If we just pop into existence as aware, conscious, conceptually blank organisms what's to say that doesn't just happen again?

If Socrates can do without one, anyone can

(Sorry I hadn't noticed your response until just now.) I don't think apperception involves parsing a syllogism, as you have done in this example - as I understand it, it's much more reflexive and generally subliminal, i.e. you will see a man, you identify him as 'man', 'someone I don't know', 'tall', and so on. It's much more associative, as I understand it, than logical; it's simply one stop past perception, where the image is assimilated into consciousness, in addition to just registering visually.

Interesting, I think it's a mix. I agree that it's nearly entirely automatic and occurs subconsciously (except in cases of ambiguity -- where there isn't a clear category the object can be classed under, so then you have to reason a little).

But I think the categorization process is governed by implicit deductive rules along with association. My idea is that the raw sense data streaming from a new object orchestrates a pattern of neuronal firing. By that it then becomes automatically associated to previously encountered percepts that've triggered a similar pattern of firing. Then some additional processing occurs -- more fine grained feature detection, feature comparison and then object classing (based on feature similarity or matching with some subconscious archetype/object class) and this process is governed by some deductive principle - heuristic rules or (if the person is more analytic or if the object is ambiguous and there's interest in discerning what it is?) more fine grained processing.

Quite! But I'm inclined towards traditionalism about logic etc. To me, what evolves is the capacity to recognize reason, causal relations, and so on. And I also think, once we have reached that plateau in terms of cognitive ability, then our abilities are no longer determined in wholly biological terms. But nowadays, of course, it is expected that all human faculties have a biological rationale, else why would they exist?

Interesting. So when you say 'recognize' are you implying that reason, causal relations are 'out there'?

I think that you can and should say more, but not more of the same. That would save me the trouble of trying to work out the implications of what you've said. Some of us here think that the depicted strawberries are grey, and some of us here think that the depicted strawberries are red. What colour do you think that they are? And what do you think about what we think? Is the former group right and the latter group wrong, or is the latter group right and the former group wrong, or are both right, or are neither right? If your answer is implicit in what you've said, I think you should make it explicit.

I think it's pretty clear:

" it's all essentially a subjective matter and therefore just an arbitrary question of utility as to how we arrange a consistent agreement regarding our assignment of colour value"

and

"The colour of that light as this is perceived by any given observer results from an interplay between that objective value and the neural network of the particular observer's brain and accordingly is a subjective experience which will vary as the neural network of the particular observer varies."

I understand that physicalism attempts to be successful in explanation the location of intentional states (e.g. thoughts/"I think") via whatever route it takes, behaviourism, functionalism etc. but what I can't understand is how a physicalist overcomes the location or even causation of intentional content (e.g. ... that a box is 2 x 2cm).

I'd imagine it's encoded in some network of neurons.

But everything is dynamic. So the gaze is actually (dynamically) focused on something that's changing.

Right, everything is dynamic but different things change at different rates.

Either way, I should have said -- 'presuming an individual has fixed their attention on a 'stationary' portion of their visual field.' Where stationary means stationary by convention: the changing occurring in that region is slow enough -relative to us - that it's not perceptible.

Well, given that we are cultural creatures, yes "psycho-behavioral coherence" is learnt behaviour. We do have to discover a balance in terms of what we are neuro-biologically and psycho-socially.

How do you define cultural? I feel we're as much 'physio-chemical' as we are 'cultural' as we are 'biological'. The biological aspect involves the activity of the brain, other parts of the CNS, other parts of the body. It's us understood in terms of parts that can mediate biological functions (surviving, digesting, eating). The physio-chemical aspect involves the mechanics of motion, fluid flow, transfer and storage of energy. The cultural aspect involves values, norms, self and other identities, groups, social institutions and structures..

I think psycho-behavioral coherence is something independent of our cultural aspect. It's something rooted in our biological and physio-chemical features.

To be psychologically coherent with US culture is very different from being different with Indonesian culture, say. And even within these countries there are huge local variations in approved cultural style.

I don't think the concept of coherence is different in different cultures. Coherence just means your beliefs, actions, and values are consistent with each other. If you value communal living, coherent action would involve living in a community. If you value the american way of life, coherent action would involve living an american lifestyle. What differs between US and Indonesian culture are the social norms and values. Those can form the basis of your own values. But the coherence between your values, beliefs, and actions is something different.

That's fine if "authentic" is defined at the sociocultural level.

So one could indeed be authentically "Bostonian" or "Javanese" because there is actually a cultural recipe made explicit in local art, folklore, language, etc.

It is hard to be authentic as an individual as what do you ground that on - your distinctive neuro-genetics?

You can be authentic as an individual because you hold a unique set of values. No two people will hold all of the same values. And there are many ways you can act out those values. So the unique, creative way you 'be' yourself (and I think what defines that self is -at least- partly rooted in your values) is what grounds individual authenticity..

Intuitively authenticity involves a bit more than that though. But I'm not sure if I can justify my feeling for that extra element. I think striving to act in accord with what you truly, viscerally feel or believe is part of authenticity as well. If a person asks your opinion on how they are performing or how they are dressed or some current event or other subject-matter, you respond with what you honestly feel is correct or true. You don't modify it because your opinion may be offensive or controversial, etc.

So I would agree that "authenticity" only applies qua cultural norms. And "being true to yourself" has become just such a meme - but paradoxically, one pretty much impossible to live up to literally and thus the source of a lot of modern angst.

I don't think it's nearly impossible to live up to! It's difficult to do it when faced with social pressure, but it's not impossible.

I agree that change is difficult - when it is viewed as radical rather than incremental. But I don't think we have to say that it is fear that stands in the way of changing habits. Habits just are hard to change by definition. That is their natural psychological status.

So what changes habits is not overcoming fears but learning the skill of mindful attention. You have to recognise that what you are doing is a habit. Then you can figure out an incremental path that could achieve the learning of a change.

So what you are expressing is the standard propaganda of modern individualist culture - the "you can be anything you want" school of thought. And part of that standard message is "only your fears stand in your way".

The more I read you the less I feel you have any affinity for existentialists.. Heidegger, sartre.. lol.

But yes that sounds right-- It just involves a lot of emotional/motivational energy. And yea it's not easy to keep the intention to change in mind.. even when breaking it into incremental steps.

Authenticity - properly understood - is about achieving personal balance in the socio-cultural arenas we all have to play in.

This is compromising! I think we certainly have to balance -- but that balance would need to take into account our own interests and values. I don't believe you can live comfortably with yourself while acting in ways that are in contradiction with your own strongly held values. The cognitive dissonance would be too much. And when I say values I don't necessarily mean moral norms. I mean it in a more 'compartmentalized' way. I'd imagine everyone has 'career interests' 'foods they like' 'educational subjects or topics they like', etc. Valuing involves 'liking', 'preferring', so it involves a judgement.

But again the question is whether the goal should be to transcend sociocultural limits or to completely commit to them?

Well it's a complicated question. Ultimately I don't think there's this 'one' macro-culture, there are a variety of small micro-cultures-- where people of -at least- partially overlapping interests come together and interact. Clearly in that small grouping there is no transcending of socio-cultural limits. What I'm trying to say is that living in a more 'stable state' doesn't necessarily mean you have to transcend sociocultural limits. It just means you have to find a niche/web-of-relations that better aligns with your own values.

So the changing course is one thing. The real question is what is the right course? And I don't see aiming for sociocultural transcendence is likely to be a recipe for personal stability. I'm not sure there is much psychological evidence for that. (Heck, I know that the opposite is true in fact.)

Well that's the thing-- I don't think there is one single 'right course' either. What I'm saying is 'loose': there are many ways to live in accord with values: If you think the only thing worth doing is philosophizing- you can spend all your time sitting at home reading books and philosophizing with yourself. Or you can spend all your time listening to philosophy podcasts, thinking and then philozophizing on the comment boards. Or you can spend all your time philosophizing in a class room. Or as a professor or as a teaching assistant or as a doctor or as a mechanic. The point is you can do the thing you value in different contexts in different places. What makes all of those contexts more 'stable' than some other context is that you're able to do the thing you value --> philosophizing.

Striking a balance may involve doing what you enjoy doing in certain contexts (i.e. within the context of a job or career), but that doesn't mean you're sacrificing your interests for the sake of something else.

But acting in this fashion is learnt behaviour. So "authenticity" is another social script.

I wouldn't say that that's learnt behavior. The values and beliefs are learnt but not the pull towards psychological/behavioral coherence. Practicality, social commitments, fears, inner tensions can hinder that impulse but psycho-behavioral coherence doesn't seem like something learnt.

And wouldn't you say that a problem in modern society is the very pressure it creates to live up to rather extreme standards of individualism?

I think there's a disconnect between individualism and authenticity. One can value communal living or strongly identify with some over-arching socio-cultural label and work to align with the norms and pressures of that. I think -if that's what one feels aligned to- then that counts as living authentically.

If you are urging the need to be "unafraid" of something, that should be your clue as to what most people might have a deep seated natural inclination to avoid doing - actually standing apart from the herd.

I think it's complicated. We're embedded in a web of relations-- I've got school commitments, exams to complete, papers to finish, classes to attend; I've got social commitments-- people to see, places to go, events to attend; I've got a whole historical momentum built from my past interactions -- close friends, self-expectations, family-expectations, images and ideals of who I am and how I typically act. Generally, it feels more comfortable-stable to stay in that web because it's already established. But that web doesn't necessarily have to align with what's valued by the person in the centre. And so while there might be a more stable; more comfortable way of being, it takes energy and emotional untangling to change that. I feel like that fear and reluctance and the like comes from that. But ultimately there can be more 'stable' states that one can be in.

So I think of authenticity as being rooted in something more innate/biological. We tend towards stability. Stability involves inner coherence. Inner coherence for a human involves alignment of action with values or strongly-held beliefs.

The problem there is that there is no such "you". There is an accumulated bundle of habits with certain tendencies, and also a capacity for creative unpredictability. But the idea of there being some essential self - a sensing Cartesian soul - as the fixed centre is itself a psychological construct.

So sure, we wear social masks. And they become as much a sign of who we are to "ourselves" as they present a sign of who we are for others to interpret.
.

But it's not just habits and creative unpredictability. There're values, deeply held beliefs, feelings. Acting / living / habituating oneself in accord with those -and being unafraid to express one's 'creative unpredictability'- in spite of what social standard or norm or external pressure is present; that seems more like living authentically.

The key to being genuine is being honest!

I like this.

I'm weary and skeptical of inner intuitions. They don't all point to the same course of action and sometimes they're in direct conflict. Moral intuitions can be confused with visceral desires masked in reasoning; goals and aims can conflict.. Different parts of me want different things.. There's some order in me, in there but it's tough to pinpoint it without serious reflection. I like to do a bit of mental maintenance and CBT-like inquiry is a great tool for that. Anyways, I think ultimately striving for honesty -- honesty with respect to feelings and held beliefs, conformity of action with valued beliefs is a nice ideal to strive for/what I think counts as genuinuity. But, accepting failures in that venture, accepting imperfection and keeping critical about oneself -- being honest involves that.

I want to find a reasonable critique of Sartre's: ''Existence precedes essence.''

Why is the statement wrong? And could it be proven wrong without using religion?

I think what causes an issue is the 'mutual exclusivity' of essences. if something has the essence of 'human' it can't have any other sort of essence. The issue is that the same object can be seen to have different essences. An object that's seen as a 'tree stub' is a 'barrier' in a war zone; an object seen as a 'knife' is a 'screwdriver' when there's no screwdriver in the house; an object seen as a 'mug' is a 'cereal bowl' when all the other cereal bowls are in the dishwasher. So, essence seems context-specific and dependent on the kinds of activities/functions one takes the object as capable of performing. So essence doesn't seem to be intrinsic to the physical structure 'housing' the essence. -If that makes sense.

Maybe you can provide an alternative by, first, getting rid of that 'exclusivity' clause. And conceive of essence as something hierarchial or multi-oriented? Hierarchical: for some object to have the essence of 'human' it must have the essence of 'animal', for it to have the essence of 'animal' it must have the essence of 'organism', for something to have the essence of 'organism' it must have the essence of 'living'... all the way up to 'object'. And an object can instantiate any 'essence' that shares some properties with the set of 'essences' that it's initially understood as instantiating. So.. tree-stubs can be seen as 'barriers' because both 'barriers' and 'tree-stubs' share some set of properties in common. Multi-oriented: Objects can have 'multiple' essences -- essence can be instantiated so long as the physical structure has the capacity to perform the functions characteristic of that essence.


In both cases - neither precedes the other. Existence and essence are always found together -- for something to exist it must have an essence. For something to have an essence it must exist.

Only the neonatal could possibly have "raw experience" as you have described it and I think that is also somewhat doubtful. If the world has a structure, then don't we perceive that structure regardless of whether or not we understand what it is we are perceiving. Many animals have significantly keener perceptual abilities, yet their cognitive abilities are limited when compared man and some other organisms.

I guess that's the statement I have an issue with. I think of raw experience as 'overlaid' or bound up with conceptual structures:

Again --I think it's clear that physical structures aren't necessarily the identity we conceive them to be. The physical structure I'm using as a 'computer' is just as much a 'physical obstacle' or a 'makeshift hat' or a 'food plate'. The point is, the same physical structure can be conceived of in different ways --for different uses. And we're capable of 'switching' the way we perceive a given object -- I can see how my computer can be used and seen as a 'hat' (someone without the concept of computer or knowledge of computers -- a tribesman? -- comes across it on a hot summers day, and places it on his head for shade). So, there's a dependence of our perception on the way we conceive of objects in our field of vision. Whatever perspective or set of concepts we use to characterize our field of vision determines what we perceive in our field of vision. But -as it stands in itself- the structures are 'indeterminate' with respect to what 'kind' of object they are. So -- given this capacity to perceive the visual in different ways-- we can recognize what about that visual field is unable to change. And that 'invariant' aspect we can intuit is raw-experience. So I think it's possible to have 'raw experience' so long as you make sense of your visual field in terms of its most fundamental features and not in terms of features that are subject to some arbitrary interpretation.

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I'm not following you at all.
First, I don't buy that any experience (or anything in general for that matter) is invariant. I also don't know why it would matter if anything is invariant or why you'd select that as a "guiding principle."

Okay. Let me know if this clears things up:

Presumably, there is a continuous information stream from the surrounding environment to the receptors/sensors found on a given observer. So, presuming an individual has fixed their attention on a given portion of their sensational field, the raw quality that presents in that given region shouldn't vary (since the gaze is fixed on a certain region, the stream of information shouldn't change with respect to what it relays). So whatever can variate (**say object categories that are instantiated within that region or the parsing of that region: e.g. if that region is perceived as a whole object or as parts of some object or as multiple different objects. While the parsing of the region changes, and the context in which that region is understood changes, the raw quality of that region is constant/invariant**) would, presumably, not be original to the raw information being relayed through the senses (it'd be an overlaying or 'top-down' processing of the raw information such that it now incorporates an interpretation of that raw information. This is the rationale for focusing on invariant features (with respect to a fixed region of the sensory field.)

I am doubtful of this idea of perceiving an uncategorized whole. It may well be the case, that to perceive something as a whole, a unit, is necessarily to perceive it as something, even if it is just to categorize it as a whole. Then to perceive something as an uncategorized whole is an impossibility. To perceive something as an object may require that it be recognized, and to recognize it is to associate it with another perception, and this is to categorize it. It need not even be the case that one puts a name to the object, just to recognize it is to categorize it, and this is to see it as having a particular identity.

The point being, that I cannot conceive of what it would mean to perceive something as "an uncategorized whole". Imagine the possibility of a perception which is completely unrecognizable. How would the unrecognizable aspect of the perception be individuated from the recognizable aspect of the perception, such that it could be assigned the status of an individuate whole, if it is completely unrecognizable?

Right, I should have said 'undifferentiated' whole -- merely a whole or a 'thing' or object. But I think you can still apprehend something which is undifferentiated or ambiguous-- i.e. you perceive some arrangement as an object but it isn't classed it into a kind. Of course, the thing wouldn't be entirely ambiguous -- since you are perceiving it as anambiguous (that fact of the object is unambiguous). And that feature, the ambiguity of that whole is what distinguishes it from the surrounding backdrop that -presumably- isn't ambiguous or at least isn't amiguous in the same way as the object itself.

That notion doesn't seem any less theory-laden to me as the idea that we simply perceive objects.

And I don't buy ideas such as unconscious inference rules.

Well I think we do perceive objects, but we can intuit that objects aren't essential, invariant elements of experience. What does seem to be that way are just the raw qualities of experience.

Also, I think you'd be able to deduce it by just using invariance as a guiding principle. Just the fact that there are phenomena like gestalt-shifts (different ways that a given physical object can present in your experience) and different frames of reference with respect to perception -- i.e. one's field of experience can be parsed in different ways depending on what relevant categories one conceives as in the field of vision or what one takes as the foreground and background) seems to imply that neither particular object categories (e.g. as in the case of the rabbit-duck illusion) nor particular object boundaries (e.g. as in the case of conceiving a whole object or a conglomerate of parts -- I can conceive the same region of my visual field as a whole or as a set of discrete parts) are necessarily perceived. And so they can't be fundamental elements of experience.

What doesn't change when one focuses on a particular region in one's visual field is the raw quality of that region -- that it presents as a continuum of, relatively spaced, color incongruities.

Very good observation. But I think the technical term for that step is actually 'apperception' which is 'the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole.' I think the principle of gestalt involves rather more than that - a gestalt is not only 'seeing a whole' but also making an interpretive judgement about it; which is why a 'gestalt shift' can be a profound experience, insofar as it sometimes amounts to a kind of major cognitive shift or insight. I mean, the two are obviously related but I don't think they're synonymous.

Based on the definition, it seems like the opposite: where apperception involves the classing of an object into a learned object category-- understanding the object within the context of this old information (e.g. all men are mortal; this new object I see is a man; therefore he must be a mortal). I always thought gestalt just involved the perception of a discrete whole -- an uncategorized whole.

I think the parenthetical comment could be objected to, on the basis of it being biological reductionism. However, there's a very interesting cognitive scientist by the name of Donald Hoffman, who has studied this exact question in great detail.

Thanks for mentioning him -- he definitely has an interesting perspective. I like the analogy he uses --conscious experience being analogous to a user interface. I mean the relevant learned concepts and object categories come bound up in the presented landscape-- trees, roads, computers.. It's not just shapes and colors.. so processing, object recognition, all happens in the background.

But I do think the interface is a bit more dynamic than he makes it out to be. We're clearly capable of -at least partly- getting underneath what directly presents. Just through this sort of inquiry alone or any other empirical reasoning with respect to the nature of objects or perception, we're able to reflect, re-orient and then re-perceive the world under the light of newly salient perspectives/aspects that take into account the more invariant (veridical?) features of experience. And I think even just the simple fact that we can distinguish between raw experience (consisting in just free-standing qualia) and naiive/folk perception (i.e. conscious experience that includes our learned object-categories and concepts) seems to imply, that there's at least some capacity to intuit how the machine works.

But, leaving that question aside, whatever those rules are, is very closely related to the nature of intelligence itself. I mean, to engage in a bit of amateur cognitive science, one can see how for simple organisms, an account can be provided for a great many of their behaviours in terms of stimulus and response, say involving predation and many other instinctual and habitual behaviours.

But the additional factor with h. sapiens is, of couse, the ability to infer, speculate, theorise, and ask 'what does that thing mean? How does it fit in with the rest of what I know?' And asking what that capability is, is very close to asking for an account of how the rules of thought operate, which is close to asking about the nature of logic, language, semiotics, and so on; it's close to asking, 'what is inteligence, really?'

Right I think the question for me is not necessarily how the rules operate but what their origin is. What comes to mind is the psychologism debate: While I'm just somewhat familiar with it and while I understand it to be with regard to the laws of logic, the whole question of whether those laws and others (e.g. principles of gestalt) are derivative from psychological features or independent of them is one that I find interesting.

One would hope 'the rules of thought' are justified in terms of logic and reason. I mean, if you have to ask why 'the law of the excluded middle' holds, then you're perilously close to asking 'why does 2 plus 2 equal 4?' The answer is, that '4' is the terminus of explanation for the question. Frege said in The Basic Laws of Arithmetic that ''the laws of truth are authoritative because of their timelessness ... they are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this, that they authority for our thought if it would attain to truth."


It is precisely because those laws are predictive that logical predictions and indeed the kinds of basic inferences made in science are possible. If we had nothing more than 'raw experience', then would we be capable of rational thought? Surely rationality is in some sense the means by which order is discovered in, and applied to, experience. And such regularities have to exist even for language to get off the ground.

This brings me back to the issue Hoffman raised -- that at least part of what restricts our capacity to perceive reality is the fact that the perceptual system evolved not to accurately present reality but to promote survival and reproduction.If we take his idea -that it's all constructed- then there wouldn't seem to be any basis for the reliability and consistency of perception. Clearly there must be -at the very least- a consistent relation between the principles that govern perception and whatever principles govern the unfolding of reality itself -- else we'd all be fully deluded.

Careful, because if you want to establish correspondence between the object and the experience, then you have to be able to differentiate them. And how could you do that? The object appears as an element of experience. One does not actually have to be a scientific realist to recognise that.

Right -- I meant to say perceived shapes are identical with physical objects (as opposed to correspond with physical objects).

But the other point is, I think that the kind of analysis you're engaging in, is not typical of the realist attitude from the outset. As soon as you start critically reflecting on the nature of knowledge, perception and experience in this kind of way, then I think you're already moving away from a realist attitude, which tends to take the objects of experience themselves as the primary datum, and not to ask too many questions about how experience itself relates to objects and so on.

Right -- naive realism says that objects are intrinsic to reality and we directly perceive them. But I think you can conceive of direct realism in a different way. One that makes room for things like mental representations and that solely takes the most invariant features of what's experienced as what's real:

One thing that seems clear is that objects can instantiate multiple different object categories. An example being the 'duck rabbit' illusion -- where the same whole figure or 'object' can be perceived as either a duck or a rabbit. In the case of my particular laptop, the object that instantiates it can also be conceived as a much different category of object -- say, a hat. If someone without knowledge of laptops happens upon mine and begins to use it to shade his/her head from the sun, then, for him it functions and is seen as a hat. I guess the point is that object categories (table, chair, food, so on) aren't intrinsic to 'whole figures' and so don't seem to be an essential feature of what's experienced. We can continue this kind of analysis and eliminate other non-essential features of what's experienced. Presumably by doing this, you'd get closer to the raw -- untampered with -- experience. And that raw experience, devoid of the non-essential components- if taken as directly presenting reality, seems like it could serve the basis for a direct realism.

I think it really depends. If that work involves things that sufficiently align with your interests or values then it'd definitely be more enjoyable than not. I used to volunteer for a nutrition research lab for example. The people weren't at all the sort I'd enjoy to be around but the work was engaging, and at the time I was interested in the topic and liked the work. I've done other sorts of volunteer work -- I had the chance to do a bit of tree planting and branch gathering/wood chopping for this farm an hour or so from where I live-- and that likewise was fun. Not for the intellectual stimulation but just the atmosphere, being outside, listening to music, helping to do handiwork..

If the work is contra values or doesn't seem at all personally meaningful then that's when it wouldn't be enjoyable. I've been in that sort of situation too -- but, again the reason I didn't like it wasn't because of it's being work perse but rather because of it just simply not being worthwhile work to me.

Sub-conscious reasoning intruding on consciousness. Short-cut decision making. Wrong, most of the time!

It seems like there are differences between heuristic decision-making, impulsive-immediate feeling based decision-making, and intuition-based decision making (gut feeling based). Heuristics being 'short-cut' generalizations used to make judgements or decisions. Impulsive decision making being 'mood based' decision making -- decision making influenced by surface level moods or emotions.

Intuition seems far more complex and stems from a well-developed/ingrained understanding of a given topic or area-- an understanding that is implicit, not easily explicable and one that can automatically effect decision-making without the need for on-the-spot reasoning. To me intuition seems more close to the notion of 'second-nature' knowledge-- An oncologist having an intuition regarding what tests to perform on a patient simply on the basis of a patient history report.

Dust:)

But even if there is no subject of experience, there is still an individualised experience existing (and it has a first person quality to it). What's to stop that existing again?

I think this is akin to asking: after all humans go extinct, is it possible for 'experiencing' at all to come into existence (i.e. would it be possible for a population of observers/first person experiencers to come into existence). And I do think that's possible.

Individualized experiencing/first person experiencing doesn't seem to be a 'personal' thing (in the sense of belonging to any one in particular). I.e. it just seems to be a general property of human bodies to be able to experience in the first person. My body's capacity for fist person experience isn't unique in any way -- and so it's more reasonable to say that experiencing would occur again (if bodies capable of it were to be formed again) than to say 'my experiencing' would occur again. What individuates any particular 'first person experience' is what's structuring the experience -- not the fact of experiencing: i.e. the memories, identities, beliefs that structure the immediate experience. But none of that carries over past the death of a person.

I think what's most likely here is my/our understanding of time, the past, ourselves, and non/existence is seriously flawed. Maybe there is no past and times not linear, or maybe it is and I'm a soul which intermittently occupies various bodies.

Considering what I wrote above, what that's particular to 'you' would carry over to the new body?

It makes sense that we are biologically evolved to value the world in ways that work. And pleasure, pain and empathy are all biologically evolved "intuitions" in that regard.

How do you define 'ways that work'. Can you give an example?

But the example of chocolate and sugar illustrates the fact that moral judgements have to be complex. What's good in the short-term as instant gratification of an impulse may be very bad as a long-term habit.

And humans bring on this particular moral dilemma for themselves. It is because we are smart enough to refine food that we can produce all the sugar and alcohol we like. The "intuitive" responses we might have due to a lengthy evolutionary history become mal-adaptive after we've removed the constraints on our ability to satisfy our urges.


If we were thinking morally, we would have to identify then what is actually "the good" that nature had in mind originally, and how we can then re-introduce the constraints so as to arrive back at that "better" balance.

So as you say, what is pleasurable ain't always reliably good. And it becomes a cruel kind of empathy to share your sugar and alcohol with your children or pets.

But we can - by taking this naturalistic approach - start to see how "the good" was defined for us through historical evolutionary forces. Pleasure, pain and empathy all existed as intuitive evaluations of something. And that something is mostly the obvious thing of meeting the goals of life - ie: to grow, to reproduce, to flourish.

So from what I understand you'd say our innate impulses, when sufficiently constrained, can be considered our moral intuitions? Or rather, our impulses are generated out of some innate understanding of what is good (*for us*) ?

Maybe this is a right approach. What comes to my mind is the end of 'coming back to stability' -- the body desires food or shelter or some other thing in order to bring itself back to some equilibrium set-point. If temperature seems to have suddenly changed from a given set-point, then the body struggles to bring it back to that set-point. People desire food, naturally, when the body is devoid of energy -- it strives to hit the minimum baseline of satiation and the pleasure taste encourages more food intake until the baseline is met (**or at least until the maximum capacity of intake is met)..

But then there's more to that. There's a difference between 'good for me' and 'good for us'. And it's certainly fair to say, as much as we are whole in terms of our 'biological selves', we are also parts of much larger biological selves. Communities of people, communities of ecosystems. Intuitions that power those interactions can come into conflict. What's good for my community may not be good for 'me' at a given moment per se. I may have an impulsive desire to jump in front of the bullet that's about to hit my comrade, but what of my impulse to save my own self. So then to define what's good would have to take this sort of stuff into account.

And then there are goods that have nothing to do with stability or equilibrium. We know that if we want to be healthy we need to keep under a certain weight, eat certain foods, exercise regularly. If we want to be a carpenter or a chef or a cleaner or a philosopher, if we want to change ourselves in any way we'd need to break out of that stability and into something we're uncomfortable with. We may believe that's good for us and perhaps it might be.. but that intuition certainly doesn't have the same origin as the intuition driving our desire for food. Accounting for these sorts of 'goods' seems to involve something more than just what comes out of our biological impulses. I feel like there's a distinction between intuition and impulse

am thinking of the quandry that philosophers talk about the impossibility of understanding or knowing the noumenon(the thing in itself), while it is rational to consider that we are that noumenon, everything we know is constituted of this noumenon and nothing else. So in a sense we are this thing we can't know. Our nature and the nature of the noumenon are the same, can a study of nature, or our nature, inform us of the nature of the noumenon, so that it can be known?

Do you accept that there is a noumenon? Do you think it can be known? Do you think that our nature is the same as the nature of the noumenon.? If philosophy can't answer these questions, are there any other ways of knowing? — Punshhh

Do you accept that there is a noumenon?
Yes. I don't believe there could be phenomena without a noumenon. (Phenomena -> Noumenon).

Do you think it can be known?
I feel as though it can be known intuitively.


Do you think that our nature is the same as the nature of the noumenon?
What does 'our' refer to?

↪Hoo That is a beautiful and articulated response. I guess my follow up question is, what if you find no joy in life? What if you see it as a continual struggle - a constant form of stress. Even without the belief in an afterlife, if you suffer continually and see no end in sight and everything seems futile, then why continue to live?

Even if death is a blank void of nothingness, do you not think some would choose that over their current existence if it consists of nothing but struggle, agony, and misery?

I think there're two things of issue here. If it is your view that there is no joy in life then that only is your view. The reality of the situation is distinct from your view of the situation. And the reality of your view is something wholly unstable. You may hold the belief that life is a continual struggle but that doesn't mean you held that belief when you were a child and it doesn't mean you'll think the same as you grow older. So then that joy, would presumably be felt at some point.

The second thing is the idea of choosing nothingness. Death involves no-one. There's not a void to be chosen, theres just a ceasing of you. There's no cessation of suffering, theres no sense of relief, there's just a ceasing of experience all-together.

My claim, though, is that we cannot let these intuitions slip, at least not all of them or all the way. And so we find a justification for these intuitions, by appeal to the most basic value experience: pleasure and pain. It is undeniable that pleasure and pain is good and bad for me, so why shouldn't it be good and bad for other people? Thus, in addition to these basic experiences, we utilize the virtue of empathy to understand the circumstances of another person. And although these themselves are a product of society and evolution, we nevertheless can't help but be swayed by them. They are undeniable, and thus a perfect candidate for fulfilling the open-ended question.

There seems to be a jump here. It's clear that pleasure is pleasurable and pain is painful but what makes that good or bad for me? Would you say this presupposes goodness equates with what's pleasurable? And there are issues here -- what's pleasurable isn't always good and what's good isn't always pleasurable. Arguably I'd be having something in mind about the good when I make that statement but it's no different than adding value judgements on top of other value judgements (e.g. something pleasurable is something good. and something painful is something bad). Also, feelings are complex and can be parsed in more fine-grained ways than just simply pleasure and pain. I'd say there are many kinds of feelings that can be considered pleasurable (e.g. feelings felt while reading an engaging book, making love, laughing with friends) but they are distinct from each other and distinct from the sense of good and bad.

I do like this idea of innate, universal intuitions being the guiding force for an ethical theory. But I think there are moral intuitions distinct from our pleasure/pain judgements.