Saw the video. Gert seems an amiable, practical kind of fellow. As you say, he ends up with 10 commandments (no doubt a cultural preference) although god is absent from it all. Significant pockets of American society will surely challenge any moral system that isn't grounded in a theistic perspective. Not sure how much cooperation we'd get from them.

Other than as a starting point for discussion, does any of this really help us determine the more pressing question of what we ought, or ought not do?

What can I say, he's a sick motherfucker!

The problem is that his use is often not in fact reasonable in context. I've demonstrated this in my posts. You might be interested in reading them.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger, and many others use the term to mean anything that is, i.e., anything that can be said to be. Nobody has to follow them in this usage, of course, but Wayfarer actually attempts to correct people who use the word in this traditional way, by saying that, actually, only sentient individuals are beings.

Can you see the problem? Can you see that if you say to Aristotle "hey, actually only sentient individuals are beings", you're not making a philosophical point, but just refusing to use Aristotle's terminology and expressing your refusal in a misleadingly substantive statement? — Jamal

Yes, I think this is worth pointing out clearly like this. It's confusing otherwise.

Yet isn't applying "aesthetic" (like epistemological) preferences to answering ontological questions a category mistake to begin with? — 180 Proof

Yes, I think so. Category mistakes are at the heart of so many fallacious beliefs.

But it's gotta suck to dislike the concept but believe it. — Dawnstorm

I spoke to an observant Jewish man once who told me he hated god and loved him in equal measures because life was so unfair and tragic. To me this just sounds like living with an abusive partner.

What we collectively need to do is recognize alcoholism as a disease — BC

I think you're insightful. As someone who works in the general area of addiction and mental ill health I would personally choose different wording. I agree 'moral failure' is a useless lens. The term alcoholic isn't commonly used any more. People have an alcohol misuse disorder and it comes in many variations and is definitely not the same for each person.

I'm not an additions academic, but I don't consider alcohol misuse to be a disease, it is an addiction, a behavioural or learned response. It's no different to an addiction to sex or shopping and probably often stems from a reaction to psychological trauma. This is certainly what I have found in the environments and life stories of the hundreds of folk I have worked with.

AA has dominated the language of alcohol use and the disease model is popular with many people from that cultish and sometimes useful organisation. This is a contentious subject because it touches on so many societal debates - personal responsibility, normalcy, recovery, meaning, hope.

I tend to find people may recover if they have meaningful alternatives to get involved in and can reimagine themselves as non-drinkers. This might require new friends and role models and a new job and deliberately acquiring alternative behaviours to the habitual patters they got stuck in. They need to recognise their behavioural triggers. Alcohol misuse is generally the result of a person's problematic relationship with their environment. It is learned behaviour and it can be unlearned, but the person requires a reason to change and personal feelings of hope.

People tend to have a 'career' in substance misuse and it can be a long road for some before change seems appealing. But I have seen people who drank methylated spirits (denatured ethanol) and aftershave come good with support and insight. People with histories of sexual abuse and trauma seem to be the hardest to support as they often have a screaming in their head that never goes way. (Social learning theory is one useful lens we can use to view addiction, but I have no desire to get into a debate about who has this subject mastered; I think we are still learning and have a long way to go.)

Yes, I think the idea of god/s is/are incoherent too. What do we do with these stories? The literalist accounts (myths) are easily junked, but the sophisticated theology of, say a Paul Tillich is harder to grapple with. Of course not understanding something does not give us carte blanche to deny its existence. There are plenty of things I don't understand which are useful and exist, from quantum mechanics to chemistry. But the god concept is a strange one. I find it hard to see what utility it has other than as a child like comfort in adversity, or as a fuzzy placeholder to explain things we don't fully understand, like abiogenesis or consciousness. I suspect where we land often boils down to people's aesthetic experience of the world. The idea of a transcendent being (magic man) seems right and beautiful to some folks, wrong and ugly to others.

:up:

Everything we do still means nothing at all, because we're all still just an insignificant speck of dust in the universe. It all means nothing. — niki wonoto

In many respects this is what makes me celebrate life even more. It's a brief flickering light in the infinite darkness, then it isn't. How marvelous it is that some of us are able to enjoy it and do things between the nothingness before we were born and the nothingness after we die.

You write 'insignificant spec' - but that is too emotive. Sounds like this has been influenced, perhaps unwittingly, by Christian thinking, where only transcendence can make a poor, earthly life meaningful. I call bullshit on that model.

Meaning? Humans are meaning making animals. There's more than enough variety of meaning out there to occupy a million lifetimes.

Wasn't there a bit of a flame war here about this definition of being last year?

I'm interested in what people think best exemplifies philosophical thought. Perhaps it cannot even be exemplified? — Pantagruel

I agree with this last part. I think of philosophy as a diversity of approaches for not taking anything for granted.

Well, they are good Christian soldiers in the war against humanism, which like Communism seeks world domination...

I quite like miniature dissertations. Thanks.

I can see that but I don’t really like that way of putting it. — Jamal

Fair enough, but I like my swords double edged...

At some level we might say this positon is also a kind of philosophical shoulder shrug.

I’m thinking that indirect realism, though popularly often expressed in modern scientific language, is a hangover from theology and speculative metaphysics. — Jamal

Nice Adorno quote. I've been looking for quotes expressing precisely this sentiment.

Ditch the ideal of the absolute, and experience is no longer a barrier, but just the way we interact with the rest of the world. — Jamal

In a somewhat cruder form, this kind of thinking informs my atheism. The idea of God, or some 'really real reality' which cannot be perceived has, for me, no clear application. It can in no way change my experience of what it is to be human in the world and can offer little but distraction and futility. Or some shit...

There may be things that are true universally, re: pure mathematical and logical propositions, in accordance with our intelligence, but I’m not sure about universal truth as such. What could be true under any possible condition, including whatever kind of possible intelligence, when the totality of possible conditions is itself inconceivable? — Mww

I think this is an important point. I'm assuming from this that you don't think there are moral or aesthetic truths?

Interestingly, Alvin Plantinga takes this idea to show how evolutionary ideas undermine naturalism. — Richard B

That's true. I think Plantinga was inspired by Kant's transcendental arguments.

Basically, what could reality be if not the stuff we know about via the swirling constructivist enterprise of perception and consciousness?

And if that's right, then of course we know about reality, and the notion of a reality about which we know nothing is just nonsense. Word games. — Banno

To be honest this has been my default, without the benefit of any philosophy. I'm curious these days to understand the idealist model better so I can say to myself I didn't dismiss things out of hand. I enjoy speculative, imaginative exercises - to a point.

So here's the thing: would Hoffman deny that the tree has three branches? — Banno

He seems to be an infotech Kant in some ways. From what I can tell, Hoffman would posit that humans have evolved a tailored and limited account of reality which assists us in survival. We do not apprehend reality. What we experience through our senses is like the icons on a computer desktop (phenomena?) but these icons are heuristic tools and are not to be confused with the reality they represent (noumena?) Unfortunately we can say nothing useful about the world beyond appearances so I wonder how helpful Hoffman is.

There's a minefield right there.

This is a fascinating discussion and not a new one for TPF. As a low-rent pragmatist, I dissolve the problem in a whole different way - by not giving a shit.

Which is a joke, of course, but has some semblance of truth. What I'm keen to discover here are the best arguments from both positions, in recognition that this debate is probably insoluble for now.

I do find myself coming back to a simple query about idealism which is, if all human knowledge is a swirling constructivist enterprise of perception and consciousness which can tell us nothing about reality as it really is, then how can we say idealism is at the heart of reality? Is idealism really just one way of expressing a problem in epistemology - that of the perspectival nature of knowledge, expressed through language, with all its dead ends and confusions?

Is purely fictional entertainment, is good story telling, enough to appease our innate desire for drama, battle, conflict, struggle, etc. — Benj96

Humans are meaning making animals. I would include philosophy and science in the story telling realm.

I don't think being the passive recipient of a dramatic story is ever going to be a substitute for an embodied experience of life. I'd say stories influence why people seek out adventures, wars and exploration. They are inspiration and may galvanize people into action. As far back as 1605, the satirical novel Don Quixote satirized the influence bad romance stories have on the crazy life choices of the hero.

Cool, I'll give it a look. Morality 'in the world'; was one of my initial reasons for joining this place.

Much more elegantly expressed than my attempt at pretty much the same point.

Thanks. This is a very lucid and clear account of your position. Not what I thought you were going to say.

'the world' is, for us, you and me, Tom Storm and Wayfarer, generated or constructed by our fantastically elaborated hominid forebrain, which evolved at a breakneck pace over the last few million years. — Wayfarer

Yes, this I get and I guess phenomenology parses things similarly.

So - he's not saying the universe doesn't exist absent observers, but that conscious observers create it as a meaningful whole by recognising objects and relations between them. He develops the argument that even very simple cognition proceeds in terms of 'gestalts' - meaningful wholes. And take us out of the equation - that meaningful whole, that 'cosmos', no longer exists. Sure all the same stuff remains, but it can't be said to meaningfully exist - whenever we make a statement about 'what exists', we do so from an implicit perspective within which the term 'it exists' is meaningful. — Wayfarer

Yep. This I get too and I have sometimes entertained similar, less developed views.

So I'm arguing that human being is intrinsic to reality, we're not an 'epiphenomenon' or a 'product'. So does that mean, in the absence of h. sapiens, the universes ceases to exist? Have to be very careful answering, but I'm arguing, it's not as if it literally goes out of existence, but that any kind of existence it might have is completely meaningless and unintelligible. — Wayfarer

Ok, now I've got you. I've only understood some snippets before. No doubt I could do a lot of reading to enlarge this brief account to give it nuance and texture.

The idea that I've been contemplating is that through rational sentient creatures such as ourselves, the universe comes into being - which is why we're designated 'beings'. — Wayfarer

I can see why you would contemplate this. There's an element of the poetic in this account, but it has the merit of being grounded, coherent and justifiable.

Would you say this way of understanding the constructivist nature of reality is similar to phenomenology?

The empirical science folks would perhaps find the chief challenge here the constructivist nature of your approach - problems inherent for them in the perspectival nature of reality you describe. I'd need to think more about this.

My question is what flows from this understanding? What then can we meaningfully say about anything if our reality, our quotidian awareness is essentially a hybrid formulation of memory, anticipatory imagination, our senses and the conceptual apparatus of our brains? Would it be your position that if there is foundational grounding underlying human experience it is accessible only through techniques of higher awareness (meditation, mysticism)?

At first there is methodological naturalism - the attitude that science ought to investigate the world as if it were strictly independent of the observer. — Wayfarer

The people I know who defend methodological naturalism may sometimes assume this but they don't generally argue or defend this point should it be identified. They generally hold that the human perspective and naturalism are all we can use to build reliable models of our reality based on the best available evidence at a given time. I think they are generally open to the notion that approaches can evolve and new information can be encountered.

I’m not using that to argue for any kind of ‘mind at large’ or even any metaphysical counter-argument, simply the recognition of foundational nature of the mind. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. Do you have sympathy for a mind-at-large/universal mind model?

But I claim that the world that you will claim ‘continues to exist’ is just the world that is constructed by and in your mind that is the only world you’ll ever know. The incredulity you feel at this point is due to the idea that this seems to imply that the world ceases to exist outside your mind, whereas I’m claiming that this idea of the non-existence of the world is also a mental construction. Both existence and non-existence are conceptual constructions. — Wayfarer

I understand what you are saying but I con't quite conceptualise this in a way which makes it entirely comprehensible. Can you say some more in simple terms or maybe even an analogy? I'm trying to avoid the solipsism thing...

Nice. In my life I have never assumed that people have access to freedom in any radical sense. Some people certainly have more choices and some have a more radically imaginative power that affords them opportunities to perceive and pursue more choices. But I'm afraid freedom hasn't been a theme which has preoccupied me much.

Do you have a working definition of what it is to be a person with freedom in choice and deed? But perhaps this is derailing the OP.

I hear you. Sometimes where we are being deliberate we are actually unconscious of what it is that is informing our choices. We can be deliberate and clueless simultaneously. I do think the familiarity of patterns is a factor.

Did I disagree? That's not my intention.

What do you make of habit? — Moliere

Depends on what you count as habit. An addiction is a kind of habit. I work in the area of addiction and mental illness - people seem to become dependent on patterns. Some personality types more than others. Making substantive change in life is often about developing new patterns (habits).

I think some people are more drawn to predictability and familiarity and ritual than others. Take Kant - he was so predictable people used to set their watches by his daily walk (or se we are told). Perhaps habits are ways of making ourselves more comfortable in our environment. No doubt there is a fancier psychological explanation which would probably bore me rigid. :wink:

In my work I've spent a lot of time in palliative care and end of life services. It's interesting that many religious people I've seen derive no comfort from their faith. They are terrified of dying. Perhaps it's the fear of hell which is so much a part of the Christian story. In the case of my mum, when she was dying she became very angry and refused to see the Pastor. "What's the good of prayer now... it's a done deal,' she fumed. She was absolutely furious not to be part of the ongoing story of her friends and family and felt like she was being taken away from all she knew and loved.

Humans are an existential animal. That is to say, why we start any endeavor or project (or choose to continue with it or end it) is shaped continually by a deliberative act to do so. We generate things that might excite us. Or we generate things we feel we "must do" (even though there is never a must, only an anxiety of not doing based on various perceived fears). — schopenhauer1

I think this is largely accurate.

the human is in a sort of error loop of reasons and motivation rather than instinct. — schopenhauer1

I think this is nice line and it resonates with me.

This is a theme which occurred to me around the time I was leaving high school and pondering what went into human purpose - why people as adults held particular jobs and had families and set up homes. It all seemed frightfully preordained and predictable and utterly lacking in visceral inspiration.

I did. I'm not in a position to assess any of this but as you know, the changing nature of science is how science is meant to work, even if it ends up unexpected places. :wink:

Don’t like the ‘made from’. More later. — Wayfarer

Sure. I'm not wedded to it, it's just a figure of speech, Didn't mean 'made' to be literal.

That said, I find some interest in ideas for their own sake, looking at what each of the different views on the menu would entail, and thinking about what possible difference it could make to human life if they were true (whatever their being true independent of human understanding could even mean). — Janus

Agree. That's kind of my perspective too. I suspect it makes almost no difference to how I would choose live, whether I am an outmoded retro physicalist or an a la mode idealist. I do find idealism hard to imagine and comprehend. This is partly a cultural construct and that was my earlier point - not dissimilar to points made by @Wayfarer about dominant paradigms.

One advantage of the "great mind" ontology is that that truth could, independently of the human, be related to, known by, that universal mind. — Janus

Perhaps, although the versions of great mind of Schop or Kastrup posit a universal mind which is instinctive and not metacognitive. It's not, as I understand it, a personality with preferences and knowledge. Perhaps it can only reach truths through brief expressions of consciousness instantiated through human life. But how would we know?

But if you push the argument that the stuff around us does not exist unless a mind is involved, you are headed towards solipsism. Because other minds are a part of that stuff in the world. — Banno

That seems right. Although are there not forms of idealism that hold that everything you see is real, it just isn't what you think - it isn't material, it is made from the one stuff of the universe - consciousness/Will. That's the Schopenhauer, Kastrup, Hoffman formulation. Here people are all like dissociated alters of the vast pool of consciousness (or great mind) which constitutes all which exists. In other words idelaism does not deal in illusion, we've just come to the wrong conclusions about what we experience as a physical world.

Now the pertinent question would be how the hell does anyone know all this? It's fine to debunk old school materialism, but it's another thing to use this as to support a speculative ontology. It's at best built from some debatable inferences, right? Cue quantum speculations, quotes from Hinduism, Plato's cave, past lives accounts and critiques of scientism....

Fair point.

Thank you. It helps to see this being applied to a problem.

MACS also is silent about the ultimate goal of moral behavior. When MACS's explanation of moral ‘means’ alone cannot resolve moral disputes (perhaps about abortion, euthanasia, or animal rights), people can try to agree on the ultimate goal of moral behavior in their society. Even if that goal is unique to their society, it can still help promote cooperation to achieve that goal within their societies. — Mark S

Interesting.

It does seem as if this particular model is aligned to a secular humanist worldview and as such might struggle to be applied in a society which must balance pluralist worldviews about values and morality. Thoughts?

Do you personally think about morality yourself in terms of ought's and ought nots? Do you ever find yourself needing to work through a potential action in order to determine if it is moral?

So it sounds like this system is only going to have some acceptance amongst secular, not religious people. Are you aware of Christians or Muslims who would find this approach useful?

:lol:

I think a form of neutral monism or panpsychism has seen a rise in David Chalmers, Philip Goff, Galen Strawson. Then there are mathematical Platonists like Max Tegmark who argue for mathematical entities have some sort of reality (even though they are not physical). — schopenhauer1

Agree. And Roger Penrose. My point was idealism has not been constantly mainstream in the West since the Greeks - it had fashions, especially the Germans. Whether it becomes dominant again in the near future is not for me to say.

A blip could indicate incoming ordinance, so beware.

I was going to add, idealism nowadays has rather counter-cultural implications. — Wayfarer

Sure, by blip I wasn't talking about potential future dominant world views.

You'd better avoid me then, because I, as the antagonist of Socrates, happen to know everything. — Metaphysician Undercover

I enjoy reading your perspective. We may disagree about some things, but I'm no philosopher and I'm here primarily to understand more about world views different to my own and the reasons/arguments people provide in defence of them.