The will to nirvana, to nothingness, to surrender is still a willing. — Joshs

I'm not talking about nirvana or nothingness. Application of will is not the only way to act in the world. Looking at my own behavior, I can see that much of what I do I do without any kind of self-consciousness or intention. Taoism has a term, "wu wei." It means, roughly, acting without acting. Acting from our deepest nature. If you don't like that, you can just say conscience, although that's not exactly the same thing.

It has always struck me that what we call morality grows out of our deepest human nature. We are social animals. We like each other... usually. We want to be around each other. We want to protect and take care of those we are close with - our family, friends, community.

formal systems of morality are social, not personal. — Vera Mont

I was trying to say something stronger than that. "Formal systems of morality," what I called social control, are not really morality at all. They rules for the functioning of society. Rules against sinning, however that is defined, are no different than rules against parking derelict cars in your driveway or playing loud music at 2 am.

I think that, by referring to usefulness and interest, you have touched an important point. I think that an essential reason why philosophy today is in a crisis is because it seems not useful nor interesting. I think this is a result of becoming more and more technical, professional, scientific, precise, this way becoming so abstract that even professional philosophers can't clarify what this clarity is supposed to be used for, once it is (hypothetically) reached. Today's philosophy has become less and less human, less and less related to life, to the human experience of existence. I think that attention to experienced subjectivity, even at the cost of renouncing to some control, power, clarity, precision, has an ability to recover philosophy to life. We would just need to work on it, especially to make it in a dialog with the precision of analysis. — Angelo Cannata

I agree with all of this.

In other words, science cannot say that what it cannot study does not exist. It would be easy to object to this: how do you know that something does not exist, since you acknowledge that you cannot study it? In this situation the conclusion is that no dialogue is possible. — Angelo Cannata

You say science, but science is just a formalization of how people go about knowing the world - I guess one would say "reason." It is a common understanding, although clearly not universal, that proposed phenomena for which there is no evidence do not exist. No, it's not that they don't exist, it's that there is nothing useful to say about them.

Backing up a bit, I think you've changed the terms of the argument. Just because there are non-scientific, non-rational ways of knowing things, e.g. consciousness, that doesn't mean that scientific, rational, study of those same things is not interesting and valuable. We've never disagreed about the fact that the scientific study of consciousness is not the same as conscious experience itself.

What then is an uninteresting phenomena? — jkop

Good point. I guess "phenomenon" is just another word for "thing," which makes the argument circular. Let's try this - a thing is an aspect of the world that draws the attention of and holds interest for people. Now you ask "What then is an aspect of the world that doesn't draw the attention of or hold interest for people?"

A feeling, a country, and a state of mind. Clarky, I assume those exist by common convention, but I'm not sure how 'real' they are. Yes, the United States has a specified territory, but isn't this acknowledged as convention rather than reality? — javi2541997

I guess it comes down to that - if we name it, which is a matter of convention, it is real and it is a thing.

I think that oranges are different from consciousness, with reference to this discussion. I think that oranges are not very subjective. — Angelo Cannata

I disagree. Consciousness can be studied just as much as oranges can. And oranges can be experienced subjectively.

About consciousness, science is even unable to determine if it exists and what it is exactly. — Angelo Cannata

I don't agree. There are often problems getting people to define what they mean when they say "consciousness," but once you get that tied down, there's no problem. Of course it exists. I've experienced it myself and observed it's results in others.

In this situation, wanting to objectify subjectivity, to be able to study it, is like wanting to put a kiss or a hug in a slide to be able to observe it with a microscope. — Angelo Cannata

How to hug, according to science — Science

I didn't mean that real things are different from the study of them. Of course everyone knows that studying an orange is not an orange. What I meant is that they think that they are studying subjectivity, they think that subjectivity, or consciousness is what they are making their research about. Against this thought, I oppose that they do not study subjectivity, they do not study consciousness. — Angelo Cannata

Sorry, you lost me. You recognize the objective study of something is not the same as the thing itself. So, why can't I objectively study consciousness or human experience?

Taoists say "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name." But that's not just true about consciousness, it's true of everything, including oranges.

So since there's no people holding interest in my examples, you seem to agree with my views? There is no 'thing' outside of intent/convention. — noAxioms

Yes, we do agree. I have a strong interest in Taoist philosophy as expressed in the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu. This is from Stephen Mitchell's translation of Verse 1 of the Tao Te Ching.

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things. — Lao Tzu

And this from Verse 40.

Return is the movement of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.

All things are born of being.
Being is born of non-being. — Lao Tzu

In Taoism, being is associated with the everyday world we live in. Non-being, or the Tao, is the unformed, unconceptualized state before things are brought into being by naming them.

almost 100% of discussions, both philosophical and scientific, about consciousness, subjectivity, qualia, “being like to be a bat”, quantum theories about consciousness, are completely wrong, completely groundless: they don’t realize that what they talk about, what they do research about, is not actual subjectivity, but an objectified, petrified idea of it, that is exactly the opposite of it, the opposite of what they want to talk about. — Angelo Cannata

You seem to be arguing with someone who doesn't exist. I don't know of anyone who believes that studying human consciousness and experience using psychology, neurology, cognitive science, anatomy, biology, sociology, or any other method is the same thing as the experience itself. That doesn't mean that kind of study isn't interesting and important in its own right.

A forest is a recognizable object that consists of trees. Neither is a random swarm of unrecognizable gunk from which we construct recognizable objects. — jkop

Humans can name, make an object or thing out of, anything. There is no such thing as a random swarm of unrecognizable gunk if it holds any interest for us. There's a good definition - a thing is a phenomenon that holds interest for people.

Is love real? The United States of America? One of my dreams? Is anything that's real an object?

other objects are physical and exist regardless of conventions. — jkop

So, perhaps a tree is an object. Is a forest?

Dinosaurs have intent. Predator and prey both need to recognize each other as distinct objects/threats/kin etc. Their convention is sufficiently pragmatic for their needs. — noAxioms

How about a microorganism that recognizes it's prey by chemical signals, then moves in that direction and engulfs it. Does it have intent? Does it recognize it's prey?

I would argue that there are no real objects in the world. It is just a matter of how our brains carve things up, some of this determined by our evolutionary history, some by cultural practices. — petrichor

You say no "real" objects, but for most of us, reality is also just how our brains carve things up too. The idea of objective reality is a much a human construct as everything else.

Yes.

Prefering rock music and prefering no murder are fundamentally the same process in terms of how they affect action, — Ourora Aureis

I disagree, but I don't think I can make a good argument for my position right now. I'll have to think about it some more. Thanks for the provocation.

It doesn't make sense to ask whether grammar is "true or false" any more than it does to ask this of metaphysics. I think (Western) metaphysics consists in what is necessarily presupposed (e.g. ontology) in order for epistemological statements (e.g. physics (i.e. cosmology)) and axiological statements (e.g. ethics, aesthetics) to make sense as domain-specific criteria for truth and falsity. In other words, physics models computable aspects of nature (just as ethics maps eusocial aspects of human nature) whereas metaphysics indefeasibly describes physics' model-making (& ethics' map-making). — 180 Proof

As I'm sure you know by now, metaphysics is important to me. Of all the people here on the forum, I think your way of seeing it is closest to mine, but you generally have a bit different take and way of describing the subject. I find that helpful.

This could be a major cause of our suffering and the consequent increase in psychiatric medication consumption. — merloz

Here are some possible alternative or supplemental explanations.

• Christopher Lasch was a social critic who died in 1994. In 1978, he wrote an influential book called "The Culture of Narcissism." In it he described a social process he called the "psychologization" of society to create a "therapeutic culture." I like his work, but it's been a long time and I need to go back and reread it so I can't remember the details.
  
• Related to that, the government has stepped in to take a larger role in people's personal lives - social security, Medicare, Obamacare, welfare, civil rights. Add to that social movements including civil, women's, and gay rights.
  
• More people have health insurance and more health insurance includes mental health benefits.

I don't think this list is anywhere near exhaustive.

T Clark: Are you saying a metaphysical position isn’t true or false? (Why? Because such positions go beyond the evidence and therefore their truth/falsity cannot be determined?) — Art48

R.G. Collingwood wrote, and I agree, that metaphysics is the study of the (conscious or unconscious) underlying assumptions, what he calls absolute presuppositions, of our understanding of the world. Let's take materialism, since that's what this thread is about. What are some absolute presuppositions of materialism. Let's try these:

[1] The universe is uniform, i.e. the rules that apply to the behavior of matter and energy are the same anywhere in the universe and at all times.

[2] Every event has a cause.

Now tell me, how would you set out to test these assumptions empirically? My answer - can't be done.

I’d say Newtonian Mechanics is wrong. It gives the right answer to a certain number of decimal places but if you go far enough (10th decimal, 100th decimal), it gives an answer that disagrees with Relativity and with reality. — Art48

So, let's take the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of matter. I guess they were true until 1905 when Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent. Or maybe it was when scientists worked out how to go about actually creating energy from matter in nuclear fission. Now we have the law of conservation of matter and energy. Does that mean the law of conservation of energy is wrong? But scientists and engineers still use it all the time. It works fine except in situations where there are nuclear reactions. My answer - no, of course it's not wrong, it's just limited.

Or how about superconductivity. Superconductivity has so-far been observed only at very low temperatures. That's because at normal temperatures thermal movement of particles overwhelms the physical processes that manifest as superconductivity. Modern theories of superconductivity do not include consideration of physical processes that show up at temperatures we normally see in nature. So, are those theories wrong? Again, no they're just limited to the specific range of size and energy for which they were developed.

So is it purely linguistic simplicity for a particular role/purpose? — substantivalism

Hmmm. Is that what I mean? Maybe I would say that metaphysics is conceptual simplicity for a particular role/purpose.

I admit it can get rather tiring making explicit what senses and brain states lead to such an' such a mathematical/abstract realization so the majority of such thinkers use certain vernacular as wide/generalized shorthand. Course, then all that philosophical seriousness about the choice between these shorthand languages is beaten into meaninglessness, pointlessness, or pragmatism. — substantivalism

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. I don't see the value in talking about senses and brain states, at least not in this context. As for "meaninglessness, pointlessness, or pragmatism," I resemble that remark. I have been called a pragmatist and have accepted that label.

The notion that what's true is different qualitatively from what is established by our day-to-day interaction with the rest of the world minimizes the significance of our lives as part of the world, and separates us from what is significant, what is "true." — Ciceronianus

I really like the way you've put this.

I do not think psychology or social factors are irrelevent to ethics but that for the purpose of my specific argument I think construing it as a model is more relevent. I am assuming here that we have values as just a product of our being, regardless of the particulars of how they arise, which is where I believe those factors would be more relevent. — Ourora Aureis

You're right. I just wanted to clarify that values do not come from any kind of moral code or principle. They come, as you note, as products of our being.

To express the paragraph you quoted with some more context: I think that there is no such things as "values" outside of the experience we value. When we say "I prefer the taste of orange juice to apple juice", I think that can be translated to "I prefer an experience involving the taste of organge juice to apple juice". — Ourora Aureis

I don't think your analogy between my feelings for orange juice and my concern for other people is a good one. The desire to help people and not to hurt them is not a preference, it's an imperative, a drive.

There are infinite hypothetical experiences and we arrange these into hierrachies, aka we value them in relation to eachother. To state again, this isnt a psychological statement about how people view morality but a way of construing a basic idea that we have preferences for different experiences. — Ourora Aureis

Again, I think calling conscience a preference is not right, at least not for me.

I propose the easiest way for the West to defeat Putin and Xi. — Linkey

The only thing wrong with your plan is that it will never work. Oh, wait, another thing - opening up the possibility of a limited nuclear war makes it much more likely. Seems to me that any nuclear war between the US and Russia will inevitably lead to an all-out exchange of warheads. The only way to win is not to play.

Yes, materialism is a philosophical perspective. Newtonian mechanics , like all scientific theories, also rests on a philosophical perspective. As a theory, its predictions are ‘good’ and ‘accurate’ according to a particular metaphysical way of thinking about things. — Joshs

This is a good way of putting it and I agree.

The predictions of quantum physics are also good and accurate, but in relation to a changed metaphysical perspective. Both the old and the new physics use terms like mass and energy, but their qualitative meaning has shifted in subtle ways that, as you and Collinwood say, can’t be subsumed under the categories of true and false. The new physics isn’t simply ‘more true’ than the old, it is qualitatively different in its concepts, but in subtle ways that are easy to miss. — Joshs

This is something I've thought about a lot, which is made harder because I often struggle with quantum mechanical concepts. You say "the qualitative meaning has shifted." I don't know about that. There are a lot of arguments about different interpretations of QM. They have always seemed pointless to me if different ways of looking at it don't lead to questions that can be answered empirically. I think it's still an open question whether or not that's possible. From my reading, it seems like much of the dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen interpretation is that it doesn't provide new ontology. That has always seemed like an pointless criticism to me. Science isn't required to provide we mortals with ontology.

Maybe that's the new metaphysics of QM - no ontology. I'm comfortable with that.

Morality must be fundamentally concerned with experience, not principle. — Ourora Aureis

To start, I agree that a legitimate morality is not concerned with principle. For me it's more personal, human than that. As for the rest of your position, I'm not sure I understand it or agree with it. I'll make some comments on specific things you wrote.

Individuals value experience and arrange differing instances of experience into hierrachies, denoting their value in relation to each other. This is a neccesary condition for the concept of value to have meaning. To value is to prefer over another (this doesnt mean you cannot have equivalent value). — Ourora Aureis

As I noted, I don't understand what this means. As I understand it, value comes from inside us. It gets there by dint of our human nature and, later, from what we learn socially. I don't think this is what you mean when you talk about morality being concerned with experience, but I'm not sure. As I see it, moral values are founded in the fact we are social animals and we, more or less, like each other.

This expresses my understanding of the source of morality well.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. — Emerson - Self-Reliance

to avoid more semantic confusion, this isn't a psychological analysis but a model of morality. — Ourora Aureis

I don't think there is any legitimate discussion of morality without an understanding of psychological and social factors.

An interesting, well-made video. You've covered many of the bases that need to be covered. I do have one disagreement. Materialism is metaphysics, a philosophical perspective on reality, a way of thinking about things. As I, and R.G. Collingwood, think, metaphysical positions are not true or false, right or wrong. This is a drum I've pounded here on the forum many times. As you note, materialism can be very useful as a way of looking at the world. I've read that most physicists are materialist, which makes sense. But it's not the only useful metaphysical approach, e.g. I've read that most mathematicians are idealists. Ontology is not an all or nothing thing. We can use different approaches in different situations and at different times, depending on which is more useful in each set of conditions.

Also - I think your comparison of materialism and Newtonian mechanics is misleading. Newtonian mechanics is a set of scientific theories. I don't think it's correct to call it "wrong," it's just that it's limited. But for most uses in our everyday world, it's adequate to give us good answers. I can make accurate predictions about events here on Earth using Newton's principles. I can't make any predictions with metaphysics - that's just not how it works.

Nonsense. For instance, we seek "territory and food" in order to sustain ourselves biologically (like all other non-human animals do) and not because of "imaginary stories". And I don't see the relevance here of tychism (though I've always agreed with the principle ... from the perspective of classical atomsm). — 180 Proof

Nonsense. We, and all the other animals, seek territory and food to address hunger and security, basic animal impulses, i.e. instincts. Humans and perhaps a few other animals tell ourselves stories while we do that - explain to ourselves what we're doing and why.

This from the Wikipedia article on tychism.

In his theory of tychism, Peirce sought to deny the central position of the doctrine of necessity which maintains that "the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time." One of the principal arguments of the necessitarians is that their position involves a presupposition of all science. Peirce attacks this idea asserting: "To 'postulate' a proposition is no more than to hope it is true." Thus an avenue is opened up allowing the entry of chance as a fundamental and absolute entity. — C.S. Peirce

Humans don't fight over territory and food. They fight over imaginary stories in their minds. — Yuval Noah Harari

Sure, but we do everything based on imaginary stories in our minds.

My big sister bought this. — unenlightened

The web says that's 1957, when I was 6. I didn't know they still made 78s then. The web says they still made them until the early 1960s. Looks like your big sister may be old too.

the pages of the National Lampoon — BC

There's a reasonable chance that you and I are old.

Consider though, a tree. — Hanover

Thank you. Great example.

what do we think is the best long term future for consciousness? — Gingethinkerrr

I think humans evolved to be acting, problem solving creatures. I guess all living organisms have. That is at the center of our nature. Without that, we have no reason to live. Whatever gets uploaded into a computer wouldn't be human anymore. Without any reason to do anything, I think we'd all sit around doing nothing till we decided to delete ourselves.

If I understand it correctly, "Great Britain" refers to the main island, not the country. Did you hear that Trump called the UK "a terrible country, worse than Milwaukee?"

It seems plausible to me that any large regime will inevitably end up in tyranny. — unenlightened

Not sure about that. I guess it also depends on how you define "large."

The reality is that no one is going to make America great again for ordinary people. — unenlightened

Not sure about that. I'm also not sure it makes sense to talk about the US ever being great.

When it comes to complex ideas, I struggle with anything that isn't in plain English. — Tom Storm

Aw, shucks. Down here in Oz we're just country folks. We don't cotton to no pencil-necked, highfalutin, namby-pamby, fast-talkin ijits who like to spout out big words like "indubitably," "pusillanimous," and "utilization." On the other hand, we do know to put quotes around words when referring to the word itself rather than what the word signifies. "Signify," that's another one of them words you all like to spout.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose — BC

That's always struck me as a pretty good definition.

Corpse counting is tricky — BC

Agreed, but it's more than 7, more than 70, more than 700, more than 7,000, more than 70,000, more than 700,000, more than 7,000,000, and maybe more than 70,000,000.