You take life so seriously! Why do you object so strenuously when I put it in terms that you claim to support - framing it as an absurdity? — apokrisis

Because you're wanting to make this absurdity moral. Why, because it's naturally occurring? You're painting this picture to me that looks as if we all just entropified everything would be totally fine. Entropy is not moral. Experience is what makes morality in the first place.

Ah, dualism. Or are you finally going to define "mind" in objective and physicalist fashion here?

What limit to caring now marks your usual slippery slope metaphysics now we have introduced this sly boundary term of "sentience"? — apokrisis

Are you seriously going to argue that we ought to care about pebbles? There is a difference between things that have a mind and that which doesn't. We don't know this boundary, and it's probably a gradiance anyway. But things don't start mattering morally until they have the ability to have frustrated preferences, to be able to suffer. And so we must be reasonably cautious.

Yep, let's pose crazy scenarios as a last resort when our arguments are falling apart. — apokrisis

Yep, let's ignore legitimate scenarios because it threatens the cohesion of our worldview. :-}

Yep. Just turn everything I have said into something different. Chalk up another victory for yourself. Imagine the round of applause. — apokrisis

woooo go me :-}

Look! One of your oranges is a tangelo! Crikey, what now? Does the number three no longer exist? — apokrisis

:-}

But for "object" to be a meaningful term in a metaphysical discussion, it needs the reciprocal context of that which is its "other". — apokrisis

Not necessarily. Being-identical-to, existence, etc are no reciprocating properties. You can't have the property of non-existence...otherwise you'd exist. You can't be not-identical to yourself...otherwise you wouldn't even be.

You are stuck in your realism which is a dualist subjectivism - naive realism in other words. There just isn't a problem for you in dividing mind and world, observer and observables, in brute and unaccounted-for fashion. — apokrisis

How? You always tell other people they're dualists and that there's a problem with this but then never explain why it's problematic, only affirm that your position is right. Something something semiotics.

Pragmatism (of the Peircean kind) is all about bridging that gap by granting the ability to care to the whole of nature - even if we then wind up with "the Universe" which in fact seems to care about very little beyond arriving at its Heat Death. Bastard! — apokrisis

I might accuse you for being dualistic by separating the rest of the world from the agents that are part of the world. "The Universe doesn't care"...it does care in certain contexts when we're talking about sentients that are manifested by the Universe. Unless you want to claim that the manifest image is actually the scientific image.

You can't just dismiss the possibility of a soul, by saying it seems to be highly unlikely. You may be one who lives your life making decisions based on what "seems" to be the case, but this is philosophy, and we don't take "seems to me" as justification for any such assertion. — Metaphysician Undercover

From a more naturalistic point of view, I can. There is no being 100% sure (even about this claim). Truth is estimated by likelihood.

And in fact we do use "seems to me" to be a preliminary for something. It seems to you that my argument is wrong. It does not seem this way to me.

Huh? Isn't the number line continuous ... as an infinity of infinitesimals? — apokrisis

In bowl 1 you have 3 oranges. In bowl 2 you have 4 oranges. It is an objective fact that there are 2 bowls and 7 oranges, and an objective fact that the two bowl's contents are different in virtue of the discrete amount of oranges in them.

Properties don't just disappear just because they come from a more general source. The number 3 is still the number 3.

Or what they share is a state of individuation sufficient to achieve the general purpose of some actual boundary condition. They are X enough (in being sufficiently, self-groundingly, not not-X). — apokrisis

Wittgenstein all over again, man. You're talking about classes of things. But classes are identified by their essential properties. The properties that you must have to be an x, or, in the case of Wittgenstein, the properties you must have to be similar to a sufficiently large amount of objects that are already seen as a set.

We exist in a highly individuated state of being as a result of our rather particular thermal scale. We sit on a planet that orbits a star in the middle of a void which is nothing but a radiation bath 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. So a classical, reductionist, object-orientated approach to reality modelling can take a lot for granted. — apokrisis

But you're assuming that properties are like those you see on your office desk. When really there shouldn't be any kind of limit like that. 2.7 degrees above absolute zero is a property. We can identify it. Being a billion miles away is a property. We can predicate it. Being general is a property. We can understand what it means to be general.

Furthermore objects need not be limited to the boring office desk pens, papers, coffee mugs and staplers.

So vagueness is not-not vagueness. Or in other words, it is at the other end of the spectrum, as distant as it is physically possible to get, from the crisp. — apokrisis

At what point do properties no longer classify as properties? Properties (universals) are just the way things are. If something is general, say, the universe, the the universe is general. It is in a state. The state of affairs is always crisp. The objects and their parasitic properties within need not be.

But who cares about that level of individuation? (And in the systems view, you have to have an answer to that - you have to show there is some reason to care.) — apokrisis

Our disinterest in something doesn't make it not-true. You're more focused on pragmatics, I'm more focused on what's actually true in the correspondence sense. Not-caring about something doesn't make it go away.

Why would judgments of good or bad be relevant to my point of view? Surely my point is that morality - as it pragmatically exists in the real world - is beyond such obviously absolutist and subjective terminology. — apokrisis

Then it quite simply is not morality. Morality is a guide to action, based on what we ought and ought not do. Without absolutism you end up getting either arbitrary subjectivism or inertness (i.e. an inability to decide what to do - nevertheless an action in the objective sense).

Again, if I had to judge flourishing in terms of some universal and absolute telos, I would point to the Universe's thermodynamic imperative. Flourishing in the natural sense - the sense we can actually see and measure as what reality is all about - is the maximisation of entropification. — apokrisis

But this equivocates flourishing. Seems to me that people decide what is flourishing and what is not, not the universe at a cosmic scale. Indeed the addition of a mind to the world's inventory creates a sort of world-inside-of-a-world, in which a person can sit around all day and nevertheless flourish despite not creating as much entropy as he would if he were playing soccer or something like that. The mind, the ego, becomes a microcosm of the world.

So "goodness" would be defined by a system being good at that. And "badness" by a failure to degrade entropy gradients. — apokrisis

You're equivocating ability to perform an action, i.e. accomplishment, with normative good. This is why Mackie argued that moral properties probably don't exist outside of our minds, because they'd be "alien" to the rest of the world.

A hammer is good at hammering nails, but that doesn't make it morally good. A gun is good at killing people, but that doesn't make it morally good nor morally good to kill people. The point being made is that the mind, being a microcosm, has its own rules, its own system. It doesn't follow the same rules that a general model of the entire universe does. This is why non-natural properties ("subjective concepts") can exists in a mind but not in the rest of the world. They are endemic to a mind.

A fighter pilot - able to get through 14,000 gallons per hour once he kicks on the after-burners - must be the highest form of life that exists on the planet. No wonder they are our heroes. ;) — apokrisis

No offense but really you need to step down from this holistic picture for second and realize that nobody but yourself actually considers fighter pilots to be the highest form of life, and if they did, it would be for their apparent heroism (risk)/sacrifice and not for their entropification. You can't explain everything using your holistic metaphysical model. There exist pockets and corners in reality that don't quite match up with the rest of the world in the global sense, like a bug in a computer program. Separating yourself from this particular zone we call Earth in favor for a holistic picture ends up ignoring Earth entirely.

It's not too difficult to see how, despite what you claim, many or most of our commitments are explicitly fighting against entropy. The focus of morals is on sentient welfare, and to focus on something else is to completely lose sight of what morality even is.

But then plants have feelings too. And then why shouldn't we respect the rights of the minerals of the earth, the gases of the atmosphere? — apokrisis

What, no, plants don't have feelings, neither do minerals. I'm talking about sentient organisms, the only things of moral weight.

Say you're an animal that just got caught and is about to be roasted on a fire. You beg and plead to be let go, but in the end the hunter calmly tells you that what he is doing is perfectly acceptable, because he's increasing entropy. Furthermore he tells you that you ought to accept this and be glad you are being roasted alive.

It's what said elsewhere: if there exists any value independent of people, we shouldn't give a shit about it.

Yes, we progressives ought not only eliminate ourselves, but eliminate all animals (as they are barbaric consumers too), and even all plants (as they too show no respect for minerals and gases). — apokrisis

No, we ought to eliminate our dependency on cannibalism.

And yet it seems all a mite ... impractical? — apokrisis

So you're a moral conventionalist. Our abilities dictate our responsibilities. A great way to excuse immoral habitual behavior. History dictates value.

No thanks.

I don't really see how your process system view solves the riddle. Numbers seem to be digital: you have only a discrete amount of objects in a given set. Sure you can break the objects up, start talking in terms of fractions, change your positional number system, etc. But at the end of the day there's still only a certain amount of objects in a certain domain.

So if we are talking about a white thing - a thing that partakes in the property of "whiteness" - a systems view is that the real question here is "Is the thing white enough?". — apokrisis

This only means that there has to be a sufficient amount of qualities to be called "white" - Wittgenstein's family resemblance all over again. Things overlap. A is similar to B, but not similar to C. B is similar to both A and C. They aren't identical but neither are they totally different. They share qualities, i.e. universals

So conventional ontology is usefully simple - it treats the world as a collection of existents, a state of affairs, a collection of formed objects that thus only partake in predicate type logic arrangements.

But a holistic ontology talks instead about such existence as a state of self-regulating persistence. The whole is forming its parts - the very parts needed to compose that formative whole. Logically, it is a closed reciprocal deal where universals cause individuation and individuation contributes to there being the steady flow of particular events that results in the emergence of the regularities we call universals. — apokrisis

You deny conventional ontology yet retain predication by talking about a state of self-regulating persistence, wholes and parts\, etc. You're still referring to these as something that fills the subject in a predicative statement. These subjects have properties in themselves because they are of a certain state: a state is vague when it has no "crisp" as you like to say properties - yet vagueness would be a property itself. Any sort of adjective is going to either refer to a specific property or a collection of properties abstracted into a unified concept.

It's hard to consider something that doesn't make sense, sorry. You said that existents are properties, i.e. a bundle theory of objects. But this does not address the theory of universals at all, for it's a substratum/composition question. You argued that things are similar because they have some sort of putative relationship to each other that makes them similar (as I understood extensionality), without explaining why these things have these relationships in the first place. It's completely arbitrary.

In the example you give, for example, % one has a circle to the left of a slanted line as does %, — Terrapin Station

SInce both %s have a circle to the left of a slanted line, they both have circles, they both have slanted lines, and they both have a relationship between the circle and slanted lines. You just described universals.

Do you think that the flourishing of society is, in itself, good? i.e. no matter what the discontents think, they're wrong when they wonder if society maybe shouldn't keep going?

For example, a society may inevitably be based on the consumption of other animals - a carnivorous society. Being the progressives we are we might look down on such a society; such a society should be abandoned, eliminated, because its members eat other animals (organic cannibalism).

Russell said it better than I could.

When we identify two things as being of a certain quality, they are of a certain quality, that is, a numerically-distinct and unitary quality. One quality. The basis of adjectives.

Without universals, we're left with two white objects with no way to explain why they are white, or how we come to know that they are both white. It contradicts even our own language: the two things are white. They are under the category of "white". Members of the category are such because they instantiate a universal. Without universals there's no reason to be in a category. There's no reason why x is a square and y is a circle, or why they appear to be different. Difference requires a difference in composition which can only be done by property differences. Without universals, there is no way to differentiate between a white object and a black object, a square object or a circle object.

Those properties, which are identical to the materials/structures/processes are not numerically identical in two different things. — Terrapin Station

And this, I contend, it impossible to maintain if you also maintain that they are similar in some respects, for numerical identity between properties is necessary for a similarity to be. I don't understand how you go about explaining why and how things are able to be identified as being a certain universal concept, such as red, square, 1.346 g, etc, without believing that the reason we have these concepts in the first place is that the objects they correspond to have a certain ontological structure. How do we identify some two things as being red if they aren't both red, i.e. being a certain way, a duplicative way?

Glad you liked it.

Because by altering our perception we alter how we perceive. — saw038

Just as long as we don't delude ourselves. It's less about altering our perceptions and more about changing our response to the perceptions. Whether there is a difference between the two, I'm not sure. There doesn't seem to be any "right" way to react to the world, but certainly it does seem to be the case that many people limit their perceptions in order to limit the reactions they have. In these cases it seems as though a lifestyle is only compatible with certain beliefs or lack thereof - existential angst manifests as an inability to continue living as one has habitually in the past given what one now knows.

That's complete nonsense. The idea that either there's some abstractly existing, numerically identical property that's somehow instantiated in multiple things, or resemblance is "random" simply makes zero sense. — Terrapin Station

Re there being a "reason for the ways things are," that's the case with universals, too. No matter how many reasons you give behind something, no matter what it is, you get to a point where "it's just the way things are." You can't keep giving an infinity of reasons one step back and then another step back and then another step back, etc., right? — Terrapin Station

Right. The primitives do the work. But in this case you lack sufficient primitives. Relations are ad hoc, brute facts without any real reason. Whereas a unitary, single thing, a universal, explains this far better without being so ad hoc, since it's grounded in one single thing instead of trying to ground it in multiple totally different, yet somehow the same, tropes or classes or something.

What's incoherent is saying that they're not numerically different in terms of the quality or properties. And you have to be saying that the properties in questino are numerically identical or you're not talking about universals. You'd be a nominalist then instead. — Terrapin Station

No, properties are numerically identical because they're universals, transcendental or immanent, take your pick.

Objects are numerically different but qualitatively similar/different in virtue of the numerically-identical universals they share.

You don't need an explanation for that because no two properties are literally identical. Again, you'd simply be reifying type abstractions that we make. Reifying conceptual categories we create as individuals in our minds. — Terrapin Station

Well of course we don't have to say that every book instantiates the universal "book". But they are sufficiently similar to each other as to warrant us to call them books, i.e. their constitution is similar enough, i.e. their basic properties. There's scarce and abundant properties.

It couldn't be more simple. They both meet your criteria, you mental, conceptual abstraction, for calling them "round" things. — Terrapin Station

Are our own mental abstractions universals across humanity? Are we not all utilizing similar abstraction constructs? Are our mental ideas not in some sense universal, allowing language to flourish?

You've removed universals from the world, but only have relocated them in the mind as conceptual constructs.

If Jesus indeed was resurrected, then it wasn't Jesus. It was Jesus2.0. The definition of death is the ceasing of biological functions, and unless we posit the existence of a soul, which seems to me highly unlikely even in the Aristotelian sense of it, we're left with the view that Jesus was re-animated somehow, and a new set of consciousness created, one different from the previous versions. Jesus couldn't have been resurrected. If the story is even true (which I think it not), he was psychologically cloned.

The only thing with that is that "societies should flourish" or "it's better for societies to flourish" (or whatever similar formulation) isn't objective. — Terrapin Station

It's also so general as to be practically useless in terms of ascribing action, since what makes a society flourish will depend on who you're asking. And of course there's some who would deny that society should flourish - we call those people discontents, who have a morality of there own entirely dissimilar to that of everyone else's.

In the example you give, for example, % one has a circle to the left of a slanted line as does %, while that's not the case for and @. They're not numerically identical circles--obviously, which makes them not identical. It's simply (degree of) resemblance.

Why would you think that o and o are circles by instantiating a numerically identical property of circularity that exists who knows where and that obtains in those circles by who knows what means so that it's just ONE circularity property even though we're talking about two different things? That's just incoherent. It's reifying the fact that we make mental type abstractions. — Terrapin Station

Because without universals similarity or resemblance becomes arbitrary. There is no reason for the way things are - they just are. Brute fact. Language does not constrain reality, reality constrains our language.

There are indeed multiple different things - they are numerically different but not qualitatively different. When you say something is round, why is it round? Why is it a certain way? Without universals, there cannot be any explanation as to why two properties happen to be identical in nature. Two things are round - without universals there doesn't seem to be any way to explain why these two things are both identified as being round. There's no explanation as to why the one round trope is identical to another round trope. What makes them round tropes and not something else?

Without universals, the world becomes totally disorganized and messy. There's no structure to it all, no reason why anything can be reliably predicted or predicated on.

What stops us from committing suicide? — saw038

In most cases I would argue that what stops us form committing suicide is an inherent instinct to survive that overrides any higher-level thought processes. Humans are, as far as I know, the only species on Earth that has a rather high percentage of self-inflicted deaths, but this percentage is still rather low in comparison to other ways of dying or to those who continue to exist whether it is justified or not.

This may come across as rather harsh but I honestly think that most people, perhaps myself included, would be personally better off not living. It's not my call nor my responsibility to enact this, but nevertheless I think that if people were able to objectively and honestly evaluate their condition, a very large amount of people wouldn't see the use in continuing - they would realize that reality has little to offer them. This is where the whole "instinct" factor comes into play, in particular fear and anxiety, a form of motivation that appears from the void which control us, forcing us to consent to a raw deal.

If you believe there is a purpose to life then I can understand your reason for wanting to stay.

But for those that believe life has no purpose, or better yet, that it is something that is filled with continually suffering. Why continue? — saw038

Generally suicide is a difficult thing to accomplish. You have to be in the right mind-set to even consider ending your own life without having an uncontrollable aversion to the thought of annihilation. So the way I look at it is that life generally is not really worth it but death, in particular suicide, is something too difficult to accomplish to even consider as a legitimate option. We're all going to die anyway, dissolving into the infinite void in which we came.

But how to live in this mindset? In this case, I think there is a phenomenal difference between living and surviving. In both cases the system persists, but the latter involves some element of risk. In my opinion the authentic existential life is one filled with risks, dilemmas and perhaps even outright disregard for the well-being of the system itself. A chaotic life of rebellion and aesthetic expression, like a star going supernova. There's nothing more beautiful than a star that explodes in a brilliant light display, and there's nothing more authentic than a person who willingly exposes herself to danger, living on the edge, prepared to supernova at any given time.

At the same time, there's nothing more noble than a person who sacrifices themselves for the sake of others. The authentic person is not one who rains chaos around her, but one who brings order to the chaos by immersing herself in it. To be perpetually at war against the universe, to not play by the rules, to ignore the signals trying to force her to stop. To be an expression of pure power, manifesting as a deep concern for the well-being of others and a hatred of the oppressive environment.

We need not go around on our motorcycles and leather jackets, drinking diesel and fighting ISIS while high on cocaine to be authentic, although that certainly sounds pretty badass. All we need to do is not be complacent, to not accept the norm, to reject the constraints imposed on us, to not only live but to survive. We must go outside our comfort zone while maintaining our responsibility to others as an ethical priority - the best way of doing this, in my opinion, is to rebel primarily in the mind, for the mind is where the self is, and let our physical bodies (ignoring any dualistic/monistic metaphysical ideas for now) operate within the world by helping other people. The best way of surviving then is to have a mental rebellion that corresponds to our ethical duties - to help other people not only out of ethical duty but out of spite, rebellion, and desire.

We also should consider prioritizing our mental rebellion over physical rebellion because we'll never actually be able to free ourselves from the physical. We have to eat, sleep, drink, pay taxes, etc. Starving ourselves to death is not tenable even if it is rebellion. But mentally continuing to exist despite what the universe throws at you is. It's making do with what we have, rebelling as much as we can like a child does to its parent - never able to quite accomplish the overthrow but beautiful in any sense.

So there you have it - I have no environmental ("natural") reason to continue to exist. But I at least like to think that I have an existential, personal, and authentic reason to survive.

But what makes it the case that they are similar, other than the possession of identical properties? Is it just a brute fact? Why is @@ similar to @ @ but different to %%? How do you account for identity, if not by recognizing the attributes of things?

Just from wikipedia: "In logic, extensionality, or extensional equality, refers to principles that judge objects to be equal if they have the same external properties."

Are these properties not universals? How else should be interpret this as?

If it's a brute fact that things are similar in certain ways, then fine. But I think universals provide a much more useful and appealing theory, especially when it comes to causation.

1. involuntary: most of us like freedom, and dislike being harmed

2. subjective: (1) is not objective, and only has meaning in terms of us beings that dis/like things

3. morals: us liking freedom and disliking being harmed is relevant for morals

4. therefore morals are subjective (in part or whole) — jorndoe

I disagree with your analysis on 2. Certainly freedom and harm are not only personal matters but also abstract matters, that nevertheless depend on people to be instantiated. Freedom and harm, pleasure and pain, yada-yada, matter because people matter.

So in a sense, these values are person-dependent, but this does not necessarily etch out objectivity or realism. For we can still value a population of people who have these values, i.e. a state-of-affairs; classic totalist consequentialism.

The color green exists only within the minds of perceivers. There is no "green" floating around in the darkness of un-perceived space. And yet it would be wrong to deny that colors exist objectively - they exist but in a limited, constrained way. Similarly, value may be person-dependent but that need not make it subjective. We can just as easily say that if value exists, then people exist, just as if colors exist, then perceivers exist.

It's a common form of psychologism that is the placement of properties on objects that don't have them by themselves: sugar is sweet, the apple is red, pleasure is good, etc. And yet we would still say it's an objective fact that sugar is subjectively sweet, or that the apple is subjectively red, or that pleasure is subjectively good. This is why I think labeling anything mind-dependent as entirely subjective is too flimsy to be tenable. If we value pleasure, then it is an objective fact that we value pleasure. Therefore, it is an objective fact that pleasure is valuable in virtue of there being persons available for this. So long as there are people, pleasure is objectively valuable.

For those who live, Epictetus' recommendation is sensible--do the best with what you have and take the rest as it happens. — Ciceronianus the White

I read the Echiridion. There were some useful ideas in it but overall I was struck by how many "do's" and "do not's" there were, as if we had to jump through so many hoops just to maintain some element of virtue. The resolutions only seemed to illuminate the problems more.

My gut feeling is that we would all (men and women alike) rather be other-oppressed than be failed self-liberators. If we fail in our own liberation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we fail at overthrowing our oppressor, well, they were just too oppressive to beat. Not our fault! — Bitter Crank

But doesn't liberation require some sort of oppression? i.e. there would be no need for liberation if oppression was not the case?

We agree nothing can't come from nothing. Which is why I support metaphysical positions which argue existence arises via the constraint of pure potentiality, called variously apeiron, tao, vagueness, firstness, indeterminacy, quantum foam, etc, depending on whose metaphysical system it is. And chaotic everythingness is another attempt at a descriptive term for the same idea. — apokrisis

But you're being inconsistent with your use of "existence". You said that nothing can't come from nothing, and yet say that a constraint of pure potentially is where existence comes from, but pure potentiality obviously exists for us to predicate it, so are there different kinds of existence to you, or are you just talking about the particularization of the general, i.e. a transformation of something that already exists? If the latter, then the apeiron is not where existence comes from, it's where particulars come from.

If you had a strong argument, it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. You wouldn't need to pile disaster upon disaster. — apokrisis

So the disaster, catastrophe, tragedy, etc are material arguments. You're sweeping them away as if they're unimportant yet they still are an astute observation, something that cannot easily be denied or justified, as if the seriousness of them isn't implied in the definitions. In fact, they're what I see to be the pessimist's trump card - if nothing else convinces someone, the idea of horrible pain and terror might, not in a threatening way but in an illuminating way. The realization that one is a ticking time bomb. It's not a crutch as you seem to believe it to be, it's an observable and real fact. There cannot be poetry after Auschwitz.

it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. — apokrisis

So you accept that everyday existence is mundane (i.e. dull, unoriginal, repetitive, boring, tedious, annoying...everything I have been saying for the past week or so). A direct contradiction to what you had previously said regarding the "richness" of everyday experience.

Now who's going on circles? Cause I sure as hell am being as consistent as I can.

umm

And what is this everythingness other than pure possibility, what you just denied was the case? What is everythingness?

To claim that such an outcome is inevitable is nuts. Being lost in the woods for a night doesn't even sound traumatic, just embarrassing. — apokrisis

Being lost in the woods when it's negative ten degrees out and snowing and you have no tent or warm clothes because you barely survived a plane crash in the Siberian tundra. Not a walk in the park, in fact probably a death sentence (just look at Stalingrad - and they even had resources).

Isn't that what they say about quantum mechanics? You can't conjure up reality out of pure possibility? — apokrisis

I never said that. I said that there has to be some sort of hypostasis, the Aristotelian Being of Pure Actuality, for something to appear. "Nothing" is incoherent.

Glad to know you have such a loose definition of objects. The vaguer your position, the less it can be challenged. — apokrisis

Or, I had a very general definition of objects. Remember that I never made any ontological realist claims about objects. I'm actually in favor of mereological nihilism.

And you could say the universe must be full of entities with higher IQs. But we can say if they are in the vicinity, they're not waving back. (Just picking up the occasional country hick for a good probe.) — apokrisis

Probably cause other planets are really freaking far away and it's highly unlikely we'll ever be able to differentiate between natural stellar radiation and intelligent communication.

How can I argue against your monotheistic Pessimism without pointing out that there is the second thing of optimism, and then beyond that, the third thing which is a neutral balance? — apokrisis

Because you're not espousing a neutral balanced position. You're implicitly favoring life - only a nihilist could actually argue that life is neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, neither worthy of continuation nor worthy of ending. Valueless. Any other kind of value tips the balance in one way, either life-affirming or life-denying.

Life just is rich and varied in that way. — apokrisis

Confusing, more like. Awkward.

That is why I object to your habit of monotonic exaggeration. I could focus on just one part of my total umwelt at the moment - like a slight achiness in my back - at the expense of others, like a slight sense of satisfaction in my stomach. I could make my back the center of my world (and ouch, now I'm really starting to notice it). Or instead I could be more honest about my phenomenal state and say in fact it is quite naturally mixed at all times. It is neither up, down or even neutral, in any simplistic fashion. — apokrisis

Right, but that's not the pessimistic claim. Again, the claim is that pain is intrinsic to existence. Sure, you might experience pleasures as well as pains, nobody is denying that. But what we do deny are that these pleasures are guaranteed, long-lasting, and satisfying. Schopenhauer's entire philosophy revolves largely around the idea that the Will (an ever-striving presence) coerces us to do things. We need things, we want things, we're never quite satisfied. Dissatisfaction and death are structurally-guaranteed to living systems.

It's a mixed bag, like you said. But nevertheless the painful ingredients are always there, while we have to consciously add pleasurable experiences. The Will, the dissatisfaction, the fear of death, is an ever-present rumbling underneath the rest of our experiences, like a drum beat or rhythm. The large majority of Buddhist eschatology is focused on removing this problem and achieving nirvana - Buddhists realize that life just is suffering. That's what it is, minimally, minus an extra additional accidental or contingent features. You cannot live without pain of some sort, while you can live without pleasure, and indeed many people unfortunately do. Pain is guaranteed.

So that's the aesthetic argument, and also a material argument because the constant hum gets annoying and burdensome to deal with. Life is a pain in the ass, and I can say this because I'm not currently worried about starving to death. I'm lucky enough to have a relatively untraumatic experience to be able to reflect upon the overall human condition and come to the conclusion I have.

Of course I accept that if I were currently being crushed in a car crash, or I was out of neurobiological equilibrium and in a depressive fugue, then that internal variety might be a lot more one-dimensional. — apokrisis

Then why do you ignore this? Is this not a facet of instrumentality? We exists because other organisms suffered horrible pain. Our ancestors ate animals alive. The realization that your life is not justification for the plight of these innocents is what instrumentality is.

But if we are talking about typical mental state, then it is better characterised as vague - an awful lot of nothing much in particular. — apokrisis

I disagree substantially. Schopenhauer argued that if you introspect you will find the presence of the Will. You will find yourself dissatisfied, anxious, stressed. You will find yourself pressured to do something, which is instrumentality as well. The use of another thing.

Is there no evidence in the world of emergence? — apokrisis

I don't see what you're saying here. I agree there are emergent phenomenon, but these nevertheless are dependent upon a more basic ontological level. They supervene on it. You can't drive to work without a car, you can't have an object without brute facts behind it. Somewhere along the line is the primitive that does all the metaphysical work.

On what exactly - their lack of predicates? — apokrisis

Well, yes. An object isn't just something that we can hold in our hands. Black holes, parasites, staplers and armies are all objects. They all act as a subject of a predicative statement. Had they had no properties then we wouldn't be able to predicate them. This is the fun little "hole" problem all over again - do holes exists or are they just the lack of something else?

Neuroscience when it comes to measuring information density. Economics when it comes to measuring ecological footprint. — apokrisis

But surely you're not going to limit yourself to the immediately-accessible (Earth). That's just bad science. Unless there's a good reason to believe that humans are as good as information processing can get - in which case the AI dream is a pipe dream.

I'm just saying that a rather more sophisticated analysis is needed than "life sucks". — apokrisis

Okay: life sucks for the majority of sentient organisms that aren't lucky enough to get out relatively scar-free.

That's how things go - polarisation. Pessimism must frame itself in terms of what it is not - optimism. It has to construct this "other" as a mafia to justify its own desire to become a mafia too.

This is what I criticise. You have to exaggerate the strength of your opposition so as to legitimate yourself as its counter. You want to leave bystanders no option but to declare for either Team Optimist ir Team Pessimist. Philosophy then becomes the loser because your slippery-slopism admits to no shades of grey. — apokrisis

Actually my position is realism, but I call myself a pessimist because other people see my views as "pessimistic".

Nominalism has to frame itself in terms of what it is not - universalism. Atheism has to frame itself in terms of what it is not - theism. What's the problem here?

And no, we're not the mafia, because we're not forcing people to conform. If optimism was a true philosophical position then it wouldn't feel the need to smack people on the head every other day to remind them of its correctness.

But of course what I am "exactly arguing" is something else. I am arguing that optimism and pessimism - to the degree they are natural - would exist as the bounding limits which then make possible the variety of all the feelings that lie in-between. So now I would focus on the nature of that balance, that hopefully fruitful balance, that lies in-between.

If you can point out a flaw in this logic, go ahead. — apokrisis

The flaw is that you're explicitly favoring (affirming) this "in-between" between optimism and pessimism, thus making it a quasi-optimism. While if you were completely honest with your assessment it would be utterly neutral. If it's indeed neutral and not worthy of being called "good" or "bad" then there would be no way of evaluating it at all.

You are not really listening. My point has been that feeling bad, feeling good, feeling neutral, are all part of life's rich and varied experience. — apokrisis

There we have the optimism-in-disguise. "Life's rich and varied experience." as if there's some other-worldly aesthetics to it all.

So the very idea of "eliminating unhappiness" is nonsensical on its own. The question is really would you want to eliminate "feeling" in some generalised sense? Can you offer a strong philosophical argument at this deeper ontological level? — apokrisis

Because happiness, bliss, joy, etc are simply the lack of suffering. Think about it: if you're not suffering, what are feeling (assuming you're conscious). Are you happy? Are you joyful? If you're not happy and not joyful, then you must have something keeping you from feeling this way - thus you are stressed, anxious, panic-ing, suffering, etc.

People are severely deficient in their self-evaluations. It's a psychological fact.

It answers the question in terms of the emergence of a dynamical symmetry state, an equilibrium balance. An equilibrium has emergent stability because it is a state where continuing (microstate)change no longer makes a (macrostate)change.

There is an entire science of (thermo)dynamics now. — apokrisis

Emergence from what? poof! existence, ta-da!

So if the universe has the possibility to be clumpy and object like, this requires in matching fashion that it has the possibility for empty spaces. Each possibility necessitates the other. And then if this dichotomy is freely expressed over all scales, then you will have objects and voids of every possible size. — apokrisis

Objects need not be "clumpy" to be objects. Again this depends on what you consider to be objects. Voids can be objects, since we can predicate them.

And humans are measurably the most concentrated forms of intelligence. — apokrisis

How do you know this?

(So if we ask what the subject matter of philosophy essentially is - even if it is only now becoming apparent - then it is thermodynamics. :) ) — apokrisis

I mean I know this was more tongue-in-cheek than anything but if that's the case then everything is thermodynamics which makes it an empty term.

You can talk about such dynamical balances as "mediocre" or "imperfect". But that just shows your metaphysics is fundamentally unrealistic. You are not even understanding the message that metaphysics wants to deliver when it comes to the (self)organisation of nature. — apokrisis

I don't think you understand how not all axiology or aesthetics is realist in nature. Any value is going to be subjective, depending on the existence of a mind. This changes nothing.

For anything to exist - phenomenologically - there must be the extremes which together allow the spectrum of what then actually is. — apokrisis

And yet there is distinct shift between pleasure and pain, a shift from what we like and what we dislike, what we want and what we don't want. There is no gray area that isn't accompanied by some sort of anxiety.

Perhaps you're thinking more about moods than brute sensory experience. But this changes very little. Indeed suffering seems to be an emotional experience that is almost always accompanied by physical pain. We cannot be happy when we experience great and unrequested pain. Yet curiously we can feel great pleasure and yet still feel empty and cold inside. The more generalized principle then would be that we have two pressing concerns: avoid painful stimuli and cultivate pleasurable stimuli, and neither are guaranteed.

I can't help but wonder that if you got lost in the woods one day and faced a cold winter's night, if you wouldn't reconsider the duality of what I'm saying here. Your metaphysics, no matter what it's validity is, would have very little importance. Again people like to think they are complex, in control of who they are, and powerful, but when faced with the aforementioned scenario they inevitably fall into mania or depression. "Where is you God metaphysics now?"

Sadly, it just is juvenile. — apokrisis

Patronizing other people doesn't help. For some reason these kinds of debates always end up with everyone getting so butthurt.

If there were some evidence that this "philosophical" tendency is instead the troubled path to a more positive outcome, then fine. Let's hear more about that then. — apokrisis

Coming from the opposite vein, pessimists are fed up with the system. As Schop1 said elsewhere, there is a kind of "optimistic mafia" installed in society: you WILL be happy!, you WILL love life!, you WILL support your country!, you WILL smile at death!, you WILL suck up your internal struggles, etc. Although the optimistic mafia analogy works well I'd rather just use the words "affirmative" and "negative". Any affirmative lifestyle "affirms" life - it takes life as a good thing to be produced and maintained. And any "negative" lifestyle calls this assumption into question in various degrees. From the negative perspective, social optimism is rather similar to fascism - make the perfect happy bubble and get everyone to conform to it, because everyone secretly knows just how fragile happiness is. You can't have unconformers. Which is exactly what you seem to be arguing here.

But if people are going to make general claims about futility, instrumentality and self-delusion - seek to impose their "truths" on my existence - then they better be prepared for a robust argument. They are making it personal. — apokrisis

The pessimist isn't personally attacking you. They're pointing out flaws in the system. Your argument is akin to the theist claiming that any atheist who tries to make general claims about the creation of the cosmos is going to have to meet them in battle. Like...no...they're not attacking the theist personally, they're attacking the worldview and/or presenting new data.

And even if they were, would it matter? Does your own self-esteem take priority over truth?

You're also claiming that the phenomenological experiences of pessimists are somehow invalid because they're socially constructed, without explaining how this actually changes anything (sweetness is just a chemical reaction on the tongue that yield spike trains in the brain: that doesn't change anything about what it's like to taste something sweet. The scientific image does not immediately, or perhaps ever, replace the manifest image).

If you don't feel any of the ways pessimists describe us as feeling, please tell us all why and how you are able to accomplish such a great feat. We'd love to know, as would everyone else.

-

Since we're talking about Sartre's Nausea, here is a quite illuminating quote from it which I was trying to allude to in the other discussion when I brought up extreme pain:

“What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they'd think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present."

And indeed they are, otherwise we wouldn't have to consistently distract ourselves on a daily basis.

Our transcendent concepts are empirically argued using examples. They arise as the inductive limits of what seems immanently to be the case. — apokrisis

Yes, this, very much. This is a big part of what I was getting at: while the rest of science can easily point to what they study, the metaphysician has to use analogies and examples, because what they study is not the particular. I can't just open my desk drawer and pull out a natural kind by-itself, or a property by-itself, or causation by-itself. I can't study the nature of tropes under a microscope, only infer their existence. This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of particular-favoring nominalism, for particulars are only understandable within a broader general context.

Where metaphysics goes further is in apply dialectical or dichotomistic reasoning to generality itself. It derives polar pairs of limits to frame its talk about possibility. — apokrisis

I don't know what this means. Do you have any examples?

We can argue - with logical rigour - that either flux or stasis, either chance or necessity, are the limits of possibility. And in being able to name the bounds of possibility, we are talking about the reality of the transcendent - that is, the limits where reality in fact has gone as far as it can possibly go. — apokrisis

But this begs the question as to why reality is constrained as it is. Which leads us to the conclusion that there is something keeping it all in line, something fundamentally static, that acts as the joints or structure of reality. A television screen can only produce certain colors on its display - but there is a structure behind this television that we never get to see that doesn't change, isn't constrained in the way the screen is. And so we can disassemble the television and see what's going on, however in the case of metaphysics we can't do this because we are fundamentally part of the world, which would requires a disassembly of the disassembler, which conceptually and dare I say logically is impossible.

Then science has another trick up its sleeve. It turns the empirical into a matter of measurement. It now turns the world into a play of numbers. Transcendence is brought down to the level of the confirming particulars. — apokrisis

Platonism?

And so generally we are stuck in an immanent reality. But we manufacture a transcendental point of view by establishing bounding limits both "looking upwards" and also "looking downwards". Looking upwards, we see metaphysical generality. Looking downwards, we then turn the micro view into patterns of numbers - digits read off measuring instruments. — apokrisis

I would argue that objects exists everywhere, at any scale, micro to massive. The objects have parts, sure, but they are nevertheless objects, whatever you take objects to be. Certainly a human being is not a transcendent component of existence unless you're an idealists, and certainly we aren't "just" numbers that magically turn into matter. We ourselves exist in our own level, dependent but not identical to these other hierarchies.

One of the easiest and yet also one of the most difficult, imo, thought experiments relates to "totalist" consequentialism: adding happy people to the universe's population does not initially seem to be important, pressing, or perhaps even good. It seems like there's literally no difference between there being a happy person and no persons at all.

And yet, sometimes it can seem as though there is. Say you can press two buttons. The left button generates a universe with 3 happy people. The right button generates a universe with 4 happy people. Which do you pick? Does it matter which you pick? Perhaps the small number of people makes it seem unimportant. But what if the first universe has a million happy people, and the second universe has a trillion happy people? Now it actually seems like there's something substantial here. That's a lot of happy people.

The fact that two universes, both with happy people, can nevertheless be compared to each other in terms of value makes it seem as though population of happy people is indeed important.

A related idea here is that it is difficult to feel empathy towards people who are already happy, unless you're celebrating some accomplishment, if you're not yourself currently happy. Happiness does not seem important. And yet I think the next time you consider yourself in a happy state of mind and consider the totalist's population theory, you will agree that it would indeed be a good thing to maximize the amount of people who are experiencing what you are, because what you are experiencing is good and what is good is what ought to be maximized.

Now of course this seems to theoretically open the door to forced childbirth. But I think this is easily avoided when we consider our inherent prioritization of suffering over happiness. Forcing a person to have a child will cause them to feel bad, and a sufferer is more important than a happy person for reasons that I still have yet to completely figure out but still find it to be practically unrefutably intuitive.

Indeed that was the view of Zapffe, that the Universe is incapable of delivering enough for us. This kind of thought can also be seen in the Gnostics and even Plato.

I and I are, yes. (Which doesn't mean I'm Jamaican. Rather I at T1 and I and T2.) — Terrapin Station

How do you account for similarity and difference if not by universals. i.e. what if your flavor of nominalism?

Yes, that makes it sound more alive. We are all metaphysicians, even the illiterate, as soon as we can speak, if not before. We have "software" that can contemplate and edit itself --and can apparently contemplate this ability to contemplate and edit itself. We are self-consciously self-conscious. We can think about "unknown unknowns" in the abstract. — Hoo

Another interesting part of Moore's book is the emphasis on the tension between self-consciousness and self-confidence. If we're too self-confident, we might step beyond the limits of intelligibility and into the realm of obscurantism and bullshit. If we're too self-conscious, we submerge into a quasi-masturbatory skepticism feigning as wisdom. There has to be a balance between the two extremes of rationalism and empiricism. Which I suspect would label as pragmatism.

I'm a phenomenologist, I don't know where that puts me on that spectrum. *drop mic*

In any case I'm a realist about philosophical questions but am uncertain as to how to approach them. I have a certain amount of skepticism regarding intuitions, unless we're talking about something that is straight up dependent on intuitions, like ethics. Your mind does not constrain reality, reality constrains your mind.

Hey now. — Terrapin Station

I mean, you aren't really a nominalist, are you? ;)