No, it's not anthropomorphic nonsense. — darthbarracuda

You are welcome to present the scientific evidence then. As I say, I've seen what you are talking about first hand and talked to the researchers who live with the colonies.

To quote Voltaire, then, if animals cannot feel or have no sentience - then why are their bodies structured and their behaviors so as if they do feel and have sentience? — darthbarracuda

It is probably pointless repeating myself here but I am the last to claim animals lack experience or phenomenology. Jumping spiders are one of my favourite cases.

But my argument is that we then have to define sentience or consciousness in ways that aren't anthropomorphic. We have to talk about the neuroscientific reality rather than just projecting some image of consciousness we have developed onto animals universally.

Having studied the comparative neurology of critters like jumping spiders and avians, I think I am well placed to do just that.

Put yourself in the shoes of a lab mouse. Do you really think it would be alright for the scientists to experiment on you just because they think you're not actually "there"? — darthbarracuda

Well yeah. One of the reasons for not actually doing that kind of research myself was that in the end I could not stomach it. After cutting up bodies for biology, shocking rats and frogs for psychology, and then discovering what really goes on in neuroscience animal laboratories, it became too much to continue going down that line.

But that was the 70s. The ethics is not perfect these days, but they have been hugely cleaned up. In terms of these kinds of issues, I have seen immense and continuing change on all fronts.

However it has been achieved on a rational basis, one capable of understanding the notion of reasonable trade-offs.

You however argue in terms of absolutes. And when the evidence is not there, you invent it - like these forlorn suicidal penguins deciding to die by trekking inlands rather than just stepping off the beach into the waiting jaws of the local orca pack.

Do you think there is a problem or not in regards to animal suffering? How am I wasting time by pointing out what I see to be problems? Essentially your positions comes down to "I don't quite agree with what OP is saying, therefore he is wasting is time." — darthbarracuda

In fact I care a lot about animal suffering and ecology generally. The difference is that I don't have to invent the facts that would support a simple-minded absolutism. I've studied the science and that informs my ethical position.

Each person believes the candidate to be the best, despite having differing reasons, and these differing reasons don't concern them so long as the candidate is elected. — darthbarracuda

I still don't follow you. But doesn't simply mentioning Trump and Clinton create a problem here?

The problem is that if people see themselves in terms of the world they will inevitably come to deny their own freedom and responsibility; their selfhood, This may already be seen in the way the scienitfc image of the human as being just another species leads to an inability to see humans as anything other than completely determined by nature, genetics and/or culture. — John

I disagree. I know science gets the blame for Scientism, but science is perfectly capable of understanding organisms as organisms. And a capacity for creativity and autonomy fits quite happily into the organic perspective. This is why biologists think computer scientists are a little nuts when they talk about artificial this and that.

So yes, there is definitely the widespread notion that reality is a machine, deterministic in its detail and meaningless as a whole. But this is a caricature of the relevant science, not a view that the science supports.

My question then is to whose advantage is it that a mechanical disposition has become wired in to much of modern culture? And how does that wrong view coexist so happily with what should seem its exact opposite - the Romantic view of life?

My argument is that scientists (in the relevant fields) don't really believe that nature is "just a simple machine". The scientist would instead be the first to stress the intimate interconnectedness of individuals and their cultures, human social systems and planetary ecologies.

But a belief that the world is just a bunch of mindless material to be exploited, coupled to the belief that the individual mind has transcendent importance, goes together as the moral justification for the way our politics and economies have become structured.

Even though the two things seem to be speaking in opposite ways, in both privileging the most self-centred possible view of life, they both act to remove social and cultural constraints on individual action. And thus - even in their conflict - they co-exist and thrive.

So you can't oppose Scientism with Romanticism. They are both riding the same wave of entropification.

Only Naturalism can see this is the case and so perhaps do something about it. But what hope is there in a world where people can pass off forlorn suicidal penguins as empirical evidence of something? That romanticism is just the flipside of thinking of penguins as disposable flesh automata.

I'm watching Westworld. Consider the co-dependency of these memes there. The machine that comes alive - has a soul. Scientism and Romanticism need each other as thesis and antithesis. Meanwhile the extravagant desires of fossil fuel slip past unnoticed. Whichever way you think you go - mechanistic exploitation or maximal individual autonomy - you are endorsing the one grander entropic scheme as in practice they amount to the same thing.

Individualism wants to shed all constraints - social and ecological - and so finds itself plugged directly into fundamental thermodynamics, the most general and mindless constraint that can't be avoided.

There is video evidence of penguins looking back at their clan as if they are looking back in forlorn. They know exactly what they're doing. — darthbarracuda

Anthropomorphic nonsense. And dangerous for the reasons I've outlined.

Absolutely not. It was the Enlightenment after all that produced the Cartesian view of animals as simply "machines" that has persisted for centuries. — darthbarracuda

I think Descartes produced that Cartesian view as part of sustaining the transcendental self of theism.

Science certainly promotes popular notions about reality being a mechanism. But scientists - especially if they biologists - know that the reality is in fact organic. So bodies are not simply machines, but complexly/semiotically machines, and thus not really machines at all.

You're operating under the assumption that what we can fix is all we ought to fix. This limits the content of our theories. — darthbarracuda

I'm seeking to limit theorising to what is rational. Your OP claimed to want rational thinking. I have shown how your views are actually informed by the irrationalism, the dualism, the transcendence, the absolutism, that are all the hallmarks of Romanticism.

We can't even talk about the fixing until we have a proper understanding of the thing we might claim to be broken in some fashion.

And you seem content with diminishing this perceived rift between the self and the rest of the world as if it's not important at all, thus shifting the focus of ethics from people as they perceive themselves as people to some abstract universal concept of entropy. — darthbarracuda

My point is that Romanticism gets in the very way of the problems that it might want to solve. If folk see themselves apart from the world, then they are not going to act in ways that could improve things.

If you spend all your time worrying about the pain lions inflict on zebra, you are never going to contribute in useful fashion to the real moral consequences of collective human behaviour for both lions and zebra.

Well, I mean I am a consequentialist. I would prefer if you were vegetarian and antinatalist for good reasons, but what matters ultimately is how your actions are affected by your views regardless of their justification. — darthbarracuda

You lost me there. How can the justification not be basic?

One of the points of abolishing speciesism is becoming an active role in the ecosystem - i.e. intervening and eliminating predation, helping diseased animals, etc. — darthbarracuda

Eliminating predation? What by euthanasing all predators? Teaching spiders to be vegan? What are you even talking about?

Penguins actually have been recorded to kill themselves. If they cannot find a mate, they walk into the ice desert of Antarctica and die. — darthbarracuda

Occam's razor says it is rational to seek the least complicated explanation of natural phenomena. I happened to be in Antarctica with penguin researchers a few years ago. And in fact a little group of penguins waddled right past the base heading in the wrong direction. They didn't look unhappy, just determined. The researchers said they get lost like that all the time as they seek out new living space. We headed them off and pointed them back where they came. But the researchers said most likely they would resume their trek after we had gone.

It's nature at work. If penguins never wandered, they'd never find new places to live.

So to mitigate the suffering of non-human animals because they lack socially constructed propositional language is, as I see it, dogmatic and narrow-minded. — darthbarracuda

Or the rational answer.

The conflict here is between the Enlightenment and the Romantic point of view.

The Enlightenment was about recognising humans as natural creations with a natural logic. We could consider the basis of human flourishing and create the social, political and ethical institutions to foster that. And recognising the continuity between humans and other animals was a big part of the new thinking.

So it is Enlightenment values that have steadily changed our treatment of animals (and races, and sexes, and the infirm/mentally ill/infantile) to reflect what we actually know about their capacity to suffer. That is what rationality looks like - consistent decisions based on accurate information.

Unfortunately you appear to be backing Romanticism instead. Every individual is a special creation. Absolute rights apply because something "is a mind" or "has a soul" in black and white fashion. Romanticism rejects shades of grey. A papercut is as bad as the Holocaust. Any flicker of suffering at all becomes a reason to say life in any form simply should not exist.

Romanticism is the ontology of choice for facists for good reason. Absolutism justifies irrationality in absolute fashion. That is why politically correct thinking - enlightened attitudes born out of rational realism - becomes something far more dangerous and unreasoning in the hands of those with romantically absolute habits of thought.

Morality need not be possible to attain for it to be so. — darthbarracuda

Again this just betrays the monotonic absolutism which gives you the answers you want to hear.

Back in the real world, complexity is the result of complexly (hierarchically) organised states of constraint. So there is never a single target to be shot for. Instead, we seek to organise our world so that it is separated into its more general constraints and its more particular constraints. So generally we might not want to cause suffering. But then many particular circumstances can rationally justify that.

Rational morality is all about having this well-integrated variety in our behavioural responses. We act in a way that is a negotiated balance of all the circumstances, both general and particular. That is why it takes quite a lot of time, training and effort to produce morally mature humans. Functional humans have to find complex decision-making to be second nature.

This is the reason for being impatient with simplistic romantic thinking. It is patently unadapted to the real world where moral action actually matters.

How so? Singer actually argues that if we adopted vegetarianism or something like this, we could solve a lot of the world's hunger problems. — darthbarracuda

Sure, we could all eat powered seaweed and the planet might then support 20 billion people. But rather than one dimensional thinking like this, it would be more moral to recognise the huge complexity of the ecological disaster we are so busy manufacturing.

And that starts with understanding the fact that fossil fuels have been dictating human moral behaviour for the past 300 years in ways we only dimly perceive. There is a reason why climate deniers thrive.

So there is no point discussing morality in an abstracted absolutist fashion - especially in terms of what we would all hope for, but already believe could never be achieved.

We have real problems in the world which we need to solve. Your romanticism becomes Nero fiddling while Rome burns in that context. Veganism or anti-natalism is dangerously distracting - immoral behaviour - to the degree it degrades contemporary moral debate.

Applying holistic habits of thermodynamics to acute problems in morality obscures the identity of morality. — darthbarracuda

As I say, it is quite the opposite. Your promotion of fluffy irrealism is a dangerous distraction when there is a real debate that needs to be had.

In exaggerating the agency of the sentient individual, you are playing right into the hands of fossil fuel's desire for entropification. Removing social and cultural constraints on biologically-wired desires is exactly why rampant entropification is winning despite our own human long term interests.

Yes, and I am advocating a moral non-naturalism. Nature is not inherently good, in fact many times it comes across as entirely indifferent or perhaps even sinister. — darthbarracuda

Who was talking about "good" in some abstract absolutist sense?

Again you betray your Romantic ontology in worrying about what might "inhere" in material reality as if it might exist "elsewhere" in Platonically ideal fashion. If you understood Naturalism, you would see this couldn't even be the issue.

You point to the indifference of Nature - even its sinister character - as a way to sustain the standard mind/body dualism of Romanticism. You have to "other" the world in a way that justifies your absolute privileging of the self - the individual and his mind, his soul, his inalienable being.

But absolutism of this kinds works both ways - which is what historically makes it so philosophically dangerous.

In removing all moral determination from "the world" - and society and culture are the principle target there - the Romantic reserves all moral determination for "the self". So it suddenly becomes all right if you are a vegan or anti-natalist "like me". You don't actually need a reason. You get an automatic high five as a kindred spirit. Morality becomes reduced to a personal preference - the preferences the Romantic knows to be true because of the certitude of his feelings about these things.

You are asserting that propositional mental content is required for self-consciousness, or any sort of experience at all for that matter, — darthbarracuda

No. On the basis of the science, I say that animals of course have experiences and can suffer (or enjoy). But also that it is clear that self-consciousness is a socially-evolved linguistic habit. So only humans can worry about things in an abstract fashion, viewing their own existence through a culturally-constructed lens.

Furthermore, humans are not the only ones with language - look at birds, dolphins, whales, primates, etc. — darthbarracuda

Humans are the only ones with articulate language, as I say. The difference is in the capacity for grammatical structure and hence actually "rational" or abstracted trains of thought.

In any case, it is clear from the behavior of animals that many, if not most, fear death, which is why suicide is almost unheard of outside of human civilization. — darthbarracuda

Nonsense. Animals don't contemplate suicide because they are not equipped for that kind of (socially constructed) kind of thinking about the fact of their own existence.

They don't "fear death", even if of course they are biologically wired to act in ways that promote their own survival.

It is clear that animals react to painful stimuli in similar ways that we do. It is clear they nurture their young and care about the pack. And until we have good evidence that animals aren't conscious in some sense (evidence is leaning the other way), it would be wise to act as if they do have consciousness. — darthbarracuda

Again, I am the first to say animals are aware. But it is a plugged into the moment or extrospective awareness. Humans have grammatical speech and so a new level of abstract symbolic thought.

The super rich ignore the super poor right outside their doorstep. — darthbarracuda

That's not so hard if they live in a gated community with security and are tightly connected to a super rich view of life in which the poor only have themselves to blame for their poverty.

So I would hardly condone what you describe, but it is not a good example of why proximity is a relevant fact.

It's only natural to care for one's family — darthbarracuda

You got it. And from there, your extended family, your neighbours, your town, your nation. Or however else your social existence is in fact hierarchically organised in terms of co-dependent interactions.

It is not a bad thing. It would be irrational not to be most interested in those with whom there is the most common interests. Its normal social organisation.

Bottom line here is that appeals to proximity or emotional support groups (like nationalism) is tribalism, a worn-out doctrine that can and should be replaced by a cosmopolitanism. — darthbarracuda

That's my point. The loss of social cohesion is one of modern society's moral problems. Once people start caring more about highly abstracted wrongs than the wrongs they can see right under their nose, then things get out of kilter.

Cosmopolitanism presents no issue here as the proximity principle does not stop you have some generic views about humanity as a whole. Given that we are 7 billion people now crowded onto one small planet, cosmopolitanism is indeed a clear necessity.

Yet still, it matters that we live in structured fashion - that's what morality is all about. And it is the nature of that structure which I am addressing.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here, but from what I can tell you are associating comfort with morality. — darthbarracuda

No need to jump ahead to any goals. I'm just talking about the fact that there are discontinuities that mark the continuity of the moral landscape.

I take the naturalistic view and so "it is all one cosmos". But then there is also a clear structure - an emergent hierarchical organisation, a self-balancing complexity - that is also part of this naturalness. And it would thus be only natural for that ontology to inform any moral reasoning.

We know what is natural. The debate then is whether to remain consistent with that or to strike off in a different direction because it is "reasonable" ... then supplying a good reason for deviating from nature.

Speciesism cannot be held up without leading to a slippery slope. — darthbarracuda

But only humans have articulate speech and so a capacity to master the habits of thought that we would associate with being self-conscious. For instance, we can fear our death. We can even fear the death of those animals particularly dear to us. So in reality there is a discontinuity there that would make a difference.

And then there is also a proximity argument. You may not like it, but it seems quite rational to be most concerned with everything that is closest to us. If a plane crashes in a foreign land, it is natural to care most about any tourists from our home country. And this is because it is only sensible to care the most about what we most directly can affect (or be affected by). It is irrational to just have a free-floating abstract empathy, regardless of differences in proximity.

So your starting point is a presumption of a world without gradations. And yet gradations exist. Any rational ethics would take account of the fact we are actually people embedded in a complex world, not souls living in moral Platonia.

So where is this justified that we should/can "shoot" at flourishing? — schopenhauer1

How is it not justified exactly? You are arguing the minority position here.

Instrumentality is the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. — schopenhauer1

It's only absurd to you because you choose to frame it that way using antiquated notions about scientific determinism and cosmic meaninglessness.

You make a pipe dream out of this "flourishing" rather than see the instrumentality that is inherent in all actions, situations, decisions, motivations. — schopenhauer1

You say it is a pipe dream. I've yet to see your evidence.

And you don't seem to appreciate the monotonic nature of your argument that makes it invalid as any kind of theory. In claiming to explain everything, it can't in fact explain anything.

So start again and explain to me what a life would be like if lived in a non-instrumental fashion? Let's see if that sounds appealing as a counterfactual option.

Yep, otherwise we are just talking past each other. — schopenhauer1

Well I can only really talk about your instrumentalism in a fashion that fits my point of view. And the interesting idea to me is how the modern fossil fuel burning phase of humanity is having to construct its own heat sink in terms of "pointless activity".

So life in a general naturalistic sense is all about the negentropy that arises to dissipate entropic gradients - the organisation that forms to liberate energy stores. But life normally is stuck with a rate of burn defined by environmental accidents - like the actual amount of sunshine hitting the Earth and being available for re-radiation at a lowered temperature having done organic work. Life normally has to find its equilbrium balance with the daily solar flux.

Humanity, through its technological development, stumbled on the entropic bonanza of coal and oil - fossilised geo-distilled plankton. And that took the lid off human development. There was suddenly enough fuel to do anything.

The problem then was finding something to do with this fuel. Humanity had to evolve a mentality to match - one adapted to a new energy environment. And humanity also needed a heat sink - some activity that could dispose of all this potential work in terms of, ultimately, waste heat. So a reason for action had to be invented to complete the cycle. Humans had to invent the outcome that would allow fossil fuel to be burnt in exponential fashion in a way that "made sense".

A lot of this "making sense" of the fossil fuel bonanza has happened in normal biological fashion - a population explosion in which we are headed towards 10 billion people by mid-century.

But then you can argue that a lot about the modern fossil fuel based mentality is "instrumental" in being fundamentally pointless activity. This seems right because we can see that psychological flourishing does not seem high on the entropic agenda. Instead, life is driven by a blind consumption imperative - an over-riding need to generate as much waste as possible because more ordinary rates of fossil fuel burn aren't enough to satisfy its entropic imperative.

So Rolex watches, and Instagram, and McDonalds, are all symptoms of the need to create heat sinks beyond what nature makes readily available. Humans have to consume products in ways that keep cranking up the global rate of burn. Our part of the bargain is using our creativity to invent these pointless - from the point of view of psychological flourishing - activities. And it would be this aspect of modern existence that I would call "instrumental" - in as far as you can clearly define your neologism in a way I might respond to it.

But then this thermodynamic view of nature does not really justify pessimism or anti-natalism or other recent incarnations of Existentialism and Romanticism.

There still remains the possibility of psychological flourishing. There is a goal at the heart of human activity that we can still shoot at.

And then there is the question of exactly how much of the apparently wasteful side of modern consumerism is merely heat sink creation for the sake of heat sink creation. Clearly there is a worryingly large amount. But once you look at everything we expend resources on - which includes public health, universal education, national security (including natural hazard defences) - then quite a lot goes to propping up the various levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It is useful activity, rather than useless activity, in terms of a standard model of psychological flourishing.

So an actual examination of the human condition will certainly say there is a fundamental problem which humanity faces. We are being rather mindlessly driven by the entropic imperative of fossil fuel, and we already know that is going to end unhappily.

But that nuanced story - in which the future is an open question, given we are so involved in how it works out - is a far cry from the monotone droning of pessimism and anti-natalism.

The Otaku/gamers version of Romanticism lacks any entropic/organic realism and so its criticisms of modern life have no penetration. It is just a pathetic bleat from the sidelines. It says "I wish I wasn't here" without having any philosopical means to analyse why it is where it is, and where else it might more fruitfully be.

I am asking you to define the neologism that I am using — schopenhauer1

You want me to define a term you invented....

I'd first like to see you define instrumentality in your own words, — schopenhauer1

But it already has a philosophical definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

You might need to coin a different word. What's Greek for "pointlessly eating free time"?

all structural parts of life — darthbarracuda

Along with being born, having fun, being royally entertained.

We are back to your one-side view of existence as usual. Are you trying to prove that one can indeed see black without ever seeing white? ;)

any action that eats up free time — schopenhauer1

God forbid that we might narrow our definitions to the point where they would make a meaningful commitment to anything. How could we simply presume our conclusions if we had to start doing that?

I doubt this. Surely we can feel pain without feeling pleasure. Surely we don't need black to see white. We just see white. — darthbarracuda

Wrong.

I thought you were all about pragmatism. — darthbarracuda

That's why I say there is nothing wrong with modal logic per se. But you don't try to do heart surgery with a hammer and chisel.

Right, cause the majority can't at all be wrong, or because the majority wins by sheer might. — darthbarracuda

You are forgetting that it is the preferences of others that you are judging. And your excuse for advocating anti-natalist genocide is that the common herd are all self-deluding fools who don't realise how unhappy they ought to be.

The technical term for that is projection.

It is actually THE natural state.. upkeep/survival and entertainment for big-brained social animals. — schopenhauer1

You might not have noticed it, but entertainment is an industry. And being reduced to being a consumer of a product - a packaged experience - is where much of modern life loses its meaning.

What is more realistic is that society developed initially to support our needs to survive, but later began to develop as a means of keeping ourselves entertained. — darthbarracuda

So modern society exists primarily for mass entertainment.

Are you for real?

Done unbiased it shows how humans have developed civilization as a hodgepodge method of postponing/procrastinating death. — darthbarracuda

Let's not be ridiculous.

Oh, it exists sure, but we're not focused on the World, are we? We're focused on the inhabitants of the World! The basic focus of ethics! People! Not the relations they have to the environment or how they are part of the great cosmic plan of entropification. — darthbarracuda

What level of natural selection do you want to talk about then? Merely the cultural? Not the social or the ecological?

You're making this impossibly difficult. Pain exists where people exist. If people do not exist, then pain does not exist. — darthbarracuda

Is there a reason you skipped my actual point? Pain can only exist in counterfactuality to its phenomenological "other" - pleasure. So if the existence of pain is your big ethical concern, then that is the counterfactual that is actually relevant.

It's not me who launched into the great red herring of literal non-existence. I just reminded you of the rational basis for any counterfactual state of existence - the one which naturally relies on the further notion of striking a balance.

We're not just talking about things that already exist, we're talking about potential existants. — darthbarracuda

Yet you state that the red plate, along with your sibling, is literally non-existent. And it sounds like you want to talk about potentiality as though it "exists" now.

So yes, this kind of logical talk is very familiar. It works well for reasoning about states of affairs. It is very pragmatic.

But it is all at sea when it comes to addressing deep metaphysical questions.

Just because the lack of pain would be good for us, doesn't mean the lack of pain would be good for potential, unborn people. — darthbarracuda

Well, it would seem to remove what is in your eyes a major constraint on their existing. What would they say if you indeed allowed them to exist having created such living conditions? Thank-you?

It's actually pretty rare for people to wish they have never been born even in this imperfect world. So it seem presumptuous of you to talk for the unborn billions.

That was meant to convey that LIKE being a on a desert island where we are solely focused on upkeep/entertainment- — schopenhauer1

Where is your evidence that anyone living on a desert island would think about their existence in this fashion? In what sense are you describing a natural state of being for humans?

...SOCIAL reality that we actually DO live in, is the same except DUE to the social nature of it and more complex environmental/historical situatedness of it, we may THINK that it is otherwise. — schopenhauer1

You can't scale up from an unnatural state to explain the natural state. Complexity is different (as the slogan goes).

You make a strongman because you think I deny that we are social animals. I do not deny this at all. — schopenhauer1

That would be more convincing if you just hadn't begun by presuming the opposite - that society is a bunch of people who for some reason wandered off their desert islands, with their abundant food supplies, to go live collectively and dependently in the name of a little light entertainment and big city distraction.

And you're trying to reduce transparent phenomenological experiences to a foreign anthropological structure. As if recognizing the sustaining force of our existence doesn't make it less (or perhaps more?) absurd. — darthbarracuda

But anthropology has no trouble explaining the phenomenology. It is obvious that modern folk live such insulated lives that they develop a magnified fear of the real world. Every papercut becomes the Holocaust because life has lost its normal calibration.

If you grow up dressed in silk, even the manufacturer's tag may seem like an unbearable annoyance.

So this kind of complaining about the unendurability of life is simply a symptom of something you need to fix. It has none of the grandeur of a fundamental philosophical problem or even a Shakespearian tragedy. It is just simply a practical issue - how can we design modern society better in a way that might be more natural to what makes the human animal most content?

Because phenomenologically that is the case, and that is where ethics resides. — darthbarracuda

You have to make up your mind whether the world exists then. If it does, then there may be something beyond your person-al phenomenology. :-}

Suppressing the potential for tortured lives only benefits those who exist. — darthbarracuda

And?

Unless you are going beyond phenomenology to claim ontic idealism or dualism, there is no reason to treat pain as some disembodied quality whose existence can be weighed in Platonic fashion.

And then we have the non-identity problem, and the related issue of lives that are inherently shitty - i.e. if they weren't shitty, they wouldn't be the same life. — darthbarracuda

How many different abuses of logic can you conjure up just to maintain an argument that doesn't work?

Well, sure, but we're talking about an individual china plate, just as we are talking about the advantages a potential, single person can have in non-existence. Does non-existence benefit anyone? I answer in the negative.

Everything else is gibberish, sorry. — darthbarracuda

You've got your conclusion. So all you need is any old rubbish that seems to allow you to get to it.

I've pointed out to the contextuality needed to make your statement true. You agree - even going so far as to say the specific context is you and me agreeing verbally about the absence of some currently experienced particular.

If you aren't then willing to deal with the consequences of the acknowledged contextuality of the statement, that's your problem.

If we were to prune everything down to one person sitting in a deserted island with enough food to stay alive...

...Life is just an expanded version of this scenario.. — schopenhauer1

And yet of no evolved creature could this scenario ring less true. Humans are socially and even culturally-constructed beings. We are only complete as functional members of functioning groups. So you are basing an argument on an utter fantasy.

I don't see how this is necessarily of cosmic importance. — darthbarracuda

I'm talking about the logic we would apply to anything. And you already agree we are talking about "possible worlds" don't you?

I've said this before, the ethics I work with is not necessarily of cosmic importance, rather, it's of person-al importance. — darthbarracuda

Again, your dualism in this regard is only possible if you reject the holism of natural philosophy.

So yes. You continually claim this kind of atomistic freedom. It appears to validate your logic. I'm just pointing out its deep flaws. It is the reason why you just accept that there is the world, and there is the self.

Well, sorry, you've just ignored the whole point of my post. — darthbarracuda

I've pointed to the flawed logic upon which you have argued your whole point. That's different.

So non-existence initially seems like it might be advantageous to the tortured child - yet clearly if this child does not exist, then there are no advantages to be found. — darthbarracuda

I dunno. Suppressing the potential for tortured lives by addressing their contextual causes seems a lot more logical to me. Doing something about that is what would be actually logical wouldn't you say?

If a red chinaplate does not exist, what color is it? It's an inane and irrational question: the plate isn't even able to even have a color to begin with in virtue of it not existing. — darthbarracuda

But red china plates can and do exist. So there is both the general possibility and the literal actuality.

What is irrational is to try to base your "logical" position on such nonsense as "this red china plate that does not exist".

Surely you can appreciate the inherent and necessary contextuality of that claim - what it would take to make it a "true statement"?

Alternatively, we can say that non-existence is characterized as the differences between possible worlds. — darthbarracuda

Exactly. And I'm pointing to the fundamental flaw in such modal reasoning.

It takes for granted that things which exist could also not exist in free fashion. And yet if existence is holistic and contextual, then that is a faulty presumption. It can be only relatively true at best that events or objects can be treated as independent variables.

This matters at the cosmic level. Could you have change except within the context of stasis (or stasis except within the context of change)?

And likewise, anything important one might pick out about the life of a person is going to be similarly contextual. You couldn't have joy without pain, etc?

So you can't talk about the possibility of you having a sibling in any plausible fashion unless it is in fact plausible that such a sibling might exist. And you say such a sibling doesn't exist - but how can you be so sure? Did you check in the basement where your parents have had him locked up all these years?

So sure, modal logic is good for reasoning as often the world is atomistically disjoint to a high degree of approximation. It is close enough to a collection of independent events fixed by a history for us to just argue in that fashion. You could have had a brother. But you don't.

I'm just pointing out that this is not a secure basis for the kind of grandly general argument you want to mount here.

If a bad thing happens, then the avoidance or resolution of this bad must result in a good outcome. But this is entirely irrational. It is the exact same reasoning behind the valuing of recovery - if I recover from cancer, recovery must be a good in itself, right?! — darthbarracuda

It is of course entirely rational. Bad and good encode a counterfactuality that makes it possible for there to be definitely something. Things can be one way because it is a real possibility they could be the other way.

I realise you find this problematic because it means life being bad means life can be good. But tough. You just have an illogical approach to this issue.

Therefore, many of our actions seem to involve a faulty image of non-existence and a need for a good outcome. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, the very notion of "literal non-existence" is illogical, unintelligible, given that something does exist.

So you are arguing it is a problem in a personal sense. The "you" that exists already brings with it the choices that counterfactually define that existence (such as a good life vs a bad life, a happy moment vs a sad moment).

But the same goes for existence as a whole.

Something surely exists (our Universe at least). And that makes non-existence a non-sensical thing to be taking seriously. It is not a valid counter-factual. It is not an actual possibility. We can only have the relative absence of something or other.

So this notion of "literal non-existence" has to be given up. It is an impossibility. Metaphysics in particular has to start somewhere else if it is to be an exercise in intelligible argument.

It seems the problem is the government, having severely limited the construction of new homes, thus making demand high and supply low and thereby creating increased prices.

The other solution is to get a better job. I know it sounds so American of me, but when there's a problem, how about looking within for the solution instead of asking for help. — Hanover

The number one problem is letting banks freely manufacture credit - ie: debt. That is the fuel that drives the speculative bubble.

Then you have the political settings that encourage general speculation in an unproductive asset.

Down the list is constraint on land supply. If this were the critical problem, people wouldn't see ex-urban McMansions and prime beachfront as such great "investments". Small and safe properties would be in higher demand.

But I don't say experience is a complex state. I say it is not many things, and so not complex. — Dominic Osborn

It seems complex to me that I would have both the illusion of the rock and the further experience of the pain of kicking it. It would be simpler to have just the one and still simpler to have neither.

So you may claim that there is just "one state" - experiencing. But it has a structure that is robustly divided between "self" and "world".

There is the experience that seems constrained by "reality" in a reliable fashion, and yet then also another set of experiences which are not (like dreams, imaginings, hallucinations). So you are positing a state of experiencing which is intrinsically complex. And that sets up the question of what is the simplest way to account for that particular experiential structure. The simplest answer must be that there is a world that accounts for those constraints on experience.

I can also adduce Ockham’s Law of Parsimony (razor) in support of my assertion that there is nothing other than my experience. Why postulate anything other than my experience? My experience is, I concede, unexplained and inexplicable. But so is a physical universe. And so is a self. All of these are utterly mysterious; all of these represent the end of a line of enquiry. Why not choose the simplest ontology––there is my experience, and nothing else––? — Dominic Osborn

But as you say, your experience is a very complex state. It includes mysteries like the fact that kicking rocks hurts and not eating has unwanted consequences.

So Occam's razor would say the simplest thesis to explain such extravagantly elaborate illusions is that they are instead a mental model of real non-mental constraints.

Note that I accept when it comes to an inquiry after the true nature of this reality, we are indeed epistemically stuck on the solipsistic side of the fence. But then, Occam's razor in particular is a principle that could only apply if we believe already in the kind of physical reality in which the complex is grounded in something simpler.

So in invoking Occam's razor, you have already abandoned solipsism proper for some variant of pragmatism at least.

But we can and perhaps even should stop at some point. Especially if our previous line of argument is something which will offer no terminus (and we happen to desire a terminus — Moliere

While agreeing in general with your reply, I would add that what makes metaphysics doable and useful is that its argument takes the special form of being dialectic or dichotomistic. And so its terms are self -grounding, self-terminating.

Is it general or particular, atom or void, discrete or continuous, stasis or flux, matter or form, etc or etc? Every term can be grounded in being the limit of what it is not.

So questioning can stop (because more questioning would be fruitless) when we have identified a logically complementary limits on ontological possibility. That is simply what intelligibility consists of.

It's no secret that the mind can sort of 'fill in' details where they 'normally' would be to produce a kind of impression. But you're not actually seeing the edges of the triangle except where there is black and white contrast. — John

But where you see a white edge, there is only just unedged whiteness. So you are seeing a triangle when you really shouldn't - even if this is the kind of foundational trick upon which the whole business of "perceiving reality" depends.

Dreams and hallucinations sort of fill in for reality in a big way. But the point is it is all "fill in" down to the finest grain of perceptual processing. Your epistemology has to be able to deal with that frankly.

To admit this is not to admit idealism though, because idealism claims that percepts are not merely mediated and added to, but entirely constituted by, ideas. — John

Well in a way they are. Or I would say signs, as in Peircean sign relations.

The difference between real delineation and the visual suggestion is that the first produces an actual image of a triangle, and the second produces a mere impression, — John

So in the first case, the self actually sees a representation, in the second, the self merely imagines that it sees this? Hmm....

I really can't see the issue with the triangle illusion apo, it exists as an image on a screen or on paper or as something, whatever doesn't really matter, that reliably gives us the impression of a triangle,but is not seen as a fully delineated triangle. — John

Yet you see an edge that is not physically there to complete the impression of a triangle. So there is now delineation that is a real visual difference and a delineation that is only a visual idea.

Whatever your epistemology, it must account for such a contrasting state of affairs within the one general point of view.

Naive realism is now to pretend there is no fact of the matter. So what does considered realism want to say?

So a considered naive realism is simply based on the fundamental logic of the experienced differences between waking and dreaming, veridical perception and hallucination. — John

A considered naive realism sounds oxymoronic. Do you simply want to avoid tagging yourself a pragmatist here?

That's fine, but pragmatism does come with its more specific commitments and the question is whether there is something in that which you dispute.

Also Wayfarer's phantom triangle seems still a good test of what folk actually believe. In what sense does it really exist - either as reality or idea?

All neurotypical humans would be expected to see a glowing bounded triangle that is "not really there".

So the naive realist has no problem counting cows in a field, or sitting on chairs that are physically present. But then they also have no problem thinking the cows are actually coloured, or the chairs are actually "solid stuff". This is why their realism is naive. It ignores a division by flip-flopping from objective to subjective ontic commitments without even realising it.

Gestalt illusions like Kanizsa's Triangle are nicely poised right at that critical divide. And so it becomes revealing exactly what answer the realist can give. Everyone sees the triangle. Everyone can have the neurological trickery explained. How should this combination of definite experience and inescapable trickery be resolved as a model of epistemology, a putative theory of truth?

This is where naive realists change the subject. But idealists also fail to do it justice on the whole.

I think what you are failing to see is that realist assumptions are not made on the basis of a belief that one possesses any knowledge of the "ultimate nature of things" or anything like that, but simply on the basis that when something is available to perception in common, that is when something is publicly available, then it is classed as real, in the sense of being concrete, and is understood to be logically independent of any particular percipient. — John

Yes, the reason this debate is the hardiest of all perennials is that many simply do want to make absolutist claims. Or at least, have the strong desire to get as close as possible to that position

Then you are putting the middle-ground case for a pragmatic or epistemic realism, as against an ontic or naive realism. That is, all we can know in the end is that we seem to be talking about (and reacting to) the same things in the same ways.

And this is also a pragmatic or epistemic idealism in that it likewise rejects solipsism as credible belief. Instead we start already at the level of building belief based on the presumption of the existence of other like-minded minds. :)

In Mach-bands we see grey shapes as they are, but exaggerate the contrasts between the greys. The exaggeration is a use of the greys that we see, a way to organize them, but which is incorrectly passed for something present in our eyes or minds, yet absent somehow. But absent things are not present, neither in your eyes, nor inside your head. A memory of something absent does not possess parts of what it is a memory of. — jkop

Don't Mach bands both strengthen and weaken the case for idealism?

They strengthen it in proving there are perceptual illusions we "can't wake up from". We can't unsee the Mach bands even if we believe (from the neuroscience) they are psychologically constructed. So reality is a perceptual illusion (well, perceptual process) from the get-go.

And we know that from colour perception too. What we experience resembles "nothing" about the stimulus.

On the other hand, Mach bands, colours and other perceptual illusions are utterly reliable in their usefulness. They do tie us to the world in what seems like a pragmatically factual fashion. We wouldn't really want to "wake up" if they are a dream as the evolutionary efficiency of our discriminatory abilities is also something we can believe in.

Dreams and other hallucinatory states are by contrast unreliable states of perception and not useful in any known fashion. It is not hard to see them as dysfunctional (although dreaming causes few problems as it is not remembered and the body is normally paralysed so we can't act on our visions).

So in being fictional - or rather symbolic - the brain's perceptual illusions are desirable precisely because they are idealistic rather than realistic. They begin the business of action-oriented conception from the get-go, right out at the retina or cochlear.

The homuncular "we" who is suppose to be watching the raw data as it eventually makes its way to "display central", the theatre of consciousness, has already been replaced by the mental habit which is a useful interpretation or model baked in as neural wiring. Right out at the eyeballs, the essential business of "not seeing reality" has started. Instead we are already "seeing", or conceiving, of shapes, motions, colours, sounds, scents - the "signs of things".

In short, the whole idealism vs realism debate gets hung up on the presumption that something veridical or representational is going on, when what is really going on is something functional or enactive.

So in this context, thank God for Mach bands. Reality is already unseeable except in terms of conceived signs. And also thank God for waking up. Our system of signs can't be fooled for long. In its functionalism, it has the means to sort its passing confusions out.

The whole point is that you don't know that, because you haven't antecedently figured out that all, or any particular, perception is not an illusion. — The Great Whatever

I thought the point was that hallucinations and dreams can be judged retrospectively. The long-run can be properly contrasted to the merely intermittent even in a purely internalist perspective.

Of course if what is at stake is whether reality can ever truly be known - even merely as a recalcitrant fact - then of course doubt is always possible about anything, if simply only because that is how intelligibility must work. To fully believe, there must be doubt to demonstrably dismiss.

Although here again pragamatism steers us back to the embodied view. Verbal doubt - claiming a formal possibility - is one thing. But real doubt is a real reluctance to act.

Again, the functional is what matters, the veridical is not a true concern here.

So are you claiming to be able to count 3 cows as an indisputable fact or not?

If not, what kind of fact is it? If you want to proclaim yourself instead a Pragmatist or whatever, then say so.

? — jorndoe

As I say, we can quantify the quality of naive realism by counting the number of deflections we observe when it is faced with evidence of its central epistemic self-contradiction - its cosy presumption of a real self "in here" to observe the real world "out there".

So the count is 2 in this sequence. Are you about to make it 3?

Where do you see naïve realism — jorndoe

In the lack of a reply on the question of how you ontologise quality. The first rule of naive realism is explaining is losing, so just deflect.

The quantity of cows seems real enough to me. — jorndoe

You will note that this dichotomy of quality~quantity relies on the quality of cowness being real too - otherwise how else do you know that cows are what you are counting?

So naive realism always conceals what it pretends to answer.

If you put the concept of cow all in the counter's mind, how is that realism and not idealism? Nothing secures the truth of the counting except some individual's claim to know what they are doing.

And alternatively if you put cowness out in the world as a further fact, how is this not still idealism? Now you are claiming to "see" an abstract object in some fashion.

So confusion is rife in your naive realism. You are doing nothing yet to improve your situation.

I often notice that in debates about Platonic realism, that there that they founder on this notion of 'where could such a domain be'? As I have tried to explain, I think this is based on a misconception. Or rather, I think it is 'the habit of extroversion' that our culture has drilled into us. — Wayfarer

I disagree as it was already an issue in Ancient Greece even if it became both heightened - and nominalistically talk away - in modern times.

At the centre of Western philosophy is already this rock-solid dualistic distinction between observer and observables, the mind and the world. And while I agree there is then the unfortunate tendency to want to place them in different places as realms (the mind has to exist "somewhere"), it is also an inevitable kind of issue that must be resolved.

And it is also inevitable that people either tried to reduce everything back to one world (as in idealism, or instead nominalism), or indeed, started talking about the three worlds of material reality, mental reality and Platonia.

The 'empiricist' mindset is such that 'what is real' must have a location in the physical matrix of matter-energy-space-time. So everything we say exists, must be either locatable there, or be shown to have some evidence or consequences in that domain. That is what 'empiricism' means, right? — Wayfarer

My point here is that the empirical in fact invokes the very notion of "making a measurement". And so it speaks about observers as much as observables. And that is why philosophy has to focus on generalising the very notion of an observer - which Peircean semiosis does and dualistic approaches to "conscious minds" don't.

The kind of empiricism you describe is dualistic - the familiar unwitting dualism of the naive realist.

I have been hanging out briefly on another forum and discussing this point with a diehard materialist, and he simply cannot accept that something can be real in any sense other than being somewhere. 'To be real' is 'to have a location in time and space'. If I ask 'what about abstract ideas', the answer is, 'they're located also - in the mind, which is generated by the brain'. And that is the sense in which they're real. End of story. How they're predictive and so on - 'we're working on that'. — Wayfarer

Exactly. You wind up in dualism unless you can generalise the very thing of "an act of measurement".

But I would add (slightly digressively) that modern materialism would have to say things are real when they have an energy density and thus an energy potential when located in a spacetime frame. So now there is also a "location" in being the unlocated possibility of an action.

That is to say, modern physics is dualistic with its realms so that energy exists in a separate abstract way - the contents are abstracted from the container. And so energy has to be located somewhere that isn't, in the formalism, "somewhere".

Of course the ambition of modern physics is to heal this rift via a theory of quantum gravity - a story of spatiotemporal containers and energetic contents are shaped in mutual interaction.

There is only one sense in which something exists, and that is that it is real, and that applies to chairs, apples, real numbers, sentences, snowflakes, or whatever. Whereas fictional or imaginary things don't exist except for in the mind, which is in the brain, which is physical. — Wayfarer

But speaking for empiricists, you are talking about old-fashioned notions of the empirical - ones that rest on classical presumptions about observers. And modern physics has left that behind (even if it is also as reluctant as hell to let completely go).

Of course I also agree here that the ontic issues can't be solved by the materialists pointing out that the mind is emergent from the brain. That's not a sufficient theory. You would have to have an account that makes sense of such a claim - such as semiosis, where we can see how sign relations or "symbol processing" is indeed both physically instantiated by, yet causally disconnected from, the material dynamics it can arise to regulate.

This is why I point to the centrality of the measurement problem. It has to be solved by both mind science and physical science. It is where we have got to. And oh look, semiotics, biology and thermodynamics all speak right to that.

I think in the Platonic and neo-platonic understanding, existence is hierarchical, with nous and its objects higher, and the senses and their objects, on a lower level. — Wayfarer

You can extract a "ladder of life" story from this - the one that runs from pan-semiosis through bio-semiosis and linguistic-semiosis. So from the simplest self-organised dynamics to the most complex semiotic organisation.

But you instead are endorsing a dualism of mind and world here. Or at least, a divine and world. There maybe a useful difference.

Mind~world dualism treats consciousness as some definite Cartesian substance - a concrete soul stuff. While divine~world can ease you back towards a more pantheistic and immanent rendering of the situation. It starts to sound more like my organic and pansemiotic conception.

But I would say that is simply because divine~world is vaguer - less in your face than hardline Cartesian dualism. On the other hand, it does want to imbue the whole of reality with what is missing from hardline materialist accounts - formal and final cause. So that is where our worldviews usually overlap. That is a common interest arrived at from quite contrasting start points.

But the key point is that insight into mathematical principles, is insight into a different domain. And the problem we now have is that we have no means of envisaging such a domain, because we are so habitually disposed to locating everything in time and space. — Wayfarer

That's a good summary of the impact of Greek maths on the very creation of a rationalising mindset. And there is indeed the irony that we now mentally inhabit that very world because we "see" it in this dimensional fashion.

We learn maths as kids and grow up seeing we exist within three dimensions surrounded by countable objects, etc. Indeed we actually used the maths to build a carpented world of straight lines, perfect circles, exact right angles - the geometry of the modern house or formal garden. So we have really internalised Platonism. And if you are up to date with maths, you now see the same all over again in terms of the forms of trees, clouds, coastlines, mountain ranges,, and other fractal/dissipative structures.

But I think the key point about Platonia is that it is implicitly "other" to something. And that other is the act of measurement. The implied self who is the observer, waving about measuring instruments like rulers, clocks, balances, etc, in ways that make "perfect sense".

So Platonia was rational paradise. But it made opaque its necessary other - empirical paradise. That has to "exist" to. And that is what has become the target of inquiry in the modern era.

If we could generalise the notion of an "observer", an act of measurement or individuation, with matching rigour, then we would really be closing in on a fundamental view of things. We could finish what the Greeks started.