You're conflating hypothetical imperatives with categorical imperatives. — darthbarracuda

No I'm not. I'm taking the view that talk about categorical imperatives is transcendent bunk. As a Pragmatist, I can only support reasoned approaches to morality - ones that are natural. And I've said that all along, so I hardly have to come out of the closet about it.

Yet I think it is clear that morality, as it is being discussed here, is about the categorical imperatives. — darthbarracuda

That's your claim. I've repeatedly asked you to justify it.

You don't make an appeal to god, or maths, or anything. So what justifies your transcendental ontology apart from a dualistic, reality-denying, approach to "sentience"?

You say that '"equality" is your transcendent principle, and yet you reject any reasonable approaches to measuring that equality. If anyone points out that humans and animals are not equal in terms of any sensible definition of sentience, you simply claim not to believe the science which tells us that as a measureable fact. Your position is defended by sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to talk about equality realistically.

The fact that animals cannot really "give back" to you is seen as evidence by yourself that they are not worthy of ethical consideration, as helping them would be irrational (against our own interests). — darthbarracuda

As usual, you distort what people argue.

I said in practice we do care about animals to the degree they "give back to us". And this is natural as morality is all about the practical business of organising social relations. We are social creatures and ethical frameworks exist to optimise that. As social creatures, we now have extended that to the realm of domesticated animals. We treat domestic animals differently from wild animals or good reason. We do things like pay their vet bills because we accept their welfare as our responsibility.

Are we not better than that? Can we not move on from these beastly behaviors? Can we not recognize that there is a difference between rationality and ethicality? Can we not recognize that, if we existed in a different world, we might not have to espouse these ancient, oppressive traditions? — darthbarracuda

Not only can we do these things, but we do do these things. However the best argument is going to be that it is rational self-interest to do so.

By calling these traditions "oppressive", "tribalistic", "totalitarian", "unequal", etc., I am identifying an actual quality of these traditions. — darthbarracuda

Or rather you are trying to win an argument by using emotionally loaded terms. I prefer reason and evidence myself.

You could accuse me of putting everyone on a guilt-trip; yet this guilt is precisely why I think we ought to abandon these traditions. After all, I am only pointing out facts. Whether or not we are able to act ethically is entirely irrelevant to the discussion. — darthbarracuda

This gets very weird. You want to cause us the suffering that is to feel guilt even if there is then nothing we could do to assuage that guilt you have created?

Is that ethical in your book?

What those that criticise speciesism would say about this is that the question is why does people being human cause us to treat them better than other animals? I believe the reason is simply tribalism - because humans are our group and cows are not. — andrewk

It is hardly so arbitrary. Humans treat each other well in the hope and expectation they will get the same treatment in return. That is basic rational behaviour.

Pet owners and farmers do the same thing with their animals because in reciprocal fashion they get personal goods like pets that comfort and protect them, or farm animals that are easier to handle and more productive.

So it is about the group dynamic - the give and take of mutual interests. But to simply give rights without reasons is arbitrary and irrational, unless you can argue for some further transcendent principle at work.

In order to argue against my claim, then, you will need to argue that equality shouldn't be applied universally (and thus not be equality in any meaningful sense), and that suffering is not the only ethically important notion - and from my view, the former would depend on arbitrary moral constraints, and the latter fails to fulfill the open-ended question. — darthbarracuda

Or we could just ask you to support any claim you might wish to make, having explained why it is in fact arbitrary in mandating universality where even commonsense says differences exist.

If animals, for instance, can't imagine their own extinction by death and so experience existential dread, then do we get to take that distinction into account, or not?

You are taking an all or nothing approach to sentience. And where are the facts that would justify such an arbitrary stance on your part?

Yet, as I have argued, there are no constraints that aren't arbitrary, contradictory, or irrational. — darthbarracuda

I think I see your problem....

You've avoided any real response so I'll only repeat that pessimism is a cliche - the latest reincarnation of romanticism - and not an interesting philosophical analysis. It finds only what it already presumes.

That is what life produces in copious amounts: irony, the comedic aspect of tragedy. — darthbarracuda

What's ironic is that the Life of Brian was accurate as satire in being so squarely aimed at the narcissism of small differences. The laugh was at all the various beetle-browed self-rule factions that were utterly ineffectual.

Remember how the film ends. The crack suicide squad from the Judean People's Front charges to save Brian on the cross and then commits mass suicide in front of the Roman troops in a political protest.

The modern equivalent is proclaiming oneself to be a Vegan, or a Pessimist. Cue the furious social boundary marking discussions about whether you can be a "real vegan" living on chips and chocolate. Or a "true pessimist" if you don't follow through and top yourself, or if you keep a cat, dog or pet rat.

In terms of postmodernity, consumer culture has been seen as predicated on the narcissism of small differences to achieve a superficial sense of one's own uniqueness, an ersatz sense of otherness which is only a mask for an underlying uniformity and sameness.

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

The Wisdom of Silenus would have been the True Detective of ancient Greece. — darthbarracuda

I enjoyed True Detective (the first one at least) at the level of well-acted murder porn. But let's not pretend it had any philosophical merit. Or even artistic merit. It was a soap with glossy pretensions.

You can talk of entropy production but life adds such insignificant amount of entropy to the overall state of the universe that this makes it rather unimportant.... Where there is sentient life, there is irony. — darthbarracuda

Humans are warming a whole planet. That's quite impressive historically speaking.

It takes a gallon of petrol to produce a modern cheeseburger. A gallon of petrol represents the geologically-reduced remnants of 98 tons of ancient planktonic biomass dug out of a deep hole.

I think you can only call the ecological footprint of the typical Westerner "insignificant" because you haven't really ever checked out the numbers involved.

And irony is not that prevalent in human culture. Sarcasm might seem universal these days due to the internet, but I remember when the Germans, French and Americans certainly did not get Monty Python.

And even then, the primary job of irony/sarcasm/mocking and "a sense of humour" generally is as a sophisticated tool of social constraint. Laughter is the group's way of bringing individuals into line with a collective point of view.

So to the degree that irony exists, it is evidence of the value we all place on a capacity to exert social control. Laughter is the clever way we now draw sharp boundaries so as to define a group identity - even when that laughter is aimed at the very fact that this is the kind of social trick we are always pulling, as in a very fine comedy like the Life of Brian.

Life is an accident, it's a thing that just "happened". We shouldn't expect it to be purpose-filled and comfortable. — darthbarracuda

For something so accidental, life managed to happen rather easily. It appeared pretty much immediately once the biophysics allowed the semiotic phase transition involved. So from a biological perspective, it is about as "accidental" as steam condensing to water once the temperature has sufficiently cooled.

If we are going to talk about purpose, then it doesn't seem a problem to me that that is only meaningful in an ultimately thermodynamic sense. I'm all about the naturalism.

As for comfort, who ordered that? Thermodynamics justifies talk about balance or equilibrium. And you need two to tango. So if there is satisfaction, there must be unease. If there is comfort, there must be striving. It's yin and yang. Your monotonic notions have no value in nature.

Veganism was practiced thousands of years ago — darthbarracuda

So should I be a vegan because I believe animals have souls and in the truth of reincarnation?

Cannibalism was practiced until a few hundred years ago. And with a similar theistic logic. You ate the dead so as to make something of them also something of yourself.

So let's stop pretending that there is a fixed morality at work here. Rationality is not enough as a guide to what is right. You also need an accurate empirical picture from which to draw those rational conclusions.

And this is what I've been saying you lack. You just make up the facts to fit the particular cultural prejudices which are symptomatic of your cultural miillieu. You have picked up various ideas that are fashionable for the moment and sticking to them like glue.

They may well be functional ideas. They may indeed be a better way to think. But you haven't yet managed to argue that case in terms of naturalism. You have just appealed to the kind of romantic and dualistic mysticism which deserves the kind of ridicule it gets.

A cursory glance at culture reveals a deep sense of cynicism about life. — darthbarracuda

Yep. Romanticism tells the story of what it is to be the heroic individual, the legend of your own lunchhour.

And in a fossil fuel age, where there is abundant resources to be wasted, it makes sense to construct a mentality that wants to rip up its own past so as to free itself to invent a new future.

All the traditional constraints on growth - the kind of conservative wisdom that traditional societies build in because they have been bumping into various growth constraints - can be trampled into the dust, leaving the individual unfettered to be part of the new fast changing lifestyle predicated on a new level of entropic possibility.

The reason they are popular is because they speak a bit of refreshing truth in a sea of madness. — darthbarracuda

Yep, rebel without a cause still sums it up. It's the hep cats against the squares. Anti-natalism is just the latest self-tragic pose - the floppy Emo fringe being drapped across the murder porn of shows like True Detective to give them a little counter-culture chic.

Individual lives tend to look almost like an MMO — darthbarracuda

Well that's been my point. Modern civilisation has developed in unreflective fashion, re-organising itself so as to dissipate fossil fuels in the most mechanical fashion. Thus if you want to focus on the actual issue, this is the issue.

But there is no point bleating about cosmic insignificance or the fact that the majority are going blindly with the entropic flow. This is simply given voice to the very Romanticism, the Individualism, that modern civilisation has used to rip up its past, free itself to consume its own future with unconstrained haste.

To talk about the virtues of veganism or antinatalism is just pointless displacement activity. It is to accept the disconnect between the social and individual sphere which modern civilisation is using to do its thing. It is to exist in a world that is actually eating ever greater quantities of meat and breeding with exponential zest, and simply want to do "the opposite" without actually dealing with the core mythology that makes that society what it is.

The fact is that entropification is natural. That's who we are. That's what life is. But also there is a choice. We can see that a sustainable lifestyle requires one mentality - a highly socially constrained one. While a fossil fuel lifestyle promotes another - one in which romantic individuality prevails, where the social past can freely be rewritten in whatever way "you" believe right.

Thus, as I said, your point could make sense but it does so in a way that does not pass your own test which again, is an appeal to the majority. — schopenhauer1

So you agree I'm right but now make up this weird claim that I think most people would straightforwardly agree? And yet I've said the majority - in this romanticised, individualist, existentialist modern culture of ours - have been brought up to have a different set of beliefs. So to agree with my rational and empirically supported position would be to go against the general social brainwashing.

My point was that people like you and DC have swallowed the idea that personal autonomy is paramount - which is why the discovered lack of it becomes a bitter disappointment. Romanticism promised you something, then took it away. But you still fundamentally believe in it.

The Cosmos was meant to be enchanted. It is merely prosaic. So you wish it would all just fuck off and die.

You fail to understand that our species' ability to self-reflect means that we not only follow the group-individual dynamics that you describe, but we can make judgements, evaluations, and conclusions on our species' activity as we are participating in them. — schopenhauer1

You talk about rational self-reflection as some "big brained" biological capacity which we should take for granted. But it's a linguistic and cultural habit that has evolved socially and so is tightly wedded to a social level of action. Our societies shape the kind of "self" reflection (and regulation) which suits their purposes.

So again, you are just expressing the particular romantic individualism promoted as a social asset at a particular stage of human social evolution - a time when fossil fuel wants to be burnt as fast as possible. It really helps that unlimited growth agenda to produce generations of individuals who want to get off their arses and find ever more creative methods of increasing their ability to consume.

We have this general-processor brain capable of not only solving immediate problems but understanding our very own human condition. — schopenhauer1

If we must use computer analogies, then again look to the culture that writes the current generation of software and the story of the "human condition" it finds functional to tell.

And sure, it is a necessary part of the evolutionary process that there is dissent. You have to have failure to find the winners. You need variety to maintain adaptive capacity.

So there is absolutely nothing unnatural about anti-natalism being out there as a meme. But while we are on the sugar-rush of a fossil fuel bonanza, global population growth won't halt until it hits some harder limit than that.

the individual point of view is still unique to each individual. — schopenhauer1

Romanticism in a nutshell.

Of course I understand that I'm not you and you are not me. We are all separate lives in that sense. But humans are highly constrained by their shared biological, social and cultural histories. The actual individuality becomes fractional by comparison.

So I'm not about denying anything. I'm just about empirical accuracy. If you want to claim that everyone is an individual, let's quantify that. Society seems to need both poets and soldiers. It has cultural institutions to produce both. But what would you guess the ratio of professional poets to professional soldiers to be? And what would the answer tell you?

This group dynamic thing you promote has to work on statistics rather than necessities. — schopenhauer1

But that's just the definition of a natural system. Nature works by developing the constraints that shape its local degrees of freedom. Existence is probabilistic - or rather, a story about the rational development of propensities.

Tendencies can tolerate exceptions and still be tendencies. This is why the organic is so powerful and persistent, not brittle like the mechanical (where tendencies must be necessities for the machine to work more than once).

On average it has to work well for most people, but it does not have to work for everyone. — schopenhauer1

Yep. And natural selection needs its failures. That is how it can continue to track success.

it's a bit unfair to paint me as an advocate of factory farming don't you think?

You don't have to actually articulate thoughts as the inner voice as even preparing to say something is already enough to know where the articulation was headed, and to be responding to that accordingly.

It takes about half a second to assemble a fully fleshed out speech act. Hearing yourself say it as mental imagery certainly helps in provoking more precise responses in turn. You can stop to think about what you just suggested. Yet that is overkill for most trains of thought which are more the chaining of familiar habits. We know the thought was already going to be right and so no need to listen in with any care.

So inner speech is essential in that it gives human thought its rational structure. But then the aural image of a completed speech act is not essential. The latent structure can carry most of the load.

But just as antinatalism does not sound appealing to some, telling people that they are here to keep the group going would probably not get much fanfare either. So your own claim would not pass your own "appeal to the majority" test, oddly enough. — schopenhauer1

This is nuts as there is hardly a crying need to protect the human population from the dangers of cultish antinatalists.

With 2.5 billion people in 1950, 6.5 billion in 2005, and 9 billion by 2050, there just ain't a problem in that regard.

Antinatalism is as meaningless as a possum throwing itself under a passing truck and trailer.

Whether the group persists, there would be less people that suffered that could have otherwise. The harm prevented from preventing one birth does not get nullified by someone having a child. If you saved someone from getting hurt and someone in the town over does get hurt, that other person's pain does not nullify that the person you saved did not get hurt. — schopenhauer1

More crazy arithmetic.

The way societies actually think is that small global changes can improve the average lot of the many. You only have to focus on shifting the mean a small degree to make a large difference for the many.

Again, even if this was true, "knowing" that people are created by social institutions that want to ensure survival for individuals and the institution itself, does not negate the absurdity one may feel if one self-reflected on the fact that we are keeping our own individual upkeep going, the group going, and pursuing more goals simply to keep it going. — schopenhauer1

Yeah. But you hardly invented this idea yourself, did you? You are simply repeating what you heard others say. So you speak for a familiar vein of thought - the romanticism that became existentialism that has become pessimism. And you are looking around on this forum for moral support for this stance, along with seeking to "other" me so as to confirm the social validity of that way of thinking.

You can't escape the very game you pretend to reject. If you could, you wouldn't even bother coming on a forum like this to argue with someone like me.

This is where you make the category error. Humans do not just exist with no internal reflection and simply take in information and output actions... — schopenhauer1

And humans only have such capacities due to social evolution.

There is a reason why you might be a dissatisfied, questioning, quarrelsome, social-approval seeking, kind of critter. That is the kind of individual that perpetuates the social system that produced it.

And if in fact you happen to have some collection of dysfunctional traits, then you will disappear from the meme pool in the not so distant future.

I'm presuming you have parents. Well they had at least one kid. And if you have siblings, are they breeders? Or is it dead-end for your lineage?

Even if it is, it would be less than a drop in the ocean. There are over 7 billion people on the planet. Even a billion antinatalists could only slow the increase.

Maybe its futile, but that does not mean it is wrong. You are making the is-ought fallacy.. just because something is a certain way, does not mean that this is what someone ought to do. — schopenhauer1

I've already pointed out your fallacious reasoning in demanding that existence have transcendent meaning. So I know that is-ought is classically a big deal. But that's only a hangover from Platonism and theism. It doesn't apply to my position.

There is no cosmic failure.. rather we have the ability to self-reflect on the situation and have emotions, attitudes, and such on the human condition itself.. something that is not merely there to keep the group surviving. — schopenhauer1

So you say. But to the degree it matters to the survival of the group, an attitude that is actually socially dysfunctional will simply be erased by time.

The group doesn't even have to worry about that. Question all you like. See ya latter buddy. Life goes on.

its about your head surely?

Yep I agree. There is the biological or instinctual level of evaluation and then the sociocultural overlay that then still gets called emotion, and yet is different in being a learnt construct.

The line gets easily blurred. So when talking about anger, we might try to restrict it to limbic responses - the fight/flight reaction. Or we might then talk about various social scripts that put different slants on the cultural propriety of the raw feeling.

So we might talk about anger as bravery - socially approved fighting. Or we might talk about it as aggressiveness - socially disapproved combativeness.

There is a basic palette of wired responses. And then we can overlay that with an unlimited variety of socially framed views of how some situation ought to rightfully make us feel and act.

This is of course standard psychology. As told here in a list of the seven basic responses as revealed by coordinated reflexive actions.

http://www.humintell.com/2010/06/the-seven-basic-emotions-do-you-know-them/

But where it gets interesting is the human capacity for more social feelings like shame, guilt, empathy, dominance and submission.

These likely have a stronger biological base given we are highly evolved as social creatures.

Your post was vague and rambly. So most of it I neither agreed with nor disputed in any particular fashion. It didn't constitute a criticism as such.

I focused on the most salient point, or at least what I felt worth pursuing. I appreciate your only desire now is to get at me in whatever way you can.

So continue with your little psychodramas if you can't respond to the substance of my post. It's all good entertainment to distract us while we wait to die, heh?

Nor do I think Experience is a system. I don’t believe in parts and wholes. It seems to me that either two things are entirely separate, distinct and independent, in which case they do not form a whole. Or two things do form a whole, in which case they are not separate, distinct and independent. I think the notion of “part” is intrinsically contradictory. (Another unsupported, controversial assertion. But I am here just stating my beliefs, for what it's worth.) — Dominic Osborn

I think we are on the same page. But the way out of this particular bind is the logic of the dichotomy.

Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce all wound up with a triadic, developmental, ontology as the way to resolve the dilemma. If you start with pure unformed potential - the unspeakable ur-stuff that is an ontic vagueness - then that can then get organised, structured, via a process of differentiation and integration. You have the division. And that division allows the mixing. And the division is never a real separation as such as it is just the same thing moving apart from itself with ever increasing definiteness.

So this was Anaximander's gift at the dawn of metaphysics. You have the apeiron. And it divides in logical fashion. Part of it, by concentrating the possibility of warmness, leaves another part that is subsequently a concentration of the cooler. And if such a separation is possible, what is to stop it proceeding to its limits. Coupled to a further consequent separation - the dry and the damp - you then get all four basic elemental categories, fire, air, water and earth. Or in modern physical parlance, plasma, gas, liquid and solid.

Thus systems thinking supports an ontology that is triadically developmental. You start with an unformed potential (that is no kind of substantial state - mental or material). And then all you need is the rational possibility of some "this" which then, in its very becoming, must produce its matching "that". You just need a symmetry that can be broken. From there, complexity can follow as the differentiation that then gets integrated, the brokenness that can mix and interact.

“Experience” is the name I have been giving to Reality. I don’t like the word because it implies something that is experienced and something that experiences, things that I don’t think exist, but I have to have some word for it: “Experience” will have to do for the minute. — Dominic Osborn

So two points on that.

First, I accept the full force of solipsism on a non-solipsistic basis. So it is because I believe - after Peirce - that our mentality is "pure symbolism", that this then is a justification of the Kantian impossibility of knowing the "material" thing-in-itself.

I "know" - as a reasonable belief derived from scientific investigation - that even when I see colours, or shapes, or motions, such perceptions are indirect constructions. It is modelling. And that leaves me "trapped" on the side that is the play of symbols. There is no getting outside my own mental creations. It is a categorical difference.

And yet of course, the very idea of a modelling relation only makes sense if there is indeed a world, a thing-in-itself, that causally constrains the impressions I might have. So to believe in this epistemic "full force" solipsism - the one due to being trapped in my own play of symbols - requires also the ontic commitment that there is something the other side, a material world. It would be the biggest surprise possible, the most impossible conceivable thing, for it not to be true that my impression of there being a world is not sustained by there being a world.

But then beyond that, this semiotic argument also pretty much mandates that the world I think I see is such a selective and self-interested impression that I'm not really seeing that world at all. This is especially obvious when it comes to talking about colours or odours. But rigour would demand it applies to primary qualities as well as secondary qualities.

Anyway, you can pursue that semiotic argument still further (winding up in pansemiotic metaphysics). But the key point is the strength of my epistemic solipsism is due to a positive belief in the world - a belief that the world exists, therefore I must be symbolically modelling, and therefore I am trapped due to the necessary indirectness of this modelling relation. If I stopped believing in the world in this fashion, my reasons for accepting the force of solipsism (which is usually due to the weakly defined notion of "mind" rather than the strongly defined notion of "symbol") would collapse. I would lack an evidential basis for making that very claim.

Second, or continuing on from that really, you are in the same boat as you can't talk about "experience" as "just whatever everything is" in some uncontextual fashion and claim that to be meaningful speech. For any statement to be intelligible, it has to be so by virtue of a claimed contrast.

To speak of "experience", it must have a definition in terms of what is its "other". And you are claiming to be talking about "a state" which has no other. In logic, the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply and so technically your claim is simply vague. It may sound as though you are making a definite reference to something, but you really aren't.

Now you try to sidestep this difficulty by starting with a crisp dichotomy - the usual one of self and world. Then by virtue of their metaphysical intelligibility - it makes dialectical sense that such a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive pair such as self and world could exist - you can claim dissolve each into the other to arrive at a third thing. Let's call it dasein. Let's call it "experience". Let's call it whatever. You only have to point to the fact that starting with the fact of a strong separation, that gives you the grounds to reverse the separation and arrive back as at some logically unseparated state.

That's fine. It's good logic. But we need to call it what it really is - and that's vagueness (or Firstness for Peirce). And it is as far away from actual experiencing of any phenomenological kind as it is from the noumenal world.

Being that, it is unlike anything an actual traditional solipsist - as an end game idealist - is conceiving of. We are not reducing everything to some kind of mental stuff, some play of ideas. We are reducing everything to vagueness. We have gone way beyond the kind of definite being that an idealist is imagining as the basis of all existence.

So strong epistemic solipsism is warranted in the sense that we "know" that ourselves and our impressions can only be a play of symbols. We are trapped on one side of the modelling relation we have with the world (but we can only "know" that by believing the world to be there on the other side).

And then strong ontic solipsism is not warranted. If you try to reduce our state of mental representation, our embodied state of being, to its greatest state of simplicity, you find that the only way that this can be done rationally is by beginning with the definitely separated and - from there - argue towards their foundational unity. And that unity can only be a state of vagueness or utter indeterminacy.

And indeed, we can do that, even using weaker ontic notions such as self vs world rather than my preferred symbol vs matter.

But we then arrive at a "state" that resembles no state of mind. We arrive at a "vagueness" that could hardly satisfy any traditional notion of idealism and thus of solipsistic being.

So idealism/solipsism fails as we track back towards the very origins of ontic possibility. But that then becomes why I say there is this other ontic expedition of pan-semiosis. Instead of being a bug, the fundamentality of vagueness is now the metaphysical feature.

The apparent complexity of experience is accounted for by an external world which is complex, which is many things. — Dominic Osborn

Remember that my original argument to you was that you were having to assume at least two simples - the self and world. So my argument did not rely on the world being complex (even if it surely is).

That is to say that I only think that there are two things, the experience of the seeing the rock and the experience of having the pain after kicking it, because I mistakenly believe that there is such a thing as the rock (independent of my experience) and such a thing as a foot (independent of my experience), each of which is independent of the other. — Dominic Osborn

But what warrants you treating the pain as real, the rock as illusion? This shows you have already assumed that existence has the character of being "mental". And as I argue, you can only claim that intelligibly by virtue of already believing that "mental" stands in meaningful contrast to something "other", such as physical reality. Thus we are starting at an irreducible complexity that contradicts anything further you might claim about there be a monistic simplicity when it comes to this thing called "experience".

Another argument. If experience is complex, then it is many things. If it is many things, where are the gaps in experience? Experience is one unbroken flow. How is it divided into different bits? — Dominic Osborn

But we know that if you run the frames of a strip of film through a projector then - at the right rate - you experience an unbroken flow of imagery. Or if we introspect on dreams with accuracy, we discover each is in fact a "still", just a still with a psychological sense of swirling, camera-tracking, motion in which nothing actually changes in the momentary snapshot "view".

So there is abundant evidence - both empirical and even phenomenological - that we can be fooled by the general assumption experience has no composite structure, no "bitty" complexity.

Each part of my experience implies all of it. Red implies blue and the whole colour spectrum. Colour implies texture, form, etc., the other components of the Visual. The Visual implies the Aural, the Olfactory, etc.. Each tiniest sensation implies the whole experiential panorama. — Dominic Osborn

That makes no sense to me. If I am deaf and blind, how would my remaining kinesthetic knowledge imply anything about those other sensory modalities?

And if we imagine removing every modality, what are we going to be left with. No state of sensation surely.

You can’t know if this is a dream, and when you are dreaming, you can’t know that it is dreaming. Again — Dominic Osborn

You can’t know if this is a dream, and when you are dreaming, you can’t know that it is dreaming. Again, to merely assert the point again, though in a non-epistemic way: what I dream is just as real as the waking world. — Dominic Osborn

Again, you can't argue positively for ontic solipsism on this basis because you are trying to employ terms like "dreaming" and "awake" in ways that presume the knowable difference you are seeking to deny.

Epistemic solipsism on this score is fair enough because now you are disposing of the "knowing" with all its absolutism. You are instead beginning with the structure of your beliefs and agreeing that's as good as it gets.

But then those beliefs are the ontic commitments. And so to talk about dreams and awakeness is intelligible speech - something we could actually argue about meaningfully, with ourselves even - because we accept they are terms representing different categories of experience. That level of complexity is already being taken for granted. Thus destroying the undividable simplicity you require to make ontic solipsism fly.

Experience is, in a way, nothingness. But not nothingness in the sense of absence, or in the sense of blackness, or silence, or air, but in the sense of––nothing determined, in the sense of everything piled on top of everything else (a metaphor), in the sense of having no characteristics because having all characteristics, in the sense of being identical to everythingness. I think Experience is like what Anaximander called apeiron. I think Experience is like chaos, what there was before Jehovah started dividing this from that. — Dominic Osborn

Or as I've argued, not nothingness but vagueness, firstness, indeterminacy, potential - and yes, apeiron.

So the contrast becomes not that of something vs nothing, light vs blackness, but indeed more like an everythingness that is thus equally a nothingness in that all possible distinctions are overwhelmed by their own lack of proper contrast.

So it seems you do want to arrive at the same fundamental state as I do. But as I have said, I don't see this as a species of idealism or solipsism. It is a metaphysics that goes beyond all that. It undermines both realist and idealist ontologies in radical fashion.

Of course, why someone needs to keep the group going merely to keep the group going is not really explained — schopenhauer1

That's the group's need clearly. It doesn't have to be the individual's. It is just likely to be the individual's as logically the group would need to be able to make that kind of individual as the way it has managed historically to persist.

So sure, you the individual could suddenly rebel. You could top yourself. And if enough others felt the same way, then there would be no society eventually.

Of course your problem there is even if only a few individuals did not want to drink the Kool aid with you, they would survive, breed, and pass on their habits of thought. All you would prove is something about your own mental quirks. The circumstances which produced a persistent social entity in the past would roll on probably better adapted for its self perpetuation in the future.

So it doesn't matter if individuals opt out. But it shouldn't be surprising that the collective expresses a different opinion, and not necessarily a very patient one.

Stepping back, are you thinking that existence itself must have a meaning, and so your realisation that it doesn't have a meaning is then a meaningful lack?

My argument only needs to be that meaning is what a system constructs. Goals are emergent regularities that exist because they foster their own persistence. That's the basic difference between taking the immanent view vs the transcendent view.

So in that light, a social system is free to form its own goals, it's own identity - and do so via the particular kinds of individuals it creates. That is as high as we need to shoot in finding a meaning in existence, or equally, as far as we can go in making some complaint about a lack of meaning.

That still leaves the individual free to construct his own life meaning, or equally, construct a notion of his own cosmic meaninglessness. Maybe the individual can even start up his own small movement - like antinatalism - as a gesture that appears to imbue his existence with the meaningful lack of meaning which he seeks. That is a lack of meaning of suitably trans-social, trans-historic, cosmically-absolute scale.

Such a moral construction - an anti-goal - can be proclaimed. On rarer occasions, it might even be acted upon. But as I say, it is unlikely to impact the collective system if that system already has up a head of steam and will simply end up reproducing via the kind of thought habits which are in fact functional in regard to its persistent being.

You can't stand in the way of natural selection anymore than natural selection can stand in the way of thermodynamics.

And again I say that from the point of view of pansemiotics - reality's own construction of meanings or habits of interpretance. It doesn't matter that goals don't pre-exist and are only found as whatever are the habits which permit persistence. The claim is never that meaning could have a transcendent status such as what instead exists counts as some kind of cosmic failure.

I wonder if you see this yet? The very basis on which you want to mount your fundamental criticism doesn't even exist from my point of view. There is no standing outside existence that could count as meaningful here.

Jeez, if the Enlightenment and its Romantic reaction are that unfamiliar to you, where could I even start....

Maybe you should actually make a post on this instead of having a assert it every single time. — darthbarracuda

Don't just be a dick. I've explained plenty. For example....

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

The Enlightenment was about recognising humans as natural creations with a natural logic. We could consider the basis of human flourishing and create the social, political and ethical institutions to foster that. And recognising the continuity between humans and other animals was a big part of the new thinking.

So it is Enlightenment values that have steadily changed our treatment of animals (and races, and sexes, and the infirm/mentally ill/infantile) to reflect what we actually know about their capacity to suffer. That is what rationality looks like - consistent decisions based on accurate information.

Unfortunately you appear to be backing Romanticism instead. Every individual is a special creation. Absolute rights apply because something "is a mind" or "has a soul" in black and white fashion. Romanticism rejects shades of grey. A papercut is as bad as the Holocaust. Any flicker of suffering at all becomes a reason to say life in any form simply should not exist.

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

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

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

But absolutism of this kinds works both ways - which is what historically makes it so philosophically dangerous.

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

Calling people desperate, it seems to me, is a sign of desperation. — darthbarracuda

You mean exasperation.

You keep using this word "romantic" as a cop-out. — darthbarracuda

No, I'm describing the cop out. But you are never going to address this confused dualism of yours no matter how often I point back to its familiar cultural basis.

It's been amusing as always.

. The therapist that helps the patient form his goals sits in the position of power with the patient. He does what he thinks the patient needs, but it's the therapist's conception of how you ought to be behaving, feeling etc. are constituted in the goals the patient forms. I think it is a form of brain washing. The symptoms are treated but not their causes. — Cavacava

That's nonsense. But you are free to make up what you like.

In regards to you on Freud, more ad hominems. His work is still being studied, with plenty of professional work being generated based on his theories. — Cavacava

More vague and uninformed comment. But you believe what you like.

What are you saying. That CBT is different from Positive Psychology, or different as I have described it, unsure from what you said. They sound the same to me. Martin Seligman's is a big in both areas. — Cavacava

You misdescribe CBT in relation to PTSD in that it sounds like you are thinking of desensitisation or exposure therapy. And the idea of "accepting the therapist's goals" is expressedly not how positive psychology works.

Freud was a neurologist and psychologist and he is still being studied by neurologists and psychologists. He didn't romanticize psychology, that's your spin. — Cavacava

He was a coke head and a charlatan. And I've studied what he wrote - even the early neurological speculation he abandoned. So if you want to talk about omega and psi neurons, or this mysteriously oozing Q fluid that needs its psychic discharge, we could go there, have a laugh.

Yet a scientific ethics does not necessarily satisfy what we perceive to be moral. — darthbarracuda

But that's just you pushing your personal wheelbarrow again and claiming it to be the everyman view.

Tell a person whom you're helping that you're helping them because they can go on and make more entropy, and not because they're a person who is valuable because they can suffer, and they might just shake you off and tell you to buzz off. — darthbarracuda

There's no point replying to nonsense like this. It is just a sign of desperation on your part.

Yet surely these ends do not match with what we want — darthbarracuda

You are getting it half right in accepting that there is a thermodynamic framework at play. But I've already said that then itself creates our "free" choice about what we then do about things once we have that accurate picture.

We could go with the flow or instead swim against the tide. That's the choice.

And the choice becomes rational to the degree it is both possible and has some agreed goal.

Is the goal to make DC blissfully happy? Is the goal to remove the very possibility of psychic suffering? You might very well say so. I don't feel particularly moved to agree.

These behaviors are not wrong because of some entropic principle. They're wrong because we find them wrong, and then apparently some of us try to ignore this and shoehorn science in. — darthbarracuda

You keep talking about this "we". I realise you mean the many like yourself brought up on a steady cultural diet of vague romantic notions.

Query: what if the universe was malignant to us? What if, no matter what we did, we could never manage to escape its malevolent grasp? Would it still be "good"? — darthbarracuda

That is an adequate answer to your own strange question. But it is irrelevant to anything I've been saying.

And yet it is intuitive that we should give non-human animals the benefit of the doubt despite this being a presumption. It's not necessarily rational, it is ethical. — darthbarracuda

It is rational to give the benefit of the doubt when faced with uncertainty. But there is far less uncertainty about things like grades of sentience than you pretend.

So what we have here is only your weakly informed "intuitions" (ie: prejudices) against readily available scientific knowledge.

No, I'm talking about the ability to suffer, however that manifests. Sentience is just a placeholder. — darthbarracuda

Why doesn't it surprise me that you not only abstract the object but even its properties? Your approach is Platonic and dualistic in classic romantic unbounded fashion.

What are your thoughts on this? — Blue Sky

Integration and differentiation are both part of the same game. So it is completely natural that everything is all part of the one ecosystem, and yet ecosystems also tend towards complex richness - a hierarchy of divisions.

To talk about "interference" is to think about this unbiologically. If there were no competition or boundary drawing, there could be no co-operation that acts across those boundaries.

Prey needs predators to keep their numbers in check. Otherwise growth is unregulated. the prey consumes its environment, the whole system collapses of starvation.

You don't seem to understand the way that positive psychology is different from how you describe CBT.

The whole point is empowering individuals to figure it out for themselves after discovering how much of what they are doing has been unthinking - an internalisation of social or familial tropes.

And as for Freud, the whole bloody point about him was how he romanticised psychology. That is why he was such a big cultural hit. He regurgitated the mythology people wanted to hear.

And then I trace cultural attitudes to Romanticism's history (as the reaction to the Enlightenment) because it is a subject I have studied and understand.

If you want to dispute my interpretations, you are welcome to have a go. But you might have to be prepared to do some background reading by the looks of it.

I watched an ABC documentary last night on suicide prevention amongst tradesmen in Australia. — Wayfarer

There is no doubt there is a problem. And yet ethnologists find high levels of happiness in villagers living very basic lives in large parts of the world.

So it is a question that has to be studied systematically if you want to draw strong conclusions.

Are the tradies unhappy because they are no longer craftsmen but simply hammer hands of various description? Are they unhappy because masculinity itself is now problematic for tradesmen?

DC and Schop would have us believe the tradies are unhappy because they have discovered life is an existential charade with no true meaning. But I would doubt that. I would inquire first after their particular social circumstances and its distance from the kind of "village scale life" that is the most natural psychic state of being arguably.

The problem is, that nature is now valorised - 'being natural ' is now another form of faux spirituality. — Wayfarer

Yes and no. I don't see nature as being "spiritual" in some traditional ontological sense. That is a Romantic notion of nature - one in which humans and their messy social lives is exactly what is missing. The Romantic just wants the fluffy kittens and the starkly beautiful mountain ranges. Humanity is the ugly bit.

But in terms of an emotional connection, I think "nature" is what makes existence meaningful. And it is that messy nature - that mix of competition and co-operation, that cycle of life and death - which is then what I would feel like celebrating. The best cities are like the best countryside - organic.

And furthermore even within the developed economies, where we are supposed to enjoy the benefits of that progress, there is widespread dissillusionment and unhappiness, as evidenced by rates of suicide, mental illness and substance abuse. — Wayfarer

You say widespread, but have you measured it?

I'm not disagreeing that there is much that seems far from optimal. But also, it is easy to exaggerate what the majority actually feel.

Also there may be other things going on. The easier you make life for people, the more numerous become the many tiny things that might now get noticed as sources of annoyance, anxiety, etc.

When life is lived in more brute survival mode, you would either have the straightforward alternatives of an unhappy starving belly, or a satisfied full one after the kill.

But as modern developed life removes all the basic sources of unpredictability, the tiny stuff now becomes the focus in all its trivial, unresolvable, multiplicity.

If you have OCD about a neat house, there are just any number of crooked hanging pictures or mismatched cushions you can obsess about. If you fear strangers or spiders, you have the luxury of indulging such existence-irrelevant phobias to an irrational extreme.

So how much of the problems that the pessimists and anti-natalists complain about are problems that exist because all the bigger, simpler, problems have been removed from their lives?

You have to understand the psychology of why people might feel the way they do rather than just take their explanations - life sucks - at face value.

Thus the actual point of ethical importance is agential well-being. — darthbarracuda

Sorry but that is precisely the kind of presumption that I would be willing to question. I wouldn't use it as a starting point.

So what I would say is that flourishing and well-being are widely felt to be important as the basis for any ethical system. It reflects what would seem to be inescapably our own self-interest.

But I would then step back from the phenomenological justification to inquire about the natural basis. Why would humans have evolved (both biologically and culturally) to feel this way? And that is where we can see that it makes sense thermodynamically. Life exists as negentropy, or little pockets of organisation, so as to assist the Cosmos in its general entropic flow.

So stepping back to the bigger physical picture - as best we so far understand it through the systematic inquiry of science - we can see that human ethical systems do have a naturalistic logic. They are rational in terms of the rationality of the Cosmos.

You just want to start with "how it feels to me". I am interested in the hypothesis that "how it feels" is always going to be naturally rational. And the hypothesis is holding up pretty good.

As I say, many might be puzzled by climate denial, rampant consumerism, neo-liberalism, gated communities, McDonalds. These seem unnatural and unethical behaviours - according to PC romantic notions that are widespread.

Yet a shift in the entropic basis of the species now can make those behaviours "ethical" and natural. If we endorse the desires of fossil fuels, the things we might object to are in fact morally right.

And if we still feel they are wrong (which I tend to) then we have to dig into just why. And that is where the alternative of a slow burn sustainable entropification can be considered. We can now argue objectively why this is a better moral paradigm.

So my approach to ethical systems presumes nothing except that the Cosmos is rational. Nature has an over-arching self-organising logic. And that then presents us with the choice of either living within that logic or acting counter to it. And in fact, we can't act counter to it in any fundamental sense. But that still gives us a range of choices about the level of "harmony" we opt for.

And again I stress the empirical nature of all this. After making the broadest of presumptions - existence makes its own sense - it then becomes a matter of discovering what the fundamental nature of nature actually is.

Science has the advantage it is an open-ended process of learning. So we can get as close to the truth of things as we feel it matters. The answers one might have given 300 years ago would be much less informed than the ones we can give today.

But again, how we focus on welfare is more of a practical and applied ethical issue than a purely normative ethical issue. For you need to have normative ethics before you can even start applying them. — darthbarracuda

As I have argued, I would always seek to begin with the fewest presumptions about what might be the case. So the guiding norm would be the expectation that the Cosmos is rational. Nature lies there waiting to be discovered. Morality grows out of nature and so it would be questionable to hold to any ethical systems that go against nature. That would be - by definition - irrational and unsustainable (from a personal phenomenological point of view).

Well, in my opinion (which I've said before), you shouldn't. Goodness is such a queer property that it would be quite difficult to actually find goodness "out there". Hence why I'm an anti-realist: our mental states define and encompass all that is moral. — darthbarracuda

Your "out there" is my immanent nature. And your phenomenological "in here" is my hearing you assert transcendent dualism. You treat the mind as if it could exist without a body, without a world.

Sorry, but we should've all moved beyond this kind of atavistic belief.

Ants, admittedly, are probably more of a fluke than anything. But the fact that they scratched off the paint means that, potentially, they are able to recognize what is "normal" in their colonies, and recognize that there are "others" - the recognition of the "other" requires a separation between the other and the self.

Denying this possibility is speciesism, or the disregard of others' rights just because you doubt they have sentience (since it's neither proven nor disproven that they have sentience). It is an unethical leap of faith. — darthbarracuda

As I say, I have no problem with self~other distinction being as basic as it gets in the definition of life. Cell membranes can do it. Gut digestion and immune systems can do it.

And science shows that social wasps can discriminate the faces of nest mates so as to organise their interactions according to complexly hierarchical ranking.

So science continues to surprise our preconceptions about "sentience".

But that cuts both ways. We can't just cherry-pick the findings that support our preconceptions while not listening to the others that question them.

So I am very surprised by this ant finding - even if I already have no trouble believing other recent findings regarding arthropod cognition.

However the evidence that only humans have articulate speech, and thus only humans can evolve culturally encoded habits of "self-conscious introspective awareness", is just as scientific.

You are trying to talk about "sentience" as some generic property - a mind stuff abstracted from the world. This, as I say, is a Romantic hang-over - a dualistic belief in the mental as causally something apart from the world.

Now we all know that there is a Hard Problem when it comes to connecting mind and body. But how much of that problem is due simply to its ontological framing - a belief in the kind of materiality that arose out of a Newtonian model of physical causality? The advantage of a semiotic understanding of physical causality is that it offers now a causal bridge to span the gap.

So my approach is based on naturalising explanations - turning dualistic notions like "sentience" into measurable hypotheses.

The problem I have is that I am unable to see how anything more than an illusion of freedom could result from a semiotic process; if it is understood as entirely materially based. — John

First, Peircean semiotics takes spontaneity as fundamental. So it already rejects a deterministic ontology even at the cosmological level. In this fashion, it foresaw the shocks of quantum mechanics and complexity theory. It starts with a probabilistic worldview in which chance is inherent.

So there is the raw material - a built-in spontaneity. And then complex systems arise by the regulation of this spontaneity. A complex system can bend chance to its will, harness material accidents so that they achieved desired outcomes.

A Newtonian view of material existence of course makes all spontaneity a paradox. But Newtonianism just describes the Universe as it is in a highly dissipated state - within a degree or two of its final heat death. In talking about life, we are talking about existence that is 300 degrees C hotter, sitting in that heat sink which is 300 degrees C cooler. So there is a huge gradient to exploit - given also the solar radiation arriving at a temperature of about 5000 degrees.

Chance is thus taken for granted. And life sits in the middle of a flow of chance - solar radiation bouncing its way quantumly towards cosmic background radiation. So all life has to do is organise that chance using semiotic machinery.

This is physically what happens. Life is based on respiratory chains - complex proteins that take the energy off an excited election in seven or so steps by setting up a chain of quantum tunelling events. The chain is a sequence of sub-units set apart by precise distances that organises the milking of the electron's energy as a series of discrete and habitual "accidents".

So the underlying quantum behaviour is pure probability. But proteins are coded structures that then give cosmic accidents no choice but to bounce down life's carefully arranged flight of stairs.

So self-determination can be explained now in terms of the biophysics where it first arises. Biology has made contact with the quantum ground of being - via semiotic explanation.

Of course, it is then all "materially based". But it is nothing like materiality as would be traditionally conceived - the Newtonian description of a basically dead and dissipated cosmos. It is materiality regulated by symbol systems.

There is actually some evidence on this front: — mcdoodle

Yep. I googled and found that. So what is your assessment of its credibility?

The researchers do look credible and their university is reputable. But the paper is published in a rubbish journal and has attracted zero comment. This is a red flag given the result should have really made waves.

For instance, it should have got a reaction like the finding that wasps can learn to recognise the faces of nest mates - http://www.nature.com/news/wasps-clock-faces-like-humans-1.9533

And also the authors make some rather weird comments such as " It is logical that ants try to clean themselves if they see such a strange marking on their head".

It hardly seems logical that such a behaviour could have evolved given when in history has any ant ever before seen itself? Ants don't live in a world of mirrors.

Also, even if the finding holds up, there is other evidence that would argue that the behaviour is not the result of an integrated state of consciousness - the ant brain being too small to support that - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-been-looking-at-ant-intelligence-the-wrong-way/

But the experiment as described seems robustly designed. It builds on other work from the same authors. So if it can be replicated, I'm sure it will create a stir.

It is the sort of result I can't believe can be true. Or if it is, it must have a simpler explanation. Yet even that simpler explanation - as with all recent work on arthropod cognition - is going to be surprising.

And surprising because we do project a mechanistic/robotic notion of how brains should work on to neurology. But we are only starting to get to grips with brains in terms of organic or semiotic theories of "computation".

We underestimate insects because we think of them as mindless automatons.

Yet also, like DC, we also underestimate the gap that a new level of semiosis - articulate language - then opens up between humans and all other animals.

So if this ant finding holds up, I would say it makes the mirror test an even less credible test of "self consciousness" than it already was.

I think where we are going to disagree is in regard to the meaning of autonomy....

...Kant had the right idea, although I don't entirely agree with his method of thinking. He separates reality into the empirical, which is rigidly determined by causality, and the noumenal, which is not. The noumenal leaves room for Kant to believe in God, freedom and immortality. — John

Naturalism says something pretty similar and also exactly opposite based on Peircean semiotics.

So in the semiotic view, autonomy results from the separation of material cause and symbolic cause - the modelling or sign relation. Life is self-determining because it can use remembered/encoded constraints to regulate material/energetic processes.

But this is freedom constructed from "inside" the material flow - arising immanently - and not sourced from without. So it leaves no room for souls, gods, immortality or freedom in some transcendent sense.

So naturalism has an empirical model of what it is talking about - one that can be concretely tested and measured.

Autonomy in the real world is all about turning the accidental - the world's material degrees of freedom - into a useful habit.

But to say that what science discovers is what is moral is the naturalistic fallacy. — darthbarracuda

Good job I don't say that then.

Getting back to what I did say, why should I treat any notion of the good as something transcendentally abstracted from existence? So naturalism can't be a fallacy in that light. Any rational definition of the good can only make sense within the context of that which exists.

You ought to recognise this from the argument you wanted to make about the irreality of nothingness.

??? It's known that ants have sometimes reacted in such a way as to warrant the consideration of them having at least a rudimentary sense of self, when they scrape off the paint on their heads. — darthbarracuda

After looking in the mirror? References please.

1) We should work socially (like some Star Trek fashion..at least moderate environmentalist) to preserve nature/the planet, specifically to do away with the dependency on fossil fuels so that humans can exist farther into the future so that they can... — schopenhauer1

My point is that there is a choice - both choices natural in themselves.

So we could create a lifestyle that is predicated on the exponential liberation of fossil fuel. And that's fine in itself. It is not unnatural. Just a rather "live fast, die young" collective strategy.

Or we could seek to construct a lifestyle that is sustainable - one based on renewable energy. That is a conservative and homeostatic ambition - although one that could still be high growth depending on the realities of what we can achieve technologically.

And then more than that, I am saying there are reasons why fossil fuels are winning and not renewables. It is inevitable - usually - that the more urgent desire rules. But hey, we're supersmart humans. So maybe we do have a choice in the matter after all. So let's get talking about that in ways which are realistic.

it might also be true that it needs more "willpower" by the nations/actors involved — schopenhauer1

That's the trouble. Its like allowing McDonalds to exist and hoping a nation exercises its willpower. As soon as you frame the collective problem in this classically romantic fashion - one in which "individual will" is at the centre of everything - then the battle is already lost. A faulty philosophy is going to be the reason you fail.

THAT needs justification other than circular reasoning. — schopenhauer1

Its hierarchical reasoning, not circular reasoning. There's no point fussing about the details if the general structure is not right. And life on earth being a thermodynamic equation - a proton gradient - that balance is the one 7 billion homo sapiens most urgently need to attend to.

You know Maslow's hierarchy of needs right? That is hardly circular is it? More triangular. :)

Flourishing, happiness, tranquility and the like are so vague as to be useless unless expanded on in detail. — schopenhauer1

Did you ever check out positive psychology? What they mean in practice is hardly a secret. Although no-one is going to promise you that you can have it all. That's what Romaticism promises you - and why your life consequently feels like shit because you are so far from what is being promised.

Where does this crazy idea of its "perfection or nothing" come from? Mostly from being conned by a modern individualist and consumerist culture.

Pessimist philosophy in that context is then learnt helplessness - seeking escape from the game as if there is no other alternative.

Yet it is just a game. The rules can be rewritten.

Well up to a point, the ultimate limits being that it still has to be a thermodynamic game. Even suicide only recycles the parts, advances the dissipation, a little ahead of time. There are no perpetual motion machines in this existence.

If lab rats are being used to cure cancer, and this is only way to do it, then I'll support the effort. — darthbarracuda

So it IS justified that they suffer for our benefit? We should shut them in horrible little cages, give them a disease and also drugs, just to see what happens? Or even just give them enough of the drug to discover for a start what is the lethal dose?

This seems confusingly at odds with what you have been saying.

It's when we start talking about hunting animals for fun, eating the flesh of a dead animal for enjoyment, and ignoring the plight of predation and the infirm of the animal world, that I start to have problems with your and others' worldview. It's inconsistent. — darthbarracuda

It is hardly inconsistent that I would weigh up the trade-offs of curing cancer in the same way as anything else. But it is inconsistent that you seem to think inflicting suffering in the name of cancer research is OK for some reason that does not apply to the other cases you cite.

It's not clear how science should be the ultimate guide to morality. — darthbarracuda

My position is that nature constitutes existence. Science is our best inquiry into the character of that existence. Morality should be based on a proper understand of nature as morality is about our actions in the world.

So science doesn't tell you the answer in some way that is different to what we already would do in exercising rationality. It just is the method of inquiry which provides the picture of what is the case regarding the world, the context of our behavioural actions.

...ants behave as though they can recognize themselves in the mirror, — darthbarracuda

OMG. Here we go again! You must be punking me. Congrats.

Not having the stomach to dissect animals isn't the issue here: the issue is dissecting the animals in the first place when there's no good reason to. — darthbarracuda

Well you keep making the presumption about me being the blithe vivisectionist. I'm quite willing to draw my own lines in life.

But my point is that doing so is a complicated ethical business. And right at the beginning I highlighted at least two key issues - human cognition and social proximity - that you left out in your simplistic OP.

And the issue matters to me as you are representing attitudes which claim the status of rational argument but are essentially wishful romantic absolutism.

You're rather frothing at the mouth there, Schop. I'll wait until you've had a chance to calm down.

No, it's not anthropomorphic nonsense. — darthbarracuda

You are welcome to present the scientific evidence then. As I say, I've seen what you are talking about first hand and talked to the researchers who live with the colonies.

To quote Voltaire, then, if animals cannot feel or have no sentience - then why are their bodies structured and their behaviors so as if they do feel and have sentience? — darthbarracuda

It is probably pointless repeating myself here but I am the last to claim animals lack experience or phenomenology. Jumping spiders are one of my favourite cases.

But my argument is that we then have to define sentience or consciousness in ways that aren't anthropomorphic. We have to talk about the neuroscientific reality rather than just projecting some image of consciousness we have developed onto animals universally.

Having studied the comparative neurology of critters like jumping spiders and avians, I think I am well placed to do just that.

Put yourself in the shoes of a lab mouse. Do you really think it would be alright for the scientists to experiment on you just because they think you're not actually "there"? — darthbarracuda

Well yeah. One of the reasons for not actually doing that kind of research myself was that in the end I could not stomach it. After cutting up bodies for biology, shocking rats and frogs for psychology, and then discovering what really goes on in neuroscience animal laboratories, it became too much to continue going down that line.

But that was the 70s. The ethics is not perfect these days, but they have been hugely cleaned up. In terms of these kinds of issues, I have seen immense and continuing change on all fronts.

However it has been achieved on a rational basis, one capable of understanding the notion of reasonable trade-offs.

You however argue in terms of absolutes. And when the evidence is not there, you invent it - like these forlorn suicidal penguins deciding to die by trekking inlands rather than just stepping off the beach into the waiting jaws of the local orca pack.

Do you think there is a problem or not in regards to animal suffering? How am I wasting time by pointing out what I see to be problems? Essentially your positions comes down to "I don't quite agree with what OP is saying, therefore he is wasting is time." — darthbarracuda

In fact I care a lot about animal suffering and ecology generally. The difference is that I don't have to invent the facts that would support a simple-minded absolutism. I've studied the science and that informs my ethical position.

Each person believes the candidate to be the best, despite having differing reasons, and these differing reasons don't concern them so long as the candidate is elected. — darthbarracuda

I still don't follow you. But doesn't simply mentioning Trump and Clinton create a problem here?

The problem is that if people see themselves in terms of the world they will inevitably come to deny their own freedom and responsibility; their selfhood, This may already be seen in the way the scienitfc image of the human as being just another species leads to an inability to see humans as anything other than completely determined by nature, genetics and/or culture. — John

I disagree. I know science gets the blame for Scientism, but science is perfectly capable of understanding organisms as organisms. And a capacity for creativity and autonomy fits quite happily into the organic perspective. This is why biologists think computer scientists are a little nuts when they talk about artificial this and that.

So yes, there is definitely the widespread notion that reality is a machine, deterministic in its detail and meaningless as a whole. But this is a caricature of the relevant science, not a view that the science supports.

My question then is to whose advantage is it that a mechanical disposition has become wired in to much of modern culture? And how does that wrong view coexist so happily with what should seem its exact opposite - the Romantic view of life?

My argument is that scientists (in the relevant fields) don't really believe that nature is "just a simple machine". The scientist would instead be the first to stress the intimate interconnectedness of individuals and their cultures, human social systems and planetary ecologies.

But a belief that the world is just a bunch of mindless material to be exploited, coupled to the belief that the individual mind has transcendent importance, goes together as the moral justification for the way our politics and economies have become structured.

Even though the two things seem to be speaking in opposite ways, in both privileging the most self-centred possible view of life, they both act to remove social and cultural constraints on individual action. And thus - even in their conflict - they co-exist and thrive.

So you can't oppose Scientism with Romanticism. They are both riding the same wave of entropification.

Only Naturalism can see this is the case and so perhaps do something about it. But what hope is there in a world where people can pass off forlorn suicidal penguins as empirical evidence of something? That romanticism is just the flipside of thinking of penguins as disposable flesh automata.

I'm watching Westworld. Consider the co-dependency of these memes there. The machine that comes alive - has a soul. Scientism and Romanticism need each other as thesis and antithesis. Meanwhile the extravagant desires of fossil fuel slip past unnoticed. Whichever way you think you go - mechanistic exploitation or maximal individual autonomy - you are endorsing the one grander entropic scheme as in practice they amount to the same thing.

Individualism wants to shed all constraints - social and ecological - and so finds itself plugged directly into fundamental thermodynamics, the most general and mindless constraint that can't be avoided.

There is video evidence of penguins looking back at their clan as if they are looking back in forlorn. They know exactly what they're doing. — darthbarracuda

Anthropomorphic nonsense. And dangerous for the reasons I've outlined.

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

I think Descartes produced that Cartesian view as part of sustaining the transcendental self of theism.

Science certainly promotes popular notions about reality being a mechanism. But scientists - especially if they biologists - know that the reality is in fact organic. So bodies are not simply machines, but complexly/semiotically machines, and thus not really machines at all.

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

I'm seeking to limit theorising to what is rational. Your OP claimed to want rational thinking. I have shown how your views are actually informed by the irrationalism, the dualism, the transcendence, the absolutism, that are all the hallmarks of Romanticism.

We can't even talk about the fixing until we have a proper understanding of the thing we might claim to be broken in some fashion.

And you seem content with diminishing this perceived rift between the self and the rest of the world as if it's not important at all, thus shifting the focus of ethics from people as they perceive themselves as people to some abstract universal concept of entropy. — darthbarracuda

My point is that Romanticism gets in the very way of the problems that it might want to solve. If folk see themselves apart from the world, then they are not going to act in ways that could improve things.

If you spend all your time worrying about the pain lions inflict on zebra, you are never going to contribute in useful fashion to the real moral consequences of collective human behaviour for both lions and zebra.

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

You lost me there. How can the justification not be basic?

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

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

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

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

It's nature at work. If penguins never wandered, they'd never find new places to live.

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

Or the rational answer.

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

The Enlightenment was about recognising humans as natural creations with a natural logic. We could consider the basis of human flourishing and create the social, political and ethical institutions to foster that. And recognising the continuity between humans and other animals was a big part of the new thinking.

So it is Enlightenment values that have steadily changed our treatment of animals (and races, and sexes, and the infirm/mentally ill/infantile) to reflect what we actually know about their capacity to suffer. That is what rationality looks like - consistent decisions based on accurate information.

Unfortunately you appear to be backing Romanticism instead. Every individual is a special creation. Absolute rights apply because something "is a mind" or "has a soul" in black and white fashion. Romanticism rejects shades of grey. A papercut is as bad as the Holocaust. Any flicker of suffering at all becomes a reason to say life in any form simply should not exist.

Romanticism is the ontology of choice for facists for good reason. Absolutism justifies irrationality in absolute fashion. That is why politically correct thinking - enlightened attitudes born out of rational realism - becomes something far more dangerous and unreasoning in the hands of those with romantically absolute habits of thought.

Morality need not be possible to attain for it to be so. — darthbarracuda

Again this just betrays the monotonic absolutism which gives you the answers you want to hear.

Back in the real world, complexity is the result of complexly (hierarchically) organised states of constraint. So there is never a single target to be shot for. Instead, we seek to organise our world so that it is separated into its more general constraints and its more particular constraints. So generally we might not want to cause suffering. But then many particular circumstances can rationally justify that.

Rational morality is all about having this well-integrated variety in our behavioural responses. We act in a way that is a negotiated balance of all the circumstances, both general and particular. That is why it takes quite a lot of time, training and effort to produce morally mature humans. Functional humans have to find complex decision-making to be second nature.

This is the reason for being impatient with simplistic romantic thinking. It is patently unadapted to the real world where moral action actually matters.

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

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

And that starts with understanding the fact that fossil fuels have been dictating human moral behaviour for the past 300 years in ways we only dimly perceive. There is a reason why climate deniers thrive.

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

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

Applying holistic habits of thermodynamics to acute problems in morality obscures the identity of morality. — darthbarracuda

As I say, it is quite the opposite. Your promotion of fluffy irrealism is a dangerous distraction when there is a real debate that needs to be had.

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

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

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

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

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

But absolutism of this kinds works both ways - which is what historically makes it so philosophically dangerous.

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

You are asserting that propositional mental content is required for self-consciousness, or any sort of experience at all for that matter, — darthbarracuda

No. On the basis of the science, I say that animals of course have experiences and can suffer (or enjoy). But also that it is clear that self-consciousness is a socially-evolved linguistic habit. So only humans can worry about things in an abstract fashion, viewing their own existence through a culturally-constructed lens.

Furthermore, humans are not the only ones with language - look at birds, dolphins, whales, primates, etc. — darthbarracuda

Humans are the only ones with articulate language, as I say. The difference is in the capacity for grammatical structure and hence actually "rational" or abstracted trains of thought.

In any case, it is clear from the behavior of animals that many, if not most, fear death, which is why suicide is almost unheard of outside of human civilization. — darthbarracuda

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

They don't "fear death", even if of course they are biologically wired to act in ways that promote their own survival.

It is clear that animals react to painful stimuli in similar ways that we do. It is clear they nurture their young and care about the pack. And until we have good evidence that animals aren't conscious in some sense (evidence is leaning the other way), it would be wise to act as if they do have consciousness. — darthbarracuda

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

The super rich ignore the super poor right outside their doorstep. — darthbarracuda

That's not so hard if they live in a gated community with security and are tightly connected to a super rich view of life in which the poor only have themselves to blame for their poverty.

So I would hardly condone what you describe, but it is not a good example of why proximity is a relevant fact.

It's only natural to care for one's family — darthbarracuda

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

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

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

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

Cosmopolitanism presents no issue here as the proximity principle does not stop you have some generic views about humanity as a whole. Given that we are 7 billion people now crowded onto one small planet, cosmopolitanism is indeed a clear necessity.

Yet still, it matters that we live in structured fashion - that's what morality is all about. And it is the nature of that structure which I am addressing.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here, but from what I can tell you are associating comfort with morality. — darthbarracuda

No need to jump ahead to any goals. I'm just talking about the fact that there are discontinuities that mark the continuity of the moral landscape.

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

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