Like I said, you need to read the article. — NKBJ

So we can't have a discussion about the question I asked?

I don't think that either time travel or eternalism make any sense. Or rather, at least not outside of fantasizing where we just ignore a lot of details (because not ignoring them stresses that the ideas don't make sense), and we're basically just assuming that we can do some magical things per rather superficial whims. So it just becomes a matter of what we want to loosely fantasize.

Re eternalism, how would we move or change anything? Don't we have non-eternalism as soon as we do that?

I would be surprised if you didn't already know about Chalmer's Hard Problem of Consciousness and the various arguments involved: — Amity

Yes of course. The first step in tackling "the hard problem" is setting out our criteria for explanations in a way that (a) the things we consider explained fit our criteria, (b) the things we consider not explained are not explained because they don't fit our criteria, and (c) our criteria are fashioned in a manner where anyone (reasonably educated/competent), or even perhaps a well-programmed computer, could check whether a putative explanation counts as a legitimate explanation under our criteria, so that we can't just willy-nilly declare things to be explained or not.

My point is how can you conclude our maps of empirical observation have territory and our other notions don't? — TheWillowOfDarkness

How can we know that there's a territory to map and that there's anything different than maps?

You can try the sentences in different contexts to see if they're different. — Andrew M

Pretty much an evergreen answer to your responses to my comments:

What does that have to do with what I wrote?

I don't know if you never understand what I write or if you never really want to address it.

Well-being (eudaimonia) is central to Aristotle's (and arguably Plato's) ethics and political philosophy. — Andrew M

So we're assuming Aristotle's ethics or something?

Yep. I'm more or less agreeing that it is an odd question - asking for support for their being something "wrong with them" where that's not about the judgement of the person making that judgment... — Banno

Because aren't you arguing that there's something objectively wrong with them? Or are you just saying that you strongly feel that there's something wrong with them?

But, what sort of support does one need to make the judgement that kicking a puppy is wrong? — Banno

If you're saying that it's objectively wrong, then it's the sort of support that if someone says it's not wrong, we can independently check what's the case--with instruments of some sort, for example, and discover which person is correct, just like we can do if we disagree about the composition of rocks from the moon, say.

2) Doing any work that one would not ultimately do from original preferences (meaning, before buying into slogans, having to buy into some sort of Stoic ideology, lowered expectations, changed expectations, etc.) is a harm to an individual. — schopenhauer1

Could you explain how you're figuring that it's a harm?

The problem is all our accounts we give are the way we think. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'm not claiming that the map is (necessarily) the territory. Are you?

Weird that you'd see it as a pejorative.

I did also use the word "judgment" by the way.

At any rate, so the epistemological support?

Again, if someone thinks that kicking the pup is fine, then I wouldn't say they have a different preference to me in the way I like vanilla and they like banana. I, and I hope you, would say rather that there was something quite wrong with them. — Banno

Keeping things philosophical, epistemologically, what would be the support for their being something "wrong with them" where that's not about the feelings of the person making that judgment?

People use gustatory language as if gustatory properties were objective ("the pizza is delicious"). — ChrisH

Exactly, as well as aesthetic utterances.

The problem with emotivism is that it does not account for moral phenomena -- in particular, it does not explain why it is that people hold moral beliefs as if they are true or false. It misses out on the semantics of moral statements: they are true or false. Perhaps, in the end, moral phenomena are decided by emotions, and emotions are non-cognitive, so how people reason about moral phenomena is through non-cognitive means. But this still leaves out the fact that moral statements are of the form of propositions, and that people treat them as if they are true. — Moliere

What's not appealing in the sense that you're using that term is the suggestion that beliefs must have some merit just because they're strong beliefs or common beliefs. That approach would suggest that we should still be performing rituals, making sacrifices, etc. to ensure a good harvest, to stave off natural disasters, etc.

Why don't people just say "yay" or "boo"? — Andrew M

First, people don't normally just say "Yay pizza" or whatever. They say things like "Pizza tastes good," "Pizza is the best," etc. Do you believe that by virtue of that, "Pizza tastes good" is significantly different than "Yay pizza" would be?

so too can humans act in ways that increase or decrease well-being. — Andrew M

Re this, what does it have to do with morality?

Is Smith primarily studied as part of economics or philosophy? And Ricardo? Your loaded question wasn't even the beginning of an answer. — Benkei

Smith is studied some in philosophy, but he's not generally a big focus. Ricardo, again, I'm not familiar with.

I've read Marx--because my educational background includes philosophy degrees.

So are you aware that Marx is primarily studied via philosophy departments? If you disagree that he is, that's fine. That could be your answer, and then we'll go from there.

Re "other sociology," by the way, what mid-19th century stuff are you classifying as sociology?

That's part of the answer. It's the first step in answering it (hence "first," announcing that I'm starting there with you, but thats not the finish.)

It's not clear to me on what you base that. What did Marx do or not do to put it apart from other economics, history or sociology and instead gets qualified as philosophy?

While we're at it, Adam Smith? His economic theories, economics or primarily philosophy? David Ricardo, economics or primarily philosophy? — Benkei

I'm not familiar enough with Smith's writing, and I'm not at all familiar with Ricardo, to comment on that.

First, aren't you familiar with the fact that Marx is studied primarily, if not exclusively, via philosophy departments? (And do you think that when we talk about Marx here, we're not actually talking about philosophy? If so, it should be in an off-topic subforum, no?)

It's primarily philosophy.

That's trying to paint Marx as doing anything in the vein of contemporary social science, which isn't the case. I'm not saying that as a knock on Marx. He just wasn't at all doing the same thing.

I find it very strange that anyone would have ever considered Marxism science.

I'd have to wonder what that person would think that science is, what its methodology is, etc.

In my view, as a physicalist and a nominalist who doesn't buy genidentity (identity through time), the issue is simply if one is willing to consider the later instantiation "the same x" despite there being a temporal, spatial and possibly material disconnect from our usual temporal, spatial and causal-material contiguousness. In other words, the only difference from our usual dilemma is that there's a spatio-temporal gap that's not usually present, and the new material may not be causally connected to the previous material in the normal manner.

Since we have a "positive account" that those are ways that we think, we'd now need a "positive account"--in other words, similarly accessible empirical evidence--that they're something else, too.

It's an empirical claim. As such, it requires empirical support.

Even if that were the case, anything with an intentional property isn't going to be objective, which is what he was shooting for, unless intentionality is no longer "the mark of the mental."

At any rate, claiming that something that seems to only make sense as a judgment, or assessment, or evaluative property, etc. is not actually anything like that, but has a property of intentionality, where we just don't know about it, doesn't help on the conceivability end, because we still haven't the faintest idea how it's supposed to make sense that we're talking about morality, where we're allowing that we're talking about something intentional (otherwise now you've also created a burden of explaining non-mental intentionality), but where we're not talking about a judgment, etc.

Don't we have evidence that we do indeed think in terms of logic, mathematics, etc.?

I would argue that anyone who holds that moral utterances cannot be true or false have mistaken beliefs about thought and belief. — creativesoul

Sure, and then what you'd offer as empirical support would be?

Similarly, actions can conceivably be moral (or not) absent any explanation or even recognition of that. — Andrew M

Conceivability needs a bit more detail than just stipulating that something is conceivable, no?

The spirit in which it's forwarded is akin to a scientific examination. It's not based on whether anyone finds it appealing or not. We want to know what the phenomenon really is.

the commonplace notion that moral statements are indeed statements. — Banno

Insofar as people believe that moral utterances can be true or false they're simply mistaken. They have mistaken beliefs about the ontology of moral utterances.

Noncognitivism/emotivism is an analysis of what moral utterances are ontologically. The task isn't to address why people have mistaken beliefs, as common as the mistaken beliefs may be.

It's akin to an analysis of what God talk really is--pegging it as a fiction, etc.--despite the prevalence of mistaken beliefs otherwise.

Then you seem to be in the rather odd position of claiming, say, that it is wrong to kick a puppy, but that it is not true that it is wrong to kick a puppy. — Banno

Aren't you at all familiar with noncognitivism/emotivism? "It is wrong to kick a puppy" is akin to "Boo to kicking puppies!" Boo, and alternately yay, are not true or false.

SO you can't comprehend that one might approve of an action which is immoral? — Banno

So "x is immoral" is "Boo to x!" If you're booing x, you're not approving of x.

Those things are simply ways that we think.

You saw what NoAxioms wrote, we don't use "time" and "change" in similar ways. you're assertions are completely wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

A la you're thinking that I'm saying something about conventional language usage?

Producing an incoherent argument is worthless.

The problem is that I couldn't care less if you don't realize that time is the same thing as change/motion. All it takes is simple observation re what we're doing--functionally, that is--whenever we're referring to or utilizing time in any manner, combined with the complete lack of evidence or coherent argument that time could be anything else. But there's no reason that I'd particularly care if you don't realize this. It's not my problem that you'd have false or incoherent beliefs.

I agree, but I believe many people are misinformed. Many skeptics say evolution isn't proved — ep3265

I say evolution isn't proved. Because empirical claims are not provable. Not because I don't buy evolution.

If goodness is subjective, then you can be right and I can be right, even if our views contradict one another. — Banno

Moral utterances aren't true or false, correct or incorrect.

"I prefer the behaviour in question, but it is not good".
"I approve: but it is still immoral". — Banno

Both are incoherent.

Right. So to give an Aristotelian example, if human well-being (eudaimonia) is the standard (independent of people's opinions about it), then that would ground moral judgments. — Andrew M

So your task would be to explain either how we get to "x is human well being" without it being a judgment, preference, evaluative property etc., or if you're going to say that human well being is a brain state (re certain levels of dopamine, serotonin, etc.), how that has anything to do with moral judgments so that we're avoiding judgments, etc.

I'm familiar with the Shoemaker paper. When the freezes coincide, no time passes anywhere until the next thaw. The only sense in which time passes when one freeze (but not all) occur is from the perspective of one of the zones in which a freeze does not occur. Time does not pass in the zone where the freeze occurred.

If you're requiring soundness you had no argument either. Because it's false that time is anything but change/motion.

Actually it's a simple modus ponens. If p then q. P. Therefore q.