It seems to me that I know my parents. I do not know them perfectly, as God knows them. I do not need to know them perfectly to know them at all. It would be more speculative — more dishonest — for me to claim that I know nothing of my parents than to admit I know something about them.

As St. Thomas says in his commentary on Boethius, all knowledge is received in the manner of the receiver. The human intellect's grasp on the intelligibility of things is necessary finite, imperfect, discursive and processual. We do not grasp things in their entirety, nor is what we grasp present to us all at once. This is simply the nature of human knowledge, that it is not angelic knowledge. But this does not make it such that there is no such thing as human knowledge, only knowledge from the "God's eye view."

. I admit to knowing nothing, but I claim to be aware of many things. Those are not the same things to me. Indeed, people react less well in general to someone claiming some awareness than they do to someone lying to them and claiming knowing. This is a terrible problem with understanding in most people. It is inherently more correct to applaud and suffer with the person only claiming some awareness. That is the gist of my claim stated fairly plainly.

I take it that you then might agree with the following claims, that human beings are intrinsically motivated to seek truth, to attain to veracity

By veracity I do not mean a virtue; it is something more elementary. It is in us from the beginning. Veracity is the impulse toward truth, and the virtue of truthfulness is its proper cultivation. Veracity is the origin of both truthfulness and the various ways of failing to be truthful. Thus, lying, refusing to look at important facts, being careless or hasty in finding things out, and other ways of avoiding truth are perversions of veracity, but they are exercises of it. Curiosity is a frivolous employment of it. Veracity means practically the same thing as rationality, but it brings out the aspect of desire that is present in rationality, and it has the advantage of implying that there is something morally good in the fulfillment of this desire. It also suggests that we are good and deserving of some recognition simply because we are rational. Veracity is the desire for truth; it specifies us as human beings. It is not a passion or an emotion, but the inclination to be truthful. The passions are not the only desires we have, and reason is not just their servant; we also want to achieve the truth.

If we cultivate our rationality we become truthful, and if we frustrate it we become untruthful or dishonest (or merely pedantic), but it is not the case that truthfulness and dishonesty are two equivalent alternatives for us
to pursue. It is not the case that we are defined by veracity (rationality) and that we can cultivate it in these two different ways. Being untruthful is not one of the ways of being a successful human being.

Robert Sokolowski - The Phenomenology of the Human Person

However, I think there is a misplaced sense of piety if we begin to claim that we do not know anything of our parents, anything of arithmetic, or anything of ourselves for fear of error. This strikes me as the "fear of error become fear of truth," that Hegel discusses in the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit. For, "as a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth."

No one lives as if they actually "know nothing." Phyrro of Elis, the arch skeptic of ancient Greece was himself caught running away from a wild dog, apparently confident that it would indeed harm him if it bit him. As Aristotle remarks on such skeptics, they obviously believe they know some things, as they find their way to the Lyceum to bother him, following paths that take them there, whereas if they truly knew nothing they should not prefer one path over any other when they set out to travel to some place, or should not even assume that walking will get them from one place to another.

One cannot live into veracity while thinking they truly know nothing. To be sure, we can always doubt, just as Moore points out that we can always ask of something "is it truly good?" or just as we can always ask "is it truly beautiful?" or "why is it beautiful?" This is part of the reason that truth, beauty, and goodness were proposed as transcendentals by the scholastics. Reason is transcedent, ecstatic. We can always go past current beliefs and judgements (moral or aesthetic as well). This is what makes reason special, it's ability to transcend who we.currently are and make us into something new.

But it is a mistake to take this property of reason as grounds for doubting everything. This makes veracity impossible. We can not overcome a doubt of reason itself with reason, and this is the risk of misology. Yet embracing misology is to fail at living as a rational agent.

As Plato says in the Phaedo:

No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places …” (114d)

Belief in reason itself is a noble risk, and reason shows us we know some things. We know them in our manner, not in a divine manner. This does not mean we lack all knowledge.

Now if your point is merely to use the word "know," in a very uncoventional way, such that people don't "know their parents," or "know that two and two makes four," because radical skepticism can always ask of anything "but is it really true?" this does not seem to me like a worthwhile exercise. Not only that, but it seems that many of our experiences are not even open to this sort of doubt. If I am in terrible pain, I might very well ask, "ah, but am I truly in pain?" but to deny that I know the truth of this matter is simply self-deception. Being in terrible pain is an ostentatious reality. Likewise, if we cannot know our own propositional beliefs, then veracity becomes impossible, for we cannot even know what we hope to improve.

Beyond the possibility of a mistake, the task of decomposing thoughts on the axis of time is very troublesome, and I would be interested to know if there was ever a philosopher to undertake this task. For example, when we think "red car", does that take less time than if we were to think "the happy swimmer dove into the shallow lake"? Surely one has many more concepts than the other, but ultimately — at least for me —, both give one single mental image that can be realised at a given instant of time. So is it a single thought when we say "X therefore Y" because we are uniting these concepts or is it the thought of X followed in time by the thought of Y? I expressed this worry before in the thread:

I have been kicking around ideas on this for a while. In Eddington's "The Rigor of Angles: Kant, Borges, Heisenberg, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality," he discusses a philosophical treaties by Heisenberg that tries to apply his famous uncertainty principle to language. His basic thesis is that words (and so propositional, syntactical thought) can have more or less dynamic or static meanings. In science, we try to speak very precisely and rigorously, using many words to be clear. This ultimately makes our language less dynamic, causing it to cover less cognitive ground. The more we try to focus them on to just one thing and fix that thing, the more the words lose their purchase on what we are describing.

I think we can tie this back to limits on the "cognitive bandwidth," conciousness has. R. Scott Bakker has written some good stuff reviewing studies on the quite limited bandwidth/bit rate of human propositional/linguistic thought (inner monologue being a prime example). Long descriptions essentially get too long and the flood of precise detail makes us lose the thing being described. For us to understand complex propositions about complex topics, e.g., some proposition about "Hegelian dialectical," we cannot stop to unpack our propositional knowledge of all the terms. We must have studied the terms and internalized them so that we have a "grasp" of their intelligibility such that they can be "present" to us simply, without unpacking.

We might liken this simple grasp to Aristotle's second sort of knowing, adiaireta. It's more a noetic awareness of the thing. It might be cultivated and informed by propositional knowledge, but it's opposite is ignorance or lack of awareness of a term, not falsehood as in propositional thought.

So for instance, we might paint a word portrait of the Mona Lisa quite well in a paragraph. If we try to be super detailed and start listing precise dimensions, hex codes for the colors used, etc., we can have a description with way more precision that we nonetheless read and have no idea what it is describing. By contrast, Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," captures the substance of an art work in a dynamic way that a very static description cannot.

This is also why I think we can get endless milage out of some of the more poetic, vague philosophers. They don't fix their subject to the same degree, and this allows their words to cover a more dynamic range.

I think there is a good convergence here with some more phenomenolgical works on knowledge (e.g. Robert Sokolowski) and also St. Aquinas' understanding of the "God's eye view," where intelligibilities are present "all at once." The "view from nowhere," or "view from anywhere," errs by failing to account for how knowing occurs over time and how more and more abstract and rigorous formulations lose their grip on intelligibilities. The "view from nowhere/anywhere," really wants to be the God's eye view, where intelligibility is simply present, but the desire to excise God from an explanation led to excising mind as well, leading to incoherence where "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," and so the true view of things is "how they are conceived of with no mind."

The goal of understanding then is a sort of contemplative grasp that can then be used in the dividing and combining of discursive thought (e.g. Aquinas' description in his commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate).

Well, if we take it that adiaireta, awareness of something, is a sort of knowledge, it seems like we can possess it without formulating any propositional beliefs about a thing. We can have false propositional beliefs about something, but I'm not sure if we can have a "false awareness" of something. So, at least this sort of knowledge seems possible.

Further, if we think of knowledge as grasping the intelligibility of something, or "making our mind like it," it seems like we can do this either well or poorly. There is a gradation here, not a binary known/unknown. But whenever we act in knowing something at all, there is adiaireta, which is at least some sort of grasp of the phenomena.

I tend to like the ancient and medieval understanding of knowledge as being more or less perfected, as opposed to the total reduction of knowledge to propositional beliefs and their truth values so common in modern analytical philosophy. It seems obvious to me that I know my brother for instances, but I can know him more or less well than I currently know him.

I agree with your point that to doubt anything other things must be certain, or at least held to be certain.

It seems that most forms of "we cannot know anything about the world," rely on a certainty that there is indeed a world and a real truth about it out there. I just don't know how advocates of these theories can claim to know this given their position.

I think there are a lot of concepts that are not decomposable, that is, you cannot break them down into component parts without losing something. Perception might be one of these things. It's easy enough to describe perception. E.g., "you see a beautiful sunset over Death Valley."

If you try to decompose the experience into what causes it though, you end up losing elements. No amount of talk of neurons or light waves, B-minimal properties, etc., no matter how informative, seems to avoid losing something.

Every object can be defined with its relations to all other objects.

Right, there are some pretty good arguments out of the Thomist camp that all properties of things have to involve how they relate to other things or parts of themselves. For example, John of St. Thomas points out that even substance is constituted of how it relates to other substances. I think a parallel might be drawn here to information theory as well. Describing anything meaningfully requires some sort of difference. I think some good metaphysical inferences can be drawn from what is minimally necessary to describe anything.

Which makes it kind of funny that arelational knowledge of "things-in-themselves" became a sort of gold standard of knowledge in some areas of philosophy.

But then what does it mean for something to simple? That it relates to all things in just one way? I am not sure what fits that bill. That it cannot be decomposed into constituent parts without losing something? A lot of things seem to be primitive in that way.

It just doesn't seem very convincing. The experience of being aware of an experience is phenomenologicaly concurrent with it. Certainly, it's true that we don't have an experience "in no time at all," but it seems like a mistake here to take experience as being decomposable into smaller and smaller intervals, with certain parts having to follow others in serial order. Understanding seems to occur as a sort of parallel, composite process (which makes sense given our cognitive architecture).

I think the issue might be conflating the process of developing a thought into a propositional form, and the experience of self-awareness itself. For example, in the passage from Augustine above he spends a paragraph unpacking inferences made from an experience of knowing and willing that occurs in an instant. These two are divided in propositional thought, yet if a line drive is hit to us while playing baseball, our experience doesn't seem to involve first knowing that the ball has been hit, then willing our body to move to catch it. We do all of these together, seamlessly knowing, willing, and acting. Likewise, in introspection we experience and experience our own experiencing together.

My point is that we can be aware of a particular thing without believing or knowing anything about that thing, we can believe a particular thing without being aware of or knowing anything about that thing, and we can know how to do something without believing anything or being aware of doing the thing.

Examples may help me to grasp what you're saying here. The above, as written, seems plainly false to me. I would argue that all three candidates/examples/suggestions are false, as they are written.

You might consider here Aristotle's two types of truth, which gets at this distinction.

Aristotle, in Metaphysics, IX 10, distinguishes between two kinds of truth: truth as the correctness of speech and thought, and truth as the grasping of indivisibles (asyntheta, adiaireta).2

The first kind of truth involves complex articulation: it requires that the things in question be “combined and divided.” If in our thinking and speaking we combine and divide things as they are themselves combined and divided, our thinking and speaking will be true; if we combine and separate things in ways different from the ways they themselves are com-posed and divided, our thinking and speaking will be false (Metaphysics, IX
10, 1051b2–9). It is important to note that this form of truth has falsity as its opposite. If I say, “Snow is white,” I have composed a statement. I have put thoughts together. If snow indeed is white, my statement and my opinion will be true; if snow is brown, my statement and my opinion will be false. It is the statement and the opinion that are true or false. In De Anima, III 8 (432a11), Aristotle says that being true or false belongs to an "intertwining of things thought, a symploke¯ noe¯mato¯n.” In this passage, the term we have translated as “things thought,” noe¯mata, needs to be clarified, and we will have more to say about it later. The intertwining of things thought is a syntactic achievement.


The second kind of truth involves not complexity but a simple grasp of simple things (Metaphysics, IX 10, 1051b17–33). This kind of truth has ignorance, not falsity, as its opposite. Suppose I am engaged inconversation and someone begins using the word eisteddfods. If I have never heard that word before, I do not take in anything when I hear it now; and since I do not take anything in, I cannot be mistaken. I do not get anything wrong; I simply do not know. My deficiency consists not in falsity but in ignorance. Or suppose something is happening before me and I am completely bewildered by it. Again, I fail to take anything in, and my thinking is not false; it is simply uninformed, which is different from being misinformed. To be exact, I should say not that my thinking is uninformed, but that I simply am not thinking. I have not gotten there yet. I may be trying to think, but I have not succeeded in having a thought, either simple or complex. In the first kind of truth, by contrast, I do have a thought (that snow is white), but it might be false. In the second kind, my mind does not rise to the level at which falsity is even possible.

I would add that our limited cognitive bandwidth requires that we make frequent use of this second type of truth. In statements, predication, etc. we say things about things, or we evaluate such statements in thought. However, when we do this, we cannot "unpack" all this detail. I can say something about, say "Russia," without either of us having to unpack all our propositional knowledge about Russia. There is both a subconscious and pre-concious element to this. Subconscious because we use terms as shorthand for a huge network of connections, pre-concious because the objects and processes we perceive are organized into discrete "things," automatically. It is this automatic demarcation that allows for the phenomenology that gives rise to predication and syntax in the first place (Husserl's argument).

I'm not sure if this is much of a criticism. Thought is essentially processual. The very effort to understand a claim like "I think, therefore I am," relies on "prior cognition," as Aristotle says. "This is also true of both deductive and inductive arguments, since they both succeed in teaching because they rely on previous cognition: deductive arguments begin with premisses we are assumed to understand, and inductive arguments prove the universal by relying on the fact that the particular is already clear." (Posterior Analytics)

But simply because thought "is" in the context of becoming doesn't mean "it is not," anymore than an eclipse can be shown "not to be," simply because it occurs over an interval.

Notably, I think the common complaints here are dealt with quite well by Augustine, who has his own formulation of Descartes' famous proposition. There, the theory of mind binds together being, knowing, and willing, such that the three are intrinsically related in forming the "I"

I am talking about these three things: being, knowing, and willing. For I am and I know and I will. In that I know and will, I am. And I know myself to be and to will. And I will to be and to know. Let him who can, see in these three things how inseparable a life is: one life, one mind, and one essence, how there is, finally, an inseparable distinction, and yet a distinction. Surely this is obvious to each one himself. Let him look within himself and see and report to me. (Confessions)

I would think most people would like to avoid:
- Doing things that are ugly/disgusting
- Looking stupid or embracing falsehoods
- Preforming practical tasks poorly/incompetently

These can have a moral component, but they don't need to.

This lines up with the proposed "three types of judgement:"
-Moral/practical - good/bad
-Theoretical - true/false
-Aesthetic - beautiful/ugly

Unfortunately, these all tend to be open ended as well. As Moore points out, questions of goodness are open ended. The enduring legacy of radical skepticism shows that truth can always be questions. Likewise, "is it beautiful?" or "why is it beautiful?" is also open ended.

People don't want to be seen as having either bad judgement (of any sort) or of being unable to follow their judgement, i.e., lack of self-control.

I think this ties in quite well with Robert Sokolowski's reformulation of Aristotle's "man is the rational animal," as "humans are agents of truth." We don't want to be seen to be doing things that show poor judgement because ultimately it reflects poorly on our ability to live into veracity, to be agents who are accountable to truth.

Of relevance:

For if intellect understands itself to understand, it must first be given that it understands some thing and then understands itself to understand: for the understanding that intellect understands is of some object. Thus, either we proceed to infinity or, if we come to some first thing understood, that cannot be understanding itself, but some intelligible thing.

Summa Contra Gentiles

This seems to justify: "I am" as opposed to merely: "thinking is," because there is both thinking and the recursive awareness of this thinking as thought. What is the "I" but this very sort of self-awareness in thought? But if there is self-awareness, some self exists, since it would seem that a "self" or "I" is definitionally just this very sort of awareness.

Whereas, it seems possible that a goldfish or fetus might experience some level of first person subjective experience, but not any sort of recursive self-knowledge.

Descartes' doesn't bring this out fully, but I do think he implicitly answers the big criticism against his famous line. For it is not simply that there "is thinking," but also that there is recursive self-awareness of thinking. This is what motivates the statement in the first place.

This excludes the error of the ancients who completely removed the final cause from things and held that everything comes about from the necessity of matter.

Aquinas commenting on the silly ideas of a bygone error in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Funny how ideas go in and out of fashion.

Just bear in mind that the protean nature of religious belief is not unique. You'll see the same thing in scientific articles and public health datasets being mustered to prove anti-vaccine arguments, or in the endless debates over public education (e.g., is offering optional advanced mathematics classes in high school good, or an engine structural racism, etc.)

That people can disagree wildly on things doesn't necessarily entail that knowledge is impossible. This is true even when there isn't consensus. We'd hardly say that there is no truth of the matter as to what makes for a good or bad education, simply because there is a large diversity of opinions in the education policy space, or that there can never be an adequate explanation of consciousness just because we currently lack one and are left with a wide diversity of opinions.

From a theological perspective, such diversity is often seen as necessary for the progress of human understanding in the same way a plurality of political movements is required for the historical development of political institutions. E.g., modern liberal democracy only has universal education, restrictions on child labor, rights to unionize, pension/health systems, etc. today because it faced the challenge of socialism and was forced to sublate it, making key socialist policies part of itself. A similar phenomena would seem to be at work in the parallel strands of faith.

Or this is at least the explanation some theologians take, e.g. it's sort of the explanation of plurality laid out in the current catechism of the Catholic Church (rather than, we are right, everyone else is wrong).

It's worth distinguish between "the philosophy of science," and "the philosophy of x science." The stuff you find in handbooks of "philosophy of biology," or "philosophy of economics," is central to the work of scientists in those fields. It generally has to do with paradigm defining theory, methodology, etc., and the articles you find in these texts are about a 50/50 split of scientists from that field and philosophers who specialize in that field (who have generally completed graduate work in the field as well).

"Philosophy of science," tends to be much broader, and not intersect with the sciences to nearly the same degree. It is fairly common to see people with PhDs in physics or biology described as "philosophers of," those fields, but it is uncommon to see a scientist described as a "philosopher of science." The latter is much more general.

The other place you see philosophy intersecting with science is in interdisciplinary areas like information science, complexity studies, etc.

If you look back at how the terms for "science" were used from St. Aquinas up through Hegel's day, there isn't really wasn't too much a distinction. A science was any systematic study of an area of inquiry. Sciences were unique in terms of having different methodologies, and different first principles (following Aristotle's ideal of a science that can be deductively derived from first principles). But "science" was not a discrete form of inquiry.

I could see considerable merits to going back to such a view. "Science," is not really a special sort of sui generis thing, distinguished from all other areas of inquiry. We have only come to think of it in this way due to a short period of history where "anti-metaphysical," views were in vouge. But of course, this didn't get rid of metaphysics, rather it dogmatically enshrined a certain metaphysics, with negative consequences for the progress of science. Only now are we really getting over the hangover caused by this.

Lines of inquiry should be judged on their relative merits, not credentialism. You constantly hear academics bemoaning the negative effects of silos and turf wars, and yet it remains a common tactic to invoke these silos as a means of ending debate (e.g., "developmental biologists cannot speak to evolution, it isn't their specialty," being invoked as a counter to EES). Particularly, the replication crisis and problems with the relationship between economics, public policy, and incentive structures should call into question the absolute authority of "scientists," in their own field of study. For example, being an economist alone does not make one necessarily better equipped to judge the validity of statistical methods.

There seems to be two different conceptions of information being mixed together here.

The shortest possible way to write a program that produces a given string is called its Kolmogorov Complexity or algorithmic entropy. Shannon Entropy by contrast take a given string and then measures the amount surprise in it, based on how likely the string is compared to some background distribution.

Questions about how to view statistics (frequentism vs propensity vs Bayesianism vs logicalism, etc.) affect how we interpret information.

From the perspective of Shannon Entropy, you might say that a computation that outputs pi up to some very high number of decimals produces zero information. Even though there is a very large number of digits, they all occur where they occur with a probability equal to 100% given the program input. This ties into the "scandal of deduction," the finding that deterministic computation/deduction produces no new information.

It's also worth noting that the program that outputs pi doesn't really contain your genome. Information is necessarily relational. We could map your genome onto any string with a sufficient amount of variance, but such information doesn't exist "in itself."

A simple random bit generator produces all possible finite strings given enough time, but that doesn't mean that the Kolmogorov Complexity of all strings is equal to the simplest random string generator. You need a program that will output some string, e.g. your genome, and JUST that thing. So, while a program that outputs pi might output very many possible encodings of your genome, the program still needs some way to recognize that encoding, halt, and output it. So the information in your genome isn't really "in" the program that outputs pi, anymore than a random string generator "contains" the information for all possible programs/strings.


I wrote an article on this a while back for 1,000 Word Philosophy, although they weren't interested in the topic.

https://medium.com/@tkbrown413/introducing-the-scandal-of-deduction-7ea893757f09

And a deeper dive:

https://medium.com/@tkbrown413/does-this-post-contain-any-information-3374612c1feb




I think there is a ton of relevance to metaphysics, it's just that bad inferences are sometimes made. Paul Davies has a great anthology called "Information and the Nature of Reality," with entries by Seth Lloyd, Terrance Deacon, and others, including philosophers and theologians, that is quite good.

Information theory has allowed for a unification of disparate fields, from physics to biology to economics to cognitive science. This alone makes it of philosophical merit, a set of general principles that has explanatory and predictive power across the social, life, and physical sciences.

This is a pretty common example in logic textbooks, but it is not the case that if A -> B then ~A -> ~B. To see why, consider a lawn with a sprinkler system. A person sees it has not rained (~A), but then goes out to find the lawn is wet (B). This is possible because there are many ways for the lawn to get wet (B). If it rains, the lawn will be wet, but the lawn might also be wet for other reasons.

I know you disallowed hoses, sprinklers, etc., but in that case, when the only way for the lawn to get is from the rain (A), you should frame it as an iff/biconditional.

To get ~A -> ~B the starting premise would need to be "if and only if it rains (iff A) then the lawn will be wet (B),or A <->B. In such a case, B also implies A.



This would be "denying the antecedent."



But Corvus seems to be assuming an iff relationship, in which case the inference would be valid.

And the person for whom the drug has made it possible to continue living by making life bearable has a differnt perspective. I don't think its so easy to avoid from the perspectival nature of most matters

Ok, but this is really missing the point. Saying "different things can be good or bad for different," people doesn't even require perspectivism, let alone the claim that "good" reduces to simply "I prefer."

If "good" is just equivalent with "I prefer," then people can never be wrong about what is good for them. This seems ridiculous, because we all have memories of times we preferred to do stupid things that were bad for us. E.g. if someone spends a bunch of money on a health supplement that does nothing for them except give them liver failure, are we going to say: "the supplement was good for them at the time they took it because they felt it was good at that moment?"

Such a claim seems to make it so that introspection is impossible. People can't ever look back at their own lives and make meaningful practical or moral judgements if good and bad is simply current emotion.

Do you think there is a fact of the matter as to whether people are cowardly or courageous, honest or deceitful, and so on, or is it just opinion all the way down?

IMO, this is a tricky question, because the post-Enlightenment mode of seeing the virtues wants to have it that all the virtues are the same, always and everywhere, for "all rational agents." But I believe this is a deeply flawed way to looking at the virtues.

It is like asking "what are the social differences between men and women simpliciter, without reference to any particular culture?" The question is interminable because men and women don't exist outside of societies and social practices. We might as well ask how lungs work without reference to any surrounding atmosphere.

The virtues exist within a social/historical context. Particularly, they are formalized in "practices," which define an internal good/telos for a given practice. For example, take chess. Chess is a social practice. Its rules and what it means "to be a good chess player," are social constructs.

Yet it would seem mighty strange to say that "there is no truth about who is a better chess player," if I play Gary Kasperov 100 times, and lose swiftly in each game. But this is what the extreme relativist ends up committed to, because of the assumption is that "if something is a social practice it is entirely relative." Because chess is "just a social construct," we end up with weird claims, like "any Chess player is equally good at chess as Barry Kasperov."

Because of this, people often move to a sort of naive, static formalism. Something like: "someone is good at chess just in case they win most of their games." But this fails too. I could beat Kasperov if I cheated and used a chess computer. Yet successfully cheating would not make me a "good chess player." Being a good chess player means playing good games of chess. Someone who plays top players and losses all their games might demonstrate better chess aptitude than someone who wins all their games against novices. In a practice, the good/telos is defined internally (although not arbitrarily, even in Chess the rules evolved to make games fair and interesting).

The same is true of less morally trivial practices. In many cultures, there are strong ideas about what makes one a "good doctor." There is "bedside manner," etc. Being a doctor is a social construct, but it does not follow that my two year old son is equally as good of a doctor as the head of surgery at Mass General because medicine in a social practice.

Medicine clearly isn't "social practice all the way down," however, even if it always exists as a social practice. There can be a truth about what helps or harms a patient irrespective of current practice, and these facts can in turn be used to redefine and reform the practice.


When you read the Iliad, it is clear that Homer's characters are not confused about who is showing virtue and who is showing vice. People are confused about the virtues today because they want to apply them outside of any context. This simply doesn't make sense.

You can critique practices from an internal frame, showing how current practice fails to fulfill the telos of the practice, or from an external frame. However, you can't critique practices "from nowhere." Relativism often makes its hay by conflating the relativity of social practices with relativity within practices, which seems plausible if one is stuck in the Enlightenment mode of thinking of virtues in terms of "universal absolute goods," but reveals itself to be ridiculous when Kasparov is made to be just as good of a chess player as a toddler.

I had a chat with an American friend of my father who said that in his view Trump is one of the most courageous, virtuous men in America right now. Now our take on this will obviously be that this is absurd. But he made his case rationally. I just think his reasoning was bogus.

I think this combines multiple issues. Disagreements about Trump often center around disagreements about facts. E.g., "he didn't actually do x, y, and z, those are lies created by deep state RINOs in Trump's cabinet," etc. People widely agree that it would be bad for Trump to have called America's war dead "suckers," they just don't degree that it happened.

One thing to note is that people can hold contradictory beliefs, or a practice can evolve such that it contradicts its own purposes. For example, during the Civil Rights movement, many critiques of the Jim Crow system was that it was in contradiction with the principles enshrined in the Constitution (an internal critique). The evolution of practices is contingent, but it isn't entirely arbitrary. Hegel makes a pretty good case for such contradictions motivating practice/norm evolution, and how practices and norms evolve is guided by human goals and purposes.

:up:

My first thoughts as well. "I know no one can know," seems to fall into the same bucket as "it is absolutely true that there are no absolutes," etc.

In particular, there is the problem that, if there is no access to "reality," then presumably there is no reason to set up a knowledge/belief, reality/appearance distinction in the first place. But claims that beliefs are "merely appearance," presuppose such a distinction.

It's possible; whole centuries get reduced to one or two names in the grand scheme of things.

I feel like Nietzsche is much more often described as the harbinger of an era than its culmination — the "opening shots," if you will.

But either way, this doesn't seem to safeguard one's place in history. I've seen lots of people refer to Eriugena's Periphyseon as a sort of Neoplatonic "summa," the culmination of Late Antiquity, etc. But he still has a fairly minor place in the canon of philosophy, a stand out in the "Dark Ages," an era normally passed over.

People sometimes talk about St. Bonaventure in a similar way. The last great mind in the more platonic tradition, his "The Mind's Journey Into God," a sort of condensation of centuries of effort, distilled into its culmination. But he is primarily read as a mystic and theologian today, his philosophical output overshadowed by the new Aristotleanism and St. Aquinas.

But, if influencing future movements is important, then Nietzsche seems more secure. I suppose it also depends how the 20th century is seen in the future. Is the struggle against nihilism the defining feature? Or is it the battle between Marxism, fascism, modern liberalism, and identity?

Well yes, "hard determinism," is generally defined as "determinism in which freedom is impossible." So it's true that, given not-P, not-P. But the way I've generally seen it the "hardness" of determinism follows from simple determinism. I.e., lack of freedom isn't a starting premise, but rather taken as a conclusion. What I meant was that "given determinism" the "hardness" does not seem to automatically follow.

I can see why smallism/reductionism and causal closure are generally taken as excluding any sort of freedom though. If those premises are included, then the properties of mindless fundemental particles determines everything, which leaves no room for freedom. But these seem to me to be extra premises (with dubious evidence to support them) outside the main premise of determinism. Or, if there is something like strong emergence, then metal events are just a type of physical event, and they can have causal powers just fine under causal closure.

Some foreshadowing of Kant 1,200 years earlier in St. Maximus the Confessor's Ambigua:

We will say nothing here about the fact that the being of every thing necessarily includes a "whatness' [that is, is qualified in some way] and is not simply being; that is the first kind of limitations and a strong indication that there is a beginning to the being of things and of their coming to be. But who would deny that every conceivable being-except for the unique Divine Being, which lies beyond being itself-presupposes the concept of "where" in order even to be thought of and that necessarily the concept of "when" is always and in every manner identified with it... . They belong to those concepts that are always included with others, because the others cannot be thought without them.

But then his ultimate view of extension and motion is quite different. Extension in time and space is finitude. God, rather than being boundless extension, sublates extension — the Myriad (all number/multiplicity) returns to and rests in the Monad (one/unity). Von Balthasar's book on Maximus is quite good and gets into some interesting philosophy of number/multiplicity in Gregory of Nysa, Pseudo-Dionysus, and Maximus.

All created things have their motion in a passive way, since it is not a motion or a dynamic that comes from the creature's own being. If, then, intellects are also created, they, too, will necessarily be set in motion,
because they are naturally led away from their source, simply by existing, and towards a goal, by the activity of their wills, for the sake of an existence fulfilled by value, of well-being. For the goal of movement in what is moved is, generally speaking, eternal well-being , just as its origin is being in general, which is God. He is the giver of being and the bestower of the grace of well-being, because he is origin and goal. Only motion in general comes from him, insofar as he is its origin; motion of a particular kind is directed toward him, insofar as he is its goal. And if an intellectual being will only move in an intellectual way, as befits its nature, it will necessarily become a knowing intellect; but if it knows, it will necessarily also love what it knows; and ifit loves, it must expand itself in longing and live in longing expansion and so intensify and greatly accelerate its motion.... Nor will it rest until it comes, in its fullness, to enter int o the fullness of what it loves, and is fully embraced by it, and accepts, in the utter freedom of its own choice, a state of saving possession, so that it belongs completely to what possess es it completely.

This reminds me of Whitehead's distinction between the drive to "live/survive" and to "live well" in "The Function of Reason."

I do wonder what Nietzsche's impact will be going into the future. Will he be be like Plato or St. Augustine, a mainstay on introductory philosophy syllabi millennia later? Or will he be like Eriugena or Henry of Ghent, one of the "deep cuts" of an era, hardly lost to history, but also not a major name in the field?

Nietzsche seems like he might be the most read philosopher today. He was the first philosopher I read. It's a little ironic considering his elitism. I do sometimes think though that he is more a voice for a particular historical moment, a diagnostician first and foremost. Already, a lot of his more provocative statements have become the norm, some to the point where they themselves have become stale dogma. I don't know if that lessens to appeal though. It doesn't seem to have so far.

I am open to relativism, so this concern doesn't really bite for me.

Some degree of relativism is one thing. Most thoughtful thinkers are relativists in some manner or another, e.g., Aquinas' "all knowledge is received in the manner of the receiver." However, it seems problematic to say that truth is completely relativized, even vis-á-vis introspection —that people cannot look back on past events and say "that was a bad decision," with any more validity than their thoughts at that given moment. It's not moral relativism that is at stake when practical reason is reduced to emotional claims, but a thoroughgoing relativism for all claims.

This was the point of the reference to the drug addict. Not that "heroin is an objective bad," but rather that someone whose drug problem has ruined their life can claim, with good warrant, "it was not good for me to begin doing drugs."

Showing that notions of truth are affected by language, social practice, etc. is of course different from showing that they are nothing but social practice, "all the way down." Unfortunately, positivism, a very short lived philosophical movement, has become a sort of ready made strawman such that pulling the rug out from underneath it is made to seem solid grounds for dismissing the concept of truth.

My view would be that conceptions of truth are prephilosophical. They show up when your mechanic fails to have fixed your car, or when your child claims they didn't throw a rock you just saw them throw, etc. There are some very good studies on the phenomenology of truth, the basic aspects of experience from which the notion emerges. Good metaphysical explanations of truth then need to explain this, to explain this adequately, which is easier said than done.

For one thing this is an anthropomorphism fallacy - by attributing human-like characteristics (such as legislating laws) to the concept of the 'laws of nature'. Laws of nature are descriptive, not prescriptive, and do not imply a conscious lawgiver. The word 'laws' is a distraction. 'Natural regularities' might be a better term.

:up:

Strangely, this is a very common conception outside of religious contexts as well — that "laws" and "regularity" can only exist as the sui generis creations of minds. I have never found arguments of this sort compelling, all though it's worth noting that they also make accusations of "anthropomorphizing." I.e. "how can you say nature acts in any law-like way, you only know that your experience of nature works in that way." "But," they will claim, "the mind 'constructs' that view," and so relying on it for any judgement leads to a sort of "making the world into the image of the mind."

I am not sure how these folks think they have grounds for even believing other minds exist in this case though.

I find it hard to believe in any transcendent, creator God, and especially the personal, hectoring, demanding and strangely needy sky-gods of the kind that are worshipped in the West.

Ironically, this is an image of God that is often criticized by the Patristics, some of the big Medieval Latin theologians, and many contemporary Catholic philosophers. The Catholic philosophy space is quite vibrant, and so it's always surprising to me how this doesn't seem to trickle down into the lower levels of religious education.

There seems to be a tendency in religious education, where it even exists in churches, to tend towards "simple is best." I am not sure if this is always helpful for their goals though. It seems to me that precisely what people are hungry for in the "spirituality space," would be these deeper looks at theology and philosophy, along with the sort of intensive practice that was common in the ancient church.

Sorry Count, but I totally disagree with what you posted. Freedom is clearly prior to ethics, as the reason why ethics is needed. If it was the case, that there was no freedom prior to the existence of ethics, then ethics would never come into existence because there would be no need for ethics, being no freedom to act otherwise, nor even the freedom to create ethics.

I really shouldn't have said "prior," especially when trying to present Plato. The two are mutually reinforcing. Ethics is prior to the freedom of the freeindividual in some ways. For example, the person who is raised as a slave, without any education, subject to all sorts of abuses, is made less free by those circumstances (even if they might overcome them eventually). The extreme case would be the person who is murdered as a child. Obviously, they never get a chance to develop their freedom.

The just society makes its citizens more free and the citizens who have achieved a higher level of freedom make their society more just, having come to be able to both discover and actualize the Good. There is a sort of circular causality at work here.

It appears that we are treating 'good' as something concrete, when it is merely an adjective applied conditionally. How would one make the case that a concept such as good is anything more than a sign we apply to things we approve of (a construction of our practices, language and norms) and that this approval is perspectival?

It definitely is treating the Good as something concrete. But Plato thinks he has good reasons for doing this.

Rather then start with considering the existence of "the Good," it might make more sense to start by considering more "concrete" universals, e.g. "square," "red," or "cat." Would something's being square be a "social construct?" No doubt the word "square" is such a construct, but the very existence of such things?

If social constructs don't spring from the aether uncaused, it would seem there must be such things. And generally people are quite accepting of the claim that there are such things as cats, squares, trees, etc.

At first glance, things like "goodness," or "justice" seem more amorphous. However, there are also good reasons for thinking these are not illusions, something wholly created by the mind.

Plato points out one of these reasons during his exchange with Thrasymachus early in The Republic. If justice is just "what is good for people in power," it is still the case that the powerful can be wrong about justice or what is good for them. For example, consider a dictator who raises taxes 50% in order to fund his new palace. The result is a coup and his being imprisoned and tortured while awaiting execution. To both the dictator and others, it is clear that the tax policy was not "a good move." The dictator thought the decision was good at the time, but it was not. Likewise, pouring lead into an elementary school water supply seems to be "bad" for the children in a fairly unambiguous, objective way, regardless of what the person who does it thinks at the time.

So, what is "good" seems to have a certain independence from how people feel at any given moment, making it more than simply a "sign of things we approve of." Our dictator "approved of" his tax policy, yet it would seem odd for us to say that this entails that it must have been a "good" decision for him to make, given it leads to his torture and death. The same applies to dumping lead into the school water supply. Indeed, taken to an extreme, "good" being taken as merely a sign of approval would seem to suggest that we can never be wrong about what is good for us. Yet this does not seem to be the case; we regret our decisions and experience guilt all the time.

Should we instead say that the good for the dictator simply changed, that the tax policy was good when he implemented it, but bad when the coup occured and his opinions about the action changed? Likewise, was starting to use heroin good for heroin addicts until they began to regret it? Or does the IDF's policy in Gaza remain good so long as decision makers think it is good? Etc.

The problem with such a claim is that it slips into an extreme relativism. For why would truth be better the falsehood? It wouldn't. Truth would only be better in cases where we feel it is better, and so our feelings ultimately dictate truth claims. If it falsehood feels better then, at least for that moment, it is better. If our feelings change, the good simply changes.

This simply doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. We all make bad decisions in our lives. It seems silly to say these were good right up until we regret them.

I think you are right on the nomenclature. W. Norris Clarke's "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics," presents itself as "existentialist," Thomism, and doesn't seem to draw on phenomenology at all. Unfortunately, he doesn't really expand much on what he thinks is particularly "existentialist" in his system. The two seem discrete, with some existentialists not being influenced much by Husserl and Stein. But they can also overlap, e.g. Sokolowski draws heavily on Husserl and the Aristotlean tradition, but also from St. Thomas as well, producing a blend of phenomenology, personalism, and Thomism.

But it's a confusing area because personalism is associated with both phenomenology and existentialism. E.g., basically every personalist also gets labeled as an existentialist in encyclopedias.

And then some folks who want to go back to 19th century Thomism call themselves "paleo-Thomists."

I'm yet to see an argument that proves the non-reductive thesis - though I probably just haven't read enough.

I don't think there is anything like proof for either case. However, I do think there are very strong arguments for not assuming the reductionist view is true until decisively proven otherwise. For the following reasons:

Smallism is the idea that "facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts." Wholes are defined by their parts, rather than vice versa. Whatever is "fundamental" in the universe must exist on the smallest scales. It preferences "bottom-up" explanations over "top-down" ones.

Certainly, smallism has its appeal and some empirical support. A common way we are able to understand things better is by breaking complex things down into constituent parts.

However, there is no prima facie reason that smallsim or reductionism should be a preferred "default" in the sciences or metaphysics. "Bigism," the preferencing of the universal and "top-down" arguments, parts being defined in terms of wholes, is just as supportable.

Further, the empirical support and track record of reductionism is simply not that strong. Chemistry is a mature field and quantum mechanics has been around for a century now. Yet molecular structure has not been reduced to physics, and there are arguments that it will never be. 1 Indeed, even within the realm of physics there are ongoing debates regarding the nature of apparent emergence in quantum level phenomena.

The waters are further muddied here because exactly how to define "scientific reductions" is an area of much debate. Additionally, scientific unifications (the explanation of disparate phenomena in terms of more general principles) are often misunderstood as reductions. Unifications though, would tend to support a sort of "bigism," and there have been many of these.

The whole idea of fundamentality adds another wrinkle. For example, in quantum field theory the fields that fill the entire universe are more fundamental than particles - the whole more essential than the part. Indeed, the Italian physicist G.M. D'Ariano likens "particles" to the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, claiming that fields and relational information hold a higher ontological ground. 2 There are good arguments that computation isn't decomposable in the way assumed by smallism either ("more is different"), and there is a lot of support for pancomputationalism in the physics community. 3 If the pancomputationalist view is correct in certain major respects, it would seem that smallism is simply a bad presupposition, a useful view for understanding some sorts of problems, but flawed as metaphysical doctrine. At the very least, this would seem to caution against common views that seem to assume reductionism and smallism are true until decisively proven otherwise.

Neuroscience tends to be very bottom up, particularly because we lack good top-down theories for major phenomena like consciousness. Physics tends to have a lot of top-down explanations. Although I am not aware of any polling on this, I would not be surprised to learn that reductionism is more popular in the special sciences, and among non-scientists, than with physical scientists themselves.

I would add that Jaegwon Kim's arguments against the possibility of strong emergence given current reductionist accounts of physicalism make it extremely difficult for anything like strong emergence to exist. But, assuming we are concious, and assuming panpsychism isn't true, I would take this to suggest that even if something like smallism is true, it will nonetheless require some sort of major paradigm shift that allows for some sort of "emergence-like" phenomena to occur to resolve this impasse. That is, something like what Einstein did for physics, reshaping our fundemental conceptions instead of trying to make the world fit into them.

Well, I think you have to conceptualize this in terms of the Plato's vertical conception of reality:

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.12

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.


Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present - Robert M. Wallace

It's not hard to see the similarities here to St. Paul, e.g. Romans 7.

Hegel expands of this sense of vertical reality in the Logics, showing how true concepts need to unfold from a certain sort of necessity, and the failings of external teleology to truly ground moral teleology. True telos must emerge from within a thing.

There is a "transcedent" Good, but it isn't a sort of spirit realm sitting to the side of the realm of the senses. The question of knowing what is truly good is not absolute then, particularly in later Platonists. One can know and be led by the good to relative degrees, and be more or less self-determining.

"Spirit" is what motivates action, it drives ambition, will, and determination. Adopting a "code of ethics" which you attempt to force yourself to follow, will only stifle your spirit. So a code of ethics is not what you are looking for. What you need is a way of guiding or directing your spirit so that it can maintain its strength.

If you adopt a code of ethics because you believe it is truly good behavior and find yourself unable to do what you think is good, how is that freedom? That seems like the opposite of freedom to me.

Freedom has to involve an element of being able to enact what one thinks of as the highest good, not simply being free to fulfill desires. The alcoholic who wants to stop drinking but cannot is deeply unfree in a way, their appetites have come to rule over their intellect.

My advice would be to look at something like Plato's Republic, how he moves to define "just". It appears to be a matter of doing one's own thing without interfering with others. That allows your spirit to move you freely.

I agree with the recommendation, but I think this is very far from what Plato is saying. Consider the Apology. Socrates stirs the people of Athens on to self-knowledge at great personal risk and to his own detriment. He doesn't avoid conflict to "live and let live," but rather tries to push people towards the good and the just.

Plato presents Socrates as a new sort of hero, a moral figure to replace the old Homeric heroes. Socrates is a hero precisely because he strives for justice, and it is clear in Plato's political writings that justice and freedom must ultimately be fulfilled at the level of an entire society and that justice is not relativistic. Since men can take away other men's freedom, and since education and training is necessary to gain freedom, society must be organized in a just way for men to become free and self-moving.

Ethics then is a prerequisite for freedom. The man who can't actualize what he thinks is truly good is limited in some way, as is the man who acts out of ignorance about what is truly good.

I also grew up outside of any religious background. I would say my father at least was militantly atheist. However, now I attend a non-denominational church about once a month (too far away now with my son to go each week), have a home church otherwise with another family, and go to a Catholic Church on Wednesdays or holidays (of which Catholics have very, very many).

I'm of the opinion that many Christians profoundly misunderstand why people can say they are "spiritual" but have essentially zero interest in Christianity. They tend to think the areligious aren't interested in Christianity for very Christian reasons, e.g. shame over past sins. Because of this, evangelism often targets the emotions primarily, and in so doing it misses the mark. The problem for secular people is more often that Christianity is implausible.

I tend to group the problem into three buckets:

The Scientism Problem: the problem here is that people often think that "the way science says the world is," is incompatible with the existence of a personal God. There are many manifestations of this problem, but the most important seems to be a belief that science says "free will" is impossible, that all our actions are reducible to how little balls of stuff bounce of each other, and that this in turn is incompatible with religious moral teaching and a personal God.

The other way this problem manifest itself is in people thinking that what the Bible says about the world is incompatible with science. This problem is made more acute by the prominence of fundamentalists/literalists, who play an outsized role in public perceptions of Christianity. Even if people know the Bible can be read in ways that do not contradict science, they often assume these are ad hoc rationalizations, modern changes to save the religion from contradiction. In reality though, fundementalism is a modern movement, and strict literalism was not the norm during most of Church history.

The Plurality Problem: is the problem that, if you have many mutually exclusive claims made by various world religions and different sects, it seems unlikely that any of them are due to real divine revelation. Given the principle of indifference and very many different faiths, we should assign a very low probability to each faith. Another issue here is that of extinct religions now widely seen as mere myth (Greek, Egyptian, Norse, etc.). If these religions were mere myth, why wouldn't other ones be the same way, destined for the same fate?

What are the chances of any one faith or sect getting it right? If the Holy Spirit aids Christians, why do they disagree? Of course, theology addresses precisely this issue. Schism might be seen as a necessary historical process, or as an organic process of differentiation, of different organs within a single body (a body that must learn to rule over itself and become self-moving). But simplicity seems to win out here in the popular imagination, "everyone else has it wrong."

The Exemplar Problem: a major appeal of Christianity is that it offers the promise of transforming the person — freedom from sin, from being ruled over by instinct, appetites, passions, and circumstance — the possibility of deeper, more loving relationships. And yet many seemingly devote people do not seem to have been remade in this way. Indeed, they might seem downright hateful, impulsive, and mean spirited.

But if the faith doesn't result in being reborn in this positive way, then its claims about the workings of the Holy Spirit in the individual come into question.


---

I think these questions can be adequately addressed, but they rarely are. Faith is often described as something you either have or don't, a miracle (the influence of Reformed/Calvinist theology). Churches no longer focus much on the process of metanoia, the changing of the mind, the ascetic disciplines that used to be standard in the Church, etc. In trying to make everything "easier," the ascetic, meditative, contemplative, philosophical, and intellectual traditions of Christianity have been pushed to the fringes.

Christian moral teaching is only going to make sense in the context of a relationship with God. Yet these often get rolled out first, as if it makes any sense for a person raised in a secular environment to feel shame over premarital relations, etc.

You don't start by understanding though. As Saint Augustine puts it, we have faith so that we might understand.

Conversion involves metanoia. One wants to know God and the Good, as all men naturally want to know (Aristotle's opening lines). It is wanting to know what is truly good, not just what seems good, or what others say is good, that allows us to transcend current belief, desire, circumstance, and instinct and become truly self determining (Plato). You can't be free if you're just an effect of other causes.

Christianity is ultimately a religion of freedom. Romans 7 is probably the pound for pound most influential text for the philosophy of free will. There Saint Paul describes how he does what he hates and is ruled over by desire. He is dead in sin, not a biological death, but a death of any true autonomy and personhood. He is only resurrected by Christ, the Logos.

For man can only be free if he knows why he acts, does what he thinks is good, and can know the true good.

Metanoia is generally supported by ascetic practice, a sort of exercise to train the rational part of the soul to rule over the spirited and appetitive parts, to be self-determining. Without these, mentoring relationships, etc. you often end up in a situation where newcomers are immediately turned around to witness without feeling like they have understood what they are witnessing to.

Christians feel uncomfortable engaging with the Scientism Problem and the Plurality Problem. These are generally studiously avoided, rather than grappled with, to the detriment of all involved.

It's a little strange to make an appeal for historical nuance and then launch into a simplistic dichotomy of secular/good/progress and Christianity/evil/regression like:

Think of the advances which secular society has made towards the improvement of the human condition, in Western society, over the last 500 years; we are speaking of the transition from a feudal, religiously-intolerant society to a society governed by the rule of law and freedom of religious belief.

Now try to name one step along this road which was not bitterly opposed by the Christian religion. The emancipation of women; birth control; the abolition of slavery; universal free education; inoculation against diseases which cripple children; the universal franchise. Every modern development which has tended to reduce the sum total of human misery, and increase the general balance of health, happiness and prosperity, has been fought on the beaches and in the streets by one section or another of the Christian church.

The historical events you are talking about, with the exception of birth control, took place in societies where the overwhelming majority of people were Christians and attending religious services regularly. The issue of slavery in the British Empire and the US, or of serfdom's extremely late end in Russia, occured in contexts where almost everyone on both sides of the issue was a practicing Christian. Certainly, it was not the case that progressive policy in mid-1800s America/Russia/the UK was driven largely by explicitly secular movements. The "Battle Hymn of the Republic," is, of course, a hymn, John Brown was an Evangelical puritan, etc.

Free education is a particularly bad example because it was started and advocated for on religious grounds.

Nor does the dichotomy work going in the other direction, with secularism always being a force for progress and good. The Soviet Union was aggressively atheist and suppressed the Orthodox Church, dynamiting a great cathedral to make the world's largest swimming pool. But Stalin essentially recreated serfdom in all but name, made massive use of slave labor, and carried out a number of genocides against ethnic minorities. You could consider the abuses of Mao, the French Terror, etc. as well.

This seems like a weird application of current "culture war" categories to periods in history when they make little sense — e.g. look at the documents produced by either side of the US Civil War and there will be allusions to religion everywhere.

I am not really sure what you're trying to to get at here. What counts as intuitive might be debated, but certain statements like "a line of points cannot be simultaneously continuous and discrete," or "2+2=4," can largely be agreed upon. Are you claiming we lack good warrant for believing these sorts of things?

Eliminitivism, in its most extreme form, does violate these sorts of intuitions. This would be the claim that "you don't actually experience anything, see blue, hear sounds, etc." But does anyone actually advocate this? Dennett himself calls this type of eliminitivism "ridiculous," in "Conciousness Explained."

The problem with the claims of more plausible forms eliminitivism aren't necessarily that they are counter intuitive, it's that they claim that conciousness has been adequately explained when it hasn't been.

Ok, well we might debate what counts as adequate explanation here. But what is not a good response is to say, "yes, it does seem inadequate, but that's only because human reason is ultimately deficient." This essentially amounts to saying "I do not need to offer a convincing explanation or demonstration, because such a thing is not possible, but you should still accept the truth of what I'm saying."

This is like Luther's response to Erasmus. Erasmus says "a God who predestines — forces — man to sin, and then punishes him for it seems evil."

To which Luther responds: "yes, but it only seems evil because our reason is deficient due to the fall." This is not an explanation though.

If the second is true, and physical processes such as energy are also fundamental, it seems that the combination problem is trivial: we have observed that physical processes can form complex objects without human intervention, such as trees: if we assume that another quality is fundamental (ignoring consciousness), and this quality is used to make a complex system like a tree, which seems to have fundamental components working together to form a complex system, why can’t the same be true of consciousness

The way I understand combinatorial objections to panpsychism, the issue isn't that fundemental forces cannot combine to form complex systems. Rather, it is that the boundaries that delineate "things" are arbitrary from the standpoint of physics. Information, causality, mass, and energy flow across all such "boundaries" as if they didn't exist. This means you can draw arbitrary lines around different physical ensembles and claim an almost infinite number of distinct consciousness.

So the issue isn't that fundemental forces cannot combine to create human level intellect, but that it seems all sorts of systems can do this.

Another problem is that the Earth's core, clouds, the sun, etc. all also in involve a ton of information transfer. So too, a room with 10 people having a conversation can be thought of as a physical system, and this system has even more complexity than a single human body.

Why then does it not appear that the sun has a mind like a human? Why don't rooms of people produce self-aware group minds? If you cut my arm off, my conciousness stays mostly the same, but presumably my arm's level of conciousness deteriorates to some sort of basic, fundemental level. Why is this?

To explain this, we need to explain what it is about human beings and animal life that works differently to make conciousness become "more full" in them. But then this problem turns out to look a lot like the "Hard Problem of Conciousness" that we had before we invoked panpsychism, so we end up in the same spot.

That, or we have to suppose that the sun might have an awareness similar to ours, but be unable to act due to its composition, which seems strange. A problem for this avenue is what happens with brain injuries, where people lose whole chunks of their conciousness. If brain injuries, Alzheimer's, certain drugs, etc. that disrupt the brain cause such profound shifts in experience, then it seems like we still need to explain many of the same things that the Hard Problem asks us to, even with panpsychism.

But one of the comparisions Murti makes is between the 'two-truths' teaching of Madhyamaka and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and the noumenal. Conventional truth, samvritti, corresponds with the phenomenal realm, paramartha is ultimate truth, but at the same time, empty of own-being and beyond predication, as it were. Nāgārjuna (who authored the principle text) said he makes no claims and holds no thesis of his own. He has no absolute truth to proclaim and writes only as a kind of propadeutic. The analogy is, words are like a stick used to stoke the fire, but once the fire is ablaze, the stick is thrown in with it.

Reminds me of Plato's Divided Line and his difference between opinion (about mutable things) and knowledge (about things that are always true). It struck me a while back that the Platonic preference for this sort of knowledge is essentially reborn in modern philosophy's preference for Humean "relations of ideas" or Kantian analyticity. The whole idea of "a priori" truths is very akin to the theory of remembered truths, known prior to all sensory experience, in the Phaedo.

But this is a point where I tend to go over more to Aristotle, even if I generally find more to like in Plato. We learn from sensory experience and from experience of our own thoughts. Plato might be right to preference the realm of being over becoming to some extent, but it isn't true that all knowledge is of being alone.

For example, imagine, to take your example, there are five basic atoms which everything is ontologically reducible to. Imagine a theist says “this ‘atomic five theory’ doesn’t account for miracles”, and we need to posit God to explain them. IF the ‘atomic five’ naturalist can explain sufficiently such “miracles” under their theory, then it seems, to me, to be more ontologically parsimonious, even though God would provide a form of monism whereas ‘atomic five theory’ does not because the latter doesn’t have to posit a whole new category of entities.

Yes, this makes sense. And I think it applies to the "classical theism" of most contemporary philosophy of religion, where God is just a very powerful entity outside the world who created the world and occasionally intervenes in it against the normal "laws of nature."

Religion is only more parsimonious in systems where there is a higher level reality that the world of appearances is plausibly reducible to. This tends to be true in panentheistic systems, whereas pantheism would seem to require an identical number of entities to naturalism and theism additional entities. Advaita Vedant, Neoplatonism, and most Catholic and Orthodox theology would seem to fit the bill here. The reduction flows from a vertical conception of reality based on what is more essential.

The Catholic Mass has a line where everyone says something to the effect of "praise God in whom 'live and move and have our being'" (from The Book of Acts 17:28). God's essence is said to be identical to God's being, but this is true of nothing else. All created things are a sort of derivative partial being, existing according to their essence. All essence is derivative of the Logos (Christ) in the same way light comes in many colors but is one thing. Being is God's being alone (existence, haecciety), which is incarnated/instantiated in Logos according to essence, where essence is derivative of Logos. This maintains a true ontological God/creation distinction unlike Advaita, but it nonetheless collapses the plurality of ontological entities. But there is also a personalist trend here (normally associated with the Holy Spirit) that also tends to make persons ontologically basic, which increases the number of entities.

But a thing cannot be the opposite of what it is. What are we to make of this puzzle Bob Ross?

Dialectical. A thing is / encapsulates its opposite (Eriugena, Boehme, Hegel, etc.) . :cool:

I am not sure if this is an apt point of comparison. Consider that we tend to think all sorts of animals experience phenomenal conciousness. That is, there is something that "it is like" to live as a bat, a dog, a turtle, a fish, a squid, etc. Fish can feel pain, etc.

But if this is the case then conciousness is not akin to Marfan Syndrome. It's essential to seemingly all higher level animal life, something that has been around for hundreds of millions of years. So you're not talking about a gene with some unintended consequences that aren't all that relevant for selection, but rather a huge portion of the entire genome, genes stretching across species and genus, genes that affect niche construction and the context of eco systems in which animals have evolved, etc.

Second, we have good reason to think that phenomenal awareness is different in different animals. Dogs do not experience the world like we do. Some animals demonstrate some rudimentary mathematical abilities, most do not. Some animals seem to have a certain embryonic sense of logic, in that they are perturbed by what are essentially "magic tricks," chains of events that don't "add up," e.g., making food seem to vanish, etc.

However, epiphenomenalism says that none of this subjective awareness can have anything to do with natural selection. So we need to explain why awareness changes with intelligence, why more complex animals seem to have a "fuller picture," of the world.

The deeper problem is that, if causal closure is true, awareness never has anything to do with behavior. So the way "the way the world seems," is never selected for. And yet evolutionary psychology assumes, and in some ways seems to demonstrate fairly convincingly, that "the way the world seems to us," is affected by natural selection. But this seems to hurt the plausibility of phenomenal awareness having no causal role in behavior (and thus selection).

The other thing is that at any point in these hundreds of millions of years mutations could have caused phenomenal awareness to "drift apart" from the world, such that it represents the world less and less accurately. But, per epiphenomenalism, such a thing could never affect selection. So there is nothing to keep awareness from moving further and further away from reality. Yet if this is true, then we have no reason to trust our senses, and so no reason to trust the science and metaphysical doctrines that suggest to us that epiphenomenalism is true.

What would help epiphenomenalism would be if there was some demonstrable, necessary link between how phenomenal awareness "seems" and how sensory systems and intelligence have to work. That is, it would need to show some mechanism by which "the way the world seems" is kept from floating away from "the way the world is." No such link exists though because conciousness is very poorly understood.

The last problem comes from the question: "why even posit epiphenomenalism?" It seems prima facie unreasonable that our thoughts never cause our actions, so how do we end up here? The route tends to lead through smallism, the belief that all facts about larger things are entirely reducible to facts about smaller things. Empirical support for this philosophical presupposition is weak, even chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. But epiphenomenalism has us accepting a very counter intuitive and potentially self-refuting set of presuppositions largely to defend the coherence of a metaphysical doctrine that has weak empirical support and no prima facie plausibility (e.g. "bigism" seems just as good of a presupposition, parts are defined by wholes).

I'm using "intuitive" the way it is generally used throughout philosophy. Something is intuitive, a noetic "first principle," if we cannot conceive of it being otherwise. 2+2 is intuitively 4. It is intuitive that a straight line cannot also be a curved line, that a triangle cannot have four sides, etc.

There is nothing intuitive about the statement "when lots of information gets processed in a very complex way the result produces first person subjective experience." This is not intuitive in the way 2+2=4 is, so it requires demonstration, showing how the claim follows from first principles or empirical observations based on these same intuitive inference rules.

To say, "well I can't demonstrate it in a way that makes sense, but this is just because your intuition is broken," undermines virtually all truth claims, because now we can no longer feel certain about the principle of non-contradiction, inference rules, mathematics, etc. The work around of claiming "x is true, it just seems to not be because your reason is broken," can be applied equally to any claim, e.g. that we are actually light from the Pleroma trapped in a material prison, that 2+2=7, etc.

That everything is extension and motion is not an intuition. It is not intuitive that "color isn't real," for instance. People don't say, "color isn't real, this is obvious and could not possibly be otherwise." It's rather an inference from atomism/corpuscularism, which itself is created as a solution to the apparent unity of the universe and its equally apparent multiplicity and change (The One and the Many problems).

The problems of phenomenal consciousness are to begin with the result of tension between different intuitions

Not sure what you mean here. For most of the history of philosophy it wasn't really much of an issue. There are things. Of these, some are living. Of the living things, some are animals and have sensation. That's just part of their essence.

The Hard Problem only slowly comes into focus with the attempt to reduce all things to extension in space and motion. It even sort of goes back under the radar again with Newton, because now you have fundemental forces that can act at a distance, which led to people posting a similarly sui generis "life force," to explain conciousness.

But "things are only extension in space and motion," or "all that exists can be explained in terms of mathematics and computation," are not basic intuitions.

Neither is, "how does things being very 'complex' or involving lots of integrated information processing result in first person perspective?" a question of a violation of a basic intuition, it's a question of the explanation being extremely murky with no specific causal mechanism identified.

It would be extraordinary if mere logic were to conclude that this or that thing exists. That is nto the sort of thing logic is capable of.

I've got a book for you...


(Granted, it would make more sense if it was the Logic)

A good explanation shows in some way why something is necessary. I do not see how something "computing really hard," ever necessitates the emergence of first person subjective experience.

I am not particularly convinced by eliminitivist lines of argument. They seem to be a sort of bait and switch, or a fundemental misdiagnosis of the problem. They show all the ways in which conciousness is not what folk psychology takes it as, and provide a lot of information about current thinking in neuroscience, but I don't think any of this actually gets at the fundemental question of "why does subjective experience exist?"

My response would be: "ok, my thoughts are not what they seem. Ok, there are lots of plausible theories in neuroscience, global workspaces make sense, recursion and "high level summary," make sense. That's all good. But how does this explain how something mechanistically produces first person subjective experience? That my experience might be different from how I describe it doesn't really say anything about why it necessarily exists given x, y, z, etc."

So then we see the next move: "well, because conciousness is so different from what it seems to be, it turns out that your need for an explanation in terms of necessity is just a bad hunch. There is no reason for you to trust that what you think is an incomplete explanation is actually incomplete."

But then you could literally apply this to any explanation of any phenomena. "Actually, the explanation is perfect, it just seems bad because your thoughts don't work the way you think they do," undermines all claims about the world.

If our core intuitions can be this wrong, and there is "nothing to explain," then I have no idea why we should be referring to neuroscience for explanations in the first place. We only have a good reason to think science tells us anything about the world if our basic intuitions have some sort of merit.

Epiphenomenalism adds another wrinkle. If mechanism is understood in current terms then it follows that mental life can have no causal powers. But then, if what we experience and think has absolutely no effect on how we behave then there is no reason for us to think our perceptions and thoughts have anything to do with the real world. Why would natural selection ever select for accuracy? What we think or experience is completely irrelevant to survival given the causal closure principle, mental events never determine physical outcomes and so the accuracy of mental experience can never be something selected for.

Hoffman, who you mention, doesn't touch on this problem, but it's particularly acute. He just assumes that the way things "seem to us" on our "dashboard" plays a causal role in survival. The causal closure principle denies this. Of course, Hoffman ends up rejecting mechanistic explanations for other reasons, but he could have just stopped here with this disconnect.

If epiphenominalism is true, then we have no grounds for our faith in science, mathematics, etc. and no good grounds for the mechanistic view that leads to epiphenomenalism in the first place. Epiphenomenalism is self defeating.

Now if we don't assume epiphenomenalism, then we appear to have something like strong emergence. But if we have strong emergence, then we need to explain how it works. Yet, Kim's work suggests will be likely impossible in the current mechanism -substance framework, so there does seem to be an explanatory gap here in that some sort of paradigm shift seems needed to resolve this issue.

Another noteworthy point on miracles, is that, given our understanding of nature (and how mystical it really is--e.g., quantum physics, general/special relativity, etc.), it isn't implausible that an extradimensional being (or one with representative faculties capable of representing not in time or space) may exist and still be a part of the natural processes of nature. It seems like one could still, even if one does not want to posit that minority of miracles as misunderstandings, more parsimoniously posit a natural, extra-dimensional being over a supernatural one. Making is supernatural just seems very extraneous.

Right, the boundaries of nature can stretch quite a bit. Eriugena's conception of "nature" includes God. Or we might place the boundary at the truly infinite and transcedent, in which case such a thing is in a way inaccessible, only known through finite causes.

I think that if there were phenomena which reasonably could not be explained with our knowledge of the natural order, in the sense that it was consistently violating the laws of nature and there was no good naturalistic explanation, then that would, prima facie, all else being equal, count in favor of supernaturalism. I think I have to concede that, in order not to beg the question.

If something routinely violated the laws of nature in a uniform way, we would just posit a new law. If it did so in a random way, we could just conclude that nature is random in some respects. Miracles then seem to be more than simple violations of what we assume to be "natural law" (i.e., Hume's view, which I think is ultimately question begging).

I think what makes a miracle evidence for the supernatural would be that it displays a certain type of intentionality. If a new, bright star appeared in the sky out of nowhere, defying all our theories of star formation, we would not tend to think of this as necessarily miraculous. It would be a confusing new natural phenomena.

If several new stars appeared in the sky spelling out "Allah is the Greatest," we would almost certainly take this as miraculous. To me, the difference seems to be the intentionality and the fact that it seems directed towards us for some purpose.

An argument against such supernaturalism is often that if God could do this, God would want to because then we would believe. I am not so sure about this. Certainly, very many people would initially convert to Islam if those stars appeared, but in the long term I don't think it would make people that much more pious or loving — it would get old, and so less miraculous. Plus, if one God reveals themselves to be real, it is now more plausible that others exist, and so the miracles boost the warrant for seeking alternative aid as well, which a major theme in the Old Testament. Seeing the works of God, the people, not happy with what God says, have more warrant to seek after the help of Baal, Moloch, and co., turn to walking in the ways of Jeroboam, yadda, yadda, yadda.