bit? A more intimate relationship of understanding between people... I have always thought postmodernity an ironic, distancing, sceptical approach against the dead(ish), inert(ish) but often sincerely and strongly felt certainties and identities of modernity and pre-modernity.

I agree, but I see that as a quasi-Kantian point. And Braver's book on antirealism, which I mentioned above, basically moves from Kant toward that view expressed above. While I do agree with you, it's still a form of 'negative' metaphysics, using the very organ whose flaws are being pointed out to delineate that organ's limits. And yet I mostly agree. I'd just say the maybe we also have to be humble about our knowledge of the limits of our knowledge. (And this seems to bite back too.) — igjugarjuk

Sure, that is a good point. But I don't know if modern academic philosophy is a very good study in humility. At times I have difficulty in understanding for example that very sizeable army of academic commentators about Nietzche, so positive about him and so timid, and so arrogant. Thinking that he is best dissected. I read him and I want to burn, to be a beacon - and I don't even largely agree :)

I'm obsessed with all of them, veering especially between philosophy and prose. Not long ago I read Joyce's bio, studied Ulysses, and continued plugging away at FW, largely reading books about it, which means enjoying fragments in the context of interpretation. I've composed various fragments in that style myself. As I see it, some of the more exciting philosophers just brought in a killer new metaphor. So it's nonfictional in its seriousness but literary in its method. — igjugarjuk

Finnegans Wake, now that is a text... I guess it is the kind of the place where you would go after the utter miracle of Ulysses - and I would still say a cul-de-sac, but obviously bloody impressive for it.

What I like about art is that it is consciously, almost self-evidently local and personal and reaches from that towards the universal with usually never believing actually of achieving it. The great Western tradition of thought - which the modern academic philosophy is timidly commenting about and tinkering with - aims for the unreal, sub specie aeternitatis, influenced by the Christ and the savage brilliance of the Greeks. But we are actually fresh ex-apes, randomly born on a speck of dust, we can never approach any actual universality: we, as we now are, will never be and think for all eternity, for all places, all situations, timelessly. That is not us.

Of course, once out of nature is a different question...

Joyce was huge, so I mostly agree. But Nietzsche has golden moments that make him as big as anybody. — igjugarjuk

Yeah, he is very sizeable - I don't think I could be a liberal without having considered him seriously. He is a deadly earnest challenge. Impractical, largely insane, unfortunate for a large part, but essential. I could easily let the rest of the unalterable army go, Heidegger (mr Blut und Boden as a solution for Western liberalism being boring and facile), Derrida, Foucault et al. But not mad Friedrich, never.

Perhaps we never just 'are,' because 'we' are ethical entities ('fictions') with serious work to do. To be an 'I' is to be responsible for a past and and future, smeared out over the present between memory and fear, sins and promises. 'I am the first mammal to make plans.'

I was on a Joyce kick recently, and Ulysses is great. The stuff that goes through our minds, flowing flowing flowing. — igjugarjuk

That's a great way of putting it. I don't think we are very good at bearing the burden of "I-hood", "I-ness", but there still might at times be something there.

Joyce, yes. He was a phenomenon, easily the size of the poor, mad Friedrich, probably almost twice Nietzche and three times Heidegger. I have lately been thinking of the wonderful description of Bloom defecating in the morning - that so scandalized Virginia Woolf, of all people - one of those moments when Western intellectual history shifted, moved :smile:. It's still not very life like, is it? It's high art, utterly artificial.

Maybe just imagine philosophers as protagonists in Greek tragedies, desperate to fend off the gods with the final hieroglyphic. — igjugarjuk

Well, I'm just glad that literature and poetry are my obsessions and not philosophy :)

I have been fascinated about literary attempts at describing the reality (or as I put it, our experience of being in the world) - like the great modernists Joyce and Woolf, both tried (among many other things) to put our everyday experience, the texture of if, the internal and the external, into language. Quite magnificently but it is still clearly obvious fiction, obvious art. Reality is elusive, the moment is: we control the past and the future by internal stories and small fictions but never really are very consciously in the present, we rarely really just are. Maybe sometimes in serious pain or maybe at the moment of orgasm - but then those moments are pretty empty, not having much meaning in themselves.

Unless of course the responsible and autonomous self is just an effect of discursive practices within a community. — Joshs

Just? Anyway, this is a dichotomy that often comes up in discussion about the mind or the self. Either or, a very Western binary question. It could be seen or felt - "I" see and feel - that the mind as a concept (and/or as an empirical self-observation) is more like a spectrum. No continuous and stable Cartesian fully autonomous and moral subject but more than an illusion of whatever origin. Something messy in between, something that at times is in some shifting unclear shape there, but then often isn't. Many dualities of Western thought, zeroes and ones, trues and falses are fundamentally quite strange, misleading.