I could. But I can see you are not really interested in discussing.

Sounds like you didn't address the argument I happened to be making in the post to which you purported to be responding. Your "questions" amounted to a restatement of your monotonic pessimism where only one value in nature counts. And you did your usual trick of trying to pretend I say all sorts of things I don't say. I mean it is hardly a problem for me that life is sub optimal. How could it even have a goal if it were already there? Little logical idiocies like that keep getting in the way of any sensible conversation with you.

You don't recall stating it but that seems a fair implication. Or can you state in more positive fashion why it isn't.

Not just "metaphysical" but "Metaphysical". — darthbarracuda

That's just something my iPad spellchecker started auto-capitalising. I can't be arsed to correct it all the time. :)

Care to elucidate or do you prefer to keep dishing out these empty criticisms? — darthbarracuda

For the 1001st time you will be pleased to hear that I generalise the notion of mind to the metaphysics of sign. So - pansemiotically - the Cosmos has telos or values, even if of the most attenuated kind from our point of view.

Depends whether and how you can define "mind" in a suitably general Metaphysical fashion.

So the usual dualist or idealist position where only the mind can experience value? And truth, love and beauty are platonically real?

Sounds so, welll, primitive.

I'm not following. Is the idea of there being some value that is at issue. Or is it the fact that the value claimed might be survival and not something else? And so, what value did you have in mind?

Sperm are plentiful, and eggs are fewer and this perhaps explains the different moral attitude to male and female sexuality. What it doesn't do is justify it. — unenlightened

If attitudes are explained as serving a purpose, then are they not justified?

I think you've got your threads crossed.

A slight issue could be that a pragmatist metaphysics is empirical in its realism. So reasonableness is tied to acts of measurement. That is how it is can be known what differences make a difference. And that sets quite a high bar in terms of the alternatives you mention.

Well, good luck with that; I don't think it will ever work because of the differences in mind sets between individuals. — John

Yeah. That Enlightenment. What a joke, eh?

What do you mean? Is there some other conclusion to the argument as I laid it out?

Exactly. Hence that characterises theists as not naturalists.

I would have no argument with that, either, but I cannot see how such principles necessarily rely on a scientific theory of semiotics or how the latter could even have any bearing on them, is all. — John

In Uroboros fashion, semiotics claims to be a theory of scientific reasoning as well as a science of signs generally. So it explains itself. The ontic is the epistemic, and vice versa. How minds understand the world is based on a triadic modelling relation. And how the world becomes organised is via said triadic modelling relation.

So yes, part of the picture is that semiotics is a science. It is the natural culmination of a history of intellectual endeavour which includes all that good stuff like holism, organicism, general systems theory, cybernetics, self-organising complexity and hierarchy theory - the study of how complexity develops in some completely generalised sense.

But then semiotics is also Peirce's account of the scientific reasoning process by which any model or sign relation gets pragmatically created. Peirce's triad is the cycle of abduction, deduction and induction - the process of creative guess, logical consequences, empirical validation.

Peirce of course really struggled to take ethics or aesthetics that seriously because it was obvious that naturalism makes most of what might be said rather redundant. The problematics that motivate traditional ethics are all focused on the ridiculously specific - the hunt for deterministic specifics when it comes to human behaviour.

Should I eat pork, should I not eat pork? Should I be vegetarian or vegan? On and on with the splitting of hairs - the differences that don't make a difference (or only a tiny difference).

It's just the wrong way to think about moral issues. The whole damn point at the end of the day is to create people with a balanced view of their lives who thus can act wisely pretty much out of unthinking habit. You can't argue people into a state of good sense by ticking off some vast list of commandments they must obey. You want creative thinkers who can make personal choices within a clear framework of constraints.

And that for Peirce was Thirdness or a state of continuity where a fruitful balance between constraints and freedoms has been struck. Morality will manifest given these proper conditions. And it will be flexibly adaptive. Morality doesn't have to be discovered. We have to pay attention to fostering the generalised conditions from which a concrete reasonableness is just the way of our world.

We're not doing metaphysics here — darthbarracuda

Of course not. To deny metaphysics is not to do metaphysics. That sounds totally legit.

[Sound of window being slammed, shutters closed, shade wrenched down.]

It doesn't collapse at all. Your holism is unnecessary at best, and gets in the way most of the time. If we already both agree that individualism is important, there's no need to pretend we're getting justification from the cosmos for this. Adding whatever it is your advocating here is just redundant. — darthbarracuda

You keep skipping the part where I say it is about a balance. And so that balance does have a cosmic backdrop if you are a natural philosopher who doesn't want to introduce artificial boundaries around what counts as the individual or personal.

Naturalism is a science of boundary making. It accounts for why constraints are placed hierarchically at the positions they are. As I said, in being able to talk about the maximally general constraints like the laws of thermodynamics, already that is also talking of their natural local limits. We can define the point at which differences that make a difference then become differences that don't make a difference. We literally have the mathematics in statistical mechanics and other information theoretic tools, like notions of mutual information or free energy, to do that.

So what irks you is the suggestion that balance is precisely what always goes missing in your highly subjective approach to metaphysical questions.

My old teacher, David Stove, pointed this out. He said it was like the mythical snake the consumes itself, the Uroborous: — Wayfarer

What would a fractal Uroboros look like? What if while eating its tail, it was spawning smaller urobori, each of which in turn produced urobori still smaller?

There would be an infinity of urobori just as the mother uroborous took its own last bite.

Because that is very much in keeping with the mainstream of Western philosophy, I would have thought. — Wayfarer

Yeah. The young are clever, but the old are wise. The specific action becomes absorbed into the general habit and loses it contingency in the process.

The difference with Peirce of course is that he saw the Universe or existence itself manifesting as the result of generalised reasoning (of the semiotic/sign relation variety). So reality is intelligible to us because intelligibility is how existence happens to be the case itself. Physical laws are habits of generalisation - the development of concrete constraints on undirected or spontaneous freedoms.

But Hegel and German Idealism and naturphilosophie were hardly a million miles away from that either. The difference there was they were theist or transcendental in then invoking spirit or God's design for the world. Peirce certainly flirted with the transcendental "get out of jail card", but on the whole thought about this as a scientist looking for a bootstrap story of immanent self-design.

OK, you seem to be valorizing science over 'mere' philosophy; an attitude which I would count as an expression of scientism. — John

Of course. If you can frame me in this fashion, its a TKO right?

So ignore the fact that I'm not playing the philosophy vs science game. Ignore that I am instead arguing for a natural philosophy metaphysics that you can go read about any time you choose if you pick up a copy of Peirce and check how his ethics was cashed out as the universal growth of concrete reasonableness. Ignore my actual argument and just pretend I believe things I don't. Then TKO!

If the purported relation between ethics and semiotics cannot be explained adequately in purely philosophical or ethical terms, then I can't see how it could be genuinely relevant to philosophy or ethics. — John

Pick any of the many papers on Peircean ethics at random.... http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Herdy.pdf

Peirce’s “second mind” about ethics (or better, Pure Ethics) appears to be related to his category of Thirdness. Roughly, the Third category includes everything that is of the nature of a law and involves the ideas of generality and continuity. It requires the human mind as a “subject foreign to mere individual action” where cognition takes place (CP 1.420, 1896).

In the logic of relations, the idea of a law presents itself as a triad, since it involves a third element that mediates between two other elements, a first and a second; and its mode of being, “consists in the Secondness that it determines” (CP 1.536, 1903). Thirdness belongs to a world of necessity; it is “how
an endless future must continue to be” (CP 1.536, 1903). Pure Ethics is related to the category of Thirdness because it is not concerned with individuality, understood as concrete ideals of conduct (morality), but with generality, understood as habits of conduct. Peirce is not interested in action per se, which belongs to the domain of Secondness, as explained in the previous section, but rather in the “governing”, “mediation”, or “self-control” of human action:

[The] pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals [...]. In its higher stages, evolution takes place more and more largely through self-control, and this gives the pragmaticist a sort of justification for making the rational purport to be general. (CP 5, 433, 1905)

The point here, which Peirce advanced in the 1903 Lowell Lectures and after, is that the ultimate ideal lies in the process of self-control, the development of what he called“concrete reasonableness” (CP 5.3, 1902)22. Peirce can now see beyond the dualisms that characterize positive morality – they are mere fragments of the process of self-control. Continuity is the key notion in his procedural picture of Pure Ethics.

Peirce now sees an element of generality in ideals of conduct because he does not take them to be a fragment of a continuous process, but the continuous process itself; i.e. ideals of conduct are seen as relations of ideals of conduct. When Pure Ethics is procedurally understood in light of Peirce’s idea of continuity, the role of generality becomes clearer.

To sum up, I recall again Peirce’s words:

I have advanced my understanding of these categories much since Cambridge days; and can now put them in a much clearer light and more convincingly. The true nature of pragmatism cannot be understood without them. It does not, as I seem to have thought at first, take Reaction as the be-all, but it takes the end-all as the be-all, and the End is something that gives its sanction to action. It is of the third category. (CP 8.256, 1902;

I don't believe that the essence of subjective experience can productively be objectified as a mere "sign relation", any more than I believe it should be understood as being (somehow?) merely material. I don't think such propositions are even adequately intelligible; despite a long history of promissory notes. — John

Everyone has an opinion. Some of us also have the science. From the point of view of Peircean semiosis, that's moving along really nicely.

My stance here is that reductionism inevitably gives us stronger reasons for action than holism, as holism inevitably comes into conflict with individuality, — darthbarracuda

So when I argue the exact opposite - that only my holism foundationally requires the irreducible freedom or spontaneity that your reductionism is so focused on denying - you simply pretend I said what you would need me to say so as to make what you say sound the more coherent option?

Champion.

Holism may be true in a descriptive sense but as far as I'm concerned it's irrelevant to any serious moral inquiry. — darthbarracuda

Of course. Your arguments collapse as soon as anyone opens the window and lets any air and sunlight in. So why would you want your right to a completely subjective view on any issue central to your self-esteem publicly challenged?

But my own argument doesn't deny the observer. It explictly includes observers along with observables. That is why it is properly holistic.

Where I depart from your (theistic? dualistic? transcendental?) POV is that I naturalise the observer too. The obsever is no longer modelled as "a mind" (with all its theistic, dualistic, transcendental baggage) but as "a Peircean sign relation".

So yes. This is essentially scientific in that you take the particular phenomenon and then generalise the hell out of it. But that's not a problem. Its the nature of explanation. Its the way we go about structuring our phenomenological experience so it honestly becomes a map of the territory. We make peace with Kant and stop pretending that even our perceptions are anything greater than habits of sign.

We don't see the noumenal directly. We only ever form a phenomenal relation with the noumenal. And what we all agree is that this relation is "good" when it has a productive balance for us. If seeing reds and greens is a wonderfully efficient way to carve our world at its joints, then just do that. But also don't confuse the modelling with the modelled. And don't believe there can be the modeller or the phenomenal beyond the holistic ambit of the modelling relation itself. Actual transcendence doesn't make sense.

Some variation on "play nice" ... — unenlightened

Yep. Some balance of competition (play) and co-operation (nice) that is in generally conducive to the persistence of the state of being which is the author of that balance .

Isn't this, though, an ontological claim about ontological arguments? — darthbarracuda

Yep. And being consistent, I argue for it holistically. And I argue that holism is just an ontic modelling relation, so that is then argued on epistemic grounds. Then to complete the Peircean circle of affirmation, that model of the epistemology is found to look just like the ontic model. So there is a demonstrable unity of thought ... whichever way you look at it.

So right there you can see why I'm never bothered by accusations of natural fallacies or transgressing the boundary between transcendent unknowns and pragmatic realities (as in your usual claim that I am leaving out the subjective first person point of view on moral questions).

A reductionist can only see circularity or tautology as a logical singularity - red alert, general systems failure!!! Self-reference causes arguments to collapse because ends can't shape their means.

But a holist - of the thorough going kind - starts from the other end and has a model based on the constraint of freedom. Wholes do shape their parts in developmental fashion.

So as usual, you latch on to the self-referential bootstrap nature of my position (or Peirce's and systems science in general) as if it is just an obvious bug - the first thing anyone schooled in reductionist thinking is going to see. But it is that generalised demand for holistic self-consistency which is in fact the feature of my brand of metaphysics. A holistic argument is a generalised constraint on our state of mental uncertainty, not a construction built out off already certain premises or elements of thought.

That doesn't make ordinary logic unreasonable, any more than Newtonian physics is unreasonable, or materialism is unreasonable. They are great tools for thinking within a world already concretely given. Assume your axioms, and syntactically you're good to go.

But when you do want to step up to the metaphysical whole of things - questions about fundamental being - now a holistic logic is required. And regular metaphysics has a proud tradition of doing that (one not employing simplistic deduction but the full Peircean arc of abduction/deduction/induction).

These sorts of "ontological arguments" as you call them aren't the only thing ethicists use. I prefer counterfactuals myself because I consider myself a constructivist of sorts and counterfactuals force us to consider consistency and universality. — darthbarracuda

So then you agree that the whole natural fallacy/is-ought line of attack is pretty irrelevant to metaphysical strength thinking?

If our goal is to recover the fundamental symmetries of existence, we have to go at it dialectically - identifying the local symmetry-breakings and then generalising our way back to their global origin?

Perhaps the most striking problem with natural laws theories (including the rehashed naturalists) is that they have trouble prescribing specific action. — darthbarracuda

Again, you are back to thinking as a reductionist. A constraints-based holism says that the specific is going to be just accidental or contingent "in the end". That is why atomism eventually fails. It can only arrive at the contingent when pursued to the limit.

Again, I have explained this many times. Constraints encode a telos or purpose (they must do to persist and thus "exist"). A purpose is then itself self-limiting because it doesn't care about differences that don't make a difference. It only constrains or shapes the differences that do. Thus eventually at the limit of constraint, things become completely accidental, uncontrolled, contingent. It is all just noise - fluctuations, variation, pure meaningless difference.

Now apply that to morality. The natural philosopher says the existence has its general constraints or habits - like the laws of thermodynamics and dissipative structure. The Universe exists because what it is doing makes some generally coherent evolutionary sense. That sets a backdrop within which there is a broad kind of telos - and also a considerable degree of indifference to how its general purposes are being achieve at any particular locality, like down here on planet earth.

Then human history is another much more local story of the development of some set of constraints or purposes. There are ways of doing things which are habits that work for reasons that are fixed as local structure. Yet then again, in the end, there is always a practical limit to that constraint and so a starting point where it all starts to become pure contingency - differences that don't make a difference (at least right now and not yet - although maybe later if enough others start to join in and something collective starts to build to "change history" and construct revised global constraints).

So a natural philosopher would view morality in this fashion - a cascade of constraints that encode the pragmatic habits that enable "existence", yet which at the same time eventually fritter out at some point in a bunch of difference that doesn't make a difference (except that it then represents a storehouse of potential - the requisite variety - that stops a system from freezing senescently and allows it to continue adapting and learning).

Thus again, as ever, your bug is my feature. If you think "law" should prescribe every specific, then that is the mechanical state of complete constraint with no freedom. Such a system is brittle and not fit for survival as it has no organic store of creative potential from which it could learn.

From the organic point of view, your demand for mechanical determinism is patently "immoral" in being against nature. It is wrong because it is too rigid. And yet also - dialectically - things have to have some structure or rigidity. Thus as usual, the moral debate becomes about the productive balance. Which in turn is going to be historically conditioned - like are we talking about what's best for human organisation living within the ecological constraints of the solar flux, or what's best for human organisation predicated on the combustion of free shit-load of fossil fuel?

Reductionism cannot answer everything, but it's important for things like this, so important that I think it takes precedence over your holism. — darthbarracuda

Sure its a balance. But you want to invert the natural order of that balance. I talk about the dialectics of constraint and freedom. You talk about atomistic construction - and live with its thousand paradoxes, like is the world random or deterministic, competitive or co-operative, subjective or objective, etc, etc.

Reductionism is fine as a tool for the everyday scale of reasoning, where all the holism required to keep it sensible can be provide intuitively as "commonsense". But it just fails when it comes to the big picture level questioning. But hey, if you're not actually interested in metaphysics, just your own state of mind, what the heck?

Morality begins and ends with people and the basic interactions they have with each other and their phenomenological environment. Nothing more — darthbarracuda

Just because it is that way for you personally doesn't mean it ought to be that way for serious metaphysics.

Your arguments are crooked because they are not straight. And to what degree are they not-straight? Completely crooked in being as closed to efforts to straighten them out as possible. We are not even orbiting in the ovaloid ergosphere of your informational back hole. We have reached the perfectly spherical bound of its event horizon. Catch my heels Jim, I feel I'm dissappe.... . .. ...

1.) Whatever does not help increase the species' survival is unnatural
2.) Homosexuality does not help increase the species' survival
3.) Homosexuality is therefore unnatural
4.) Homosexuality is therefore wrong

BREACH! This argument does not work without an added premise:

*.) What is unnatural is what is wrong. — darthbarracuda

Or perhaps this entire pattern of reductionist reasoning is wrong when dealing with holistic realities?

So yes, one can "construct an argument" in good old reductionist predicate logic fashion. And that is a very useful tool for certain purposes. But it utterly fails when it comes to the kind of holistic thinking that answering questions at a metaphysically general level entail.

So for example, from my Peircean organic point of view, sure one can construct an argument based on this kind of hierarchical organisation of cascading constraints, but the irreducible vagueness of logic means there will always be "suppressed premises" at every point. An unlimited supply of them in fact. We can model reality as if it has this kind of propositional closure and get all syntatic on its arse, but reality itself is semantically open ... or at least that is my particular holistic model of the situation. ;)

Then taking this particular premise - 2.) Homosexuality does not help increase the species' survival - it is obvious that evolutionary psychology does apply an is-ought argument on convincing grounds. The natural assumption is that homosexuality must in fact help increase a species' survival. Or at least, make no difference.

Well actually, it is not about the species as a whole, but the genes floating around the gene pool. Yet still, if the choice for genes is either to be favoured or disfavoured, then "homosexual genes" (whatever the heck those really are in terms of the massive complexity of neurodevelopment) should either come to completely dominate or be completely eliminated.

Or wait. Maybe gene pools permit homeostatic equilibrium of traits. Perhaps "homosexual genes" are part of maintaining the "requisite variety" that is the other side of the coin to the winnowing sythe of natural selection that is forever removing variety. Etc, etc.

So take any premise and already it dissolves into a mass of uncertainties and qualifications. It ceases to seem so reasonable as a standalone claim.

This is why so little progress has ever been made with "ontological arguments". Even if the syntactic structure is not a problem, they simply can't prove anything about reality because of the irreducibility of semantic vagueness.

And this is where is-ought arguments fall down - in that general fashion where ontological arguments can't be constructed using a propositional form. To talk about the big picture, you need a big picture mode of thought. Hence why the history of metaphysics has been a fruitful conversation based on dialectical or systematic reasoning.

I've shown how you are making an is-ought argument, but based on a false mechanical view of nature and false pessimistic representation of phenomenology (in a normal undepresed person at any rate).

And yet schoolboy maths contradicts you.

Intuitively, curvature is the amount by which a geometric object such as a surface deviates from being a flat plane, or a curve from being straight as in the case of a line.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curvature

And curves are measured using the reciprocal extremes of tangents and osculatory circles. Perfect lines or perfect circles.

Why use the reciprocal in defining curvature? It is natural for the curvature of a straight line to be zero. Imagine straightening out a curve making it into a straight line. In the limit the circle of best fit has infinite radius giving zero curvature.

https://nrich.maths.org/5654

Nor will you get an accurate measurement of the crooked thing using the straight ruler. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is what then doesn't make sense. If the crooked is the not straight (in some degree), then only something straight could be used to measure the degree of that non-straightness.

Curve = "...having a regular deviation from being straight or flat, — Metaphysician Undercover

That's the point. You finally got there.

None is the opposite of straight. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet all of them are defined in reference to the straight. That being the point.

No, I don't agree. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course not. You would argue the toss even with a dictionary.

All those words have a particular meaning, referring to a particular shape. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great. And what particular shape does each of those particular words refer to then?

Curved = ?

Bent = ?

Twisted = ?

So do you agree that "straight" is routinely understood as being the antonym of these various forms of crookedness - "bent", "twisted", or "curved"? They are all ways of asserting "not straight"?

The rest of my argument follows of course, so no need to repeat it.

So when you plug "bent", "twisted", or "curved" into a thesaurus and click the antonym button, does it get all squirmy and evasive, protesting why are you asking, I don't understand? Or does it simply reply that the antonym is "straight"?

We can feel an emptiness at the end of pursuits, a disappointment, a world-weariness. — schopenhauer1

Sure. And we can feel the opposite. So from which "is" should we derive the "ought" here?

You are saying because you, in the end, experience "nothing but harms", then that ought to be the outcome of everyone's "self reflection". If it isn't, you get angry and tell them that they are fooling themselves and not being honest with you.

But if it is natural to feel mixed feelings upon reflection, and we can see a pattern to what feels better, what feels worse, then why shouldn't that be the real deal? Why can't we use our self-awareness to make sense of our world in that fashion?

You want to argue from an is to an ought, and that's fine. But it is just the wrong "is". The way people feel is at least mixed.

Then likewise you employ an outdated mechanical characterisation of nature. You talk in reductionist terms about a nature without purpose or order. So your is-ought argument there becomes nature has no meaning, therefore our personal existence can have no natural meaning.

So your argument is rife with naturalistic reasoning. You simply have an overly simplistic model of nature. Just as you have an overly simplistic account of what it is to experience being alive.

By rejecting an organicist metaphysics which sees nature as reasonable and the only possible source of telos, you do the Romantic thing of making meaning and purpose transcendent. That used to mean God moving in His mysterious ways. Since God died, the standing outside of nature is now left to your own good self - Schop who must judge his existence and finds it wanting.

But again, I say that comes down to a particular cultural way of looking at things. You didn't actually figure out anything new. You just read some books and decided nature is mechanical and so any "submission" to nature is bogus. Life has been thrust upon you without giving you a choice. Feelings of harm have been thrust upon you without any choice.

You see the appeal to transcendence that soaks your argument through and through? There is this "me" that is forever retreating from the advances of the world. Hey world, you force life on me, you force feelings on me. But in the end, what is this "me" doing all the complaining?

Clearly it claims to stand outside nature. Yet I would say - from a naturalist point of view - that it is just a cultural habit making its particular noise. It's a meme. A trope. An example of brain washing. We just don't get to stand outside nature or reality in this way.

This meme that has invaded your head of course fears greatly for its own preservation. That is why it flinches every time the words "positive psychology" is mentioned. The pessimist's meme has a horror of being re-written and goes on the attack.

It's nature at work as usual. Pessimism works to ensure its survival by resisting its annihalation. Do you ever wonder why you feel forced to keep saying and thinking the things you do?

If something is not bent, what is it? If something is not twisted, what is it? If something is not curved, what is it?

Just say the word. :)

Sure, you can define crooked as not straight if you want. But there are all kinds of different ways that something can be crooked. It could be bent, twisted, curved, etc. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now you have all these other description of crooked - bent, twisted, curved, etc. If something is not bent, what is it? If something is not twisted, what is it? If something is not curved, what is it?

Do you object violently to the description of "straight" for some reason?

Describing an object is completely different from measuring it. — Metaphysician Undercover

And so you change the subject yet again.

My point remains the same. Crookedness is defined in terms of a departure from straightness.

Or the alternative is to be able to imagine "idealised crookedness" as the other pole of being from which actual being can then be measured. So now you would be measuring a reciprocal lack of crookedness (and thus an approach to the opposite ideal of absolute straightness).

This is simply how measuring the world works. We have to find some believable ideal and then measure the degree of deviation in terms of that. Then those ideals turn out to believable because they are self-defining by dichotomous logic. We see that reality is in fact bounded by its ideal extremes - and the bit in the middle we want to measure is now a position between the two bounds.

So talking about measuring crookedness by creating a crooked bit of string is not measuring anything. It doesn't give a number that reflects a position on some natural idea of a spectrum that is anchored by "fixed" bounds - or extremum principles, ideal limits.

Do you mean apart from the pun on Tau and Tao? The whole argument is that a full 360 degree rotation is a more fundamental natural unit than a half 180 degree rotation. Then yin-yang is a completion of the circle like that - going through the light, then the dark, to arrive back to begin the cycle again. But it seems a mention tacked on for a bit of fun and has nothing to do with the argument really.