Eliminating predation? What by euthanasing all predators? Teaching spiders to be vegan? What are you even talking about? — apokrisis

I'm talking about radical restructuring of the ecosystems of the world in the same way first world countries restructure the political and economic structures of developing nations.

As I've explained before, as has been affirmed elsewhere (see the Foundational Research Institute), constraining the amount of foliage results in less herbivores and even less predators. Decrease the amount of foliage so that the herbivore population is manageable and the carnivore population is eliminated.

But this is merely pragmatic issues, not on the level of theoretical normative ethics.

Occam's razor says it is rational to seek the least complicated explanation of natural phenomena. I happened to be in Antarctica with penguin researchers a few years ago. And in fact a little group of penguins waddled right past the base heading in the wrong direction. They didn't look unhappy, just determined. The researchers said they get lost like that all the time as they seek out new living space. We headed them off and pointed them back where they came. But the researchers said most likely they would resume their trek after we had gone. — apokrisis

No, it's recorded that penguins remove themselves from their society and die in the middle of nowhere. They are tracked and found to die miles away from the ocean. There is video evidence of penguins looking back at their clan as if they are looking back in forlorn. They know exactly what they're doing.

In the wake of uncertainty, we should opt for the most inclusive position - that of assuming animals can suffer, and not jumping to conclusions that inevitably marginalize potential sufferers.

Or the rational answer.

The conflict here is between the Enlightenment and the Romantic point of view. — apokrisis

Absolutely not. It was the Enlightenment after all that produced the Cartesian view of animals as simply "machines" that has persisted for centuries.

I'm not sure why you keep trying to reduce my arguments to the binary Enlightenment/Romantic view.

Sure, we could all eat powered seaweed and the planet might then support 20 billion people. But rather than one dimensional thinking like this, it would be more moral to recognise the huge complexity of the ecological disaster we are so busy manufacturing. — apokrisis

Straw man.

So there is no point discussing morality in an abstracted absolutist fashion - especially in terms of what we would all hope for, but already believe could never be achieved.

We have real problems in the world which we need to solve. Your romanticism becomes Nero fiddling while Rome burns in that context. Veganism or anti-natalism is dangerously distracting - immoral behaviour - to the degree it degrades contemporary moral debate. — apokrisis

No, it's not, because there's a difference between normative ethics and practical applied ethics. I am under no delusion that veganism will be adopted worldwide. This does not change the truth of my claims, though.

You're operating under the assumption that what we can fix is all we ought to fix. This limits the content of our theories.

In exaggerating the agency of the sentient individual, you are playing right into the hands of fossil fuel's desire for entropification. Removing social and cultural constraints on biologically-wired desires is exactly why rampant entropification is winning despite our own human long term interests. — apokrisis

Maybe it's time to realize that entropy will always dominate our future interests. Hence why I said that the universe can sometimes seem almost sinister.

Who was talking about "good" in some abstract absolutist sense?

Again you betray your Romantic ontology in worrying about what might "inhere" in material reality as if it might exist "elsewhere" in Platonically ideal fashion. If you understood Naturalism, you would see this couldn't even be the issue. — apokrisis

No, I really don't, stop telling me what my views are.

You point to the indifference of Nature - even its sinister character - as a way to sustain the standard mind/body dualism of Romanticism. You have to "other" the world in a way that justifies your absolute privileging of the self - the individual and his mind, his soul, his inalienable being. — apokrisis

And you seem content with diminishing this perceived rift between the self and the rest of the world as if it's not important at all, thus shifting the focus of ethics from people as they perceive themselves as people to some abstract universal concept of entropy. We are part of the world, yes, but we also seem apart of the world as well. There is a larger picture at play, thermodynamic entropification, that we don't easily identify with. This is the "other" in which I speak, not in an ontological manner but a phenomenological manner.

In removing all moral determination from "the world" - and society and culture are the principle target there - the Romantic reserves all moral determination for "the self". So it suddenly becomes all right if you are a vegan or anti-natalist "like me". You don't actually need a reason. You get an automatic high five as a kindred spirit. Morality becomes reduced to a personal preference - the preferences the Romantic knows to be true because of the certitude of his feelings about these things. — apokrisis

Well, I mean I am a consequentialist. I would prefer if you were vegetarian and antinatalist for good reasons, but what matters ultimately is how your actions are affected by your views regardless of their justification.

Now, my rejecting postmodernism as nonsense is primarily due to the fact that they reject those rules, which in turn enables me to reject it. Once you say that words no longer correspond to reality, that they construct reality, or that nothing is outside the text, etc then we cannot but talk past each other. — Thorongil

As soon as someone leaves the realm of the intelligible then they deserve to be ignored. Post-modernism has, by and far, left this realm.

I don't see why it's inconsistent. Am I inconsistent if I eat a burger but not a hot dog? So why am I inconsistent if I help one person but not another? — Michael

In the case of burgers and hot dogs, no, you are not being consistent, but that's acceptable. You like burgers more than hot dogs.

But apply this reasoning to helping people. You would have to say that you like people of your own species more than people of different species, i.e. other people of different species don't matter.

This, I think, produces a feeling that adequately satisfies the open-ended question and shows how it is inconsistent to believe the latter but not the former, because the latter is a distinctively moral claim. I need not tell you that speciesism is immoral for you to come to your conclusion that speciesism is immoral.

Where has this "should" come from? You were just talking about what we actually do. — Michael

Switch "wouldn't" to "shouldn't". Or vice versa.

rarely, if ever, admonish them for immoral behaviour, or for eating meat. — tom

One of the points of abolishing speciesism is becoming an active role in the ecosystem - i.e. intervening and eliminating predation, helping diseased animals, etc.

Again, I am the first to say animals are aware. But it is a plugged into the moment or extrospective awareness. Humans have grammatical speech and so a new level of abstract symbolic thought. — apokrisis

Non-human animals are not capable of higher level thought process at the tier of humans, so they cannot be seriously expected to be moral agents. They can't even vote.

Yet they can suffer, and that's what matters. Many non-human animals have intellectual abilities on par or superior to babies, toddlers, and the mentally infirm. Yet these animals are often not seen as morally important.

Nonsense. Animals don't contemplate suicide because they are not equipped for that kind of (socially constructed) kind of thinking about the fact of their own existence. — apokrisis

This is not correct. Many animals are capable of experiencing depression. Look at dogs who lose their owners, they mope about and are unable to be cheered up. Or a mother sheep who loses her offspring.

Penguins actually have been recorded to kill themselves. If they cannot find a mate, they walk into the ice desert of Antarctica and die.

So to mitigate the suffering of non-human animals because they lack socially constructed propositional language is, as I see it, dogmatic and narrow-minded.

You got it. And from there, your extended family, your neighbours, your town, your nation. Or however else your social existence is in fact hierarchically organised in terms of co-dependent interactions.

It is not a bad thing. It would be irrational not to be most interested in those with whom there is the most common interests. Its normal social organisation. — apokrisis

Right, but there's a difference between rational egoism and ethical altruism. Shelly spends an entire book debunking the notion that rational egoistic constraints can be rationally (in the non-egoistic way) applied to ethics. They're arbitrary.

Our abilities and our biases do not constrain morality. Morality need not be possible to attain for it to be so.

That's my point. The loss of social cohesion is one of modern society's moral problems. Once people start caring more about highly abstracted wrongs than the wrongs they can see right under their nose, then things get out of kilter. — apokrisis

How so? Singer actually argues that if we adopted vegetarianism or something like this, we could solve a lot of the world's hunger problems.

But in any case, how does extending one's care for another being outside of one's neighborhood make the whole thing topple? I mean, there's an entire movement, Effective Altruism, dedicated to figuring out how people can still enjoy their lives while doing the most they can.

I take the naturalistic view and so "it is all one cosmos". But then there is also a clear structure - an emergent hierarchical organisation, a self-balancing complexity - that is also part of this naturalness. And it would thus be only natural for that ontology to inform any moral reasoning.

We know what is natural. The debate then is whether to remain consistent with that or to strike off in a different direction because it is "reasonable" ... then supplying a good reason for deviating from nature. — apokrisis

Yes, and I am advocating a moral non-naturalism. Nature is not inherently good, in fact many times it comes across as entirely indifferent or perhaps even sinister.

So yes, it is all "one cosmos" - yet we are also part of the cosmos, and we can feel, we can suffer. So any emergent, local phenomenon like morality is still going to be under the "one cosmos", but in a specific location. Applying holistic habits of thermodynamics to acute problems in morality obscures the identity of morality.

What 'rules of the Universe' are you referring to? Scientific law? And 'being moral' requires deliberation, to the extent one 'obeys instinctual programming' then you're no different to animals, and there's no morality involved. Indeed the fact tha we can reflect on and amend our course of action, is one of the fundamental ways we differ from animals. — Wayfarer

For the record, I'm not advocating evolutionary ethics.

Disgust is an emotion, as is empathy. So how is it a rational argument? — Michael

We need certain basic intuitions to get discussion off the ground. In terms of ethics, one of these intuitions is empathy. From there we can create rough logical syllogisms. In fact we don't even have to call anything (im)moral to get a point across. We can show how inconsistent our behavior is: for example, we would help a child who is drowning in a lake, so why wouldn't we help the child in Africa who is dying from malaria? We would help our dog if it was injured, so why wouldn't we help the rodent in the Amazonian jungle who is injured? We wouldn't experiment on humans, so why should we be allowed to experiment on animals?

Common-sense morality is filled with contradictions and arbitrary constraints, like I said.

I don't agree that empirical research can actually demonstrate this.

I don't have a problem assuming that some non-human animals have consciousness. I definitely assume that. — Terrapin Station

Correct.

Of course, I'm a subjectivist/an individual-oriented relativist on ethics anyway. I don't have any ethical problem with keeping animals as pets, keeping them in zoos, having them perform in circuses, using them for meat, etc. — Terrapin Station

I wonder how you can be alright with this if you assume non-human animals have consciousness without lacking empathy or suffering cognitive dissonance.

The fact is that even if you eradicated speciesm from humans you have only made a small dent in specieism as a whole. How are you going to change the minds of all those other animals and if you don't think it is necessary to do so, then you really aren't against specieism - just as Black Lives Matter isn't about all black lives - only about black lives ended by cops. — Harry Hindu

This is a pragmatic argument that does not affect the legitimacy of the OP.

In any case, we would presumably change the minds of predators by eliminating them from the population and restructuring ecosystems so predators cannot exist en masse. A good way of doing this would be to limit the amount of foliage available for herbivores to eat. Thus the population of herbivores would decrease, and the population of carnivores would follow.

It's interesting how most of us, including the participants in this thread, drift from saying 'non-human animals' to mistakenly saying 'animals' - by which we mean all animal life but humans. We are like them; oh, but we aren't. — mcdoodle

Singer points this out in his book Animal Liberation and argues that the use of "animals" instead of "non-human animals" is merely for pragmatic efficiency, not to demean them in any way.

There seems almost an injustice. The suicide act itself was trying to be some sort of romantic gesture of rebellion against life's pain. The fact that this ability to control one's fate was taken away, even if the same result occurred, seems to make a difference. — schopenhauer1

Excellent thought experiment, I agree.

But only humans have articulate speech and so a capacity to master the habits of thought that we would associate with being self-conscious. For instance, we can fear our death. We can even fear the death of those animals particularly dear to us. So in reality there is a discontinuity there that would make a difference. — apokrisis

There is not. You are asserting that propositional mental content is required for self-consciousness, or any sort of experience at all for that matter, when this is quite a big issue and actually has a lot going against it. Furthermore, humans are not the only ones with language - look at birds, dolphins, whales, primates, etc. They may not be as refined or poetic (capable of metaphors) as ours, but they act as a complex signalling device that offers the hypothesis that they realize who they are and that others like them exist.

In any case, it is clear from the behavior of animals that many, if not most, fear death, which is why suicide is almost unheard of outside of human civilization. It is clear that animals react to painful stimuli in similar ways that we do. It is clear they nurture their young and care about the pack. And until we have good evidence that animals aren't conscious in some sense (evidence is leaning the other way), it would be wise to act as if they do have consciousness.

And then there is also a proximity argument. You may not like it, but it seems quite rational to be most concerned with everything that is closest to us. If a plane crashes in a foreign land, it is natural to care most about any tourists from our home country. And this is because it is only sensible to care the most about what we most directly can affect (or be affected by). It is irrational to just have a free-floating abstract empathy, regardless of differences in proximity. — apokrisis

I disagree. Hume pointed out how proximity matters in empathy, but he failed to recognize economic proximity. The super rich ignore the super poor right outside their doorstep. It's only natural to care for one's family - but tell that to Marx and see how he reacts.

Bottom line here is that appeals to proximity or emotional support groups (like nationalism) is tribalism, a worn-out doctrine that can and should be replaced by a cosmopolitanism.

So your starting point is a presumption of a world without gradations. And yet gradations exist. Any rational ethics would take account of the fact we are actually people embedded in a complex world, not souls living in moral Platonia. — apokrisis

I'm not really sure what you're saying here, but from what I can tell you are associating comfort with morality. So long as we follow the rules of the universe and obey our instinctual programming, we're being moral. Moral conventionalism, i.e. common-sense morality, rife with contradictions and arbitrary constraints on action.

Excellent.

Wrong. — apokrisis

Please explain.

genocide — apokrisis

False.

You are forgetting that it is the preferences of others that you are judging. — apokrisis

Quite the opposite, I realize that nobody wants to die, nobody wants to suffer, nobody wants to lead a tedious life, all structural parts of life.

So modern society exists primarily for mass entertainment.

Are you for real? — apokrisis

Well, what other purpose is there for society other than to help people survive and the sedate them from their fears? Hints of instrumentalism can be seen here...

Let's not be ridiculous. — apokrisis

Bring an argument, then, cause you're not an authority.

What level of natural selection do you want to talk about then? Merely the cultural? Not the social or the ecological? — apokrisis

The ones that put people as ethical priority, as any ethical theory should.

Is there a reason you skipped my actual point? Pain can only exist in counterfactuality to its phenomenological "other" - pleasure. So if the existence of pain is your big ethical concern, then that is the counterfactual that is actually relevant. — apokrisis

I doubt this. Surely we can feel pain without feeling pleasure. Surely we don't need black to see white. We just see white.

Yet you state that the red plate, along with your sibling, is literally are non-existent. — apokrisis

Because it is.

So yes, this kind of logical talk is very familiar. It works well for reasoning about states of affairs. It is very pragmatic.

But it is all at sea when it comes to addressing deep metaphysical questions. — apokrisis

I thought you were all about pragmatism.

Well, it would seem to remove what is in your eyes a major constraint on their existing. What would they say if you indeed allowed them to exist having created such living conditions? Thank-you? — apokrisis

THIS WAS MY POINT, APO. We should focus on what IS/COULD BE the case FOR an individual. A bad psychological state doesn't need a redemptive opposite for it to be bad. We don't need a good state of affairs to act ethically.

It's actually pretty rare for people to wish they have never been born even in this imperfect world. So it seem presumptuous of you to talk for the unborn billions. — apokrisis

Right, cause the majority can't at all be wrong, or because the majority wins by sheer might. huh

That would be more convincing if you just hadn't begun by presuming the opposite - that society is a bunch of people who for some reason wandered off their desert islands, with their abundant food supplies, to go live collectively and dependently in the name of a little light entertainment and big city distraction. — apokrisis

What? What is more realistic is that society developed initially to support our needs to survive, but later began to develop as a means of keeping ourselves entertained. Civilization is OP in comparison to what nature throws at us generally. Yet we have the brainpower and time left over...what to do, as we twiddle our fingers?

What, indeed? Perhaps we'll argue on an internet forum!

But anthropology has no trouble explaining the phenomenology. It is obvious that modern folk live such insulated lives that they develop a magnified fear of the real world. Every papercut becomes the Holocaust because life has lost its normal calibration.

If you grow up dressed in silk, even the manufacturer's tag may seem like an unbearable annoyance.

So this kind of complaining about the unendurability of life is simply a symptom of something you need to fix. It has none of the grandeur of a fundamental philosophical problem or even a Shakespearian tragedy. It is just simply a practical issue - how can we design modern society better in a way that might be more natural to what makes the human animal most content? — apokrisis

Anthropology also can help explain as to why humans have to make culture to begin with. Done unbiased it shows how humans have developed civilization as a hodgepodge method of postponing/procrastinating death.

No amount of social institutions are going to fix the structural aspects of the human condition, only make them more or less bearable.

You have to make up your mind whether the world exists then. If it does, then there may be something beyond your person-al phenomenology. :-} — apokrisis

Oh, it exists sure, but we're not focused on the World, are we? We're focused on the inhabitants of the World! The basic focus of ethics! People! Not the relations they have to the environment or how they are part of the great cosmic plan of entropification.

And?

Unless you are going beyond phenomenology to claim ontic idealism or dualism, there is no reason to treat pain as some disembodied quality whose existence can be weighed in Platonic fashion. — apokrisis

And neither did I claim so. You're making this impossibly difficult. Pain exists where people exist. If people do not exist, then pain does not exist. If we identity pleasure as the only good, then the lack of pain is actually not a good thing at all, rather, it's merely comparative betterness in an impersonal sense. Non-existence cannot be good or bad for anyone. I'm not sure why this is so difficult.

How many different abuses of logic can you conjure up just to maintain an argument that doesn't work? — apokrisis

Oh, my god, you're hilarious. Insulting, but hilarious.

You agree - even going so far as to say the specific context is you and me agreeing verbally about the absence of some currently experienced particular. — apokrisis

We're not just talking about things that already exist, we're talking about potential existants. Just because the lack of pain would be good for us, doesn't mean the lack of pain would be good for potential, unborn people. Because we already exist, and they do not. This is not that hard.

And yet of no evolved creature could this scenario ring less true. Humans are socially and even culturally-constructed beings. We are only complete as functional members of functioning groups. So you are basing an argument on an utter fantasy. — apokrisis

And you're trying to reduce transparent phenomenological experiences to a foreign anthropological structure. As if recognizing the sustaining force of our existence doesn't make it less (or perhaps more?) absurd.

But if you recognize that, you can simply realize this interpretation of non-existence as a future non-painful state of affairs which you appear to be doing in this post. — schopenhauer1

A non-painful state of affairs is a bit incoherent in my opinion, as a state of affairs can't feel pain. Instead I would call it a state of affairs that has no individuals who are experiencing pain. Otherwise it seems like we're fantasizing about an impossibility.

To those caught up- perhaps instrumentality makes no sense at all.. Many people might feel it eventually in angst, but do not reflect on it enough to make sense of it and thus is a subtle feeling of discomfort behind the scenes and not seen as something that drives every decision and forces us to move forward. — schopenhauer1

Most people I think never go beyond the initial perturbation.

I'm talking about the logic we would apply to anything. And you already agree we are talking about "possible worlds" don't you? — apokrisis

Different scenarios require us to use different techniques.

Again, your dualism in this regard is only possible if you reject the holism of natural philosophy.

So yes. You continually claim this kind of atomistic freedom. It appears to validate your logic. I'm just pointing out its deep flaws. It is the reason why you just accept that there is the world, and there is the self. — apokrisis

Because phenomenologically that is the case, and that is where ethics resides.

I dunno. Suppressing the potential for tortured lives by addressing their contextual causes seems a lot more logical to me. Doing something about that is what would be actually logical wouldn't you say? — apokrisis

But again this is not personal value here. Suppressing the potential for tortured lives only benefits those who exist. And then we have the non-identity problem, and the related issue of lives that are inherently shitty - i.e. if they weren't shitty, they wouldn't be the same life.

But red china plates can and do exist. So there is both the general possibility and the literal actuality. — apokrisis

Well, sure, but we're talking about an individual china plate, just as we are talking about the advantages a potential, single person can have in non-existence. Does non-existence benefit anyone? I answer in the negative.

Everything else is gibberish, sorry.

Is it an objective fact that all we ever experience is the subjective?

So you can't talk about the possibility of you having a sibling in any plausible fashion unless it is in fact plausible that such a sibling might exist. And you say such a sibling doesn't exist - but how can you be so sure? Did you check in the basement where your parents have had him locked up all these years?

So sure, modal logic is good for reasoning as often the world is atomistically disjoint to a high degree of approximation. It is close enough to a collection of independent events fixed by a history for us to just argue in that fashion. You could have had a brother. But you don't.

I'm just pointing out that this is not a secure basis for the kind of grandly general argument you want to mount here. — apokrisis

I don't see how this is necessarily of cosmic importance. After all, if we're talking holism here, a little change doesn't alter the overall structure of the universe. Whether or not I exist does not change much cosmically. I've said this before, the ethics I work with is not necessarily of cosmic importance, rather, it's of person-al importance.

When I talk of possible people, then, I'm taking a person-oriented stance that focuses on advantages and disadvantages related to experience. So non-existence initially seems like it might be advantageous to the tortured child - yet clearly if this child does not exist, then there are no advantages to be found.

It is of course entirely rational. Bad and good encode a counterfactuality that makes it possible for there to be definitely something. Things can be one way because it is a real possibility they could be the other way.

I realise you find this problematic because it means life being bad means life can be good. But tough. You just have an illogical approach to this issue. — apokrisis

Well, sorry, you've just ignored the whole point of my post. Counterfactual reasoning in regards to non-existence only applies to the environment, not to the non-existent thing. The difference between the two possible worlds is measured by the causal importance of the subject thing in question. But personal values can only be derived from existing. Therefore, counterfactual reasoning in regards to personal values is rationally impossible. All other attempts to do so are merely fictions, i.e. a over-liberal use of everyday counterfactual reasoning (existing vs existing) to a quite different situation (existing vs not-existing).

If a red chinaplate does not exist, what color is it? It's an inane and irrational question: the plate isn't even able to even have a color to begin with in virtue of it not existing.

The whole purpose here was to show how we can still do ethics without the need for a counterfactual correlate, and in fact is preferable anyway since it focuses on the needs of a person instead of a dream future.

By literal non-existence I meant an absence of something. I can imagine having another sibling. This sibling is absent, non-existent. A pure possibility, whatever that manifests as.

What I'm not arguing for is holistic non-existence as a whole. Only what it means to be non-existent at the level of identity.

Alternatively, we can say that non-existence is characterized as the differences between possible worlds. But this places the focus of ethics on states of affairs, when I was distinctly trying to maintain a person-oriented ethics, i.e. something is good/bad for a person.

Was this from my response to your other post earlier regarding goals? — schopenhauer1

No.

I remember explaining a while back the difference between a totally ideal world in the preference satisfaction sense, and a totally united world in the Schopenhaurian sense, and I think these two ideas might help with your question..

Preference satisfaction ideal world: In an ideal world all preferences would be satisfied at a particular instant of time for the exact outcome one would want at that particular time (even the preference for an unknown amount of pain/misadventure that might enhance one's overall satisfaction). All dials would be adjusted accordingly. The idea of one's life needing to be a tragi-comedy would not even have to be entertained as one is just "satisfied" enough not to default to this coping aesthetic.

Schopenhauerian ideal world All would be stasis and not flux. There is no want or need as one would be completely unified with everything else. Thus a unitary existence where everything is everything is almost equivalent to everything is nothing. It is absolute completeness in the metaphysical sense. Nothing is lacking. — schopenhauer1

In regards to the preference satisfaction ideal world, this aligns with what I see to be the morality of childbirth - for childbirth to be moral, we must fulfill a certain standard for this child. If we cannot fulfill this standard, then we ought not have the child. Of course, this standard is debatable, and in my opinion cannot be fulfilled in this world. But others might disagree and believe the standard can be met. But that is a different topic.

In regards to the Schopenhauerean ideal world, I find this to be merely equivocating value. Just as certain Buddhist strains of thought make nirvana out to be a peaceful bliss in non-existence, the Schopenhauerean ideal world is one without flux or change. But this additionally means no thinking can occur, because nobody exists to think, since thinking is a process and therefore a kind of change. Thus Schopenhauer's ideal world as you describe it can be seen as the ultimate negation of life, and furthermore falls into the trap of reifying value where there is none - i.e. "grass-is-always-greener" thinking, or a need to anchor oneself in another reality. In this case, though, the other reality is unconceivable.

Schopenhauer may have been a pessimist, but if his ideal world is as you describe then he's still anchoring on to the idea of a redemptive staticity. While a full-going pessimist, in my view, negates any redemption. There's bad and not-bad. Never any good in our case. Equivocating not-bad as good reeks of desperation.

See if there's any openings around you for philosophy teachers, maybe in grade school or a community college. You might have to have education credentials, though.

Given the human propensity to ask "why" questions, existence seems to becomes irrevocably absurd.

Yes and no questions? Really? :-} — Barry Etheridge

I mean, that is binary, lol

Ayn Rand isn't exactly a great example of philosophy in action.

That is not the same with a Bigot. The Bigot pretends that he is willing to discuss something because he pretends he's open to be proven wrong but really his motive is to prove him self above others. To inflate his ego with the feeling of being right and another wrong. — intrapersona

Sounds like most bloggers.

such as? — intrapersona

Do we have an ethical priority to help those in need?

Accepting that I might be wrong doesn't preclude me from having an opinion to begin with, or to have a sense of exigency based on that opinion. The fact that I'm willing to discuss something means that I'm open to be proven wrong.

That's the difference between an open-minded and a close-minded person: whether or not they are willing to have their beliefs changed.

However, there are some things that have exigency and thus can't be legitimately postponed forever for the sake of discussion.

Are there not strategies used by humble people to avoid this kind of thing? — intrapersona

One strategy would be to not participate in discussion with them in the first place.

Though we have to be careful not to confuse bigotry with exigency.

Interesting. I knew that natural selection was not equivalent to evolution but was under the impression that it was the most powerful force in the evolutionary process.

In any case, evolutionary psychology is rife with appeals to "fitness" and natural selection as an explanation of behavior.

The admission that evolution is not equivalent to natural selection, however, opens up the possibility that evolution is a distinctly metaphysical aspect of the world, i.e. we should look at the world through the lens of evolution.

Yes, Ruse is the author I was referring to.

Oh, and fuck Dawkins, the pretentious and ignorant twat.

Interesting quote by Nagel, I believe I read it a long while back but forgot about it. Although I consider myself agnostic, I will admit that I hold a preference for atheism being true. There's also a book by Oxford that was recently released that apparently talks about how the theory of evolution was created in a context of scientific disenchantment and that Darwin's theory unfortunately evolved into Darwinism, or a secular religion of sorts.

They could take a drug and be moved to high heaven with spirituality and come back and say "nothing of it, it was all in my mind and completely meaningless... who said they needed some powerlines fixed" and go back to whatever they were doing. — intrapersona

I can see myself doing that. I'm pretty skeptical myself.

But in general the engineering crowd, or the STEMlord crowd for that matter, is filled with either a bunch of hyper-religious nuts or obnoxious nu atheists. The scientism is real, any philosophical discussion over dinner is cringey AF. Yo, what if, like, we're all one mind haha and it's just like energy dissipating in one string...that'd be awesome...

A lot of freshman choose engineering because they wanna make loads of money. They're weeded out pretty quickly once they realize that engineering's fucking hard and a lot of work. Nobody pays you 60+k out of college for a walk-in-the-park degree.

lol I'm an engineer. We tend to be kinda weird but an inability to deal with abstract information is definitely not one of our qualities.

Many professors are quite simply very strange, awkward human beings. — Thorongil

You should check out the engineering department, lol.

I found the engineering informed my philosophy stuff more than the other way round.
Classes on machine learning, computer vision techniques etc. — shmik

I've found that as well. Object-oriented programming in Java complemented my excursions into analytic metaphysics.

Currently electrical engineering, but I'm switching to computer engineering next semester. I'm also minoring in philosophy.

I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon. I recently binged four books off that website, all philosophy-related. The first was a book on process philosophy by Rescher, another was on meta-ethics, and the last two I got at a bargain price of $10 combined, both on artificial intelligence (the science and philosophy behind it).

I don't know why I bought these to be honest. It's not like college offers me much time to read anything anyway. At least the latter two books are somewhat related to my degree.

So questioning can stop (because more questioning would be fruitless) when we have identified a logically complementary limits on ontological possibility. That is simply what intelligibility consists of. — apokrisis

This reminds me of Kant, except instead you're a realist (like me) and that the noumenon is just unintelligibility.

Leibniz is an idealist. A monad is basically a mind. It's a "windowless container", accessible only by the outside by a special monad known as God. God's creation act, according to Leibniz, was that of forming all the monads.

How would I describe consciousness?

I would argue that consciousness is the presence of a world.

Metzinger has some interesting thoughts on this:

For minimal consciousness:

• Constraint 1: Globality - consciousness is globally available for many different functions
• Constraint 2: Presentationality - consciousness implies presence, or an experience of "now"-ness
• Constraint 3: Transparency - a phenomenological concept that implies epistemic darkness, or an inability to explore the roots of consciousness itself by consciousness alone. I would personally call this "limited flexibility", or what Metzinger calls "autoepistemic closure".

For a robust sense of self:

• Substantiality - the feeling that one could exist all by oneself, see Avicenna's "floating man" thought experiment.
• Essence - the perception that one possesses an "innermost core" of essential, unchanging properties
• Individuality - the feeling that one has a unique personal psychological identity.

For a more robust consciousness:

• Constraint 4: Covolved Holism - i.e. "nested" structures-within-structures (pace Salthe)
• Constraint 5: Dynamicity - change and duration, existing within the background of presence (constraint 2)
• Constraint 6: Perspectivalness, or the relationship between a stable "self" and a stable "environment"

There are more constraints and much more detail in the link above. It's a great example of modern neuro-phenomenology.

I agree, emotion (or passion) is a crucial aspect of inquiry. We wouldn't inquire if we weren't at least curious, after all.

Furthermore, many philosophical positions are directly related to emotions. Something tells me existentialism wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have some need for ego-validation, or if we didn't feel fear or pain or even pleasure. It just wouldn't matter. In fact I doubt any inquiry of any kind would have taken off had we not needed something. Science in particular seems to manifest as practical knowledge, philosophy therapeutic. But both stem from some degree of curiosity. And of course we can't have this strict demarcation either.

There are ideas that make rational sense but are too emotionally upsetting to be entertained. — Bitter Crank

"But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them" - Nietzsche.

Whether the future looks bright and interesting or bleak and dull—and what we should then do about it—is determined by emotions over which we do not have much control. For instance, the inextinguishably cheerful, happy person will probably not settle on anti-natalism as their philosophical stance. They may see the point of the antinatalist, but life seems to them too good to deny.

As Freud said, “we are not masters of our own houses” and that includes what we think. — Bitter Crank

Honestly this is why I think trying to convince other people of certain positions can be an exercise in futility. Like attempting to convince a creationist of evolutionary theory. It just ain't gonna happen. People quite literally see the world in different incompatible ways (again, Nietzsche).