Thanks for the quick answer. I’m going to read through and try to digest it and hopefully it’ll clear things up for me. Much appreciated!

If you get the time, please explain or link. I’ve always lazily ran them together but them being distinct would explain why Moore didn’t just quote from Hume when developing the open question argument as I’m sure Moore and all his contemporaries were well versed in Hume. Thanks!

What do you think about the open question argument? I often think that it is too much of a bugbear that tries to dampen meta ethical debate before it gets off the ground. I’ve heard two interpretations 1) The strong one- absolutely no ‘ought‘ from an ‘is’. 2) The weak one, an ought can be derived from an is but not automatically. Some explanation or justification is required to show how we make that leap.
As moral beings, we quite often derive values from perceived facts. It is the way that we morally reason. I think any meta ethical system needs to recognize this as more than mere error. If morality is a human invention, than the way that humans morally reason must have clout.
Do you think the is-ought distinction is best interpreted as 1) or 2) ?

Thanks!

Not the OP but I think a moral claim is a proposition that can be made into a “x should...’ claim. Meta-ethical claims can include non-moral claims such as ‘The good is X’ which can in turn set the foundation for the ‘should’ sentences that are moral claims. But, then we get get into the messy bit about whether an ‘is’ can logically lead to an ‘ought/should’.

I think what you’re saying is reasonable especially if interpreted in a pragmatic sense. I think people like Rorty and possibly Quine would agree with you. You are stuck in your reality regardless. Since there is no gods-eye-view to judge a more accurate reality, you might as well work within your experience to refine the best framework that you can. I think Hume might have said something similar regarding his skepticism about causation - we can’t know whether the sun will rise tomorrow but we better behave as if it will.

Nevertheless, reasonable as it may be, there is something philosophically unsatisfying about it. After all, you could still exist as a self in the ‘I think, therefore, I am’ but still be brain in some vat.

Interesting link! I wonder who the viewers in question were in that poll?- my guess is that Fox News viewers trust their station more, but that is ill-based trust nevertheless, whereas CNN attracts a more skeptical viewership by nature.

By the way, which YouTube news are you watching? I watch Democracy Now from time to time but unfortunately my brain is so accustomed to the dopamine fix of network news, I don’t stick with it for too long. That’s more my fault then Democracy Now’s fault though.
In all honesty, over the last few years, I rarely check the news on a daily basis. I don’t know if that is an ethically responsible position to take or a rational one for someone interested in politics. I just found that if you follow a news story daily, there’s so much repetition and overreaction. For every 10 sentences in a news article, you get maybe one sentence worth of new information each day. Journalists and content providers are desperate for content and produce so much more quantity than quality. What I’ve tried to do is identify a few journalists that I like reading and who I trust and just follow them. I get the news at a much slower pace but it’s more coherent overall and less manic in feel.

There’s the quick utilitarian response: self harm is wrong if the pain you cause exceeds the benefit. So, even if you don’t care about the harm to yourself, if your family or friends are driven to great pain by your lifestyle that exceeds the joy you receive from living your autonomous life style then you are doing wrong. So, we can imagine the pain caused to the heroin addict ‘s parents by constant worry could lead to its condemnation.

BUT, There’s a more interesting Kantian style answer though. This is from David Brink “ The self is not to be identified with any desire or any series or set of desires; moral personality consists in the ability to subject appetites and desires to a process of deliberative endorsement and to form new desires as the result of such deliberations. So the self essentially includes deliberative capacities, and if responsible action expresses the self, it must exercise these deliberative capacities. ... The proper aim of deliberation is a life of activities that embody rational or deliberative control of thought and action.”
I think what he’s trying to say here is that living according to your base desires, let’s say drinking beer all day, or whatnot is not a true exercise of your rational capabilities. Therefore, it violates your very nature as a rational human being. The exercise of morality is tied up in being a rational being who deliberates. If you choose to not deliberate and just give in to your quickest desires, you are morally wrong because you are violating your very rational, moral nature that qualifies you as an adult human.

That said, a bohemian can live a very fulfilling life dedicated to art and creativity. Not every bohemian is necessarily Charles Burkowski on a weekend bender.

I think every aspect of life has gotten subsumed in the culture war. Science, politics, racial issues, history. Climate change should strictly be a scientific issue but it gets entangled in debates about freedom and altering ‘ways of life’. I live in Japan and it’s next to impossible to explain to people that wearing a mask in a pandemic or recycling is a political issue. It’s a foreign concept to them.

I think Daniel Dennett made a decent effort towards explaining how materialism could give rise to consciousness in Consciousness Explained. I don’t agree with it but he certainly put forward a detailed framework - namely that many of the things we associate with consciousness such as a single coherent self and qualia are illusions and that we are nothing more than philosophical zombies - in the sense that we have no nonmaterial experiences and our cognitive processes are just more complex variations on what a computing system can carry out. To me, ultimately his notion of nonmaterial experiences doesn’t make sense. I think in the book he made some type of comparison of experience as nothing more than a cognitive mapping for easy reference of deeper cognitive programs akin to a desktop function on a computer. I think he did a pretty decent job of showing at the time (1991) how far science could be used to offer a possible explanation though ultimately falling short.

Sorry, kind a late to the party here but I thought this was an interesting post and I’d like to share my two cents. I think that the internet media like YouTube are more dangerous than traditional media even though the internet media is somewhat more democratic because story selection is based on viewership (really ‘clicks’) rather than large companies who are supplying ad revenue.

I think journalists in the traditional media could butt heads with their host networks and the large corporations supplying the money and occasionally get controversial stories on air. But, with Internet media, there is no one in particular to butt heads with. If a story in traditional media fought its way on air, it was guaranteed to be seen by many people due to lack of choice in media outlets. Now, a news site can publish quality journalism but there’s no guarantee that people will pay attention. And, given the way people’s attention span has shrunk in a click bait culture, there is no reason to think people will care unless that story isn’t interpreted in a really click baity way. In a weird way, censorship isn’t even necessary. The whole structure of the new media leans people into paying attention to the hyperbolic - “the watch ‘so and so’ destroy his or her rival” type headlines. We’ve effectively self-censored ourselves by shrinking our attention spans.
I think that’s why I take so much solace in philosophy. It’s hard to read - really hard, and it demands your attention. Even more than supplying critical thinking skills, I think it just forces you to sit still with a text and that’s invaluable and rare right now.

[reply= excellent question! Mines a weird one but Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. I took a rebellious, punk approach to everything as a kid but his Sources of the Self made me appreciate things that I previously disliked (Christianity, theology) as being the philosophical and historical sources of the stuff that I valued like individuality and autonomy. I’m still an agnostic but it made me see the value of things that I didn’t and still don’t necessarily accept. Just for clarification: I believe individuality and autonomy can develop out of any tradition or culture but in the case of the West it has a strong background in Aquinas and others. Taylor showed me how to value a tradition which is something that really resonates in my everyday life, without being a conservative.

I would say that if the notion of having states of ‘less consciousness’ exists, then the notion of having states of ‘more consciousness’ exists. But, you are right I think. Trying to quantify something mental like consciousness does feel awkward. I would say we could make sense of it with an ad hoc definition such as x has states of more consciousness if it displays more a) self awareness and b) comprehension indicating intelligent behavior. Criteria (a) might be hard to measure though.

I like the distinctions. But, intuitively, I’d put poetry, spirituality and religion under one banner - maybe under the term ‘the ineffable’. Of course, all categorizations bleed into each other a bit - politics and economics for example, but I think poetry and spirituality/ religion derive from the same impulses. Nice work!

That’s a tough one because I never had to quite elaborate before. Hopefully it still makes sense to me after I do so. I still see a stark contrast between someone like PF Strawson and H. But, I feel the closest connection falls with the American pragmatists. It was always hard for me to comprehend how use is more important than the truth in the pragmatist conception of epistemology. That use vs. truth contrast was baffling when there clearly are statements like 2+2 =4 that require no theory of use to justify their validity. We can imagine certain basic science claims also. Now, enter H. with his claim that science is actually an abstraction removed from our most basic contact with the world. We don’t contact the world on sense-data points a la Russell according to H. Then, that allows me to situate the basic science, logic and math claims as abstractions one most develop, not something given to us by our contact with the world.
Quine, Sellars, Rorty and others were still not relaxed or distant enough from the analytic tradition to fully describe (to me anyway) why I should value use over truth in conceiving of our relationship with the world but Heidegger’s work brought me there. I hope that sounds somewhat understandable as sometimes I’m not sure of it myself.
Heidegger also seems to resemble the more mysterious moments of early Wittgenstein like what we can not say, we must pass over in silence. Heidegger’s later philosophy on truth as revealing allowed me to make sense of that comment.
All in all, I feel like Heidegger built a great, free standing system a la Kant that I think has quite a bit of clarity. I am lost reading the more philosophical passages of Sartre for example but Being and Time never tied me up in that way.

Lol!

It’s terrible right! And, I’m still a sucker for it esp. if it’s found in somewhere generally respectable like the Guardian or NYTimes. I think nutritional science has to be the most frustrating when journalism gets a hold of it. The verdict on eggs, alcohol, coffee, etc switches every 6 months to two years often in the same newspaper or website but when you go to the original source the difference in the findings are not so stark. Scientific articles really need to be made public (ie not be put behind a paywall).

I love Heidegger and I come from the Analytic tradition and read primarily Anglo-American philosophy. I can’t really get into Sartre, Derrida and other giants of continental philosophy (not their fault, but mine) but I think Heidegger is quite systematic and clear. I think he got an unfair rep from Sidney Hook’s takedown of him in the 30s or 40s. Ironically, I think Heidegger is the easiest continental thinker to merge with the analytic school in spite of his reputation. I think Joan Stambaugh‘s interpretation of Being in Time is quite easy to understand and I don’t have a particularly easy time reading a lot of philosophy. I think he has the best take on a philosophical description of a lived life - not what is truth or objectivity or a clarification of the sciences or linguistics- but what it is to be a person living in the world.

Thanks!

By the way, if you wanna do me a favor, please check out my podcast. There’s stuff on consciousness but with Hegel and history. I might talk about media representation of philosophy in the future because I think you brought up important point. If it’s OK, could I refer to your comment in it? https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/on-the-very-idea-a-philosophy-podcast/id1511375679?l=en&i=1000479737894

I experience the exact same thing daily. Sometimes, I wonder why I even read the main stream media at all about academic issues. I guess the reason for me is that often academic writers are terrible at writing but journalists can write well. On the other hand, journalist can’t help but sensationalize especially in the way that their industry is monetized but philosophers care more about the truth represented in its most sober way. In any case, I encourage you to read David Chalmers, Colin McGinn and others on the topic of consciousness. your question was a great starting point. I like Daniel Dennett a lot but I often think that he is harmful to philosophy in general as a profession. He sometimes makes difficult philosophical problems seem a lot more easier than they are.

I have the same problem when I’m reading a science article in a newspaper or general website. The journalists covering science usually covers a finding in a much more interesting, controversial way to generate clicks than the original finding. But, when you scratch beneath the surface, my reaction is usually ‘Oh, that’s what you meant. That doesn’t quite seem so shocking’. It’s not a bad way to first be introduced to an idea, but please take everything with a grain of salt.

Journalists writing about philosophy and philosophers themselves are two very different types of writers. The journalists want to amplify the outrageous claims because they want people reading the article.

Please have a closer look at some of these people who claim that consciousness doesn’t exist. When you work through their position, It usually becomes something like ‘our traditional idea of consciousness isn’t quite what we think it is”. ‘Consciousness doesn’t exist‘ is like the click bait title on a well considered position. It sounds provocative the content isn’t quite so. People like Daniel Dennett, who is a great writer, are sometimes a bit too concerned about book sales rather than working within the general philosophical community in a piecemeal, gradual way.
By the way 24% represents the number of people who consider that position a possibility not a legitimate possibility or the likely case.

Thanks! Looks fantastic and very comprehensive

I think most philosophers do accept some notion of consciousness but the ones who reject consciousness get more coverage or attention so the rejection of consciousness seems greater than it is.
For example, this is a survey of professional philosophers in 2009 and go to the zombie question. It seems most think a zombie without consciousness is impossible. Only 24% consider it a metaphysical possibility which is a much weaker claim than saying consciousness doesn’t exist. https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=All+respondents%26areas0=0%26areas_max=1%26grain=medium
Some people may have trouble with a non-physical notion of consciousness but still admit we are conscious in some sense; it’s just not as ‘special’ as we think it is. I think Dennett takes this position.