owever I would be interested to hear from others as to the potential for such an imperative, and if indeed Philosophy is 'predicated' upon this basic formulation of Psychology. — Marcus de Brun

I don't think so, and that's a very weird construal of Wittgenstein. Even on the point of philosophy being "therapeutic," that's a common idea about W., and based on reasonable evidence - but Wittgenstein had doubts about that formulation right to the end (which is why On Certainty is starting to look more like an old-fashioned philosophical thesis - a reinventing of the Aristotelian wheel, actually, IMHO).

There is an element of therapy (being "shown the way out of the fly bottle") in philosophy, for sure, but the question is whether that's all there is to it, or whether it's a preliminary clearing away of the rubbish.

Re. your thoughts on psychology: the way I see it is that evolutionary psychology forms the bridge between biology and personal human psychology, so now we can see that there's a continuum, with one thing building on the other.

In that context, I'm not sure that our "imperatives" are necessarily bad or misleading things. We should examine them, sure, but not with the nervous expectation that we're going to have to overturn our natural inclinations at every point. If our thoughts are based on evolved processes, that means they are highly likely have some connection to reality (although they may occasionally also be "spandrels", accidental behavioural flotsam that's merely passed on because it doesn't even get a chance to rub up against nature wrongly, carried along as part of our system).

Summary: Moral and ethical conduct via The Rites as in rituals of respect are what facilitate moral homeostasis. — Sum Dude

Yes, well that's the "Catholic" attitude. But lots of people can't stand decoration and like things to be clean-lined and functional.

Art and life seem to oscillate between too little "decoration" and too much.

It's interesting that the etymology of "decorum" would seem to suggest a similar awareness of the beauty of settled social ritual in Western thought. This is something the iconoclasts of the Boomer generation were completely blind to - the culture of critique and the restless need to make things over dominated thought then. I think respect for ritual and tradition are coming back into fashion though. Most people feel happier when things are a bit ritualized, at least - when there's a degree of propriety in the public space, a degree of decorum. But again, not too tight, not too loose.

Finding the sweet spot is an active process - I myself would say the balance was about right in the late 50s/early 60s (before the disastrous "sexual revolution" of the mid to late 60s), when there was about equal respect for settled order and for social experimentation.

As with most things, it's a bell-curve distribution. A few people are ok with being alone (and for them being alone is solitude rather than loneliness, a positive value, as above said), most are a bit uncomfortable with it to varying degrees, or for too long, and a few can't stand being alone for any length of time at all. It's the same with the obverse circumstance: some can't stand crowds, some love 'em.

On the mystical side, there's quite a paradox here. OK, so initially you feel separate and alone, but you have a fugitive sense that intimacy or oneness or togetherness are possible, and they can heal the pain of separateness. You go on a spiritual path. You discover that the sense of being separate is illusory, and that there's nothing here but the Universe, and you are THAT. Very good.

But there's a cruel trick here, because yes, the mystical insight draws everything into a unity - or rather, it's the realization that everything already is a unity. So that former sense of being a feeble little thing lost in a vast unknown Void is gone. But isn't the Universe itself (or "God" if you prefer that terminology) alone in another, deeper sense?

What is there to compare IT to? What friend can IT have? It can't have the pleasure of discovering unity any more, neither in affairs of the heart nor the life of the mind. It is truly alone, with no peer, no other.

And this is why many spiritual traditions have this sense of a "Path Up" and a "Path Down." The path up is the seemingly separate thing discovering its impersonal nature, the path down is God's yearning for something else, his creation of a playmate, or at least of the possibility of there seeming to be playmates.

IOW, perhaps, just as Man's mystical work is dissolution in the All, so God's mystical work is kenosis, the very hiding in the illusion of separateness that you start off with when you're born. Of course God's work requires actual omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence (in order to create the - so to speak - "solid illusion" of the world), whereas all Man's work needs is a little bit of grit and determination, and love of Truth.

Yes, when there are two different ultimate values, and there's some confusion between which value is being held as ultimate.

IOW, you can have an action that's morally wrong from one (ultimate) point of view but contextually right from another (ultimate) point of view (which simply means that it's morally right from that other point of view).

This was the essence of Tragedy in the old sense: two different senses of what's morally right clashing, two forces acting for the good as they see it and coming to blows. The best villains have a plausible motivation.

Morality is objective but not intrinsic. This is a nice but important distinction. Nature herself offers no reason to favour one point of view over any other - so no particular morality is intrinsic to Nature, no point of view is "Nature's own" point of view - but once a point of view has been taken on, the world automatically divides into things' being objectively good or bad from that point of view.

e.g. I can look at the world from the point of view of the survival and flourishing of the human race, or from the point of view of the survival and flourishing of bunny rabbits, or from the point of view of the continued existence into the future of my old, worn-out shoe. Nature is indifferent to which I choose, but honours my evaluative act by instantly having her parts stand in objectively good or bad relation to any of those points of view.

So you can have objective moralities that clash.

Now of course in reality, human beings have bell-curve distributions of preference for a basket of closely-related ultimate goals - e.g. one's own personal happiness and flourishing, the flourishing of family, kin, race, the human race in general, the individual qua individual. Under most ordinary circumstances, what is to be done will be roughly similar from the point of view of all these closely-related moralities (e.g. to take one extreme, it's in none of these interests to have a social rule that commands, "Kill everyone you meet.") But sometimes there's a clash in edge cases, and one has to figure out what one holds as the higher value.

The relationship between "is" and "ought" isn't as fraught as people think: obviously if you are born with a particular preference for a particular ultimate value, or you've been trained in it, and took to the training, that's your birthright, you don't need to further justify that preference. And to some extent, the "nesting" of values (from self, to family and friends, to kin, clan, town, nation, race, human race) gives good enough reason to follow most social rules because most social rules will redound with benefit at all those levels. But, again, sometimes there's a clash and one has to think through seriously what one's deepest values are. That's when you have "the struggle in the human heart," which Hemingway and GRR Martin assure us is the key to good storytelling - and which, again, makes heroes and villains interesting, and their clash weighty.

Yeah I do think materialism is waning - you can see increasing scepticism about materialism on both the Left and Right.

I'm not sure how to parse "turning society into God", but certainly for a long time we've thought of Man as the default, de facto God. Humanism, Communism, Liberalism, Fascism, they all make Man out to be the measure of things.

I remember the puzzlement among intellectuals back in the mid 90s at the resurgence of religion as a world force with the advent of Islamism - it seemed all that had been done with and dusted when the "End of History" had happened at the end of the 80s.

But no, apparently people do seem to want to have some kind of belief in the transcendent in their lives.

There's probably going to be a bit of a resurgence of interest in Christianity in the West too, I'll wager (I myself enjoyed our local church's Christmas Mass this year) - as well as in atheism (the resolution of the apparent paradox being that more people are concerned overall to nail their colours to the mast publicly, whereas before they thought of religion as more of a private matter).

I know myself, my attitude towards religion has softened over the years, and I'm less cocksure about my atheism - in fact I do think of myself more as a classical Agnostic in the Huxleyian/Spencerian sense these days. I also find the Aristotelian/Thomist classical arguments for God more interesting and challenging than I used to, now that I understand their classical philosophical jargon better.

And I don't think I'll change, I think this is my settled position after 30 year or so thinking: IOW, no, I don't find sufficient reason to believe in God, and even the most valid arguments are still not demonstrable as sound.

But I wouldn't scorn anyone who feels like going with a religion, not like I used to when I was young. The classical arguments aren't airtight, but they're quite strong for anyone who's inclined to already have a sense of the transcendent at the emotional or mystical level.

To some extent it's a leap of faith - there is the known, and the unknown, and with the unknown, you pays your money and you takes your chance.

Abstractions don't exist, but Universals are abstractions only on the Nominalist hypothesis. On the Realist hypothesis they are a type of existent.

I'm referring to the 60s generation who followed Marcuse, the New Left who became today's liberal establishment, etc.

The aetiology of it's quite simple, and in a way quite innocent: a generation born to parents who had lived through a tough war, and who wanted some peace and quiet, and to give their kids the best life possible at a time when technology was really coming into its own in terms of creating safer, healthier conditions than had ever existed before in the whole of human history.

Result: "arrested development" (as Churchill twitted socialism :) ). A generation without any real worries, with masses of disposable income, able to "live in the present" - in a way, the fact that such a thing was possible at all is quite a positive thing, it bodes well for a sort of Star Trekky future, it's like a foreshadowing of things to come. But unfortunately, at the time, it led to a whole bunch of narcissism and bad ideas, to a contempt for tradition and a desire to remake society (as encapsulated in Lennon's Imagine). A generation that thought it knew better than its parents.

I too am a very late Boomer (born 1959), so I'm familiar with the syndrome and take full responsibility for my formerly childish way of thinking :D

NABBALT and all that ofc, but it is the generation that frittered it all way, to the extent that people from that generation have been in a position to fritter away the European/American heritage for the past 40 years or so.

The leftist-SJW-PC-types don't get right is the rootedness you are talking about. They are not, for some reason, rooted in the soil in which they were planted. — Bitter Crank

I think it's natural variation - the balance between the various psychological factors that people like Haidt, Pinker and Peterson talk about (e.g. high openness vs high loyalty). SJW types just don't have a strong feeling for their people, don't naturally have a strong sense of rootedness like I think most people do.

But there have always been people like that - it's just that formerly they didn't rule the commanding heights of culture.

The future will look back on Boomers with a great deal of contempt, as a generation of clowns: the generation that threw away centuries of accumulated culture and tradition that had been passed on down the generations, that took so long to build up. All thrown away in what amounted to a fit of adolescent rebellion by the first most spoiled generation in history.

America nowadays is a a civic concept, it's about civic association via an idea/ideal.

European is more of a racial concept, basically genetic (it means White, Europe is the ancestral homeland of that 8% of the world's population that is White - and it has been for tens of thousands of years). Of course that ancestral homelandeyness means there's also a good deal of shared culture implied (Graeco-Roman, Central European, Anglo Saxon, etc.).

However, America wasn't always a purely civic concept, it was at first more of a race-based idea (early immigration was for "White persons of good standing" or words to that effect, IIRC). But I think because of slavery most Americans came to think of America as a biracial society (with Blacks being a small minority who deserve some consideration because of slavery) - and that requires thinking of the "social glue" of the country as more in the realm of ideas.

The extension of that "civil rights" idea by the modern-day PC cult (which is basically Gramscian/Frankfurt School Communism) to immigrants from South America, and the idea of "PoC," is a complete nonsense, though, because "nation" is still largely about where you were born, and about living with people who are somewhat like you (because born from the same soil) - either in terms of genetics, ideas and culture, or both.

The Statue of Liberty poem idea of America (itself written by a socialist) doesn't represent a possible idea for a nation, because a nation can't be based on immigration (though it may have some). It has to be based on a society that's knit together by similarity, habituation and ancestral ties going back in history: what's called "rootedness." That's what makes for a relatively high-trust, relatively unified culture.

In this case, as always, the Left drinks its own Kool-Aid - it actually believes the nonsense about social constructionism (it actually believes the nonsensical idea that you can transform a society in a revolutionary way by changing words and social habits). That's why Communism is starting to fail now at the globalist/PC cult level, just as it failed at the national level numerous times in the 20th century: in fact, while some of the ideas that bind us in society are obviously socially constructed, the vast majority are grounded in, and partly shaped by our biology; and our biology forms a tether for the socially constructed ideas (they can "wander" a bit, but not too far).

Some on the Alt Right thought the movie hilarious precisely because it represents as an ideal for Blacks what Whites are forbidden from thinking about: an exclusive ethnostate.

The reality is that most "SJW" stuff in movies is box-ticking exercises (and to that extent, the critique you might get from SJWs is partly correct - it's insincere posturing). The diversity industry is such a malignant cancer that there are a million and one landmines out there for any commercial company or product, any one of them easily exploitable by someone with a grudge, or someone who wants to make a pile of cash. That's the general idea of the PC cult, to have people on tenterhooks so they're easily controlled, so they'll toe the party line automatically.

It was actually quite a fun movie though. One gets the feeling that the people at Marvel, though they may virtue signal as furiously as anyone else, for fear of losing their jobs, are actually more enthused about making great comic book movies than they are about being political activists in their profession.

Also, Wakanda was a thing in the comics right from the early 70s, I believe, pretty much as depicted. It was meant in the liberal spirit of, "People are equal, and Blacks could do great things too if they had the chance." The comics were always fairly liberal, though formerly (until the last decade or so) they put storytelling above propaganda.

This isn't Tumblr lol

But it sounds like ataraxia rather than nirvana. Nirvana is ceasing to understand yourself as a queer kind of thing that's situated vaguely behind the eyes, looking out at the world; IOW it's the cessation (usually at first momentary, a "glimpse", then over time one gets in the saddle - or out of the saddle, rather :) ) of the ordinary, everyday sense of self.

Epicurean ataraxia is more like equanimity, tranquility, etc. You stay within a fairly muted range of emotions and desires and take the world as it comes.

They are kind of related, not a million miles from each other (ataraxia might be one kind of natural result of nirvana for some people), but the one is a gestalt switch as a result of specific kinds of training (e.g. meditation), the other is better understood as a form of ethico-psychological training for facing a world rightly understood, which may result in a habituated equanimity.

I'm curious about other's thoughts on a timeless or objective moral code. Perhaps you disagree with my existence postulate and think there are alternatives. — Robot Brain

I think there are a gazillion timeless moral codes - pick any perspective, any point of view, and the world automatically crystallizes as having objectively good or bad bits in relation to that point of view, and objectively good or bad things someone can do who takes on that point of view. A rock, a tree, the human race, one's people, one's self, etc.

I also think there's less variation in morality than seems at first glance. I believe Pinker has gone over this, but there's a good deal of commonality in moral codes. If you look at the history of the concept of "natural law" it came about precisely in the context of Greek and Roman conquest and hegemony, when jurists and philosophers were surprised to see that foreign systems of moral codes and laws had their own peculiarities as expected, certainly, but also some commonalities.

This is largely because biology forms a sort of tether - we can mold our behaviour in all sorts of ways at need (i.e. we can "act" in all sorts of ways), but it doesn't stick unless it fits nicely with our biologically given predispositions.

So you are saying a life without meaning can not be saved? — SherlockH

Generally speaking, yes, apart from the outliers I mentioned. It does seem that most human beings are built to see their life in the perspective of some transcendental over-arching contextual view or other, whether that be traditionally religious, or patriotic, or the quasi-religious perspective of the modern Left. We just seem to hum along better with a sense of transcendence like that.

Can you be more specific about what I said that suggests that?

You mean reincarnation? — Michael Ossipoff

Yeah, normally in New Age circles that sort of thing is called "metaphysical." I don't see how reincarnation can be connected to metaphysics strictly so-called.

While I think that your post takes Frank's questions in an interesting direction, there's still a glaring philosophical puzzle skulking in the corner: does the acquisition of concepts/language/practices sit atop this basic animal nature (e.g. perceptual capabilities) or transform this nature; in other words, are you arguing for a layer cake conception of human mindedness or a transformational conception? — Ilyosha

I should think it's largely one thing built on top of another, but I'm sure there are also cross-connections all over the place. (For instance, sometimes conceptions can alter how things seem to us - certainly, on occasion, at first glance.)

Eh? This sounds like you're using the word "metaphysics" in a New Age sense, rather than a philosophical sense

Generally speaking, people in that sort of scenario, if there are things they could be doing to pull themselves out of suffering, but they aren't doing them, it's because they don't have anything "outside themselves" to believe in (a God, an ideal or principle, another person, e.g. a child or a beloved, etc., etc.). It's a cliche, but it's true: generally, human psychology usually needs to be focused on goals that transcend the ordinary self.

There are exceptions - some people function quite happily pursuing self-generated goals related solely to self-betterment - but on the whole most people seem to live more happily when they're dedicated to some goal external to them - raising a family, doing charitable work, working for the betterment of one's people or one's nation, working ad majorem Dei gloriam, etc.

If someone won't help themselves, then maybe getting them to help someone else will help them help themselves too.

Yes, it's very useful to distinguish those cognitive abilities we have that we share with animals (that are therefore pre-verbal) from those that require the use of words and concepts. Schopenhauer distinguished between Reason (which uses words and concepts) and the Understanding, which we share with animals.

Obviously, animals can distinguish 3-d objects and their position in space, they can distinguish colours and textures, smells, etc. They can distinguish things as defined by such criteria. The dog can tell that the postman is a living 3-dimensional creature like them, arse-for-the-biting-of, but they don't know what "post" is, or the social role "postman." There's also obviously some language of emotions (mammals, with their more developed limbic systems, are distinguished by their ability to signal their inner states by various means - noises, touches, gestures, etc.). Some aspects of sex and gender would fit in here too - males and females are instantly recognizable to each other, and as with infant animals, some elements of "cuteness" probably cross species boundaries too (in fact by different aspects of the same principle, neoteny; usually a "lady" dog, say, is "prettier" - i.e. more neotenous - than a male).

There's a whole bunch of stuff like that. You can actually get along at a rudimentary level in life without much use of concepts and words at all - it can even be quite pleasurable (not for the chattering classes, for whom it could only possibly ever be a break, but for most normal people, who are generally fairly taciturn).

Although it has to be said that human children can probably sense the "shape" of social roles before they have the words to plug into their own thoughts. We're exquisitely designed to follow social cues, etc., to "fit in." So a good deal of acculturation in the early years can indeed be pre-verbal too. (As is a good deal of infant thought - I remember as a small child having thoughts about the world that were like intangible shapes in the mind, fitting together or not fitting together along the lines of what I later recognized to be logic, once I had names for them. Human children - as opposed to animal young - already have a more sophisticated mental equipment, waiting for words, symbols and concepts to gradually take the place of the various idea-shapes they're already working out in a wordless way.)

But yes, once words, symbols, concepts enter the picture, the cognitive landscape is vastly extended, as is the possibility of various social roles, and acculturation to them.

If there is objective morality, then equal interests per life time for each sentient being should be the aim to achieve. — Atheer

This seems obviously wrong on the face of it. In the first place, morality doesn't dictate what peoples' aims should be, it shapes the way they try to achieve those aims. Morality/Justice is adverbial, so to speak, one behaves morally, it's not that one is supposed to behave with some particular specified aim, with some particular specified result (and that's what's called "moral").

In the second place, what business of yours is the particular distribution of goods in society? People achieve whatever they are able and/or willing to achieve, which is both shaped and limited by their intrinsic capabilities (genetics) and their social situation (e.g. family, education, milieu) - it's up to them what they strive for (e.g. whether it's equal to others) not you.

If all you're saying is that nobody should hinder anyone else from doing whatever harmless thing they damn well please, to the best of their capabilities, then I would agree; but it seems you want a particular distributive result.

But equal distribution has no more sacred moral standing than any other random distribution (e.g. "90% for me and my cronies, the rest for the plebs").

One might also agree with some degree of compensation for those worst affected by unfortunate circumstances, etc. - that seems like a nice thing to do. But it's not particularly moral, it's not how one ought to behave in a moral sense, it's more of a charitable act that one ought to do in a looser sense, a sense that respects a generalized obligation of kindness and giving, that the more fortunate have towards the less fortunate (such that one is not immoral, but rather a churl, if one ignores it).

One might call the lumpiness of the distribution of luck a "cosmic injustice" - it is indeed "unfair" (of life, in a loose sense) that some people should be born lucky and others not, but that doesn't translate into it being a matter of human beings having done something morally wrong or actionable. It's not (usually) the lucky person's fault that the unlucky person is unlucky. And if it is, it's the result of particular, specifiable actions on the lucky one's part, not of what they are (i.e. lucky). One may say that something has to be done, but that something can't involve punishing the lucky, because that would itself be a primary injustice (punishing people who are innocent of wrongdoing).

This is quite a deep subject actually, it's one of the main topics that Aristotle and the Scholastics spent a lot of time thinking over.

The short answer is that the totality of logical possibilities is always constrained in some way (e.g. bullets don't turn into soap bubbles like in Infinity War), and that constraint represents things' nature or essence, which is basically a thing's set of potentialities when it encounters various contexts.

This gets rid of the problem of induction (which is probably why Aristotle said "induction is easy" and unproblematic). When you induct that something will happen in the future, given certain conditions, you're not basing your induction on past instances, you're basing it on the fact that you're pegging the entity with having a particular nature in terms of which only some actions are possible (and, in the concept, in the essence, logically necessary) under those conditions - and that would have been true in the past, is true now, and will be true in the future.

The difference I think we see with hindsight and a few hundred years of modern philosophy (i.e. where the old school essentialists were wrong), is that it was a mistake to think that essences are perceived (as inhering in the object, and then somehow we "read them off" from the object). Rather we punt them, and see what fits with eventuating behaviour (scientific method - science being "instructed common sense"). If a proposed essence fits the consequent behaviour of an object consistently, then it's permissible to rest our case and say "well, it looks like this thing is an x." (Although of course the case is kept on archive, should an anomaly crop up in the future.)

IOW, the old school essentialists were correct to say that things have natures and essences, particular ways they are and are not, particular sets of potentiality, and they were correct to say that what we're doing with cognition is trying to ken those essences. But they were wrong to say that we can "read off" those essences from the objects (the same plain way we'd see the colour of something). There is no necessary connection between what we say and how things are, it's always a guess that never leaves the logical status of conjecture, even if strongly corroborated.

Pain and suffering aren't intrinsically linked to self-awareness - or at least, to the extent that they are, they're linked to self awareness at a level of self-awareness way below the human cognitive level - at a level that we share with animals. Buddha would have said that animals feel joy and suffer, and I think most people would agree, certainly re. the "higher mammals."

The only difference with the more sophisticated form of self-reflection that we have is that the horror of it all becomes more apparent, because we understand it in more articulated detail. The cow to the slaughter perhaps senses something amiss, feels pain and fear, and feels the bludgeon. The human to the slaughter feels all that, but also understands what the whole thing is - a monstrous Moloch.

IOW, Buddha's "Desire," Spinoza's "Conatus," Schopenhauer's "Will," operate at the level of striving, surviving life in general, they're not specifically to do with the possession of our kind of reflective cognitive apparatus. Everything acts to protect itself and enhance its own life, and to that end cleaves to some things and avoids other things. I suppose this is either a "boo" or "hooray" fact, depending on one's mood. But it is what it is.

Incidentally, this is also why Buddhism is difficult and takes a while - you're not just trying to get a calm mind and a clear perception of reality, but you're trying to loosen up a very deep-seated urge or tendency that exists at the animal level too (if you don't do that, your insight is unstable, like a candle in the wind, flickering and going out).

Re. your last point: I'm not sure wisdom and knowledge can be achieved without self-awareness - after all, self-awareness is a form of knowledge, so there'd be a gap.

They can both be right if they're using different "Frames" (i.e. looking at the situation from different perspectives, with differing central values).

Or: one of them must be right and one of them wrong if they're both using the same Frame. And that can be for various reasons (mistake in reasoning, misinformed, poor perception, stupid, etc.).

On a psychological note, I don't think we can expect people to change their mind on the strength of one argument (not unless it's a problem amenable to a slam-dunk solution, which most things people argue about aren't). We're all building a model of the world as we go, and often people have to chew things over and adjust their model in private before they'll openly accept something. That's why it's a bit churlish to press the advantage too much in argument. A bit of light mockery is ok, but, being kind, we have to give people a bit of space to change their minds.

Moreover, the deployment of our concepts is not governed by truth, but by their range of illumination. This is not on account of their being arbitrary ('subjective'), but absolutely necessary. — StreetlightX

I think this is almost right in a few ways, but when you say "their range of illumination" I'm reminded of the old adage about looking by the lamppost for the lost keys at night.

IOW, in venturing beyond the known, we do in fact use truth as a guide - in the sense of it being an ideal to aim towards.

Every great philosopher then, is measured by what he or she brings into view — StreetlightX

If they don't bring into view something that's true, then they're merely imagining logical possibilities.

I do agree with you that philosophy operates at the level of framing, but it's not done for its own sake, like a game, but to discover how the world is, how we should live in a world that's that way, etc.

Even "the cat is on the mat" could have tremendous purport if you're likely to trip over it when you're walking up to the nuclear button.

I don't think that makes a difference, because you can't just "create a life" and leave it in the dumpster. "Creating a life" in the sense of procreation as that is normally understood, logically involves and requires sustained sacrifice and un-selfish action for many years.

Okay. Seems you're a utilitarian, then. — Thorongil

No, not really, not even strictly a consequentialist. I don't think there's any hard and fast dichotomy between consequentialism and deontology. Deontology is just the "strategic" version of consequentialism, which is at the "tactical" level. (IOW, general rules of behaviour are instituted because - so it is hoped or believed, or trusted - they create general conditions that lead to good consequences; but that sometimes means having a general rule override strictly consequentialist decision-making, because the benefit of following the general rule and having it be a general rule that everyone follows becomes itself a higher-order value.)

That wasn't my argument. I'm not an antinatalist, remember. But this logic cuts both ways, so the procreator isn't on any firmer footing. — Thorongil

I think the burden of justification is on the wrong side here. It's like the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" - people don't need to justify just being who they are and doing what they're doing, it's interference with people being who they are and doing what they're doing that requires justification (which is usually on the basis of the harm principle - i.e. if someone being who they are and doing what they're doing is harming someone else without justification, then interference may be justified).

I do not see that there could be any such benefits, given the nature of what a benefit is. — Thorongil

Think about what you're saying here: you're asking me if there are any non-selfish benefits to devoting time and energy to the raising and nurturing of another life. ;)

Ah, I said that because you were questioning whether a p-zombie would behave as we do, but the stipulation is that it does - it behaves indistinguishably from us (so it wouldn't die of starvation because of its lack of consciousness for example).

I think the problem is that questioning whether other people have consciousness isn't really a well-formed question (or, it's not a question that actually makes any sense), it just seems to be.

Actually digging into the philosophy a bit: there are broadly two senses in which we use the concept of consciousness:-

A. A publicly verifiable thing. We observe the world, we see things avoiding some things, cleaving to other things, and that kind of behaviour is what we call "conscious." Animals have it, although there's a fuzzy line where animals don't seem to have it any more and their behaviour can be explained as purely mechanical and "robotic" (e.g. bacteria, ants, things like that). And this sense of consciousness has reasonable, publicly verifiable tests, like "How many fingers am I holding up?"

B. Something each of us has or is that is completely private (no one else can see your consciousness, or can tell whether you "have" it or not).

I think the problem is that, generally speaking, the latter sense, which probably derives from religion (ideas about soul, spirit, etc.), is often confused with the former sense, in that having B is supposed to be what makes A possible. B is supposed to be an un-publicly-verifiable inner thing that makes the publicly-verifiable A behaviour happen.

Most of the philosophical battles in philosophy of mind seem to be around some people thinking that B is a real thing, and that if you don't have it, you can't be conscious, even under conditions when most would say you're conscious in sense A (the p-zombie).

Detractors of B point out that we seem to get along perfectly well in the A sense regardless of whether we have B or not.

I don't know what the answer is, it depends on how you squint at it. Sometimes one thinks having this inner "registering" of outside events and of inner thoughts is the most weird and important thing in the world, and that denying it would lead to hideous atrocity; sometimes the detractors seem right and it's all a fuss about nothing.

One point: it looks like we're getting pretty close to being able to scan peoples' brains and know what they're thinking. If that's the case, then in the end, the complaints just come down to an ontological truism elevated to something grand and mysterious: I am not you, and you are not me.

I think you're missing the point re. the p-zombie thing, it's a stipulation, a thought experiment, an "intuition pump" (a tool to draw out and clarify our intuitions about something) not an empirical hypothesis (that there could be such a creature).

I love the way some philosophers (e.g. Dennett) handle it though: they cut the Gordian knot by saying simply (in complicated ways) that we are p-zombies! :)

I'm not sure how you get the idea that I'm a moral relativist when I explained in my response, as part of its context, that and how morality is objective.

Morality is indeed objective - but it's not intrinsic. Another way of saying that might be that it pertains to action not being. IOW the act of making babies is neither good nor bad intrinsically, it's objectively good or bad (from whatever point of view - e.g. human beings or dromedary jumping-slugs) depending on circumstances. And in relation to any given desideratum, procreation has objective costs and objective benefits that can be weighed up.

This also means that (compressing a large argument down to a caricature) the "Nature" one might wish to protect by not having us filthy humans polluting the planet is also intrinsically neither good or bad, so "it's evil to make babies because muh Nature" isn't an argument.

Most environmentalist philosophy is just one bunch of humans trying to force another bunch of humans to behave the way they want to, using bogus arguments, social shaming tactics and the occasional capture of a corrupt legal system. The only bit that makes credible sense as philosophy is, "Don't foul your own nest."

Is any natural event or creature intrinsically right or wrong?

Procreating is just something people do, something they're semi-compelled to do (most people have some degree of broodiness, and sexual intercourse is one of the most sought-after pleasures). It is in peoples' nature to procreate; we are a form of being that (among other things) procreates.

In that sense we ourselves are a possible measure of "good" and "bad" (what's good or bad for us). Just as the world crystaliizes as objectively good or bad relative to any given point of view - a rock, a galaxy, a plant - so do we too have a point of view of our own, a nature, a way that we live. (In philosophical terms an essence or nature.) And the perpetuation of that through time, its flourishing, has some value, just naturally (again, it's just part of our nature to value ourselves).

And in that sense procreation (making babies) can be good or bad only in relation to other things that are good or bad for us. (The limit to it would probably be something like "but not up to the point of fouling our own nest.")

IOW, you just have to weigh it up, procreation is one value in the context of several important values. And here there's a hierarchy that fluctuates with circumstances (sometimes it's wise to hold off and build up a career for example, sometimes the opposite, it depends on the people and their circumstances, and it's for them to decide).

With regard to the known, one must stick to accurate beliefs about what exists and doesn't exist; with regard to the unknown, one's own guess is as good as anyone else's, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Regarding the over-arching context of ordinary, everyday experience, regarding what sort of setting the jewel of experience might have, everyone is equally ignorant, nobody seems to have a backdoor hotline to reality, nor a guarantee of knowing the way it really is.

What happens is that as we encounter things, we guess at what the world outside experience has to be like for experience to have been that way, and although we're usually right, if we're careful, it's always possible we might be wrong. So there is a gradual transformation of the unknown (about which one can guess) into the known (about which one knows or doesn't know) over time, gradual revelation of what is, but it's hard won.

If Mary threatens Jack it is because she thinks he can make a choice. — Londoner

Excellent.

What's deterministic is the biological machinery that issues in thoughts and actions - for example, the fact that the sound "Ouch!" comes out of my mouth when I hit my thumb with a hammer is a result of largely mechanistic, deterministic processes (that sometimes go wrong, fail of their function), and the fact that I have a subjective blinding flash of pain is also largely the result of deterministic, mechanistic processes going on in the brain; but the fact that this particular sound and that particular image mean their respective signifieds, is a function of social rules. Meaning is not something generated solely in the brain, but also something from the outside world that's attuned-to by the brain. It's a stable pattern of behaviour that arises out of the dance of mutual interaction between deterministic systems that are relatively sealed-off from each other's influence at the level at which their own internal determinism operates.

Mary can expect a certain type of behaviour of Jack, because they're both attuned to the same folkways, ways of interaction, use of language, gestures, etc.

The entity that's making the choice is the total organic being ("moist robot") Jack, it's not any of the innumerable little deterministic processes that are causing Jack's behaviour, it's the whole relatively sealed-off "boat" of Jack, who is an internally-deterministic process navigating a chaotic ocean, with imperfect knowledge and imperfect information, and the burden of the necessity of choosing among more or less dubious courses of action.

Respect is given for achievement of some sort, you don't get respect just for existing.

Tolerance as a principle:- It falls out of the reality that war is expensive, always the worst outcome for most of the people involved, and best avoided whenever possible. Tolerance opens up a space for the other's co-operation. You behave nicely, and if the other reciprocates, everything is copacetic. But tolerance has its limits, it's subject to the more important principle of survival (you have to survive before you can flourish, and a rule built to enhance flourishing isn't necessarily useful for survival) - to tolerate real threat may be part of a strategy up to a point, but too much tolerance not only gives you up to the possibility of death by a thousand cuts, but it also turns you into a target for other predators and parasites.

Tolerance as a policy, or a form of discipline-: We have all sorts of tribal, animalistic, status-jockeying urges, and sometimes they're useful, but in a modern context, mostly they're not. So when we find ourselves having those sorts of feelings - such as instinctive dislike or distrust of the alien, often very useful in our ancestral environment - in an inappropriate context, like the context of modern life, we can tame those feelings.

Eventually, as tolerance becomes instinctive, it produces a suave attitude to intrusions of novelty. Then you have a canny, mature population.

It's a bit of a problem, but it's relatively easily remedied - have one thing in your life where your relation to what you produce isn't like that. What people normally call a "hobby," but of course it's a bit bigger than that, it can encompass higher level creative stuff - art, music, etc.

There's a trade-off between the amount of alienation and the difficulty of the labour. Technological progress has made things easy (press a button and do what the labour of a dozen men would have been required for in the past), but that very ease is what distances the labourer from their product; on the other hand, our ancestors went in this direction because they were pissed off having to work so hard for a poor result. Nevertheless, we are not bound by their decisions going forward, we just have to keep in mind the baselines of unpleasantness they were trying to avoid with ingenuity and the strategem of progress.

Basically a lot of the problems the Left is canvassing - the Rousseauian element in the Left, one might say - comes from a recognition that we have a hankering for a natural, simpler life. And that's true, that's what Nature designed our bodies and brains for, our ancestral environment, and while we are slowly evolving to cope with modern life, and we may be able to engineer ourselves so that we are our "best bits", part of us still hankers for a life out in nature, confronting relatively simple tasks we can do with our whole bodies, that have relatively immediate feedback.

Our social mindset is also designed for a small group of people we know very well and are accustomed to, who are relatively closely genetically related (tribe, clan, ethnic group, race). That set of expectations being often thwarted by often impersonal modern living, is the kernel of much discontent in society - we need to find ways of satisfying those expectations and urges that don't necessarily indulge them, but at least neutralize any ill effects they might have in a modern context. There are many close-enough substitutes, and there are many different ways of coming to terms with those itches and hankerings intelligently.

To some extent, and in general, rules won't "take" unless they conform somewhat with native predispositions. Our genetics and biology form a tether that gives us some "play," some elbow-room, but prevents us from being infinitely plastic.

Yeah, it was from a stint teaching kids in a primary school in a small country town in the Bavarian mountains (IIRC) that Wittgenstein started to get some of the ideas that went into his later philosophy. From observation of what you have to do to teach kids, he started to realize the limitations of the philosophy of the Tractatus. Not that it was totally wrong, but that it was a special case in a bigger picture. In fact, in terms of the later philosophy, the Tractatus is a more elaborated "language game" thought experiment in itself, a more elaborate version of the toy experiments with grunts and blocks that the PI opens with. Seeing how the "grand philosophies" of the past, the systematic overviews, are themselves fixated-on miniature "language game" examples, helps one see to the core of the function of philosophy - and what goes right and wrong with it. That's why Wittgenstein recommended putting the books side by side and comparing.

One thing to note, the "rules" don't have to be articulate or present to the mind - in many examples they're just "know how", either a habit inculcated by practice (in which case it was conscious, but doesn't have to be any longer, like driving a car), or something we pick up, as we say, "by osmosis," by acute and focused observation, but without already knowing the words for what's going on. As Wittgenstein says somewhere, the bigger part of the apriori is "agreement in use." And then some of the "rules" we live by can come to the surface in consciousness, and can be made explicit, tabled.

Another way of looking at this, is that genetics provides us with a developmental path, an unfolding sequence of particular expectations about how the world, how nature, how the developer's environment, will be; and that includes the social world (e.g. expectations of reciprocity arising at a certain age). Made-up rules that don't go against those deep expectations will tend to be passed along and survive (the first and most important social "carrier" of rules across generations is the family), those that do won't be.

The game metaphor is instructive: games often require some degree of both competition and co-operation. (A useful trope to fix in the mind, a useful thought experiment, is to think of a small child observing some kids playing an unfamiliar game, and then joining in - what's happening there? How does "picking up a game" happen? What are the usual concrete steps?) There's often a layer of tacit co-operation that has to be there before competition can occur. And it's the same when it's just layers of co-operation - there has to be some pre-established harmony of action, agreement in use, before agreement-in-use proper - conscious, or articulated - can get going. (Shades of Aristotle's Prime Mover argument for God!)

Well most moral arguments in philosophy use thought experiments to try to tease out our intuitions, which is to say, the feelings and thoughts we have about what's right or wrong in any given scenario.

When we do so, we find that there's the usual bell-curve distribution - there's a good deal of agreement, but some disagreement on the fringes. But that's exactly what you'd expect if morality is largely driven in the first instance by our genes, which select first of all for kin altruism, and in a more vague way, for a kind of racial feeling (genetic closeness/distance), and in an even more vague way, for general sociability and like-mindedness (elective affinity, friendship). But there are slight variations in strategy there that our genes throw up too, and then even more "play" at higher, more abstract levels.

Effectively, the situation with morality is that there are a billion and one possible objective moralities. Take anything - a grain of sand, a turd, a person, a robot, the human race, tigers - and the world instantly crystallizes into objectively good and bad possibilities from the point of view of the existence of that thing. So we as human beings, rational animals, have inbuilt a certain point of view - we (on average, as a rule) act from the point of view of first of all, of reproductive fitness, the transmission of our genes, which we act to further willy nilly, because human beings in the past that didn't have that intuition didn't survive to reproduce. And then, built on top of that foundation, we also have certain intuitions at the more meta level of what's good for social groups (families, kin, clans) that have reproducing members, and so on. No two individuals will have exactly the same set of moral intuitions in this way, but there's a good deal of overlap and agreement (if there weren't, the human world wouldn't work at all, communities couldn't form, etc.). And then on top of that we have even more rarified, abstract considerations about social structures (this is where the social constructionist aspect comes in - although our genetics form a tether, we do have some freedom to try out possible social rules).

But separate from this issue, is the fact that you can search in the logical space of possible social rules, for some "tree" of consistent morality that maps onto any one of those billion possible "what's good/bad for x" perspectives.

So effectively, what we are doing in society, and what we are doing in philosophy, is looking for a good, consistent set or structure of moral rules in possible-social-rule-space, that maps onto the largest average consistent set of moral intuitions that most people have. And that logical tree that we're looking for is an objective morality, built around a basket of closely-related desiderata that ultimately fall out from the basic requirements for human existence - reproduction, co-operation, fulfillment, pleasure, etc. (Here we could also think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is closely related to the way that moral goals are built on top of each other, and all ultimately on the foundation of genetic fitness and reproduction.) But that purely logical structure also coincides with our inbuilt feelings and intuitions - it has to, otherwise we'll reject it, it will never "stick."

In this way, our intuitions tend to fit together coherently (but not perfectly), and then we're also constantly trying (especially with the advent of new technologies, which open up new possibilities of things that can be good or bad) to set up a kind of feedback to our intuitions from our logical explorations, trying to make our moral systems ever more clear and coherent - the process works in tandem, back and forth between intuitions/feelings, and objective conditional moral logic (if ... then you should).

I'm not very well versed in that aspect of Kant (I've only really delved into him from a narrow angle on his epistemology as such), but my understanding is that he denied that scientific (which in contemporary terms meant demonstrable-with-certainty) knowledge was possible about speculative/faith matters, yes; but I'm not sure what he thought the relation of practical knowledge was to faith. Off the top of my head I'd say you're probably right, and I don't see any reason why they would clash in terms of his philosophy.

I think there's two ways to understand "phenomena are presentation" - either in an idealistic/phenomenological sense, in which there's nothing (or there cannot be shown to be anything) "out there, behind" the phenomenon; or in what I believe to be the true sense, in which the "out there" is in causal continuity with the "in here."

One might say, in a trope, that the idealistic/phenomenological view is "thin" (notionally a sort of flat surface, like a map, beheld by a hovering, abstract, point of view) whereas the correct view is "thick" (a participated-in "rod" with beholder and beheld as two poles of one existent).

The content of the phenomenon is a re-presentation, — tim wood

I don't believe there's any good reason to think this. On the contrary, phenomena are all direct presentation. There is something like representation in the brain, but we don't have access to it (e.g. some configuration of neuronal firings may represent an object in some abacus-like calculation in the brain, but that's all "rough work" going on underneath conscious awareness). Consciousness isn't something locked inside the head, or in the brain, it's actually the name of a process (causal, physical process) that takes place between an object and a conscious object. The brain is a necessary part of it of course, but so is, e.g., the tree, the actual physical tree "out there." (But there's no "out there", the tree itself is part of the process.) Memory, dreams, reflections, are time-delayed perceptions, gerrymandered in various ways. (cf. Riccardo Manzotti for this "Process Externalism" - precursors being the New Realists, and a roughly similar contemporary theory from a scientific point of view being J J Gibson's theory of perception and "affordances.")

As to the rest of it, I think your problem was solved by Aristotle, in his distinction between actuality and potentiality (Act and Potency in the jargon). Aristotle harmonized Parmenides and Heraclitus by positing a kind of existence inbetween being (actuality) and nothing: potentiality. The range of potentialities an object has (e.g. of a rubber ball to melt, but not to sprout wings and fly) constitute the object's essence or nature, and causality is the transformation of one or more potentialities of an object into actualities, by the impingement of the actuality of another object (e.g. heat from a fire applied to the ball).

"Work" then, in your sense, is the application of an object's actuality (being) to another object's potential, making it actual. A machine is potentially a machine when it's switched off, it's actually a machine when it's switched on by another actuality (e.g. engineer).

And then you get into full hylomorphism, the four different types of causality, and all sorts of other things in the extraordinarily sophisticated classical (Platonic/Aristotelian/Scholastic) philosophy, in relation to which most modern philosophy is like a child's finger-painting.

what they are doing commits them to nothing other than constructing models — ProcastinationTomorrow

Even that implies a fair amount of metaphysics, I think. Who or what are "they", what is a "commitment", what is "construction", what is a "model"?

It's not really possible to think at all without taking a good deal for granted, and actually what's taken for granted is a bunch of fairly boring stuff that most people agree with and that comports with common sense.

However, one understand what those scientists mean: they mean they're not committing themselves to anything particularly bizarre or unusual.