What kind of answer did you think the OP wanted? Were not its language and concerns explicitly neurobiological?

But I guess you have your Procrustean metaphysics and every conversation must be cut to fit. :hearts:

Woke people are emerging. Rednecks have been with us for a very long time. — creativesoul

Armed militia would worry me. Cancel culture is being matched by online extremism.

If there is unravelling, it is happening in both its directions.

"Red" is part of a language game played by a community. — Banno

Sure. There is a distinction to be made. But is it due to a "language game" or is it due to neurobiology?

One starts to sound awfully Whorfian about colour perception otherwise.

I thought you were honestly saying you would be happy with whatever the law prescribed. — Janus

:chin:

Sure. In the context of a neurobiological discussion, that certainly does become a meaningful use of words.

odd that folk seem to thing that philosophy of language explains away the question ... as if there were no experience, just its notion.

To the second point, you've summarized the general idea underwriting the laws(now defunct) that forbade black people from buying property in some community or another because they wanted to exercise their freedom to choose their own community members. — creativesoul

You are being terribly literal. But yes. Liberal democracy would mean being free to fight for such arrangements and free to contest such arrangements. If the political system actually works, the right balance results. And the outcome isn't determined by some Platonic moral abstraction, or even "a feeling". It is based on some rational and evidence-driven grounds. An optimisation principle.

To quite the contrary, I think that that is the opposite of unraveling. — creativesoul

It would help if you actually read what I say. What I said was that two cohesive interest groups are emerging via a dialectical confrontation. And that could be a crisis which produces its resolution in some mutually agreed new social balance. Or not. Depending on the US capacity for political change these days.

That's the mindset that is common, as you've hinted at, that is a part of the unraveling. The overvalued notions of individual freedom and liberty at the expense of the community. — creativesoul

That’s the bind. If you aren’t free to be unaffected by things then you aren’t really free. But there is no point to freedom unless it is so as to be able make choices in forming your communities - your social interest groups.

Isn’t the US unravelling in the sense that two opposed interest groups are forming more strongly - the woke against the rednecks? And aren’t both of these something like coercive tyrannies if you don’t particularly care to get involved with them?

What is natural is for human affairs to be in a flexible state of ravelling and unravelling in ways that optimise a general state of adaptedness to the world. When it comes to the pandemic response, what strikes the outsider about the US is its social confusion.

But as I have also argued, many think it is clear that folk are ready for a shift from the neoliberal order that has prevailed for the last 30 years - the era of peak resource extraction with no care for the environmental consequences. So great social confusion in the “world leader” is to be expected.

And the US may still be the most likely to lead the way into whatever follows as the next stage in world history. Even just by turning inwards, becoming a regional empire, that could be a key change. The US is also well positioned if it suddenly decided to go green in serious fashion. It has the tech creative advantage as well.

What could hold it back is that while it is a highly creative nation in terms tech and economics, it seems very poor at rewriting its political institutions to fit the times. The constitution and federation of states locks it into the past. The political sphere has long been captured by billionaires, industry lobbies and elite interest groups.

A modern state is constantly updating its political framework to better meet the needs of tomorrow. The US is strangely sclerotic on that score.

What do you mean — TiredThinker

Heh, heh. Ask a neurobiological question and get some rando pushing philosophy of language.

Sorry about your retinal disease. I’m sure it is more than a linguistic notion.

I was wondering if the perception of color is as defined as the wavelengths that produce — TiredThinker

You are asking what is in the end an impossible question because no one else can see inside your head to check. But we can say enough about how the eye and brain process colour experience to at least limit the scope for a difference.

There are for example tetrachromates who have a fourth pigment. The prediction from neurobiology, from how the peak sensitivies of the four cone pigments were arranged, was that they ought to be able to discriminate an awful lot of extra shades of orange that regular folk can’t see. And light mixtures were devised to find subjects for whom this was so.

The tetrachromates said things like that was why they must have struggled in the shop to get the right thread to colour match a garment. The shop assistant thought the orange was a perfect match and couldn’t see how far off it was.

So we can’t get inside heads to say experiences are the same. But we can use discrimination tasks to see if people experience the same distinctions.

So, for you the legal answer just is the ethical answer. Incredibly subtle of you! — Janus

I see you are pretending to take seriously the ironic answer so as to run away from the actual answer which followed.

Not so subtle. Quite transparent in fact.

The problem with utopia, Fukuyma says, — csalisbury

Do you have the page number where he said this? Not ringing any bells yet.

those who do have the right view can't get the kick of explaining, scolding and berating those who don't. — csalisbury

Don’t be so hard on yourself. I don’t take your anti-totalising rants to heart. My only complaint is your failure to make a case to match your scolding and berating. Explaining would in fact be good.

Instantly? Gee, I’m impressed by your memory for books you might have read 30 years ago that failed to capture your imagination.

Well, clearly you are itching to explain your point?

Oh I see. I didn’t think much of his first book and so I should have read his latest?

Here is a previous discussion anyway....
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/226840

The job application just went in. Thanks. That was the article I was looking at too.

This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things that do not change.

This does feel the key - the search for invariance, the search for the unity that lies behind all the variety.

but usually the distinction is between cosmology and ontology, under the umbrella of metaphysics. — Banno

References?

How is it the bone in the throat? Do you mean that if everyone self-actualises as the highest personal good, then no one is left to give them respect. Everyone is Superman, no one the crowd?

I think what that says is respect is a two way street - given and earned. If we are to biologise thymos, then I would point to the fact that social animals are adapted to make smart choices in terms of social dominance and submission. Our neurobiology is designed to promote hierarchical social order. That was the “ethics” that proved entropically functional.

So self esteem has to be situated within a hierarchical social order to be meaningful. And it has to be essentially permissive in that constraints based fashion.

Of course we can deny our biological heritage. Just as folk like to deny geopolitical national advantage - Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis where the world could be viewed as a single flat market of opportunity.

Denying the constraints that in fact historically shape our freedoms “for a reason” always works out well, doesn’t it?

This pandemic and it's effects/affects, are symptoms of much deeper problems with the US... as is Trump. Symptoms of the unraveling... — creativesoul

Maybe you missed the point at which I entered this conversation. My geopolitically informed view is that even a buffoon can’t damage the US in an end times way. The US starts with so much advantage that talk of its unravelling are premature.

I’m indifferent to the degree it doesn’t impact on my freedoms. That is the “personal” answer anyone would give who is unable to talk about a wider view.

Why so much resistance? — creativesoul

Because I really have no idea who you want to be answering.

I had assumed you wanted the answer from "entropy's point of view", so that is what I gave.

I asked if the American government should do everything it possibly can to minimize the harm caused to Americans. — creativesoul

And who are you asking that question of now?

God? Some Platonic abstraction? Some random dude on the internet?

As far as I can tell, you’re using ‘hegelian’ simply to mean that history has a direction -& while I think it’s a confusing word-choice (‘Hegelian’ carries a lot of meaning) I agree that history has a direction. — csalisbury

In history circles, it is well understood as a term. And the idea that history could have a direction, a trajectory, is also highly disputed.

Hegel's actual finality was the arrival at a rationally organised society - an optimisation function that would deliver Maslow's hierarchy of needs, pretty much.

I say that is what is happening, but for another deeper underlying reason. The negentropic dividend is being paid for by the greater entropy that it manages to produce.

But I can’t understand your above post without some wedge between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ - if, as you say, It is by understanding how things are that we become able to make a choice and ‘resist’, then there is a space in which to choose that isn’t inevitable. There’s a ‘gap’ in the ‘is.’ — csalisbury

You will never understand my position until you manage to let go of the position from which you are trying to understand it. Give up on this is-ought nonsense - a metaphysics that opposes determinism and freedom as irreconcilable opposites.

My approach is based on dialectics - the unity of opposites. Your language has to start reflecting that logic to get a purchase on the argument.

Constraints are not laws. They don't dictate. They just limit. And thus that which is not limited is free. Or at least, a matter of deep indifference. :smile:

In practice, that is how human law works. And even natural law.

For a while I’ve felt that if ‘free will’ means anything, it involves learning to observe patterns and cycles, including the weak/unstable points that would allow for the disruption of the whole, thereby allowing actual change. and then to ‘wait’ for that moment or part of the cycle to come around again, and act (with and against the pattern.) — csalisbury

You mean tipping points? Bistability? Butterfly wings and chaotic attractors? All the good things provided to us as mental models by the modern science of non-linear dynamics?

This is exactly the physics that employs a probabalistic and constraints-based view of reality.

How does one ever jump off the high diving board? Or even find the will to get out of a warm bed?

Do we just command ourselves, now is the moment? Or do we get tipped into the act at the very moment we finally forget our fears for an instant?

(The ‘ought’ that leads to nudging in this direction organically bubbles up as discontent before finding this means of finding a way forward.) — csalisbury

Yes. You are describing what I've been saying. Change often happens because some random event is the straw that breaks the camel's back. You can then either blame the straw or recognise that there was some deeper constraint coming under such tension that "anything" was going to release it to do its equilibrium rebalancing thing.

I asked if the American government should do everything it possibly can to minimize the harm caused to Americans. — creativesoul

I replied that the US likes to say the government should keep its nose out of people's business. That is the social context that in fact constrains US choices.

I could say the US should be more like New Zealand, Korea or Sweden. Or I could dig even deeper into the contextual constraints to give you an answer in terms of the recent Western fossil fuel story, or the longer run agrarian revolution, or the perspective of the past million years of hominid hunter-gatherer evolutionary biology.

In fact I did.

I don't have to come up with an answer to that, because I am not in a position of power. — Janus

That reply is as lame as it gets. You say it is an interesting question until the moment it gets asked. Then run away.

It's a genuinely tough question, and I can't see how any thinking about thermodynamics would throw any light on it. — Janus

It's an incredibly easy question. Laws tell you what the penalties are for dissent.

If you want a more interesting answer, that is why you have to step out of the whole is-ought schtick where nature is presumed to operate by deterministic law and that then makes human choice an existential drama.

As I have already said, constraints are inherently permissive. You can do anything that isn't in fact limited, because the system is merely indifferent to your choices beyond that.

And being a systems deal, constraints evolve. They are learnings made habits. Peirce 101. So "dissent" becomes part of the learning side of the equation - the experiments that keep the system open and developing.

Modern western society was all about institutionalising a rational framework of laws and penalties. But the natural sense of such a philosophy can be seen in the way learning is still built into an apparently deterministic system. Law is implemented in hierarchical fashion. In the US, Congress makes law, the President can write regulations. A judiciary exists to interpret as well as enforce. Voters get to change those making the laws if they seem incompetent. There are are multiple recognised channels for dissenting and achieving change.

All this is the bleeding obvious again.

but to me the more interesting question then would be as to what should be done with dissenters. — Janus

Well what should be done with dissenters then?

One law could be imposed, yet there would still be dissent. — Janus

Sure. There can be a definite act of dissent because there is that one law. You have confirmed what I just said. What would dissent even look like if it wasn't in opposition in this fashion?

There is more than enough money available to keep everyone safe in relative isolation, through no cost of their own until the virus is contained and we are well enough prepared to keep it that way. — creativesoul

The US population could just refuse to go to work, to socially distance, to wear masks and wash their hands. The US "ethic" surely says that in a society based on some collective notion of rugged individualism, folk wouldn't need federal government to be telling them anything. And if the CDC does give rational federal advice, the typical such individual would do the opposite out of @Metaphysician Undercover's spite.

The Swedish population made its own choice that surprised a lot of people expecting a more Volvo-like, public safety first, response to Covid. The Swedish social culture seemed to make that a viable approach to limiting death without tanking the economy. That is an experiment still in progress.

As far as my entropic hypothesis goes, the pandemic is simply too exceptional event to have been built into anyone's social system - apart from those like Korea who have had a few recent scares like SARS, or New Zealand, which has had to eliminate multiple biosecurity threats like Mycoplasma bovis.

There, the consequences have been thought through. So go hard, go early, is a concept that both governments and the population understand.

That is why "ethics" seems such a poor lens for this kind of geopolitical discussion. As @Janus demonstrates, this starts the discussion off as a standard Western philosophical drama of "what should I do?"

If you boil ethical systems down to personal choices then you are simply buying into the fundamental tropes upon which the aggressive and competitive Western way of life became based. You are going with the flow that was precisely the one that set us on the path to colonial expansion, coal burning industry, neoliberalism, climate denial and a general belief in a right to be "spiteful" as the ultimate expression of personal freedom.

So any discussion of the ethical choices has to recognise that we are all individually already grounded in an ethic. We are not the starting point when we make personal choices. We are the end-point. Our world has already been shaped by a succession of increasingly specified constraints that start at the brute physical level, work their way up through biology, sociology and culture, and right on through in terms of our community, our family history, every other aspect of our world that is shaping out habits of thought.

That doesn't mean we can't then make "ethical choices". It just points out that mostly we don't make thinking choices at all. We are already deeply embedded in layers of evolved and cultural habit. What is left is the making of self-interested calculations. We have the "freedom" to weigh the balance of multiple factors and come out with some plan that has a probability of success. A constraint that we impose on the world ourselves.

And that personal choice is the cherry on the cake. It is evolution's way of keeping the learning going and not becoming rigidly bound by habit. It is part of what is natural.

But personal choice only makes sense in the context of a set of habits that reflect much longer timespans of learning. There has to be that established flow first. A way of life has to be some form of success. Then the ability to act sharply "otherwise" can count as a meaningful action - an experiment that will have an outcome that can be judged. Something will be learnt as being either the right or wrong thing to have done.

Like maybe the US should have put health before money. Or perhaps even that the US should have had a leadership that could actually make a simple binary choice if it couldn't manage a more complex weighing of the factors like Sweden.

The problem in the US is not about the ethical choice it made, but about the confused inability to stick to any choice at all.

Some people, when someone tells them what they must do, will go and do the opposite, just to spite. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. That sounds like a “good reason” to resist something.

It's fundamental to the nature of freedom, to prove that your proposed constraints cannot actually constrain. — Metaphysician Undercover

So out of spite, you will spread your arms, step off the cliff, and thus demonstrate your contempt for the constraints of gravity? OK.

So your mistake is that you refuse to recognize that when free minded people are told about constraints (thermodynamics in this case), they will figure out a way to demonstrate that such proposed constraints cannot actually constrain them. — Metaphysician Undercover

That might be my mistake if it wasn’t what I was saying.

All your Wikipedia quote tells me is that if a chemical "system" (whatever that is supposed to be) is reacting with its environment, it is unstable. — Metaphysician Undercover

Stop being an idiot. Why is carbon dioxide stable? Because one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms collectively form a lower energy state than the same three atoms wandering around by themselves. That is why burning charcoal produces so much heat. The formation of CO2 is an exothermic reaction.

This is schoolboy chemistry.

I can't see how thermodynamics comes into it though, except in the very most general sense I which it comes into everything. — Janus

And that is what I have said. It is foundational. It is the ground of the natural world. So whatever else follows, there is already an “ethics” - as in a finality - in play. The choice becomes about whether to go with the flow or - for some reason - oppose it.

And as I’ve also said ‘til I’m blue in the face is that life and mind exist because they can add intelligence to the deal. A selfhood is constructed from building systems of dissipation. Negentropy is the “other” that is also part of the deal as the simple evolves into the complex.

There could be several explanations for this fact; a society that approved these things within their community would not thrive or even be likely to survive long. Or you could say that most people are empathetic enough to motivate their condemnation of such acts. — Janus

Well which one seems more basic? That we do in fact survive and thrive as a collective or that we are empathetic?

Oh wait. Empathy is part of that survive and thrive deal. Indeed human neurobiology is evolved to switch sharply between an empathetic response and a its opposite. In every social setting, some kind of choice is being made as to whether we are in a social cooperative mode, or instead doing the opposite of facing off against the competition.

We love our tribe. We demonise our enemy. Our brains are designed to switch between these too equally valuable social behaviours.

Is one more “ethical” than the other? That would seem strange in that every culture finds ways to reward the right choice in the right setting. Soldiers must hate their foe. Parents must love their kids.

So it is not hard to see how “ethics” arises as levels of complexity. At a basic level, as social animals, we have to work together in ways that keep us collectively warm, fed and housed. As a species, we have to do that better than other rival species. He who best masters entropy production produces more population.

Then society kicks things up another level by creating a stark instinctive contrast between the cooperative and competitive mindset. It becomes “a choice”, but one that gets made in habitual directions that generally - probabilistically - favours the entropic fortunes of the species.

The several explanations are different levels of the same explanation once we consider the pragmatic evolutionary imperative at work.

They are too easy. — Banno

I never got the impression you found science easy. And yet it does a pretty good job at moving towards an ever more unified model of nature.

What motivates individuals in their ethical choices is diverse; — Janus

So there is nothing you would name as a fundamental good or basic precept?

That’s convenient.

Do you think the American government ought to do everything in it's power in order to prevent as much harm to Americans(by extension non-Americans alike), as is actually possible? — creativesoul

Tough question because maybe there just aren’t no right answers and any view would be context-dependent.

To pick up on the points I raised, if we asked what nature wanted, well nature doesn’t care that much. The thermodynamic argument is merely probabilistic. Nature ensures that if there are ways to maximise entropy production, then those outcomes become so likely as to be inevitable. But if humans upped and did something else less entropic as a conscious choice, what are the consequences? The only ones that could suffer as such are humans trying to live off a lower entropy budget.

But let’s say that the US is being blindly entrained by the entropic imperative. It is not even thinking differently. Then does the Covid response reflect this?

I would argue that the US system is the most engaged in entropification as its project. It has the greatest per capita footprint. (Well Canada just beats it. But Canada has cold winters.) So if the US political-economic is shaped by the imperative, then we would expect it to put GDP maintenance ahead of lives.

In fact it is more complex. Economists put a high price on premature death. Too many deaths could hit public morale and confidence in “the system”. There might be a revolt that beings down the high revving economic engine the US built up. A short and effective lockdown might be the better strategy - from the entropy point of view - if it gets the pain over and the economy can get back to full on growth.

On the other hand, is there a reason to make the priority life at any cost? Well flu kills a fair number of people all the time. Junk processed food shortens the lives of a vast number more. Presidents regularly decide it is vital to the US national interest to invade countries that are major oil producers or have key oil pipelines.

It seems the US has made its ethical choices about where to draw its line. It’s culture certainly reflects some habit of thought. And was this framed in terms of entropy good, defying entropy bad? Of course not. The imperative is invisible to anyone who doesn’t have the imagination to see it. The US just went with the flow and made a trade off between some balance of annual GDP growth and the “friction” of social degradation that might derail that project over the longer run.

So folk may talk about this as the ethical vs the unethical. But back in the real world, the decisions are always pragmatic - and also fiendishly complex as calculations, only probabilistic in their outcomes.

Politicians of course have to sell their actions so they will offer the simple justification, Either it is the economy that is primary - hey more people will suffer if they can’t earn or can’t get an education. Or it is life that is primary - no question. Given an actual free choice about what matters, humans may vote to sacrifice and save their communities.

Well, even if nature’s entropic flow is disrupted by an economic shut down, I would agree that my community matters more to me in the end.

So to the degree we are unthinking, we can expect to be entrained to nature’s entropic flow. We will be shaped as its clever local agents digging ancient hydrocarbon reserves out of the ground and setting them alight inside various kinds of metal machines.

But we can be also thinking. We can accept the choice nature has already made for us. Or chose to do something different - at least within nature’s limits.

I would not presume to speak for Banno, but for me ethics is the inquiry into how best to live. — Janus

So pragmatics or what?

Give your best example of an ethical precept you feel is fundamental. We can then see how it stacks up against the logic of the thermodynamic imperative.

You are the one waddling off in a huff, dignity wounded but nose still in the air.

Your usual cop out. :cheer:

Are you now agreeing with me that thermodynamics does not tell us what we ought do? — Banno

You continue to misrepresent. Thermodynamics constrains what we can do. The ethical question then becomes, is there some good reason to resist the general tug of its flow? What kind of reason would that be?

There is no “telling” here. No ought about it. But we are embedded in the historical flow of nature. We are what we are as natural entities. And so either we find that good enough or there must be some positive reason we can provide for wanting things to be other.

Again, to circle back to the actual argument I made at considerable length, humanity has rather unthinkingly gone with the flow in its political and economic history. And humanity has also made a dangerous step change in shifting from a life lived within the means of the solar flux to a new world based on burning fossil fuel.

It just happened. And ethically-speaking, what of it? Who is judging our behaviour as good or bad? Some big daddy in the sky? Some Platonic notion of the Good? Alternatively, is our behaviour just meaningless. It is what it is because there is no “ought”?

Well pragmatism provides a whole different ballgame. The question becomes is it functional? Is it working for us? Does it meet some goal that we want to define for ourselves, in contrast to whatever goal nature seems to have had in channeling us towards such a path?

Ethical discussions treat life as some great permanent drama. Your OP tried to crank up exactly that. And yet you won’t be explicit in what way US as a winner or loser has some kind of “ethical” point.

From my point of view, pointing at Trump or the US and demanding a judgement - good thing/bad thing - is certainly entertaining, but hardly deep.

My analysis focuses on the pragmatic realities of the current moment. If we want to make choices, we need to understand how the “unseen” forces of thermodynamic order have got us to where we are.

We are in one kind of thermodynamic regime - powerlaw - and not in another - Gaussian. As an example that makes one of the things we view as a big problem - gaping inequality - just a natural part of what is going on. Therefore eliminating that inequality is going to be hard as it is basically swimming against the tide.

So contra your pigheadedness, my point is that understanding the actual thermodynamical flow that entrains humanity is the only thing that actually could create a “choice” - ethical or pragmatic.

If we want to resist the “is”, and construct out own “ought”, one needs an understanding of history a lot more sophisticated than thinking it is one damn thing after another.

History has a Hegelian structure. It is a dissipative flow. We now have a science of all that. Time to leave your metaphysical nonsense questions in the past where they belong.

I mean that kind of ethical thinking is a great, if not the greatest, part of human life. — Janus

And so how do you define “ethics”? How does Banno define “ethics”?

If one is troubled by the old is-ought chestnut, this must be because one is already caught up in a certain binary presumption.

As I say, as a pragmatist - of the Peircean systems thinking kind - I start with a different model of causality. And so is-ought is a use of words with a metaphysical emptiness. It sounds like a question but becomes a form of nonsense.

You sound like you want to adopt an idealist metaphysics which treats the human mind as something special in the sense that its central drama is “what is the right thing to do?”. That existential dilemma is everything.

That romantic metaphysics then finds its sharpest opposition in the “science” view that existence is essentially meaningless. You can act anyway you want. Morality is relative and godless.

Well, to me, that’s two complementary brands of bullshit. I wouldn’t bother starting any serious discussion from that Cartesian foundation.

But Apo will not entertain such a discussion. — Banno

Rather than complaining, make your case. What are you waiting for?

Your requests for clarification are a familiar tactic. I gave you an answer. Why should I have to repeat it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_stability

Big sook. :joke: