It's a question of degree. I think while peoples' experiences are ontologically distinct (different experiences) they share enough similarity so that triangulation is possible; but some people can experience things that are dissimilar enough to others' experiences to make them less communicable.

On the positive side, for example, not many have experienced, say, Earthrise, on the negative side, not many have experienced being nearly eaten by a shark - but even these experiences have some similarities to more common experiences to make them somewhat communicable (one can make a "patchwork" description that takes bits from things others have experienced more commonly).

So I think yes you can be "alone" in that sense, but it's quite rare; for most things, one's experience is fairly common and easily communicable. For example pop music attests to the commonality of most of the experiences surrounding love won, sustained and lost.

Hedonism is based on a desire,
and self-indulgence is a pleasure. — Number2018

Hedonism is generally understood as a philosophy that sets the pursuit of pleasure (understood in the sense of pleasures that are sensorily gratifying, ecstatic, etc.) as the primary ethical goal.

How do you access knowledge of this standard? It's not a state of affairs we can observe. — Benkei

It's difficult to observe, but not impossible - for example for "human flourishing" you can have, as a first approximation, proxies like mortality rates, infant mortality rates, suicide rates, successful medicines, reported happiness indexes, that kind of thing. It's necessarily imperfect, and not an absolute measure, but the main thing is that you can see the direction of trends, and change relative to previous measurements.

you weren't just "present[ing] how [you] think things are." You were saying how things are. — Michael Ossipoff

I really fail to see the difference, one's opinion about how things are is one's opinion about how things are, and that is an assertion. Nobody expects (or would accept) that some one particular person has a backchannel to reality such that their utterances are guaranteed to be true, so the lack of such a thing is no problem.

I think the nub of our disagreement is probably that you think that a statement about the Whole would have to have ascertainable logical/evidentiary links to the Whole (which would then justify or guarantee the truth of the statement), which would be impossible for a mere mortal.

I don't think knowledge is like that, I don't think logical/evidentiary links guarantee the truth of anything. Something can be as justified, as supported by evidence, as topped and tailed as you like, but still be wrong, whether it's about the whole or a part.

(IOW knowledge is not JTB, it actually never leaves the fundamental logical status of conjecture, a la Popper. All we ever do is make informed guesses.)

So, how do you prevent misunderstanding, then? — Posty McPostface

I don't think you can prevent misunderstanding by an means "internal" to rational discourse itself, "being on the same page" comes from having shared traditions, reference points and culture, and to some extent genetics (ethnicity, race); and that provides a launching pad for people having some basis for understanding each other.

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

By the objective standard of whether our behaviour helps towards the ultimate ethical goal.

Morality is objective and instrumental in one sense ("if you want x, then given your nature and the nature of the world, you must A,B,C") but the choice of ultimate goal towards which the whole structure of ethics tends is subjective in another sense (although we do seem to end up with a basket of closely related ultimate goals - IOW "human flourishing" isn't a million miles away from "general happiness", which isn't a million miles away from "my happiness", etc., the ultimate goals that have been proposed for ethics are interrelated to some degree).

With the process you outlined, you develop (as a growing, unfolding person) something like an analysis of what all the rules seem to be tending towards, and you pick out and crystallize that goal. Once picked out and highlighted, then as a thinking person you can turn back, revise and reconsider the rules with a view as to whether objectively they are likely to lead to the goal or not.

There's an interplay, a to-and-fro between these two directions (top-down and bottom-up) in the formation of ethics. We inherit loads of rules from genetics and culture, and most of them probably work (after all they've lasted all this time) but it's not guaranteed, and sometimes revision may be necessary, or the addition of new branches (e.g. with new technology, which offer new possibilities of moral/immoral behaviour).

The very fact that one would behave contrary to what something teaches indicates some lack in understanding of some facet or feature of an ideology or doctrinal truth. — Posty McPostface

Not necessarily, the person may just be struggling to overcome contrary tendencies in their psyche. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," and all that.

The key thing about most religious understandings is that they take man to be imperfect and his situation somewhat tragic. That's why hypocrisy isn't such a great evil to religious people, but something one can be forgiven for (within reason) provided they show contrition. That's why redemption is possible in most religious systems.

That, and because God is understood to be the ultimate arbiter and judge, not other human beings (for one thing, God knows the real facts of the case, including all the sinner's hidden thoughts and deeds).

But isn’t that the nature of an assertion? …certainty or claimed certainty of truth and accuracy? — Michael Ossipoff

No, an assertion just presents how one thinks things are, and if questioned one gives one's reasons. If something crops up that shows one was wrong, so be it. There's no "presumption" about it - what a strange concept to use in this context!

but if you think that logic applies to the whole of Reality, then we must agree to disagree. — Michael Ossipoff

By your own lights, how do you know that it doesn't, o "presumptuous" one? ;)

merely a faith. — Blue Lux

No, not merely a faith, it's corroborated, such that the world would have to be very different from how we both think it is, for our estimates to be not, in fact, objective like we think they are. We are justified in being sure of our opinion, so long as we always leave room for doubt.

But doubt has to be on the basis of some anomaly. Just the mere possibility that things might be different, is not in itself reason to doubt our settled model.

IOW, so much would have to be revised, so many settled facts and theories looked at again, that the evidence that would make all the effort we'd have to make to revise our settled model justified, would have to be very "big" and unusual (Hume's point).

This is why people think of extreme examples (like bullets turning into soap bubbles) to illustrate the kind of evidence we'd need to have to even begin to really seriously doubt the settled, generally accepted model.

When 'the thing' = human, no amount of diversity stops it from being 'the thing', — Christopher A

Yes it does, the thinghood of the group is dependent on communication, as I keep saying, and the generic "humanity" qualities aren't fine-grained enough for that. Viable groups have to share some measure of genetic similarity, which leads to some measure of shared culture and communication.

I think you're making a mistake analogous to the mistake that socialists made wrt the economy, you're underestimating and overlooking certain practical realities that rather put a spanner in the works for your theory.

But as I said, other than that, I think your idea has some interest. It's definitely worth exploring, both for its own sake as a possible way of looking at ethics, and for practical reasons (since it's quite feasible that we may actually achieve at least very long life in the not too distant future).

But these other points of view will inevitably be your point of view. — Blue Lux

You mean if we agree?

You'll need to read at least "Versions of 'our kind'" in Chapter 3 to see that there's no contradiction and Chapter 2 on why I think you're dead wrong regarding homogeneity. — Christopher A

OK, I've read those, I still think you're putting the cart before the horse: you still require a common basis of shared culture and communication before any group focus or group effort can get started, which is why (relative) homogeneity comes first. Of course some degree of diversity is necessary at the margin, but it's only a leaven.

It's the same all the way up and down nature: a thing is a thing, it has boundaries where there's some "mixing", but the bulk of the thing is the thing. A thing that's all mixed isn't a thing.

This presupposes that others perceptions, experiences, feelings and impressions say something contradictory to what mine do — Blue Lux

Eh? Not at all, they might agree with me. But they may not, and because I may be wrong, I am morally obliged to to look at other points of view, to cross-check.

That’s an assertion. About the character or nature of the whole of Reality — Michael Ossipoff

I get to do that, everyone gets to do that, including the people who's assertions about reality I'm taking into account in formulating my own.

And my statement, their statements, your statements, are either true or false. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

You're manufacturing a problem where there is none.

This:-

The term “our kind” is completely arbitrary — Christopher A

Contradicts this:-

act in a way that maximizes their probability of survival — Christopher A

"Our kind" is circumscribe by the possibility of communication and co-ordination, which is limited by biology and culture, which is why "diversity" isn't a strength, but a weakness.

IOW, ideally, you need a large degree of homogeneity plus a little bit of diversity to keep things jogging along.

Other than that, I like the idea of using immortality as a benchmark of sorts, but you'd have to extricate it from that politically correct rubbish for it to make sense.

But anyway... Perhaps you can see that line of thinking — Blue Lux

Yes, it's roughly in line.

A more modern way of looking at it is in terms of Bayesianism, and an idea proposed by neuroscientist Karl Friston, called the Free Energy principle (note: the term is used in a narrow technical sense).

An actual, full-on Bayesian machine would be too computationally expensive to house in our brains, but we have a sort of quick and dirty imitation of one, in that action and cognition at all levels basically seek to reduce expected surprise, or (much the same thing) minimize uncertainty. Of course something like this idea has been suggested by many people in many different terms, but the neat thing about the Free Energy idea (which is exceptionally difficult to understand, it's real big-brained stuff, requiring math) is that it links the "lower level" neuroscience with higher level cognitive functioning terms (e.g. Bayesian reasoning).

At any rate, the key take-home message is, I think, to conceive of knowledge more as a stock of expectations, rather than a logical deduction or some other kind of extrapolation from perception or awareness. Cognition explains perception by leaping beyond it and containing it as the explanandum, it isn't derived from it.

This ties in with Popper again: knowledge never leaves the status of conjecture, although we can be certain about our deductions, and somewhat confident in the corroborative eliminative tests we make based on modus tollens, we can never be absolutely 100% certain that we are modelling the world correctly, there's always some fallibility built in, or at least we have to make room, in our thought, for the possibility that we might be wrong (and this ties knowledge to ethics and politics, actually - think of Cromwell's plea: "I beseech thee, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you might be mistaken!" This was the beginning of democracy, in a Europe riven by vicious and violent civil strife between various religious certainties.)

Is that supposed to have something to do with what I said? — Michael Ossipoff

Uh yeah, it's a direct response to your:-

a presumption that your own perceptions, experiences, feelings and impressions, and your emotional conclusions from, and reaction to, them, have universal authority about how things are — Michael Ossipoff

Clearly, if I'm ready and willing to take into account others' perceptions, experiences, feelings and impressions, I don't think my own have universal authority ;)

All those forlorn love songs, stories and such, must have been from the "unusual" cases. — schopenhauer1

Cognitive bias: you are forgetting all the joyous music about love found.

Divorce rates hover over 50% I believe. — schopenhauer1

A comparatively recent phenomenon, as is the general unhappiness we see around us, the suicide rate in the midst of plenty, etc. We may hypothesize the cause (I think it's the baneful influence of Cultural Marxism, Feminism and Postmodernism, as filtered down to the populace in "pop" form since roughly the 1940s, but what do I know :) ), but it is at least notably a relatively recent thing. I agree that social media is highly problematic - again, a lot of these things are analogous to sugar craving or various other kinds of addiction, like porn addiction. We're built to crave things that were rare but good for us in our ancestral environment, so when we have an abundance of them some of us are really thrown off kilter.

Now you may scoff at the notion that basic forms of happiness should be so easy — schopenhauer1

I wouldn't scoff at that at all, but I think the difficulty in modern times is artificially created by ideology, as aforesaid. Careful improvements on traditionalism, rather than throwing the baby out with the afterbirth, would likely have been the ideal path, but instead the "intelligentsia" from the mid to the late 20th century got it into their heads that the whole thing had to be torn down, "revolutionized," reformed, etc., etc. Result: greater unhappiness, greater difficulty for ordinary people to find ordinary happiness.

When things go well for people, it’s even easier to scoff. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, sometimes, although for most people for whom "things are going well," it's because they worked at it; they often came from some set of circumstances that offered a contrast to "things going well," which motivated them to get out of it.

In all seriousness, I'm not immune to bouts of pessimism myself, but I do think the mood is parochial and comes from a diminished, somewhat myopic overview.

My own conclusion, and I hope nobody steals this idea (not that it is... probably... very significant), is that Knowledge is as if it is knowledge, and is only as if it is knowledge. — Blue Lux

Have you heard of Hans Vaihinger? He's one of those philosophers who was popular for a time but now forgotten, he wrote a book actually called The Philosophy of As If. You might be interested in it (although it's not quite as good as one thinks it might be from the title).

To reiterate: awareness is presence-with, actually just being (just being is always causally-concatenated with other being). One way of looking at it is that perceptions are perturbations of one's being - poetically speaking, one's very body and brain shimmer and thrill with the impact of rills of sound and light. What we experience when we see something is first of all that very perturbation of our being, and then partly consciously, partly unconsciously, the brain, our mind, however you want to think of it, tries to model what reality must be like for that perturbation to have occurred then and there, in that way, and then that sets our expectations for further experience. When symbolized in objective, public form, and ordered and structured into logical patterns, in language, in texts, on computers, those expectations become what we call "knowledge."

A lot of our knowledge was "worked out" by our animal/animalcule ancestors - we inherit their rough and ready sense of what the world is (which gave them at least a "pass" in their own lives, even if it may not have been wholly accurate), and then we refine it (cf. Schopenhauer for a marvelously concise distinction between "understanding," which we share with most of the higher animals at least, and "reason," the first being an instinctive, shared understanding, long worked-out, of the world as 3-dimensional, comprised of solids in motion, etc., etc., the second being more concerned with overt symbolization of the same). Some of this is partly what Plato was getting at with the idea of "Recollection." And in that sense you are right that we "already know" quite a bit about the world.

Now the perturbation of our being (what we call awareness or consciousness), in and of itself, is not yet knowledge. Knowledge is the projections (about reality) and expectations that perturbation elicits - whether from the instinctive level (again, what we share with animals) or from the level of our trained, learned and symbolized expectations about the world around us.

And knowledge always goes beyond, outside, refers outside of, the present perturbation (perception, awareness), to a larger world that's "outside" it (actually just not-it, but causally connected to it).

There's an element of "born with" for some people, but sometimes people learn pessimism or optimism too (e.g. from lots of failure or success).

Generally, the Buddhist analysis is good: our attitude to stuff can be divided into three directional tendencies - towards, away from, and indifferent.

But in order to describe something one must have a knowledge by acquaintance. — Blue Lux

Again, no, I think this is the confusion, there's no relation other than the vague one I mentioned. Awareness isn't knowledge and knowledge isn't awareness.

The real analogue of big knowledge in the individual would be not awareness, being-present-with, etc. Rather, say to take any ordinary animal as an example, it would be in the way an organism is built, such that it behaves in a way that "expects" its environment to be such-and-such. (And just as those "expectations" can occasionally be baulked, so can our knowledge be wrong, false, etc.)

Again, knowledge is a kind of structure, or tool, or programming. When we learn something about the world, that sets our expectations to be a certain way. If a thing is called "x" then we expect it will behave thus-and-so. If it doesn't, then either it's not an "x" or we need to revise our definition of "x." If it does behave that way, then it's an x.

This does relate somewhat to your "as if" point, but it's not problematic and doesn't make knowledge superfluous. It's all we've got to navigate our way through the world.

Going to an example like Mary the colour scientist, what Mary has before getting sight is knowledge, when she gets her sight, she doesn't learn anything new, she just becomes acquainted with colour, becomes aware of it. But that isn't knowing it any better; her becoming acquainted with colour, becoming present to/with colour, is a change in the present state of her conscious being, not a change in the structure of her expectations.

But wouldn't that count as being disingenuous? — Janus

Not if it was instinctive (by that I just mean the idea being "in the air" and people following it like a fashion - I remember it happening some time in the early to mid-80s).

Although people have objected to Freud's ego as well. — Blue Lux

They certainly have lol :)

I'm not saying anything particularly controversial. I'm saying that most people don't find a significant other or at least in some satisfactory manner. — schopenhauer1

Actually that seems like quite a controversial statement. Do you have a source for it or is it just your sense of things?

I think knowledge is superfluous. — Blue Lux

Superfluous to what?

money is merely a false material representation of value. — Noah33

This is wonky in two ways. In the first place, economic value is subjective, marginal utility. In the second place, in representing ratios of exchange of (subjectively) valued goods, money can't be "false," it either does its job or it doesn't (e.g. if the currency is inflated, etc.)

Value appears objective only because the multitude of economic actors, exchanging stuff according to their individual scales of preferences, results in relatively stable prices most of the time, but the system constantly adjusts to shifts in those preferences (e.g. something new is invented, lots of people now want it, and consequently some hitherto-valueless resource now has a value; people were sitting oblivious on top of coal and oil reserves that had no great value until various kinds of machinery were invented that everyone suddenly wanted to use).

The only thing we need now - is to weed out deterministic terminology. There are no cause and effect driven robots and computations. — Damir Ibrisimovic

I don't see how you can get away from talk about cause/effect and determinism, especially if agency talk can be broken down into deterministic talk. On the other hand, it might be possible to cast deterministic talk in terms of agency talk, but that strikes me as analogous to preferring to calculate the orbits of the planets from a geocentric point of view: theoretically, you could do it, but why?

It just seems reductionistic to distinguish between two forms of knowledge which are at base doing the same thing by different means, which seems to me to be what 'knowledge' does in general. I could just as easily analyze knowledge in terms of what is a priori or a posteriori, and fragment the question further, and lack a unified characterization of knowledge, and furthermore of consciousness... For is consciousness not a knowledge of being conscious? — Blue Lux

No, no, that's the confusion I think you're making: awareness is awareness, knowledge is a different thing, only very loosely connected with awareness.

Awareness is presence-with, an aspect of Being. Knowledge is more like a tool.

The point is an integral part of what most people consider a valuable good, is not achieved by most. — schopenhauer1

Not achieved by "most?" I'm not sure if people have such a concrete idea of their ideal partner as all that, and anyway, isn't it sort of a good thing if you find yourself loving someone who isn't your pre-planned ideal? Didn't the Stones have a song about that?

Ah, that reminds me, yes: love is all about loving what is.

a presumption that your own perceptions, experiences, feelings and impressions, and your emotional conclusions from, and reaction to, them, have universal authority — Michael Ossipoff

Oh ok, thanks for the sermon. But I haven't seen anyone else reporting on any universal particularism either. I suppose there are some people who claim "miracles" but such cases seem to fizzle out on close investigation.

But then there's always JBS Haldane's comment about beetles, which does give one food for thought :)

Well I haven't seen any manifestations of particularism in the universe, so I go with "indifferent." ;)

Again, why is equal distribution so important? And so worth cursing reality for the lack of it?

I mean, would you be happier if we were all identical clones raised in identical circumstances?

Eh, I think that's needlessly complicated. Knowledge is an objective body of symbolic structures (paper, ink, bits, words, etc.) that get their meaning from constantly-maintained social conventions (linguistic rules, habits), which purports to represent by means of those conventions the structure of the world. (Russell's "knowledge by description.")

What's often confused with that is simply awareness-of. (Russell's "knowledge by acquaintance.") That's the confusion you're making here, I think (a confusion that's been made by modern philosophy generally, from Descartes to the Idealists).

In a way, the larger, objective form of knowledge can be conceived of as a collective extension of awareness, and that would be the genetic/historical link between the two meanings. By being inducted into the larger body of knowledge, we avail ourselves of the experience (acquaintances with things) of others. But that's really just a metaphorical, sort of poetic way of looking at it. There is nothing like awareness, or a magnified or abstracted or rarified form of awareness, in the body of knowledge as such. Its representational quality is purely conventional.

But this is a form of disingenuousness. — Janus

I don't know whether it's disingenuous, it was probably an instinctive move by "Atheists" to shift the goalposts to make winning formal arguments against nonplussed religious believers easier on call-in radio shows and the like :)

The description can be rudimentary. Please note that even smallest unicellular organisms have a very complex genome... — Damir Ibrisimovic

Yes, I understand, that's the allowance I was making for directedness and teleology. There must indeed be some kind of rudimentary, "blind" computation of boundaries, etc. But the point I was making was that you don't get identity in the sense we're talking about, where free will comes into the picture, without the capacity for self-reflection. The organism may "know" about boundaries, in the sense that they're automatically computed and taken account of in its peregrinations, but it doesn't know in the way that we know, it isn't modelling itself to the degree that it actually has a sense of its own identity.

But none of that would have anything to do with morality, only that which is conducive to successful copulations. — Blue Lux

Yes, well that would be the irony of it: all our grand moral structures, which actually exist and actually are objective, ultimately exist because they're conducive to successful copulation.

But one has to be careful here: that doesn't mean successful copulation is the standard or criterion of morality. The standard and criterion of morality is the flourishing and success of a community and the individuals in it, and that has its own independent reasons.

The irony is simply that the reason WHY rules that are conducive to the group's flourishing have evolved, exist and are maintained, is because such objective rule-structures (with their own independent criteria) are in turn conducive to successful copulation.

It is to laugh, but there it is. Nature is full of such little ironies :)

Another one that's the cause of so much human suffering is that we are accidentally exquisitely over-engineered to feel pain and shame. Everybody hurts and all that. But it's another accidental byproduct.

So unevenly distributed? Ah right — schopenhauer1

What's wrong with uneven distribution?

True, but that's a pragmatic reason, not a philosophical reason :)

any without god, it would be even easier to say "so what". but yes, I hear you. — Aleksander Kvam

It's the same for a godfull and godless universe. Basically, unless you want to be good in the first place, nothing's going to argue you into it. Some human beings are like that (what I'm calling "sharks", by analogy with the dead-eyed, machine-like predatory quality of the shark) - they just don't have any sense of compassion, or fellow-feeling. They are outliers, but they exist, just as "saints" exist (people who are all love and compassion all the time). For them, no "should" argument would make sense anyway.

Most moral talk is basically preaching to the choir.

"Atheism" used to have the stronger sense of positive belief that God doesn't exist, and that's usually how religious people understsand it, as a positive denial of God's existence. Your friend probably has that at the back of their mind.

Recently, the fashion has been to call "Atheism" what used to be called "Agnosticism" (the "I simply lack belief because I haven't found the arguments convincing" idea). So the whole thing is a bit muddled now, with so-called "Atheists" (actually Agnostics) and Theists arguing at cross-purposes a lot of the time.