– I think would render "virtue and The Good" moot for the person trapped inside. The thought-experiment seems more analogous to a fentanyl-induced, permenantly vegetative coma than "Plato's Cave".

Well, here is how he describes it:

Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel “from the inside.” You can program your experiences for tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams “from the inside.” Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? If not, why not?

It seems like it can involve simulated romances, friends, career success, etc. Given Boethius' definition of happiness, I was thinking that the machine would produce a rigorous training environment for the development of the virtues, since it is attaining these virtues that makes one happy.

Because "living a virtuous life [...] leads to knowledge of the true good," and someone who is connected to the experience machine is not living life at all. I actually don't understand how Boethius could be imagined to endorse the experience machine.

If you're able to get out it seems like it would be a useful way to "train" people in the virtues. Provided it can perfectly simulate anything in the world, it would seem to open up the opportunity of being raised around the very best teachers, with life events precisely calibrated to test you but not overwhelm you. A person who spends some time in the machine might come out a much better, and thus happier person in the same way that a rigorous education program can help develop a person intellectually and morally.

But I guess the problem comes when virtue and attainment of the Good is thought of wholly in terms of internal goods and harmony, which Boethius tends to get towards at times. It seems like the machine could help guide someone to be able to respond virtuously to both real and simulated experiences, since the two are indiscernible for the subject. So how is the person in the machine still deficient in some good?

I think that's the wrinkle, although I think the idea of not being reliant on the machine, and the virtues of "love" and "charity" clear this up. However, Boethius doesn't really focus much on those virtues.

BTW, I also thinks this gets at ways in which Boethius claim that "all fortune is good" could be improved. He looks at fortune exclusively through the individual lens. In this way, his Lady Philosophy starts to look a big like Dr. Pangloss in Candide, claiming that we live in "the best of all possible worlds," against all the evidence.

However, it seems that bad fortune can also ruin people when they are afflicted with it before they have had time to develop the virtues. Obviously, we are not self-determining as infants, and we rely on a certain sort of environment, some minimum standards, to be able to develop the virtues. So, on the grand historical scale, when we think of disasters that befall whole peoples, the collapse of cultures, etc. it seems like bad fortune is a true hindrance to those who might have been virtuous under better circumstances.

But this seems to flow from the individualistic conception of fortune. We tend to think of human freedom in terms of the individual. However, precisely because the development of freedom requires a certain environment, it might be that we should take a broader, more historical view of fortune. From this frame, I can see how bad fortune might be necessary for the free development of humanity, even if it isn't "for the best," if we look at things from the frame of one individual's life. That is, the development of self-determining societies might require periods of collective misfortune. Maybe. It's at least a little more convincing that Book IV, and there is some evidence that Boethius didn't necessarily think he was being convincing either.

I know this thread is quite old, but I do find the topic interesting.

In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary.

On the bolded, I wonder how common belief in the primacy of particles still is? It does not seem to have a particularly strong standing among the whose who of the physics world. Strong commitments to reductionism in terms of particles seems to be more popular in the special sciences and then strongest in the laity.

As far as arguments in metaphysics go, I find Nicholas Rescher's survey of arguments for process metaphysics about as convincing as any. Mark Bickhard in "Systems and Process Metaphysics," lays out a concise summary of these as well, and then Terrance Deacon touches on them in his "Incomplete Nature," although less fully. You can even find some of this in Aquinas.

Since I've quoted these all at length in different places, I'll just throw them out here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619 -Bickhard
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/885631 - Rescher and Aquinas
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/837241 - Deacon

I think this view helps out with both of the problems listed.

This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.

Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they "relate to nothing else," is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world. Things only make a difference to other things in the world to the extent that they interact with them. These interactions are both what we care about and what we can know (see the quotes from Rescher and Clarke on Aquinas above for an elaboration). Further, the preferencing of mindless interactions over ones involving phenomenal experience is arbitrary, and the rationale for it confused. The logical positivist doctrine that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," ends up in the absurdity that things "really look the way they would be seen without eyes" — that the world "is the way it would be conceived of without a mind."

Process metaphysics helps here in elucidating the fact that the universe is can be seen as just one, unitary process. Yet we experience a multiplicity of beings and there is a multiplicity of minds. The old One and the Many problem. What I think it can help us bring out though is that there is no reason to see processes that don't involve phenomena as somehow "more real" than those processes involving bodies, objects, and environments that lead to phenomenal awareness.

I think information theoretic approaches to the sciences, particularly physics, and applications of semiotics to the sciences, are both instructive here. Through these lenses we are able to see how perspective and context end up being relevant for all interactions, which is another reason for not preferencing processes that don't involve phenomena over those that do.

I believe there is a strong argument that runs through Plato, Aquinas, and Hegel that the processes that involve phenomena might actually be thought of as "more real," as they relate to essences, but this is more secondary, and requires a lot of elaboration.

The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.

The shift to the process view helps here because you lose the problems of reductionism. Some authors claim that "process metaphysics allows for strong emergence," but it might be more accurate to say that it doesn't need it. More is different in process, there are no "fundemental building blocks," such that getting anything distinctly new violates the Parmenidean concern about getting "something from nothing." Phenomena are produced by some, but not all subprocesses of the universal process. It perhaps doesn't make sense in this context to have any sort of ontological distinction between physical and mental, at least not in the way physicalism versus idealism is normally framed.

Excellent points. And then the elucidation of certain natural rights gives us something ready-made to point to in order to show why a certain act is wrong. It's not unlike how civil rights legislation works. E.g., if the police act a certain way, you can point to the statute and say, "this is the right they have infringed," to make your case.

This doesn't mean the rights are always ensured. The same is true of civil rights. Often civil rights get violated in obvious ways and yet the justice system turns a blind eye to this. This was incredibly common during Jim Crow, when the rights identified in Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment were routinely violated.

However, when civil rights advocates wanted to point out the evils here, they were able to point to both the Constitution and natural rights. For, if you just point at the law of the land, people might say "well, maybe you're right, but that just means our laws are wrong." But, provided they accept a natural right, they will have no grounds for defending their actions even if the current laws allow them. In this way, natural laws also show lawmakers what the laws of their state should be.

Because forms are attributes of beings, not of simulations

Isn't a convincing fake still fake?

Well, the intelligibility of things seems to be accessible through images of them. For example, if we have a picture of FDR, we would say "FDR is in the picture." The photograph is a likeness of FDR and transmits some of his intelligibility, whereas FDR would not be said to be a "likeness of," photographs of him.

We can learn about things through images of them. Indeed, skillfully shot photography or diagrams often help to bring out the intelligibility of things.

So, I'd agree that intelligibilities are "in" real things. However, they can also be transmitted. The same is true of sensation. The way a thing reflects ambient light waves allows the medium to transmit the intelligibility.

That said, it seems like the person in the machine can learn much about the intelligibilities of things for the same reason a medical student can learn much about the human body from books, diagrams, videos, etc.

But in a view like Hegel or Plato's, where intelligibilities are most real because they are most self-determining, it seems like a perfect simulation of sensory experience should be enough to get one to the true objects of knowledge, provided the simulation is faithful. Obviously, our simulation can't be fully faithful, else it would have to just be a replica of the world, but it might get close.

Would an idealist even care about being in the machine or not?

This is sort of what I was thinking. The Platonic ascent still seems possible in the machine, and it might even be easier to the extent a person is not distracted by the contingencies of the world. But then one might save themselves some effort and run off into the desert to be alone, rather than build such an elaborate machine. I suppose the machine can simulate good teachers though.

My hypothesis would be that your mind is uneasy about but also somewhat satisfied with identifying goodness with happiness because you recognize that happiness, all else being equal, is good but yet you also intuit, notionally,that what is good is not identical to happiness.

Yes, this makes sense to a certain extent. Plato sort of makes this point in the Philemon and Aristotle in the Ethics. It might be that the contemplative life and the life of virtue are what is best, but it is still the case that we want things like good food, wealth, friends, comfort, etc., and that these contribute to happiness. Aristotle allows that a person might be quite happy due to good fortune despite being a novice in the virtues. His critique here is merely that this person's happiness is less stable because it depends on good fortune, and if they lose these external goods they will become unhappy. Conversely, the person who is happy due to self-development and internal goods derives their happiness from things they cannot lose (or that are at least hard to lose). Augustine makes this same point, although he has it that the things that cannot be lost grant a higher sort of happiness, and are thus preferable to the gifts of fortune.

But I think there is a wrinkle here. The person who is dependent on good fortune is less free and less fully developed, being reliant on external goods, and so I think we do have grounds for saying they are less happy/flourishing precisely because they are dependent (Plato in the Republic, Augustine, and Boethius seem to make this point).

Now, can the person in the simulation grasp these immutable goods? It seems they can. So where is the problem? I think the Timaeus might identify it. If our goal is to become "like God," a goal Aristotle also puts at the top of the pyramid in Book X of the Ethics when discussing the contemplative life, the machine is not enough. To become more like God requires that we become self-determining and free, and this would seem to require not being reliant on the machine or fortune. Moreover, God loves all other things because to hate other things or to be indifferent to them is to be defined by what one is not. But in love, the self identifies with the other, and an all embracing love transcends the limits of self-identification. To perfect the virtues of love and charity then, one cannot remain in the machine, since you can't help anyone from there or help "give birth in beauty," as Plato describes it in the Symposium.

A certain degree of self-harmony can be met from within the machine, but not total harmony with the self-in-the-world. This requires harmony with the world, which requires a love that will make one exit the machine.

I think... lol. One might say though that Plato in the Philemon or Aristotle in general are more practical here. Socrates' quip in the Apology that "nothing bad can happen to a good man," rings hollow to the average person, but prehaps it can become true for the best of us.

I'm supposed to get on with theories that begin with something I can't understand how a rational person would involve.

I don't know what to tell you, lots of rational people have embraced the idea of natural rights. You seem to be hung up on the idea of enforcement, but no natural rights theorists claim that natural rights cannot be violated, it's that they should not be violated.

The natural right then is something you can point to when justifying political action. E.g. "we are justified in revolting and demanding a constitution because the king keeps violating natural rights," or "this new bill should not be passed because it allows the state to violate natural rights."

You'd have to claim that any society who doesn't enforce the same rights you do, is wrong. I cant really see that happening... (by this I mean, you don't come across as either a Moral absolutists or someone willing to claim their culture is the 'right one' per se)

So, "children categorically have a right not to be sold off as sex slaves," is a bridge to far for you because it wouldn't be relativistic enough? Was there any grounds on which someone outside of American culture could have said that slavery or Jim Crow was immoral, or must they pass over it because to criticize chattel slavery would be to say that "someone else's culture was wrong?"


There is a place for particularism, sure, but particularism and relativism can become their own sort of absolute. And why stop the relativism at individual cultures and societies? Why not let it apply to the level of individual communities or even individuals?

Obviously, one answer would be that this makes any ethics impossible, no one can criticize anyone else on pain of "absolutism." But then why is the "society" the proper dividing line for determining when relativism should kick in? Natural rights theorists are simply claiming that society it isn't the proper dividing line for some issues.

Yes, but there is also the idea that understanding requires training the mind - or maybe even reconstructing it. (I mean, by meditation, of course) Christianity, it seems to me, talks a great deal about belief and so presents itself as primarily a matter of doctrine.

This is a consequence of modern philosophical innovations and the Reformation. The idea that understanding requires training, asceticism, meditation, and contemplation, was quite well developed in the early and medieval church, as was the idea of rigorous sets of spiritual practices. In the middle ages though, these became more and more aesthetitized and formalized, so that they began to revolve more and more around specific rituals and less on abstract understanding — e.g., the very common practice, even among the peasantry, of undergoing to rigors of pilgrimage, the jam packed liturgical calendar of the medieval holidays, the various religious festivals and processions, the vast pantheon of saints and shrines venerated, guild and local support for chantries, close observance of the daily liturgy of the hours, etc.

The Eastern churches have kept more of both the old aesthetic ritual and the ideas of internal practice alive, in part because theosis and illumination remain such a large part of their doctrine. Catholics tend to keep more of this than Protestants, but it's not prescribed for the laity, or if it is, it's at the initiative of an individual confessor.

I am not sure how different this really is from Buddhism as practiced by the laity. It seems like a lot of the Buddhism that makes it to the West comes from monastics, not necessarily reflecting the laity. People act shocked that Buddhists are carrying out genocides against Muslims in their lands because they think of Buddhism primarily in terms of monasticism. But if we thought of Christians primarily in terms of monastics and modern monastic writings, we'd continue to find asceticism, practice, meditation, and contemplation at the very heart of the religion. E.g., I go to a Cicstercian monestary near my house and the daily schedule 365 days a year revolves around the Liturgy of the Hours (communal meditative chanting), farm work, mass, study, silence at almost all times, ministering to visitors, and contemplation.

But this is also very far from the general culture now. The Medieval uncomfortableness with commerce and the vice of "coveting/grasping" has become essentially a virtue, which casts the old homeless, impoverished saints in a new light. I always find it ironic when conservatives are so out of sorts at the sight of homeless people in San Francisco, their very existence, given who the city is named after.

Question: Begged.

I can only recommend looking up what question begging actually is. In your first post, you seem to have mistaken my pointing out a use for natural rights theory as a justification of it, but even there the problem you seem to think you've identified is circular reasoning, not question begging.

That's the only possible source for 'natural rights'. Hence, it's incoherent to pretend we have some kind of alienable right... from... nowhere.

What's the only possible source for natural rights? Natural rights theory is old and diffuse and they are justified in many ways. E.g., when natural rights are established in the context of social contract theory, the claim is that the rationale that justifies the social contract is such that it is impossible to justify the alienation of certain rights. Or the classical justification is that such rights are established by divinely mandated natural law, in which case enforcement is carried out by primarily through damnation rather than through political means.

Historically, natural rights aren't only enforced by existing law. They were often used as justification for abrogating existing law, e.g., the Declaration of Independence — motivating new enforcement mechanisms.

This seems to beg it's question. The 'evil' seems to consist in the violation of a right. If so, without hte right, there is no evil.

No it isn't.

P1: Violating natural rights is evil.
P2: It is (relatively) easy to determine when natural rights have been violated.
Conclusion: Natural rights are useful in identifying evil because it is easy to identify when they have been violated.

Your objections seem to be to P1 and P2, but the premises don't assume the truth of the conclusion.

It would be great to know about some inalienable rights, not conferred from on high - but that seems incoherent to me too.

How so? It's incoherent to say people can't sever moral individual's obligation to treat them with some basic level of dignity? To be clear, the question posed by natural rights theorists has never been that natural rights cannot be violated, it's that they should not be violated. E.g., "people have in inalienable right to freedom so they should not be taken as slaves or allowed to sell themselves into slavery." Seems coherent to me.

So perhaps the machine will first train our subject in the virtues and, when this training is complete, eject him? And if he doesn't know he is in the machine the machine shall reveal this to him at an opportune time, when he is ready to go into the world and live a virtuous life? Perhaps the last test is in fact the willingness to leave the machine itself?

I can see this making a good analogy for the ideal upbringing/education.

Let's not even forget that their war on terror (more like war for oil and for Israel) has indirectly caused heinous crimes in Europe.

Ah yes, the war to control the vast oil exports of Afghanistan and control the ever potent Afghan-Israeli rivalry. The "war for oil and Israel," makes a little more sense if one looks at Iraq in isolation, but it's hard to imagine that the Iraq War would have happened without 9/11 and Afghanistan. And at any rate, it makes far more sense to replace "Israel" with "Saudi Arabia," given both who the benefits of removing Saddam immediately served and the relation to oil. But the disaster that was Bush II era foreign policy had more to do with hubris and ideology than anything else. Trying to set up liberal democracies in both nations worked directly against the interests of US oil firms, and allowing Iran to dominate Iraqi politics was hardly a win for Israel.

Be that as it may, my feeling is there are no rights which aren't legal rights. Unless claimed universal rights are enforceable by law, they may be proclaimed by anyone and will mean nothing, in fact.

Won't they mean something in that we can point to the evil being done in their violation? Rights, as the defense of the good, seem like they should exist outside of any given system of laws. Molesting children isn't just bad in contexts where it is illegal, or only in cases where there will be punishment.

This might be overly blunt, but if my wife dies in a failed conception, my nation's culture is being erased, and the water I drink being poisoned, I don't think I would be happy even with the greatest virtues. But that is me.

Well, Boethius was awaiting his death, and I believe he was already undergoing torture when he wrote the Consolation, and he was living at sort of the peak of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But it's unclear if we are supposed to find Lady Philosophy's guidance totally convincing. There is some evidence to suggest that he knows the argument isn't convincing, and that this is why he uses Pagan Philosophy as his interlocutor instead of the divine Sophia of the Old Testament or the divine Logos of Christ. That is, human thought only gets you so far, you need something else to get to the sublimity of St. Irenaeus or St. Paul as they approached grizzly deaths.

E.g. Paul's letter from captivity: According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet what I shall prefer I know not. For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.

All in all, yes, I don't think Nozick's machine is compatible with that definition of happiness, exactly because you pointed out that the person in the machine is sucking up resources while adding nothing to the world themselves, but that is a bit besides the point of Nozick's thought experiment.

I am now thinking there might be two routes to elucidating why it doesn't work. First, it cuts the person off from the whole of reality, a lesser issue. Second, it cuts them off from other persons, the main issues. And maybe personalism could lay this issue out more clearly.

This is a good question. I would think it does not, as the simulation is just a bit deeper into the cave, but still in the cave nonetheless. It just might take a bit more effort to leave the cave than if we were in the real world.

I was actually thinking that it might be easier to access the Forms from within the simulation. None of the distractions of the real world, the machine will keep you from experiencing the extreme pleasures or pains that bind one to the body, etc. And it might even be better at teaching virtue in the same way simulations can help someone learn a skill better than throwing them into the fire of real events. But then it seems like you can't stay in the machine because then you become dependent on it the way Boethius was dependent on Fortune and became miserable when he lost his power, fame, and wealth.

Strangely, there seems to be a lot of similarity between thinkers who are often labeled as "existentialists" and those who are called "personalists." Yet these two camps tend to have diametrically opposed views on God and the amount of ancient and medieval philosophy that should be "brought forward" into modern views.

If we look only at the military and paramilitary interventions of the USA after 1945, it becomes clear that this is not about morality or the defense of Western values, but exclusively about economic interests. John F. Kennedy fell victim to these interests when he wanted to end the Vietnam War. By ending the war, he would have done too much damage to the military-industrial complex in the United States. Oliver Stone's film on the subject bears witness to this.

This is not in any way obvious. US foreign policy is the result of values, personal ambition, internal politicking, economics, strategic concerns, and accident. I don't think any attempt to reduce it to one thing, be it "economics," "values," or the personalities of key figures is going to paint a very accurate picture. But it's especially hard to justify this view if the key evidence you point to is a heavily fictionalized, conspiratorial, Hollywood account of events.

As to the overwhelming influence of the MIC, given their ability to dispatch presidents at will and cover it up through a series of assassinations and widespread manipulations, it is strange how such an omnipotent cabal so steadily lost market share in the US economy over the years, or how they were able to assassinate JFK, but not Oliver Stone.



At any rate, the relativism you're advancing seems by far and away most popular in the West, and quite popular to boot. I'd imagine its the most popular conception of morals, at least with the younger generation. I do not think you could say this was the case in say Egypt or China.

Well, since Epicurius is in the mix, I'll try to add some meat to this thread.

In his paper “How to be Dead and Not Care: A Defense of Epicurus,” Stephen Rosenbaum contends that it is unreasonable to fear death. Given that a dead person cannot have experiences, and that a person must experience something for it to be bad for them, it follows that being dead is not a bad for the deceased. Since it is irrational to fear something that is not a bad for us, it is irrational to fear death. In this paper I argue that this argument fails due to two false premises: P1- “a state of affairs is bad for [someone] only if [they] can experience it,” and P2 - “when one dies, one ceases to exist.”

Key to P1 is the supporting proposition: “a person does not experience a situation simply by believing that they have experienced a situation,” rather “one experiences a [situation] only if it can affect one [causally].”i Since this proposition assumes a difference between actual states of affairs and experiences, it is fair to assume that Rosembaum embraces the existence of an external world that continues to exist after our deaths. Almost universally, people have strong interests related to states of affairs in this external world, interests that are not necessarily predicated on their ability to experience said states of affairs. For example, people desire that their loved ones are safe even after their deaths.

It seems apparent that it is bad for a parent if their young child dies, even if the parent is unaware of this fact. Rosenbaum argues that situations like this are not a problem for P1, since the claim is that situations can be bad for someone only if they “can experience [them],” not that they must experience them...

...imagine a city suffers sudden, severe flooding. A mother must make her way to her young children to evacuate them. Her path home is dangerous. Because no one else will evacuate the children, if the mother does not make it home, her children are certain to experience a terrible death. The mother cannot save her children if she is killed enroute. Since she must traverse a low-lying area, she may die prior to the deaths of her children.

If we accept P1, it follows that it is not bad for the mother to have her children drown, provided she dies before they do. Yet, per Rosenbaum, had the children died before the mother, even if the mother still drowns before reaching home, their deaths would be bad for her.(2) This conclusion seems bizarre. It is far from clear that desires related to events after our deaths are necessarily irrational. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how society could function if people did not care about what happened to others after their deaths.

In response to this contention, Rosenbaum could argue that, while people have preferences about events after their deaths, these preferences cease to exist at their death. Yet if the contention that “death is not bad” is forced to rely simply on the claim that, definitionally, bad things can only happen to people who have experiences (i.e., who are not dead), it appears guilty of begging the question.

Even if we accept this counterargument, in the prior example it is the mother’s being dead that would prevent her from saving her children. Thus, the living mother has a valid reason to fear death, as her death will result in her children’s suffering and death. Our fear of death remains rational if our fear is tied to the experiences of others who may survive us.

Rosenbaum’s claim, that our fear of death is due to our irrational tendency to imagine that we will experience things after death, misses a key reason we often fear death─ we fear death because we know our being dead will negatively affect loved ones(3) It is not irrational to think that living people will continue to have experiences after we have died. The mere fact that our loved ones will suffer is bad for us; it is not our experience of their suffering alone that we care about. Thus, Rosenbaum’s argument about the fear of death, i.e., “that we should not fear death because it is not bad for us,” requires the claim that genuine concerns about others’ future experiences do not exist.(4)


(2) - In his response to Nagel, Rosenbaum makes it clear that far away events that a person is not aware of, such as being betrayed by one’s friends, can be bad for a person, even if the person is never made aware of them. All that is required is that an inability to have experiences does not logically preclude someone from experiencing the event.

As any student in linear algebra can readily attest, Descartes' infliction of cruelty was not limited to animals...

This isn't circularity. It's feedback.

I agree that its feedback, but isn't feedback a sort of circular causality?

The most profound consequence of all of this is that it tells against the approach to language as a complete consistent structure with its own metaphysical existence.

Right, it's protean and dynamic, in the same way that organic life is.

The view that language is a practice amongst human beings and part of the human way of life is more helpful in many ways.

More helpful than what? A systems view of language? But then it's always been obvious that language is a social practice and this alone doesn't really elucidate any of the big questions in philosophy of language.

Attempts to unpack what "social practices" are seem to lead to more questions. E.g., if rule following is just based on "the expectations of others," what are we to make of apparent rule following in animal behavior, biology, and "law-like" behavior in nature? Are these different sorts of rules?

One example might be how Asian fireflies all blink in unison due to the rules males follow for deciding when to blink. These don't seem to be based on "expectations," but are rather instinctual, the result of each male trying to "blink first." But then the mathematics used to describe this synchrony ends up also describing how heart cells synchronize, even in petridishes, and here "expectations" are even harder to find — and then the same principles show up in earthquakes. Stogratz' book Synch has a bunch of great examples on this. For the doctor or biologist, defective heart cells inability to "follow the rules," ends up being defined in terms of function. The "bug" issue in games is interesting because these also seem to be defined in terms of function as well.

I do agree that attempts to formalize language in simple ways are not time well spent. E.g. Carnap-Hillel information. You're better off looking at the aggregate and emergent. Trying to pin down how the meaning of individual utterances works in formal terms is hopeless, like trying to give a theory of discrete actions in economics. Economics deals with complex human practices, but it works because it sticks to fairly high levels of analysis.

I'm not a fan of systematic analyses, but perhaps we could distinguish between three different kinds of problem here.
1. One is issues caused when a difficult or anomalous case turns up in the world. The discovery of black swans or of platypuses.
2. Another is the kind of discovery that has been so much evident in mathematics - irrational numbers, etc. The problem of what to do about "0" is perhaps not quite the same, but shares the feature that the standard rule don't apply. But it is the rules themselves (given the standard interpretation of them) that produce the result.
3. A third is where people take advantage of (misuse) the rules to achieve some thing that is not strictly relevant to them. The passive voice is one example, and the "fix" for your bug seems to me to be another.

:up:

I think this is a good classification. Although, they can also blend together a bit. E.g., the black swan causes us to discover the Type 2 problem, or the Type 2 problem opens up the possibility of exploiting incoherencies in a system.

But this is about ontology: the Being that is presupposed by talk about neuronal activity.

The reference to Hebbian learning was just an example of the extremely defuse number of phenomena that are "scientific," in the sense of involving correlation. I wasn't trying to make any other point aside from the fact that this seems to make a very large number of things "scientific," in a way that stretches the word far past its normal usage. So, the suggestion is that, if you can elucidate what all these things have in common more clearly, it would be helpful for your case. I do agree that they all have something in common, but explaining exactly what will not be easy. Information theory has been used to unify many of these ideas, but it leaves our the subjective element and so leaves out something essential.

See Rorty's Mirror of Nature and his Contingency

Funny enough, Boethius also criticizes the image of the mind as "mirror of nature" for being misleading writing in 524AD. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver." But crucially, he has as organs of perception the "imagination" and "intellect," capable variously of abstracting objects away from their surroundings and of comprehending their intelligible forms. This makes all the difference in the conclusions he draws from this sort of relativism.

Intelligibility of the world? I assume you mean by world you mean the things laying around. These have intelligibility? How does one make the move from the intelligibility of the mind, to that of the world? One can simply affirm this, true, and suspend justification, but you know justification is everything to a meaningful assertion. I can't imagine how this works.

Let's back up from metaphysics for a second. A phenomenological explanation of intelligibilities might be something like "the sum total of true things that can be elucidated about an object of discussion across the whole history of the global Human Conversation." Here, "truth" is defined in phenomenological terms, e.g. the truth of correctness, whereas a metaphysical explanation is set aside for now. An important point made by phenomenologists is that predication emerges from human phenomenology and intersubjectivity.

When we perceive an object, we run through a manifold of aspects and profiles: we see the thing first from this side and then from that; we concentrate on the color; we pay attention to the hardness or softness; we turn the thing around and see other sides and aspects, and so on. In this manifold of appearances, however, we continuously experience all the aspects and profiles, all the views, as being “of” one and the same object. The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.” The identity of the thing is implicitly presented in and through the manifold. We do not focus on this identity; rather, we focus on some aspects or profiles, but all of them are experienced, not as isolated flashes or pressures, but as belonging to a single entity. As Husserl puts it, “An identification is performed, but no identity is meant.” The identity itself never shows up as one of these aspects or profiles; its way of being present is more implicit, but it does truly present itself. We do not have just color patches succeeding one another, but the blue and the gray of the object as we perceive it continuously. In fact, if we run into dissonances in the course of our experience – I saw the thing as green, and now the same area is showing up as blue – we recognize them as dissonant precisely because we assume that all the appearances belong to one and the same thing and that it cannot show up in such divergent ways if it is to remain identifiable as itself. [It's worth noting the experiments on animals show they are sensitive to these same sorts of dissonances

When we move to intersubjectivity, to predication, we make a significant step.

We achieve a proposition or a meaning, something that can be communicated and shared as the very same with other people (in contrast with a perception, which cannot be conveyed to others). We achieve something that can be confirmed, disconfirmed, adjusted, brought to greater distinctness, shown to be vague and contradictory, and the like. All the issues that logic deals with now come into play. According to Husserl, therefore, the proposition or the state of affairs, as a categorial object, does not come about when we impose an a priori form on experience; rather, it emerges from and within experience as a formal structure of parts and wholes...

For a longer excerpt on this process, see the long quote midway through this post: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/879424

The work of metaphysical explanations of intelligibilities then is to elucidate what lies behind these processes and what makes different minds work similarly.

How does one make the move from the intelligibility of the mind, to that of the world? One can simply affirm this, true, and suspend justification, but you know justification is everything to a meaningful assertion. I can't imagine how this works

Many ways. Wittgenstein for example, points out the compelling nature of clarity, symmetry, and parsimony in explanations.

Demands for absolute justification can undermine any assertion. How are you sure there are other minds other than your own? How are you sure your thoughts aren't piloted by an evil demon who makes you only sure of falsehoods? Why speak of the "intelligibility of mind," when all you really have grounds for is the apparent intelligibility of things in your own mind? Why believe reason or argument is useful? This is an aspect of the transcendental nature of reason. We can always ask "but is this really true?" in the same way that Moore identified how we can always ask re practical/moral judgement, "is this truly good?"

The position that intelligibility is a sui generis creation of "mind" itself makes metaphysical assumptions. It not unlike how Hume's arguments re cause assume that seeing a baseball break a window or seeing one billiard ball move another isn't observing cause. At first glance, it seems to be a somewhat pious statement about the limits of knowledge, not assuming too much, but the assumption of ignorance itself assumes much. On closer inspection, such claims end up grounded in the conceptions of causation dominant in Hume's day, the idea of extrinsic eternal laws shaping the interactions of discrete things.

IMO, any successful metaphysical theory of truth has to recover the phenomenological given of truth, the way in which truth is prephilosophical.

What there is "outside" of this is impossible to say, for even to speak of an outside is to borrow from contexts where something being outside makes sense, like the outside of a house. There is no outside that can be imagined. This is Wittgenstein

Sure, but Wittgenstein leaves untouched the issue of how the house is built and from what it is constructed. If you can build additions onto the house as needed, if there is no limit to the size of the house, and if the house is built from the very things you are trying to fathom, then I think very different conclusions will follow compared with the case where the house is said to fixed and sealed. But I would say there is plenty of evidence that people can both move between different houses (consider Eriugena's different affirmations and negation re levels of being if you're familiar with that) and reconstruct or expand the houses. The goal of "getting outside" might be a "blind alley," but I think it's possible to take different conclusions from this.

Well, I'd say the house is built from the materials of human phenomenology, and these include intersubjective predication and essences. But do these spring to mind uncaused? Intelligibilities seem to be "in" the world to start with, as a given to our experiences. Metaphysics has to try to explain the why of this.

In this context, do we really have a basis for making these judgements?

What context? Judging the various merits of historical lines of thought? I should hope we have some basis for making these judgements, or else philosophy doesn't really seem possible. I don't think we have to "go back," to say something like "well here the Stoics really got off track..." or "in retrospect Descartes' dualism has these issues," etc.

So perhaps we should be very careful, and sceptical of certainties

It's easier to have destructive certainties when you allow them to sit apart from one another, and so to selectively decide where reason applies. So, yes we should be skeptical of certainties, but we should also not be terrified of them.

Consider Plato's "noble risk" at the end of the Phaedo.

It is not fitting for a sensible man to affirm confidently that such things are just as I have described; but that this or something of this sort is what happens to our souls and their abodes, and since the soul is clearly immortal, that this is so seems proper and worth the risk of believing; for the risk is noble.

We should not want to reach the point where fear of error becomes fear of truth for us. We shall have to act anyhow or others will act for us. We don't want to end up in a situation where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error. 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.

Phenomenology of Spirit §74

In an exchange with Erasmus, Martin Luther allows that his predestinating vision of God "seems evil and cruel," but then states that this simply shows how degenerate man's sense of reason is after the Fall. That God should seem evil just shows that man is evil. Man cannot judge properly. Except Luther uses his judgement often and forcefully, in part, to articulate the very theology he his citing as evidence for his inability to reason.

Having read a number of Luther's letters, I feel they can oscillate between the sublime and the horrid. When he goes into his unhinged rant against the peasants "crush and stab them, kill them where you find them," and seems to embrace the political expediency of "every prince a Pope in his lands," this seems to flow from the fact that he has cut up reason. Now reason can stand in some places. In other places absolute certainty blocks its application and warrant. This leads to chaos.

Obviously, Catholics did this too, as did Calvin's tradition at times. They placed some dogmas outside the realm of reason, and in doing so ruined reason and faith. Erasmus was hated by both Protestants and Catholics at the time for refusing to do this, but I think time has proved him to be the wiser soul of this era. He was not too timid to risk certainty in some areas, but also unwilling to butcher reason for piecemeal consumption — a sin Plato puts a lot of focus on.

Aren't practices and ways of life ("This is what I do") foundations for Wittgenstein at least? If they are, your question does arise, as it always does for any foundation. For some, it leads us to a change of discourse, to naturalistic ideas about human beings, social animals finding their way through the "real" world. But that seems to be where we came in!

People take Wittgenstein many ways. If the ideas in PI around social practices are deflated enough, they begin to look trivial. Everyone knows that different peoples call different things by different words and that a child learns to speak by being around a given language. A Greek child raised in Latin society speaks Latin, an Arab raised in France comes to call things by French words. People who move to foreign countries come to refer to things by foreign words. Often, the sounds that represent words seem quiet arbitrary, and they change with social trends. All this was known and accepted since antiquity.

Did the verificationists and positivists Wittgenstein was speaking to forget this? At first glance it might seem this way, but I don't think they did. Rather, they abstracted the social variances away in their conception of abstract propositions to try to grasp the nature of meanings and reference.

What does Wittgenstein say to such attempts? Interpretation is very varied here. Kirpke moves past the trivial at the cost of advocating a theory of rule following that seems implausible even to other self-described Wittgensteineans. McDowell gets rid of interpretation, sort of turning it into an unanalyzable primitive grounded in practice IIRC. Point being, "rules all the way down," is saying something novel, although I don't think it works.

If we say, "well the natural world is involved in meanings, as well as human cognitive architecture, the phenomenology of human experience, intentionality, and purpose," though, which I think we must, then the role of social practices seems to slide back towards the merely obvious. Once we locate the proximate source of meaning in social practices, the obvious next question is "what causes those practices to be what they are?" I find some phenomenological explanations of how predication arises quite plausible, but then these lead to the question: "why is human phenomenology this way?"

This seems to lead back to the way the world is, the way objects of predication are, and the way human minds (part of the world) are, which seems to reintroduce the question of "how language hooks to the world," that some, such as Rorty, thinks Wittgenstein has proven to be unanswerable. I personally don't think Rorty is right here. The question of "where do rules come from," seems both possible to investigate and very relevant.

IDK, IMHO, what PI says about justification is more interesting than what it says about language.

Do their have to be general principles as such? Should we not change the model and think of something more dynamic, more evolutionary?

I don't see why not. I feel like too much is dismissed as unknowable because it can't be formalized in static systems, as if the limit of current modeling abilities is the limit of knowledge. Sort of like how many in physics say the universe must be computable because we lack an understanding of how things would be "decidable" otherwise.

They say that in movies, you can kill as many people as you'd like, but to murder an animal is unbearable for the viewer.

But you can castrate pigs without anesthesia and leave them to wallow in pain, or pack chickens so closely together that you need saw their beaks off (also without anesthesia) to prevent them from pecking each other to death for lack of space, and people will consume them with every meal.

Surgical procedures on live animals is still the norm for most animals raised today.

Richard M. Weaver defined obscenity as the exposure of that which should remain private. The routine exposure of intense human suffering, or gratuitous depictions of it, would be the paradigmatic example in that it is both something that should remain private, while also being seemingly everywhere in modern media.

Descartes reduction of animals to machines has something deeply wrong with it, but the if anything the modern trend to be more shocked by animal suffering seems to suggest an even greater deficit.

Animals are machines.
Humans are animals.
Therefore, humans are machines.

...is a correct syllogism at any rate. I am reminded of Alan Moore's depiction of "Jack the Ripper," in from Hell. A man caught up in high flying esoteric ideas about history and the destiny of man nonetheless sees his victims as machines to be taken apart and examined, a total displacement of wonder and respect to the merely mechanical.

What happens when you "see" something? Why are you not shocked? Because memory informs the occasion, making it familiar. So what is familiarity? Repetition of results. This is the scientific method, isn't it?

No, I wouldn't say so. This would seem to flatten out what makes the "scientific method" distinct, why it only emerged in the modern era, etc. It renders all perception, seemingly even animal perception, "scientific," and collapses the meaningful distinction between pseudosciences, such as astrology, and the sciences.That is, it generalizes the term "scientific" to the point where it no longer has anything like its original meaning, which I don't think is helpful.

I think it might be more useful to say that there are general principles that are essential to making the scientific method work that are also relevant to statistics, probability theory, perception, Hebbian "fire-together-wire-together" neuronal activity, and how physical information works at a basic level.

It doesn't seem helpful to make every human action "scientific," in the same way it doesn't seem helpful to make it all "pragmatic." What exactly is the universal goal that is being pursued such that all things are pragmatic? Moreover, importantly, there seems to be a useful distinction between what is commonly called pragmatic and what isn't — a notable difference between pragmatist epistemology and Aristotleanism, etc. If the point is simply that people have purposes, why not just say that?

Every time I see something, I can predict what it will do or not do

Consciously or phenomenologicaly, I would not say this is the case. When I take the trash out, I am vaguely aware of my lawn, but I don't make predictions about it. Perhaps this is true in a way of pre-concious processes, the ways in which information is pruned for relevance before entering the system of recursive self-awareness — it would seem to be. But then it seems worth disambiguating these two types of "prediction."

I'd be more worried about trying to reduce all meaning to correlation and inference though, the way computational theories of mind do when they lean to heavily on intuitions from information theory.

So, what IS a door? Just this consummatory event, the process to consummation, the door opening, is the "meaning".

Is the meaning of what? The meaning of a door is opening a door or the meaning of opening a door is opening a door? Is it that things are known in terms of their final causes? I'd agree with that, but the formal, material, and efficient causes can be objects of our inquiry as well, and these are all made manifest to some degree in perception.

Truth is dynamic disclosure, aletheia, revealed in the event of the self creation by the explicit act of drawing upon one's potentiality of possibilities in the openness of one's freedom

I don't know what to make of this. Truth is often a constraint on freedom, something that asserts itself in the world against our will our expectations. How does this definition apply to usual cases of truth and falsity? E.g., if someone tells me Miami is the capital of Florida or a mechanic claims to have fixed my car and it starts having the same problems again?

Freedom would seem to be posterior to perception. It is the sort of thing that must be developed. Infants do not have much by way of freedom.

Hamlet's stoic lemma that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," was understood by the Stoics as a very limited sort of freedom. Rather than a declaration of moral relativism or moral freedom, it assets our affective freedom as we respond to events. Yet even the Stoics admitted that this freedom was limited.

But "nothing is either true or false but thinking makes it so?" I am not sure about this one. Yes, there is a sense in which thought and belief are required to give the appearance/reality distinction content but truth does not arise from mere "thinking that it is so." I would say that, to avoid a sort of nihilism, truth has to be grounded in the intelligibility of the world, which is a part of thought, but which transcends it.

Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, it was often remarked how the US Republican Party had far more "discipline" than their rivals. That is, they were very good at voting lock step on issues, which gave them significantly more leverage than their electoral success would necessarily entail. The Democrats, by contrast, had frequent problems with defections, people being unwilling to vote for party prerogative.

Well, today it seems like the opposite is true, but it got me thinking that in electoral systems there is a benefit to pooling votes, something like "I will vote for things I don't like for you if you will vote with me on things regardless of what you think of them." The centralization of decisionmaking allows votes to be used for more effectively. People can essentially trade autonomy and the ability to have a voice in all votes for political power, i.e., a greater ability to get their way on some key issues.

This has the effect of shifting to locus of power away from votes in the legislature and into the more shadowy realm of internal party politics, which is sort of the opposite of "populism." However, it also has an application to popular support for authoritarianism. Here, people are willing to give up on having input in all issues for getting their way on some key issues that are more important to them. So, they might support giving significantly more autonomy to a single leader, reducing their own power, in exchange for getting progress on some key issue like immigration, welfare expansion, etc.

Counterintuitively, delegating your political authority to a centralized decision-maker is a way to increase your political power, even as it reduces your individual input into decisionmaking. This strategy works as long as enough other people are also willing to delegate decisionmaking authority.

Populism is inherently unstable in democracies though because people can always pull out of such tacit agreements and because this sort of agreement entails that legislators don't actually represent their voters, but instead the "party-line." The current state of the GOP is a good demonstration of this tension.

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth
century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

Now this gives me an idea for a book I had in mind. I really enjoyed Christopher Buehlman's "Between Two Fires," a historical fiction/fantasy novel set in France during the Black Death and Hundred Years War. The key idea is that Satan has decided to destroy man through plague and war, but then God is silent as society dissolves and demons begin to walk the Earth.

But I thought it was also a missed opportunity in that it diverges radically from the source culture it had been following pretty closely early in the book and doesn't actually make much of a point.

I thought of a sequel of sorts, where a defeated Lucifer realizes that man's faith only gets stronger when faced with external horrors and pressures. So instead, the Devil whispers to the faithful, turning the certainty of faith against faith, resulting in the cataclysm of the Wars of Religion (Mammon also does a good job getting the Spanish to chase gold in the Americas, enslaving the peoples there). But tracing this plan back to nominalism on the 1400s, as Satan licks his wounds from the failed Black Death campaign would be interesting, since nominalism definitely paved the way for Luther and the resurgence of fideists.

But the Thirty Years War is such a shit show I find it impossible to write about, so maybe it will never work. Plus, I don't want to suggest Calvin, Luther, and co. were "agents of Satan," but rather that something goes dreadfully wrong when man reaches for a divided and false certainty, and this was certainly as true for Counter Reformation figures as well. Some allow the fear of error to become fear of truth, while the worst are "filled with passionate intensity," led on by an angel of light who promises to reduce all things to some single idolatrous image — the elevation of man's ideas to divine status.

namely through a kind of relativism.

Interestingly enough, the book that kicked this thread off makes a case for a certain type of relativism. Plato's Good falls into the category of "things that are good for the sake of something else and good in themselves," a category Aristotle lacks, but which Augustine recovers. These basically map to "relative good," and "absolute good." There is a perspectivism at work in the love of the good. Plato uses downright erotic language to describe knowledge, and romance is deeply personal and subjective (at one point he seems to suggest having intercourse with the Good, which gets close to the eros between husband/God and the bride/soul/Israel/Church in the Song of Songs, the apex of Hebrew wisdom literature).

However, the whole point of the images in the middle of the Republic is that there is no true division in the relative or absolute. The divided line is still one whole line. The philosopher king goes back into the cave because he must recover the whole, the appearances with the in itself in order to have the absolute. Appearance and reality are not mutually exclusive alternatives as Parmenides would have it in the Parmenides. The absolute, by definition, includes the relative. Relative appearance is not reality, but the reality of a thing must include all its appearances. The reality/appearance dichotomy isn't dyadic then, but rather appearance is a subcategory of reality. Nor is the modern positivist's "objectivity" the absolute, but rather, sitting in intersubjective space, it is a certain type of appearance.

The relative then is always a part of the whole, not divorced from it. This is why relativism in Augustine's semiotics (even if object and sign are the same, the interpretant will vary) or in Boethius' conception of human vs divine knowing do not collapse into sophistic power struggles and a bad sort of relativism. Such relativism is still a part of whole to which reason applies due to the fact that reason is transcendent and ecstatic.

That's a good quote. I think the idea of meaning being defined by social practice causes particular problems for nominalists. On the one hand, I don't think many people want to say such practices have no reasons outside other practices. We develop and change practices for reasons out in the world. But it becomes very hard to articulate how this works when your picture of the world is a seething sea of multiplicity that only ends up differentiated by practices in the first place. When you look for the causes of practices, there is nothing concrete to point to behind them, no essences to inform what it is that rules might be used to point out. Then you're in danger of positing that the world must be "social rules all the way down," or getting "trapped in the box of language," because the rules that define meaning have become unfathomable.





I am not really sure I've understood what you were trying to get across. Language and knowledge as a whole are pragmatic? But then why does the theory vs praxis division seem so obvious to us and why is it useful in philosophy? Is truth not sought for its own good? It would seem to be in many thinkers.

I'm more confused by the idea that perception could be "pragmatic." It seems like perception just happens, regardless of if you intend to use it for something or not.

:up:

I had forgot the ethics was so short because my copy had an introduction as long as the book lol. Another classic. Big fan of Murdoch too.

I do think it's a bit of a shame that verse and drama are so out of style in philosophy these days. But I suppose this could be selection bias, where we only get the good examples of philosophical verse. I imagine there are many ways to do it poorly. Plus, I guess we still have people like Dostoevsky and Kundera more recently, it's just that this sort of literary phil seems quite dead outside the existentialist frame. Where are the poetic epics looking at the philosophical implications of quantum foundations or extended evolutionary synthesis!?



I think that is mostly right, although science can inform metaphysics and our idea of what human flourishing consists in. So, there is the technical side of science, that shows us what to do in order to reach our goals, but then there is also a knowledge component that informs our goals (epistêmê, theoretical wisdom, for Aristotle). I think its possible for elements of episteme to cross over into sophia, philosophical wisdom.

Passive voice might be another example. It's perfectly grammatical, and should be used in some cases. It can also be used in order to make things ambiguous on purpose, often to avoid assigning blame, e.g., "mistakes were made."

But, because it often cuts against the purpose of language vis-á-vis clear communication, many people want to essentially remove it as an option in most cases. That is, it is fine according to the rules, but people see something wrong with it despite this, and this wrongness relates to the function of the system. Not a perfect example, but a common one. Natural language bugs will necessarily be hard to define due to the lack of canonical rules and faithful execution.

It’s not a private situation , but an intersubjective one.

Isn't that the very point of contention re Kirpkestein, that it seems obvious that Robinson Cursoe can develop practices off on his island?

It seems to me that Kirpke ends up in the position of denying that things that obviously happen actually happen, or allowing that people can indeed create private practices, but that for some reason these must be considered "practice-like behaviors." Except that it is more acute than that, for he seems in a position where it is impossible for him to explain why someone might ever decide they have performed a private practice incorrectly, IMO, a very effective point against Kirpkestein.

We are brought up into, or inherit, our practices, because they are language games, not solipsistic opinions.

Yes, and we also modify those practices for various reasons and create practices for specific purposes. I don't see how practices then can be identical with reason, at least not sui generis forms of reason, for then it would never make sense for us to go about changing the rules of games because they fail to achieve what they were created for. But this sort of thing happens all the time.

So how do practices arise? The same way that Kuhn tells us paradigms arise. Via a gestalt shift. We turn the picture upside down, change its sense. This is a different notion of causation than that of empirical reason.

Sometimes. Naismith came up with basketball for the practical purpose of keeping athletes active during the winter. Spencer Brown's system in "The Laws of Form," might have been a paradigm shift, but it was a private one until he released it. Lots of changes in practices are iterative. But the very fact that people make iterative changes to practices based on what they think is bad about the rules, or can think that "the rules are wrong," shows that such rules can't be the ground for reason.

I don't even think Wittgenstein thought reason was locked into separate reasons (plural) that can't communicate, his point is on how justifications hang together. Reason is the ground for rule following. Kant puts it before perception in the First Critique. Plato locates it out "in the world" in the Philebus. Hegel locates it as the engine of all being in the Logics. I see better arguments for the expansive view than the deflationary one.

:up:

If god is the creator and sustainer of our reality then it must be that case that before creation, before existance and causality, there was nothing but god.

In a way, it seems like there is always sort of nothing but God. I think. Aquinas is tricky on this point. God is present to all things and gives them their being, and this is not a sort of making or production, but more a participation.

Creation is not the sort of making that is properly speaking a change, but is rather a certain receiving of being. Hence it need have no essential relation except to the giver of being, and in this way it is not ‘out of’ non-being, except insofar as it is after non-being, as night is ‘out of’ day.”

Ok, I was honestly just trying to be helpful in pulling these out. I see that you have gone back and made it clearer.

I would just point to two things here:

This suggests that our learning process is guided by external influences, rather than by our own free will.

Why not both?

Our learning and decision-making processes are shaped by external influences and do not stem from a truly autonomous free will.

If you look back, you'll see that I agree with you on the paradoxical nature of an absolutely free will. I think most philosophers would. I guess my suggestion would be: "is this a good definition of free will?"

Look at the inverse of your conclusion, if our learning process was not guided by external influences at all, would that make us free? I would say no. Our memories and beliefs, who we love and who we despise, are all influenced by things that are external to us, right? But if our actions were fully autonomous, then it couldn't be the case that our memories play any role in our choices (unless we suppose our memories are also divorced from the world, not caused by it). So this seems to lead to the impossibility of free will in either case.

Our actions can't be free if they are fully determined by the world, but they also can't be free if they are completely divorced from the world, since our interactions with the world make us who we are. This is why most conceptions of free will reject the idea that it entails being "totally autonomous."

Which is to say, I think you are correct, but in the larger scheme of free will discussions the "free will" that proves to be contradictory in this way is not the "free will," being debated. For example, most compatibalist accounts of free will assume that the world as a whole is deterministic.

What logic? You seem to be saying something like: "an entity is free if and only if it is free from its inception."

I do not see a demonstration of this though.

Consider a universe of just one agent and a video game. At first, the agent has no freedom. They are in a tutorial mode during which they can only click on one bottom at a time as the game demonstrates how all the different buttons work. Through the tutorial, the agent gains true beliefs about what the buttons do. But they can't choose anything, they just watch.

Then the tutorial ends. Now they can push the buttons however they want, choosing which to use. In what sense have they not gained any new freedom? In what sense has the tutorial robbed them of their ability to choose which buttons to press?

nowing what choice you should make, also requires knowledge, but if we gain knowledge, not because of our free will, then our "choice" is already set in stone, because we know through faith which choice is the choice we will make.

I am not sure about that. Is an embryo free or self-determining? A baby? A two year old? A teenager? At some point, people seem to gain more of an ability to determine their own actions and feelings, although this ability is never absolute.

To get a little metaphysical, it seems possible for a semi-isolated system to be more of less self-determining, its states determined by what it is. This is generally what is meant by "adaptive" when we talk about complex, dissipative systems. Systems might be self-organizing to varying degrees, but they don't create themselves ex nihilo, and complexity takes time to develop.

A well educated person who has cultivated the virtues, who makes an effort to understand their world and themselves, etc. seems like they can become more self-determining than someone who is always led around by their passions and appetites, or someone who has been subject to horrendous abuse and locked in a room all their lives.

A person might have taken things for granted, but they can only return to challenge these assumptions effectively after having developed in certain ways. This sort of freedom and self-determination seems to show up in the world. The claim that a person cannot have this sort of freedom as an adult because they lacked it as an embryo, and so their development wasn't their "free choice," doesn't seem to carry water.

It seems to rely on an abstract conception of freedom that is contradictory - one where freedom is total freedom from constraint. But then choosing certain beliefs and not others would itself be a form of constraint. To choose A and C is to not have chosen A and B, or just A, or none of the above. Freedom as freedom from any constraint turns out to imply that freedom requires never choosing anything, as choice implies constraint. Yet the inability to choose is the opposite of what we tend to mean by freedom - a contradiction. So freedom can't be just the total lack of constraints.

Nor can it be that freedom would require that we choose our beliefs from some vantage of having no beliefs at all. For if we were to choose our beliefs in that way, based on no prior beliefs at all, these choices would be arbitrary. These choices would have nothing to do with us. Indeed, it's hard to see how we exist sans any beliefs. Yet you seem to be setting things up so that, in order to be free, we must have to somehow select our beliefs prior to having any beliefs.

So, I think it's your conception of freedom that is giving you trouble. It doesn't seem to cash out. Under this definition nothing can be free. You either have your beliefs forced on you by some extrinsic force, or you would be choosing your starting beliefs based on nothing and so have arbitrary beliefs guiding your actions. But why are these the only options? Why can't a mature individual return to their beliefs and examine them within the context of other beliefs and evidence, overturning them if there is warrant?

The Socrates of The Clouds has the advantage of being quite funny though. "Huh? We don't deal with mortals here; we're contemplating the Sun. Oh you want some divine knowledge, quick, to the Divine Couch to contemplate!"

Re the reliability of old sources, Eusebius passes down the rumor that the theologian and Platonist scholar Origen had castrated himself in order to avoid temptation and focus on his studies. Yet one of Origen's books that has made it down to us, a commentary on Matthew, says something to the effect of "you'd have to be a real, grade A dumbass to think that Jesus is actually telling us to remove body parts that make us sin here." A funny disconnect.

I did, but I will admit that I had a hard time following it. My point would be that looking to Plato for a discussion of radical skepticism might not be the best framing, because it's not really what he's interested in, especially in the Apology. I will admit confusion as to whether you think you have found a flaw in Plato's project or are just using Socrates as an arbitrary example of the fact that "you can doubt anything," and that "knowing anything means knowing something." The latter is interesting, but then the topic isn't really Socrates but skepticism.

The idea that it's possible to doubt anything is in many other places — Descartes might be another more logical starting point?

But why do we have faith in anything if our faith in logic is correct? If we began with uncertainty, not knowing anything or even nothing at all (requiring faith), we could not have reached this point if we had free will. Having free will would imply knowing (though faith) that knowing things is important before knowing anything... which contradicts logic. Therefore, we must have been influenced to learn things not by our own will, in other words, to gain faith in things without free will. So, how then would we conclude that it makes sense that we have free will when we didn't initially use free will to learn anything? It doesn't. The logic does not follow such a possibility. Of course, I assume that those of you reading this believe that logic exists through faith, since if that is not the case, then I guess I wouldn't be right within your faith (whatever that is).

"Free will" as such isn't really a concept Plato and Aristotle had. It comes on the scene with Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. But they did have robust theories of self-determination, a sort of reflexive freedom.

I don't think either Aristotle nor Plato would say we start out self-determining. For Plato, most people are ruled over by the appetitive and spirited parts of their soul, in a sort of disharmonious chaos. Aristotle clarifies a lot in Plato by laying out the idea of virtues as habits/practices we can develop, and the distinction between vice (doing the wrong thing and not knowing it is wrong), incontinence (doing what you know is wrong), continence (overcoming emotion and desire through effort), and virtue (doing what is good and enjoying it). You aren't self-determinating off the bat — babies aren't free, they follow their impulse. Freedom is then to do what one thinks is right, to overcome being ruled over by desire, instinct, and circumstance.

You don't get that at the outset. You become more free through self-discovery, self-knowledge, and through gaining knowledge of the world and skills that empower you to act in the world.

Does cultivating such knowledge require faith? I suppose so, under some definitions of "faith." This is what Augustine says. You need to start with faith to understand. You can start by questioning anything, who your real parents are, if the world was just created this second, etc. You "have faith so that you can understand."

To me, these seem like reasonable positions. I don't know why freedom should come first. You can't question assumptions until you've learned how to question them effectively. Likewise, justification doesn't have to come prior to beliefs.

Two things are important here:

First is that skepticism had its heyday after Plato, with the Academy itself having a "skeptical period." So, while threads of skepticism run through the dialogues, particularly the Meno, Phaedo (interlude on misology), the Theatetus, and parts of the Timaeus and the Republic, it's not a position Plato is necessarily paying close attention to because he is more focused on the relativism of the Sophists. Relativism leads to its own sort of skepticism, but it's distinct from skepticism and Plato puts far more focus on dealing with the claims of the former. Phyrro isn't around yet, so he doesn't have this sort of broader skepticism in mind.

Second is that, when discussing Socrates, its always important to note that he is being fictionalized into highly stylized and artistic project, and his view is not always meant to be "correct." I tend to agree that the early dialogues are very focused on the project of introducing Socrates as an alternative to the Homeric heroes and those of the contemporary dramatists, but that this Socrates might also be closer to the historical one. But they key point I'd make here is that it'd be a real risk to read the later Socrates of the middle and late dialogues through the lens of Socrates initial statements about the limits of his own knowledge. Plato does think he knows some important things, and he wants to teach them to us, primarily through Socrates. He is skeptical about physical knowledge, since the physical world is always contingent and changing (e.g. the Phaedo) but that skepticism doesn't extend everywhere (there are interesting similarities to Shankara here).

There is a profession of falibalism in the Timaeus, but it's important to distinguish fallibalism from total skepticism. I would take Socrates' initial statements about his own lack of knowledge in the Apology and the other early dialogues in context. He seems to be talking about the ability to to know important things, e.g. how society should be run, what is good, etc. While Plato does get into more fundemental sorts of doubts, doubts about the accuracy of perception, etc. in the Theatetus and other places, the rest of the content in the Apology would seem to warn against Socrates' being taken as a wide-ranging position about all knowledge.

If you want a really good ancient treatment of the skepticism that grew out of Plato and its relation to faith, St. Augustine's Contra Academicos is quite good and includes a version of Descartes famous "cognito ergo sum."

I was just rereading Boethius' "The Consolation of Philosophy," and I've decided it might be the pound for pound greatest moral work of all time. It's quite short and packed with great verse, symbolism on every page, and probably the single best display of "philosophy as therapy."


It occured to me that the science of morality is just about useless for Boethius as he sits in his prison cell awaiting his torture and execution for not not allowing corruption. His problem is that he is wallowing in self-pity and ruled over by his emotions (surrounded by the Muses). He is in the situation described by Plato in the Phaedo, "nailed to the body" by extreme pain (or pleasure).

Where science is probably most helpful is in knowing what to do and how to do it, rather than in being motivated to do the good (or to bother discovering it). Science would be extremely helpful to Boethius while he is still Consul and dealing with the intricacies of public policy.

Could it still be useful for him as he sits in his prison cell? To some degree, in that it might help him with self-knowledge. But its uses seem fairly limited in comparison to Lady Philosophy's weak and strong medicines.

The first medicine she applies is Stoicism, showing Boethius how the fruits of fortune cannot be the source of a stable human flourishing, how money, power, glory, and pleasure do not "make one good." The second medicine, which can only be applied after Boethius is liberated from the passions and appetites, is the philosophical ascent into the transcendent and the consideration of the good in itself and the nature of being.

Point being, science, and techne in general, is only useful once one is already self-determining to some degree. Being "ruled over by the rational part of the soul," ends up being a prerequisite for good science and for making use of science (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15027/plato-as-metaethics). Science can only do so much to help us make the jump from continence to virtue, from doing the good to loving it.

Boethius' complaints line up to Plato's three parts of the soul. He laments being in prison and having lost his wealth and comforts (appetitive and spirited/emotional complaints). He also is upset by the lack of justice in his situation (spirited and rational complaints). Finally, he has the same deep existential questions as Job, "if God, from whence evil," and why does God not punish the injustice?"

Like Job, he is answered by a divine theophany, Lady Philosophy recalling the personified Wisdom (Sophia) of Proverbs, Sirach, and The Wisdom of Solomon. But Philosophy itself ends up sitting somewhere between the human and the divine. Boethius describes her height as variously shifting between the "measure of mortal men," and her crown touching the heavens. Philosophy then is a bridge, whereas Job's problem is that there is no bridge — he is "a worm" and there can be no intercessor between him and God (e.g. the great lines in Job 40 where God asks Job out of the whirlwind if he can do what God can, lay all the proud low at will, garb himself in glory — "then I shall admit that thine own right hand can save you.")

Science then, lies in Lady Philosophy's ambit, but not Lady Philosophy within the compass of science. This makes it a tool/art relationship, rather than a grounding one.

(There is also something interesting in the positing of Sophia/Chokmah, the Incarnate Logos, or emanated Nous as the necessary intercessor between created man and the Absolute - the problem brought up in Job, which has a lot of parallels with Boethius)

Is the idea here that necessity needs to be imparted by something else that is necessary?

But consider the case of being dead (as opposed to simply not living). If something is dead, it was necessarily alive at some point, regardless of if that thing's existence was contingent. Or consider Greg, whose death was contingent, an accident. It is necessarily the case that Greg, being dead, is not alive.

Likewise, my being in a room alone might be contingent, but if I am in the room alone I am necessarily the tallest person in the room.

There is a meaningful distinction

I'm inclined to agree with you here. My point relates to those who would make the claim that there is only appearance.

That said, I have to ask, is your statement above a "Real Truth?" It would seem that, based on your criteria, you cannot have access to such a truth, making your claim merely "a thing invented by the mind."

If there would be no difference between beliefs and perceptions, and if you would be stuck in a world of language, then you wouldn't know that there is a world and have no reason to lament the supposed limits of language. Yet you do know, but argue against it.

An oft missed point. If appearances are the only reality then there is no meaningful appearance/reality distinction.

With language, this often seems to go back to the idea that the meanings of words must be (partially) grounded in social practice and rules. That's a fine thesis, but it should prompt the further question: "what determines social practices and rules?" Strangely, some people seem to miss this question, and this is how you end up with word meanings that are fully divorced from the world — language as a barrier to intelligibilities rather than a tool for actualizing them.

Or, it becomes fully self-refuting in some versions:

Why can't we know what determines social practices and rules?

"Because we would have to know this in terms of words, which are only defined by social practices and rules."

And how do we know that words are totally defined in terms of social practices and rules?

Answer: because of more words.

But then the impenetrable barrier between us and the causes of rules and social practices turns out to also lie between us and knowledge of the fact that words actually are given their meanings solely by rules and social practices, so this too must be impossible to know. But now our grounds for the impossibility of knowledge itself seems hidden behind an impermeable barrier.

Multidirectional, dynamic, many to many relationships are possible to model. I think an extra level of difficulty is encountered here though when there is a commitment to austere nominalism (or a default to nominalism spurred on by the desire to "avoid metaphysics.") Any attempt to think through the relationships between signs and referents is liable to be significantly more confusing without essences or universals, and this probably a larger problem if nominalism has been embraced only implicitly.

I don't know if I totally followed all of that, but I do think it's true that lack of novelty or its maximization end up having interesting similarities. From the frame of information theory, we could say that a code of just 1s or just 0s can hold no information. The opposite end of the spectrum would be a truly random process. There, you have potentially infinite new information. However, being truly random, the information you get never tells you anything about the source producing it — it's predictively useless. So, in either case there is a strange inability to use the signal to say things about the source (aside from it lacking all variance or being truly random).

There are a few things like this, e.g. the way in which maximal order or chaos become fatal to complexity, same with total lack of interconnectivity and total interconnectivity.

But I'm not sure about "authoritarian." States, bosses, churches, and parents can be authoritarian, but experiences and novelty? I can see how a loss of intelligibility could interfere with freedom, with self-determination. However, "authoritarian" to me is indictive of some sort of social external restraint. Loss of intelligibility would be more a threat to reflexive freedom/self-determation, no?