It seems you are saying that the reproduction part (given safe and effective contraceptive and/ or abortive methods) is optional, not necessarily the driver, and if so, I agree. I have never actively wanted or sought to have children, but both of my ex-wives became pregnant when on the pill. In both cases, at first, I thought they had forgotten to take it "accidentally on purpose" but it turned out that neither wanted to give birth and they chose to terminate, even though I was in favour of proceeding once it had become a "fait accompli". I felt the decision was up to them, since they would have had to carry and give birth to the child. Nowadays, looking back, I'm glad how it went down.

The analogy isn't that all these types are tried out in both, but that "personal preference" for why something tastes good / is desirable can't really be used to support some genetic theory or at least, is a wash, and doesn't tell us much either way. — schopenhauer1

It's not "some genetic theory" it's simply genetic diversity; even my dogs have different preferences for various foods.

In any case, I think the evidence points to the idea that human sexuality is inherently other-directed, as we are in general; we desire the company of others, and we enjoy being able to be physically intimate with those others who awaken that desire within us. We are not so different from other social animals.

We are looking at the artifice whereby one directs their sexual energy towards another person. — schopenhauer1

It's not "artifice" it's desire.

There are individual preferences, but that doesn't speak to it being "inbuilt" any more than someone's proclivity for vanilla versus chocolate is. — schopenhauer1

Bad analogy...we don't try a whole lot of types of sexual partners and then decide that we like some types and dislike others, as we do with food.

There are no "cultural markers" for my taste in women, no "type pattern" as to which women turn me on and which don't.

I suspect there has been some kind of meaning crisis throughout human history. But since the project of modernism has been to foster independent thinking and living as a reaction against the inflexible strictures of religious orthodoxy and the bigotries this has generally entailed, it's no wonder that people today are spoiled for choice and many feel adrift. Certainty has gone and society seems atomized - I find this exciting, but many fear it. — Tom Storm

:up: I'm like you in that I find the current situation not at all "a crisis of meaning" in the sense that we have lost anything worth having, but an exciting "melting pot" in which new possibilities might emerge. Uncertainty seems to me to be the most fruitful condition.

I think the most important challenge we collectively face is dealing with the practical economic and ecological consequences of the 'continuous growth' paradigm, and the enormous problem of plutocracy and corrupted politics.

However, it would not seem implausible, indeed, possibly very likely, that other-oriented sexuality is largely (maybe almost fully) from encouragement from learned experience. — schopenhauer1

Plausibility is the whole issue since we cannot know for certain, obviously. But everything we know about animal sexuality and the endocrinal and social nature of human sexuality makes it overwhelmingly plausible, in my view, that human sexuality has always been basically instinctive, with obvious socio-cultural overlays.

Of course, plausibility is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder, so I don't expect you to agree with me. I will say, though, that we all have tendencies to indulge in confirmation bias in areas that have emotional significance to us, so it pays to examine and critique yourself and try to see whether you have other motives for wanting to believe whatever it is you believe.

I cannot find any motive in myself that would cause me to want to believe in the instinctive nature of sexuality; it wouldn't matter to me if it turned out that human sexuality is entirely socially constructed, I just don't believe it is.

There is no inbuilt mechanism in humans whereby an erection means that that erection goes into a specific location. — schopenhauer1

This is a silly argument. People with erections want them to go to specific locations; the erection itself is not a disembodied object that could have some kind of imperative motive force like the needle of a compass. Sexuality is not just the erection or vagina or anus or whatever but involves the whole body, the whole person.

Physical attraction is inexplicable: why do I desire one person who may be far less attractive by conventional standards than another person I have no physical attraction to? There is evidence that it can have something to do with pheromones, with how people smell: how could that be socio-culturally conditioned?

Does something being a tautology make it false, if it’s really so? A tautology, just because it’s one, isn’t a falsity. — ItIsWhatItIs

Tautologies don't tell us anything about the nature of things.

How do you understand the term “absolute”? — ItIsWhatItIs

It means 'not relative', not relative to any other thing or context.

A universal negative judgment is absolute. — ItIsWhatItIs

Meaning what? All our judgements and knowledge, whetger true or false, are relative to us, so none are absolute.

So, the thinker is assumed but the idea of thinking isn’t? What makes it that the latter isn’t but the former is? — ItIsWhatItIs

Thinking is experienced, the thinker is not; the thinker is an idea, an artefact of thinking. There must be thinking if there is an idea of a thinker, but it doesn't follow that there is a thinker, since the thinker could be nothing but an idea.

Yes, we know that because it is impossible.

Are you asking, what is indubitable? Beyond doubt? — Banno

I think what is being asked is more than that. Some things are indubitable, but only within a context or contexts. The idea of absolute knowledge as I understand it refers to knowledge which is both true, indubitable and transcendent of all and any context; an obvious impossibility.

I have read the discussion thus far. It wasn't a rant, it was pointing out things which are obvious and not in the least controversial.

Your viewpoint is one-dimensional if you deny that there is a basic instinctive, biological other-oriented aspect of human sexuality. Do you deny that?

I don't deny there are cultural overlays; it's not a matter of "either/or".

Presumably you can be celibate right now, full stop and you would continue to live. Not so with food, or refraining from going to the bathroom. — schopenhauer1

If you seek to deny that sex in humans has a biological, instinctive basis shared with animals then you are promoting an absurdity. Sexual desire is unquestionably hormone driven as is evidenced by observing teenagers. It is also basically oriented towards others which is evidenced by the fact that even masturbation is usually accompanied by fantasy or porn. Your viewpoint is one-dimensional, sex is a mutli-layered phenomenon in humans.

As I said, best of luck!!! — charles ferraro

I don't think I'm the one who needs it...

Your first statement is a presumptuous non-sequitur. — charles ferraro

You don't seem to know what 'non sequitur' means. So, you don't accept the premise that we are basically animals evolved from other animals?

Besides the cogito, what absolute knowledge do we have? — Cidat

The cogito is a tautology; if it is true that I think, that there is an "I" that thinks, then of course it is also true that I exist. Something is going on, that much we know, and thinking certainly seems to be one of the things going on. Perception is another, sensation is another, desire is another: if it is true that there is an "I" perceiving, feeling, desiring, then it is also true that I am.

All our knowledge is relative...to how things appear, so in that sense none of it is absolute. We can think 'absolute' as the binary opposite of 'relative', but it does not follow that we can know anything absolute.

The most plausible explanation would have to apply to both humans and animals, since it is with animality that we begin.

I already have too many things of interest to read and too little time; why would I consider reading a philosopher of little interest to me?

I haven't read much Sartre, and that explanation makes no sense at all to me, I'm afraid. Is it supposed to explain how things stand out for animals too?

Experiencing is "mapping, modelling, denoting, depicting, describing, representing, referring", it is not subject of it.

Experiencing the world is to model it. That which is modelled therefore cannot be the experience. — Isaac

Firstly I agree that experiencing is modeling, but I was referring to linguistic judgements which do map, model, denote etc what is experienced as well as what is considered to be experienceable. It's the difference between first order unconscious modeling and second order conscious modeling. And since we are talking about the relation between language and the world ('world' denoting what is experienced, as well as what can be experienced, but may or may not be) we are dealing with the latter.

Any empirical entity I encounter is given to my perception as a complex of sensations that has already been completely organized according to a principle which always precedes and is unrelated to any subsequent, deliberate effort on my part to attempt to conceptually categorize or classify the entity. — charles ferraro

Taking vision as paradigmatic, what you seem to be saying is that we can, prior to any learning or influence of culture and language, see things and that how those things merely appear, as opposed to what we think of them as being, is not modified by cultural or linguistic accretions.

In order to see something it must stand out from its environment, or if you prefer, from the whole visual field. What is it that makes objects stand out, such that humans and animals alike arguably see the same things in the same places?

I see. Is anything in the universe independent of humans? — Vera Mont

it seems there must be, but we cannot say what it is...

The target here is not you, but the notion that what language is for is "mapping" the world. We do far more than just that. As if a map were the same as a bushwalk. — Banno

Leaving aside all the other things language may do like commanding, promising, imploring, implying, coercing, coaxing, consoling, belittling, berating, alluding, evoking, invoking and so on, what is its propositional relation to our common experience?

Mapping, modelling, denoting, depicting, describing, representing, referring? What is it that is mapped, modeled, denoted, depicted, described, represented or referred to if not what is commonly experienced?

We are not passive absorbers of sense data. We interact with the world around us, not just knowing but doing. We don't just observe cups, we fill them, drain them, clean them, pass them around and smash them.. — Banno

Nothing I've said contradicts any of that.

Only in forgetting this could someone come up with "we don't know whether the physicality of things is or isn't a truth beyond our experience". — Banno

I haven't forgotten any of that and yet I say it, and my saying it is not inconsistent with my not forgetting any of that either. If you think it is then please lay out your argument and show me the purported inconsistency.

Happy to be of service.
What I didn't get was how it relates to the concepts of 'relative' and 'absolute'. — Vera Mont

As I said, the relative is what is relative to human experience, and the absolute is what cannot be experienced, which in the context of this discussion is the existence of anything as it is pre-cognitively.

What you say here speaks precisely to this:

What is an object without its characteristics?
— Matt Thomas

unknowable — Vera Mont

The characteristics of objects are all and only those attributes of objects cognized by us. If we cognized no attributes, then there would be no object presenting itself to us.

I think the easiest way to have evidence for ↪apokrisis' thesis is to admit that despite the ambiguities surrounding the concepts of relative and absolute, some things are more relative and some things are less relative. — Leontiskos

Some things are relative to more other things than other things are is a better way of putting it. There are no degrees of relativity per se and certainly no degrees of absoluteness.

Nothing is absolute for us, everything is relative to us. However, we cannot but think that things have their own independent existence which is not dependent on, meaning not relative, to us. But even then, those things must be relative to other things, and then it would only be the sum of everything which is absolute, in the sense that there is nothing left out for it to be relative to. Is the sum of everything a thing, though? Seems like it is just an idea.

Edit: It just occurred to me that we might say the sum of everything is relative to everything in which case there would be no absolutes and the sum of everything would be the most relative thing of all. But then again, the question that arises is whether relation (being relative) is an actuality or merely an idea.

That repeated centering of "experience" is misleading. It gives the impression that one starts with oneself and works one's way "outwards" to the world. But that's not right — Banno

We come to know things via experience, how else? Experience does not consist in "working outwards to the world" (whatever that little bit of nonsense could even mean) but rather precisely the opposite: the world working its way into us via the senses.

It's not enough to say that we don't know "what is outside of human experience". We each are constantly facing things which were previously outside our individual experience - opening a box, driving down a new road. Such things are easily spoken of. — Banno

This is philosophy by caricature. I find it hard to believe that you didn't realize I was referring to what is beyond the possibility of human experience. Time to take off the blinkers, mate!

And if I asked where the cup is, your answer, I hope, would be "It's in the cupboard", not some obtuse construct like "I don't know, but if you were to open the cupboard you might experience cup-ish-ly". — Banno

More caricature. When I put the cup in the cupboard I can be more or less confident (depending on how long ago I put it there) that it will be there when I open the cupboard. So, the answer I would give to the question about where the cup that I just put in the cupboard is, would be "I have no reason to doubt that it is in the cupboard, and if I open the cupboard, I expect to see the cup". That the cup has been there the whole time is the inference to the best explanation as to why I find the cup there when I open the cupboard.

It doesn't. The world doesn't perform for us. It simply exists — Vera Mont

The world doesn't perform for us, but is given as always already interpreted. Of course we think there must be a pre-interpretive world, and must acknowaledge that we are pre-cognitively affected in ways we cannot be conscious of, and consequently have no control over.

So yes the world simply exists, but we know nothing, cognitively speaking, of the nature of that existence.

Yes: knowledge is comparable to knowledge. Worlds are comparable to worlds.The worlds and the knowledge are not relative to each other. — Vera Mont

You are making the point for me. The world of our experience is the world of our knowledge and understanding; we can imagine a world that exists in itself prior to our known and understood world but we cannot imagine what it would be like.

Perhaps not, but then so what? That fossils, among other things, have meaning for us is a truism the significance of which is itself a matter of interpretation.

An empirical fact - but there’s always an implicit first-person perspective in such conjectures. — Wayfarer

Which is really more an interpretation than a fact. I mean the fact that conjectures are always made by people is a truism; the interpretive part comes into play when we form opinions about just what it is to be a subject of experience; something which, despite our perhaps seemingly self evident intuitive "folk" understandings, is by no means obvious.

Our understanding doesn't affect the world; some aspects of the world affect our understanding. What we know has no relationship to the world; it's relative to what we knew last year, or to what Centaurans know, or to what God knows. — Vera Mont

Our understanding may or may not affect the world. The world certainly presents itself as being largely independent of human control, so that was not the point. The point was that what we know of the world is dependent on, meaning relative to, human experience and judgement.

A planet may have greater mass, less atmosphere, a cooler core, less gravity or whatever, compared to others of its category; only characteristics of an object are relative; not objects themselves. — Vera Mont

There is a sense in which the world is relstive to human experience; we only know things as they are experienced and understood by us.

But we are unable to step outside this reality, even if there are reasons to believe that it is contingent and partial. (can you improve on this frame?) — Tom Storm

No, I can't improve on that; I think what you said expresses the pragmatic truth of our situation.

I think Banno might ask us do we have any good reason to posit a reality outside of our experience? Even using the word reality is problematic. I suspect 'lifeworld' is better but if one is not a fan of phenomenology this too might be problematic. — Tom Storm

I'm guessing Banno would say the word 'reality' derives from a contrast between the things we can experience in common as features of the phenomenal world and imaginary things.

But we cannot help imagining that there is an absolute reality apart from the relative reality of human experience, conception and judgement, in fact it seems unthinkable that there would not be, even though we cannot give a coherent voice to that.

There is nothing to stop us conjecturing about an absolute reality but we have nothing to compare our conjectures with.

Cups, whether observed or not, are a part of our experience. Not knowing of "things" whether or not they are physical "in themselves" is really not an epistemic matter, but a semantic one: our talk about things and their attributes is relevant only within the context of human experience. To assert a metaphysics, whether materialist, physicalist, idealist or anti-realist of what is outside of human experience is to speak inaptly, and that is what I meant by "we don't know". We just don't know how to speak of things that our not a part of our experience.

That's where your misunderstanding lies: I haven't said the cup isn't physical when not being observed.

It's not as if, absent beings, the universes ceases to exist, but that such an existence as it has is unintelligible and meaningless. — Wayfarer

Such an existence is not unintelligible, but is rather intelligible, but yet to be understood, meaningful although the meaning is yet to be discovered, just as unseen worlds are visible, but yet to be seen.

This is a subtle, but most important distinction. Our understanding of the fossil record speaks to this; those traces were always intelligible and meaningful, just waiting to be discovered by an intelligent being.

You're talking gibberish, meaning I have nothing to base a response on, so effectively you have done nothing other than to "leave me to it".

If you are not sure the cup is physical, then you are using the word "physical" in a very odd way. — Banno

I have never said, nor implied, that I am not sure cups are physical. They are tangible, can be picked up, drunk from, moved around. measured, so of course they are physical.

This is like trying to win a chess game by insisting that one cannot be certain that the Queen is a chess piece. — Banno

That seems to be a ridiculous analogy on the face of it; perhaps I'm not getting your point, or what seems more likely is you're not getting mine.

This seems to be a rich source for further exploration. I like that you describe the physical world as a grounding characteristic that has meaning to us but is not necessarily the truth about a reality 'outside' of this experience.

The idea we do not know what we mean if we claim that - the everyday world is mental, because that is simply not a part of our basic common experience - is interesting. Does this mean to you that we cannot effectively describe models of idealism because we have no way of doing so outside of, perhaps, some kind of mystical experience? — Tom Storm

:up: I like that you say "not necessarily", as we don't know whether the physicality of things is or isn't a truth beyond our experience.

Also, I agree that we cannot really have any idea what we are talking about in making claims that the fundamental nature of things is mental or is consciousness. Are mystical experience not bodily experiences, consisting in powerful feelings of connection with everything that cannot be adequately articulated? Are our bodies not "of a piece" with things when we drop the egoic ideations of separation? If fundamental particles or fields are "immortal" then it is the body which consists of those which we could say is immortal, even though the bodily form itself is obviously not.

So if we have no fundamental guarantor of realism, what does this say about our ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics?

I feel like this is a Kantian matter - language is like our phenomenal world. — Tom Storm

I think you're right—language is, in effect, like our phenomenal world, since our perceptions of the phenomenal world, and how much more so our judgements about it, are linguistically mediated.

What is not linguistically mediated is the primary pre-cognitive effects of the body/brain/world interaction processes, which we cannot become conscious of, and hence can have very little to say about. So, if we think of that precognitive body/brain/world interaction as "the world" then our language does not map onto the world at all, or at least we have no way of saying whether or how it does or doesn't.

The world our language does map onto is the cognitively, linguistically modeled intersubjectively shared world we refer to as "the everyday world" which includes everything we know, including science.

If we understand metaphysics to be confined by phenomenology, as Heidegger does, then there is no problem, but if we think of metaphysics as dealing with the precognitive "world", then I think it is a fact that we have no ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics.

So, we know what we mean when we say that the world we share is a physical world, because we all experience the tangibility and measurability of that world, the tangibility and measurability which just are the characteristics that our notion of physicality consists, and is grounded, in. It seems to me that we do not know what we mean if we claim that the everyday world is mental, because that is simply not a part of our basic common experience.

Any talk or claim about the precognitive "world" is literally senseless.

I'd say language, being our primary medium of communication, is not capable of getting "behind itself" in order to derive "a realist theory of language". Language makes communication of ideas about the world possible, as evidenced by ordinary life; to ask for a realist theory that could explain that would be to already presuppose that language is capable of communicating ideas about the world and be asking for some more fundamental guarantor of realism than our merely taking it to be so, and the obvious successful practical communicative applications of language we routinely experience.

Your interpretation is at odds with the text, though, and every interpretation of the meaning of the Allegory of the Cave that I've read. In the allegory 'prisoners' represent those ignorant of the forms: — Wayfarer

That quoted passage says nothing about the "forms".
— Janus

'When it comes to knowledge, the form of the good is seen last, and is seen only through effort.' — Wayfarer

I was referring to the passage you presented as a rebuttal of this

The escape from the cave is an escape from the bonds of our education, an escape from the images of the truth. Replacing an image with another image, one of a transcendent realm of Forms, is not to escape the cave, but to remain bound within it. — Fooloso4

which I quoted.

When you say that we "model" a world of empirical objects do you mean that we deliberately "create" a world of empirical objects out of the raw sense data by our brains synthesizing the raw sense data into particular empirical objects of our own choice? — charles ferraro

Of course not: for it to count as a deliberate act we would need to be precognitively aware of our own primordial affections.

Or do you mean that we are spontaneously guided by and follow empirical rules of sensory organization imbedded in, inherent in, the raw sense data when our brains synthesize the raw sense data into particular objects not of our own choice? — charles ferraro

We might assume that there is some lawlike process that entails that our models are naturally isomorphic to what affects us; but we don't and cannot know that, because we cannot compare what we are conscious of with what we cannot be conscious of.

In my opinion, we do not have to have immediate recourse to transcendent things-in-themselves or noumena to explain sensory organization. They explain nothing. — charles ferraro

It is not just your opinion, we do not have recourse to what is transcendental to our experience. The ding an sich and the noumena are explicitly understood, or stipulated to be, that way by Kant.

We simply have to posit the possible existence of empirical rules of sensory organization embedded in the sense data which spontaneously guide our brains' synthesizing activities. — charles ferraro

We don't have to; we can just acknowledge our ignorance and be content with dealings with things as they appear to us.

Your interpretation is at odds with the text, though, and every interpretation of the meaning of the Allegory of the Cave that I've read. In the allegory 'prisoners' represent those ignorant of the forms:

For in the first place, do you think such people [i.e. the prisoners in the cave] would ever have seen anything of themselves, or one another, apart from the shadows cast by the fire onto the cave wall in front of them? — Wayfarer

That quoted passage says nothing about the "forms".

Where in his works does Kant clearly and convincingly explain precisely how the "nature" of a given empirical object of everyday a posteriori experience can be generated by human sensibility and understanding simply applying space, time, and the categories to what he calls the given manifold of sensation? Kant needs more than just a given manifold of sensation. — charles ferraro

Our everyday experience consists of images, sensations and impressions, which we model as a world of empirical objects. Do we say that modeling is a part of our experience or our judgement? The "nature" of those objects, as far as we can know, is given by their observed attributes and relations, including their differences from and similarities to other objects.

Kant acknowledges that we cannot know how our experience of a world of objects is engendered by a given manifold of sensation. What we are precognitively affected by, including what we precognitively are, is simply not available to consciousness. This is what is denoted by noumena and the ding an sich.