Ah, of course, not so familiar with him either, other than reading Mere Christianity about 40 years ago. As I remember it his arguments didn't impress me much.

:cool:

Lewis's premise is that reasoning admits of only one description. He could have claimed that other accounts leave out what he's interested in, that they miss the reasoning in an act of reasoning and treat it like any other psychological or biological event. Instead he claims that no such description is even possible, and that nothing that could be so described and explained could be what he considers reasoning.

The question is, why would he think that? And it looks like the answer is: theology. — Srap Tasmaner

Is this David Lewis you are speaking about? I'm not very familiar with his work. Is he a theist? I think you are right: that it is only theology which would allow that things are just as we perceive them to be, because God thinks them into existence and then gives us perceptions which accord with his thoughts. Everything lives and has its being in God, according to classical theism.

I see that as a possibility, but not a very plausible one.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. Richard Rorty says something like truth is what communities of shared understanding describe it to be. In other words, reality is a case of intersubjective agreement, not an external certainty.

Do you share some of the post-structuralist views on language and truth? — Tom Storm

I agree that reality, in the determinate sense, is what is agreed upon intersubjectively. So, reality cannot be anything more, or other, than empirical. What is intersubjectively agreed upon is what is in accordance with (most) everyone's experience.

The most immediate reality for each of us is our own lives; we experience what we experience (even if we cannot put it into words) and things seem to be as they seem to be. We don't experience objective reality; there is arguably no such thing other than what is intersubjectively agreed upon, and we don't experience that intersubjective reality, we experience concrete things in a concrete environment; whereas the (collective) reality is the abstracted commonality of that experience.

I don't much like the post-structuralist notions that everything is text, or that words don't map onto the world. For me words do map onto the world insofar as the world is not something we experience but a collective generalized abstraction.

The simplest reason is that it's intentional, and intentionality is lacking in physical causation. — Wayfarer

I just see the two explanations as being different. Deciding to go to the shop can be explained in terms of intentionality or in terms of physical causes. It was because my reason for going to the shop is intentional that I said it cannot be reduced to a set of physical and neural causes.

My having a reason can be explained in those terms, but the reason itself, being intentional, cannot. To say that my reason could be explained physically would be a category error; we have two different categories of explanations: those given in terms of intentionality and those given in terms of physical causes.

To put it simply, the point was that making a decision can be explained physically, as can having a reason, but the reason for making the decision cannot; the reason itself is an explanation. It's all about context.

But the argument from reason is about physicalism - that everything about the mind can be reduced to or explained in terms of physical causes. — Wayfarer

I don't see why a decision to (for example) go to the shop to buy milk, cannot be explained in terms of physical causes (environmental conditions and neural processes), but it doesn't follow that my reason for buying milk can be reduced to a set of physical and neural causes.

If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? (I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?) — Tom Storm

The only reality we describe is the reality of shared human experience and concern, as I see it. Saying that the map is not the territory is saying that the network of collective representations which constitute our real, shared world is the map, while our individual pre-linguistic experiences are the territory. The map is an abstracted generalization and sharing derived from a vast number of particular experiences. Of course, this is not to say that the maps do not feed back into and condition the experiences of individuals.

BTW I think this is an interesting OP, and the only reason I haven't commented is that I haven't found anything interesting to say about it, that hasn't already been said.

If you are convinced that there are twelve categories, then you should be able to articulate the proof that convinced you. — Bob Ross

I can't help interjecting here, since I have already explained this to you. The categories of understanding are identifiable simply by reflecting on the ways we experience and judge things; nothing at all to do with the thing-in-itself.

The problem is, Bob, I don't think you are listening to anyone else.

:up:

And BTW, I'm a bit stoned, and suspect that was awfully disorganized and stream of consciousness, but I'm a bit stoned. — wonderer1

So, not "boneheaded mistakes" but stoneheaded mistakes? (Just joking; I live just five minutes from the stoner capital of Australia). :halo:

I think it depends on what we mean by "ethics". If we think of ethics as the art of living well, then it has a broader provenance than morality, and since thoughts may determine how we live and flourish, then, in that restricted sense, we could say that ethics does apply to thought.

. It's a biological theory, but the view that it accounts for everything about human nature and the human condition is biological reductionism (whereas I would say that we're 'underdetermined' by biological factors). — Wayfarer

I'd say that with the advent and evolutionary development of culture, factors other than the merely biological certainly came into play, plausibly to the point of predominance. Don't forget, though that evolution is not merely a biological determinant, since animals, including humans have to cope with and survive in environments. Another point is that cultures themselves and their survival and flourishing are determined by geographical and biological, as well as human factors, so there is no clear line beyond which biology becomes irrelevant.

In any case saying that the capacity for language and rational thought evolved, driven initially by adaptive advantage, is not to say that everything about humans is determined by fitness for survival and reproduction.

No, the study of civilization, which includes evolution, is also the study about the intelligence of humans over epochs. What Janus might be referring to is the study of logic, which is a modern development. The "capacity for reason", as civilization reveals, is actually the capacity to use tools, for example. — L'éléphant

:up: Yes, tool use is one very significant thing that distinguishes us from most other animals, and the degree to which we have developed that distinguishes us from all other known animals. Language and logic can also be considered to be tools, but I would be loath to say that they are nothing but tools.

I still say it's a mistake to say conceive of reason as result of evolutionary biology, because it reduces reason to mere adaptation. — Wayfarer

I'm not seeing why acquiring the capacity for reason should not be thought of as a result of evolutionary biology, driven by adaptation. We know that thinking is correlated with neuronal processes, and we also know that we can formulate the principles or rules of rational thought or logic. And further to that we know, due to the obvious adaptive superiority of humans over other animals, which most plausibly would seem to be on account of language and the evolutionary complexification of rational thought it enables, that language and rational thought must have adaptive advantages. What am I missing?

As you point out, logic itself is not necessarily descriptive of the world of experience - something can be logically true but physically impossible, and things happen which defy logic. The argument from reason is not presenting reason as a panacea or magic bullet, but as an indispensable faculty which can't be explained in physicalist terms (among other things. — Wayfarer

I don't think many would disagree that reason is indispensable to human life. However, even if the semantic content of logic or rational thought cannot be described in terms of fundamental physics (to expect that would be to commit a category error), it doesn't follow that there can be no physical, neurological or evolutionary explanations for the fact that humans are capable of rational thought.

It's the old Indian elephant parable; that we've only ever got a grasp of some aspect of the elephant, its tail or its ear or tusk and we form conclusions on that basis. Reality, or rather, Being, is infinitely vast, and coming to an understanding exceedingly difficult. — Wayfarer

No one is omniscient, or even close to it, and some know more than others to be sure. A neuroscientist presumably knows much more about neuroscience than you or I do, for example, and knowledge has become so specialized that it seems laypeople such as ourselves are in no position to criticize a neurological understanding of the mind and brain unless we have sufficient training in the discipline.

:rofl: Gave me a laugh!

That's subjectivism and relativism. It's obvious that, for example, in the American political scene, there is a huge polarization, but it's no coincidence that a large part of the cause of this is a leading political figure who quite openly tells enormous lies which large numbers of the electorate are willing to swallow. Surely a political scientist or pollster can come up with reasons why they do that, but it doesn't change the fact that they're believing lies, and that they are lies, regardless of anyone's opinion. — Wayfarer

The question was about people who are (presumably) capable of thinking strictly rationally, philosophers for example; what explains the fact that there is so much disagreement among them?

Say if I do persuade you to believe any proposition whatever - not necessarily this one - where you agree that you 'see the point' of the argument - how can that be understood in any terms other than rational persuasion? — Wayfarer

The neural networks in your brain have been formed by your unique life experience and genetic constitution such that hearing the proposition affects those networks so as to produce the result that the proposition is convincing to you, whereas it might not be so to others, whose brains' neural structures have formed differently, due to different life experiences. If it was all just pure sovereign reason, then why would everyone who can think rationally not agree about everything?

Of course, I'm not claiming this explanation or at least something along those lines is anything other than the best empirical explanation we currently have. If logic doesn't by itself doesn't tell us anything, and a primary principle of rational thinking is not to believe anything without sufficient evidence, then what other possible cogent explanation is there?

Should we believe something simply because it feels right to us? I don't say we shouldn't, but I also believe in that case we must relinquish the claims that our belief is rationally-based and accept that is is a matter of faith. Matters of faith cannot be cogently argued for.

The other point of inconsistency in your position seems to be that you think rational persuasion is a matter of free will; but how could it be if rational persuasion is as strict as valid logical deduction is?

That's a non-answer, or an argument from authority, (whivh amounts to being a non-answer) which I suspect you know.

Do you think your argument and/or philosophy itself belongs to any of the categories I outlined? One of them, (variously) all of them or none of them?

And please note, what the ancients, people of other cultures, or other times generally, cannot imagine being otherwise is not necessarily the same as what we moderns cannot imagine being otherwise.

No, that's scientific materialism. It is not the same thing. It mainly comes from the attempt to apply scientific methodology to philosophical problems, as a few here are doing. — Wayfarer

Science only deals with subjects insofar as they are material, or physical, if you like. It is only those kinds of inquiries that can be rigorously tested. Other kinds of ideas (like the synthetic generalizations I mentioned earlier) are what we (collectively) cannot imagine being otherwise. Then there things which are true as a matter of logic.

What category do you think the idea your OP consists in is based on?

:up: It seems that there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of thinkers about the nature of the brain/mind: those who wish to discover new and better ways to think about it, and those who seek for support for what they want to be the case.

Many people dislike science because it is seen to be delivering a picture of humans as exhaustively material beings. Others value a scientific approach because the prime directive is to remain open to the idea that what might seem to "ring true" to us may be profoundly mistaken.

Surely this does at least suggest 'a transcendent realm accessible to the wise'? — Wayfarer

What exactly leads you to think so?

:up: cheers

Arse'n'all!

I would add to what you said above, that we can learn from the study of applications of Artificial Neural Nets (ANNs), to improve the effectiveness with which we use our brains. A key consideration with ANNs is the training set, or the set of inputs that were involved in an ANN learning whatever it learned. Analogously, we can consider the size and scope of the training set that went into the deep learning underlying our intuitions, and consider whether our intuitions are likely to be trustworthy or untrustworthy under whatever the present circumstances are. In doing so we might recognize a benefit to increasing the size and/or scope of our training sets, and improve the training of our neural nets, resulting in an improvement to the reliability to our intuitions in the future. — wonderer1

That sounds like an interesting avenue of investigation, that I am yet to take the first step upon. If only we had more time!

Can you recommend an introductory text?

There is no need to write a treatise on the foundations of logic; logical principles are actually fairly simple.

We arrive at synthetic generalizations from experience by recognizing what the general characteristics of different experiences are: so, it is a form of cognition: re-cognition. I don't see it as involving any logical deduction; it is more like pattern recognition.

Of course, we have to also think about it coherently as well, and that does involve thinking consistently or in logical terms in keeping with the principle of validity; that is we should avoid contradicting ourselves.

A simple example is that we can recognize that all our experiences of sensory objects are spatiotemporal, from which we generalize to saying that all experiences of sensory objects must be spatiotemporal because we cannot imagine how it could be otherwise.

But these "givens" that state what, for example, all experience must be like are not purely logically given (that is they are not tautologies in that their negations are not logical contradictions) they are synthetic generalizations from experience, and I think they represent what we find it impossible to imagine.

It is the subject of the OP, and the basis for an argument. — Wayfarer

I wasn't referring to the subject: the argument from reason itself is not a purely deductive argument. You seem to be taking it for granted that a pure deduction cannot be at the same time a neural process.

Let me put it another way: iff it is accepted that a pure deduction cannot be at the same time a neural process then your argument form reason would stand, but that is the very point at issue. Where is the argument for the contention that a pure deduction cannot be at the same a neural process?

All of which is quite irrelevant if you were doing an actual exercise in logic. But rationally-inferred propositions aren't a matter of belief at all - the hackneyed example I gave of 'if X>Y and A>X then X>Y' is not dependent on belief nor a matter of belief or sentiment. — Wayfarer

But, so what? That kind of purely formal logical deduction has little to do with actual human life and reasoning. Your "Argument from Reason" itself is not that kind of deduction, but is an abductive speculation based on premises which are taken for granted.

It would help if you actually engaged in argumentation with your interlocutor's arguments rather than attempting to dismiss them with statements like "considerably more smoke than light in most of the above".

I spend a lot of time in 'provisional credence' country. I hear alarm bells when people say they know something to be certain. — Tom Storm

So do I. The demand for certainty seems to be the motivator for the kind of platonist thinking that wants to place reason high up on on a throne presiding over mere emotion. I don't understand this attitude, since the principles of reason of skillful thinking: coherence, validity and consistency are formal constraints, that by themselves tell us nothing, and must work with what we receive via the senses and our emotions to yield any knowledge.

Right. Going with intuition is relying on the deep learning which has occurred in neural nets between our ears. — wonderer1

I think that's right, but our intuitions can fool us, so we do need to examine the reasoning and its foundational presuppositions and our desires and aversions that underly our intuitions

So, yes, I broadly agree with what you posted, Janus, but I reserve a bit of Humean horror that the foundations of my rationality are not themselves rational. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree, it is kind of horrible, especially when you consider the dire situation humanity faces now, with all its competing narratives and interests. The flipside is the fear that if human life was governed by reason, and only reason; a civilization comprised of Vulcan-like or Spock-like beings, who either have no passions or keep their passions rigidly in check, that we would be a repressed, uptight bunch who live too much "in our heads". It seems a balance is hard to achieve it is either the individual at the expense of the collective or the collective at the expense of the individual; not a very attractive pair of options.

.

I see two possibilities regarding my belief about anything whatsoever: the first being that the information I have encountered regarding the thing my belief is about has convinced me that my belief is true, which means that my belief is determined by my understanding of the information.

The second possibility is that it is entirely up to me to believe whatever I like, regardless of whether of not the information I have encountered up to the time of the formation of the belief has convinced my reason. It may have convinced my reason, but failed to convince my desire that I should believe that which my reason indicates, because perhaps I don't like the implications. This second possibility sounds like it could only obtain if I decided to believe something contrary to what the evidence indicates. Now, why would I do that? Out of pure perversity, out of displeasure with what the evidence indicates? Either way it does not sound like my belief would be one of rational conviction.

Is it even possible to believe contrary to what the evidence indicates to me personally is the truth, constituted as I am, with all my built in presuppositions and emotionally driven biases? Remember, whether valid or invalid, reasoning is only as sound as its grounding premises, which are often based on unacknowledged prejudices, and not derived from reasoning at all.

So, it seems that if it is not possible to rationally believe something contrary to what I genuinely find, whether rationally or not, convincing (which itself is a function of how I am constituted emotionally and intellectually, which in turn does not seem to be something I can actually determine "causa sui"), and it follows then that my belief would not be rationally driven at all, but emotionally driven.

This line of thinking reminds me of Schopenhauer's perspective on free will (which refutes the libertarian conception): "A man can will he wants, but he cannot will what he wills". This in turn reminds me of Hume's “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” .

It seems that both of those philosophers did not belief in free will as conceived by the libertarians, and if this right, which it seems it must be if my belief is not to be merely arbitrarily driven by desire contrary to reason, then the idea that beliefs could be purely driven by rationality refutes itself and it follows that we are determined to believe what we do by our desires, aversions, biases and prejudices, and this would mean that the best we can do is to try to become conscious of those desires, aversions, prejudices and biases and grow out of them...into better, more rational ones...which would seem to be a never-ending process, at least unto death.

So, in short it just doesn't look possible that reason could be sovereign, but that it must be content to work slowly and piecemeal to become aware of, and then, as needed in order to live with greater serenity, change my desires, aversions, prejudices and biases, without the remotest possibility of becoming completely free of them but, at best, being able to gradually obtain a more livable suite, a suite of convictions which brings more peace and yet does not contradict the most convincing evidence, for if it does I will have more work to do, and will not be as much at peace as I could be.

In some ways this seems like the (Ancient) skeptical solution; Ataraxia attendant on suspension of judgement, but only regarding absolutes, for pragmatism dictates that I should give provisional credence to what the evidence indicates seems to be the case, while at the same time not imputing that seeming to some imagined ultimate reality. The latter can only cause dissatisfaction, unless I abandon reason altogether and put my faith just in "what rings true".

Good on you, mate, you must be used to it then...

I think these posts assess the issues aptly. Unisex toilets... :up: Although they might need to be phased in to get people used to the idea.

I agree with both of you about politics...if only it weren't necessary!

I think it does, because the only way a thing a representation can be invariant is if either (1) the mind of which it is produced simply fabricates it as such, or (2) the object of which it is representing (which is a thing-in-itself) is invariant. There’s no other options by my lights. — Bob Ross

The way I see it, everything that is outside of our conscious experience including what we don't know about ourselves is what we refer to apophatically as the noumenal. We know that we experience invariant objects in invariant environments, and all we can do regarding what is beyond our knowledge and experience is try to imagine what that noumenal being is; the problem with that being that all our imaginings are in terms of what we know of the experienced world.

So, there may be no other option for you than the two you outlined there, but that says everything about you and nothing about the noumenal as I see it. For me the other option, apart from the inevitably aporetic imaginable ones, is simply that we cannot know, and have no way of comparing our conjectures about the noumenal with anything in order to assess their plausibility.

I think, given what I said above, it is an inconsistency. Either the mind’s representative faculty cause the invariance, or the things-in-themselves which are being represented do: there’s no third option. So to make a claim like “we can know phenomenal invariance but nothing about the things-in-themselves”, to me, is claiming a third option that can’t exist. — Bob Ross

Our minds, by themselves, being as far as we can tell, unconnected with one another cannot plausibly be thought to cause invariances which are common to all percipients. So the thing-in-itself must cause the invariance; that is it must be mind-independent, in the sense of being independent of any and all individual minds (which are the only minds we know about). But, as I have said, it doesn't follow that the thing in itself is invariant, other than in its capacity to cause experienced invariance. Perhaps, it might be thought, as per some recent theses in QM, that everything is really one thing: an entangled unity; but then we have the problem of how it could produce experienced diversity.

Face it Bob, whatever we imagine about the noumenal, we are always going to run up against aporias. Personally, I think this is because all our categories of thought are based on our dualistic mode of thinking, and those categories just don't apply to the noumenal. If this is right, the noumenal can never be experienced or understood and our speculations are merely "pouring from the empty into the void". All that said, if you enjoy speculating then go for it, but I'd be wary of taking those speculations seriously.

I'm going to leave it there, Bob: it's been fun, but we are inevitably going to continue to go around in circles. Thanks for the conversation.

Regarding the trolley problem: people generally do not want to be agents causing the death of others, even it is accidental and not at all their fault. If a child runs out in front of your car and you kill her this will probably be much more traumatic for most people than witnessing someone else run over a child. So, the more overt and obvious one's agency in causing the death of another, the more I think most people would wish to avoid it.

Switching a lever to kill one instead of the five that will otherwise be certainly killed is taking matters into one's own hands to a greater extent than doing nothing, because doing nothing is not being the active cause of anyone's death. Sure, you can argue that omitting to act is the same as committing an act, but I don't buy that argument. The trolley problem fails to take people's feelings, and the paralysis that they might cause in the critical moment, into account. Also, the idea that one persons' life is worth less than five people's lives is questionable if we are not convinced that a definite value can be put on a human life.

How do we build principles that assist in achieving this for all? Even the notion of 'for all' is an axiom, since we know of people who think that the circle of moral concern should only encompass the types of peeps they recognize as citizens. — Tom Storm

:up: Yes, that is the conundrum. Perhaps part of the problem is the incapacity of people to viscerally care for more than some relatively small number of others. I think it's worth remembering that for the greatest part of human history (including here prehistory) people lived in relatively small communities, and now many of us live in vast metropolises; perhaps we haven't adapted fully to that condition yet.

The way I see it, we ought to cooperate if we want to enjoy happy lives, but not with anything that goes against a balanced sense of compassion and fairness. The laws in most societies which are not autocratically, theocratically or kleptocratically corrupted reflect what are the general human sentiments regarding what is acceptable and what is not. The most significant moral issues are regarding exploitation, theft, violence, rape and murder. and those things are almost universally condemned. Other issues such as age of sexual consent, acceptance of homosexuality and so on seem to get worked out sensibly in the absence of dogmatic religious interference.

The question then devolves to 'ought we want to live happy lives" and that question just seems silly since happiness is universally preferred over unhappiness.

I tend to agree with this. If only for the fact that most metaphysical views or scientific theories make no difference to how I live my life or what choices I make. — Tom Storm

If we could somehow know the absolute truth about "life, the universe and everything" then it might make a difference to how we live our lives. But as it is there is just a plethora of competing ideas, some of which we may find more attractive than others.

One thing that seems to me to be absurd, and perhaps even unethical, is to live one's life with the expectation and aim of gaining merit for an existence after death; I think that idea has the potential of radically devaluing this life.

That said, if otherwise reasonably responsible individuals want to hope for an afterlife because it comforts them and makes the inevitable rigours of this life easier to bear, and their ideas do no harm in this life, then I find it hard to argue with that. Whatever works, and we are all different, right?

And here’s the problem: you can’t say that things-in-themselves cannot be thought of as knowably having object permanence and then turn around and say that the phenomena suggests that the things-in-themselves have object permanence. The phenomena do not suggest anything about the things-in-themselves under Kantianism. Period. — Bob Ross

If things-in-themselves are responsible for producing the phenomenal things, and the phenomenal things are reliably invariant (to varying degrees according to the phenomena under consideration, of course) then we can say that things in themselves reliably give rise to invariant phenomena. That doesn't say anything about the things in themselves being invariant in themselves, though.

except in the sense that whatever it is that appears to us as invariant objects does so reliably, which suggests, but doesn't prove, that the in itself is invariant

And here’s the problem: you can’t say that things-in-themselves cannot be thought of as knowably having object permanence and then turn around and say that the phenomena suggests that the things-in-themselves have object permanence. The phenomena do not suggest anything about the things-in-themselves under Kantianism. Period. — Bob Ross

What I meant there is the same as what I said above; we have no warrant for saying that things-in-themselves are invariant in themselves, but we do know that they are invariant in the sense that they reliably produce invariant phenomena. In positing things-in-themselves as being the things that give rise to the appearance of phenomenal things I'd say Kant must be committed to that much.

Now I admit that there is a tension here in the Kantian idea that we know absolutely nothing about things-in-themselves, but I don't think it amounts to an outright inconsistency.

However, I am not a Kant scholar, so I can't say whether Kant addresses this area of potential tension or passes it over. In any case, the point is that if all we know about things in themselves is that they invariably produce invariant phenomena, then it remains that we know nothing at all about what they are in themselves.

Would you say that we, then, get indirect knowledge of the things-in-themselves? I think that none of the above (that you said) is compatible with Kantianism, but I personally agree with you. Kant argues adamantly that we have absolutely no clue what the things-in-themselves are—not even a reverse engineering of the phenomena. See:

We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of phenomena; that the things we intuite, are not in themselves the same as our representations of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear; and that these, as phenomena, cannot exist in themselves, but only in us – CPR

Perhaps you can be a neo-Kantian, but you are clearly contradicting Kant here. — Bob Ross

If "the nature and relations of objects in space and time" and space and time themselves are human representations, human perceptions, then it would seem to follow that these cannot exist apart from human experience. Look at it another way: what could it even mean to say that the objects and relations and the very modalities themselves of human experience existed absent human experience? All he is saying is that the phenomena of perception cannot exist absent perception, and that seems right, doesn't it?

Janus, you are conceding here that you can, at the very least, get at what is suggested of the things-in-themselves via the phenomena, which is clearly not compatible with Kantianism (in its original formulation). I personally agree with you, but then you can’t turn around and claim, like a Kantian would (which was my whole point originally with Mww), that we can’t do metaphysics beyond transcendental philosophy. Your argument for object invariance here is exactly that: a metaphysical claim pertaining to the things-in-themselves. — Bob Ross

No, you're misunderstanding again. I'm only talking about the natural expectations of the dog that objects don't simply disappear when not being perceived. And we know they don't because they are generally always there where they were last time we looked. But this speaks only to the phenomenal objects, it says nothing about the things-in-themselves other than that they must be thought to somehow invariably produce this object permanence.

“noumenal invariance” and “object invariance” are the same thing: they are both a metaphysical claim about the same things-in-themselves. By definition (of “object invariance”), we are talking about whatever persists beyond your phenomenal experience and is thusly non-phenomenal (i.e., noumenal). — Bob Ross

No, they are not the same thing, Bob. It might seem inconceivable to us that something could produce a world of differentiated and diversely invariant objects without being differentiated and invariant in itself, but it doesn't follow that we therefore know that the in itself must be differentiated and invariant. We might think that to be the most plausible explanation, but quantum physics might make us think twice about that (even though quantum physics only talks about how things are as they appear to us, we might think it is the closest we can get to the in itself, and it presents us with counter-intuitive and paradoxical pictures).




.

There is something to be said for the idea that compassion towards other sentient beings is a natural condition for humans, because we have the reflective capacities to be able to vividly imagine pain and suffering. Of course, this natural capacity for empathy and compassion can be distorted by culture, life experience, and is arguably not universally innate as there are genetic disorders that affect every aspect of human capacity and functioning.

So, perhaps for most people harming children is anathema simply on account of how they naturally feel about it.

Are we still agreed? — Srap Tasmaner

:up: Yep, I have no argument with the idea that phenomena are, at least for the most part, objects.