The point is that agnostic atheism/theism complicates matters unnecessarily. We just want to know what you believe, not how "confidently" you believe in them or whatever. We just want to know: do you believe God exists, or not? It's very simple, you're either a theist, an atheist, or in between as an agnostic, and this is how it's used most commonly in the literature.

Agnosticism is just the position that we do not or cannot possess knowledge of something. — JustSomeGuy

No, agnosticism in philosophy is the lack of any belief on the matter. This is why agnostic atheism and agnostic theism are logically incoherent. Don't let the etymology trip you up here. Agnosticism is used not as a knowledge claim but as a middle-ground between positive beliefs.

From the SEP: "Nowadays, the term “agnostic” is often used (when the issue is God’s existence) to refer to those who follow the recommendation expressed in the conclusion of Huxley’s argument: an agnostic is a person who has entertained the proposition that there is a God but believes neither that it is true nor that it is false." Note that this is not denying the cognitive content of God talk but is denying any positive alignment with a view.

You originally said "Morality is given to us in the form of a command-from-afar, as something we ought to do." So tell me, why should I believe that there is this command coming? Explain to me where it is how you know there is a command, where is it coming from, and why should I believe that it is objective? I don't hear this command. — SonJnana

You don't "hear" the calling of the face of a victim? You don't "hear" the inner voice of your conscience telling you to do something? You don't see morality as a system of imperatives, something we must do based on something that is higher than our own empirical desires?

Again, this is just phenomenology. I'm not necessarily saying here that there actually is someone who calls or grounds these imperatives. It's just how morality manifests in our consciousness.

I don't need any framework. — SonJnana

You do need a framework if you're going to explain what it is about my explanation that you find wanting. Otherwise it's just you denying anything I say as "unconvincing" without any dialectic argument. I need to know what you think is wrong with my argument.

Someone who says one gumball plus two gumballs = three gumballs can be proven right because if you actually have one and add two, you end up with three. — SonJnana

And we know this a priori. What I was pointing out was that one and two and three could just be "mental" stuff that doesn't apply to the "real" world, if we're to be nominalists, and the same could be said about moral things as well. So if we deny morality is real on the grounds that it's just "mental" and not "real", what prevents us from doing this with mathematical claims as well? Why are numbers real but morals not?

So far all you've said to support this is that there is some command, but haven't explained how you know there is this command. — SonJnana

I already said we know of moral things like rightness and goodness through an a priori intuition in the same way we know mathematical things. Rightness and goodness are sui generis concepts and are importantly simple, not being able to be reduced to parts. By the same way we know 2+3=5 and that triangles have 180 degrees, we can know that gratuitous suffering is bad and inflicting needless harm onto others wrong.

Why should I believe that there is a command coming from anything? I lack a belief in that. — SonJnana

I am only saying that morality oftentimes takes the form of a command-from-afar. I'm providing a phenomenological description of our experience of morality.

I personally don't see things as objectively morally good or bad because I haven't been convinced so yet. — SonJnana

But why haven't you been convinced yet? What's the argument against what I've said? I want to know what the metaphysical framework you're coming from is.

Also, just because something feels intuitive doesn't make it true. I can intuitively think that what I see in a magic trick is true, but that doesn't mean it is true. — SonJnana

You misunderstand me. Essentially I am saying that if you deny objective morality than you ought to deny that mathematics is also objective. Consider how both operate through intuitive principles that can be applied through logical reasoning. Both can be rationally argued for - at least, we do believe that someone can be right or wrong about mathematics, so why cannot someone be right or wrong about morality?

A command from who? — SonJnana

I'm hesitant to answer this. I'm only describing what it's like. It's a command from the Other, whether that be God, a victim's face, or whatever.

It does require explanation because it's not intuitive and self-evident. If it was we wouldn't be having this conversation. You can't just say I'm right because it's obvious. You have to explain that. — SonJnana

Again I'm describing the experience of perceiving something as having moral content. Do you doubt that we do, in fact, see things as objectively right and wrong, good and bad, even if they aren't actually?

The point I'm making is that the perception that something is good or bad, right or wrong, is intuitive in the same way it is intuitive that a triangle has 180 degrees. It's synthetic a priori.

Sure, I'll give one. Morality is given to us in the form of a command-from-afar, as something we ought to do. It is not an expression of an emotion, although is certainly involves emotions in consequence. Perceiving something as having moral content is intuitive and self-evident, requiring no further explanation. Unless there is an opposing argument, such moral perception should be taken as similar to any other sort of perception.

But it's the burden of the agnostic to clarify why they are agnostic, so the moral realist can know what to focus on, no? Certainly agnosticism has to be motivated by something.

Now that we have clarified your current view, what is it about objective morality that makes you unsure if it exists?

Okay. Just to be clear, dictionary definitions are not always the best tool to go to for philosophical things. How atheism is defined colloquially is not how atheism is used in rigorous philosophy.

I am not asserting that morality is non-objective. — SonJnana

Okay, so you are agnostic on this and want people to convince you that objective morality is true?

An agnostic atheist doesn't assume God is not real. It lacks the belief in a god.

If you ask me if there is an even number of gumballs in a jar, just because I lack the belief doesn't mean I assume that it is not even and therefore odd. How could I say that it is even with out a reason to think so. How could I say it's not even (and therefore odd) if I don't have any reason to believe that either? I am unconvinced both ways.

Similarly if you can't convince me why morality is objective, I have no reason to believe it. It doesn't mean I believe morality is not objective either. — SonJnana

Agnostic atheism is an incoherent position that begs the question. Lacking belief in God does not mean you believe God does not exist just as lacking a belief in an even number of gumballs does not mean you believe there are an odd number of gumballs. Lacking a belief in objective morality does not mean you believe morality is subjective. I'm not seeing the issue here.

So, the claim that something isn't true is not the same as the claim that it is false. — JustSomeGuy

No, it's more like, the absence of evidence for A is not evidence of the absence of A. Saying something isn't true is equivalent to saying it is false. Saying someone has not provided sufficient reason for believing in A does not mean A is false.

The claim is that morality is objective. If I take the position of not believing that morality is either objective or non-objective, then the burden of proof lies on someone to demonstrate that it is objective. And in the absence of any argument for it that is convincing, I think it is unfair for me to say that any action is objectively wrong even if that feels uncomfortable to me.

I don't think I have to argue for my position because it is a lack of belief of objective morality. And one has to make an argument that something nonphysical exists, not the other way around. That would be like you telling me that there is an invisible unicorn in the room and telling me to prove that it isn't there. — SonJnana

Don't misconstrue this as the same thing as the equally-silly notion of an "agnostic atheist", where atheism is just assumed-to-be-true-unless-proven-wrong. That's precisely not how philosophy works. We don't just assume things are right or wrong. We don't assume anything, we start from the basics and work from there. And the basics are definitely not that physicalism is true, God does not exist, and morality isn't real.

The "invisible unicorn" schtick is frustrating because it shows you are not actually an agnostic here. You're a moral anti-realist. There's no "agnostic moral anti-realist" just as there is no "agnostic atheist". You can believe in the reality of x, deny it, or withdraw from commitment. You can't withdraw from commitment but still have your toe dipped in one camp. Well, I guess you can but it doesn't help the discussion at all, because we're concerned about the status of beliefs and not the status of how deeply you personally believe in something.

Notice how a lack of belief in something is not inherently asymmetrical. The agnostic lacks belief in both moral realism and anti-realism. You need to be uncommitted to both to be an agnostic. Whereas you are only lacking belief in realism, and have anti-realism as your fall-back position. Which is question-begging, as I said before.

So going back to the invisible unicorn: if you think the invisible unicorn does not exist, then you aren't agnostic about its existence. It's very, very simple and I get very frustrated when this sort of reasoning keeps cropping up. I blame it entirely on the new atheist charlatans. Sorry if this sounds like I'm attacking you personally, I just get really triggered by this.

I am just unconvinced that it is objective. I'm taking the position that if someone were to ask me "why is murder objectively morally wrong," I would say I don't know. I won't tell them that it is, but I also won't tell them that it isn't. So that is up to you argue for since I am not asserting that morality is objective or non-objective.

(My position from the original post has changed a little bit because I have found some holes in what I was originally, and I thank you all for that). — SonJnana

Okay, I did not know you had changed your views. So now you are agnostic on this, at least you claim to be. If you are agnostic then you aren't sure if morality is real or not. But remember that a failure to provide a convincing argument for A does not entail ~A, logically. It just means there hasn't been a good argument for A; in the absence of all evidence for A, we may feel compelled to adopt ~A, but ~A still has not been demonstrated itself. Something about A has to be proven to be contradictory or incorrect for ~A to be proven.

I have re-evaluated. In the absence of any argument that rationally demonstrates that there is an objective morality, let alone how that morality would judge actions, it is not being intellectually honest to say that any action is objectively good or bad. I'm open to objective morality, but still haven't seen a good argument for it. — SonJnana

This doesn't sound quite right, since it's question-begging. Why should morality, in the absence of any argument that demonstrates it to be objective, be seen as not-objective? Why shouldn't the opposite be the case? Why shouldn't you have to demonstrate the morality is not-objective? After all, morality certainly seems to appear to us as "objective", as a command-from-afar, an imperative, something we must do out of free will.

To put the "burden of proof" on the moral realist is question-begging because it only makes any sense at all if we already assume certain other metaphysical notions: notions that (if we are to discuss philosophy) need to be argued for (which would then just lead into an argument for moral anti-realism).

So you probably are assuming something along the lines of a "modern" naturalistic picture of the universe: the world operates (mechanically? statistically?) by certain "laws" that are discovered by science, and part of this includes the rejection of any sort of non-physical "stuff". Objective morals are seen as necessarily being non-physical, and thus we can assume they do not exist given the prevailing physicalist framework.

Okay. You may believe this is true. But you need to argue this to be true. For someone like myself is going to deny that physicalism is true, and a realist naturalist is going to deny that objective morals have to be non-physical. You can't just assume this naturalist framework is true, because not everyone agrees with it.

I agree right and wrong aren't the same think as like and dislike. My point is that we claim to say something is right or wrong based off of our preferences. If I like to live in a stable society, I may say murder is wrong. But when we say something is immoral, we're using the standard of our own personal moral code which is based off of our like and dislikes. Or maybe it's because it was socially conditioned and any other moral code is too uncomfortable. Or maybe it seems intuitive because of the person's genes. Or maybe the person themselves beleives something is objectively right or wrong. — SonJnana

The ambiguity here is with your claim that morality is "based" on our preferences. I'm not sure what this exactly means. You say right and wrong are different than like and dislike, so as to regard them as separate things. But you say we claim something is right or wrong based off of our preferences. Since you deny preferences (like and dislike) are identical to right and wrong, and want to argue for anti-realism, you're effectively left with error theory: we have concepts of right and wrong, but they never are instantiated because there are no such things as objective right and wrong moral truths.

You claim that if I want to live in a stable society, I may say murder is wrong. Thus it seems as though you see morality as something people use for their own benefit. But this makes it ambiguous, still, as thus statements like "murder is wrong" seems to be basically saying "do not murder because I want to live in stable society". Yet I will press you on this - is this really what we mean? Do we really think something is moral or immoral based on our contingent preferences? Because it seems obvious to me that the two statements are not equivalent in any sense. One is a moral imperative and the other is non-moral supplication.

The difference between non-cognitivism and error theory is basically that of truth-aptness. Non-cognitivists think moral claims are expressions, say, of emotions or preferences, which themselves cannot have any truth value. Liking chocolate is not a truth claim. Whereas error theorists claim that moral propositions are truth-apt: saying "murder is wrong" is literally saying that murder is something: it is wrong. What separates the error theorist from the moral realist (they are both cognitivist positions) is that the error theorist denies there is anything real about right or wrong (or good and bad, etc).

You have said that the moral realist must provide the demonstration, but you yourself have offered mostly "maybes": maybe morality is socially conditioned, maybe it's "because of someone's genes", maybe they're fooling themselves, etc. You'll need to provide more to convince someone.

So in conclusion there are two things I think you need to explain and clarify:

1.) the general metaphysical framework you are coming from (including what you think objective morals are/must be), and

2.) what the claim "morality is based on preferences" ultimately amounts to, because although I think you wish to present something along the lines of error theory, you nevertheless seem to also vacillate into non-cognitivism.

^ Also this.

According to Kant:
1. What can we know?
2. What ought we to do?
3. For what can we hope? — Mitchell

^ This.

Yes, they would die, because we'd kill them out of fear and hatred.

We can only say killing is wrong because we value a stable society, biological survival, or whatever you value. But the value is subjective. — SonJnana

But again, you're just asserting this. Why is value merely subjective?

I didn't say its not cognitive. — SonJnana

But you're implying that morality stems only from our "valuation" of things, and nothing more. Either you think morality is a sham (error theory), or you think it's an expression of some mental state (non-cognitivism), since those are basically the two major options for moral anti-realists.

To say "I value society" can be a true statement that represents a non-cognitive state, the state of my valuing society. From the non-cognitivist perspective, statements like "murder is wrong" is not really a proposition, it's more like "boo murder!" or "I dislike murder". The difficulty with this, of course, is that "right" and "wrong" seem to not obviously equate to "like" and "dislike". Whereas subjective preferences are one thing that we know frequently, rightness and goodness seem to be non-natural, indefinable things. Which is partially why I said I think the choice is between moral realism and error theory. Rightness and goodness just can't be reduced to subjective preferences. Either morality is a real thing or it's a "cobweb of the mind" (to use Kant's phrase).

Haha! Have you talked about this on the thread about Feser's arguments? I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say about his arguments.

In effect, then, if a proof is successful in demonstrating the existence of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being, then the problem goes from a defense (the logical compatibility between God and evil) to a theodicy (an actual explanation or story for why God allows evil, such as the free will suggestion).

I suppose the counterargument is that, if the existence of God can be demonstrated by another means (such as a cosmological or teleological argument), then this makes the evidential argument against God fail. It would be silly to say, I recognize this proof for God's existence is sound, but nevertheless think God does not exist because of the evil in the world.

The evidential argument from evil requires that other proofs haven't worked to demonstrate God's existence. The logical argument from evil is the only thing that could counter a successful demonstration of God's existence by showing that this ends up positing a being that is incompatible with the empirical reality of evil.

The Evidential Argument from Evil is, I think, a serious problem for Theism. — Mitchell

What is the evidential argument, that one that says that because of the amount of suffering in the world, the best explanation is that there is no God? That is, the probability of there being a God is low?

I maintain that there are no good reasons for thnking Theism is true and some plausible reasons for thinking it is false. If I am right, then most forms of Judaism, Chistianity, and Islam are wrong. — Mitchell

What reasons against theism do you find to be particularly strong?

Judging an action to be morally good is simply saying it is consistent with your morality code, which is based off of your subjective values, which expresses preferences (wants, needs, desires, comfortableness). Essentially, ones moral code is just their preferences. — SonJnana

So you assert, but why should I believe this? Why should I believe that what seem to be truth-apt, cognitive statements like "murder is wrong" ultimately derive from non-cognitive, meaningless non-truth-apt, particular preferences?

The problem with subjectivism in moral theory is that it sort of precludes the possibility of genuine dialectic, because it threatens to collapse into relativism. If what is moral is what people like, and people like different things, then there exists the possibility that people will like contradictory things. X and not-X cannot both be true, so it must therefore be the case that neither are true at all (error theory), or it's entirely relative to the person (in which case, real argument is useless).

This is a tough pill to swallow, because we do not approach morality as if we construct it but rather that it "calls" to us, it "commands" us as if it were objective. Judging an action as morally wrong is entirely different than judging an apple pie to be good. This is why, if we are to be moral anti-realists, I think error theory is superior to non-cognitivism (the subjectivism you have presented). Just by phenomenology alone we can know that morality is not just an expression of our subjective tastes or preferences, and that morality at least presents itself as being objective (even if it isn't).

From my perspective, the arrival of subjectivist/relativist interpretations of morality comes alongside a jadedness to humanity as a whole. People act irrationally, are mean, spiteful, hurtful and otherwise bad, always looking out for only themselves, not caring for anyone else, etc. Ironically and paradoxically, the move to a subjectivist/relativist moral view seems to often come from this disillusionment and disappointment with people living up to what we otherwise do see as objective moral laws. It's similar to the skeptical view of religion - there are so many religions and many religious people are actually quite terrible, thus there must not be anything objective about religion.

Can you think of anything else that has intrinsic value? — Mitchell

Knowledge, virtue, justice (the distribution of goods based on merit), beauty. Hedonism is false because it misinterprets these other goods as being derivative from pleasure when in fact they stand independently of pleasure.

It is tempting to adopt hedonism, however, because sensuous experiences, particularly pain, seem to motivate people far more effectively than anything else. Other goods may be independently good, but nevertheless may require that there be a certain threshold of pain that is kept in check. We cannot pursue knowledge, or act virtuously, or distribute justice, or appreciate beauty when we are suffering. It does seem to be the case that, when push comes to shove, suffering and pleasure usually disable these other goods, and not the other way around.

A better way of putting it, in Cabrera-esque terminology, is that Nietzsche was an affirmative pessimist, i.e. someone who recognized the pessimistic point but affirmed life regardless (as opposed to the negative pessimists, who denied life).

But again, we can affirm intra-worldly things while denying the context in which they arise.

I don't deny that "good life" has problems. Life just is problematic, even if it is good. There are bad people in this good life. There are difficult diseases in good life. It isn't perfection of niceness that makes life good, it's existence-at-all that makes life good. — Bitter Crank

I don't know what to think about this, the claim that the sheer existence of life makes it good. I mean, I'm familiar with Scholastic attempts to show the existence just is good, since it's the actualization of a potential and this entail more perfection, but that doesn't seem like what you're going for here, and I don't like Scholastic stuff that much either.

What about life makes it good? Why is it life that is good? I've already given my reasons why I think life is not good (not that life has no good within it) - the inevitable suffering, decay, disease, and most importantly death. Life is suffering, life is death. Every cradle is a grave.

So when I hear these claims that "life is good", it always strikes me as more appropriate to say "certain forms of unsustainable ways of living are good". As has said, we have to strive towards and create the good within life, it doesn't come ready-made. And if we don't go for them, we suffer (and probably die eventually).

It's a shabby game, because even if you win, you lose. That's what I see to be the core of the pessimistic point.

Why? — Bitter Crank

Because I think making this distinction between the empirical, contingent aspects of life and the structural necessary aspects of life gives a more accurate picture of human life than the more common view that life is a "see-saw" or "mixed bag", some good, some bad. On my account, the good that happens within life takes place within the context of a broader negative landscape. In my opinion there is hardly anything more absurd than the notion that life is meant to be enjoyed. It's just what it is.

It also helps me and I think some other people to approach life in this way. As Schopenhauer said, life makes sense if we see it as a penitentiary. If we approach life as something we have to struggle against, we can help prepare ourselves against the inevitable and live a more heroic life.

And finally it frees pessimists from the charge that they can't enjoy anything in life, or can't see anything as good at all, and actually thus makes it more digestible to non-pessimists. I don't deny there can be good things in life. I just deny that life viewed outside of the present, subjective moment, can be seen as anything other than bad. And that's probably fairly easy for many people to accept, since they already oftentimes do - see how they affirm things within life in order to "make up for" the structurally negative things in life, like death and disease.

So in the end all I'm saying is, keep living your life if you want to, but don't be fooled into thinking these enjoyable aspects of life constitute life itself, or qualify life as good. And certainly do not procreate or encourage procreation, as abstaining from procreation is far easier than suicide (and the vast majority of the rest of life, at that).

Nietzsche was a pessimist, nerds. A Dionysian pessimist, but a pessimist nonetheless.

As much as I'm getting tired of the repetitive pessimistic rants here (despite being a pessimist myself), I cannot agree to what you are saying here (because I am a pessimist).

Life is Good in Itself. — Bitter Crank

What does this mean? What is "Life" with a capital L? What does it mean that it is Good?

Too often is "life" associated with a sunny, cheery afternoon, the greenery of the landscape, the cutesy Hobbit village. But that's not "life". That's only a way of life.

The same can be said of most conceptions of life - they are ways of living, not life itself.

The way I see things is that, after you have met all your basic needs, have worked and strove to maintain a tolerable equilibrium, and aren't horribly suffering...then you might start enjoying some things. The negative is structural, and the positive contingent. This is exactly what the Buddha meant when he said that "life is suffering". Life is suffering, even if there's some good parts to it as well.

But the upsides outweigh the downsides. There are pleasures and joys, loves and sorrows, great music, drama, art, and science, dreams, the fascinating details of life on earth, the vastness of the universe, and all such things. — Bitter Crank

Do you mean instead that the stuff that happens within life can be good? If so, then I agree - there are many things in life that are good, great even, and are worth celebrating. But LIFE itself? No, that is not good. We absolutely must make a distinction between the empirical, ontic phenomena within life (love, music, drama, art, science, dreams, etc) and the metaphysical, ontological structure of life itself (suffering, desire, decay, disease, death).

True enough, there is pain and suffering; disappointment and aggravation; hard labor and little reward, injustice and inequality, tyranny and worse. — Bitter Crank

There will be liars, thieves, knaves and scoundrels who will prey upon the kind, loving, innocent, and defenseless (as well as each other), and that has always been the case. — Bitter Crank

...and will continue to be the case. The problem with affirming life is that you implicitly affirm all of these bad things as well.

Affirming the things within life can be and often is innocent. Affirming life itself is most definitely not, since it entails the affirmation of that which should not be affirmed.

But the upsides outweigh the downsides. — Bitter Crank

Do they, though? If the upsides outweighed the downsides, why are there pessimists? It puts a dent in the proposition that life is good (TM) when there are many people who cannot seem to recognize this, and in fact when most people live as though it were not good (but rather a burden, a chore, sometimes even a nightmare).

I like you BC, you seem like a nice enough person. Don't waste your time on us pessimists, cause we're not gonna start loving life any time soon. Optimists have a hell of a lot more to lose than we do, which is why I always feel a bit of guilt when I argue my pessimistic point.

Holy shit this is a book. >:O

If you want a solid alternate realist position it's Husserl's. I'm with Feser on this, universals exist (though I'm not sure what sort of realist I am exactly, maybe Husserlian?).

That's not to say I would like it if nominalism were true. It would make things less oppressive, I think. For instance, Feser's argument "words are universals too" strikes me as imperialistic. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE UNIVERSALS, EVEN WORDS ARE UNIVERSALS TOO. At least some nominalists must have wanted to escape this metaphysical regime: see early Buddhist philosophers who argued for extreme nominalism in order to overturn the Hindu caste system. As do I, but unfortunately I don't know if it's coherent to deny that universals exist.

Implicit in Feser's (et al) approach to metaphysics seems to be the dominion of the Same over the Other, the desire to "fit" everything within a totality, the imperialistic urge to know everything. To which I typically say: no thanks.

The "value" or "sanctity" of life does not come from it being intrinsically good, but from it being completely devoid of any positive value at all. Every person's life is equally worthless, which helps explain why murder is wrong (because we do not have the right to interrupt the being of someone else, because we do not have any positive value for this right to be appropriate).

It's ambiguous, what "life" actually means. Do we mean the current present spectacle? Do we mean the temporally-unified structure of a life (as I do)? Or something else? A key part of the ambiguity, I think, surrounds the "ontological" distinction, or the whole beings vs Being schtick (though it's probably not exactly as Heidegger thought it was). Humans are beings which can invent all sorts of axiological and ethical paraphernalia to suit their ontic agendas, which typically involve some kind of aggression, manipulation or neglect of the Other. Thus it is said that people "deserve" things like equality, liberty, freedom, etc (even if it comes at the cost of other people's equality, liberty, equality, etc). But to go beyond the ontic and into the ontological leads us to the structural aspects of life: banal suffering, decay, death and moral impediment, all inevitable and guaranteed within the temporal structure of life. Once we arrive in this dimension it is much harder to see how any of these values could ever seriously be appropriate for beings with this Being. It's hard to see how a being-towards-death can seriously be given a positive value without the typical sleight-of-hand, the "obscurement" or "forgetfulness of Being" that leads to the exclusive valuation of intra-wordly, ontic beings and not Being.

The point I'm trying to make, then, is that within life, there can be positively valuable things, but life itself cannot seriously be seen as positive in value. That is to say, when the moral paraphernalia of the intra-worldly is applied to the ontological it falls apart.

Pseudoscience is a bad concept because it's lazy. Anything someone disagrees with can be labeled as pseudoscience. If you think there is something wrong with it, don't just slap on a label and declare your dogmatism to be true. Spend the time to explain what is wrong with it and let people come to their own conclusions. There absolutely must be a separation of science and state, as there is religion and state, in order to avoid these totalizing and oppressive schemes where anything not-science is bad, wrong, misguided, corrupt, outdated, and worthless.

In fact I think we ought to scrap the whole label "science" and just refer to things as their individual disciplines. Fuck the idea of a unifying theory and fuck the idea of a unified methodology.

Other have mentioned this, but part of the difficulty of pinning down the present is that we never just "exist" in the present. Experience irreducibly involves temporality. Phenomenologically, we experience not only the "present" but also a retention of the past and a protention of the future that anchor us to the world. It is not incorrect to say that we live in the present only by living a little in the past and future as well.

Lots of SSRIs.

Go ahead and make one, if you want to discuss it.

I think you’ve fallen for some romantic notion about space travel - that it somehow represents humanity’s best side. But exploration is just the precursor to exploitation. It isn’t noble even if it makes sense to big up those willing to take a risk on behalf of the masses. — apokrisis

(Y) The interest in space travel is fueled primarily by a naive, adolescent, starry-eyed anticipation for some future metamorphosis in human civilization.

It doesn't make sense, from a practical perspective, to colonize Mars, or the moon, or whatever. It's not going to solve the overpopulation problem, especially since it's stupidly easier to just put down procreative limitation laws instead of sending people vast distances across space. It's not going to solve any energy problems, because it takes at least as much energy to get to Mars and back as we would get from mining there. It would be a logistical nightmare to try to "govern" an interplanetary society. And it wouldn't be a very comfortable, easy or fulfilling life on another planet, either. Like you said, it's fun to go to Antarctica for a few months or so but it gets old after a while. Try arriving on Mars, being amazed for maybe a week and then realizing you're stuck there for the rest of your life, or at least for many years.

If space holds answers for energy problems, it might only be with bringing things to us, not going there ourselves. We might be able to lasso an asteroid into Earth's orbit and, assuming rocketry becomes more efficient, be able to mine that. Or set up entertainment depots or whatever makes the capitalists froth at the mouth.

Not to say that I don't harbor curiosity about other worlds. If there's a "good" reason for going into space, it's for sheer scientific, philosophical and spiritual reasons. I used to fantasize (and still do, on occasion) being a deep-space explorer, who leaves Earth (probably permanently) in order to travel FTL to all sorts of worlds, not for colonization or exploitation but to simply bear witness to their existence. There's something deeply, intensely breathtaking to think there are worlds that, given certain metaphysical assumptions, have never been perceived, and that I conceivably could be the very first to witness them.

That's what drew me to astronomy as a child and what continues to pique my interest in it. To realize that stuff still happens even if there isn't anyone around to witness it disorienting. Makes you feel like an alien, like you've been exiled from everything else.

What's the real existential issue of instrumentality? — Πετροκότσυφας

Presumably that we suffer only for us to continue to suffer. We don't go anywhere, nothing changes. It's a whole lot of effort for nothing.