Please explain to me what exactly is involved in the reasoning of vegetarians and Nazis that make them both "romantic" according to your book. — darthbarracuda

In a word, spiritual purity.

Romanticism boils down to the complaint that the modern technological mode of existence is soul-less and impure. It is dirty, messy, disgusting, unclean, ugly and joyless.

So Romanticism inspired a particular kind of back to nature organicism and back to the past Volkisch-ness or rural community lifestyle.

Of course early Romanticism had a lot of overlap with the Humanism arising out of the enlightenment. But Humanism was anti-theistic and socially optimistic. It was forward looking and celebrated the modern possibilities for human growth, personal freedom and the triumph of rationality.

Evolutionary theory also plays into it because it showed that humans were animals and so raised questions for both the rationalists and the irrationalists (the sentiment driven romantics) in terms of how animals ought to be treated.

Anyway, the association between vegetarianism and romanticism is well known.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_Romanticism

Just as is that between Nazism and romanticism.....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkisch_movement

So on the one hand there is a rationalist version of back to nature that arises from the rejection of theistic world views and a proper scientific, ecological and evolutionary, understanding of life. This views does not seek spiritual purity as its ultimate good. Instead it is more likely to celebrate the messy and confused imperfections of existence. Life is a balance, a negotiation, full of dynamism and passing variety.

Then there is this other view of back to nature that unites the romantics, Nazis and vegetarians. Purity is the ultimate good. Hence the sentimentality about children, bloodlines, untouched nature, medieval peasantry, animal innocence, etc.

An obssession with purity allows the rationalisation of extreme or absolute positions. That's how the Nazis could justify their concentration camps. That's how vegans can justify their own non-negotiable beliefs. If purity is the good, it is rational to argue imperfection should be eliminated by any means necessary.

But if your view of nature is instead essentially stochastic, then there will always be variety and imperfection. The good is now always about a global dynamical balance that constrains existence in a statistical fashion yet is also creatively sloppy, still fruitfully disorganised and playful at the margins.

To me all your claims about what nature has in mind, which was the phrasing you used at the start of this thread, are about what you have in mind, which you ascribe to natural principle because of your belief-system, which is your own choice within a culturally, historically determined set of 'constraints', which was in turn originally set in motion by our 'natures'. — mcdoodle

It is always going to be the case that we model the world to the best of our abilities. I haven't claimed absolute knowledge in some thing-in-itself fashion. So your epistemological argument is moot.

That leaves the validity of my claims. And they are based on modern science. So well based - as good as it gets when it comes to inquiry into nature.

I have consistently pointed out that I am limiting morality to minds, and thus it cannot be transcendent.

So if we're talking about value, then I am arguing that it is immanent in minds. — darthbarracuda

Yep. You are employing a dualistic ontology and you don't see that as a problem.

So once again you are thrusting practical applied ethics into theoretical normative ethics. Stop doing that. — darthbarracuda

:-}

Nietzsche would have fallen under this vague "romanticism" term, yet he was vehemently opposed to nationalism. And Peirce, your philosophy-Jesus, was a womanizer and eccentric douche. I can cherry pick too! — darthbarracuda

Calling Peirce a womaniser is a bit strong. That charge says more about the uptight community within which he lived. And he was an eccentric douche to the degree that many of the mathematically brilliant can have an autistic streak that makes them somewhat unfit for the regular world.

But fire away. If you want to draw some kind of conclusion about the value of philosophical arguments based on the moral character of their originators, then amuse me.

What exactly do you take transcendental to mean, if not all-encompassing and universal throughout nature? — darthbarracuda

Err, if it pervades nature, that makes it immanent. And immanence is opposed to transcendent, not transcendental, in this context.

Focus on causality. We are talking about the reasons things are the way they ought to be. We are talking about the origins of the shaping constraints, the lawful regularities.

To say that formal and final causes act from outside the realm of material and efficient cause - as Plato did, and as Western religions do - is to claim transcendent origins.

Immanence - as argued by Anaximander, Aristotle and other organicists - is about self-organising materiality. The formal and final causes of being arise within the world itself.

I'm saying there appear to be brute experiences, or transparent experiences. You're saying we can deconstruct them, and show their origins, and somehow this changes our perspective on things. It's akin to me saying there is the color green, and then you saying green is just blue and yellow mixed together, and there "is no green". There's green right there in front of your face! The origins of the color green doesn't matter in this case. — darthbarracuda

First, I would be more likely to talk about electromagnetic radiation and opponent channel processing if I were deconstructing qualia in terms of physicalism.

And then the phenomenological fact that green can be mixed from yellow and blue paint ought to tell you that your experience is not actually brute at this level even. It ought to raise the question of why you can't phenomenologically mix two paints to arrive at red, yellow and blue? Or why the rule for mixing light is different in that now it is yellow that is composite and green that is primary.

Woo. This phenomenological shape-shifting really ought to bother you. And it's right in front of your face - if you ever open your eyes and mind.

Once again you are arguing that what we have done (historicity) and what we are currently doing constitutes what we ought to do. Just because we murder animals doesn't mean we should murder animals. Just because we've made it this far doesn't mean we should continue. — darthbarracuda

I'm sure no matter how many of thousands of times I correct you, it won't make a difference.

The argument is that history proves a state of constraint right - as the best reflection of that history. But then constraints, by their very nature, are permissive and even positively enabling of degrees of freedom. Part of the deal is that they set the degree of disagreement or novelty it is useful to see. And even that is itself subject to the principle of evolvability.

With living systems, the constraints can include information about when to stick with the rules, when to break away and experiment. Animals under stress are designed to increase the mutation rates and so make possible greater than usual adaptive changes.

If you want to make an argument for veganism, no problems. Others are making an argument for paleolithic diets.

My argument already endorses a degree of experimentation of any kind. Let society suck it and see. If there is collective social merit in not eating animals, expect your wishes to come true eventually.

Harm is pervasive and impossible to get rid of. But this need not constrain our ability to think of what could be the case. — darthbarracuda

Sure, we can talk about fictional worlds. But fictional worlds would have fictional moralities. So there doesn't seem a lot of point in wasting too much time on what can't be changed.

Again, your antinatalism might lead you to argue for the wiping out of all life with an integrative nervous system - the minimal qualification for sentience. Leave reality to jellyfish, daffodils and bacteria. But as I have pointed out, you won't in practice beat life so easily. Antinatalism is always going to lose as it only takes a couple of sneaky breeders to slip your net.

So what? What if you found yourself in the Holocaust? I'm sure you'd wish everyone else would adopt the principles I am advocating. — darthbarracuda

One could always wish. But given that is not the way reality works, we need instead to focus on more practical responses to the threat of nasty demises.

Godwin's law not withstanding, aren't you at all troubled by the familiar debating point that Hitler was a vegetarian, Himmler wanted to ban hunting? The same pervasive Romanticism that justified their Nazi racism, justified their anti-specieism.

There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany[1] among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.[2] Many Nazi leaders, including Hitler and Hermann Göring, were supporters of animal rights and conservation. Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the Nazi regime.[3]

Heinrich Himmler made an effort to ban the hunting of animals.[4] Göring was a professed animal lover and conservationist,[5] who, on instructions from Hitler, committed Germans who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. In his private diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a vegetarian whose hatred of the Jewish and Christian religions in large part stemmed from the ethical distinction these faiths drew between the value of humans and the value of other animals; Goebbels also mentions that Hitler planned to ban slaughterhouses in the German Reich following the conclusion of World War II.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany

No scientist has told me to shut up and calculate, though I've discussed these things with some. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's actually a famous line. You know that, don't you?

How do you know that the quantum vacuum is three dimensional? — Metaphysician Undercover

We know that our vacuum is both quantum and three dimensional. And these facts may well be directly connected. That would be a hope for a Theory of Everything. And indeed, dissipative structure arguments are being used to explain why three dimensions are optimally balanced. But its still work in progress to say that is the connection.

I see a difference between relative and absolute, and both relative and absolute things are real. — Metaphysician Undercover

In my book, absolutes represent limits and so are by definition unreal in being where reality ceases to be the case. And that's why reality always needs two complementary limits to give it somewhere to actually be - the somewhere that is within complementary bounds.

Nah, I do not think there is much to do except whine metaphysically, so that I do. — schopenhauer1

It's your life. But you seem to expect me to take it seriously.

...they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.' — Wayfarer

That is certainly the problem for those who are seeking "the particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world".

But as a structuralist - one who sees reality as the product of formal constraints on free possibility - one would point to gauge symmetry for example as a rather absolute reason why we have particular particles as particular excitations of particular fields.

It is a mathematical impossibility for there not to be an electron or a quark with their particular spin characteristics if the possibility of spin cannot be eliminated from the world.

So Albert is talking about the lack of an absolute substantial base from which to build upwards. However the Peircean argument in particular sees "stuff" emerging due to top-down formal and final causation. In metaphysics currently, you would call it ontic structural realism.

The fact that we NEED positive psychology means that we must somehow work to achieve it..more stress to lay on the individual..more burden. Whey we need someone to live so they can go through your "good habits and manners" regimen is not explained other than it is the next best thing once born.. which is at that point simply a band-aid not a remedy. Since there is no remedy, why even provide the burden? Because the group "wants" it? And why abide what the "group" wants? — schopenhauer1

We are back into adolescent whinging then?

Life's too hard to even get out bed in the morning. Everyone is always bugging you about chores you need to do.

The system, just because it is involved in your development does not mean one must like it. It is not an inevitable pairing, simply a truism that society and the individual cannot be separated.. it does not NEED to be a mutual admiration society though (no pun intended). — schopenhauer1

The social system we have in fact requires your dissent. That is part of the pairing. There is no point giving people the power of choice if they never bloody exercise it.

But as usual, it is about balance. It would be a little crazy to remain in a position where you seem to find everything about your social circumstances a burden. If your dissent is that strong, do something more than whinge metaphysically.

You're the one accusing me of the naturalistic fallacy?

And I already explained how I am an anti-realist, so I don't think there is any transcendental value actually out there, — darthbarracuda

Yep. As I say, you are appealing to trancendental values in talking about pleasure, pain and empathy in the dualistically disconnected fashion that you do.

But this would require me to systematically ignore the important bits: feeling, downgrading it to some signal and nothing more. — darthbarracuda

You forget that semiotics is about meaningful signs - there is interpretance built in. We form signs so we can respond with habits.

And then those sign relations are hierarchically open ended or recursive. Creating a robust layer of wise habits is what allows the further thing of intelligent variety.

We can ignore the suffering of going to the gym by focusing on the longer term benefit of getting fit. And after a while, the pain of the gym becomes a pleasure. We suffer when we can't go.

So as a model of feelings (and habits), semiotics is hardly downgrading feelings to signs. It is opening feelings - as just signs - to more sophisticated worlds of meaning. It is doing the very thing of allowing you to care about abstractions like "world hunger" or "specieism".

Doing otherwise reminds me of nationalism - you are proud of the country, not of the people that make up the country. — darthbarracuda

This is just you being wedded to concrete thinking like any good reductionist.

Can one be proud of a nation that can't produce individuals you would be proud of? It might be possible - where they make you stand around the flag every morning and sing some ancestral anthem - but we would hardly call it rational.

In any case, I'm a prioritarian and contingent-sufficientarian. — darthbarracuda

Jeez. How many -isms do you need to establish your moral identity?

Well, let's say I give up my position and go behind you. Are you now obligated to give up your spot to me? — darthbarracuda

So are you meaning to confirm my point that harm can only be mutually minimised and never in practice eliminated? Moral organisation consists of collectively targeting its minimisation.

In the real world us queuers make complex judgments. If someone's needs are visibly greater, we may indeed let them jump ahead, in hope that we live in a world where that behaviour is a norm, and in the belief that our example will indeed be paid forward. But also we resist queue-jumpers in the knowledge that it is quite natural for people to cheat to the extent they can get away with it. So game theory - a balancing of conflicting impulses by the third thing of an optimisation principle - gets applied in real life.

However, in everyday life we often do give up our spots for those who really need it. A man with a broken finger really ought to give up his spot in line for another man suffering from a heart attack. There's priority in effect here. — darthbarracuda

It is everyday life that matters. My complaint is that when you are challenged by exactly this kind of proximity principle, you start talking about finding yourself dying slowly in a motorway pile up or the existential horror of the Holocaust.

It's a good thing we're not doing metaphysics, then. We're doing (meta-)ethics. It already presumes an un-removable manifest image of man, one of Selves, Qualia, and Free Will. — darthbarracuda

So it is metaphysics. But your metaphysics makes different presumptions than mine.

The problem is that unlike non-feeling/thinking things, humans (at the least) have subjective "what it's like" minds. The fact is, when we are born, we are subjected to harms and suffering. This is felt on an individual level despite the fact that we are shaped and shape alike our social group. In fact, the social group dynamic does nothing to mitigate individual feelings of pain and harmful phenomena. That is what your system ignores- the individual "what it's like" experience of actually feeling the pain or harm. — schopenhauer1

You are ignoring the fact that an introspective level of awareness is based on the semiotic mechanism of grammatic speech. Self-consciousness is a socialised habit and not a genetic endowment.

And so all the problems of personal experience can only find their logic and their repair within that ontic framework - as positive psychology, for instance, realises.

Now we are biological selves too. That is part of the deal. And that is why we also try to solve our "mental problems" using drugs or other treatments aimed at our biological capacity to feel.

So I hardly deny anything, I take it all into account. And from there, the answers flow systematically.

Pain and suffering can be more biological or more social in origin. If you have a broken leg, take these pain-killers. If you have a broken heart, find a new partner.

You can't hope to fix anything if you don't have a clear view of how it works.

And if you are a pessimist or antinatalist, your problem is your relationship with society in general. You don't fit it, and it doesn't fit you. One of you is going to have to change. And in my systems view, in fact both sides have to be capable of mutual change as each side is the other's reflection.

It is just that the majority view, the wider social scale, is most naturally going to represent "the good" - at least historically, in terms of what has worked in the past that led up to the present.

New ideas can come along. They do all the time. And at an increasing rate because we live in a society that now encourages a degree of change that I would say is - ecologically - over-exuberant.

But a high degree of mutation does mean a lot of failed experiments. There are masses of social casualities - which is fine in social ecosystems like high tech start-ups where vast flows of capital underwrite youthful resilience. People can crash and immediately get up again. But socially, the other side of the coin is that we also wind up with a permanent underclass subsisting on minimal capital investment.

It is not that hard to understand our current culture in terms of natural imperatives, is it? And from there, start arguing for changes that would improve the general lot.

But ultimately it ends in nothing. — Wayfarer

The quantum vacuum is hardly nothing. It might be cold, flat and extremely featureless, but it is still a sizzle of quantum fluctuations spread out in a three dimensional vastness of cosmic proportions. It is an eternal something.

Well, I think there is a problem here, because "good" is qualitative, and we cannot measure any quality unless we know what it actually is that we are measuring. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's why I don't defend a notion of the "good". This thread shows that folk can't in fact define it except in terms of other more measurable things.

So, with respect to "entropy", how do you propose that we measure this if we do not know what it actually is? — Metaphysician Undercover

We know what it is instrumentally or operationally, like all good physicalist concepts.

What is matter, energy, time or space? In the end, we can only pop these terms into our equations as placemarkers for types of observations we know how to make.

And the reason why entropy (or information) has come to the fore is that it is our most universal way of measuring anything.

Entropy can be defined both in terms of material degrees of freedom and message uncertainty. The information theoretic approach has unified the physical and mental because there is just one unit that can measure reality quantumly either in terms of "what exists" or in terms of "what we can say".

Nowadays, we talk about matter, energy, time and space in fundamentally thermal terms. Hot = curved = dense = fast. Cold = flat = empty = slow. So cosmology is understood in terms of entropy and dissipative structure.

Likewise biology and neuroscience are becoming branches of thermodynamics. They now base themselves openly on dissipative principles.

So it is simply the case that our best model of reality is becoming so generic that it is losing all the particularity that might make it feel more intuitive. Complete abstraction might work, but it can't really be pictured.

I know you don't like that idea - you continue to believe that it is instead a symptom of explanations going wrong. However it is why scientists in the end are right to get exasperated and tell you to shut up and calculate. Abstraction that works is the best we get.

Of course, that is how the Platonic Good arose as a notion. It was an early attempt to cash in on the success of mathematical strength abstraction.

However - unlike entropy - it wasn't defined in terms of a real world measurement. That is why we have Darth proposing his system of wholly subjective and personal measurement.

The notion of the Good does feel right in some way, but folk can only offer hazy objective definitions in terms of flourishing or such like. We can see the Good has something to do with adaptive resilience and healthy growth - real world facts that we could measure using rulers and clocks. We could time how long a system persists when prodded or disturbed. We can measure how much bigger it is getting or how far its extends its relational reach.

So it is not impossible to define the Good in scientifically objective or measurable fashion. And indeed complexity theorists use entropic notions like free energy and mutual information to do just that when talking about societies or brains these days.

The alternative is, we reach a stage where the transcendent is discovered or realised. — Wayfarer

Well, that's not going to be an empirical discovery, is it? And I've argued why it is not a rational discovery either.

For you the 'final cause' appears to be 'dissipation' - things exist only to dissipate energy, or return to a state of maximum entropy. From my perspective, that seems like nihilism. Perhaps you might explain where I'm misunderstanding this? — Wayfarer

Dissipation might be final cause. But dissipative structure is then its formal cause. To achieve dissipation, there must be negentropic organisation that gets you there.

Hence this is why the Cosmos has its laws and other kinds of structure. Regulation has to emerge to make dis-ordering even a concrete possibility.

So it is not exactly nihilism to say that social organisation is necessary as dissipative structure. We have to be organised because there's a job we are expected to do.

No, I'm not, because pleasure is inherently valuable to whoever is experiencing it. Like I said in the OP, humans are value machines. They create value. — darthbarracuda

That's the naturalistic fallacy. Just because pleasure is what a machine creates as its value, doesn't mean that pleasure is transcendentally good.

Of course, you are now using language more like my own - a mechanistic naturalism - and so that reveals the fallacy of the naturalistic fallacy. It is a view of nature which presumes transcendent causes and so there is always something floating off into the distance as "not part of the material system".

Just switch from talking about pleasure as qualia and start talking about it as a biological sign - a semiotic mechanism - and you will have arrived at my kind of pan-semiotic naturalism.

But we must make sure that we focus on the constituents of the social group, not the social group as an object itself. — darthbarracuda

No. We must focus on both by focusing on the mutuality of their relationship.

In systems theory, parts construct the whole and the whole shapes its (re)constructing parts. So the focus is on the primary dynamic that drives the self-organisation.

Sorry, but it is a fundmentally complex model of causality. And one has to focus on the irreduciably triadic nature of that holism.

No, it is not enlightened self-interest. I don't help people because they will help me. I help people because that's what they need. — darthbarracuda

So there is no payback at all?

The "Platinum Rule" - i.e. do not harm others and do not manipulate others. — darthbarracuda

This sounds rather disengaged from life. But how do you define harm and manipulation? Are you going to recognise grades and distinctions? Or as usual, are you treating them as qualitative absolutes?

If we are standing in a queue, and I am behind you with the need to get to the front, are you going to "harm" me by not stepping aside? Are you going to "manipulate" me by keeping your back firmly turned and ignoring my plight?

So sure, normal society puts bounds on individuals and their needs for the collective good. And that defines things like harm or manipulation in grounded practical fashion. You know what to do in that regard by becoming a properly engaged member of that society.

But again we are back to your kind of unplaced and scaleless view of morality where there is none of the relativity that comes from relating. The "good" congeals into a mentalistic and immutable substance. It is not the kind of adaptive dynamical principle that lies at the heart of my naturalism.

And in doing this you ignore that pleasure, pain, and empathy are immediately accessible - you reduce them away and pretend they don't exist. — darthbarracuda

I say they don't "exist" in the way you presume they exist - as dualistic substance.

Instead they are part of a dynamical system of sign and interpretance. There is stability in the development of a hierarchy of interpretive habits, and yet still plasticity in a capacity for novelty and experiment within that system of established constraints.

So in this process view, you get both persistence due to habits, and adaptivity due to spontaneity, co-existing in the same world.

In your actually reductionist view of ontology, you can never get these to complementary aspects of being in the same room. In reducing reality to material being, you create the eternal mystery of the mentalistic.

For example, you have to introduce the homuncular self that experience its experiences. Pleasure, pain and empathy now become qualia - substantial "mental" properties. And you even start appealing to "me" as a fellow homunculus doing the same thing.

It's a familar way of reducing reality - to matter and mind. But we all know that it doesn't work out in the end. Dualism is good for a while, but in the long-run, it is a philosophical blind alley.

The main point I was making is that just as a ball's propensity to roll down a hill can't tell us what's good for the ball, why would our propensity with respect to entropy tell us what's good for us? — Michael

I had already explained that in posts at the start of the thread and then re-explained it to you - and you continue to talk past that. To repeat once more....

When you follow the story of thermodynamics through to the level of complexity represented by a social system, you can see that its fundamental dissipative dynamic can best be described in terms of competition and cooperation. And thus you can see why a basic moral precept, like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", makes natural sense. It encodes a natural organising balance.

I agree with apo's eco-outlook but from a different base altogether. I think naturalism as a basis for ethics is a metaphor/analogy which has a sort of virtue theory lurking in it; that naturalism in itself implies nothing in the way of the good, because nature did not originally have anything in mind. — mcdoodle

But then if you don't accept that our biology and sociology expresses natural principles, then that seems to leave you with only the options that either whatever we do (biologically and socially) is thus arbitrary - it lacks any rational support - or that this support must come from some other (transcendent) source.

So we are back to creating gods, Platonic goods, or whatever.

If you want to reject my naturalism, you have to be able to point to the alternative basis you would then embrace. Otherwise that rejection is simply in bad faith.

Note that my naturalism is explicit in spelling out the role of individual spontaneity and creativity. It is part of the dynamic that there is a fostering of individual competition within the globally co-operative social context.

A society wants to produce the right kind of people. And automatons aren't that useful it turns out.

But is entropification a real regularity, or is it just a function of the way that human beings interpret the properties of a given object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I wouldn't get too hung up on what entropy "actually is". Like the notions of force or energy before it, the more we can construct a useful system of measuring reality, the further away from any concrete notion of reality we are going to get. In modelling, our analytic signs of reality replace the reality we thought we believed in - our synthetic intuitions due to psychological "direct experience".

So you either go with Kant and Peirce here, or you don't. And entropy thinking is way of conceiving of reality that is demonstrably more general or abstracted, less particular and concrete, than what it replaces. In the end, we only know that it pragmatically works.

Another explanation (from Google's define:behaviour) includes "the way in which a machine or natural phenomenon works or functions.". — Michael

So you are denying that the primary definition is about intentional action within a social context context?

The fact that you complain when I use psychological-sounding concepts, then use them yourself without even admitting that is what you are doing, shows you really aren't willing to think this through.

Get back to me when you can account for physical events without talking about the forces that particles feel, or the laws they obey. Demonstrate that there is a fully un-psychological language available to us.

"Behave" isn't a psychological term, so I don't understand this. — Michael

Not sure where you get your definitions from. :)

behave
bɪˈheɪv/Submit
verb

1. act or conduct oneself in a specified way, especially towards others.
"he always behaved like a gentleman"
synonyms: conduct oneself, act, acquit oneself, bear oneself, carry oneself; More

2. conduct oneself in accordance with the accepted norms of a society or group.
"‘Just behave, Tom,’ he said"
synonyms: act correctly, act properly, conduct oneself well, act in a polite way, show good manners, mind one's manners, mind one's Ps and Qs;

And once again I have to explain to you how I am a moral anti-realist. There is no "Good", there are only goods spread out across a population and abstracted as a "Good" in virtue of the basic triad. — darthbarracuda

Yet you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" in claiming that because pleasure is what is, then pleasure is an ought.

And so ethics involves the systematic distribution of care across a population. — darthbarracuda

As I keep saying.

Apo said he recognized pleasure as a mug of beer - but this is a shallow misrepresentation of what pleasure is. — darthbarracuda

Or a sarcastic one.

So like I said, the only thing that makes chocolate and sugar a long-time bad habit is that it will diminish the welfare of the individual. That is invariably what ethics is about: person welfare. Any other conception leads the train off the rails. — darthbarracuda

And so you continue to agree with what you claim to disagree with.

Ethics is about the flourishing of the social group. It is about caring about others in ways that creates reciprocal benefits. And that is a tricky balancing act because - as game theory can spell out mathematically - the "right balance" has to involve the possibility of selfishness too.

We can care about the suffering of others, but then reality has to come into play - rational principles like proximity which you so strenuously want to deny.

It makes more sense for me to care about my immediate family, my immediate community, than to worry about the fate of those so distant as not to have any reciprocal consequences. My starving or sick child has to matter more than some random starving or sick child in Syria or Somalia. So I might give a little money to the Red Cross, but would sell my house to save my child.

So on the one hand, you accept that ethics is about enlightened self-interest - the mutuality and reciprocality that is the definition of social organisation. But on the other, you transmute these rational goods - the secrets of successful organisation - into transcendent goods.

You talk dualistically about biologically-evolved feelings, such as pleasure, pain and empathy, as if they were Platonic abstracta. You treat the qualia as things in themselves - ineffable properties of sentience - rather than biological signals with pragmatic meaning. And in doing this, you ignore all the spatiotemporal complexity of the real world in which social organisation must operate to instead impose a scaleless notion of suffering that floats Platonically above the world we have to describe.

You just ignore proximity arguments, or any kind of complexity really. And you claim to be a moral anti-realist and yet you claim transcendental reality for suffering. Are you starting to see how it doesn't add up?

A physical law is just a proposed description of how things have behaved (and presumably will continue to behave). — Michael

So why do inanimate things now "behave". Why do you find yourself continually using psychological terms to describe what you appear to believe are non-psychological causes? When do we get down to your bare naked description of physical causality in such a way we are explaining and not just "describing by psychic analogies we believe to be fundamentally wrong/fundamentally question-begging"?

Well it would be quite odd to think of entropy as an intentional act. It seems like the opposite of intentional to me, what happens when intention doesn't intervene. — Metaphysician Undercover

My argument is that all regularity is the product of constraints. So for entropification to "keep happening" there has to be a global prevailing state of constraint.

Now you are picking up on the connotation that intentionality must go with having a choice. You can intend to do one thing and not another. And of course, the Universe in general - in making entropification its general rule or intention - seems to lack this choice-making. It doesn't permit alternatives. And yet that the Universe is organised the way it is must be some kind of choice.

We can imagine that it might have different rules. But then by the same token, if it was in fact free to explore all possible options, we would also it expect to arrive at the optimal choice, the optimal balance, simply by natural selection. Whatever works best - in terms of "being a cosmos" - would be what would have to triumph in the long run.

So given a naturalistic point of view, the Universe is intentional in having made a rather definite choice during its early developmental history. This is what works.

It is not of course a conscious choice. But then consciousness is one of those words we bandy about without any naturalistic definition and so isn't of much help in talking about the natural world.

It's not that it acts a certain way because it is the law. It's just that it acts a certain way. It's not a matter of intention or purpose or any other conscious drive. A ball on hill will roll down it. Opposite charges attract. And so on. — Michael

You're smart enough to know how weak that is.

You object to my imputing intention or purpose to a physically simple level of being. And yet you happily use the notion of "lawful" without apparent definitional discomfort. Then when challenged on this, you change tack to say, well, things "just act in certain ways" - when the point of even invoking laws is that things are found to act in fundamentally general ways.

So the normal language of physicalism is far more question-begging than the jargon of systems science.

It is associated with eco-philosophy in my mind, which I suppose fits fairly well with your systems approach. — unenlightened

Yep. Ecological thinking is systems science central. It is synonymous really.

Except that it doesn't. Quite apart from encouraging potentiallty damaging co-dependency even to the point of deviancy (sado-masochism, for example) reciprocity is not a desirable feature in most relationships. A teacher doesn't wish to be taught by his pupils, a parent doesn't seek discipline from offspring, a policeman doesn't wish to be arrested, a soldier certainly does not expect to be killed. — Barry Etheridge

The advantage of it being a basic precept is that it can then be developed in more particular fashion. So are your examples all revealing further natural features?

What I would pick out is that they go to the naturalness of developed hierarchies. The balancing of the twin imperatives of competition and cooperation has to be achieved by one becoming dominant in scale, the other submissive, in an organised society.

S+M is a twisted play on that hierarchical social relation. Perhaps it is actually immoral or unnatural when taken to a damaging extreme.

Teaching is naturally organised in hierarchical fashion. One has the wisdom to impart, the other has the need to learn. Same with parents and kids. Or police and crooks.

As to soldiers, I think it is the generals that don't expect to be killed. But soldiers certainly expect the other side to fight.

Well dung is good for dung beetles and rose growers, affection is good for humans. — unenlightened

So the relating is the relating which promotes growth or flourishing?

It's just something that happens given the laws of physics. — Michael

What could be more question begging than saying the material world acts a certain way because it is the law?

When you follow the story of thermodynamics through to the level of complexity represented by a social system, you can see that its fundamental dissipative dynamic can best be described in terms of competition and cooperation. And thus you can see why a basic moral precept, like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", makes natural sense. It encodes a natural organising balance.

It is easy to see what proximity relates. So what does the good relate?

I'm just not sure how understanding natural propensities relates to normative rules of behaviour. Surely the former is only relevant if it helps us determine how best to achieve some desired end? It certainly can't tell us which desired ends are good, can it? — Michael

If the most general propensity of nature is to entopify, then we can consciously consider our moral precepts in that light.

If your notion of "the good" has to be then modified to get passed its traditional transcendent presumptions, or even completely abandoned as a useful term, then great.

I think "purpose" is the wrong word to use here. It suggests intention, which nature doesn't have (unless you count us wanting things as nature having intentions, or unless you're arguing for panpsychism). — Michael

Natural philosophy is about taking finality seriously, but in ways that are suitably deflationary.

So finality is seen in nested hierarchical fashion as {propensities {functions {purposes}}}. Or to use systems jargon, {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

Things with brains thus can have purposes, conscious intentions, teleological plans. But at the other end of the spectrum, even the physico-chemical realm has propensities or teleomatic tendencies.

And no, this leads not to pan-psychism but to pan-semiosis. It is a claim about a material world organised by the "immateriality" of a system of signs.

You are taking empirical observation of what "is" and saying this is what we "should" be aiming for. — schopenhauer1

Or rather I am saying there is what is. And it has its reasons. And that frames our choices. We can either go with nature's flow or - for some reason - decide to swim against its tide.

So the difference consists in actually knowing the purposes of nature and thus being able to make some conscious choice.

Although why you would want to live your life in a way that is naturally dysfunctional is a mystery to me.

I guess to clarify what I was trying to say is that humans are not fixed instinctually to follow any balance. — schopenhauer1

This is simply to ignore the science to the contrary.

Your ethical assumptions.. "Me like survival...survival good.." "I learn good ways for survival...this one-issue policy to stop global warming" "we follow that..everyone good".. "me ethical prophet intuiting what is good" "me Tarzan :)" — schopenhauer1

Isn't this rather specieist if not racist? Or maybe you think it's witty?

Here's the naturalistic fallacy again — schopenhauer1

You remain confused about this. It is Darth who is advancing the naturalistic fallacy here in suggesting that pleasure, pain and empathy are natural properties the good (and bad).

In philosophical ethics, the term "naturalistic fallacy" was introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.[1] Moore argues it would be fallacious to explain that which is good reductively in terms of natural properties such as "pleasant" or "desirable".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Of course Moore wanted to argue for some ineffable notion of the good. And so he was wrongly focused on a particular kind of metaphysical notion of what even "is". His argument was against qualia - pleasure, pain and empathy regarded as objects of experience.

My naturalism is physicalist (with its semiotic twist) and so it has quite a different metaphysical basis.

For me, what "is" is material. And what "ought" is thus some empirical observation about the necessities of material self-organisation. I am not a closet dualist like Darth and so the "ought" part only needs to have the ontological status of historical inevitability.

I don't claim a transcendentally absolute existence for "the good". Therefore I don't have to justify a strong distinction between is and ought. They become merely the same system observed over different spatiotemporal scales.

In the short-term, everything is what it is, even if it is disorganised and chaotic. In the long-term, what that everything is, is then what it "ought" to be in the sense that by definition it must have struck on the fruitful balance that enables its own long-term persistence.

So do you see the difference yet?

If you presume a metaphysics based on substantial existence with external causes (like a world of material action ruled by some transcendent principle), then is~ought is automatically a naturalistic fallacy. It simply restates the assumption that the rightful cause of a material action - its finality - comes from "outside" the world. By ontic definition, it doesn't come immanently from within.

But my metaphysics is a process ontology based on immanent causality. Finality must arise within the system - to the degree that any final cause exists. That is why I keep pointing you at the laws of thermodynamics. That is what finality looks like in the real material world to the best of our scientific knowledge.

And so now - by definition - there is no problem with ought arising as the historical inevitability that is immanent self-organisation. It can't be a natural fallacy as the oughtness is built in, not hived off as some mysterious further transcendental principle - the desires of a creating god or the abstract objects of a Platonic realm.

Once self-awareness becomes involved, we no longer "have" to do anything, whether that be re-introducing restraint or moving towards a "better" balance... These all become hypothetical imperatives.. prescriptions for this or that lifestyle, but none of them are justified in and of themselves, only suggestions for living this or that lifestyle. — schopenhauer1

Unfortunately you give humans too much credit for self aware insight.

No one would get morbidly obese or a hopeless alcoholic if they could freely make well-informed choices. Most folk in fact struggle to help themselves - fight their evolved urges. And then our societies build in those bad choices for some reason - selling sugar by the bag, alcohol on every street corner.

So that is why we need morality that works. We have a real problem in being natural creatures in a world where we have got good at removing natural constraints.

And you are not going to fix that problem with a faulty philosophical model of morality.

what's pleasurable isn't always good and what's good isn't always pleasurable. — aporiap

Well put. The "good" is never going to be found so simply in personal feelings. Otherwise chocolate and beer would be the highest good. :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep. You want to believe what you believe and being asked to substantiate your claims becomes an inconvenience.

Again there is a difference between saying morality just is social organisation that works and taking the stance that morality is somehow optional or a free choice.

Not my problem if you can't understand the argument.

You are still talking right past my naturalistic approach.

History is full of events being diverted by contingencies.. — schopenhauer1

And yet the domestication of the planet, the curve of fossil fuel exploitation, and the overall human population, ride right over all that.

You are telling me that the forest is made up of many trees. I can only nod and say yes, while reminding that you are avoiding the point.

To you, the survival of present relationships in nature "feels" right, — TheWillowOfDarkness

It "feels right" because rational/empirical investigation supports that. So the feeling of which you speak is called a reasoned belief - a demonstrable constraint on uncertainty.

By definition what survives the test of time, survives. It's not a measure of who can survive. Many others could have survived, if only people had acted differently. — TheWillowOfDarkness

As usual you give the impression of typing without thinking.

If it can make a difference that people acted differently, then there was something they were doing wrong.

And what I am doing is focusing on what "doing right" actually looks like. I'm asking the question of what generic principles can we identify that would be useful in redesigning our current moral codes so as to consciously achieve the future outcomes we might prefer.

It still amounts to admitting what I said has truth to it- varieties can become the dominant, even if it starts out small/unpopular. — schopenhauer1

I hardly need to admit what I already say is basic to my position.

Of course, the further notions of hierarchical constraint and propensity are then also basic - indeed more so, in explaining why the small/unpopular must exist, even merely as a fluctuation.

Now, you are just asserting the opposite what you admitted to briefly above- that local variants can eventually BECOME the general trend. — schopenhauer1

Do you not yet understand the difference between the possible and the likely?

So, rather it is the other way around.. even if one person does not have a kid when they could have, one instance of harm is prevented. — schopenhauer1

And I've nothing against this as a rational judgement. Indeed, it seems to me a responsibility to think of whether the world is going to be a good enough place before you do in fact bring children into it these days.

If enough people were collectively making a rational assessment of the state of the world and acting by refusing to breed, then it would quite fast become a political issue. Governments would have to react with policy changes that started to deal with the realistic fears potential parents might have.

But to claim that life is generally "too much suffering" just by being life is - for me, for reasons I've outlined - an irrational line of thought.

What works may be what remains, but what works best is not always the path taken. Contingencies may lead to outcomes which are useful, but not maximally useful. — schopenhauer1

Yes, but over time water finds its way to the lowest level. And the contingent story of how the trickles became the river fade into history. So you are raising objections which are irrelevant.

What actually matters if we are talking about recent human history is that it has now become a far more complex situation where humans themselves are changing the evolutionary landscape. We are affecting the environment so dramatically that it does count as a general phase transition. We are kicking the eco-sphere into a new age - the anthropocene. And to the degree we are actually smart primates, we can get to shape the outcome in some self-conscious fashion.

So it is not my point that nothing is changing or that we have no say in the changes. Instead - in highlighting the thermodynamic imperative of fossil fuels - I seek to focus attention on the deep drivers. Being conscious of the game is really the only way to actually have some control of its direction.