And this seems to be a common way of thinking about the matter throughout history, e.g. in the Indian parable of the man drowning in a river and feeling pleasure at coming up for air before getting pushed back in. It may not be right, but it's one of the broad options out there, and the one that seems right to me. — The Great Whatever

Deprivationalism is an attractive theory. All experience is some form of bad, maximizing at a neutral state of mind. But I don't think it's quite accurate. I won't argue against the observation that pleasure is almost always accompanied by some relief of discomfort. You eat cause you're hungry, you shit cause you're stuffed, etc.

But I hesitate to simply call pleasure merely an absence of pain, or merely a state of lesser-suffering. Back a few comments, I said how I saw pleasure as akin to the heat produced from friction. It's independent of friction but almost always closely tied to it, and it typically dissipates fairly quickly. And if you get enough pleasure from an activity, it makes up for the process. Hence why people climb mountains.

I'm just saying - doesn't an 'active pessimism' betray... pessimism? — StreetlightX

This is perhaps one of the reasons why I'm tempted to eschew the term "pessimism" entirely. "Pessimism" is only "pessimistic" insofar as it is compared to more optimistic philosophies.

Instead, I prefer the term "negative", emphasis on the "negate", as opposed to "affirmative". Or perhaps rejectionist, although this too carries ascetic connotations. "Negative" it is. While affirmative thinkers base their philosophies on the assumption that life and existence are at least acceptable, negative thinkers find inherent flaws in the system that threaten to undermine the whole thing.

So perhaps you are right that an active pessimism betrays pessimism, but only in the sense that there are two sorts of pessimism - the psychological "everything is futile and everything will fail, waah" and the metaphysical "things are not good". And it seems that people such as Schopenhauer unknowingly adopted both at the same time. When in reality there is nothing logically preventing someone from being a pessimist and yet simultaneously euthymic about the prospects of the pessimistic goal.

You can't lose if you don't play. — The Great Whatever

At the same time, though, they seem to find some value in the irony they produce when they advocate views like these and yet turn around act possibly even worse than their own contemporaries. If philosophy is anything to its etymology, you would think the wise would do something with their wisdom instead of keeping it all cooped up and sacred.

But I think a thoroughgoing pessimism voids the effects of any prescription – it doesn't matter what you do, and not in a meta-prescriptive sense that you 'ought not' to do anything, either. So what we have is an observation about these men, not a criticism of them. If pessimism has truth to it, these observations cease to be interesting. — The Great Whatever

I'm not sure I would still consider that "pessimism" - just straight up nihilism. Nothing matters because what you do doesn't matter. It's interesting, if you ever take a safari over to YouTube and watch all the bickering between all the self-proclaimed torchbearers of truth, there's typically two sides that both use the same strategy. There's those who bitch and moan about those who have children ("breeders") yet are content with not doing anything about it by claiming nothing matters anyway, and then there's those who try to salvage any sort of value to birth by pretending there is no value and that nothing matters.

To me, "nihilism" is one of those vogue terms people throw around to ignore those who don't have the opportunity to understand what nihilism even is.

For those interested, this is a relatively short and thorough introduction to quantum mechanics:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/waves/quantum.pdf

Or SSRIs can take away their depression. — apokrisis

mhm, guess we agree on something.

Can someone please explain to me how to quote ? — Raphi

Highlight the text.

What is the point of active pessimism? — Marchesk

Actually, I'd change this to say what is the point of comfortable pessimism? If nothing substantial changes based on your beliefs, what's the point? Especially when something like this has the inherent potential to be practical and not just theoretical.

Me, I'd rather drink a beer and pass the time doing something half-way enjoyable or interesting. — Marchesk

As would I, but this doesn't make anything better. I'd be willing to argue that, from a consequentialist perspective, not doing anything could be considered criminal negligence in some cases (like a drowning child), or inappropriate apathy towards the rest of the world.

Now, if everyone were consequentialist, our responsibilities would drastically decrease. Unfortunately we live in an non-ideal world where not everyone recognizes the importance of suffering, and so we have to switch to non-ideal theory.

The way our brain misinterprets our reality leads to it stating “I feel good” when it feels less suffering. — Raphi

The problems is that the only thing that feels is you. There is no other thing feeling suffering. If you are feeling pain, but interpret it as pleasure, then you're not feeling pain. At least you're not experiencing the negativity of pain.

Yes that is part of my whole hypothesis. I think the human brain would have evolved in such a way that it perceives some experiences as good, whether or not those good experiences really exist. — Raphi

This is exactly what is problematic, though. You can't know what a concept it unless you experience it yourself. Where does this good concept come from?

I don’t claim anything about how you perceive your feelings; I claim something about what constitutes those feelings. — Raphi

Yes, but you claim that what constitutes them are more feelings, specifically suffering. There's the "illusory" feelings of pleasure and goodness, and then there's the "actual" feelings of suffering.

If you sit on your hand for a while you will lose feeling. If you immediately poke your finger afterwards with a pin, you won't feel anything. Presumably you will say I did not feel pain when I did this, despite the fact that something has harmed by skin.

You might argue that there exist independently positive experiences, which can arise when we don’t suffer, but to me it feels more like faith than anything else since my hypothesis seems complete without it. — Raphi

Yet your hypothesis is wrong. Completeness has nothing to do with accuracy in this case. If anything it is you who demands faith for their hypothesis, as you claim to know better than I do what I am actually feeling.

Pleasure is any experience that we want to continue to feel. We prefer it over unconsciousness. To ignore the existence of pleasure is akin to ignoring the existence of suffering and claiming all pain is just less pleasure. This does the exact same work you theory does. We avoid pain not because it's actually painful but because it's less pleasurable and we want to maximize our pleasure. Both theories are inadequate.

Sup mate. Great to see you here.

perhaps more pertinent is: What is science? Science is doing a lot of work in the OP. Everything can be elucidated by science. So also what is 'explanation'. What is Science and what is Elucidation and what does it mean that Science can/will Elucidate everything? — csalisbury

Yes, this is probably the biggest issue at play here. Re-defining what "science" is, is exactly how charlatans like Sam Harris get away with murder and trick the average person into believing that science can actually answer philosophical questions like morality.

And of course I am sympathetic of philosophers of science like Feyerabend who argue for a more "anarchic" version of science. Where there's no "one-single method" to getting something done. The Scientific Method is a general guideline for ideal circumstances but can also be a hindrance in some cases.

The unifying piece that makes science what it is, I think, is the empirical nature of its approach. The use of data acquired from observation or instruments of reliability, which is used to model reality and produce theories that can accurately predict future outcomes. I suppose this is a primary reason why science is so seductive; it allows us to control nature. Not only are we diving into its quantum depths but we're harnessing the very stuff reality is made of. To engineers like myself this can make me salivate. (also being an engineer tends to make me focus more on material and efficient causes than formal or final, to the apparent dismay of )

So the question, then, is this: is there anything that can't be studied empirically? Put under a microscope, modeled, placed within mathematical structures, etc? The first things that come to mind are the various things we take for granted when we study the ontic, the empirical. And, if these cannot be studied empirically, then it looks like we might actually have to go through some sort of negative dialectic, i.e. figuring out what's not the case, and narrowing down the possibilities (similar to negative theology).

As explained, a constraints based view of materiality sees matter being produced via the limitation on possibility. So solidity arises as freedoms of actions are removed. — apokrisis

So what is material/efficient cause made of? Top down constraints on possibility. — apokrisis

I go back to your example of a vortex in water. You can't just scoop out a vortex. Similarly I have a hard time visualizing what a constraint is supposed to be independent of a material basis.

I'm not an "expert" but I would recommend "Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed" and "Pragmatism: A Guide for the Perplexed". The "Guides" are typically very good. The latter book is nice not only by how deep it goes but also how it questions some of the pragmatist ideas, especially the post-modern "pragmatism" of Rorty but even some of the ideas of Peirce (for example, I found the authors convincingly argued that pragmatism, although attempting to be anti-foundationalist, nevertheless was empiricist and thus foundationalist in that empirical perceptions are the foundations of belief.)

But do Peircean signs require material cause? What are Peircean signs made of, more signs?

So try again with my earlier example of scooping a vortex out of a flow in a bucket. — apokrisis

Yet clearly the vortex is a vortex of something - a flow of water. It's not just a vortex, it's a vortex of something else.

The Philosophy of Disenchantment by Edgar Saltus. Great prose.

So you accept the irreducible triadicity of relations ... and now want to change the subject. Sweet. — apokrisis

Only to point out that the irreducible triadicity of relations doesn't mean relations themselves are irreducible. One can pick apart an engine without worrying about keeping the engine intact. And we can pick apart a relation without worrying about keeping the relation intact.

I don't see how that is relevant, as I've already demonstrated why relations are not primary.

Sure you can count three things. But none of these things are the same thing, nor can exist without the other two. So your reply is pretty flippant. — apokrisis

Yet clearly since they are not the same thing, this means they have a different nature. And their nature cannot be completely dependent upon the relations between the three, since this would lead to an empty regress of relations: A's nature is dependent on B and C's, but B's nature is dependent on A and C's and C's nature is dependent on A and B's, but A's nature is dependent on B and C's so A's nature really is dependent on the relations between itself and B and C, but we don't know what A, B, or C even are to even begin to sort out anything.

I don't pretend to know what the big theory of everything is, so don't expect me to come up with a replacement theory. I just think your confidence is unwarranted as your theory isn't sufficient.

I would imagine a whole lot, but this doesn't answer my question: calling the most basic "something" irreducibly triadic is like saying the United States government is irreducibly triadic and also the most simple and basic thing in the country. The government is surely triadic, but it can also be dismantled into the three branches of government. Similarly, the Peircean sign can be reduced to sign, object, and interpretent - yet surely these three things are "things" in themselves, no?

So YOU can only understand a relation as another part. Yet how many things must you have to have a relation? I count a minimum of three ... even for the reductionist. — apokrisis

So as you say, a relation must have three parts. Are these parts themselves also triadic relations? If not, then what are they, exactly? How can we know what they are?

How am I supposed to understand a concept that is usually used in a reductive sense, like a relation, but is claimed to be non-reductive, irreducibly complex? How is it that "complexity" is not reducible to parts and yet maintains its identity as complexity? How is this still meaningful?

Well remember that Peircean pragmatism is distinguished by the fact that it does indeed generalise the notion of the perceived. So existence itself becomes a modelling relation - a kind of pansemiotic state of mind. — apokrisis

This is not very coherent to me, unfortunately. By saying existence is x, someone is inherently advocating a kind of monism. I know you call the relation irreducibly complex and triadic, but this means that existence is not basic, that there is "something more", "below" existence, that makes up the relation. A relation without parts makes no sense.

Similarly, let's say I argue the world is a giant cobweb. That is at least coherent, as I am saying that the world as a whole is structured so that it is a cobweb. The same thing applies to theories that make the universe an expanding sphere, or a tube, or whatever.

But when I say that existence itself is a giant cobweb, that is when things are not coherent. A giant cobweb is still an ontic substance that I can visualize. But I can't "visualize" existence. I can't predicate anything about it. This is exactly why Heidegger, when read charitably, can be seen as using difficult and obscure words simply because he was struggling to explain something that normally cannot be explained using language.

So when you say that existence itself is a modelling relation, this is using an ontic phenomenon to explain all ontic phenomenons. It's just ontic all the way down. That doesn't make sense.

So pansemiosis is the ontic argument that there is no such thing as "unperceived existence". And thus it fits with quantum physics and it's demand for "someone" to collapse the wavefunction. — apokrisis

But Peircean metaphysics says all that can happen is a separation of indeterminate possibility towards the complementary poles of the observer and the observables - the interpretation and its sign. It is a very different ontology.

And the proof of which ontology is right is in how fundamental science is turning out. Observeless worlds don't make much sense. — apokrisis

You have a lot more in common with speculative realism than you might think. The idea of ancestrality, ontic communication, metaphysical architecture, etc is all very important in it, and I believe some of them even take from Peirce as well.

What if we want to go beyond the ontic and pursue the status of the ontic itself? Ontic investigations are inherently tied to a human-world relation. But surely the human-world relation is "not all there is". Surely we must go "beyond" the human-world interaction and investigate what the world is actually like independent of perceivers, investigate what we mean by "Being", what the conditions are for intelligibility and how everything "falls into place" a la Sellars.

And of course there's also the potential that natural observations of the world will lead us to believe in something "more" to the natural order of things, something commonly seen as supernatural. Natural theology and even atheological metaphysics thus stems from general empirical observations and modality and creates a metaphysical order of things that is implicitly outside the order of the ontic and presentable; being qua being. Yet this goes against what a meta-philosophical eliminativist would believe. What makes it the case that such matters are outside of "direct" empirical study?

So it all keeps coming back to the "scientific method of reasoning". Or the modelling relation. We conceive of qualities. But that only makes sense if we are able to carry out acts of quantification. There is no such thing as a quality that can't be quantified. And so empiricism - for some reason much derided - is basic to philosophical thought. You can't talk intelligibly about the general if you can't successfully point to its proper instances. — apokrisis

If I am understanding correctly, you are saying that when I conceive of the color "red", I am not only conceiving of "red" but also a single (one) instance of "red"? That as soon as any concept reaches my sphere of awareness, there is already a number attached to it?

At any rate, there's the separate issue of how scientism fails to account for the poor ability of science to study certain things, at least at the current moment. It's one thing to say "science" (however we're describing it as) can "study everything", and another thing to say that it's actually recommended that we use this "science" to do this. To postpone inquiry simply because it's not able to be studied scientifically is an instance of unwarranted dogmatism and short-sightedness.

If we're talking about ethics, say, there doesn't seem to be a clear way of coming to terms with ethical answers that isn't suspiciously similar to how it's already being done in philosophy. Adding a brain scan to the mix is only going to supplement the process, not finish the process. The only test we know of for normativity is how we ourselves react to certain things in a normative way. Thus a "science of ethics" could only study how ethics is done, i.e. what conclusions ethicists produce (ethics as an anthropological phenomenon), but this is still not normative ethics. Only a kind of meta-ethics (re: moral psychology is on the rise in meta-ethics).

Or say we want to study the aesthetic under scientific means. In order to even study the aesthetic, we have to know what the hell the aesthetic even is. Thus ontology is fundamentally necessary to any other mode of inquiry. Attempting to do ontology purely by empirical means would be an exercise in wastefulness and tedium - surely it's conceivably possible, but practically impossible.

At the core of philosophy is the assumption that nature is intelligible. Rational inquiry can thus produce some kind of answer.

But from there, you get a major divergence. The very position that nature is intelligible leads "philosophically" - by the same dialectic method - to the counter position that existence is fundamentally irrational. Or contingent. Or whatever else is the rationally contradictory position that could be thus put forward as the stark alternative. — apokrisis

Yes, I suppose I agree with this. You have to be able to conceive of something in order to reject it.

I think you want a more mechanistic definition - one that rules the wrong stuff out. But I would prefer an organic approach that only cares about the general "growth of reasonableness" in human models of existence. — apokrisis

Well, I was attempting to construct a view that captures the modern scientistic views of many of the average Joes, which resembles a foundationalist approach (science is the bread and butter of everything). The idea that science can answer everything is simplistic, but I don't think it's problematic at the metaphysical sense, rather, simply the pragmatic sense. "Do not block the road of inquiry" as Peirce said. If we are serious about inquiry, then philosophy is something that is needed, not as a field with a subject matter itself but as a field that engenders subject matters and clarifies the notions of other fields.

Or, alternatively, we could just go the Deleuzean route and call philosophy the study and assimilation of concepts.

Raphi, to be clear, you are saying that pleasure is not independently good because it really is only the experience of being in a comparatively lesser suffering state?

What does it mean when you say that my experience of pleasure, or perhaps my mood of happiness, is actually just a form of suffering, albeit a lesser kind of suffering? How is it that I am "mistaken" by what I feel? Do you think it is plausible that I can be sunbathing on a beach in the Caribbean, drinking a margarita and reading Shakespeare and believe that I am feeling independently positive pleasure, and yet be mistaken in my belief, and actually suffering in all these forms of experience?

That is the issue here: belief.

But there's also other issues. In the OP, you refer to suffering as an "unpleasant" experience. Notice how you use the term "pleasant" with the "un" as a prefix. You could have used the word "hurt" or "painful", but you chose "unpleasant". The use of "unpleasant" means that there must be a meaning of "pleasant", but since you are arguing that any pleasant feelings are actually lesser-unpleasant feelings, neither pleasant nor unpleasant have any meaningful definitions. If pleasant feelings are simply lesser-unpleasant feelings, what does it even mean to be unpleasant, since pleasant is deemed to be equivalent to a form of unpleasantness. It seems as though you have a conception of pleasure, and know what it feels like, but wish to get rid of it anyway.

In other words, it seems that you recognize that people commonly believe they have independently pleasurable experiences, but wish to eliminate them by reducing them to lesser-unpleasant experiences.

And you later used the analogy to temperature, however this is also problematic, because temperature is an objective feature of reality whereas the experience of heat is subjective. Just as someone may have a million dollars and feel poor, someone else may get their first job and feel rich.

There's another issue here, a phenomenological one. Compare the experience of avoidance and pursuit. We avoid suffering and pursue pleasure. We do not simply avoid suffering. When I find something to be pleasurable, I do not tell myself "this sure is better than the alternative!" I tell myself "I sure am glad I'm able to experience this, it feels good!"

Are you attempting to argue that what we see as independently good experiences only look good when in comparison to our current state? If so, then this also runs into problems when one considers going into a worse state of experience. Consider: you have a splitting migraine, and suddenly get your arm broken. Clearly you went from a bad state to an even worse state. But then say you get your arm mended but you retain your migraine. You of course will call this a better state of experience, but surely you wouldn't forget about your migraine? Surely you would still have a migraine that is painful and hurts? Surely you wouldn't see the migraine as pleasurable?

Thus there seems to be a necessary threshold.

Perhaps, as you said earlier, the neurotransmitters act as a sort of "forget" function in the brain, so that we forget our needs. In the OP, you said that suffering is the phenomenal experience of needs. Therefore, if we forget our needs, we no longer suffer. Thus pleasurable experiences, far from simply being lesser-suffering experiences, are independently positive experiences that we feel when we do not have to worry about our needs. In fact this is similar to the Buddhist conception of bliss, which states that basically bliss is attainable when we stop striving. As soon as we simply be, bliss comes naturally and automatically.

Then there's also the issue where I have options to cease consciousness. I could take sleeping pills and go to bed, but I choose not to, because I want to stay awake because I enjoy doing the things I'm doing. And it's not that I feel suffering when I go to bed. There is a positive reinforcement going on here.

The biggest issue by far, though, is that you have to explain where we got the idea of an independently-arising pleasurable experience and how we believe we have them while in reality not ever getting such.

I'm curious as to what your reply might be. It seems you have a tall order in front of you - you must be able to defend the claim that all experiences are a form of suffering, even if we don't consider them to be sufferings.

I wouldn't say that suffering can obtain if it's not a present-to-consciousness state. — Terrapin Station

Exactly. Deprivationalism like this requires the holder to not only reduce pleasure to the activity of removing pain but eliminate the byproduct goodness as well. "How can everyone be so happy if all their experiences are just suffering?" It requires you to believe that people actually don't know what they are feeling. As soon as I start considering this I begin to feel as though an illusion might be slipping away - but surely this illusion is nevertheless something real?

I find it difficult to have an adverse reaction to something I enjoy. Probably because it's actually not suffering.

Well, my perception is far from over simplifying human experiences, and I don't deny that people live what they call independently-good experiences. (I just dont see them that way) In my perception, suffering manifest itself under many different forms, (all the possible feelings people would call negative), and the feelings people call positive would be explained by some periods of time where those forms of suffering would be less intense than normally. I don't understand why the presence of chemicals in the brain would refute my hypothesis. Can't these chemicals be the ones that makes you "forget" certains needs during a certain amount of time, which would fit nicely with what I say? — Raphi

You still have to refute the experience that something feels good. It's not just relief, it's positively independent good feelings. And it wouldn't be evolutionary advantageous for chemicals to make you forget needs, as needs would not be something we ought to forget about. Rather, these chemicals act as a reward mechanism for achieving some goal.

Imagine someone hooked up to an experience machine and is artificially fed dopamine hits, a reward mechanism in the brain. This is good feeling, independent of suffering. Or, consider pleasure to be similar to the heat released through friction. It is (usually) inherently tied to some form of striving, but it would be incorrect to identify pleasure with the reduction of suffering, just as it would be incorrect to identify the heat produced through friction with friction itself. It's something that is produced from friction.

It's one thing to say that positive experience is tied to the relieving of pain, i.e. pleasure is oftentimes reactionary to pain. It's a whole 'nuther thing to say positive experience is only the relief of pain. People aren't just reservoirs of negative experience. To ignore that independent positive experiences exist is to essentially believe that people are fundamentally mistaken about what positive experience is - positive experience is just "an illusion"; yet how can something like this be an illusion? How can we actually be so mistaken about something so personal to us and believe in something that, according to you, is actually impossible? By doing so you have reduced positive experience to nothing more than an absence of something else, when in reality nobody who isn't depressed actually considers their positive experiences to be merely an absence of bad, rather they consider it something independently good.

Think about it: why does someone like myself like music, or coffee, or walking my dog? Do I like it because I know it is an instance of suffering-reduction? Or do I like it because I like the nature of the experience, because the experience is actually good? Clearly I like to do things because I find them fun, entertaining, pleasurable. It's not just a reduction of suffering but an opportunity to be taken and enjoyed.

To deny this requires you to believe that all pleasure is a relief from a worse state of experience, and that we're "fooled" into believing this lesser-suffering state is "actually good" (yet where did this concept of an independently good feeling come from?)

But the same way temperature is just about the presence of energy, I think our feeling is just about the presence of suffering. The way you formulate it, it almost look like your perception of pleasure rely on faith more than reasonning, but I might be wrong. — Raphi

No, I think you're trying to reduce all human experience to the pleasure/pain dichotomy, which is crude and not the full picture.

If everything were suffering, then there would be no independently-good experiences. Deprivationalism 101. But this is too simplistic. Pleasure occurs when we get a dopamine hit, or a hit of serotonin or oxytocin or some of the less important neurotransmitters. This is wholly different than simply the absence of suffering.

What may be the case is that our satisfaction, our enjoyment, of life can only occur when we aren't suffering very much, in which case the positives outweigh the negatives. There's been countless psychological studies on this; there needs to be roughly five positive experiences to counteract a single negative experience of the same "intensity" so to speak.

Furthermore, the existence of moods and attitudes effectively rule out suffering as the "only thing". I don't really care too much about how much pleasure or pain I get, so long as I get them in satisfactory amounts, i.e. within a certain threshold.

No suffering is not "all there is" - evolution not only made pain to act as a motivating scheme but pleasure to counter this. If pain and striving and death were all there was to life, organisms would be more apt to kill themselves. There had to be some form of positive motivational scheme to keep organisms in a state of mind that expects and anticipates a positive experience, as a depressed and always anxious organism is not only likely to kill themselves but is also not very adept at maintaining a healthy existence in general.

That being said it does seem correct to me to say that the most pleasurable experiences are only able to be experienced when one is not suffering.

No, not God. That would be stupid. — apokrisis

And here I thought you were sympathetic to teleology ... ;)

Thanks fam, I'll get back to you.

So it is simple to see "the how" of biological, neurological and cultural complexity. There is more going on than just material dynamics. There is also the very different thing of symbolic regulation. — apokrisis

Apparently it's not as simple as you think, as there are still people who don't quite understand what you're talking about. Can you give an example as to why semiosis is necessary, and why material composition is not adequate? The only way information can be represented are by parts, no?

The tricky new thing is pan-semiosis - extending this metaphysics to existence in general. But it is hardly a secret that physics is undergoing its information theoretic revolution. — apokrisis

Can you give a specific example(s) of where this is happening instead of just asserting that it's public knowledge?

I mean what do you think an event horizon actually is? Is it matter? Is it information? Or is it really about a habitual relation between these two disjunct aspects of reality? — apokrisis

I have no idea, but "information" is meaningless without any form of predication.

Yep. So that is why a functioning whole needs the power of constraint over its parts. It must limit the freedom or indeterminism of its components to ensure they remain "the right kind of stuff". — apokrisis

But, again, how does it do this? Is this "power" somehow something "else" other than simply interactions between the parts of the whole? A network of causal powers can function together but I hesitate to actually call this limitation function a thing itself.

The parts can only construct a state of organisation. The whole has the opposite kind of causality in that it can constrain the state of organisation. — apokrisis

But what is this kind of causality dependent on? Presumably the arrangements of parts. All the parts working together create the illusion of emergence, the illusion that there is "something more" to the whole other than the sum of its parts.

Ascribing causal power to a whole seems to me to simply be a heuristic, and also oddly similar to the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation. According to the doctrine, the bread and wine is literally transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ, yet none of the features actually change (something I believe Peirce called "bullshit" essentially). Similarly, would the addition of "wholes" really change anything about how things work? What difference does it make if there actually is a whole that is greater than its parts?

If you want to call a set of parts working together a "system", I'm fine with that. But to add on to this and say that this "system" is something greater than its parts, I have issues with, because it's not clear to me how this "system" could possibly be "more" than its parts in any meaningful sense. All a system is, is a network of causal powers supplementing and contradicting each other to lead to an eventual outcome. Change the parts and the system changes. Indeed it would seem to be the case that the only way a system can change to begin with is if some of its parts change.

I misread your OP. I thought you meant "can I debate those entrenched in their views", not "can debate itself entrench people in their views?"

It's not even a complete sentence.

What's the question?

What?

Really? I thought scientists were more bigoted than philosophers. A lot of science types I have met seem to think that we can know everything there is to ever know and that we will find a theory of everything even despite me pointing out that they are a finite brain with limited computational resources. — intrapersona

Well don't go to scientists for philosophical advice. Fuck the modern trope that makes scientists out to be these omniscient gurus, the priests of knowledge and power. As if working in a laboratory makes you any more wise than anyone else.

This reminds me of the sectarianism in the churches hundreds of years ago that prohibited the manufacturing of literature etc. Bastards, just like scientists. Narrow minded pricks who think their interpretations are WIN. — intrapersona

I mean, I wouldn't say every single scientist is a narrow minded prick. In fact I would say that a vast majority of them are normal human beings who decided to be scientists out of curiosity, or perhaps some idealistic goal, only to be disappointed with the academic wall and the bureaucratic bullshit in the way of scientific advancement.

If science is about facts then who is doing the interpretation? Scientists? Aren't philosophers the masters of interpretation? — intrapersona

The truth is that there really isn't a turf war between science and philosophy, contrary to what those pop-science pricks make it seem. Actually, it's a fairly recent phenomenon for scientists to be dissociated with philosophy. Not to name drop but Einstein was heavily influenced by Kantian metaphysics, and thought highly of Schopenhauer as well. So were his contemporaries.

It's always philosophy + science that produces real results. Not everyone can be a genius and do both, so you need specialization. But with that you also need communication, something that seems to be lacking in today's academic world. Instead of isolating themselves, philosophers should be branching out to other fields, and instead of claiming superiority over everything, scientists (especially those annoying pop-science physicist pricks) should be less confident and more reflective.