That takes time, effort and great commitment. Why bother? — Baden

I'm not entirely sure. Presumably they find value and fulfillment in writing about pessimism. Probably it's a mix of catharsis, distraction, and genuine moral concern.

I think a TV show that better encapsulates Horror Philosophy would be True Detective (at least the first season). — Maw

...And True Detective was effectively based on philosophical literature, like Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound, and David Benatar's Better Never To Have Been.

I do think my negative outlook on life was "eventual" in some sense, as I have a disposition to see flaws and have always been skeptical. If it wasn't this it would have been that, but it was True Detective that formally introduced me to pessimistic philosophy. The show is edgy af but then again so is some of the pessimistic literature (also I agree with Maw that the first season is superior than the second).

I'm also in debt to True Detective for getting me into doom metal and psychedelic rock. For example, this song by The Black Angels:



In regards to "horror" philosophy in general, I do find it to be cathartic and revealing in some ways, but I am also fundamentally repelled by the idea of actually enjoying horror if we're being philosophical. If you're enjoying horror, it means you're still considering it entertainment. In my opinion, it's not truly horror unless you actually legitimately wished you hadn't read that book or watched that movie.

That's what people like Nietzsche, Freud and Zapffe were going on about, how people can't handle too much truth, that truth isn't comfortable. I think Ligotti once said that truth will leave you empty handed on the side of the road wondering why you even pursued it in the first place. It destroys your beliefs, illusions, and securities and leaves you naked and afraid. This is ultimately why I am very hesitant to explain some of my philosophical beliefs to other people, as I don't know how they'll react. For all I know they might react in a very poor way, similar to how I reacted when I was initially introduced to pessimism (which is embarrassing looking back).

To be honest, valuing truth even when it's horrible is just a coping mechanism, I think. It's a transcendental (escape) "I'm holier than thou" attitude to make up for the fact that it's not exactly comfortable to believe these sorts of things about life. I know Cioran once said in The Book of Delusions:

"A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life."

Now of course I will admit that modalities like horror can be cathartic, and that's fine. But if you go beyond catharsis and start glorifying horror and pessimism (as shows like True Detective have the tendency to do), you end up leaving behind the essence of pessimism in favor of a shallow aesthetic.

It's telling, to me at least, that the ending of the first season of True Detective was the way it was. It ended on a "positive" and "hopeful" note. People were sucked into the show because of its novel pessimism and cathartic nature but ultimately there was an expectation that it would end in an affirmative vindication of life. And that's exactly what it did, and this is exactly why it's ultimately shallow. Without a good reason to affirm life and existence in general, the act of affirmation becomes a bitch-slap cop-out.

The other thing that tends to repel me from "horror" philosophy is that it almost seems like sometimes the writers are intentionally trying to construe things to be horrific. Which, if done for the sake of intellectual exploration, is fine. But certainly I think pessimism has been a marginalized philosophy that hasn't been taken seriously, and one of the consequences of this is that it hasn't been subjected to any serious objections (perhaps there are none?) So I think if there's anything to criticize the "pessimists" for, it would be the tendency to exaggerate certain aspects of life. Pessimism has been going under the radar since practically its "inception" in literature like Ecclesiastes and hasn't been given the time is deserves, which means it's been marginalized but also means that there hasn't been any real opposition (except perhaps Nietzsche or Camus) to draw the line in the sand and say "that's pessimism enough, now you're taking things too far". An example of this would be Zapffe's contemporary Herman Tønnesen who wanted to "out-Zapffe" Zapffe. Is this really the search for an unambiguous description of existence, or was Tønnesen just trying to compete with Zapffe and see who could be more pessimistic?

in short: the ideal state the fascists want only can exist as an mobilizing ideal. (so, yeah, a lot like permanent revolution.) — csalisbury

Right, exactly. Fascism only works (well?) when there's conflict and strife. The fascist state runs on fumes and always has to expand and consume to make up for this deficiency.

So, what's wrong with fascism? — Question

It's fascism.

Also, 'being-with' in Heidegger's ontology seems open to accusations of solipsism? Other people in Heidegger's ontology seems to me, as something which can be reduced to just an aspect of ones experience. As in, others can be reduced to NOTHING MORE than ones experience of 'being-with' others. That there is no actual others out there, rather there's just this ontological mode of experience one is in, which is 'being-with'. Or not, as the case may be - for the desert island person for example. — dukkha

If I remember correctly, this is one of the points that Levinas, one of Heidegger's contemporaries, differs from Heidegger. For Levinas, Ethics is first philosophy, as when we are approached by the Other, we are subjected to a demand - "do not kill me", "recognize me", "I am not you", etc. We are given this responsibility towards the Other that we have to fulfill in order to justify ourSELVES.

Heidegger avoids placing any value on Being. This is precisely the fundamental point I find questionable in his ontology. The fact that there is a care structure, anxiety, the sense of the Other, etc. is because there is an implicit value generation going on.

You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions.... I read ‘philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of ‘‘reality’’ than Plato got’. What an extraordinary thing! How remarkable that Plato could get so far! Or that we have not been able to get any further! Was it because Plato was so clever? (MS 213/424)

-Wittgenstein

The Gender Knot by Allan G. Johnson. Really good read.

http://community.mis.temple.edu/mis3504digitaldesignsections12/files/2015/01/Gender-Knot-Sample.pdf

Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics

Link: http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/batterman-ox-hndbk-phil-phys.pdf

Go to the O'Reilly Auto Parts website and type in "121g" into the search bar and hit enter. :)

So what you really have are competing explanations for your experience. — apokrisis

The OP had less to do with free will per se although I appreciate your input anyway. The point I was trying to get across was that we can't "get around" that correlation between "the world" noumenon and "what we actually perceive" phenomenon.

I'm reminded of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that denies the existence of minds. How could I be so incredibly wrong about the existence of my own mind? I am my mind, aren't I not? It seems like a non-starter.

If you tell me that mind does not actually exist and it's just an illusion, I'm gonna wonder what else I'm hallucinating about. And so if you tell me that I am mistaken and that I have no free will, despite what I immediately perceive to be the case, what reason do I have to trust anything else? If you're telling me to discard something I have a clear experience of having, what reason do I have to accept what you're providing as an alternative? How can "further away" knowledge refute closer-at-hand knowledge without putting itself into doubt?

So when someone says "you have no free will", they are asking me to question something that I have a very close-to-home experience of having. There of course could be explanations and plausible theories as to why I experience what I experience, but the fact is that these theories rest on a "secondary level" of knowledge, for lack of a better term. What I experience immediately, up front and close, is the best information I have. A crude analogy would be an amateur telling an expert they're wrong about something - there's a possibility the amateur is actually right but the epistemic judgment clearly favors the expert. Am I not the expert of my own experiences? Do we not gain epistemic fallibility the further away we get from our most personal experiences?

Denying things like free will has the potential to put the whole project of science under doubt unless a plausible epistemology can be provided. I'm not saying it's inevitable or that it's impossible but I haven't the best idea as to how it can deal with this issue.

Another example would be that of requiring bike helmets to be worn on motorcycles. Laws prevent stupid people who wouldn't wear helmets from necessarily dying in accidents. Laws protecting us from our own stupidity are preventing natural Human evolution. What do you think? — Javants

I think it is an over-simplification to assume those who don't wear seat-belts, or those who make evolutionary-disadvantageous mistakes, are "stupid".

Evolution progresses in a relatively blind manner. What works survives and what doesn't is eventually eliminated most of the time. But it's not a clean and perfect formula. An otherwise healthy and fit organism can accidentally break a bone and die a few days later. A very intelligent organism may nevertheless have an lapse of perceptive judgement and fall to their death from up high.

Accidents are very real phenomena that are largely independent from any genetic fitness. There is no genetic code for forgetting to put on your seat belt - forgetting to put on your seat belt doesn't necessary mean you're stupid, it means your mind was elsewhere as the mind has a limited capacity. Perhaps you were late for work. Or perhaps you were thinking about what you had for dinner yesterday. This behavior is impossible to trace back to genetic code. Genes are only part of the story - an otherwise "fit" organisms may nevertheless fail in their environment simply because of accidental contingencies. Think about those tragic stories of young people who seem to have their whole life ahead of them until they die in a freak accident.

So when you say humans are preventing natural evolution by having laws against driving without a seat-belt, this is not entirely correct as these laws are not simply in place to ensure the survival of everyone who exists. They help remind those who listen that they ought to buckle up if they want to have a better chance at surviving.

One aspect of civilization that sets humanity apart from the rest of the biological world is the inevitable development of decadence. People who ordinarily would not survive "in the wild" are able to survive, and even "thrive" in the cocoon of society due to the increase in freedom. It is interesting to think, though, that perhaps civilization is not entirely "natural" in the sense of fitting-in with the rest of the world. Civilization, in many respects, sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to the rest of existence.

So they tremendously value youth, sex, hedonism, but then of course we all know all of that will age, curdle, wither away in time. That is what gives rise to the sense of bitterness and dissappointment so often expressed in these threads. — Wayfarer

Yes, time-consciousness is a key, if not fundamental, aspect of existentialist and pessimistic philosophies. The reason these animals are "exuberant" as you say is taken to be because they aren't as conscious of themselves as we are. The more conscious you are, the more you aware you are about things. The key is to get right in that goldylocks zone, which humans are unfortunately out of.

This, of course, is more of a symbolic story than an accurate biological history, especially in terms of animal happiness, because on average animals live fairly short lives filled with stress. Pain may even be worse for animals because they can only endure or escape, they can't fix like we can. Although the idea of a "surplus consciousness" is something from Freud and Zapffe and is a key part of things like depressive realism. Colin Feltham has a good book(s) on this.

What philosophical question gets under your skin? — csalisbury

How reliable are my experiences, and if I have reason to doubt the veracity of my closest experiences (like the sense of free will) do I have even more reason to doubt that which is not as close-to-home, like scientific or moral or theological knowledge.

But one of the inevitable entailements of physical existence is the possibility of accident and injury. How could it be different? In what world does nobody and nothing grow old, get hurt, or die?What religions guarantees that this is how the world ought to be? — Wayfarer

Even if it were impossible to be different, why should this change the ultimate worthiness of such a universe? Just because it's the best-possible-universe doesn't mean it's actually a good universe.

It would be immensely sad and concerning if this really was as good as it got. I mean, this probably is why people believe in heaven after all.

That sense of disenchantment is what gives rise to the feeling (and that is what it is) expressed so memorably by Stephen Weinberg, that 'the more the universe seems intelligible, the more it seems meaningless'. — Wayfarer

Yeah.

Natural evils are things like epidemics, natural calamities, famines, and the like. And they don't seem 'evil' to me either, any more than a landslide is. It seems to me, you can't have a world where nobody dies, nobody gets sick, where there are no carnivous animals and no diseases. — Wayfarer

Why not? I can imagine a world in which that particular rabbit wasn't hit by a car last night. I can imagine a world in which that fish wasn't sucked into the motor of a maritime vessel. If I can imagine these particular cases as non-existent, why can't I imagine the entire set of particular cases as non-existent?

I mean, sure in this day and age we can be naturalists and believe there is nothing "objectively" evil to natural disasters. But back in the age of the Pre-Socratics and before that we were animistic and believed evil gods and demons were the source of these calamities.

The naturalistic turn, in this particular case, happened when we stopped seeing the world as divided by good and evil forces and saw it as simply indifferent. We went from seeing something that made no sense and making it meaningful to making sense of the world by realizing it makes no sense. It makes no sense for any of this to happen.

From my own experience, people who have superstitious beliefs often call them "traditional", "sacred" or "faith" to cushion the beliefs from rational skepticism.

What is worrisome is just how prevalent this sort of thinking is. Even the things that usually require lots of skepticism, like science, are themselves interpreted superstitiously, i.e. the prophecy that science will deliver us from all woe and evil. It's the 21st century Oracle of Delphi.

Probably the best defense against superstitious beliefs is to constantly go meta and analyze your foundations to make sure you're not making any ridiculous mistakes.

I read this on a T-shirt:

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is an option.

What say? — TheMadFool

Reading from a book on ethics, chapter covering moral realism, I found a quote that I think is quite relevant:

"On the one hand, we have the idea of a moral fact as a fact about what we have reason to do or not to do. On the other, we have the idea of a moral fact in terms of what tends towards social stability and unrest. If the question is 'Which conception allows us to make the best sense of moral argument?' then the answer must surely be the former. For, to the extent that moral argument does focus on what tends towards social stability, it does so because social stability is deemed morally important, an outcome we have reason to produce.

Indeed, it seems that even this kind of moral realist's focus on explanation pushes us back in the direction of the idea of a moral fact as a fact about what we have reason to do. For, again, to the extent that we think of right acts as acts that tend towards social stability, we think that they have this tendency because they represent the reasonable thing for people to do. It is the tendency people have to do what is reasonable that is doing the explanatory work. But that, too, simply returns us to the original conception of a moral fact in terms of what we have reason to do. (We might say similar things about the idea that we can characterize a moral fact in terms of the proper function of human beings; for insofar as we understand the idea of the 'proper function' of human beings, we think that their proper function is to be reasonable and rational.)"

Ethics is the study of what we ought to do, based on rational reasons-for-action prescribed to individuals within or without a community. In order to be a convincing ethics, then, any normative theory needs to give good reasons for action, reasons that any rational individual will understand (and hopefully agree on).

Or maybe not agree but at least you found that funny.

Glad you agree.

So the only difference is that my triadic approach explains its dichotomous underpinnings as being natural, and not unnatural. It is meant to be a case of competition AND cooperation, constraint AND freedom. It is not a case of having to reduce nature to one or the other as the good, or the foundational, or whatever the heck else a reductionist feels to be the imperative when "caught on the horns of a dilemma". — apokrisis

Meant by whom? The universe? Again, why should we care what the universe thinks? Why should we care what it ultimately has planned?

So I'm not playing by the rules. It's only because I think the rules are unfair and unjust and that we can do better than what the universe initially demanded us to be. We've outgrown our darwinian impulses and can look beyond.

We're too moral for this world. If this means those who realize it go extinct, then so be it. This changes nothing.

I think it's very difficult to produce epistemologically sound moral principles without determining the proper ontological status of things like final cause, intention, and will. — Metaphysician Undercover

"The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end."

"No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will."

-Peter Zapffe

I don't think it's necessary to have a super-sophisticated metaphysics in order for ethics to take off, as if we couldn't do ethics without some sort of Cartesian-style metaphysics-in-the-service-of-ethics. The two above quotations are qualifications enough, I think, because they don't demand any sort of (non-trivial) metaphysics while simultaneously being extremely compelling.

Hah. Already I am returning to the point of how unmoored from scientific measurement most moral thinking is in fact. We still do want to apply all or nothing judgements on issues like sentience even when there is a gradient that more careful world modelling would reveal. — apokrisis

Why do you assume morality must be like science? What if trying to limit morality to the constraints of the world is not satisfying for our deepest moral beliefs?

As for the general idea being presented: you offer a generalized account of what your pragmatic morality would look like, but this is all it is. You make claims about gradients and models but fail to give any precise examples; you mention cows vs cabbages but fail to show how this issue changes in your ethic. What does your ethics fundamentally look like in the every-day, and how does this differ from more popular ethical theories?

I've already said it many times before, human psychology is strange and morality is not something that is flexible enough or even suitable to be applied in as broad a manner as you wish it to be. Ethics, as far as I am concerned, is always going to be un-moored from the rest of the world, as it's inherently tied to the individual and the individual's freedom of choice, which includes the phenomenology of transcendence beyond the immanent.

What you are presenting here is, as far as I know, something not particularly similar to any of the mainstream ethical views or any ones in the history of ethics and so you'll have to pardon me when I say I am highly skeptical of your ambitious claims. If you're trying to start a Nietzschean re-evaluation of value, which it seems like you are, you will need to provide more than just a blueprint hypothesis.

I mean, it just kind of puts things into perspective when you said you don't care what I believe. It means you aren't concerned with teaching anyone. For whatever reason, you enjoy patronizing other people on an anonymous internet forum.

Hopefully you'll grow bored with this all and move on. That'll be a day to celebrate.

The fun is in watching how the arguments play out. — apokrisis

So you're a dick. Got it.

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

So you say, but why should I believe this? And if this "value" is so thin, why should it concern us?

Not just "metaphysical" but "Metaphysical". Care to elucidate or do you prefer to keep dishing out these empty criticisms?

Sounds so, welll, primitive. — apokrisis

Value outside the mind sounds like, well, equivocation.

But I did make a moral statement.

I disagree. "Everything I say is true" only implies the truth of moral claims if the set of things you say includes moral premises. — Pneumenon

What do you mean?

Validity is not the same as soundness.

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

But I'm not denying metaphysics. I'm denying the relevance of metaphysics that isn't trivial.

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

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice

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

How many times do I have to tell you, I don't consider your type of metaphysics to be sufficient or adequate for ethical discourse. You say things like "balance" but never justify WHY we need to give a damn about the rest of the universe.

We're not doing metaphysics here.

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

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

The young are clever, but the old are wise. — apokrisis

The latter also hold the former hostage...

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

My stance here is that reductionism inevitably gives us stronger reasons for action than holism, as holism inevitably comes into conflict with individuality, and we inherently value individuality, freedom, and subjective experience more than any holistic framework that sees individuals as mere constituents of a larger organic population. Holism may be true in a descriptive sense but as far as I'm concerned it's irrelevant to any serious moral inquiry, i.e. the universe as a whole is not capable of supporting the imaginative depth of human morality. It's not compassionate enough.

Yep, hence why I said looking to the stars for moral answers is wrong-headed.

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

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

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

Right, so like I said in the OP, we just have to question the premises. These sorts of "ontological arguments" as you call them aren't the only thing ethicists use. I prefer counterfactuals myself because I consider myself a constructivist of sorts and counterfactuals force us to consider consistency and universality.

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

Perhaps the most striking problem with natural laws theories (including the rehashed naturalists) is that they have trouble prescribing specific action. How does "acting virtuously" help us in scenarios in which we're not clear which route of action we ought to take? How does "going with the flow of entropy" actually realize itself in everyday, common-sense action?

Reductionism cannot answer everything, but it's important for things like this, so important that I think it takes precedence over your holism. If you go to far in lofty abstract holism, you lose footing in the real world of everyday actions. Do you kill one person or five people? Was Hiroshima and Nagasaki ethical? Is the death penalty immoral? I don't see how metaphysics is supposed to help us determine the answers to these questions in a satisfactory manner.

And I would also argue that morality, and value, is a sui generis sort of thing, something that only exists within communities of rational agents. It's an isolated phenomenon and not something to be found elsewhere in the cosmos. Morality begins and ends with people and the basic interactions they have with each other and their phenomenological environment. Nothing more, and so it's just plain wrong to look to the stars for moral answers.

Like aletheist said, philosophical arguments for/against the existence of God are almost always insufficient to prove God (does not) exist. They're more like indicators of his existence, or lack thereof. Jumble enough of these arguments together and you're bound to fall on to one side of the board.

Anyway I think it is an interesting counter-argument, although I'm not entirely sure if it works:

If an omnibenevolent God exists, one wonders why he allows evil to exist. This might be defended by a number of means, like appeals to free will, appeals to divine compensation after death, etc. Theodicies.

If an omnimalevolent God exists, one wonders why he allows good to exist. How can this be defended?

The trouble is that I can imagine a universe that is better and worse than the universe I live in. Theodicies try to explain why the universe is not better than it could be. I see no method of doing so for an omnimalevolent God and explaining why the universe is not as bad as it possibly could be. Theodicies defend an omnibenevolent God against the problem of evil, while there doesn't seem to be any defense of an omnimalevolent God against evil. An omnimalevolent God would not care about free will, or divine compensation, or any of that. Why would he wait to inflict pain and suffering and evil? Why not do it now, and forever?

Now, of course, we could see God as a wrathful, vengeful, or manipulative trickster who takes pleasure in other people's pain but likes to watch the story unfold for dramatic affect. This is surely an evil God but not an omni-malevolent God, who would instead inflict evil upon the world for the sake of inflicting evil upon the world.

By whatever means science attempts to deny that consciousness exists (as they do with the concept of choice) the singular goal remains the same, that is to deny any possibility of the immaterial or more precisely the unmeasurable. The myth of science as being the sole holder and means to be truth must be upheld at all costs. There is a tremendous cost in quality of life for anyone who buys into the myth that only the material is real and everything else is an "illusion". — Rich

...and the attempt to apply scientific method to the kinds of philosophical issues that can only be properly addressed in the first person is the precise meaning of 'scientism'. — Wayfarer

I would absolutely love to start a new discussion over this at some point, but I agree and disagree with you both at the same time.

If subjective, first-person experience is a part of the world (as it does seem to be, thanks Descartes), then there are a number of courses of action that I see that science can take to account for this:

1.) Deny that first-person experience is something "special" and try to explain how it "emerges" from unconscious, third-person objectivity, as elim and reduct mats etc try to do.

2.) Deny that consciousness is fit for scientific study, as behaviorists and even some phenomenologists believe.

3.) Change the scope of the science itself to account for subjectivity.

By far, the third option seems, to me, to be the least used. Super-Scientists (as I like to call them) have the rhetoric against religion (and even philosophy!) for not observing the empirical data and for constraining the world to a hypothesis (when it should be the other way around), yet all too often they deny what is most obvious (consciousness).

So yes, I do agree that science, in particular physics and neuroscience, has an almost masturbatory fetish with reductionism. It's implausible, if not wholly insufficient.

That being said, I don't agree that scientism is merely the utilization of science for "first-person" projects. If we are being completely honest, if science can't answer questions about consciousness, then probably nothing can. Philosophy has its uses but if we expect it, and/or its relatives like mysticism or religion, to explain something when it has a generally poor track record of linear, teleological progress (not that that's inherently a bad thing), we're going to be sorely disappointed.

I also don't agree that there is a strict demarcation between science and philosophy. Science is more than just the study of third-person, objective facts about the world, and philosophy is more than just the study of first-person accounts. In order for there to be such a demarcation, there should need to be some kind of explanation as to why science can study this-and-that but not the stuff philosophy does.

I like to think myself as an open-minded methodological naturalist. When push comes to shove, I would rather align myself with the scientistic Super-Scientists rather than those who try to exclude science from some domain of inquiry (even it's justified), because all too often I've seen that those belonging to the latter group are pushing some sort of reactionary set of beliefs. "Science can't explain this!" unfortunately gets lumped together with more conservative claims like "Science as-it-exists-today is not capable to understanding this!" All too often the intentional limiting of science is an unconscious mechanism meant to curb the perceived threat of meaningless objective nihilism or what have you. Hence why phenomenology has been criticized as being conservative and trying to seclude human meaning from the rest of the world.

So once again I go back to the list I made before: that which cannot be studied scientifically must either be mistaken, unfit for scientific inquiry in general, or unfit for scientific inquiry as science is practiced today. There are examples of all three: the first includes things like ghosts, phlogiston, and magic, the second includes normative ethics, politics, theology and any sort of transcendental or supernatural-ism (and even then it could be argued that "technically" we could use science to do these things, albeit in a very clunky and indirect way), and the third includes, in my opinion, things like consciousness, aesthetics, and perhaps even some theological issues.

Like I said, I don't see any real strict demarcation between science and philosophy. You can go off and focus more on one rather than the other but they nevertheless are inherently tied. It's silly in my opinion to have a separate branch of inquiry, secluded away from everything else that studies matters in a methodological black box.

Eliminative materialists are denying that consciousness exists, in the same way chemists deny phlogiston or astronomers deny the planet Vulcan.

Part of the reason eliminative materialism seemsto be so misunderstood is, in my opinion, precisely because it is so staggeringly unintuitive - people wonder if they really understood the fundamental position because it seems ridiculous to actually believe consciousness does not exist. And yet this is what eliminative materialism accepts. You'll do a double-take and ask if this is really what it's all about, and continue to be dumbfounded as to how this can actually be taken seriously.

The main problem with elim mat is that it equivocates, by kind, consciousness with phlogiston or Vulcan. The latter two were unobserved, hypothesized entities meant to fill in an explanatory role. Consciousness is not this. Consciousness is the data, not something we put in the data.

It's also kind of funny to see how elim mat tends to be a "phase" of philosophers of mind. Not many elim mats have been elim mats since day one.

Elim mat is also not identical to reductive materialism, or type-type identity theory. Dennett's theory is reductive in the sense that it maintains that consciousness "exists" but not in the sense we usually see it as. Consciousness is an illusion, but it still is something. Eliminative materialism doesn't even give any room for consciousness to be anything at all, because it denies the existence of consciousness to begin with.