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.

Yes, well put. I agree with you. I find idealism fascinating and am not running a campaign against it. I might be an atheist, but I am not committed to scientism or have an obsession with reason. I think truth is elusive to humans and generally avoid people who think they possess it.

Ok, I'm not really convinced - we've also had 2000 years of Christianity without much commitment to the Gospels or social justice and the creation of extremely materialist cultures within Catholicism and the inevitable schism of Protestantism. What people do is more important than what they say they believe. It's actually something @Banno helped remind me of.

And I don't think it's controversial to say that the last really influential idealists were the German idealists - Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte. The British idealists, like Bradley, were very much part of the same overall movement. — Wayfarer

I know this and agree. But it's a blip.

Perhaps I don't understand the crux what you are trying to articulate. All I am picking up so far is the notion that morality can be understood as an expression of cooperation strategies. That certain actions we describe as moral or immoral are agreed upon in culture owing to the way they support trust cooperation amongst members of that culture.

Surely if everyone agreed upon the Koran as a basis for guiding all action, then we would have a cooperative basis for an ethical system and a cooperative, trusting culture. But would this culture be moral?

You could ask the same question about "How would it work?" regarding utilitarianism or virtue ethics. — Mark S

It's the question I would ask of any moral system. But at least with virtue ethics it is me asking how I want to behave in a situation. It's more immediate. But my moral system boils down to 'prevent suffering' - I am not a theorist.

I can't quite work out how your system would apply to an individual in their day to day choices or how we would involve a community in discussing or implementing it.

It technically goes back to Plato in the West. — schopenhauer1

My point is I don't think there was a tradition of uninterrupted idealism that was displaced in the 19th century.

That idealism is commonly opposed with materialism would be a good indication that idealists are less materialistic. Don't you think? — Metaphysician Undercover

Not at all. I know rich socialists. It's a thing - we even have the expression Bollinger Socialism.

What matters is what people do, not the theories they claim to believe. Don't you think?

I think idealism as any kind of majority view died with the 19th Century. — Wayfarer

But when did it start and what do we count as idealism - are you talking about various trends of mysticism believed in by certain groups or privileged communities? Or do you start in the West with Berkeley? When was idealism held by the average person in the West?

After all we live in an individualist, materially-oriented, technocratic culture, and will naturally adopt philosophies that support this milieu. — Wayfarer

I feel like pushing back on this a little. Can you demonstrate that idealists are less individualist or materialistic? I spent a lot of time with Buddhist and Theosophical Society community members, including serious practitioners of meditation and yoga and Hindu mysticism in the 1980's (and still know some of them) and they were as wracked by ambition and materialism as anyone else. And sometimes they just replaced owning useless consumer goods with claiming access to higher truths, which they cherished in the manner of showing off a new sports car.

MACS’s principles can be additional criteria for judging how to refine cultural moral norms to meet human needs and preferences better. — Mark S

How does that operate in a culture? Surely you would need a panel or body which can understand the model and help to implement it? I suppose at heart I am asking - 'Ok so you have a model what ideally would happen next?"

Like past and present cultural moral norms, our psychologically satisfying inclination for retribution for evil deeds such as murder is part of cooperation strategies. Specifically, our feeling or righteous indignation motivates the punishment of violation component that is a necessary part of reciprocity strategies. Indeed, our moral senses’ judgments and our other moral emotions of empathy, gratitude, loyalty, shame, and guilt are also explained as parts of cooperation strategies. — Mark S

So I am now confused. How does your model decide then if capital punishment is morally good or bad?

I may well be missing something but I still struggle to see how a cooperation strategy is of itself useful or even entirely comprehensible to a diverse community, where cooperation is understood differently and where society is understood differently. A Muslim culture, for instance. Or an atheist culture. When we get to issues like abortion or capital punishment or gay rights, or whether creationism should replace evolution in school learning - how do we determine what is right?

What need to happen, then, is that he takes a couple of steps back, is reborn in a simpler form - say a lizard - that has fewer and simpler choices, so that he can learn to make them correctly, before he gets another shot at the difficult ones. — Vera Mont

If there's one thing I can't abide, it's lizards who make bad choices.

:ok:

. You're doing a Socrates, eh?

Al Bowlly 1931

Not sure why these sorts of questions matter.

Isn't it the case that in most constructions of God 1) God is transcendent and is outside time and space and 2 God being 'omni' can do whatever God wants and is not subject to any laws, since God created them? So trying to parse what god can and cannot do, or where God resides and in what form is pointless and subject to the paucity of human understanding. If the laws of physics get in the way of a person's understanding God then they're not doing it right...

Thanks for clarifying. Sounds challenging.

A simpler answer would have been nice, but morality is complicated. — Mark S

That's why I chose this issue, to see how the idea works in practice with a more complex issue. That's a helpful summary, thank you.

Capital punishment is part of a strategy that solves cooperation problems. It punishes reciprocity violations about not killing each other with the intended outcome of reducing future killing. Capital punishment can thereby increase or maintain the future benefits of cooperation in societies. This is why it has commonly existed. — Mark S

Another take is that it provides retribution and consequences for a bad deed, which people seem to find psychologically satisfying in a way which may not be easy to measure - psychological wellbeing might be one approach. But I understand your position here.

The morality of capital punishment comes down to if it will, on balance, increase or reduce the trust needed for a cooperative society. — Mark S

How do you determine which of these it does? How would a state set up a mechanism to assess all potential moral choices people could make in society?

:up: Thanks. I imagined that Buddhism and Hinduism have a rich source of potential ideas in this space - Schop certainly thought so...

The hardest part for me is trying to conceptualise what all 'reality' being the product of mentation actually means. Why does it appear as it does - as physicalism? Why do we have the laws of physics we appear to have? What is physical suffering? More banally, why do UV rays cause skin cancer and just how can this phenomenon be understood as consciousness - mind when seen from a particular perspective? It's challenging to fit it, even provisionally.

I'm not an idealist, but I think I understand the ontology more charitably than G.E. Moore and I also understand its attractions. I still think the most engaging, pellucid accounts of idealism I've encountered are those of Bernardo Kastrup - mainly via the odd paper, his blog and his engaging series of Essentia Foundation lectures on Analytic Idealism on YouTube. I haven't yet attempted the key books.

My argument is that the ideas of what constitutes existence and non-existence are too simplistic. I don't believe that any mature idealism actually claims that the object (whether it be 'an apple' or the entire world) literally vanishes when not being perceived. What I think idealism is arguing is that any idea we have of existence (and so, non-existence) is in some basic sense a mental construct - vorstellung, in Schopenhauer's terminology, vijnana, in Buddhist philosophy. That is what the massively-elaborated h. sapien forebrain does with all that processing power - it generates worlds. — Wayfarer

I think this is an elegant summary. Is it not the case that for 'object permanence' to hold (your car not vanishing when it is locked up in the garage), it needs some kind of guarantor for its 'ongoingness'. We seem to require some form of cosmic or universal consciousness or mind-at-large which holds the objectivity or scope of reality we inhabit.

I suspect it is this bit that is a big stumbling block for many, it's not just down to the fact that humans don't have access to some Archimedean point and essentially co-create reality.

Do you have thoughts on this mind-at-large? Schopenhauer calls it a striving blind, instinctive will. Berkeley, of course, calls it God. But clearly it doesn't have to be a God surrogate.

“What is morally normative regarding the means of interactions between people is what all well-informed, mentally normal, rational people would advocate as moral.” — Mark S

Sorry Mark, but I can't seem to follow what you are advocating. The language seems really unclear to me.

So is your model predicated on making moral choices about those who we decide can make moral choices? How do you determine 'well informed mentally normal or rational'? I think you might find that many of Hitler's prominent supporters fit this description. This is what makes cultural expressions of evil so challenging for us to understand. Morality is complex.

I need to see this in action or it continues to remain a strangely opaque theoretical ideal.

Can you tell me how would you assess capital punishment as a penalty for, say, killing someone? Is capital punishment morally sound - how do you go about answering or contextualizing this using your method?

I hold a similar position to @Fooloso4 in as much as what we call reality is of a human perspective - which doesn't make it unreal or not real... it just means that the representation is specific to our apparatus, cognition and worldviews, etc. The idea of 'as it really is' seems to me to be intellectual quicksand, however. It can surely only ever be something in relation to something else? Do you think this is bad thinking?

Well said, but who's Virgil? — praxis

If Virgil was Dante's guide, Agent Smith was our Jiminy Cricket...

Is there an external world? Yes.
Do we experience it as it is? No.
Is our knowledge of it an accurate representation of it? We try. — Fooloso4

I guess this would be my answer too. But...

I struggle with the words 'as it is'? Can there ever be a final 'as it is' that is not also subject to a particular perspective? Isn't the implication of such wording a god's eye view? (I know you are not arguing for this)

Neitzsche touched on the physiology and general health of philosophers. He saw Kant as anemic, but admired the likes of Plato. — Mikie

A dangerous project to begin with, especially for a lonely, sickly, unlucky in love, son of a pastor like Freddie. :razz:

I think your mistake here is saying that observing how cultural moral norms are selected is in their ability to solve universal cooperation problems for everyone. That is simply not what is observed. Rather we see many instances of cultural moral norms that are selected to strengthen cooperation in the in group, while dominating the out group. — PhilosophyRunner

Yep. We keep coming back to the idea that cooperation is not of itself a sound or neutral moral position, but may be used to dominate, subjugate and murder. Are there not ethical considerations or questions that need to be asked before one can get to morality as a cooperation strategy? Which cooperation strategies are morally virtuous and which ones are not? How can we tell?

We simply don’t realize that so much of what we think we know, who we listen to, the company we keep, the jobs we do, and how we generally live our lives, is determined by factors beyond our control — the time and place you are born, your genes, your parents and upbringing, your culture and peers, early life experiences, education, etc. — Mikie

I was drawn to Marxism as a kid because it seemed obvious to me that the way society is organized rewards some people and debilitates and destroys others. This curated unfairness seems to some people to be a 'natural order' and even as an instantiation of freedom. For me everything else flows from this modest (social justice) insight. Humans believe things because they are born in particular zip codes and because they are socialized to accept particular values. We are all products of forces beyond our control - not just those of geopolitics and economics, but the ideas and very language we use to communicate. Trying to work out which parts to ditch; which parts are really you is the challenge.

One can see the attraction of mysticism and spirituality to the avant-garde set and counter culture movement which sought to break out of all this via transcendence, even if much of this project was theatrical, smug and had its own forms of elitism. I was connected to groups like this through the 1980's.

I wonder to what extent the stuff we read and write about is simply a product of our class, our parents class and education, and our upbringings — Mikie

Most of it I would have thought. Still, mustn't grumble. I'm not looking for transcendence or glimpses into the ultimate truth (surely a human construct) and would probably settle for a good cup of tea over all that.

it feels like denying the truth. — Darkneos

Talk me through it.

That's not actually what it was about... — Darkneos

Didn't say it was. I was riffing off the seemingly endless question about what is real which is foundational to the OP.

Right. Here's a more pithy question. What then is real rather than invented story? — javra

That's the underlying question of many an OP, regardless of the ostensible topic.

My own view is we don't get to the really real or the truthy truth, we just arrive at provisionally useful truths or realities about our environment, many of which seem to work and have practical consequences. I don't have commitments to any form of transcendental truth, or that science will one day explain everything.

Sounds like you are not following the conversation I was having with BC. Don't worry about it.

Loosely speaking, the OP is about what is real. I agreed with BC's point that humans are meaning making creatures who invent stories to help manage their environment. (Richard Rorty holds a similar view.) Some of those stories work better in some texts than others. And some of those stories, like the one in the OP, might be borne out of having too much spare time.

I'm not sure what you're talking about but I would include scientism as one of those bedtime stories.

Interesting - esp the Hegel/Marx material. Vey nicely expressed.

Once we have the leisure to roast domestic rabbits, we start spinning out interesting ideas about gods, illusion, Maya, the Trinity, Karma, and so on. Some of this thinking is not illusory, it's delusional. Our - perhaps - overly intellectual brains seem to need a certain amount of delusional thinking to put up with life. Otherwise, some people find reality terrifying. — BC

We certainly seem to need and cherish our bedtime stories.

But it's not important if you're not interested. What could it matter, if it doesn't matter to you? — Janus

I don't think it is accurate to assume that if someone has no experience of the numinous they are not interested in what people think it is.

If you want to let go, then you must practice, but you would need incentive. — Janus

Just briefly, what do you mean by practice or incentive?

See my response to praxis above. I'm not taking about holding any ontology, but rather about letting go of all ontologies and concerns about ontology in order to experience the numinous; to see that all experience is, primordially, prior to subject and object and all the linguistically generated dualities that flow on from that. — Janus

Ok. I don't think I have any idea of the numinous but I get your general point. I suppose I wonder how long does one sit in this 'letting go-ness' and where does it take you? Are you suggesting perhaps some kind of meditative experience with some eventual form of enlightenment?

This notion that - all experience is, primordially, prior to subject and object and all the linguistically generated dualities that flow on from that - seems to be arrived at through conscious judgment and rationality.

So I sort of wonder if it's possible for a more philosophical version to take off. — Moliere

My experience is that people usually find philosophy to be a turn off for reasons mentioned in OP's here often enough.

New Atheism was more of a publishing, marketing phenomenon and a poor label to describe a wave of renewed interest in secular polemics.

I think those people who are susceptible to philosophy will read Hitchens (or whoever) and move on to something meatier if they already have or develop a taste for critical thinking and the history of ideas.

I see ignorance as consisting, not in holding one view rather than another (except in the empirical context) but in being wedded to some (necessarily dualistic) view or other. For me sin, or "missing the mark", consists in not seeing the world non-dually. — Janus

Maybe I have you wrong but isn't this the kind of dogmatic position you were speaking against earlier? What do you mean by seeing the world non-dually? Do you mean holding a monist ontology like idealism?

Maybe with a light sabre?

Your claim is that we cannot have veridical access to the tree. I have sufficient access to it to be able to prune it. — Banno

I think this may be my favourite line here so far.

Cool, thanks, that's interesting to hear and I would have thought this (realism vs the others) was a perennial and serious philosophical question, but glad to hear it may not be the case. My big problem in all this is not knowing how significant the use or role of language is in all these confusions and categorisations.

My diagnosis is that hereabouts - that is, on this forum - there are folk who begin by dividing things into a private world and a public world. They sometimes phrase this as internal vs external, or object vs subject, first person vs third person, and so on. They then proceed to conclude that there are two worlds, or to collapse the whole of the "external" world to some internal characteristic - the will, for example. they think they have presented an argument for one of the varieties of idealism when all they have done is to assume idealism. — Banno

The role assumption plays in these kinds of discussions is fascinating. Cheers - T

I got there from this site which has really broadened my range of understanding - limited though it remains. So thank you! :pray: