It seems the problem is the government, having severely limited the construction of new homes, thus making demand high and supply low and thereby creating increased prices.

The other solution is to get a better job. I know it sounds so American of me, but when there's a problem, how about looking within for the solution instead of asking for help. — Hanover

The number one problem is letting banks freely manufacture credit - ie: debt. That is the fuel that drives the speculative bubble.

Then you have the political settings that encourage general speculation in an unproductive asset.

Down the list is constraint on land supply. If this were the critical problem, people wouldn't see ex-urban McMansions and prime beachfront as such great "investments". Small and safe properties would be in higher demand.

But I don't say experience is a complex state. I say it is not many things, and so not complex. — Dominic Osborn

It seems complex to me that I would have both the illusion of the rock and the further experience of the pain of kicking it. It would be simpler to have just the one and still simpler to have neither.

So you may claim that there is just "one state" - experiencing. But it has a structure that is robustly divided between "self" and "world".

There is the experience that seems constrained by "reality" in a reliable fashion, and yet then also another set of experiences which are not (like dreams, imaginings, hallucinations). So you are positing a state of experiencing which is intrinsically complex. And that sets up the question of what is the simplest way to account for that particular experiential structure. The simplest answer must be that there is a world that accounts for those constraints on experience.

I can also adduce Ockham’s Law of Parsimony (razor) in support of my assertion that there is nothing other than my experience. Why postulate anything other than my experience? My experience is, I concede, unexplained and inexplicable. But so is a physical universe. And so is a self. All of these are utterly mysterious; all of these represent the end of a line of enquiry. Why not choose the simplest ontology––there is my experience, and nothing else––? — Dominic Osborn

But as you say, your experience is a very complex state. It includes mysteries like the fact that kicking rocks hurts and not eating has unwanted consequences.

So Occam's razor would say the simplest thesis to explain such extravagantly elaborate illusions is that they are instead a mental model of real non-mental constraints.

Note that I accept when it comes to an inquiry after the true nature of this reality, we are indeed epistemically stuck on the solipsistic side of the fence. But then, Occam's razor in particular is a principle that could only apply if we believe already in the kind of physical reality in which the complex is grounded in something simpler.

So in invoking Occam's razor, you have already abandoned solipsism proper for some variant of pragmatism at least.

But we can and perhaps even should stop at some point. Especially if our previous line of argument is something which will offer no terminus (and we happen to desire a terminus — Moliere

While agreeing in general with your reply, I would add that what makes metaphysics doable and useful is that its argument takes the special form of being dialectic or dichotomistic. And so its terms are self -grounding, self-terminating.

Is it general or particular, atom or void, discrete or continuous, stasis or flux, matter or form, etc or etc? Every term can be grounded in being the limit of what it is not.

So questioning can stop (because more questioning would be fruitless) when we have identified a logically complementary limits on ontological possibility. That is simply what intelligibility consists of.

It's no secret that the mind can sort of 'fill in' details where they 'normally' would be to produce a kind of impression. But you're not actually seeing the edges of the triangle except where there is black and white contrast. — John

But where you see a white edge, there is only just unedged whiteness. So you are seeing a triangle when you really shouldn't - even if this is the kind of foundational trick upon which the whole business of "perceiving reality" depends.

Dreams and hallucinations sort of fill in for reality in a big way. But the point is it is all "fill in" down to the finest grain of perceptual processing. Your epistemology has to be able to deal with that frankly.

To admit this is not to admit idealism though, because idealism claims that percepts are not merely mediated and added to, but entirely constituted by, ideas. — John

Well in a way they are. Or I would say signs, as in Peircean sign relations.

The difference between real delineation and the visual suggestion is that the first produces an actual image of a triangle, and the second produces a mere impression, — John

So in the first case, the self actually sees a representation, in the second, the self merely imagines that it sees this? Hmm....

I really can't see the issue with the triangle illusion apo, it exists as an image on a screen or on paper or as something, whatever doesn't really matter, that reliably gives us the impression of a triangle,but is not seen as a fully delineated triangle. — John

Yet you see an edge that is not physically there to complete the impression of a triangle. So there is now delineation that is a real visual difference and a delineation that is only a visual idea.

Whatever your epistemology, it must account for such a contrasting state of affairs within the one general point of view.

Naive realism is now to pretend there is no fact of the matter. So what does considered realism want to say?

So a considered naive realism is simply based on the fundamental logic of the experienced differences between waking and dreaming, veridical perception and hallucination. — John

A considered naive realism sounds oxymoronic. Do you simply want to avoid tagging yourself a pragmatist here?

That's fine, but pragmatism does come with its more specific commitments and the question is whether there is something in that which you dispute.

Also Wayfarer's phantom triangle seems still a good test of what folk actually believe. In what sense does it really exist - either as reality or idea?

All neurotypical humans would be expected to see a glowing bounded triangle that is "not really there".

So the naive realist has no problem counting cows in a field, or sitting on chairs that are physically present. But then they also have no problem thinking the cows are actually coloured, or the chairs are actually "solid stuff". This is why their realism is naive. It ignores a division by flip-flopping from objective to subjective ontic commitments without even realising it.

Gestalt illusions like Kanizsa's Triangle are nicely poised right at that critical divide. And so it becomes revealing exactly what answer the realist can give. Everyone sees the triangle. Everyone can have the neurological trickery explained. How should this combination of definite experience and inescapable trickery be resolved as a model of epistemology, a putative theory of truth?

This is where naive realists change the subject. But idealists also fail to do it justice on the whole.

I think what you are failing to see is that realist assumptions are not made on the basis of a belief that one possesses any knowledge of the "ultimate nature of things" or anything like that, but simply on the basis that when something is available to perception in common, that is when something is publicly available, then it is classed as real, in the sense of being concrete, and is understood to be logically independent of any particular percipient. — John

Yes, the reason this debate is the hardiest of all perennials is that many simply do want to make absolutist claims. Or at least, have the strong desire to get as close as possible to that position

Then you are putting the middle-ground case for a pragmatic or epistemic realism, as against an ontic or naive realism. That is, all we can know in the end is that we seem to be talking about (and reacting to) the same things in the same ways.

And this is also a pragmatic or epistemic idealism in that it likewise rejects solipsism as credible belief. Instead we start already at the level of building belief based on the presumption of the existence of other like-minded minds. :)

In Mach-bands we see grey shapes as they are, but exaggerate the contrasts between the greys. The exaggeration is a use of the greys that we see, a way to organize them, but which is incorrectly passed for something present in our eyes or minds, yet absent somehow. But absent things are not present, neither in your eyes, nor inside your head. A memory of something absent does not possess parts of what it is a memory of. — jkop

Don't Mach bands both strengthen and weaken the case for idealism?

They strengthen it in proving there are perceptual illusions we "can't wake up from". We can't unsee the Mach bands even if we believe (from the neuroscience) they are psychologically constructed. So reality is a perceptual illusion (well, perceptual process) from the get-go.

And we know that from colour perception too. What we experience resembles "nothing" about the stimulus.

On the other hand, Mach bands, colours and other perceptual illusions are utterly reliable in their usefulness. They do tie us to the world in what seems like a pragmatically factual fashion. We wouldn't really want to "wake up" if they are a dream as the evolutionary efficiency of our discriminatory abilities is also something we can believe in.

Dreams and other hallucinatory states are by contrast unreliable states of perception and not useful in any known fashion. It is not hard to see them as dysfunctional (although dreaming causes few problems as it is not remembered and the body is normally paralysed so we can't act on our visions).

So in being fictional - or rather symbolic - the brain's perceptual illusions are desirable precisely because they are idealistic rather than realistic. They begin the business of action-oriented conception from the get-go, right out at the retina or cochlear.

The homuncular "we" who is suppose to be watching the raw data as it eventually makes its way to "display central", the theatre of consciousness, has already been replaced by the mental habit which is a useful interpretation or model baked in as neural wiring. Right out at the eyeballs, the essential business of "not seeing reality" has started. Instead we are already "seeing", or conceiving, of shapes, motions, colours, sounds, scents - the "signs of things".

In short, the whole idealism vs realism debate gets hung up on the presumption that something veridical or representational is going on, when what is really going on is something functional or enactive.

So in this context, thank God for Mach bands. Reality is already unseeable except in terms of conceived signs. And also thank God for waking up. Our system of signs can't be fooled for long. In its functionalism, it has the means to sort its passing confusions out.

The whole point is that you don't know that, because you haven't antecedently figured out that all, or any particular, perception is not an illusion. — The Great Whatever

I thought the point was that hallucinations and dreams can be judged retrospectively. The long-run can be properly contrasted to the merely intermittent even in a purely internalist perspective.

Of course if what is at stake is whether reality can ever truly be known - even merely as a recalcitrant fact - then of course doubt is always possible about anything, if simply only because that is how intelligibility must work. To fully believe, there must be doubt to demonstrably dismiss.

Although here again pragamatism steers us back to the embodied view. Verbal doubt - claiming a formal possibility - is one thing. But real doubt is a real reluctance to act.

Again, the functional is what matters, the veridical is not a true concern here.

So are you claiming to be able to count 3 cows as an indisputable fact or not?

If not, what kind of fact is it? If you want to proclaim yourself instead a Pragmatist or whatever, then say so.

? — jorndoe

As I say, we can quantify the quality of naive realism by counting the number of deflections we observe when it is faced with evidence of its central epistemic self-contradiction - its cosy presumption of a real self "in here" to observe the real world "out there".

So the count is 2 in this sequence. Are you about to make it 3?

Where do you see naïve realism — jorndoe

In the lack of a reply on the question of how you ontologise quality. The first rule of naive realism is explaining is losing, so just deflect.

The quantity of cows seems real enough to me. — jorndoe

You will note that this dichotomy of quality~quantity relies on the quality of cowness being real too - otherwise how else do you know that cows are what you are counting?

So naive realism always conceals what it pretends to answer.

If you put the concept of cow all in the counter's mind, how is that realism and not idealism? Nothing secures the truth of the counting except some individual's claim to know what they are doing.

And alternatively if you put cowness out in the world as a further fact, how is this not still idealism? Now you are claiming to "see" an abstract object in some fashion.

So confusion is rife in your naive realism. You are doing nothing yet to improve your situation.

I often notice that in debates about Platonic realism, that there that they founder on this notion of 'where could such a domain be'? As I have tried to explain, I think this is based on a misconception. Or rather, I think it is 'the habit of extroversion' that our culture has drilled into us. — Wayfarer

I disagree as it was already an issue in Ancient Greece even if it became both heightened - and nominalistically talk away - in modern times.

At the centre of Western philosophy is already this rock-solid dualistic distinction between observer and observables, the mind and the world. And while I agree there is then the unfortunate tendency to want to place them in different places as realms (the mind has to exist "somewhere"), it is also an inevitable kind of issue that must be resolved.

And it is also inevitable that people either tried to reduce everything back to one world (as in idealism, or instead nominalism), or indeed, started talking about the three worlds of material reality, mental reality and Platonia.

The 'empiricist' mindset is such that 'what is real' must have a location in the physical matrix of matter-energy-space-time. So everything we say exists, must be either locatable there, or be shown to have some evidence or consequences in that domain. That is what 'empiricism' means, right? — Wayfarer

My point here is that the empirical in fact invokes the very notion of "making a measurement". And so it speaks about observers as much as observables. And that is why philosophy has to focus on generalising the very notion of an observer - which Peircean semiosis does and dualistic approaches to "conscious minds" don't.

The kind of empiricism you describe is dualistic - the familiar unwitting dualism of the naive realist.

I have been hanging out briefly on another forum and discussing this point with a diehard materialist, and he simply cannot accept that something can be real in any sense other than being somewhere. 'To be real' is 'to have a location in time and space'. If I ask 'what about abstract ideas', the answer is, 'they're located also - in the mind, which is generated by the brain'. And that is the sense in which they're real. End of story. How they're predictive and so on - 'we're working on that'. — Wayfarer

Exactly. You wind up in dualism unless you can generalise the very thing of "an act of measurement".

But I would add (slightly digressively) that modern materialism would have to say things are real when they have an energy density and thus an energy potential when located in a spacetime frame. So now there is also a "location" in being the unlocated possibility of an action.

That is to say, modern physics is dualistic with its realms so that energy exists in a separate abstract way - the contents are abstracted from the container. And so energy has to be located somewhere that isn't, in the formalism, "somewhere".

Of course the ambition of modern physics is to heal this rift via a theory of quantum gravity - a story of spatiotemporal containers and energetic contents are shaped in mutual interaction.

There is only one sense in which something exists, and that is that it is real, and that applies to chairs, apples, real numbers, sentences, snowflakes, or whatever. Whereas fictional or imaginary things don't exist except for in the mind, which is in the brain, which is physical. — Wayfarer

But speaking for empiricists, you are talking about old-fashioned notions of the empirical - ones that rest on classical presumptions about observers. And modern physics has left that behind (even if it is also as reluctant as hell to let completely go).

Of course I also agree here that the ontic issues can't be solved by the materialists pointing out that the mind is emergent from the brain. That's not a sufficient theory. You would have to have an account that makes sense of such a claim - such as semiosis, where we can see how sign relations or "symbol processing" is indeed both physically instantiated by, yet causally disconnected from, the material dynamics it can arise to regulate.

This is why I point to the centrality of the measurement problem. It has to be solved by both mind science and physical science. It is where we have got to. And oh look, semiotics, biology and thermodynamics all speak right to that.

I think in the Platonic and neo-platonic understanding, existence is hierarchical, with nous and its objects higher, and the senses and their objects, on a lower level. — Wayfarer

You can extract a "ladder of life" story from this - the one that runs from pan-semiosis through bio-semiosis and linguistic-semiosis. So from the simplest self-organised dynamics to the most complex semiotic organisation.

But you instead are endorsing a dualism of mind and world here. Or at least, a divine and world. There maybe a useful difference.

Mind~world dualism treats consciousness as some definite Cartesian substance - a concrete soul stuff. While divine~world can ease you back towards a more pantheistic and immanent rendering of the situation. It starts to sound more like my organic and pansemiotic conception.

But I would say that is simply because divine~world is vaguer - less in your face than hardline Cartesian dualism. On the other hand, it does want to imbue the whole of reality with what is missing from hardline materialist accounts - formal and final cause. So that is where our worldviews usually overlap. That is a common interest arrived at from quite contrasting start points.

But the key point is that insight into mathematical principles, is insight into a different domain. And the problem we now have is that we have no means of envisaging such a domain, because we are so habitually disposed to locating everything in time and space. — Wayfarer

That's a good summary of the impact of Greek maths on the very creation of a rationalising mindset. And there is indeed the irony that we now mentally inhabit that very world because we "see" it in this dimensional fashion.

We learn maths as kids and grow up seeing we exist within three dimensions surrounded by countable objects, etc. Indeed we actually used the maths to build a carpented world of straight lines, perfect circles, exact right angles - the geometry of the modern house or formal garden. So we have really internalised Platonism. And if you are up to date with maths, you now see the same all over again in terms of the forms of trees, clouds, coastlines, mountain ranges,, and other fractal/dissipative structures.

But I think the key point about Platonia is that it is implicitly "other" to something. And that other is the act of measurement. The implied self who is the observer, waving about measuring instruments like rulers, clocks, balances, etc, in ways that make "perfect sense".

So Platonia was rational paradise. But it made opaque its necessary other - empirical paradise. That has to "exist" to. And that is what has become the target of inquiry in the modern era.

If we could generalise the notion of an "observer", an act of measurement or individuation, with matching rigour, then we would really be closing in on a fundamental view of things. We could finish what the Greeks started.

Actually I don't this clashes with Platonism at all. Platonist Forms surely imply all divisions which might be numbered are by definition illusory. There are not many cows in reality. That's simply a product of our imperfect 'vision'. There is only Cowness. So numbers should not be seen as Forms in themselves because there is no counting in the realm of the real. — Barry Etheridge

Platonism is normally confused by the fact it does try to include mathematical objects right alongside natural objects in Platonia. There is cowness, and also twoness and triangleness, as perfect ideas.

So the interesting question there becomes what in the end is Platonically special about numbers and mathematical objects in general? What is the further truth that maths seems to capture that is the source of its "unreasonable effectiveness"?

In some sense, maths must capture the limits of what can exist - the limits of acts of individuation that would apply (modally, logically) in any conceivable world. So we are now imagining the most primitive measuring operations - as uncovered via early counting, but more especially geometry - and discovering the forms that must result as their limits.

Counting arises from the fact of being able to point to a succession of things - wag a finger to a sequence of locations as an actual physical act embedded in time and space. Geometry then treats this discovered embedding time and space more generally in moving about it, following straight lines, measuring angles - all the primal measuring operations that are encoded in Euclid's axioms.

So in this unnoticed fashion, physicality - the embodied physicality of being able to "make a measurement" - is exported to a Platonic realm where various perfect objects (or acts of individuation) arise as the limits of the measurable. Geometry imagines the abstract world needed to make these possible kinds of measurement necessarily "true" and not simply contingent or accidental events.

If the world actually is Euclidean, then you get triangles and circles as this world's perfect limiting forms. And our actual physical world is indeed Euclidean - or at least immeasurably close to that on the energy and distance scales we typically measure it on.

Thus does 1+2=3 in any possible modal world? Well we can see that already a particular kind of world is being imagined - one with the kind of global dimensionality that underwrites the acts of measurement which make this a logical necessity. Rulers aren't bent, clocks are not dilated simply due to changes in energy scale. There is no quantum entanglement, no classical collapse, to muddy the sharp possibility of measuring things exactly. The Universe only has its three spatial dimensions, its one temporal direction, and its exactly flat, etc.

So the whole of Platonic maths is merely then just an extrapolation from the starting point of what we seem to be able to measure or individuate. It is an exercise in imagining the kind of world which would make our beliefs about the possibility of some measurement act necessarily true. If the world is that way - for example Euclidean - then we now have this absolutely secure platform by our (otherwise possibly arbitrary) acts of measurement.

But of course, we have learnt the world is not Euclidean. It may not have a deep geometry at all in terms of some certain number and shape of dimensions. It may be utterly contextual or arbitrary if we follow quantum theory down its rabbit-hole.

So all we can really say in the modern era about counting (or algebra) and geometry as logical structures is that they depend on "reasonable" axioms - axioms that encode what seem to be primal acts of measurement. Platonia describes the kind of world that would make some type of measurement "true".

But we've also long since shredded any classical/Euclidean notion of where maths or measurement should come to rest. We are now in the rather advanced situation of trying to imagine what any notion of measurement could look like in any notion of a world. What is the mathematical limit description of that exactly? Does even category theory get there yet?

Anyway, the point is that any Platonic assurance, any sense of strong structure, rests on the unpacking of hidden assumptions built into the axiomatic notion of "the measurement" - the act of individuation, the difference that makes a difference. So if you want to get to the source of things, this has to be the philosophical focus. (As it is in Peircean semiotics for instance.)

Personally, I'm not much of a Platonist. Yet we do this sort of thing all the time. See the 3 cows over there? — jorndoe

Numbers exist only within the logical system that we call counting, which is a subset of arithmetic which is in turn a subset of mathematics. And as Kant pointed out in responding to the ontological argument any necessity pertaining to numbers is therefore entirely dependent upon the logical system. — Barry Etheridge

Barry is on the money. Numbers are part of their own symbolic game and so stand outside the real world (all the better to be able to describe it).

The question is what do numbers best refer to when it comes to reality. And the answer is "the individuated". Or better yet, they count acts of individuation - stressing the fact that nothing in existence comes ready-made as a particular, but must in fact be individuated as a process, and so individuation is always contextual, always a matter of degree, and never absolute in the way counting appears to imply.

Nothing philosophically is demonstrated by pictures of cows, people, cups, or whatever and saying no one could deny that they see x number of individuated beings. This just bypasses all the deep questions at stake.

By our perceptual processes, we make judgments that we see a number of things that are similar enough to fit our rules about counting. We have a theory - about numbering. And we then can measure the world according to our best interpretation of that theory. We can informally decide what looks "near enough" to another cow, another cup, to be named as a further individual of that kind.

The real question then is about how individuation arises in the world itself. How do we describe that?

That is when we have to get into an active view of the world where individuation is a contextual action. We can no longer treat existence as a passive state of affairs. And then also we have to recognise that both necessity and spontaneity can be at work. So strict determinism is out too. An act of individuation could be a fluctuation or a propensity.

The shape of a cup or a cow is highly determined by a memory - a manufacturer's intent that is genetic or human. The individual is shaped in a proscribed fashion with a limited tolerance for contingency.

But the shape of a cloud is far more accidental or emergent. The constraints acting upon its formation are far more probabilistic. That is why it is often very vague - an uncertain judgment - if a cloud has yet separated from the rest, or if the cloud in turn is composed of distinct parts.

Yet importantly - to ontology - cows and clouds are just degrees of difference along this spectrum. Both are formed contextually by some kind of information (with clouds, this is material laws). And both are also subject to spontaneous fluctuation (in cows, we don't count "normal" variations in size, colour or shape).

So we have a few things going on.

The world does seem to naturally come individuated. So numbers as a logical system appears to map on to the world in a naively direct fashion. Our theory (of numbers) can be cashed out unambiguously by our acts of measurement (our acts of counting), ignoring all questions about whether we are counting instances which themselves are a necessary fact of reality, or instead an arbitrary fluctuation, or indeed, some trickier combo of both.

It becomes a blurred issue once we start counting the number of hills on a landscape or measuring the curves of a coastline. Are our criteria for what counts as a geomorphic bump the same as nature's in some rigorous fashion?

So numbers are tantalisingly powerful. They can sum up a lot about reality using very little information. And yet they do that precisely by leaving the reality of reality out - ignoring the whole tricky business of what might result in individuation.

And then less obviously, they are powerful also because they by-pass the question of necessary vs contingent too. We can count accidents of nature right along with nature's necessary facts if we so choose. Numbers really don't sweat the details at all.

I can't tell if you got where I was coming from. — Hoo

Not really. So you are pointing to irony of using violent means to put an end to violence?

I guess my point of view here is that we actually, socially, have really big problems in this world we are so busily creating/entropifying. We haven't got time to piss around with vegetarianism or pessimism or other whiny philosophical trivialities.

People just don't know stuff like how exponentially we are transforming life on the planet - the literal domestication (or enslavement ;) ) of all four-legged protein sources.

And there is this view that when people learn the truth, they will get scared and change their ways. But hey, I believed in the factuality of the Limits of Growth the first time around - and ever since have had to boggle at humankind's ability to ignore its inconvenient truths.

Eventually one has to decide whether humankind just is crazy, or instead this is some legitimate "wisdom of the crowd" effect. One has to be willing to challenge ones own eco prejudices against a testable model of reality which then might allow some actual control over the future.

If you don't understand the drivers of a phenomenon, you can't really expect to be able to express any meaningful preferences about where the phenomenon is headed.

And burn rate - solar flux vs fossil fuel - is at the base of modern civilisation and its existential dilemmas.

Yes, "life is sin." Movement is sin. There's a religion of stasis in our guts somewhere that just reaches out and grabs us now and then. Not life-death but un-life, un-death. And yet this religion itself looks like some modulation of the killer instinct and quest for a position at the apex that it condemns in a sort of sublimated verbal violence. It seeks to bring guilt and humiliation to everything self-assured and at home in our flesh-eating flesh. — Hoo

Seriously? Is it not just as standard a mythology to celebrate the natural circle of life.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, we got to get ourselves back to the garden ... woo, hoo, hoo, hoo, lah, la, la, la, lah....

In other words, the content of our phenomenological experiences does not change with the introduction of a new scientific image of man. You need to take into account this. — darthbarracuda

Well in fact that scientific image produces pain-killers, and hip operations, and cognitive therapies, and other stuff which can change the content of that phenomenological experience.

If the person that ends up in the cemetery involves no conscious suffering (perhaps you 360 no-scoped them), where is the issue with this murder?

The issue is that someone's preferences were violated. Suffering isn't just the violation of a preference - that's much too empty. But suffering is, all things considered, the most prioritized of experiences. — darthbarracuda

Yep. Still ducking my question.

Did the lamb express a preference? Is it capable of having one? Again you are having to support your position by talking nonsense.

Do you have a preference about lamb-eating? Might I have a different preference? Now we are talking. What general ground decides the issue morally when preferences are in conflict like this?

What I see to be the fundamental problem with your view is that you aren't taking into account the phenomenology of ethics. — darthbarracuda

But of course I take phenomenology into account by sheeting it back to its naturalistic grounding. So whereas you talk about phenomenology dualistically in terms of "qualia", I talk about the biological and sociological logic of having "feelings".

You know I've explained my view of the role of pleasure and pain as signals which make biological "common-sense". Just as humans are also wired to value their social interactions in terms of empathy and antipathy.

The difference is that while I do ground these feelings in something measurably real, you seem to want to treat them as cosmically-free floating - just feelings that exist in some abstracted fashion with no connection to anything in particular and thus absolute in their solipsistic force.

I step in because I care about the person getting raped. I have placed the fundamental value on persons. My intentions are, ultimately, towards people regardless of how these intentions have evolved in the past. — darthbarracuda

All you are saying is that you have discovered that you are constrained to think in certain ways about events or choices in life. And while you also know that this is due to some ancestral history (both a biological and cultural one), right there your analysis stops. You just accept whatever it is that you have ended up being without further questions.

This is a very odd idea of moral philosophy to me. Indeed, its exact opposite.

No we can't. And no, suffering has inherent bearing in here because suffering is partly the violation of preferences (i.e. why masochists can feel some pain but not suffer - they have a preference for pain). — darthbarracuda

So we are back to my question then - the one you are dodging.

If the lamb that ends up on my plate involves no suffering, where is the issue with me enjoying my dinner? It cannot be any issue to do with suffering, can it?

Like you would say, our preferences are a result of the environment. — darthbarracuda

But they are not preferences any more in the sense of being a moral choice when you are saying you have no choice but to respect your own discovered feelings on these matters.

I am saying we can instead understand the actual moral codes of societies - which are general pretty enthusiastic about hunting and meat-eating - as natural preferences because they encode the kind of balancing acts that make for a flourishing society.

You are speaking up here only for your own very personal minority view of what feels right when it comes to being a member of the tribe, Homo carnivorius. So either you have special privileged knowledge the rest of the world doesn't share, or you are just speaking to some particular quirk of your own psycho-developmental history.

The facts - as documented in Vaclav Smil's Harvesting the Biosphere for example - are that humans have transformed the planet into a giant livestock farm in just a couple of centuries.

The total planetary biomass of domestic animals - cows, goats, sheep, camels, buffalo - outweighs that of true wildlife by 24 to 1.

Smil: In 1900 there were some 1.6 billion large domesticated animals, including about 450 million head of cattle and water buffalo (HYde 2011); a century later the count of large domestic animals had surpassed 4.3 billion, including 1.65 billion head of cattle and water buffalo and 900 million pigs (Fao 2011).

So while you waffle on about all right-thinking dudes knowing instinctively that eating animals is inherently bad form, pretty much the entire human race plainly just does not believe you.

But as you say, your position doesn't rely on such facts. The only thing that matters in all existence is your preferences on some issue. If we want to understand morality, we must come to you - learn about how self-deluding we all are.

Anchoring your morality in what is prevents you from wondering what could be. What could be better, what is not the case, possibilities. — darthbarracuda

I'm sure I could explain it a million more times and you still wouldn't twig what is meant by "constraints".

I will simply repeat that constraints are what make possibilities actually possible. Limits give choice meaningful shape (such that some action could be regarded as actually moral vs immoral).

No, we're talking vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, public maintenance, art, etc. — darthbarracuda

Oh, you mean those things we plug into an electrical socket and get hot and make a noise?

It's not just suffering, it's preferences as well. I don't get to decide who lives and who dies. — darthbarracuda

So you now admit your argument based on suffering has no bearing here. We can remove that from the discussion.

Now we instead have something truly ethereal - preferences. Why should I have to share yours? Where is the argument for that?

Since when did we not have the right? It is assumed in all the major moral and religious codes in history and prohibited by none of the world's legal systems. — Barry Etheridge

Touche!

Cosmic tendencies are not equivalent to morality, though. — darthbarracuda

Why not? Support your assertions with an logical argument.

I've argued how they are the natural ground to what we humans call our morality. If we look at what we actually do as societies, we can find why it in fact works due to general natural principles.

Now I'm guessing you are thinking that if something is "simply pragmatic" or "simply a result of nature", then it isn't "moral" because morality ought to involve some kind of transcending human choice. You have the Romantic conviction that humans are above "mere nature" in being "closer to God", or "closer to goodness, truth and beauty", or whatever other traditional morality tale has been part of your up-bringing.

But sorry, I just happen to go for a naturalistic view of morality where it is not surprising that human moral codes would encode a certain central naturalistic principle - the need for a society to strike its flourishing balance. And science now supports that position rigorously.

But only after realizing that they correspond to the golden rule, as you said. Which isn't building from naturalistic first principles. Unless you consider the golden rule to be one of these first principles, which is rather ad hoc. — darthbarracuda

Why is your thinking so relentless back to front?

In "unthinking" fashion, human societies evolved to express a pragmatic balance of competition and co-operation. That just is simply what works. And then once human societies started doing moral philosophy, it was understood that what works has the kind of underlying principle that could be sharply caught and taught as slogans like the golden rule. And now - as science has better come to understand systems in general - we can see that social systems are like biological and physio-chemical systems in this way.

All systems persist by striking a fruitful entropic balance. They need global coherence (physical laws, genetic programmes, ethical codes) as their organising constraints, and also local action (material degrees of freedom, evolutionary competition, individual initiative) as the dissipative flow of events that sustains the whole.

So the "ad hoc" bit is that it has taken time to learn enough about nature to understand why we are in fact expressions of nature - and not unnatural, or God's children, or demiurges recalling our origins in Platonia.

see the various societal constructions meant to curb the triumph of entropy. — darthbarracuda

Sorry. Remind me which those are again? Are we talking patents for perpetual motion machines?

Or have you simply forgotten what is meant by a dissipative structure?

There is no justification for killing animals unless it's out of self-defense - and even then this is often caused by a violation of the animal's own territory, it's own "home". — darthbarracuda

LOL. This is quite simply atheistic divine command theory.

Yes, because husbandry is not as perfect as you make it seem. It's absurdly easy to market one's meat as "humanely raised" by a couple easy fixes to the farm that doesn't help the animals much. — darthbarracuda

OK. But I ask again, where do you stand if the husbandry was perfect and the lamb had the happiest life, a painless death?

Applying your own calculus of suffering, how would it be immoral to eat the lamb?

What about children relating in earnest to dolls, robots, cartoon characters and teapots? — sime

As I said, we can over-project and under-project because it is only ever a habit of projection. We don't know (in some direct access way). But we can certainly believe. It is empirically reasonable.

And indeed it is socially necessary. Our introspective sense of self - our self-consciousness - is a culturally-evolved habit encoded in language. Awareness of "being a self" is born out of dialog with others. It is socially formed. So just to function in our social settings as humans, we have to have a "theory of mind". It is no accident that we thus do believe in the consciousness of others.

I am free to perceive someone as a person as i naturally do and to feel empathy towards them in a pragmatic fashion, but I am also free to perceive them as a zombie in a critical fashion and to deconstruct their speech acts into acoustic blasts, and analyse away their appearance into moving edges and changing colour blobs. — sime

Yes, logic always creates this kind of counterfactuality. For every sensible belief, there is its crazy opposite. That is automatic.

But it is one thing to talk about a crazy counterfactual and another to live by it. How far would you expect to get in treating your fellow humans as zombies? Does that really sound like a good plan? If it doesn't, then you must have other reasons or evidence that you have not yet brought to the table here.

But why call this morality? It offers no clear guide as to how to act except in general rules, and places the emphasis on something other than people. — darthbarracuda

Maybe you missed my first post. I argued that the systems approach supports the golden rule. It explains why social systems need a morality that encodes a way to balance the opposing tensions of competition and co-operation. Neither of these drivers are bad. Both are required. But then so is the third thing of their appropriate balance.

The question of the appropriate balance must then be answered within the larger context of an environment's carrying capacity - the entropy equation.

At the cosmological level, it is "morally good" to maximise entropy. (Although of course in attributing finality or purpose to the Universe, we would only be doing that in the weakest possible sense. And there is no reason why we can't do both those things.)

But a social system has to make some choice about its burn rate. If its growth rate is too anaemic, it will be out-competed due to its lack of efficiency. But on the other hand, too fast and it will flame out. A measure of the intelligence and foresight of a social system will be how good it is at making some right decision on the issue.

So yes. Morality can be built up from first principles in natural fashion. And it arrives at the kind of moral truths that are found to be the most general across societies. Anthropologists find a common structure across societies because - by definition - if they can survive, they must have found a suitable balance in this regard. They will have tuned their competitive~cooperative social balance so it has a good fit to their environmental carrying capacity.

Of course civilisations rise and collapse. That is natural too. A lack of foresight and natural disasters - nothing is ever perfect in life.

Instead of trying to make morality a global holistic thing, make it an isolated and domain-specific phenomenon. Morality is all about choices. You're making it so that it has nothing to do with the people making the choices. — darthbarracuda

Again this is just you ranting.

My argument is that a secure morality is one built from the ground up on natural principles. If we can see what nature wants of us, then we can tell in measurable fashion how close we are to what it says is good. That creates a context in which we can make actually meaningful and useful choices.

You're basically justifying murder and/or torture simply because you can get away with it (the animal can't fight back, the animal can't offer alternatives - as if the animal's life should even be on the gambling table to begin with, might=right). — darthbarracuda

You are just making simplistic assertions with no grounding argument other than how you personally feel about things.

As you can tell, I have no problem with what is in fact actually natural. So natural=normal. And unnatural=questionable.

Again a degree of behavioural variety is also natural. So I don't have any fundamental objection to veganism. I would only want to see it "done right" - done as an actually healthy diet.

Instead the animal is senselessly thrown into a situation that it could not consent to, cannot escape, and is forced to endure extreme pain and fear so you can have a snack. It's cannibalism and barbaric. You're arguing that the animal should have been sensible enough not to walk into the trap that we set, or have been sensible enough to run away from the gunshot in a zig-zag fashion. But it's somehow the animal's fault that it got trapped and eaten? We humans get off scotch free? — darthbarracuda

Here we are again off into your wild rants. Maybe you live somewhere where everyone runs around with spears, chasing down squirrels and possums, ripping them apart on the spot and eating them raw. But I live somewhere where we buy meat over the counter after it has been humanely reared and humanely slaughtered.

Of course the "humanely" part remains a work in progress. But that just shows there is a moral awareness that is being acted upon.

And if indeed a lamb has a happy life in a paddock, safe from all the usual diseases and predation, then dies instantly and painlessly, could you still morally object to it ending up on my dinner plate?

On your calculus of suffering, is it better that it grows up a sheep in the wild than a carefully fattened meal? How does that work exactly?

Being the most intelligent organisms on the planet, we ought to use this intelligence for the benefit of all sentients, not to subjugate them. Avoid speciesism. — darthbarracuda

This is more mindless PC sloganeering rather than moral philosophy. Why is there any "ought" here?

Not necessarily. Being-identical-to, existence, etc are no reciprocating properties. You can't have the property of non-existence...otherwise you'd exist. You can't be not-identical to yourself...otherwise you wouldn't even be. — darthbarracuda

You kind of wandered away from the point.

What is the formal antithesis of "object"? What is its opposite in the mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive fashion the LEM demands?

You always tell other people they're dualists and that there's a problem with this but then never explain why it's problematic, — darthbarracuda

If you are happy to defend dualism as ontology, be my guest. If you don't believe it problematic to have two entirely separate kinds of reality, with no way to account for their connection, then probably pretty much nothing is ever going to trouble you when it comes to metaphysics.

I might accuse you for being dualistic by separating the rest of the world from the agents that are part of the world. "The Universe doesn't care"...it does care in certain contexts when we're talking about sentients that are manifested by the Universe. Unless you want to claim that the manifest image is actually the scientific image. — darthbarracuda

Couldn't really follow that.

Experience is what makes morality in the first place. — darthbarracuda

That's certainly a point of view. But that extreme subjective position - one that is only supported by naive realism and its implicit Cartesian dualism - is precisely what is the topic of discussion.

You are claiming subjectivity as the ontological basis for moral necessity. I am replying that morality is better understood in terms of "objective" reality - in terms of whatever general purposes or constraints nature might have in mind.

Yep, let's ignore legitimate scenarios because it threatens the cohesion of our worldview. — darthbarracuda

Talking animals and philosophising hunters? Is this Narnia where our legitimate scenario takes place?

But if we grant this craziness, then what actually follows? A sensible animal - if it is indeed taking the hunter at face value - would suggest a way to provide the hunter with an even better meal to their mutual benefit.

Isn't this the standard stuff of kid's morality tales? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Mouse

So I can only conclude that in all important respects, neither the presence nor absence of other minds is metaphysically conceivable. — sime

It is certainly conceivable - you've done that. But whether it is completely knowable - in a way that your logicism wants to demand - is another question.

So that goes to the issue of what counts as knowledge. As a Pragmatist, my view is that it is what you cannot doubt in your heart. It is what you would actually be willing to act upon in confidence.

So a Pragmatist admits to the possibility of eternal scepticism - doubt can never be absolutely eradicated. But meanwhile back here in the real world we are acting on the most ropey states of belief the whole time. And in that context, belief that other people are other minds - based on the behaviour and similarity we observe - seems one of our safer bets.

But then again there is a real issue as - due to the empathetic modelling you describe - we can jump to faulty conclusions. We can think a dog or cat has a self-aware kind of subjectivity "just like us" (it takes psychological science to tease out the truth there). Or going further back into traditional culture with its animism, we can believe even the wind and earthquakes are out to get us in some sentient fashion.

Alternatively, we can go the other way of not recognising self-hood in others when it is there. A person in a coma might actually still be aware. That curious looking savage that greets the missionary explorer might be just as much a fellow mind.

So yes, it is a business of projection. And empathy is a neurobiological resource that helps us in gathering the personal evidence when we seek to divide the world in that fashion - into the mindful and the mindless.

But only in the logicist's infinite regress of Cartesian doubt could we worry too much about the properness of projecting mental status on to our fellow humans as some kind of sane epistemic minimum.

The problem of other minds is frequently over-blown.

In bowl 1 you have 3 oranges. In bowl 2 you have 4 oranges. It is an objective fact that there are 2 bowls and 7 oranges, and an objective fact that the two bowl's contents are different in virtue of the discrete amount of oranges in them.

Properties don't just disappear just because they come from a more general source. The number 3 is still the number 3. — darthbarracuda

This concreteness of thought is now beyond a joke. You know all this about the oranges because you have ... counted them again right now?

You're talking about classes of things. But classes are identified by their essential properties. — darthbarracuda

Or classes of things are produced by acts of constraint. That's why a better term for them is family resemblances. They only have to be judged alike enough to the degree there is person (or a system) that cares.

Look! One of your oranges is a tangelo! Crikey, what now? Does the number three no longer exist?

Furthermore objects need not be limited to the boring office desk pens, papers, coffee mugs and staplers. — darthbarracuda

Yep, talk is cheap. We can say what we like.

But for "object" to be a meaningful term in a metaphysical discussion, it needs the reciprocal context of that which is its "other".

So in talking about objects, what are you thinking are their exact opposite? And having spoken that name, do you now still feel you have mentioned everything that is the case ontologically?

Our disinterest in something doesn't make it not-true. You're more focused on pragmatics, I'm more focused on what's actually true in the correspondence sense. Not-caring about something doesn't make it go away. — darthbarracuda

You are stuck in your realism which is a dualist subjectivism - naive realism in other words. There just isn't a problem for you in dividing mind and world, observer and observables, in brute and unaccounted-for fashion.

The habit is so engrained that you can't even realise it is your way of thought.

Pragmatism (of the Peircean kind) is all about bridging that gap by granting the ability to care to the whole of nature - even if we then wind up with "the Universe" which in fact seems to care about very little beyond arriving at its Heat Death. Bastard!

Without absolutism you end up getting either arbitrary subjectivism or inertness (i.e. an inability to decide what to do - nevertheless an action in the objective sense). — darthbarracuda

Ah. That good old slippery slope again.

The difference with my point of view is precisely that it includes the practical business of drawing a boundary that, in marking out the degree to which we do care, marks out also where we then cease to care.

So the slippery slope is the world you inhabit. It is not my world.

But this equivocates flourishing. — darthbarracuda

No. It makes it a measurable concept. It puts a vague philosophical notion that connotes ideas about "healthy growth" on a sound natural philosophy footing.

It is you who equivocates in not offering a definition (except probably in subjectivist/dualistic terms of "god, life feels crap to me no matter how much I dream of a state of untroubled bliss").

A hammer is good at hammering nails, but that doesn't make it morally good. A gun is good at killing people, but that doesn't make it morally good nor morally good to kill people. The point being made is that the mind, being a microcosm, has its own rules, its own system. It doesn't follow the same rules that a general model of the entire universe does. — darthbarracuda

You say hammers and guns have no relation to the generality that is the Universe. But clearly you are not understanding the logic of constraints. The Universe only requires us to maximise entropy production. It doesn't sweat the detail of how we might achieve that.

So building things, destroying things - the issue is only that overall any energy gradients are degraded.

And just look at the entropic curve that charts Homo sapiens' progress. On that objective score, hammers and guns are certainly being put to good use. You can't argue with the data even if you might be confused about exactly how our little human world fits so neatly together.

No offense but really you need to step down from this holistic picture for second and realize that nobody but yourself actually considers fighter pilots to be the highest form of life, and if they did, it would be for their apparent heroism (risk)/sacrifice and not for their entropification. — darthbarracuda

You take life so seriously! Why do you object so strenuously when I put it in terms that you claim to support - framing it as an absurdity?

(Again to short-circuit your response, remember that my case is that our current fossil fuel predicated existence may indeed be absurd in comparison to a more properly self-interested "rate of burn" - we should be aiming instead at a more "moral" or sustainable rate, which would be a social organisation living within the constraints of the solar flux.)

Separating yourself from this particular zone we call Earth in favor for a holistic picture ends up ignoring Earth entirely. — darthbarracuda

It is hardly separating to want to return to nature. It is your choice to fly off into dualistic realm of the transcendently subjective in search of "a metaphysical foundation". I instead am talking about what it is like to ground everything in physical immanence, the world as it is actually now known to us in measurable fashion.

So the earth and life are highly individuated - the most complex state of being known to us. And we can certainly celebrate that fact (although you get upset when I suggest the big brained human is the peak of all such peaks). But to ground that, we must also look to the limiting simplicity which is the context to our individuation. To talk about the general is not to ignore the particular - when, as I keep saying, systems logic shows them to be reciprocal in their very existence.

What, no, plants don't have feelings, neither do minerals. I'm talking about sentient organisms, the only things of moral weight. — darthbarracuda

Ah, dualism. Or are you finally going to define "mind" in objective and physicalist fashion here?

What limit to caring now marks your usual slippery slope metaphysics now we have introduced this sly boundary term of "sentience"?

Say you're an animal that just got caught and is about to be roasted on a fire. You beg and plead to be let go, but in the end the hunter calmly tells you that what he is doing is perfectly acceptable, because he's increasing entropy. Furthermore he tells you that you ought to accept this and be glad you are being roasted alive. — darthbarracuda

Yep, let's pose crazy scenarios as a last resort when our arguments are falling apart.

As a morality tale, The Magic Pudding is far more convincing on this score - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding

So you're a moral conventionalist. Our abilities dictate our responsibilities. A great way to excuse immoral habitual behavior. History dictates value. — darthbarracuda

Yep. Just turn everything I have said into something different. Chalk up another victory for yourself. Imagine the round of applause.

(Hint: My naturalism is pragmatic and thus anticipatory. The future confirms value. The present thus needs its seeds of unconventionality so as to be able to advance. The past can only be a general guide,)

Numbers seem to be digital: you have only a discrete amount of objects in a given set — darthbarracuda

Huh? Isn't the number line continuous ... as an infinity of infinitesimals?

If you are talking about set theory, then you are talking about a conception of things that builds in the very atomism I have disputed. So to wheel it out is not proof of anything except, yes, that is what a reductionist model of reality looks like. And we all know that mathematically that way of thinking winds up in paradox.

They aren't identical but neither are they totally different. They share qualities, i.e. universals — darthbarracuda

Or what they share is a state of individuation sufficient to achieve the general purpose of some actual boundary condition. They are X enough (in being sufficiently, self-groundingly, not not-X).

You deny conventional ontology yet retain predication by talking about a state of self-regulating persistence, wholes and parts. — darthbarracuda

As usual, I use language I hope might be familiar to you. But the relation of wholes and parts is then different - reciprocal - as I go on to explain. And then as I also say, we can still use a logic of predication as our rough and ready way of thinking about things.

We exist in a highly individuated state of being as a result of our rather particular thermal scale. We sit on a planet that orbits a star in the middle of a void which is nothing but a radiation bath 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. So a classical, reductionist, object-orientated approach to reality modelling can take a lot for granted.

However we also know that it is only a very particular and unrepresentative view of the cosmic reality.

These subjects have properties in themselves because they are of a certain state: a state is vague when it has no "crisp" as you like to say properties - yet vagueness would be a property itself. Any sort of adjective is going to either refer to a specific property or a collection of properties abstracted into a unified concept. — darthbarracuda

You just keep pointing out properties of our habits of language, not things we have to believe of reality itself.

Sure, we can give names to even the unspeakable. We can talk about "everything", "nothing", "vagueness", "God", "matter", or anything we like.

But if we pay close enough attention, we will see the same organic logic at play behind the names we feel most metaphysically confident about. Something like vagueness can be considered a measurably real property of the whole of existence - a viable predicate or act of individuation - because it is understood as being counterfactual to some "other", namely the crisp or definite.

So vagueness is not-not vagueness. Or in other words, it is at the other end of the spectrum, as distant as it is physically possible to get, from the crisp.

Your confusion may stem from the fact that we are also - through language - quite free to predicate the contingent or accidental. A heap might "actually" have 101 grains of wheat and not 102. But who cares about that level of individuation? (And in the systems view, you have to have an answer to that - you have to show there is some reason to care.)

Do you think that the flourishing of society is, in itself, good? i.e. no matter what the discontents think, they're wrong when they wonder if society maybe shouldn't keep going? — darthbarracuda

Why would judgments of good or bad be relevant to my point of view? Surely my point is that morality - as it pragmatically exists in the real world - is beyond such obviously absolutist and subjective terminology.

Again, if I had to judge flourishing in terms of some universal and absolute telos, I would point to the Universe's thermodynamic imperative. Flourishing in the natural sense - the sense we can actually see and measure as what reality is all about - is the maximisation of entropification.

So "goodness" would be defined by a system being good at that. And "badness" by a failure to degrade entropy gradients.

Given that modern Homo sapiens is spectacularly successful at entropy production, then of course it would be a bad thing for "society to just stop".

A fighter pilot - able to get through 14,000 gallons per hour once he kicks on the after-burners - must be the highest form of life that exists on the planet. No wonder they are our heroes. ;)

For example, a society may inevitably be based on the consumption of other animals - a carnivorous society. Being the progressives we are we might look down on such a society; such a society should be abandoned, eliminated, because its members eat other animals (organic cannibalism). — darthbarracuda

But then plants have feelings too. And then why shouldn't we respect the rights of the minerals of the earth, the gases of the atmosphere?

Yes, we progressives ought not only eliminate ourselves, but eliminate all animals (as they are barbaric consumers too), and even all plants (as they too show no respect for minerals and gases).

But then what is the progressive programme for those stars that just burn away merrily, or the Cosmos which is consuming its very self in pursuit of its heat death?

I mean your logic here is unassailable in its progressiveness. It is very superior in its morality. And yet it seems all a mite ... impractical?

Without universals, we're left with two white objects with no way to explain why they are white, or how we come to know that they are both white. It contradicts even our own language: the two things are white. They are under the category of "white". Members of the category are such because they instantiate a universal. Without universals there's no reason to be in a category. There's no reason why x is a square and y is a circle, or why they appear to be different. Difference requires a difference in composition which can only be done by property differences. Without universals, there is no way to differentiate between a white object and a black object, a square object or a circle object. — darthbarracuda

This is another illustration of the paradoxes that arise within traditional reductionist notions of existence. We know that both universals and individuals must be "real", and yet there is no way to show that using a reductionist ontology. The two halves of the deal always seem to wind up dualistically divided.

And so we have nominalism wanting to say that universals are just ideas, and not real. Then we have the Platonic response to that of idealism, which says well OK, but that just means the real reality is the realm where the perfect ideas have their eternal existence.

A systems approach to ontology looks at it differently in talking instead about reality as a process. Now universals become constraints - emergent limitations that are real enough to go out and physically measure. Likewise, individuals become instead acts of individuation. They are what the prevailing constraints actually produce in terms of local events. And so, in being now merely events, individuals are rather less substantially "real" than the entities or objects imagined by conventional reductionism.

Thus the reductionist sense of paradox is eased from both sides. Universals become more obviously real - we can physically measure their presence in terms of historically developed constraints. While individuals now become matchingly less real - they exist only by virtue of some constraining context which forms them.

So if we are talking about a white thing - a thing that partakes in the property of "whiteness" - a systems view is that the real question here is "Is the thing white enough?". Whiteness is not some perfect absolute but instead an act of individuation where possibility has been constrained to a degree where any vagueness, any further variation, doesn't, on the whole, matter.

And this individuation is physically measurable in terms of a dichotomy. To be white can be reciprocally defined as to be not not-white, or not-black. So we can claim whiteness by measuring the lack of its "other" - a state of constraint sufficient to exclude any meaningful degree of blackness.

So conventional ontology is usefully simple - it treats the world as a collection of existents, a state of affairs, a collection of formed objects that thus only partake in predicate type logic arrangements.

But a holistic ontology talks instead about such existence as a state of self-regulating persistence. The whole is forming its parts - the very parts needed to compose that formative whole. Logically, it is a closed reciprocal deal where universals cause individuation and individuation contributes to there being the steady flow of particular events that results in the emergence of the regularities we call universals.

It is a feedback, cybernetic, or dynamical way of looking at things - normal in science, but apparently still alien in philosophy.

And of course there's some who would deny that society should flourish - we call those people discontents, who have a morality of there own entirely dissimilar to that of everyone else's. — darthbarracuda

That's where my actual theory of society - the standard systems view that it is an organic whole in being a balancing of constraints and freedoms, global cooperation mixed with local competition - has the advantage.

It says at the local level of the individual, there should be plenty of scope for "discontent" if the society as a whole indeed has a flourishing balance. There needs to be creative tension feeding in novelty from the bottom - just like biological evolution needs "mutation" or genetic variability to ensure the continual adaptivity which allows life to persist in the face of environmental change.

So a natural philosophy approach to morality doesn't seek to impose absolute constraints on behaviour. It also places value on a certain level of variety. The super-empaths and the psychopaths are part of the same gene pool for a reason. And a workable notion of morality would need to follow the same evolutionary logic.

Yeah, I'd agree that there are such facts--although most of the conventional moral stance-related things that people claim to be such facts I think are highly dubious as such. In other words, I don't think it's at all clear that societies couldn't allow murders, rapes, etc. and persist. — Terrapin Station

So as I say, evolution depends on a grain of variety. Therefore moral naturalism would target average states of constraint, not absolute states of constraint, when it comes to individual behaviour.

You find this really is the case in governments having to take the pragmatic view in regulating a society. In public, politicians have to be absolutist - not a single case of child abuse can be tolerated. But when it comes to actual policy, it becomes about what can we do to suppress child abuse to the level where it doesn't really disrupt things too much. The same with murders, rapes, terrorists blowing things up, or whatever.

I'm not saying these are a healthy form of individual variety. But I am saying that even anti-social variety only needs to be constrained by a system of morality to the point where it is not disrupting the overall continuation of that social system. The honest answer is that the system does not even need to care once misbehaving becomes small change so far as its general goals are concerned.

If there are bums on the street, drug addicts in the gutter, that is part of life and not necessarily a moral crisis. The ability not to care about what doesn't really matter is part of the definition of flourishing - being the flipside of being able to control things at the level which does matter..

I didn't say it was an objective fact. I said it was a necessary one (for a social system to persist).

I experience morality viscerally. I work in healthcare and occasionally cause people pain. — Mongrel

But healthcare is precisely where there is close social attention paid to the ethical dilemmas. Leaving people to "what comes naturally" is a recipe for disaster. Part of the recruitment process to intensive care wards would be avoiding those who by nature would not respond to ethical conditioning? Weed out the psychopaths (and watch them become managers). ;)

Traditionally, across most cultures, morality is not a social issue. — Mongrel

Cultural anthropology would disagree. If we are talking about actual tribal culture, what is remarkable is how purely social morality is.

Western culture - because of its Romantic model of the human condition - makes people claim that they act from "authenticity". They look deep inside and do what they discover to be the right thing.

But tribal people asked what made them feel they should or shouldn't do something will simply refer to the judgement of their peers. It is quite natural to point to what everyone else would think as the reason why they acted a certain way - the very thing that Western individualism would be most loathe to admit ... following the herd.

In the West, we internalise concepts of such as honour, duty, goodness, etc. We hide from ourselves the socially constructed roots of our own thinking. And the East - being also civilised - does the same.

A large population creates so much room for social cheating that it is necessary that part of the social conditioning involves the internalisation of "a moral conscience" - an inner self that knows what it ought to do even when not under watchful scrutiny of the tribe.

But an actual tribe always has its eyes on everyone. And so the moral code can be understood as something external - part of the social world and not something to be found "inside".

But you're being inconsistent with your use of "existence". — darthbarracuda

I am contrasting vague existence with crisp existence. Or in fact talking now about the development of persistence.

So yes, I have to use your language in an attempt to communicate. We can agree roughly on the metaphysical image of what it is "to exist" - with the useful apparatus of predication that flows from that, along with also the Parmidean implications of eternalism and other issues which are the consequent paradoxes of "existence".

But then - way over here in a different metaphysical space that holism and organicism calls home - there is another image of emergent self-regulation, a world where everything is founded on flux and develops persisting stability. That image of being has its own language.

Why not let your behavior come naturally? Be authentic. — Mongrel

Why do you think this is self-evidently the right thing to say? A history of social conditioning?