I've found that my intuitions on these two words tend not to pan out, but here they are anyway:

I'm thinking of empathy as being experiental and sympathy as being judgemental:

For example: If I see you in pain, can't bear it, and leave, I'm being overwhelmed by an empathic response and not driven by a sympathetic response to help. Similarly, I can care deeply about another person's pain without having the faintest clue what that pain is about; you have a sympathetic response, but not an empathetic one.

My intuition is, for example, incompatible with @bert1's distinction between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. To me (intuitively), cognitive empathy isn't empathy at all. It's just a form of problem solving: If I see you cry and it makes me want to laugh because I enjoy that sort of vista I do not have an empathetic response, but I certainly undertand that you're miserable. I might even figure out what you're upset about, and how. So, for example, "cognitive empathy" + "sympathy" would be just sympathy + trying to figure out why as an external problem. You've learned to "read the cue cards", but there's nothing inside to replicate the experience (which is what I'd say enables empathy).

It's my experience that my intuition often leads to such incompatibilites, and thus they just might be off base. Alternatively, there might be a way to resolve the incompatibilities somehow?

Second, there seems to be a logical possibility of having an "empathetic response" that "fails", is inadquate to what the target person actually feels. And I'm unsure whether my intuition would allow for that - i.e. I'm dithering on this. My intuition might have internal contradictions.

It's an interesting thread, and I'll continue reading.

If believing a false belief, such as "Ice cream is good, and it's so good that anyone who says otherwise probably hasn't figured out the truth of it's goodness" makes a person happy, and it doesn't hurt anyone, including themself, then by the hedonic metric that belief is not only acceptable, but good. — Moliere

Anyone-who-says-otherwise clauses tend to have the potential to hurt someone down the road. (Aside: My first thought: "Why can't they just enjoy ice cream?" My second thought: "It's possible the believe makes someone happy precisely because they don't like icecream." Beliefs and their consequences are a messy, messy topic.)

Ahh ok, that's fair. A slightly stronger version that I would use is all. Fully makes sense of what you're saying though, thank you. — AmadeusD

Oh, good. I wasn't sure I'm making sense. For me, there's this intuitive substratus, and then there's the attempt to explain myself. Sometimes I notice myself talking myself into a corner as I speak. Online, that'd be me deleting a post and starting afresh. In real time? It's rather frustrating for the listener.

Not quite - I don't think gender and sex are rule-bound. They vary almost interdependently but this is no rule - a mere observation. Does that resolve that tension? — AmadeusD

Just to make sure we're on a page: I'm thinking of rules here as "regularities to be observed" rather than "instructions to be followed". And I think only the former can be "objective", though the existance of the latter can be objective in terms of the former. (And we have to be vigilant to tell the two apart since social processes braid the two together in its genesis: theories about what's going on influence behaviour influence theories about what's going on...)

This says to me you want to conclude that gender is analogous to sex? I understand that's not what you're saying but it seems so intensely difficult to accept that there's some biological connection without equating the two. What could apply to one, and vary independently in the other? — AmadeusD

I thought the claim I was making here was pretty weak, actually. What I mean is merely that I assume (theorietically, without justification) that what we look at as the "diffence between sexes" will be significant in any society, and people being people, they will always "mythologise" beyond the difference. Not individually, but simply by virtue of living together and accounting for differences with as little friction as possible. So either you have more than two gender category (as organised in daily praxis, as opposed to ideologised in particular discourse), or you have tried and true methods of dismissing the minorities (e.g. considering them deluded).

Again, this is a baseless assumption, as in the real world we can't isolate "societies" (the best we get is really isolated tribes in inaccessible locales such as rainforests, but even they are likely to have some minimal contact). I just need some sort of narrative to think about this.

And all the distinctions I'm making are purely analytic. In real life it's all braided together. My very basic attitude to life is: if something seems clear, you've probably not yet run into troubles. (This is halfway between a slogan and a joke; but it *is* based on a practical attitude.)

I'm also a fairly staunch relativist. I see understanding others as a balancing act: you need to take yourself back to some degree to understand others, but if you take yourself back too far you end up in a place where you no longer understand *anything*. There's no perfect balance, but there's a "useful range". Gender, and this is an impression from experience this time rather than a theoretic assumption, tends to be so deeply rooted in ones daily praxis that it's hard to understand people who have problems here. It's not that you don't see things from their place, you literally don't know the place can exist. I've been interested in this topic since the 1980ies (and I'm born in 1971), and I'm still not sure what it's all about. But it doesn't feel like it has less substance than the male-female distinction. It just feels less familiar.

The above doesn't change anything about a strict delineation between child and adult, which we have along two metrics:

1. Age of majority;
2. Having experienced puberty.

Both are objective measures of an adult. The subsequent behaviours and presentations don't alter that. Does this make sense? If so, read across to sex. — AmadeusD

It makes some sort of sense, but I'd need time to let this settle. Off the top of my head, this is already "within the braid", though. Puberty isn't social, but age of majority certainly is. That is 1. is already part of behaviours and presentation, given that age of majority is reliant on concepts such as birthdays in a way that the onset of puberty isn't (though social organisation might "sculpt" the body in some ways - nutrition, avarage rate of bodily movement, etc. - which in turn might influence the avarage age of onset - again, not an expert here, but I think I've heard some things about this?).

Unless you mean something different from the legal concept? (Note the difference between a rigid date placed on birthdays, or coming of age ceremonies based on people becoming impatient if the kid's "not ready yet, when s/he should be?)

My impression is that we both likes our things clear cut, you manage to have them that way, and I don't. We might live our lives differently because of that. Partly a personality difference? Maybe.

I think this is an unfortunate way to proceed. — AmadeusD

It's not a way to proceed. It's preparation work to make sense of the world.

I want to know what that is, before assessing it in situ of another discussion (I realise you've resiled from that, and do not hold you to it - just being clear about any comments that might betray this) — AmadeusD

Yeah, I'm sympathetic to wanting to know. Which is why I venture out of the shadows in such a thread in the first place. Going back to the above, I don't know how to proceed. I'm at a loss. The result is that I do nothing but add my two cents. My intuitive response is to let transwomen into women's bathrooms and transmen into men's bathrooms, but I'm not married to that. I'm not worried about people thinking this should not be allowed. It's a difficult topic that needs to be sussed out - one way or another. But I dislike the insistance that if we do allow that we're "letting men into women's bathrooms" - not because on some level that's not a valid way to present the facts, but because it tends to signal a not-my-problem attitude that's going to be more of a problem than a "no" to the bathroom issue can ever be. Where people have no motivation to take trans people seriously no laws are going to matter.

They are requesting access to a protected space - being the target of the protective measure (i.e male, in this argument anyway). — AmadeusD

Also, they *have* no protected space being at risk from cis people of either gender. Again, it's not about the bathroom issue. It's that the discourse around them currently tends towards taking them less seriously again. I expected that. It's not a surprise. The backlash was always going to come.

Anecdote alert: when a trans person you've known online only (across the pond, so to speak) suddenly disappears online, I'm worried in a different way. (I always worry. I worry too much. I guess that makes me an expert in the intricacies of worrying?) Drastic change in presence unheard of years; no public announcement. Luckily, nothing bad happened (according to someone closer to her, whom I also only know online). I won't be specific about this. I don't talk about other people when they're not around, beyond the most general of terms.

This seems quite clearly wrong, unless what you mean by gender is "immature and potentially misinformed prior concepts of sex" which is what I think actually is the case. — AmadeusD

This is probably a thread of its own. You say later that:

The concept of gender refers to behaviour and presentation. — AmadeusD

And under that concept there's probably no way to make sense of what I said. I'm not quite sure how to be concise here: I think of gender as a socially organised way to order sexual behaviour through our daily praxis. That's probably not making much sense for now. There's a nature-vs.-nurture aspect here, complicating things, too - but basically it's impossible to think about sex outside of gendered concepts. That includes science, as science is social activity. (It's not that important to follow up on this here, and I'd rather not, since this goes in a different direction, but my influences here come from sociology - Husserl-inspired theories [Alfred Schütz, Berger/Luckmann], as well as a little of Mannheim's total ideology. For what it's worth, I think the current confusion follows on from post-Derridan post-structuralism - which mostly left me confused and I don't think there's much influence here - I think I stopped with Saussure...)

I can't quite disagree, but I cannot see an avenue to assent to this. Male and female are categories that are not violated. They are useful inherently. I cannot understand a discussion about "trans" that doesn't include the grounding what you're on the "other side" of. That would be sex, no? — AmadeusD

They're useful inherently for most people:

They rarely vary independently, but they do in an incredible minority of cases (exception for rule, i suggest). — AmadeusD

You talk about exceptions for a rule. But if the occurance of exceptions is also rule bound, then you're not going find the rules of the exception while focussing on the binary. The key here is attention. We're not going to find the rules that govern those exceptions. Not because they can't be found that way, but because habitual thought patterns have led us past them for centuries. I don't think we can't; I think we won't. And I think the problem is socially re-inforced complacency: it's not our problem. Unless we're trans.

If there are no biological markers somewhere around sex that regulate those exceptions... how can we tell? If there are, listening to trans people and what they're paying attention to should be interesting.

Of course, right now, it's fashionable to be "trans". High motivation (comparitively to earlier times) to look into it, but also more noise to sift through. It's frustrating.

His position is that if we were to abolish gender (insane) cis people (i hate that term, btw. Just people) would lose so much of what they are unaware constitutes their identity with the loss of words like 'man' and 'woman'. — AmadeusD

I'd sort of agree with your lecturer, provided this doesn't lead to a political program. It's impossible to abolish gender, I think, since the combination of biological differences and living together in groups will always lead to some sort of gender distinction. However, I do think there's a lot of unaware stuff going on in gender identity. A practical repetition that doesn't even need to be put into words; something you only really run into if you don't fit (say, if you're trans).

Which is why I said "whithout much of a gender identity" rather than "without any gender identity". I walk into the male toilets without a second thought, for once. Socially speaking, I'm unreflected male as much as I'm unreflected cis. I think being trans means that you can't be "unreflected" anything in terms of gender, because the system that would fit you has not socially developed. I see only two possibilities: you must reflect on your gender, or you must find some other area to put your problems in.

So:

it is a subversive transition from "your gender" to "your chosen gender" or some similarly opaque and unhelpful line. — AmadeusD

How else would they put this? I'm fairly pessimistic, though, so I think I agree it's unhelpful. People aren't going to understand them without a way to approach them or disproportionate effort. If we'd encapsulate them in a social category, the need to actually understand would probably lessen. Of course, then we'd likely have a new trans-people-are-like-this problem. Humans tend towards stereotypes.

Not unreasonable, but not your problem. — AmadeusD

Not much of a problem to be honest. I brought it up as markers of gender identity in a social negotiation context. To what extent I am a man is mostly a fun puzzle I don't take seriously. It passes the time. I can deal with mishaps. But the way they happen do shed light on how I connect with gender.

This implies there is an objective standard to being a woman/man. If "adult human female" isn't it, the entire conversation collapses in on itself. Another weirdo type line, imo. Fwiw, "adult human X" is perfectly sufficient, conceptually. — AmadeusD

There is an objective standard, but it's in constant flux. Let's take our eyes of gender for now and just look at adult. "Adult" is usually connected with both age and behaviour. An adult can behave childishly without being a child, but an adult can "fail to grow up". Etc. Also, this are all things I've improvised from within a social context. How many years have passed since my birth is pretty much a fact. Beyond that there's an ongoing repetition of imperfectly internalised norms you can be wrong about. But being wrong about something that's in flux... adds to a gauge that might lead to social change if the gauge doesn't empty (pardon the video game language; it comes naturally to me).

So:

Is it posssible you could elaborate here? I get the intuition i would agree, if I understood. — AmadeusD

I start with the assumption that there are trans people; i.e. they arise out of contexts that don't give them the information that trans people exist and still end up seeing themselves that way. Whatever that means isn't clear. Whether that's a single grouping or convergent symptoms isn't clear. But this happens in significant albeit low numbers.

Next, we can find out that trans is a thing and name it "trans" and try to figure out what that is. Experts can do that: anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, biologists, etc. We get terms that are used in a variety of systematic ways, sometimes incompatible with each other, but experts usually know about this (as they demonstrate when they fight for academic resources).

Then the terms bleed out into "the wild", where they propagate unsystematically. I don't want to go into it too much here, because that's a whole wild topic of its own, but now you have a lot of people calling themselves trans who might never have "figured it this out for themselves". A man who would like to go out in public in womens clothes certainly engages in cross-gendered behaviour, ("cross" being the English word for "trans"), but that doesn't make for a trans person by itself. They overgeneralise.

Overgeneralisations, IMO, are part and parcel of the identity game. I *am* this. I will fight for the right to be this. And so on. The identity game tends to reinforce gendered behaviour, here, as someone who's gender-identity is contested will often seek refuge in hyper-gendered behaviour to make their "chosen gender" more accessible. The fall-out is two-fold:

If you're really trans you might feel pressured into gendered behaviour you don't really want to engage in (voice lessons are common example... or were a couple of years ago). "I guess I have to wear a dress now."

Meanwhile, the guy who simply wants to wear dresses might try to justify that (maybe to themselves) with "I am trans". This assumes a positively marked social category, and with the right political leanings...

The problem here is this: it's hard, and maybe (currently?) impossible to tell the difference from the outside, when all you have is what they do and say.

I have a hard time siding with an extreme minority which can totally reasonably be characterized as mentally aberrant, on issues that, for the majority, amount to safety issues (i have provided ample evidence for this throughout the thread). — AmadeusD

I'm not contesting the evidence you've cited - mostly because to do that I'd have to go to the source; other than the biology paper, I'd at least somewhat be qualified to read them. And I also don't really want to talk about whether or not trans people ought to be allowed in this or that bathroom. It's just that the acutal "safety issue" seems to be secondary to the general discourse around this (especially, since the safety of trans people is usually secondary for people who argue safety). There's an unease around the gender topic that needs to go before any law change might be useful. I'd not be surprised if trans people allowed into "their" bathrooms still choose to avoid public bathrooms, as these places aren't seen as safe. Under this theory, your numbers could be a transition problem (e.g. some of the trans people who do take advantage of the law might be the "vengeful" kind). This is why, ideally, an attitude change would have to come first. But then an attitude change isn't going to come without actual contact. And given that being trans is rare to begin with...

It's all a muddle for me. My sympathies are with the minority, here, though more with the regular person than with the activist. There's something there, I think, we don't quite understand enough.

Fwiw, by 'weirdos' I mean people who willingly try to convince others to enjoy their cognitive dissonance and accept clearly contradictory positions (either this, or people who do not think there are reasonable structures to be found in the world whcih we can describe. I find both weird and unhelpful. I avoid both kinds of people whenever I can). — AmadeusD

I'm reading this and rubbing my chin trying to figure out what positions are clearly contradictory. It's messy to begin with. Me, I'm generally uncomfortable with activitsts of any kind, but I also recognise that they're often necessary for social change. Here's my position on the trans issue:

I think "being trans" is a thing.

If "being trans" is a thing, then it's definitely a gender-thing.

It might be, in addition, a sex thing. Or, a variety of disparate sex-constellations could give rise to similar symptoms.

I think the way we think about sex is inherently gendered; male/female are both sex categories and gender categories, but they are sex categories in part because they were gender categories first. We could have devided the field differently. As long as we're talking about reproduction, there's fairly little leeway. But the trans-issue is not primarily related to reproduction (as a gender issue).

I find the trans/cis distinction useful. It must start as a gender issue, and we'd need to approach the underlying sex-issue (including if there is one in the first place) in a way similar to the reproduction issue. Sticking to the reproduction-derived male-female typology might inhibit our ability to ask the right questions. Abandoning the male-female binary while researching the trans-issue may be useful; that doesn't imply also abandonding the male-female binary while researching reproduction.

I'm no biologist, and I have trouble understanding some of the more complicated issues. I tried reading papers a couple of years ago... I don't speak biology; it was slow and inconclusive. On top of this, the trans-issue is highly political, so my default attitude towards such papers is one of cautious distrust: I expect wishful-thinking on the activist side and not-my-problem-complacency on the conservative side. I imagine there are middle-of-the-road researches, but I don't know who they are. So I don't trust my intuitions on the topic, and I don't trust my ability to figure out which experts to trust.

Given a minor background in sociology (academic degree, but decades ago and not my job ever since), I'm a little better at reading gender studies. Unfortunately, that just means I can be more specific about my distrust. I'd need to go read the actual studies, and then think through the theories that underly them, and then... I'd simply be exhausted and still not have made up my mind.

Once the dust settles we might get a clearer look of the issue at hand. Part of me fears though that, once the dust settles, we'll go back to not caring much - meaning we might just not look. I'm hoping for positive left-over substratus, but the current backlash doesn't seem to justify that hope. It's like running with a rubber band; either the rubber band breaks and you fall flat on your face, or the you lose strength and the backlash smashes your back into the wall.

The difference between sex and gender is also intuitively clear to me: I have no problem calling myself male - that's a fact. But I can't call myself a "man" with a straight face. The term feels more like a social imposition than something I identify with. Note that "man" isn't only a gender term; it's also an age term. Am I more comfortable with "boy" than "man"? Peter-Pan Syndrome? Maybe. It's also clear to me, that I'm definitely not a girl/woman; that's just intuitively off the table. I take this to mean that I'm "cis male" without much of an gender identity.

When I say I don't have much of a gender identity, what I mean is that, unless the topic comes up, I don't think of myself in terms of gender at all. That can lead to me not making connections that I'm socially supposed to make. An example: I was working at a market research institute, when the boss of a different department needed to have some tables moved (for a group discussion, I think). She enlisted the help of "strong men". Now the department I was in was mostly women, so most people who responded to the call were women, like my friend and colleague, who said something like, "Hey, you come, too." Not only did I not respond to the flattery, I didn't even realise it was supposed to be gendered flattery to make the (few) men in the room feel good about helping. I just thought I'm not strong, so I'm not going to be much help. (I only later learned that we were to move tables, and they weren't that heavy. And most of the table movers ended up women, anyway.) There are also times I got in trouble for being gender insensitive - that is not being able to see myself as a man and thus making (mostly) women uncomfortable with my presence, or something I said. So while I find the trans condition hard to understand (I asked clarification question, at the end of the which the only thing that was clear is that I didn't understand), I also find it hard to understand why the man-woman gender differentiation matters as much as it does. I don't, here, mean an intellectual understanding; more an instinctive understunding. Meaning: I get by well enough when I pay attention; not so much when I relax.

As for the concrete trans issues, say the bathroom issue - my sympathies tend to lie with your avarage trans person who just wants to live a comfortable life like anyone else. Public bathrooms are a source of stress, and that won't change, not immediately at least, even if they're legally allowed in the bathroom of their "choice". Most of the discussions around the topic tend to focus on the lone toilet goer, but what if a transwoman vistis the bathroom with their cis-woman friends? (Something I've heard of once, concretely: being dragged to the toilet by their cis-woman friends, as the transwoman would have preferred to wait until she got home.) So what about insider vetting? It's not the laws, here, I'm primarily concerned with: it's the daily life that structures around them. The szenarios we imagine reveal our preconceptions. If you'd focus on the actual life-paths, things might look different.

This was meant to be a short post that makes things clearer about where I come from. It's certainly not a short post, but it should make clear that the issue to me inherently messy, which puts me in clear opposition to people who think: men here, women there, trans people deluded. To be sure, I started out saying that I think that "being trans" is a thing; that implies (in my world view) that this is something you can be wrong about. So I do think there are people who are wrong about being women, but their being wrong about being a women is secondary to them being wrong about being trans.

A four-spot grid works well enough for me, for now, definitely when it comes to gender.

But that simply kicks the can back into a situation we were already in. — AmadeusD

Yeah, what did I think making that post? It's never been the facts that are at issue.

What is unreasonable is to simply defer to 'grey area' instead of figuring out the best uses of words for our purposes. — AmadeusD

Which I don't think I do:

So, disambiguating gender has been done extremely well, by almost everyone but weirdos. — AmadeusD

And that's, I think, where the disjunct is: We're likely not agreeing who counts as "weirdo". I really don't think I should have made the post. I simply don't have the stamina to suss this out. Certainly not now. I'm tired.

There's male, female, and what else? Various disorders where the person has characteristics of both sexes? That's not really a third sex though. — RogueAI

It is not really purely male or purely female either, is it? So we have to make room for these people in our society, our laws and our thinking? — prothero

It is and we don’t. — Malcolm Parry

I've been interested in the biology of sex since the 1980ies, but I'm really bad at understanding biology. However, reading about biology from biologists, I did get the impression that the way we abstract from biological sex is cultural. So the "fact" that there are men and women is a gendered abstraction that biologists sometimes find useful and sometimes don't. Biological facts are biological facts, but the biological categories we use to make sense of biological facts are theory-bound and often reflect what we're interested in. Sex is sex, but the way we research sex is - in part - gendered.

I've been looking online, right now, for examples of what biologists have to say about the topic, and surprisingly the most interesting (to me) yield comes from a Quora page, as an answer to a question about biological sex, which confusingly uses the word "gender" and thus also gives rise to the expected reactions. A few biologists do talk about sex, though. A selective sample (usually not the entire post):

Link

James McInnes:

I can tell you that we distinguish between anatomical sex and genetic sex. I believe that there are 12 viable combinations of sex chromosomes in humans; XX and XY are the most common, of course, but we see XO, XXX, XXY, XXXY, XXYY and some more rare combinations. Most of the time the presence of the Y chromosome produces an anatomically male phenotype, but, as luck would have it, some people with a Y chromosome are insensitive to androgens or have a deletion in the SRY gene and they have a female phenotype despite the Y chromosome.

There are also people born chimeric, the product of early fusion of two different fertilized eggs, who develop with some tissues from one cell line, and other tissues from the other. Sometimes they are XX/XY chimeras and parts of their anatomy develop as male and parts female. They can have distinct male and female genitalia.

That brings us to phenotypic / anatomical sex. Most clinical records minimally accept 4 designations: male, female, intersex, and ambiguous. Often times there will be a cytogenetic description if the person is not XX or XY, and there’s a code if they are androgen resistant XY female. I’ve seen these in clinical trial data records I’ve worked with in the past and it still catches me by surprise when I see it.

In summary, biology recognizes that gender is psychology, not biology. Biology recognizes that there are more that two sexes (3–15, depending on the classification scheme used).

Comment: I'm curious about the "classification schemes". Everything else sounds familiar, and is the stuff I sort of understand on the whole, but not in detail. One of the things I never properly understood is the difference between "intersex" and "ambigous". The language here gets very biological, and I'd need to dive deeper here than I'm willing. I'm content to know that biologists (some? most? all?) understand the difference.

Rik Wouters:

I’m not very well informed about what sexes are defined right now, but it surely doesn’t take a lot of effort to convince me of the existence of an xth sex. The only issue is how to define a sex and that will determine the number of sexes in existence. Limiting the total number to 2, however, unavoidably causes difficulties that can be prevented. The number needs to be higher than that. How high depends on what’s most practical and intuitive to work with.

Comment: Non-expert with a practical intuition of how many categories are useful.

Quinn Copeland:

Understand that humans, like all other organisms , function primarily to to pass on their genes, and for us that means a pairing between a male and female. That is the only way it can be done in vivo, naturally.

There’s no other combination that allows the passing of genes.

Comment: Male/female binary, with deviation being defined strictly in terms of "passing on of genes".

Oliver Caspari:

If you look at the great big hump in the centre of the bell curve, there’s no problem because all of these tend to point you in the same direction for a given individual. But as you move closer to the long tails of the normal distribution, expect to be surprised.

Comment: Statistical distribution.

Adriana Heguy:

Sex determination is also very, very complex and in biology, you can find pretty much all kinds of modality: some binary, some non-binary, including non-reproducing forms such as worker or soldier ants, and also parthenogenesis. Many environmental factors affect sex determination, too. And I’m talking just about sex, not gender.

[...]

As a professional biologist, I’m not surprised by people who feel that their gender does not match their biological, chromosomal, or anatomical sex, or by people who don’t feel that they are of either gender, or who feel they are both genders at once. What would be surprising from a biological point of view is if this did not happen, given that biology is messy and complex, and there are hardly any hard and fast rules.

Comments: Left out paragraphs talking about gender. This sort of response is, in my enteriely anecdotal experience, pretty common with non-human biologists, and less common though not by much with human biologists. Take that with a grain of salt; I'm unaware of any studies on the topic, so I have nothing to corroborate.

Make of this what you will. My own take on this is that even when a stark biological binary is useful, it's strictly centered on reproduction with very limited validity outside of this topic. Even then, it stops at "male" and "female" - and I'm not sure how we would relate reproductive systems to individuals. "Man" and "Woman" are terms meant to describe individuals, and that's a step up the abstraction ladder from the only clear binary that is useful. In effect, "man" and "woman" are gender terms, not sex terms, and that's what we care about. Any appeal to biology feels like an appeal to authority, rather than an appeal to biological sexual facts.

So, yeah, I'm on the whole with prothero here: It's not really purely male and purely female; it's a matter of how you classify stuff. I'm curious about trans biology (we might learn more), and insisting on a binary + deviance might hinder us getting a clear view of field. Facts are meaningless without theory.

Are they phenomenological questions, though? — J

Think of it in terms of intentionality, then. When you get the flash, what you focus on is influenced by relevance horizon. You don't just focus decontexualiedly on your grandfather's face, for example, which you could, even if the specific look you'd flash in were compatible with that scene. You place yourself into a context with your grandfather, etc.

Meanwhile, imagining a snark has a different sense of focus. As I said, you could flash in a significant moment that involves a snark, and would be memory, but you didn't.

The intentionality of the "perceiving" act is different. The difference between "a memory" and "an imagination" (viewed wholistically as an act) is in the detials: what you focus on, whether or not you place yourself in the memory, and perhaps other things I'm not thinking of now.

The context of this thread abstracts from both in some way, and I think that causes problems, because the difference doesn't necessarily lie in the intentionality of the content; it might lie in the intentionality of the act of "remembering" or "imagining". The reason "imagining a snark" is an "imagination" and not a "memory" is because the act of imagining excludes from your relevance horizon things that would make it a memory. The reason I'd "diving down" is that most of the relevance horizon is pre-consciously given in your day-to-day praxis and only surfaces if problematic.

But could you say more about why "no 'memory' could manifest"? Do you mean we require the palette-style of remembering in order to have the other, more specific type that satisfies a) and b)? — J

I'm not sure what you mean by pallette-style. As you live your life, you select details to comit to memory and you do that by integrating them into your memory flow. If we focus on the flash, for it to be - in that moment - a memory of you walking with your grandfather, you obviously need to remember your grandfather. But that's not what I'm talking about. For example, you could forget you ever had a grandfather but still remember the scene. The memory would manifest differently (walking with someone else - substitution; who was I walking with - puzzle...). But for the flash to surface at all something needs to be there to trigger this under the intentionality of a remembering act. Some impetus. And you can remember you remembered that scene and try to remember it again. It's complicated. But if you remember you remembered something you reinforce the memory as memory in the ongoing praxis of your life. It needn't be coherent, and it certainly needn't be conscious. But it needs to be there.

A memory being (a) true and (b) autobiographical is part of the intentionality of the act of remembering, but not of the actual memory - neither the flash, nor its more substantial substratus. It's more of a success-condition, which you can check with other sources (such as photographs, or even other memories), or - probably in the vast majority of cases - just assume.

And memories aren't static. Under certain circumstances you can "remember" having hunted a snark - and it would be a memory, even if it never happened or couldn't ever have happened. The circumstances have a rather high barrier, is all.

If I suddenly get an image of my grandfather walking beside me in Manhattan, I know it's a purported memory. And if I get an image of a snark, I'm quite sure it isn't. At the risk of repeating myself, I ask again: How do I know these things? (And see below for some explication about what I mean by "how".) — J

I've let this settle for a while, because I wasn't sure how to answer this. I don't think you've addressed the more important part of my post: and that's what is "a memory" vs. "memory".

"A sudden flash of your grandfather walking beside you in Manhatten," can be identified as a memory, sure, but even if it is: is this what the memory amounts to? Is that all of it? What about it is memory, and what about it is imagination, and what about the broader topical memory isn't actuallised in the flash?

Do you remember, generally, walking beside your Grandfather in Manhatten, even if it's not actualised in your consciousness? Isn't that "flash" an outgrowth of a greater structure that's your internal sense of autobiography? The flash is the mushroom to your fungal memory?

Do you see what I mean?

Given this, if you get an image of a snark, that would also be some kind of memory, given that you're not making up snarks on the spot. But it's not located in your biography, as it would have been if you'd gotten flash of reading Lewis Carrol. You remember stuff that doesn't manifest as "a memory". If you didn't, no "memory" could manifest.

But I am constantly being bombarded with unbidden mental images, randomly, and often triggered by things I'm barely aware of. Far from unusual, it's much more common for me than deliberately seeking out some memory, or expecting one. — J

This is difficult. I think there's a twofold meaning involved here: memory vs. imagination as a psychological function, and remembering vs. imagining as an action. You can't remember stuff without involving the psychological function of "imagination", and you can't imagine stuff without the psychological function of "remembering". For instance, if I tell you to imagine a starfish, you'll need to remember what one looks like, or you won't be successful. And if I tell you to remember a starfish, you need to be able to "imagine" a past situation (since it's not here right now). Now if what you're doing is "associating" (or something), situations might occur in which it becomes relevant whether the content of the association "really occured, was experienced, etc." or not. And it's going to be hard to figure this out precisely because the psychological functions of imagination and memory are both going to be involved to some degree or other. Embellished memory? Memory-inspired vision?

How you can tell will differ depending on why this distinction matters. If it doesn't matter situationally, you're likely dealing with some sort of reification or other, and the cunfusion's going to be chronic.

A common example would be a composer composing a piece of music and then finding out it sounds like something else. Accidental similarity? Unconscious plagiarism? Note that this distinction makes sense in a particular social context. A lot if the lawsuits I've heard about, for example, I find... silly. I hear the similarity, but in most cases being caught up in western music theory promotes certain similarities. For example, an organ run in Webber's Phantom of the Opera, and Rick Wakeman's instumental Ischariot sound very much the same; but they're basically just walking up and down a scale in half-steps. I imagine you could find similar movements earlier (Bruckner maybe?). Yet, if this goes to court a decision is forced. And to the extent that institution "court" is supposed to be meaningful, a decision should also be meaningful, and (partly) because of that the distinction between "memory" and "imagination" becomes relevant. And the composer might ask themselves, "did I get it from there?" So:

Is a sudden, unbidden image a memory or an imagination? It's probably to some degree both. Can you figure out a ratio? What's the expected certainty you can reach? And is the effort needed proportional to the situational importance of the distinction? The result will never amount to more than a provisional classification, though.

Basically, cognitive activity is always going to involve more than one cognitive function, and confusion may occur when we use the same word for the activity as for the function; such as memory in general, and "a memory", or "remembering". You can create an analytic category but should be careful not to reify it beyond it's situational occurance. If you do treat a sudden unbidden image as either an image or memory that treating it as such will become part of what constitutes its status - and it's a status which can be contested by others, and that being contested is something you can anticipate, and that anticipation can feed into your classification and further behaviour... If you treat something as a memory and it turns out things didn't happen like this in some detail or at all, what you'll have is a "false memory" - because of the way your treat it. All the while, it is what it is. You can always sidestep the issue and call unbidden images with a defined trigger an "association", and you might be happier for it. One can get trapped in dichotomies of ones own making.

If you don't mind my asking into it some more: Has this created problems for you in your interactions with people, or does your brain come up with workarounds that facilitate communication? — J

I've never had problems with this, other than minor stuff (like the meditation technique I mentioned not working on me; also creative writing exercises... nothing that I couldn't interpret in terms of other failures). I mean, I grew up for 40 to 45 years without realising there was this difference. Even now I'm not completely sure (fairly sure, but not completely) that I actually have aphantasia. It's just that I see myself so much in diagnosed people's accounts, and a lot of little stuff makes sense.

Communication isn't a problem. I don't think a workaround is even necessary: the most relevant topics would be visualisation related; we'd certainly not have been on the same page - but the problem is to figure that out, and that's hard when we end up in a "successful" social situation (such that both of us "get what we want"). I think (and thought so even before I heard of aphantasia) that successful communication is better understood in terms of situational compatibility of individual meanings than in terms of similarity of the individual meanings involved. So if a communicative situation ends satisfactorily, you're not going to realise in what way meanings the people involved hold are different - people are just going to assume similarity (I certainly did).

I'm sort of bad at spacial perception; in intelligence tests I was always tremendously slowed down during those "wheels-and-levers" tests. Not sure if this is related to aphantasia in some way. It's certainly not a necessary consequence, but I did hear that people with aphantasia have trouble rotating 3D objects in their mind, so maybe? I'm certainly bad at stuff like reading maps, and fitting in furniture (I need to measure when it's obivous to anyone else that stuff will fit or not).

I'm perfectly fine the way I am; I never felt anything was lacking. Come to think of it, back after leaving school there was a year where I had three instances of a sudden shift in perception. It went along with some sort of shock, but no re-orientation was necessary. Different but the same. It was weird and fascinating. Some neural anomaly, I suppose?

The first was rain, all of a sudden I saw it more in geometrical terms. The next instance was the face of a former teacher; this one was close to making a functional difference: I'm not sure I'd have recognised him if he'd looked like that to me in the first place - but it switched mid-situation. A sudden shock, a moment of confusion, but I adjusted quickly. The last was darkness in my own house (I'm light sensitive so I tend to not switch on the light if I know a place very well). This is the only one I have absolutely no concept for - I don't understand the difference in terms of anything.

It was just those three instances, and all within one year. I've never had anything like this before or since, and I still don't know what that was. But it served as a quite nice illustration for myself of what it is like to "see things differently". Literally, too.

I'm fascinated, and rather appalled, by what it must be like to be an aphantasiac. Is it a bit like being asked to translate something into a language you don't speak? — J

For most of my life I thought "mind's eye" stuff was some sort of metaphor. I was in my fourties when I first heard about aphantasia and by extension learned that other people can have visual experiences in various degrees of vividness (up to "hyperphantasia"). I have "visual concepts"; I know what my mum looks like when she's not there, but I can't summon an image. I can sometimes conjur "microflashes"; very short images, like the flash of a camera. It's not worth the effort.

In terms of visual experience, a memory of something is very distinct from something I imagine. If I remember what something looks like I trigger a "visual concept". It's non-linguistic; it just sits there in the mind - something once seen, but unavailable to anything vision-like. When I imagine something, and you ask me for details, I make them up on the spot, one after another. In retrospect, I know realise how those meditation techniques where they have you lie down in darkness and someone narrates something are supposed to work. I always thought it was strange that I was supposed to relax and they made me work. I thought I was just slow. It never occured to me that others might just have visual experience to go along with the narration.

***

After reading this thread, I'm wondering if we're not seeing memories too much in terms of... computers? Something stored; something retrieved. Or the metaphor of storage to begin with: the warehouse of the mind. I think memories are more integrated than that in the daily praxis. A memore of an event that's no accurate is still a memory: it's continuous with how you see things, and you'll have to deal with an error to go on. Sometimes people my deliberately not check up on a memory, so they can go on the way things are. But where do these misrememberings come from; if you remember a detail wrong, is that some sort of imagination? What if the problem was your perception in that moment: that is it's not your memory that's wrong - as it's accurate to what you've experienced - but it's your experience that wasn't accurate to the moment. I think you peel back the layers you might end up with "elementary particles" that inform everything you do. I'm too confused right now to think further down that lane, as there would be no memory without imagination, and no imagination without memory - but it feels like I'm transgressing "tiers" here, and I can't quite make it out.

Maybe we could try to approach this from the negative: what's the difference between not being able to imagine something, and not being able to remember something?

For me, what I expect to be lacking with a memory is a good deal more specific than what I'm lacking when I'm trying to imagine something. A gap in the memory is usually surrounded by other memories: there's something very specific that's not there. Meanwhile not being able to imagine something indicates a lack of experience - it's more fuzzy. It feels like the difference between closing in on something, vs. casting out for something.

This is difficult to express. I have aphantasia; I don't get mental images at all. Yet, I can imagine, say, my mother's face. I can't imagine a face I only "know" from a description you give me at all (I can try to draw it and approach it from there). Maybe like this: a memory is something living in my mind, while something imagined is a lattice of details cohering through the act of active focus. The memory recedes into the background; the imagination disappears (but might leave traces as a memory of something I imagined).

I'm not happy with this. It doesn't seem quite plausible, but I can't figure out the exact flaw. I have this vague sense of a memory being bottom-up, while imagination being top-down. A memory starts off from a unique experience, while my imagination works more by getting rid of more and more options until something more or less unique comes out. The gaps in what I'm not paying attention to are literally blank when imagining something; they don't come with a sense of "forgetting" - they come with a sense of "filling in".

My point is asking why faith #1 is at all worth having without #2? — Hanover

Or conversly, is it possible to have faith#2 without faith#1? A sort of practical faith that's not very concerned with the source? Just a deep-rooted sense of "this is the way"? As an atheist who grew up among lots of atheist-accepting, ecumene-favouring Christians, I've often wondered how important "faith in the existence of God" is. Faith in the guidance seemed more in evidence in the people around me (and I wonder if this "in-evidence" is a result of selctive intention, or maybe incomplete interpretation).

I may well be underestimating the importance of a "personal God", though. That does come up. I wonder if it's possible to follow the guidance with deep conviction, while, say, holding some sort of ironic distance towards the "God exists" discourse, as whatever you say on that issue feels... inadequate. It sometimes feels like that (not with my parents, but I've met people who gave me the impression).

I don't find this an easy topic.

[Aside: I originally typed "discurse" rather than "discourse". I almost want to believe in Freudian slips.]

A --> Eat cheese. Reason: It tastes good. The eater hasn't the freedom to deactivate this reason.

B --> Lose weight: Reason: The latest fashion dictates that slim bodies look better. The fashion follower hasn't the freedom to deactivate this reason. — Quk

I've read C, but I'm stopping here for a reason. I'm not convinced an analytic combination of desire/will creates a fine-enough tool to look at the situation. There are a couple of dimension here I'd like to address, unsystematically for now:

1. Trigger. A sudden craving for cheese vs. seeing a piece of cheese and wanting to eat it. The object triggers the situational instance of will/desire, vs. something else (some association? a random firing of neurons?) triggers the will/desire. The target is ideal if not present, and specific if present (but also ideal, because to recognise cheese as cheese is to have expectations for a category that overlays the instance). It's far easier not to eat cheese if there isn't any and you'd have to go to the fridge/shop etc to get it. [Aesop's Fox and Grapes is instructive here.]

2. Complexity of what you call "reason" here: "tastes good" seems less complex than fashion dictates. But where there's complexity, I'd need analytic categories to account for components. Would a conflation of desire and will make things clearer or cause confusion (note that this might differ from person to person, since people have different thought habits).

3. What you call reason seems to split up into two modes: legitimisation and motivation. Even "tastes good" can be some sort of legitimisation; if you're eating cheese out of habit and have no real other reason you might want to convince yourself of liking the taste more than you actually do. If you were to kick the habit and then go back to eating cheese later, you might find you no longer like it (I'm speaking from experience, though not with cheese). A question here is: was I ever motivated by taste, or was this an easy-to-understand and not-too-implausible rationalisation for an indecipherable bundle. In any case, the vector (a pretty good choice of word, thanks for that) of the desire does point towards cheese.

So given that, what's the advantages/disadvantages of having one category or two, here? My own position so far is that I'd intuitively like to keep them separate for now (call this a weak instance of "desire/will"), so I'm biased. But this particular question (dis/advantages) is an open one with no concrete answers or even models in my mind. Still thinking.

(Part of the background context is that I consider "free will" both an unimportant and vague concept, so I don't usually think about it, and I never bring it up of my own accord.)

The generalising person has more options, no? — bert1

My earlier post was whimsical and silly, and I sort of wish I hadn't made it, but there is a point hidden away in there and it concerns this:

We make distinctions and attach our desires to them. So it's not necessarily true that, from the perspective of the person in question, that they have more options. It depends on the categories that are meaningful to them. Maybe they just like "cake": their options would be equivalent, while the "texture" of their desire would be less rich, if that makes sense.

There was a second point, too, but it was even more implied:

What's the relationship between desire and will? Do they have the same target, or is will the result of a synthesis of bundles of conflicting desires? So when you reply to Patterner thus:

This universe consists of a cake shop, three cakes, and four people. What else is there to do? — bert1

I would say, taking the desires (known or unknown) of the other three people into account can be part of the will (as some sort of social desire: the desire to be looked upon well, the desire to see others happy, etc.). If you want to bracket the social element, that's fine, but you depending on what you think will is you might have gotten rid of the opportunity to see the whole picture. The question is: if we focus simply on the desire for cake, did we get rid of "will"? Does will emerge from the conflict of desires as some sort of synthesised compound?

I've set it up that way I guess! This universe consists of a cake shop, three cakes, and four people. What else is there to do? If Pete chooses not to buy a cake, he's not Particular Pete any more, he's Absolute Pete. — bert1

Your set-up is confusing, though. If Pete were to decide to buy an Eccles 2 cake, would he be General Pete or Universal Pete. Would he know?

My intuition is that restricitions are what makes any particular will descernible as will. So if Absolute Abdul has no preference at all, in what way could we say there's will? He's certainly free to chose between four equal opportunities - but the choice doesn't matter. There's no will here, only randomness.

Your set-up feels like one of those logical puzzles: the optimal outcome is:

Pete: EC1
Geraldine: EC2
Ursula: IF
Abdul: None

But viewed like that, both freedom and will appear to be a social-distribution category. But your categories don't say anything about the social dimension. It's just sort of implied in the three-cakes/four-people set up.

For example, Absolute Abdul could choose Eccles Cake 1, as the social dimension is not part of the "Absolute" modifier, and thus undefinied. Your set-up doesn't tell me what happens if Particular Pete, General Geraldine and Absolute Abdul all choose Eccles Cake 1. I suppose the Universe terminates in an error?

Honestly Dawnstorm, I tried very hard in the other thread. — James Dean Conroy

I know and appreciate this.

I see there's a disconnect here... — James Dean Conroy

It appears to run deep. I'll slink back into the shadows and continue reading.

...from the standpoint of life itself. — James Dean Conroy

I believe it's this that's giving me trouble connecting. I feel like there's some sort of reification going on.

I can accept a descriptive system that says "life is bad" selects itself out, at least for the sake of argument, or testing a logical system (as far as I'm capable; I'm not a trained philosopher). My problem is that at that point I lose sight of the relavance of "value only exists because of life".

Evaluating is something living things do; if they don't affirm, they're selected out. An evolutionary perspective. Fine. The problem comes when you raise value to a perspective beyond the individual. What even is this level? It's not selection in the sense of population figues: it's not like suicidal people or pessimists are different species.

For example: social insects often sacrifice a massive amount of life for the sake of the "queen". From an evolutionary standpoint that makes sense. In terms of human societies, this could mean that evaluating life as bad on the individual level could be affirming life (e.g. a few suicides reduce conflict for limited resources). I simply cannot see the connection between a living thing's perspective and the "standpoint of life itself".

This isn't a criticism of your position, btw, it's meant to illustrate an item I have trouble with. I can't play your game if I don't understand the rules, so to speak.

I wouldn’t always call faith itself irrational, — Tom Storm

So what do we mean with "irrational", here?

I can see three related but distinct meanings:

(a) If you thought about it rationally, you'd come to a different conclusion.
(b) Rational thought cannot help here; the subject matter is meaningfully decided in different ways
(c) Rational thought isn't involved in the genesis of the belief

For example, I think, if a Christian fideist would use the word "irrational", they might appeal to (b) above.

Thoughts?

The point is you don’t need faith that planes fly; the empirical evidence of their capabilities is so strong that to doubt this would be irrational. — Tom Storm

Similarly, there's evidence that planes sometimes crash. How many people check statistics to make an informed decision? So what's rational here? Your motivation? The act when analysed later?

I don't think you're wrong here; I just think that emphasising rationality like that feels wrong. So:

Theists often say to atheists, “You guys live by faith too—every time you fly.” I wouldn’t have thought to compare those two ideas myself.

I raised it because it seems like an equivocation. — Tom Storm

Yes, I know. The version I'm familiar with is "...that the ceiling won't crash down on you." Same thing.

If this is an equivocation, I think, it's one that arises when theists and atheist meet on the topic of God, and that situation isn't an ideal frame, because the ideal self-image of both parties tends to remain implied. I think it needs to be put on the table.

The discussion has nothing to do with how anyone feels while on a plane or if one may crash. — Tom Storm

Yes, I know. But I think that including this could maybe tease out what the evangelist means when he says you have faith, too. If I have faith that a plane won't crash, but I find myself in a plane that does crash: how does he think I would behave? Denial? The plane doesn't crash, I'll be fine. Confusion? "My plane, my plane, why have you forsaken me?" A faith that isn't tested in a situation of crisis doesn't seem to amount to much, so invoking a crisis situation (and one I'm fully aware of when I board a plane) might help understand where their coming from - at least in a way that insisting on your rationality won't.

So:

We are comparing faith in God with a reasonable expectation of successful airplane flight and, particualry, the role of evidence in both. — Tom Storm

Yes, but it's divvied up as "theists have faith in God," and "atheists have faith that planes won't crash". So rather than insisting on me having "reasonable expectations", I'd rather question if theists don't also have "faith that planes won't crash" in the sense that atheist do. If they're honest interlocutors you could maybe tease out if they'd use the word on themselves, or if "faith in God" somehow supersedes here and makes a difference. If you make the comparison uncritically, you're ending up with a lopsided comparison.

Or differently put: is there a difference in reasonable expactions of succesful airplane flight between theists and atheists? If no, whey invoke the comparison. If yes, what is it? Can they explain, or is it an intuitive half-understood thing.

Basically, you're comparing a circumstance that only has a place in the self-image of one of you with a situation that, I would imagine, has a place in the self-image of both (that is both theists and atheists can imagine themselves in a crashing plane, but only theists can imagine themselves believing in God.)

If it turns out that the theist, once contemplating this, thinks what you really have faith in isn't "flying" but, say, "luck" (anything closer to the abstraction level of "faith in God") then it seems to me that the evidence-question could take the backseat, and it's really about different modes of ordering and interpreting experience.

My background is in sociology — Tom Storm

This is just an aside: I've got a degree in sociology, but have been out of the loop for 25 to 30 years, now, but the theoretical background that fit me the most back then would have been Anthony Giddens' structuration theory. If you're familiar with this, I'm probably leaning towards looking at a conflict situation from the point of view of routine and a personal need for ontological security. Where do your time-space paths intersect, and where do they diverge? What motivates the comparison here for either of you? Do you generally leave these situations with predictable outcomes? A typical social situation with typical outcome for both parties. Rarely any surprise. A game of metaphysical ping pong.

So, at the risk of becoming boring, if I trust that a plane will fly me somewhere safely because of empirical evidence that they do, almost without fail, would it be fair to call this 'faith' in flying? How does this compare to faith that God is a real? — Tom Storm

I feel the framing is geared towards conflict from the get go. We're invited to emphasise the difference. What, in ongoing social praxis, does it even mean to "trust that a plane will fly me somewhere safely"? That's certainly the expectation I have when I get on a plane, but it's rarely topical in the moment. I don't worry that the plane will crash: I get on it, and then, if I don't plummet with it, I get off it again.

Similarly, the focus on "faith that god is real" seems off, too. That's just the point of departure for atheists, but that's usually not what faith is about for Christians (at least not those I know, most of whom are Roman Catholic). Faith in God comes with a sense of being taken care of, I feel. God knows what's best. So, in the context of flying, if I get on a plane, and I have faith in God, that's going to cover both landing safely (thanks), and crashing (if that's the divine plan...). So as an atheist, I know that planes can crash, and I know that planes can crash with me in them, so if I am in a plane that crashes I have no more resources. If it becomes clear that the plane will not land safely, the only way is down. A theist may have a slightly better time in the last moments, via praying.

So what are we comparing here to begin with? I'm aware that this is a common talking point of apologists. See? I have faith, too. But there's something very real I don't have here. What, despite being frightened, would an apologist expect of me while in a crashing plane? What do I invoke? That - I think - is what we'd need to target. "Bad luck?" "Cursing the neglectful maintanence staff? The suits who don't want to invest?" What sort of narrative do they think we have here?

Clearly, both theists and atheists don't expect to crash when they get on a plane, and clearly both can find themselves in a crashing plane, and not quite as clearly but still somewhat transparently, both know that they can find themselves in a crashing plane before they get on. When the expectation isn't met, then what? If faith in God has an effect in such a situation, what do I have in its place, and what is its effect? What would the apologist expect here?

For me, it'd likely be a mix of fear and air sickness; I wouldn't be surprised if airsickness would be at the forefront of my mind ("Air sickness sucks, but at least it won't last long," is also a type of humour that I can see asserting itself in such a situation.)

Here, however, we enter philosophical territory, starting with the scare-quotes around "based"! Why the quotes? Do you mean to question whether there is a true basis for moral behavior, apart from social upbringing and norms? — J

Sort of. Talking about the morality of social groupings rather than the morality of a person has had my hyper-aware of the metaphor I use. A base is something you build on. A person's morality has its base in the earliest learning process. Here "base" is adequate. But I view the morality of a social grouping more like a flow, metaphorically a river maybe, and under that perspective each person turns into a spring that feeds into a river (and those rivers run together - I wonder if, given enough time, I can extend the metaphor to include the sea?). But even that is a problem, because the flow is bi-directional, as people is all that there are: you learn, imperfectly, from your parents, but by the time you grow up you've made it your own. So the flow-metaphor isn't quite right either... Basically, I just got confused by the metaphors we use.

but say more about the chicken/egg aspect. — J

You take your morality from society and in turn become part of the morality-distribution-sytem of a society. From a simple-to-complex point of view, what you want has to come first, but by the time you're developed enough to want things, you've also already aquired some of the morality of your parents. Then transfer this to a historical point of view: was there ever a "first" moment, really? How far back can we go and still recognise morality in an interaction? When does an I-want-this-and-you-want-this-and-we-can't-both-have-it situation gain moral overtones? When do we have something to pass on to the next generation? It's hard to imagine a morally "naive" situation. And it's hard to imagine a grouping who *didn't* learn morality from their parents' generation, given they necessarily live at the same time (or babies don't survive). It's hard to imagine a first moral generation.

Interestingly, I think this is right -- finding a basis for ethical values does indeed do these things -- but at the same time it can't settle the question. Because . . . if we accept all this and find that our anxiety is indeed quelled, and our routine preserved, we may still find ourselves asking, "But is this enough? Is this what 'doing good' really means?" That the question can be meaningfully asked at all seems to put it in a different category from, say, "OK, I've demonstrated the Pythagorean theorem, but is that enough? Do I really understand what a right triangle is?" I'd say that question was meaningless, but the ethical question doesn't seem to be like that. — J

Yes, it's a piece of the puzzle, and I'm unsure how it fits. What I've not been addressing much is the social aspect. You acquire your moral values while growing up: you construct them out of observations when people punish or praise, when people pay attention to you and ignore you, and so on. There are rules or rules of thumb you know. You learn the when and where and who of it. People get divvied up into insiders and outsiders. And so on.

An insider can explain local morals to an outsider:

a) purely discriptive: This is how we do it here.
b) prescriptive, territorial: This is how we do it here; I will not tolerate deviance.
c) prescriptive, superiority: This is how it's done, but you barbarians don't know this.
d) prescriptive, universalist: This is how it's done; it's obvious; since you do it differently, you're evil.
e) prescriptive, exceptionalist: This is how we do it, because we're special.
And so on.

These sort of differences in attitude make a difference in how morals spread and change. Morals are socially "alive" - what we do is... "cell activity"? That is whenever we invoke a local moral, we interpret it in this specific interpretation, have an attitude towards its validity, feel it's biographical relevance more or less strongly, etc. All the while we evaluate how it turns out, etc. Our actions, attitudes, etc. are part of the social life flow of morals. In terms of moral conflicts, we go from intrapersonal to interpersonal. Interpersonal can occur within a sub-culture, within a culture but between subcultures, between cultures and so on. Intrapersonal conflicts can be the result of conflicts between two subcultures, both of which the person in question identifies with. Being part of multiple subcultures that don't overlap often can allow to "regionalise": if you wish for a superregional right in that case, you need to "climb up the abstraction ladder" - find a principle that accounts for both.

The result is that there are sentences like "murder is wrong," that say nothing at all if not interpreted. You'll rarely find people saying "yeah I murdered him; but I did so in self-defence," you'll hear "yeah, I killed him, but it wasn't murder, it was self-defense." The shared abstraction could be something like "some killing is wrong." This can be a problem when traditional values clash with more widely accepted values (and often enshrined in law). Think "honour killings", as an example.

Within any sort of social conflict, any act or utterance is taking a stance (or refusing to, or hesitating to...). Anxiety, in this context, will adversly affect your "power to influence the outcome". So I'd expect people who are more certain to contribute more to the moral landscape, by sheer force of conviction.

Basically, I view morality as a process, and what it's "based" on is a bit chicken/egg.

What we want to know is, what happens when an ethical choice arises that forces us to scrutinize our normal patterns of comfort and legitimization? Is the only tool at our disposal yet another look at the question of comfort? Or can I bypass how I may personally feel (again, taking "feel" in its broadest sense, to include like, prefer, etc.), ask for reasons, and let the comfort chips fall where they may? — J

This is extremely difficult to think through without an example; and I'm not even sure what would count as an example.

My hunch is that scrutinising your normal patterns of comfort is one of most uncomfortable things you can do in a moral context. You threaten your self image; you threaten your sense of the-way-things-are. Different people may have different tolarance level over all, and intra-personally the tolerance levels may vary by topic. "Asking for reasons" works because of this: you'd rather sacrifice some comfort-at-issue than the comfort-of-knowing-what-you-do-is-right. "Asking for reasons" quells existential anxiety (provided you find acceptable answers). You believe in God, you believe in rationality, you believe that people are basically good... anything to preserve the modicum of routine you need.

Does using my Nagel-derived concept, above, help any? I think the key point is that altruism takes the other person's situation, all by itself, without any appeal to how the altruist feels, as a reason for action. You may well believe that such a thing is impossible, of course, depending on what role you give reasons in ethical deliberation. If they wouldn't be reasons without some corresponding motivating feelings, then my and Nagel's account wouldn't fly for you. — J

I'm unfamiliar with Nagel's position on altruism, so I just read some summeries and skimmed others. First, I note that every commenter seems to have different takeaway (which makes it harder for me to grasp), and to top it off the most detailed, text-adjecent summary I read was in German, so I don't what the appropriate words in English are (and anyway, it was fairly long, so I just skimmed it, but it's definitely interesting at the very least).

What I got out of it is quite akin to us being social animals: to realise the other is a person is to realise that I am a person, the realisation of which is unpersonal and objective, and so the motivation towards altruism isn't direct (like say hunger) but derived from abstracted facts. Not sure how close this is to Nagel's postion; as I said I just skimmed it, and the specifics were very convoluted and in some parts hard to understand (especially on a skim).

To this I say, this feels to be... off topic? Let me backtrack to another question you asked, at that point, because I think it's relevant:

Could you say more, though, about why you construe "like" to involve a feeling? Is this based on usage, or are you analyzing what "like" would have to mean, in order for it to say something meaningful? — J

"Like" to me expresses an emotional attachment. It doesn't just involve feeling, it is feeling something. I think the problem comes with isolating as "feelings" spurts of our emotional flow we recognise, but that's almost certainly describing feelings by reference to exceptional states. Instead of, say, "happiness" we should look at "comfort". This is a sort of baseline that renders you able to act. You notice comfort only in transitional stages, if it's an ongoing state it becomes part of the background until disrupted. But it's important to the upkeep of routine.

This is, for example, a huge problem for social justice movements: to even be understood you need to make people realise what it is like to live in constant discomfort. And then, to be actionable, a majority needs to give up part of their comfort to accommodate a minorty. How do you motivate something like this on a huge scale, when it's easy to maintain comfort by simple dismissal (say of "being trans" as confused).

So, for example, I don't much like vanilla ice cream; I don't dislike it, but there are almost always alternatives I prefer. As I talk about this on here, I'm not in a position where I have access to icecream, so it's not situationally relevant. It's still true, as a general matter of fact, about me. It's also a trivial fact, so if you were to tell me that, no, I do actually like vanilla ice cream, I'm mistaken, I'd be puzzled, but I wouldn't experience any huge change in my emotional state. There's no disruption in the general comfort level - that'd be even true if I were currently uncomfortable somehow. However, if you were then to insist on this fact, and make a bigger deal out of it than I ever could, I'd likely get uncomfortable with this conversation. So while me liking or not liking vanilla ice cream would be involved here, it'd be very marginally - I'd be uncomfortable with this situation. However, the presence of "vanilla ice cream" as topic could create an association such that I'd further on experience a modicum of discomfort when faced with vanilla ice cream, that would re-inforce and worsen my reaction to vanilla ice cream, and to the extent that I'm unaware of this, you may now be right, and I'm actually mistaken in some small part, at least under one consideration: an underappreciate amount of dislike towards vanilla ice cream has little to do with its properties.

So, yeah, if emotivists say that every action is directly motived by an isolatable and easily categorisable desire, and Nagel says that isn't so, then I'm with Nagel. Beyond that, I haven't thought my intuitions through enough to say one way or another how feelings factor in. But take them away, away you're left with... what? Instructions? Elaborate if-then decision trees?

So:

I think the key point is that altruism takes the other person's situation, all by itself, without any appeal to how the altruist feels, as a reason for action. — J

I wouldn't expect an appeal during the carrying out of the situation, not as a default. That comes in later, when others ask why you did something, and then the most likely reply is going to be "because he needed X" or some such. It's inefficient to observe yourself too much; but neverless any action necessarily integrates into your daily comfort flow - only exceptional or challenged decision get the appeal treatment, and the appeal is usually going to be targeted towards what flies. This is not to say that people are insincere; they need to be comfortable either with their justifications or their duplicity (or whatever I'm not thinking of right now). Acts, justifications, social sanctioning... all feedback and modify your comfort flow such that they may make future actions more or less likely. But the comfort-flow itself is just there: it's not usually available for legitimisation or reflexion. Especially in routine situation your comfort level will usually remain an unacknowledged necessary condition of making value judgements. It might come up during a crisis (too strong a word; I'm thinking of any break of routine here, no matter how big or small) or when challenged - but often a set of social macros (any ethical position you might name) will obscure it even then.

Again, and this is important, I'm trying to explain my intuition. I haven't thought this through to my satisfaction (and probably never will, since I'm hard to satisfy).

Let's say that's a description of "genuine altruism." Would your view entail that such a person couldn't actually exist -- or at best would be in denial about what they were feeling? — J

I have trouble answering this question for two reasons: (a) I'm not quite sure I understand your model (more later), and (b) I'm not exactly sure what my view amounts in philosophical terms (here I've been role-playing myself as rational choice theorist, while earlier in this thread I've been roleplaying myself as emotivist).

So let me try:

I might derive no pleasure whatsoever from doing something altruistic that I believe it's my responsibility to do. — J

This seems to seperate the motivation from the deed in some way. I think you'd need to elaborate on the how more here: for example, I can do something that helps you, but out of purely instrumental considerations. Is this altruism? My instinct would be to say "no", but under a social contract model, all altruism could be described like that, so it's not quite off the table. Do you see my confusion here?

The second thing is that the emphasis on duty makes it seem like morals as rule-following. This does sort of clash with my view: people who accept a duty do so either because they're forced to, or because they internalised their "position" in society. If you "believe its your responsibility" it's likely the latter.

And third, it feels like you view "it's ultimately feelings" as feelings being the envisioned pay off. That's not the only role they have. Feelings are supposed to underly *any* value; therefore also any attachment to duty or responsibility you might have.

But in the wider, quality-of-my-life sense, trying to do this sort of thing is "what I like." — J

I can't read this line without seeing feelings front and center: "quality of my life"? "What I like"? Take feelings away and liking stuff is impossible, and quality of life becomes irrelevant to your praxis.

Do you maybe instinctively translate feelings to something like the Freudian id? I envision something more like a structuring personality principle that underlies it all. More like a constant flow that only makes itself known when there's turbulence.

I like it because I believe it's morally right. It accords with my values. — J

This to me has no meaning outside specific theories. "Morally right" is a variable that has different content in different theories; different theories craft different formulae for it; and some theories have little use for it at all (maybe as a macro further out). Since I'm not quite sure where you're coming from, this is something I suspend my interpretation on when reading, until I have a better grasp and can make educated guesses.

Let's say that's a description of "genuine altruism." Would your view entail that such a person couldn't actually exist -- or at best would be in denial about what they were feeling? — J

So now: do you have a better grasp why I don't quite understand your description? If I'm unsure what "genuine altruism" is, I can't judge whether it "actually exists". For better or worse:

I believe there are people who feel good when making others feel good. I believe there are people who feel good about doing their duty, which includes making other people feel good. I believe this can but needn't occur in the same person. The label "genuine altruism" is an intrusion here: it doesn't order the field, but adds a semantic problem I can do without. I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing something, but if I'm missing something here it's likely because it's not usually within my relevance horizon, and thus to see it would require painstaking bottom-up construction with many false starts. Or alternatively an epiphany.

I hope I haven't made things worse.

Yes, that's reasonable, otherwise you start thinking in terms of joyous martyrdom or some such. But even "bad" vs. "worse" is problematic. Should we imagine a self-sacrificing hero (with, as you say, a bit more time to cogitate than a grenade would allow) saying to herself, "I'll feel really bad if these innocent people die. I will feel nothing at all if I sacrifice myself to save them, since I'll be dead. So I'm choosing to feel nothing rather than feel really bad"? Maybe. But it would be a very subterranean level of cogitation, as it were; what usually goes through a hero's mind is thoughts of duty and compassion, I would imagine, not how rotten they'll feel if they funk it. I'm inclined to say that it's only plausible if, for independent reasons, we've already decided to rule out genuinely altruistic motives as incompatible with the "what I choose = what I like" equation. Then we can say, "She thinks she's acting from altruistic motives but here's what's really going on -- it's what she likes, even if she doesn't realize it." — J

Well, there are two things going on. One is how we make decisions based on value (where rational choice comes in), and the other is where value comes from (e.g. "feelings" - rational choice theory doesn't demand that feelings be the source of values, just that you have values).

But what values does a "truly altruistic person" have? "I want others to be happy"? And in what terms would you describe the value? If you want to describe the value with respect to rationality, rational choice can probably achieve that, but they'd need recourse to other values. And there are pretty much only two options open I can see: some sort of structuralism - it's all circular, values feed into other values etc. Or values come from something other than rational thought (e.g. we are "social animals").

A rational choice theorist who decides values derive ultimately from feelings would likely describe "genuniely altruistic feelings" in terms of feeling - maing others feel good feels good. And I don't see how that would devalue altruism. Or differently put: if making other people feel good didn't make you feel good, would you be "genuinely altruistic"? Maybe. But "genuine altruism" is a loaded term here. You need to be aware that a rational choice theory might describe that differently from you.

Again, rational choice theory isn't something I read widely. At university I've written a paper about the sociology of suicide; one approach was rational choice - it was, I think, my least favourite approach. I don't remember the name of either the author or the book anymore, but that was my most in-depth reading of a rational-choice point of view. I went with summaries for the rest of my studies. All this to say, it's never been my expertise. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

It's now between two sorts of unlivability -- death, and moral disgrace -- one of which at least will spare the innocents. — J

Yes, as I said, "bad" vs. "worse". Where there's no gain, you minimise cost. Ultimately it's "feelings"; they needn't be pleasant. That's a misconception. You can rescue a modicum of pleasantness by, say, attaching it to the hero concept. Some people can feel at peace if they take a role with only lousy prospects, but it's socially valued. Identification is a powerful enabler.

Turn this around, the same person who might be touched by the heroism eulogy might berate her for being reckless while drunk in the bar and missing her. Where there's a tension field between feelings you can use rational thought to establish a legitimisation structure, so you can feel good about doing the right thing. "I was drunk; I didn't mean it." And then you put some emotional weight behind "objective morality" so you can feel good about yourself.

I think people are too messy to be rational when choosing. That said, rational thought does play its part; we just need to pin down "where".

It's tough to make this work with examples of altruism and self-sacrifice. You'd have to stretch the meaning of "joy" awfully far. — J

I read the posts more as cost-benefit calculations (as in rational choice theory). It's not all that hard to account for altruism: even if there's no benefit to be had, there are still costs to minimise. It's just a matter of priorities. I though "joy" was just the word used in the context of Beethoven vs. Bach, while "good feelings" vs. "bad feelings" is the more general model. I'd like to append that in situations where there are no good feelings involved, it's likely "bad feelings" vs. "worse feelings". That said there might be some marginal good feelings in throwing yourself on a grenade: "I'll be remembered a hero!" As you say, it's the stuff we admire, and some people might enjoy the prospect of being admired.

Given how quickly granades explode, I wager there won't be much time for deliberation, though.

So, no, this isn’t a matter of opinion or hermeneutic complexity - without life, there is no value. The axiomatic nature means hermeneutic drift (of the axiom at least - not the contextually driven implications of acting on it - which are dynamic, think Foucault - you highlighted this) is impossible. It is an axiomatic foundation - undeniable by definition. — James Dean Conroy

I understand that (or at least think I do). It's precily the dynamic context, though, that makes the axiom meaningful. Otherwise it's just... floating free. This is why I called my reservations "mostly methodological". You reply seems to indicate you think I was talking about the content.

I'm looking for an application of the axiom; I can't see one.

Life must see itself as 'good'.
Otherwise, it self-terminates.
So across time, only "life-affirming" value-sets endure. — James Dean Conroy

This is excellent. I think the penny dropped... but the slot machine is kinda slow in operating, so I won't really know how much I agree/disagree until later (maybe much later). I do have one reservation, and it's mostly methodological.

The above phrasing is... hermeneutically difficult to pull through, I think. If you go by surivival, for example, "it survived, so it must be good", you go into circular arguing. You'd need to figure out a way to describe a system as "lifeaffirming" independently of its survival, and this is always going to be difficult to pull off in a way that doesn't suggest you're motivated by maintaining your theory - especially by people who would have a different view of what counts as "life affirming".

For example, you describe antinatalism as parasitic and reliant on surplus. There's a baseline here that's easy enough to describe: you have an empirical way to test this. You'd expect antinatalism to be more popular in times of plenty, or on economic decline, rather than on during economic crisis or growth. But even then... parasitic strategies are strategies that propagate. (A single human can host quite a lot of tapeworms.) And you're using that as your metaphor here. And I find that... difficult to parse. What's the parasite-host relation here? The antinatalist to society? Antinatalism to the antinatalist? Both?

Or another example: how would you deal with Christianity's fixation on the afterlife? Praising martyrs? The saviour dying to "defeat" death?

The problem is that there are a lot of goalposts to shift, and it's easy to do so without realising. Survival of the individual? Survival of genome? Survival of meme?

I'm not rejecting the sytem outright, but knowing myself I'll likely stay at a skeptical distance, the way I react to psychoanalysis or evolutionary psychology. Not implausible, but full of hermeneutic traps. That's where I am right now, but bear in mind that I need to still let this settle.

Can I ask you a few questions to establish where the disconnect is? — James Dean Conroy

Great approach. That could really help.

1. When I say "life is the source of value", do you hear "life feels valuable to humans"?
(Or do you interpret it as a structural claim - about how all value originates from being alive?) — James Dean Conroy

Structural. Value arises out of praxis.

2. When I say "life is good", do you think I mean "life is morally right" in the human ethical sense?
(Or do you see that I mean "good" as in the precondition for goodness to exist at all?) — James Dean Conroy

Not really ethics/morals, no, though after a view permutations that's included. It's more generally just evaluation. I'm not entirely sure where you're going with it, but value would include lots of things: instrumental, aesthetic, moral.. None of it without life.

3. Do you believe there’s such a thing as value without any life to perceive or act on it?
(If yes, how? If no, then you already agree: life is the necessary condition.) — James Dean Conroy

No, I'm a pretty staunch relativist. Even stuff that doesn't arise out of human praxis is filtered through the lense of human praxis to be "good" (e.g. oxigen is good for fire to burn).

4. When I say "morality emerges from the structure of life", do you think I mean “animals have moral systems”?
(Or do you see that I’m saying morality is a refined strategy for multi-agent survival over time?) — James Dean Conroy

I didn't get that far, to be honest. I have no idea on that one. I'm not even sure how you view morality within a framework of evaluation (e.g. what's the relationship to instrumentality and aesthetics and other stuff I'm forgetting). I saw you talking about a blanket term for all that.

5. When I equate survival-optimised behaviour with morality, do you hear "murder is fine if it helps survival"?
(Or do you understand that moral systems optimise survival under social, complex, recursive constraints - and that’s why they evolve towards things like empathy, fairness, reciprocity?) — James Dean Conroy

After 4., it shouldn't be a surprise that I didn't quite think that through either.

Personally, though, I see morality as a tension field of human praxis, and anything one can say about as an interpretation to "phase-lock" people roughly into compatible behaviour, partly through constance of the word-sounds/graphs. Morality as ongoing social process, fed into by and feeding into minds. It's iterative. (And for it to be iterative people need to be alive. Otherwise, the process just stops.)

6. When I say value is not "subjective" or "objective" but "emergent", do you hear that as vague fluff?
(Or can you imagine value as something arising from pattern persistence in systems capable of preference?) — James Dean Conroy

No, that part's fine (as my answer to 4. may have indicated). I also missed you saying this, to be honest. I did sense you going in that direction, but that confused me even more, because I couldn't (still can't) see how life could be "good" under that approach, rather than just sort of "there". I come from sociology, not philosophy, where this is the default mode of viewing morality. Phenomenological sociology uses the word "intersubjectivity" here.

Life is the condition for value,
Because value is only ever a function of life. — James Dean Conroy

I agree with this. It's entirely opaque to me how you get from here to "life is good". As I said, this means that life is value-neutral. Once alive, you can evaluate anything, even life itself.

You're mistaking the axiom for an opinion. It's not. It's an axiom. — James Dean Conroy

I'm not. As an axiom, it's just entirely meaningless to me. I don't understand the axiom, and your posts don't help. What do you want to do with this axiom? What's the context? As my failure to communicate this demonstrates, I don't even know how to properly respond to this.

Yes: without life, no value. Fine. Now: why is life good? Because it gives rise to value? Living things evaluate things; non-living things don't. Fine. How does that make life "good". Or even before that: what do we even evaluate if we evaluate "life".

So "life is good" is an axiom. So how do you use that axiom to argue stuff? What sort of logic does this axiom tie in? How, for example, do you deal with predators killing prey? This is not disagreement. I don't see a way forward here - I don't know why I should assume the axiom.

This is so utterly against my intuition that I have a hard time figuring out what you're even saying. I'll only adress point (1), because here I'm still relatively on board with what you're saying, so I can still somewhat talk about it. From point (2) on out, you pretty much lose me completely, but maybe if I understand point (1) better, I'll find a key to unlock the other points? Experience has taught me not to be overly hopeful, but who knows.

Life is the only frame from which value can be assessed. — James Dean Conroy

At this point, I wasn't sure yet what you're talking about, so: read on.

It is the necessary condition for all experience, meaning, and judgment. Without life, there is no perception, no action, and no evaluation. To deny this is paradoxical because denial itself is a living process. — James Dean Conroy

I'm on board with this, for the most part. There is one word, though, that gives me pause: I would invoke irony rather than paradox. I simply don't a paradox. I simply see no paradox here. Part of the problem is the abstraction "life": if we're comparing a live person with a dead one, I will definitely not find a dead person denying this point. Empirically, all I can ascertain, though, is that they don't communicate; not that they have no experience. When we compare a person to a rock, it's hard for me to see what we would be talking about, empirically, if we were to say that "rocks" have experience. What's lacking here is not empirical evidence, but a theoretical framework. I'd have to put that question to a panpsychist, but I can't rule out that they have some sort of theory, or something approaching it that is empirically viable (even if it's not useful to me).

All I'm saying here is that a living person denying that life is necessary for experience, might just say that non-living things, too, have experience. The fact that they say so while alive doesn't seem to cause a paradox. Them saying that while dead would be rather surprising, sure, but that's not particularly relevant to a paradox, I feel. There's no contradiction here.

Example:
Even nihilists, who claim life is meaningless, participate in actions designed to preserve themselves. — James Dean Conroy

"Designed" is a value word. If nihilists don't eat they die. But that's just a description of a process. If you set life as a goal, you could argue for hunger as a function, but it doesn't seem like that's what you're going for. In any case, we'd first have to figure out what "life is meaningless" means to a nihilist. "Hunger is unpleasant, therefore I eat," doesn't impart any value on life. It imparts some sort of value on one mode of living over another - that is all. After all, starving is something you do while you live. You can't starve while dead. In fact, dying is part of life. It's baked in at the end. (Or is it? You could invoke jellyfish, I suppose.) Basically, just like you can't have experience when not alive, you can't die when not alive.

At this point I wonder how you see the relation between the individual, the species, the clade... all living things. For instance, a conflict between predator and prey, parasite and host, etc. plays out differently on the level of the organism than on the level of the ecosystem. The life of an organism - the iteration of organisms - the branching off/dead ends during speciesation - the presence of *any* living thing at all. There's no intuitive anchor point here where value comes in to begin with.

The act of breathing, eating, and communicating all point back to an unconscious, unavoidable affirmation of life’s primacy. — James Dean Conroy

Again, I don't see any affirmation, just a process. Again, it makes sense to view hunger as a function to keep an individual alive, but to do this you need to set survival as a goal, and that, IMO, is a methodological assumption.

But then I'm fairly radical here. For example:

Evolution has no aim other than to survive and the propogation of the genome. — Wayfarer

Evolution has no aim period. Extinction is one possible outcome of evolution. Extinction of everything that evolves is the end of evolution. Does that mean that "evolution has failed"? When there's nothing that can evolve, then there's no evolution - that's all.

It might interest you to know of a pubic figure who’s come to prominence in this regard in the last five years or so. That is John Vervaeke, who is professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at University of Toronto. He has a YouTube lecture series comprising 52 units on the topic of ‘The Meaning Crisis’. Review here. — Wayfarer

That's interesting, thanks. I read the article; most of it felt familiar (the worldview part, for example, sounds straight out of phenomenological sociology - and then the name drop: Peter L. Berger, yep). I'll need to get to the videos, but it's a tad daunting. We'll see when I get to it.

From the article alone it sounds like "society will find a way," coupled with an awareness that academics participate in society.

I think we not only have every right but perhaps even a responsibility to try to understand where others are coming from. — Tom Storm

Heh, I'm certainly not worried about trying to understand others. It's assymetry inherent in simply not having a concept that's fundamental to others that worries me: trying to understand can easily go astray in the sense of "they believe this because" theories I might hold unconsciously. Things that sound ridiculous to me aren't ridiculous to others; but it's hard to cut out the ridicule, if you know what I mean. If it were just clear-cut this-is-nuts moments of breakdown, it would be easier to deal with. But it's more insidious.

I remember someone online saying something like "atheists often don't have no strong father figures". This happens to be true for me. My inner response to that was something like "so you folks want the universe to take care of you?" There's a sense of sparring, here, that overlays the understanding. I'm well aware that I can't overgeneralise like that, but there's this sense of condescension here that I have to be very vigilant against. (Does this make any sense?)

Eagleton published an hilariously scathing review, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching - from which I quote below. — Wayfarer

I remember reading this article. It sounded plausible, but since I don't actually know what sort of picture of God Dawkins portrays (the parts I read concerned religion), I couldn't actually judge it. I remember Eagleton from his works about literary criticism. Was a good read.

If someone tells me they believe in the God of Moses, the burning bush, and the ark with all the animals, that's a very different conception compared to someone who talks about the God of classical theism. The former, most priests and vicars don't believe in. — Tom Storm

Ah, gotcha. I didn't think of it like that. It's true that I don't believe in cartoon God either, but seeing as nobody around me does, that's not really what my atheism dismisses. I guess what I primarily stand apart from is the Roman Catholic God (with a pinch of evangelism thrown in). I didn't know Biblical literalism was such a big deal in America until I came online. It was quite a surprise.

That said, I totally understand if you or others have no interest in it. I’m simply interested in what others believe and why. — Tom Storm

That's actually me, too; otherwise I wouldn't be in these sort of threads at all. But it's a second-hand interest: I'm interested in believers, not God. I guess there's a derived intellectual curiosity that does make me interested in God, too, but not in a practically relevant way.

I sort of have misgivings about this: as if I'm putting myself above others and play arm-chair psychiatrist. I don't think that's quite it, but I do worry from time to time. In any case, even if I do, it's a two-way road: I look back at myself, too.

For example:

However, at the very least, the phenomenon of a "crisis of meaning" seems to cause many people very real mental anguish... — Count Timothy von Icarus

That, for example, is very true. There are threads on this site about this. It's something I have trouble understanding, something I'm curious about, but it's also something I'd be sort of afraid to ask about when it's acute: when people worry, they don't really want to be... specimen? And in any case I feel there's a gulf here that's very hard to bridge with language, as words can't activate meaning that's not there. You just sort of blunder about until something clicks.

If you're going to say you don't believe in God, you'd better be sure what you mean by 'God,' right? — Tom Storm

I've been reading this thread since there was only one page, but I've never quite known what to say. This line stood out, and I have to ask: why?

Me not believing in God is a fact of social praxis (and one I could be wrong about, though I have a hard time seeing how), and it's predicated on me not quite understanding what a God is supposed to be. I've grown up among a mix of Catholics (roughly 70%) and protestants (roughly 30 %), during a time when the ecumene was very popular. I've heard a lot of the arguments. They all went over my head. The disconnect seems far more primal:

...is it the case that atheism should evolve its thinking about the notion of God beyond the cartoon versions? — Tom Storm

How, though? On the God TV, I either get the cartoon, or I get static. The cartoon may be silly, but it's got the advantage that we both, the theist and me, can understand it. And on account of that I know (and I believe them) that that's not what they believe. What *do* they believe instead? At that point all I can do is shrug.

Stuff like "God is being itself," might help people who have developed a concept of God past the cartoon to understand things. For me? So what is "being itself" is a big enough problem in itself - without relating it to God (a concept I mostly relate to religious praxis, but is utterly alien to my daily life). It feels like there's quite some reification going on, but I'm unsure, and even if I were to assume I have point, I'd be unsure what on the dual end of "God <-> being" is there to be reified.

For instance, I feel the same way about concepts like "love" or "justice". I don't use these words, I don't fully grasp their scope, but if it came up I could investigate what I think is being reified here: feelings, patterns of action... etc. In contrast, the word "God" seems to be entirely superfluous wherever it shows up in discussions about, say, "being". We're not on the same page, the theist and I. It's more a lack of topic on my part than a disagreement. I don't argue from the cartoon God, but if you'd ask me what sort of God I don't believe in the cartoon God is all that I can offer. The rest just makes my head spin - and as a result remains utterly irrelevant to my day-to-day conduct.

You may notice that avoided making myself a poster-book atheist in the above post, resorting to phrasings like "the theist and I", rather than "the theist, and I, the atheist" or some such. Now I am an atheist. And I might have used such phrasings in another post (probably have on these boards?). The reason I'm not doing it on here is that I feel this muddies the waters. I think there are very real (and generalisable) differences between atheists like me, who grew up among believers but never really solidified as a believer himself, and atheists who started out as believers and changed their mind. The latter must have had some sort of sense of what "God" is supposed to be, and they probably retain some sort of memory of that (though re-interpretation according to current life-situations can make "fair" recall difficult).

An example: when Dawkin's God Illusion was new I picked it up in a bookshop and randomly read a chapter. I think it was about the ill influence of religion, and Dawkins used as an example the treatment of the indiginous population of Australia by the settlers. I was reading this, and my first thoght was: but wasn't this more about civilisation? Sure, religion plays a big part here, and sure missionaries would have played a big part, but... My second thought was to close the book and put it back on the shelf. I'd only later learn what a big deal the book was. Now, here you'll see what I paid attention to regarding the topic: I didn't emphasise religion - I looked at a broader context. Do I disagree with Dawkins? No idea. My disinterest didn't stem from what he was saying; I just felt this was too tendentiously argued. Too much shallow rhetoric, beyond the validity of any point here. But me not focussing on religion is compatible with my day-to-day context: I'm living in highly secular country; I have little interest in God as a topic (when I try to understand what God is, I try to get along with theists - the topic itself is of no interest to me).

Then there's my motivational structure: all the big questions that come up - the meaning of life, life after death, free will etc. - none of that means much to me. They're not "big questions" to me; more like intellectual diversions, somewhat akin to crossword puzzles. Any answers to those questions feel inconsequential. I locate the disjunct between theists and me (and other athiests probably) here. So I don't think I need to figure out what "God" is to be an atheist. Not caring is enough. There are theists who can't seem to imagine what "not caring" feels like, sometimes to the point of denying that I don't care (because clearly that's impossible). That polemic-laden apologist who thinks I don't want to believe in God because that allows me to sin (unlike other atheists, I don't think that's pure rhetoric; it makes sense for them to think this), or the benevolent Catholic who thinks I'm in my (prolonged) doubting phase.

My intuition is that the God concept is meaningless by design. It's a hermeneutic buffer zone that inherits meaning from the bordering areas and allows for a game of constant goal-post shifting. That's the impression I get when I read those more sophisticated takes. They feel plausible for a while, until I realise that my mind went astray and I forgot to think of "God". But I don't take that intuition seriously enough to want to explore this line of thinking, much less actually argue it. I'm literally a Godless person; beyond the cartoon God there is nothing I can talk about.

To the extent you have faith that a plane won't crash, that's just probabilistic reasoning, so I'd agree that's not really faith. That's just playing the odds. — Hanover

I wonder if it's even that. As long as we don't have "fear of flying", aren't we just going along our way without giving it much thought? Like crossing the road (a car could run me over), walking on sidewalks (a flower pot could fall on my head) etc.

We do engage in probablistic reasoning on occasion, like when we look at a cloudy sky and wonder if we should take an umbrella. But even then a large part of the decision might be not wanting to carry around that inconvenient thing. (I'd think how much anticipation of potential effect translates into imagining the event and thus making it more or less acute at the moment of decision also plays a role. For example, I'd be more inclined to worry about a planecrash, if I've survived one before - but the difference isn't a re-evaluation of the risk, it's likely a greater vividness in imagination.)

I feel like "playing the odds" is as much an ex-post interpretation of our day-to-day conduct as "having faith". And as such I could accept something like "I have faith in God (or a bigger plan, or whatever), and you have faith in statistics," as a provisional resting point to figure out what's going on. But it's difficult for me to see beyond that point: I don't know what faith is supposed to do here. I can't really pin down the common ground. Whether you have faith in God or not, whether I believe in odds or not, planes crash, and when we're in a crashing plane that sucks (I'd probably be at least a little distracted from fear of dying by being horribly airsick - a blessing?). And for me that's all there really is to say about this.

So would you say, I arrive somewhere else after a branching point, or I just stop and settle down on the branching point (I could sell people lemonade as they pass by towards their teleological or stochastic destinations)? Or if we include the social aspect, am I just going off-road, since I don't get along with the way that people maintain the roads? (Is this metaphor even useful?)

The thing is this: it's my experience that whether my outlook seems to me to align with someone else's is not something I can predict from the single information of whether they believe in God or not. I'm far more likely to find common ground with, say, a Christian fideist than with say Christopher Hitchens. How, if at all, is this meaningful?

I do find the question of what faith is intellectually interesting (hence I'm here in this thread). But I don't find it impacts my day-to-day life much at all, except when it comes to the rhetoric involved. Let's say I'm sitting next to a priest in a crashing plane; if he we trying to calm with the usual rhetoric I wouldn't doubt his good intentions, but it wouldn't calm me - it'd be a nuisance. I'd spend my last few minutes on earth humouring a theist. (But then, that's just the life of an atheist in a predominantly theist country. In a predominantly theist but also predominantly secular country, the irony of the matter is that you usually don't have to confront that rhetoric - with the exception being moments of crisis, which is also when you're least likely to have the mental energy to spare to deal with this. People who find God-talk calming don't tend to understand this, or at least there doesn't seem to be a contingency plan for such situations in place [if I can't say this, what else is there to say?]).

Very often "you have faith, too" is a genuine attempt at finding common ground. It's probably here where there's a practical interest beyond just the intellectual curiosity. But depending on where you are more often, equally often, or less often it's also an attempt to errect a barrier and either lure you over or use you as foil to solidify the barrier. (I'm in a less-often place. It seems I'm lucky.)

Your posts are well-informed and thought-provoking, thank you. — Wayfarer

Thanks; confidence isn't my strong suit. For every post I finish, there are probably two I don't, and for every three posts I finish and post there's probably one I don't post. That might motivate me to post more... or not. Time will tell. But this cheered me up.

I agree with this one some things. I don't think this is always true though. Just for example, health is at least part of the human good and living a good life. I think that part is obvious. What promotes good health is often not that obvious, and we rely on the medical sciences, neuroscience, biology, etc. to inform our opinions here. Isaac Newton's consumption of mercury to boost his health is probably a fine example; it wasn't obvious what a an absolutely terrible idea this was, even to a genius like Newton. Other examples, like the existence of externalities in economics, or the pernicious effects of price floors and price ceilings abound. Having basic access to food is part of the human good and early price ceiling schemes, e.g. during the French Revolution, led directly to massive food scarcity, having the opposite of the intended effect. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah, I agree. I think I was focussed on baby stomping here.

Yes, there is context dependence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Actually, after some thinking, I think I was "barking up the wrong tree".

You were asking how one can be "wrong when making a judgement about something which has no truth value, where there is no fact in play?" (Last post I was replying to.) And that's a good question.

A question of my own: would an emotivist agree that you could derive a fact about value from a fact about emotion? For example, if I said "boo to baby stomping," would it be a fact that "Dawnstorm feels negatively about baby stomping"? If so, there's plenty to be wrong about when you consider the path from internalised attitudes to aquired social values as instantiated in a specific situation and actualised in the decision-making process: you can be wrong about the item in question (e.g. the car), about the social value attached (e.g. I thought cars were supposed to be faster), about my attitude (e.g. I though I want a fast car, but I really just want to outdo my neighbour), about my projection (e.g. I thought going really fast with a car would be fun, but it's scary), and so on. And then you can be wrong how any of that inter-relates (e.g. I knew going really fast would be scary but I thought I'd get a kick out of being scared).

Even apparently simple things are pretty complex if you drill down.

As for this:

Indeed, the focus on acts is also part of the problem. People are primarily good or free, not acts. Just as there is never motion with nothing (no thing) moving, human acts are parasitic for their existence on men. Hence, while it is sometimes useful to speak of the freedom or goodness of acts, desires, appetites, etc., I think it is better to speak of men, lives, and societies. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm a relativist, so yeah, I agree pretty much. Who in this thread is likely going to disagree that "baby stomping is bad"? The force of the rhetoric derives in part of the extremety of the act. The variance in reaction is fairly low. What underlies this? An absolute moral principle? An anthropological constant (we're a social species)? A social contract of some sort? And off we go in abstract land.

But this type of rhetoric is also a good example of how morals proliferate. The target here is not the protection of babies: it's a meta ethical stance, with the problem being that some people want there to be a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, etc. more than others. Part of this thread is ritualistic: we affirm our stances and solve little. That's not all there is, but it's certainly there. We're topicalising a well-known divide and portraying our stances. Little will change. We re-iterate the moral landscape.

This, I think, is what it would mean for "people" to matter: we stop talking and take a long, hard look at us right now. But then I would think this; I'm a relativist after all.

In the end, I'm fine talking acts.

Do you think one has to adopt a position like eliminitive materialism or epiphenomenalism in order to being doing proper objective science? Or is it allowable for consciousness and intentionality (and thus value judgements) to be part of an explanation of natural phenomena, without these being presumed to be fully reducible to "mindless mechanism?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I actually think that eliminitave realism is of very limited use in social siences. Take sociology: the discipline was established by Emile Durkheim with an eye to Comtean positivism. The methodology was pretty much all about statistics (e.g. the suicide rate). And the intent was to proof that social facts exist, so to establish the discipline in academia. Later, we have Max Weber introduce the concept of "verstehen" (via a methodoly of "ideal types"). This put the knolwedgable agent on the table and would set off the interpretative branch of sociology: sociologists were very much aware that to understand action is to use their own intuition. Alfred Schütz would update Weber's approach with Husserl's phenomenology, and that is where I directed most of my attention. However, I was always aware of an unfortunate split of macro and micro sociology; either big systems (developed mostly in America by Merton and Parsons; also setting off from Weber, but in a different direction) or situational interaction. So I eventually stumbled on Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration, which attempted to unify the strands by rooting both in spacetime via input from geography. I really liked that.

All that to say: I'm very firmly on the side of intentionality here. I'd say ignoring this isn't an option in the social sciences at the very least, though it might be useful elsewhere (not an expert).

IDK, if I am reading this correctly, then it seems like the presupposition that "real facts don't include value" is doing the heavy lifting here. It seems like you're saying that an explanation from the medical sciences (involving value) is "fudging over the (real) facts" and is not "real science" precisely because "real facts cannot involve values in this way." Do I have that right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's probably due to the way I put things, but, no, I don't actually even care much about what "real science" is supposed to be. What facts need above all is a modicum of precision, and that's something that words like "bad" almost never allow. What I'm saying is that the scientific facts tell you nothing that your fussy-wussy intuition doesn't also tell you, so there's little point in appealing to the facts. It doesn't really matter how much damage a boot at a certain velocity can do. You can appeal to facts, but you gain nothing by appealing to science here.

And medicine isn't only science; it's also applied technology. Biology itself, for example, is more about basic research. In its application it has to feed into stuff like medicine, farming, breeding... even outdated stuff like, say, phrenology. So when you present "stomping baby is bad for them," as a fact here, it's ambiguous between the precise effect on the body, the ethical environment of treatment, and so on. But if you were to resolve those ambiguities it gets harder to see the point.

I'm not really 100 % sure what I mean myself. Maybe I was saying that science is red herring here?

I'd just point out that sometimes it is extremely obvious that natural selection has been shaped by intentionality and goals, the most obvious cases being domestication, dog breeding, etc.— unless we want to somehow say that this is not "real natural selection" (but then what is it, supernatural selection?) This seems problematic for accounts that want to exclude consciousness from biology, unless there is an appeal to something like epiphenomenalism (which has its own plausibility issues). But I digress. I think it proves quite difficult to allow for goal-directedness and not to allow for values related to the completion or failure to complete goals. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're addressing something here that's always been bothering me. I certainly think breeding should fall under natural selection, but I see it as problematic to incorporate it easily. For example, what little experience I have with evolutionary psychology didn't impress me too much. Douglas Adam's puddle analogy comes to mind here.

How can one be wrong when making a judgement about something which has no truth value, where there is no fact in play? For instance, how can one "buy a bad car," if cars are never really good or bad? One can certainly say "boohoo to my past purchasing decisions," but you cannot have been wrong about a goodness that doesn't exist. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm honestly quite confused right now. A car that doesn't move is a bad car, but if we didn't want the car to be a car then it could be something else, which it always is - beyond the judging. I think what I'm going for is insconsistence-despite-continuity or something? If I ever figure this out and have the time (not likely today or tommorrow - depending on your timezone maybe even the day after tommorrow) I'll be back - unless someone else says it better (which has preamted quite a lot of posts from me).