To contextualise it to this discussion, who exactly says human life must be part of the nature which works out. Perhaps, as the anti-natalist argues, that's the part of working nature which ought to end. — TheWillowOfDarkness

So the anti-natalist suffers from the ought-isn't fallacy, Nice. :)

Fortunately my own argument is something quite different. I say it is obvious that nature has to "work out". It would be irrational to think otherwise.

And I say morality exists to encode wisdom about the nature of that working out - its generic social-level principles. Morality thus is naturally aligned with nature. By definition it is what persists as what can survive the test of time.

So moral philosophy that doesn't seek to align itself with nature in that fashion is irrational. Or would have to be argued for on the basis of some form of anti-naturalism, like the commandments of a supernatural being, or the preferences of romantic feeling.

But my point refutes what you seem to be saying in regards to the idea that new ideas of morals cannot work if it is not something in the repertoire of what worked before. — schopenhauer1

But I didn't argue that.

What I have argued is that we can expect that in a successful organism, the historical constraints will be well organised. That is, they will reflect the hierarchical structure, the proximity principle, that I have mentioned often enough now.

So the most general constraints will be the ones that are the most resistant to change. While the kinds of things which are most local or personal - like whether I have some standard rule about eating vanilla or chocolate icecream - will be the most susceptible to variation.

So you seem to only give credit to something AFTER it has become the dominant theme, but refute it when it is just starting out, thus making it a circular argument because even current trends started out somewhere. — schopenhauer1

Circularity is a standard problem in mechanical thought. But in organic thought, it gets fixed by hierarchical organisation - a systems logic of constraints and spontaneity.

So it is not a problem if a system spawns local variety while tracking global continuity. It can do both at the same time. If the local variety proves to have value, then its own influence will grow such that it becomes itself an appropriate level of generalised constraint.

But what actual novelty did you have in mind here? Veganism? Antinatalism? What?

My argument is that it is unlikely to be a winner to the degree it tries to swim against the general tide. If it is ill-designed in terms of system fundamentals, it would be given little hope of emerging as a success. So the organic view would never say something was impossible, but it can with reason say why a possibility is vanishingly unlikely.

I've already given that kind of argument against antinatalism. It is simple maths that even if 99 out of 100 couples decided to be childless, it only takes one couple - for whatever transmissible reasons - to start breeding and your antinatalism is toast. Selection acts as a filter to find what works. And what works will replace what doesn't.

So I have no problem with starting out with your "tiny experiments". Organicism take growth/entropification as fundamental. Everything else then follows with natural logic.

Thanks for repeating what I said.

It is fundamental to organicism that history only acts as a (historical) constraint and so spontaneity or degrees of freedom are required to allow actual adaptation to the future.

It is a familiar problem with Darwinism that natural selection - as understood mechanistically - can only remove variety. This is the problem that a constraints-based view of systems overcomes as it says natural variety can in fact only be constrained, not eliminated. So now the production of variety becomes a non-problem as ontically it is always going to be generated. Natural selection is always going to have variety to work on.

And it is this organic principle that I have elevated to the level of morality or models of fruitful social organisation.

Freewill, for example, is our ability to produce various arguments and various action choices due to the focusing constraints of our socialisation. Society gives us a social framework of ideas that can impinge on our rather unpredictable individual journeys through life.

We always know just where we are in regard to social norms and so can negotiate what looks to be the most fruitful personal responses in terms of that dynamical balance we have to strike between the good of the self and the good of the group (in whatever extended sense the notion of group-hood happens to be in play in our culture at a particular place and time).

So yes. In arguing for naturalism - natural philosophy, the systems perspective - I am arguing for organicism against mechanicalism, as well as for immanence against transcendence. We thus agree that history is not prescriptive - a desire to eliminate variety - but serves simply as a constraint on the continuing production of variety.

Obviously when someone says that "human suffering and animal suffering are equal" they're not claiming that the forms of suffering that animals can experience are the exact same ones as the ones humans can (or vice versa), but that one unit of suffering is intrinsically just as bad regardless of what kind of being experiences it. — zookeeper

But it is this notion of "one unit of suffering" that is in question. It relies on the creaking philosophical apparatus of mind/body dualism.

Are you seriously claiming that you thought that DC's claim that "human and animal suffering ought to be presumed to be equal" was meant in such a way that "animals don't suffer from existential dread so no they're not equal" is a valid logical counterargument? — zookeeper

As I say, what I "seriously claim" is that DB's position relies on dualism and the treatment of suffering as quantifiable qualia. So I attack his position at its ontological roots.

But that is more about how he has argued in other threads. In this thread on specieism, it is the inability of his dualism to deal with obvious psychological discontinuities between speechless animals and language using humans that has been the particular focus.

My best guess would have to be that you think prescriptive claims are inherently nonsensical, useless or something along those lines, and that's why you insist on treating them as descriptive claims. Is that right at all, or even close? — zookeeper

Has it been a secret that of course I take prescriptive claims (based on transcendent ontologies) to lack any good basis?

But at the same time - as I don't want to be misunderstood now as just a moral relativist - I have argued that naturalism supplies its own natural prescriptions. For systems to exist (for any length of time), they must be capable of persisting - dynamically reconstructing the conditions of their own being. And to do that means being ruled by some dynamical optimisation principle - like the social systems imperative of balancing local competition and global co-operation.

So naturalism is going to talk prescriptively about what has to be the case when it comes to anything even being the case. And that starts with the impossibility of even talking about morality in the absence of a social system that works well enough to last long enough for its moral organisation to be a topic worthy of mention.

Darthbarracuda. So yes, I should have said DB. :)

I don't think there is a natural warrant for it. It seems natural to us, but it is a cultural standard, ultimately grounded in Christian ethical theory. — Wayfarer

It is natural behaviour in the sense that the group benefits from all its members having equal opportunity. That maximises the group's degrees of freedom. All individuals start on the same level when it comes to being able to pursue the group's goals and so the role of historical contingencies - such as a family history of poverty or wealth - is minimised.

In other words, social democracy and its call for level playing fields makes obvious good sense even in an economic growth situation. It maximises the group potential for creativity and adaptivity.

So the rationale for Christian social behaviour is quite naturalistic - the reason it endures. It is only the claimed ontological basis that appeals to supernatural forces. And who believes in God anymore? (Not Anglicans.)

However the trick that organised religion pulled was to convince enough people that there were beliefs and powers that transcended their existing social structure. There was one God who ruled over all kings and tyrants. So getting people to act in the name of rational abstractions required religion as a stepping stone.

So yes. You can say Christian moral philosophy identified the smart way to organise human societies once they started building cities and building up trading networks. But that came out of an identification of rational social principles, not because of what God had to say about "Christian feelings".

Right - there's the rub. Humans are differentiated by 'existential dread' - which is precisely a consequence of self-awareness and the sense of separateness from nature that humans have but that animals do not. Much of what goes under the name 'philosophy' comes from the contemplation of the source of that dread - 'who am I? What is the meaning of it all?' But then, you say, that it is something that can by understood in evolutionist terms. See the sleight of hand there? — Wayfarer

Well first let's dispose of the OP. And accepting that sentience has these sharp discontinuties as well as its underlying continuities is the start of beginning a sensible conversation on "specieism".

If you now want to discuss something else - morality as the wise habits of social organisation - then what I would say about existential dread is that sensible folk accept life for what it is and get on with making the most of it in rational fashion.

If you find yourself stuck in a loop asking "who am I?", you are not listening to the natural philosophy that says you are primarily an actor within a community. There isn't really "a you" that is distinct from the pattern of relations that is your social engagements. So "you" have the best hope of finding "yourself" by looking outwards to the world you are helping to co-create rather than inwards in search of some mysterious essence - a soul or will or anything else so disconnected from reality.

What I'm saying is that your pragmatic naturalism is very good - as far as it goes. But it doesn't serve as the basis for a moral code. Given a moral code, a pragmatic approach may well be best, but that code can't necessarily be derived from or justified on the basis of naturalism. — Wayfarer

Again, as I always have to keep saying, my naturalism is constraints-based. So it already says that we will only find broad limits shaping our personal actions. Thus morality is about constructing a hierarchy of constraint that runs from the broad and inescapable necessities (we need food, shelter, etc) to the very personal (I must get rich, get smart, get contented, etc).

So the point is to be able to fix the biological constraints at the correct distance from the other constraints, such as the cultural or the personal. I have never said biology ought to dictate anything. I only say it sets the scene in a basic way. And we need to understand what "it" wants of us if we are going to be able to fix those constraints at the right distance in terms of living our lives.

This hierarchically organised approach is in sharp contrast of course to regular moral thinking which wants to tie our actions to overly concrete abstractions. Things are good and bad in a black and white fashion. But a constraints-based approach is naturalistic because it only ever talks about fostering propensities to "do the right thing" and so tolerates exceptions, either accidental or deliberate, to a reasonable degree.

This is an evolutionary logic - and one that places positive value on individual competitiveness or local degrees of freedom. So I can choose to be vegan, or a Nazi, as my personal moral choice. On a small scale, as a local experiment, it is not particular immoral in terms of even cultural norms, let alone the much more distant naturalism of our biological history. It is only as veganism or Nazism becomes an organising idea - a constraint - at a larger social or biological scale that it starts to be judged by the forces of natural selection.

So if you are going to go the natural philosophy route, it is much more Pragmatic in this fashion. It is all about constructing an appropriately organised landscape across which our behaviour adapts. Like an onion, we have to be able to place biology at its best distance from our moment to moment decision making.

Yes, that's an important part of my position. — andrewk

Great. Then we agree and it is the qualification that DC [Darthbarracuda] has been denying.

For me, and this may be just me, the domain of ethics seems to be delineated by the simple consideration that it is about making decisions that I expect to have an impact on the feelings of other beings that I believe to be sentient. — andrewk

And so if there are degrees of sentience, then there can be degrees of impact?

Why can't the good be unattainable? Why must we be able to attain the good? Why must the good be constrained to be compatible with our own limitations? — darthbarracuda

What is this "good" that you keep harking on about? I'm sure you must have a clear definition of it as you talk about it so much. But what is it in terms of the real world?

You tell me. Is the protection of the poor based on a reasoned analysis of the comparative value of individual lives? — Wayfarer

You switched your example for some reason. But I'm not seeing a problem with coming up with rational arguments for why human societies ought to protect their poor.

Your continuing objection to darthbarracuda's claim that "speciesism is wrong" seems to basically be "no, because the definition of morality is what a group considers right/wrong and currently most people don't consider speciesism wrong so you're wrong by definition". — zookeeper

In fact I said DC was wrong in claiming that human suffering and animal suffering ought to be presumed to be equal as we have good reason to believe that animals don't suffer from existential dread, for instance.

And then morality in general has no transcendent or Platonic basis. It is simply the wisdom by which human societies live. So it could only be a group thing.

And being naturalistic in that fashion, it would be no surprise if morality evolves in step with lifestyle evolution. So what we do currently, or previously, can be examined in terms of why it worked - and by definition it has worked because here we are. However we are free to make a new kind of sense of the world, as encoded by our new moral codes.

But then, the anthropological examination of what has worked does throw up general and obvious "rules" - such as the ones that establish trade-offs between competitive and cooperative behaviours in any social group.

So, what if we're in a situation where resources are seriously scarce - which collectively, I think our culture is going to inevitably face - do we let some people perish, so that others might flourish? — Wayfarer

I doubt that "we" would get the choice. And we know the answer. If things get tight, fairness doesn't have a hope.

So the best ethical response is to act in ways that reduce the chance of things getting tight. Then also to start building up resilience in our local communities.

A utilitarian might convincingly argue that the healthy will benefit a lot more, if freed from the drain of supporting the elderly or disabled. Of course we see that, rightly, as an abhorrent argument. But that is really for reasons of conscience. — Wayfarer

But is it abhorrent or is that just the way you currently look at things from a fairly privileged position?

I don't think moral philosophy has any value if it simply takes whatever current PC view of life happens to prevail and then tries to project that on "everyone" at "all times" as the categorial norm. If your morality has no reasoned justification - its simply an endorsement of what one feels - then why even bother with philosophical discussion at all. It is merely propaganda.

Probably because we are able to conceive of realities that are not. — darthbarracuda

We can easily conceive of things that don't work. I mentioned marxism and flower power as examples. So that doesn't help your case.

Looks like we're even then! — andrewk

Not really as what you wrote was self-contradicting and so made no sense to me.

You said: "The discussion was about ethical justifications for treating humans better than animals." And then "Those reasons have nothing to do with ethics."

So I'm baffled what you might mean.

Your comment: "They are simple transactional considerations," did not help explain.

Please respond with an argument — darthbarracuda

Respond to the argument already made. Don't be a dick.

You are merely asserting that the anthropological history of morality defines what morality currently is or could be in the future, thus limiting its prospects. — darthbarracuda

Or rather I show why its future prospects would be self-limited for the same reasons.

As usual, you just ignore any actual argument I make. For instance, I've said often enough that living within the solar flux vs living off a fossil fuel explosion has produced a historical disjunction in terms of "morality". So the critical question becomes, well, do we like what that results in?

Hence why I am repeatedly said before that your position is inherently affirmative - affirmative of society, affirmative of progress, affirmative of life. — darthbarracuda

I talk about how things actually are. You talk about what you wish them to be.

No, you also give emotional arguments because you have placed value upon the "natural" state, — darthbarracuda

This is getting very silly.

You have jumped the is-ought gap here by implicitly assuming a standard that these reasons uphold. — darthbarracuda

The is-ought fallacy is your hang-up, not mine.

My argument is that morality is simply an encoding of the organisation by which a social system can persist. And to pretend it is anything more high-falutin' than that is a damaging romantic delusion.

that's the assumption that any naturalistic account will provide, but it is reductionist. 'Everything in service of survival' is what it amounts to. — Wayfarer

But your claim that it reduces to "survival" is taking a "survival of the fittest" rhetoric overly seriously.

Ecologists and other systems thinkers talk about resilience, richness, flourishing, and even ascendancy, for a reason.

Remember that German natural philosophy (as a precursor to a modern ecological view) was seen as an idealist exercise. And holism and systems science have been more than sympathetic to eastern religion - indeed they fueled transhumanism and other new age cults.

So you are trying to peg me as a scientistic Darwinist. But that's not what I've argued. I began by talking about flourishing rather than surviving for good reason.

Yes, but why should we consider communal best interest to be more important than a global community's best interest? — darthbarracuda

I made that proximity argument at the beginning of this thread.

No, it's because no triumph or something silly like that can phenomenally compare to suffering as it is experienced in sentient organisms. — darthbarracuda

Stuck. Record.

My argument is that we must treat animals with respect because they deserve it. — darthbarracuda

Why do they deserve it? I give the natural reasons. You talk about your emotions.

Oh, certainly we have to have these in place for a certain kind of society to work. But why should this constrain the possibilities? — darthbarracuda

Systems have a logic based on constraints and the freedoms they shape (which are the freedoms needed to energetically reconstruct that prevailing state of constraint).

So the reasons why society has to be that way - global cooperation and local competition - is that it is what works. Marxism, anarchy, flower power, dictatorships, communes - there are plenty of examples of alternatives that didn't work because they did not strike the right balance.

I can't see how that can be anything other than a utilitarian ethos - 'greatest good for the greatest number'. Nor can I see any 'intrinsic good' in naturalism, that compares to (for example) the higher truths in Buddhism, towards which ethical actions are directed. — Wayfarer

And?

My position is that tradititional wisdoms endured precisely because they were utilitarian in this regard. They might invent gods or categorical imperatives of various kind, but this was just post-hoc rationalisation.

Right, so you are under the framework that what has been done, and what we currently do, is what we ought to continue to do because it's natural and rational, or in our own self-interest.

In other words, comfort is evidence of moral value. If we aren't comfortable with the prospect of giving up our dominion over animals, then by golly it's not important. — darthbarracuda

You just won't deal with my actual arguments, will you?

What we did in the past was often based on flimsy reasoning. Morality was something God told you about. I say that examine some of that closely - in the light of a modern scientific understanding of the principles of natural systems - and you can see why some of those traditional habits were functional, even if they couldn't account for themselves in naturalistic terms.

Today of course we can develop morality based on a proper understanding of natural systems. Which is where we can start to criticise much of how modern society might be organised from a credible basis.

That means I have no patience for your fact-lite PC guilt-tripping. If you want to make credible arguments, establish a proper basis for them.

Yet this is false because we hold many moral beliefs that are not in our best-interest. — darthbarracuda

The argument is that morality reflects the communal best interest.

As if ethics is entirely disconnected from emotion. Because self-interest isn't emotional at its core...? — darthbarracuda

Again, the argument is that morality reflects the communal best interest.

So the bleeding point of it is to transcend your personal feelings about what ought to the case because the very idea of suffering causes you unendurable suffering.

It's not that I want you to feel guilt, I want to you act more ethically. — darthbarracuda

Then give me appropriate reasons.

Personally I find cats delightful and dogs repulsive. Emotionally, the idea of vivisectionists experimenting on kittens is appalling, but beagles don't move me the same way.

And yet I myself say it would be ridiculous to support one rule for kittens, another for beagles, in this regard.

The ability to make this kind of distinction between my emotional preferences and rationally held communal beliefs seems basic to any worthwhile morality.

In your case, this reason seems to be rational self-interest. Yet this does not satisfy the open ended question very well, and especially conflicts with our intuitions that maybe we should focus on the welfare of people instead of merely seeing them as a means to an end for our own purposes. Because that is what rational self-interest egoism entails: that we care for others so long as we ourselves benefit from this. — darthbarracuda

I'll say it again. The systems view is explicit that society is a balance between competitive and co-operative imperatives. We need both to make society work. So there is self-interest in getting my own selfish way, alongside the self-interest in my community flourishing.

Trade-offs are already at the heart of morality. Which is why your black and white thinking seems so hopelessly romantic and out of date.

That is beside the point. The discussion was about ethical justifications for treating humans better than animals. Those reasons have nothing to do with ethics. They are simple transactional considerations. — andrewk

Sorry, I can't make any sense of what you want to say here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As usual, you distort what people argue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that ethical in your book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I see your problem....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veganism was practiced thousands of years ago — darthbarracuda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Individual lives tend to look almost like an MMO — darthbarracuda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romanticism in a nutshell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More crazy arithmetic.

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

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

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

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

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

And humans only have such capacities due to social evolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

its about your head surely?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So two points on that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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