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?

Perhaps the objective versus subjective dichotomy is sort of missing the point, or is a misleading line of inquiry. — jorndoe

I would say that moral philosophy clings to that dichotomy as otherwise it pretty much lacks a point. If morality is reduced to simple social pragmatics, then the only real issues are around effective implementation - social, political and economic science.

So moral philosophy needs to stick to a sharply dualistic objective/subjective division to continue to have something to argue about academically.

The objectivists and subjectivists can fight like cats and dogs and yet still want that very thing of the unresolved duality which is what will best preserve their tenure.

However, morals are not mere matters of arbitrary, ad hoc opinion, are not mere whims of the moment; there are common/shared (involuntary) aspects of life, agreements, that render morals objective-like.

Yet, it seems that reducing morals to self-interest is the most commonly accepted justification, or understanding, thereof, like The Golden Rule, for example. — jorndoe

The "objective" part here is that which can be boiled down to some necessary principle. So it is quite right that a lot of what is considered morality is just customary variety - local differences that make no particular difference.

Should you wear a tie or not? Should you squash a spider or not? Should you eat pork or not?

Subjectively it can seem to matter for customary reasons, but objectively we can see that it doesn't matter - as tacitly we feel we are already on the track of some deeper principle which makes these distinctions simply accidental details.

So what does morality boil down to. It boils down to the dynamic, the balance, that makes for a flourishing society. That is the general goal that morality encodes - and must do naturally, inevitably, just because societies only persist as systems if they are fit in this fashion.

The Golden Rule is classic because it gets right down to the basic dynamic - the one of local competition and global cooperation. It says self-interest is good. And so is collective identity. Thus morality is about striking the balance at which these two tendencies are maximised. You want maximum personal freedom - but within a global context which is stable enough, integrated enough, to underwrite that very freedom.

Doing unto others what you would have them do to you is a neat summary of that essential balancing act.

The ancients wrote about this- thought it was probably limited to the upper class. It is hard to say with any certainty what a peasant thought when he was plowing his fields. Perhaps he had a vague feeling of instrumentality when he saw each day look pretty similar. — schopenhauer1

Yes, the invention of the individual, the invention of democracy, began in Ancient Greece - Socrates in particular - and got rediscovered with the recovery and dissemination of those texts in Europe. All hail the printing press.

So in Ancient Greece, there were thoughts about these things - among the small circle of the privileged class. Not so much among slaves and women. But also, the Greek peasant in the field was a little different just because of the small-holding nature of Greek agriculture. That itself makes for a mentality that is both individualistic and co-operative - socially flexible in a way that grain empires, rice paddy colllectives, and nomad lifestyles are not.

The Greek peasant was the reason for the fearsome "total war" machine of the Hoplite citizen-soldier. Greek individualism meant also the new possibility of men banding together in the name of a common abstraction - the state - to fight to the last person standing in defence of the abstract right to a bit of dirt.

This is the irony of Western civilisation. In enabling people to think of themselves as parts of a larger machine, not a rabble, tiny military forces could conquer vast hordes everywhere they went.

I mention this because it again shows that you have to come back always to the reasonableness that underlies the social contract. The Enlightenment took over the world so quickly because it was a form of social organisation that worked so well.

The West did not win and takeover the planet because it looked inside itself and discovered some superhuman source of will. It won because it empowered the individual to act - as an intelligent and self-interested choice - in an unrestrained collective fashion.

Of course, you will now miss the point and say this machine-like social style is exactly what you are complaining about. But again, I emphasise that when it works, it works precisely because it socially constructs individuals who can think for themselves - and through that, really commit to the collective action which best advances any self-interest.

The more free time, the more we can see the bigger picture of what is going on behind the immediacy of simply reacting to hand-to-mouth needs. — schopenhauer1

But you are not seeing the bigger picture if you don't actually understand the dynamics of the cultural history that produced you.

Modern life did not take away all the usual immediate concerns of life - like a roof over your head, food to fill your belly - so you could fritter your existence away in gaming and complaining. No, your job now is to get on with earning big bucks and consuming - accelerating the fossil fuel entropification of the planet.

Whoops. Yes, that doesn't have to be your job of course. It would be nice if you applied yourself to society's question of what better collective action we should be striving after. That might be a really useful use of the gift of life.

But you get the gist. The fact that you find yourself at a point of cultural history where - like a small circle of Greek aristocrats - you have endless "free time" to contemplate your navel, does not mean you should then waste your time in that fashion.

So if you do indeed find your own personal meaning to life in terms of "striving after the bigger picture", then you have to put in enough effort to make sure you really achieve that. Instrumentality and pessimism just seem like lazy shortcuts to me. They demand the least effort to make sense of the world. Just curl up on the couch and wait to die.

By the way, you can be as smug as you want, — schopenhauer1

What is more smug than to be telling me that I am sadly self-deluding in believing life involves an effort for good reason?

Survival may be both partially socially constructed or biological but it is certainly exists and adds to the absurd state of having to move forward at all despite the knowledge of the situation. — schopenhauer1

The absurdity lies in the new culturally-evolved and rather pointless habit of being able to question what we in fact take for granted.

We are biological creatures with all that naturally entails. It is not absurd in itself but all very reasonable.

But we are also - for a few centuries at least - rationalising animals, socially trained in the art of "giving reasons" to justify our behaviour.

It is useful that we see ourselves as "selves" - individuals who can creatively negotiate an acceptable balance between our private (biological and historical) desires and our public social systems (that exist to sustain our human lives).

And the Enlightenment - as a philosophical break with theistic social traditions - was the advance by which this implicit social contract was itself made explicit within culture. We stepped up another level in being able to debate even the rights and wrongs of this social construction of a "free-willing" selfhood. We could improve on its design as a matter of political choice. And so we had the reforms that empowered individuals to actually have more control over their own lives - the social constraints on their actions now being as abstract as possible in being framed within bills of rights, constitutions and other legal frameworks.

But of course, the very nature of rationality - the sharp construction of choice states - is that for every yes, there must be the possibility of a no. For every go, there must be the counterfactual thought of whoah.

That is not absurd. It is what makes rationality work. To act this way is to also decide not to act that way.

However, as action produces reaction, the Enlightenment did conjure up its own cultural response in Romanticism. If the Enlightenment looked outwards to the social conditions that fostered freewill - the development of a culture of self-hood based on an explicit habit of self-regulation - then that also made concrete its (impractical) "other". People could start to imagine doing the opposite in some way - like acting in unregulated abandon, returning to an animal state of unthinkingness, or ascending to some superman state where the individual became larger than his/her social conditions.

That made for great art. People find fictional worlds entertaining. And Romantic portrayals can even reinforce the Enlightenment's rational choices. The sharpness of the "other" also sharpens what it busily "others". Rationality can also take on its own absurd cultural representations as a consequence - the nerdy engineer with pens and a pocket protector.

So it is not hard to track the origins of romanticism, existentialism and eventually pessimism. The more the average individual human is empowered by improvements in his/her social conditions, so too can become more exaggerated the irrational reaction displayed to that very fact.

The pessimist can now come onto social forums waggling his/her bleeding stumps, complaining of the most absolute personal disempowerment. The pessimist has "discovered" that the whole of life is a fraud - socially conditioned, based on biological imperatives - and so he/she is not going to put up with that any more.

And yet - even worse - the pessimist can't see a point to anything. Abstract away the sustaining social conditions, the natural biological imperatives, and the habit of self-regulating selfhood is left with no meaningful choices to make. All that freewill and now no reasons to act! What a colossal tragedy (or farce)!

The pessimist claims this is all philosophically sound because it is where rationality itself leads. If you keep stepping away from the conditions of life, the conditions of society, you wind up as a knot of thought that is simply saying no because it has discovered it could also be saying yes. And in being this detached from the reasons for saying yes, logic seems now to dictate the choice must be no because yes depends on those reasons.

Instrumentality is simply a line of questioning that has painted itself into a corner. It is no different from Cartesian doubt, solipsism, and other familiar exercises in rationality which overshoot the mark by leaving behind the original grounds for belief that made such questioning meaningful.

Sure, the whole point of the modern, empowered, enlightened, negotiating individual is to be an able-minded questioner of the given. But to overshoot the mark and wind up disempowering their own selves through a questioning regress is obviously silly.

If that is the point you have reached, time to turn back and engage with mundane reality again.

So what do you understand by the term "matter" then? What kind of thing do you believe it to be exactly?

I guess that what causes confusion here the is notion that this 'ur-stuff' is called at the same time 'material' and 'pure potentiality'. Usually, we refer to the 'potential' and the 'actual as opposites and we tend to consider all material stuff actual, not potential (even if they inherently have the potential to become something else). So, in this view, the unstructured primal material cannot be said to be (just) 'pure potentiality'. We might say that it is actually something (something formless) and potentially something else (something structured)? — Πετροκότσυφας

I agree this is difficult conceptually. But the key is not to cling to the notion of "stuff". There is neither structure (ie: form) nor matter in this primal state. Instead, the claim is that both material degrees of freedom and global regulative constraints emerge together in mutual co-dependence (to use the Buddhist term now).

The argument for this is logical. We start with what exists - substantial being. And this substantial being has formal and material cause. It is in some global state of organisation or regulation. And it is also composed of equally definite "stuff". It is made of particles or - in modern physics - local degrees of freedom.

So what are we left with if we reverse the emergence process that could produce this kind of substantial organisation? Well both the formal cause and the material cause must melt back together into an ur-state where neither (definitely) exists, but each potentially could be actualised as a division of the ur-state - a symmetry-breaking of its symmetry.

It's all a bit like trying to imagine the grin of the Cheshire Cat. But it is logical in that it imputes to the primal state exactly that which is known to emerge out of it in complementary fashion. So if the substantial world is definite constraints in interaction with definite degrees of freedom, then the insubstantial origins of this world is the potential for both these things - and therefore beyond any kind of material state, or pre-stuff.

Whatever else, both form and matter are equally dissolved in being returned back to the ur-state. There is nothing ur-material to be unformed, as opposed to in-formed or structured.

It sounds weird but it fits with modern physics. If you are talking quantum field theory, you have the same chicken and egg issue. Which comes first, the excitation or the field? Each reveals the existence of the other. So what then came "before"?

What is everythingness? — darthbarracuda

Are you just going to run round in circles never listening?

We agree nothing can't come from nothing. Which is why I support metaphysical positions which argue existence arises via the constraint of pure potentiality, called variously apeiron, tao, vagueness, firstness, indeterminacy, quantum foam, etc, depending on whose metaphysical system it is. And chaotic everythingness is another attempt at a descriptive term for the same idea.

To help you out, this is one of the many other times I've explained the exact same thing to you in detail....

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/15094#Post_15094

There cannot be poetry after Auschwitz. — darthbarracuda

And yet there was - https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jan/11/poetry-after-auschwitz

So you accept that everyday existence is mundane (i.e. dull, unoriginal, repetitive, boring, tedious, annoying...everything I have been saying for the past week or so). A direct contradiction to what you had previously said regarding the "richness" of everyday experience. — darthbarracuda

...and also mildly interesting, occasionally eventful, repetitive in its satisfactions, familiar in its reassurances, etc, etc. Just because something is mild doesn't mean it can't be highly varied.

Being lost in the woods when it's negative ten degrees out and snowing and you have no tent or warm clothes because you barely survived a plane crash in the Siberian tundra. Not a walk in the park, in fact probably a death sentence (just look at Stalingrad - and they even had resources). — darthbarracuda

LOL. Every papercut a potential Holocaust in your hands!

Why don't you just throw me off a skyscrapper and ask me how I really feel about that during my plummet to the ground? Recant yet Apo!

If you had a strong argument, it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. You wouldn't need to pile disaster upon disaster.

"Nothing" is incoherent. — darthbarracuda

But how many times have I said that and spelt out the alternative - that constraints emerge to regulate a chaotic everythingness?

I don't see what you're saying here. I agree there are emergent phenomenon, but these nevertheless are dependent upon a more basic ontological level. — darthbarracuda

Isn't that what they say about quantum mechanics? You can't conjure up reality out of pure possibility?

You are wedded to ontic principles that are already defunct by 100 years.

An object isn't just something that we can hold in our hands. Black holes, parasites, staplers and armies are all objects. — darthbarracuda

Glad to know you have such a loose definition of objects. The vaguer your position, the less it can be challenged.

But surely you're not going to limit yourself to the immediately-accessible (Earth). That's just bad science. Unless there's a good reason to believe that humans are as good as information processing can get - in which case the AI dream is a pipe dream. — darthbarracuda

Well there are certainly good reasons to think AI a pipe dream. Just as there are good grounds for saying something about the biophysical constraints on life or intelligence as they would exist everywhere in the Universe.

But I'm not sure why you are making a meal of this. Even a crude measure of complexity - like the integrative capacity represented by a trillion synaptic connections inside the typical skull - would show Homo sap to be at the edge of the envelope.

You can talk about other animals with larger brains, but the encephalisation quotient is what counts to comparative neurobiology in putting us at the top of nature's tree.

And you could say the universe must be full of entities with higher IQs. But we can say if they are in the vicinity, they're not waving back. (Just picking up the occasional country hick for a good probe.)

I think you are looking passed the phenomenon of instrumentality. It is not about the evaluation of parts of your umwelt. That last sentence felt funny to write, but I am going to keep that. — schopenhauer1

Your instrumentality appeals to the issue of there being possibly contrasting points of view. So your argument is that we are divided against our own desires in being self-conscious creatures able to wonder what the hell is the point. And my argument is that check out how most people still live their lives and - even in their apparent self-consciousness - they still seem to show a unity with nature which suggests they deeply share its point of view.

Now I freely admit that how I then cash out this naturalism is itself outrageous. Far more outrageous than existentialism, pessimism, or any other familiiar "life sucks" romantic reaction,

I say life is thermodynamics in action - complexity in pursuit of dissipation. And humans have evolved a mentality that befits that in being the super-entropifiers. We are organised around the idea of being maximally wasteful.

And while you say the problem is that we are self-conscious - we look at the crazy lives we are meant to live and wonder "WTF?" - I reply that we are not yet generally self-conscious of this real living mission. And so we have not - within philosophy - even begun to debate whether it is good, bad or indifferent in some fundamental sense.

I think the answer is important. To the extent we are conscious of the fact that we are burning up the planet with unstoppable neo-liberal zeal, it seems as though automatically it must be a bad thing.

But why? You could take the view that giga-joules of buried decomposed planktonic mass - petroleum - wants to be liberated. So we are doing nature's work as intended. Then you can counter that by the calculation of how much more entropy Homo sap could eventually liberate if it avoids its current reckless crash and burn lifestyle.

So this is an approach to humanity's basic dilemmas that no doubt absolutely everyone finds more distasteful than the everyday cultural familiarity of existential ennui or pessimistic despair. And I can make it even worse from a philosophical viewpoint by showing that it is the inescapable scientific truth of what is happening.

So I can have my extremist fun too. :)

But to get back to your instrumentalism, I would say show me the reason to believe that humanity is not organised around life's general grand entropic goal. There may be discord about society's best rate of burn - go hard out or slow to a steady state - but to burn is the accepted necessity.

Now of course, once you say that, then anti-natalism, suicide, and other ways of bailing out of the whole burn game can come to mind as counter ideas. But again - realistically - for every person that makes a choice to step aside from the fray, any number will rush forward to take their place.

It is unnatural not to burn. Therefore an anti-burn lobby can never get far before being swamped by those still ready and eager.

So yes, you can make a case for a mass voluntary withdrawal from reality's thermodynamic imperative. But it is all rather hypothetical as it won't happen in practice. Thus philosophical energy would be better spent on the practical question of how to ride this entropy train to our best general self-aware advantage? What is the social organisation that can achieve that?

And as is obvious, as I keep saying, we exist with one foot in the biology of our hunter-gather lifestyle past with its steady-state economy, our other foot in the socio-economics of an exponential fossil fuel explosion. So yeah, you've got to expect that to be uncomfortable in ways we have yet to think through adequately.

I don't think you understand how not all axiology or aesthetics is realist in nature. Any value is going to be subjective, depending on the existence of a mind. — darthbarracuda

What I don't "understand" is the dualism this kind of comment relies upon.

I argue from naturalism. So in the end, your talk of "selves" and "experience" has to be a socially constructed delusion - a way of talking that makes sense, and yet in the end, doesn't make sense.

The world of "subjective opinions" - axiology and aesthetics - is clearly real in being culturally constructed in pursuit of naturalistic social goals. A linguistic artifact. To talk about it as if it inhabits some ideal Platonic realm - a realm of the "mind" - is unreal.

Perhaps you're thinking more about moods than brute sensory experience. — darthbarracuda

From a neuroscience perspective, these are just different spatiotemporal scales of adaptation. So they are not fundamentally different.

Faced with this kind of complexity, you of course will immediately seek to reduce things to the simplicities that best fit your style of arguing.

I can't help but wonder that if you got lost in the woods one day and faced a cold winter's night, if you wouldn't reconsider the duality of what I'm saying here. Your metaphysics, no matter what it's validity is, would have very little importance. Again people like to think they are complex, in control of who they are, and powerful, but when faced with the aforementioned scenario they inevitably fall into mania or depression. — darthbarracuda

To claim that such an outcome is inevitable is nuts. Being lost in the woods for a night doesn't even sound traumatic, just embarrassing.

Of course we can be well adapted to our worlds as we have so far experienced them, but then nature can throw down its further surprises and "our sense of mastery will prove an optimistic illusion".

This is true, but that is already factored into a general model of life as an anticipatory system - one that develops habits of coping while retaining a capacity for further learning.

The flaw is that you're explicitly favoring (affirming) this "in-between" between optimism and pessimism, thus making it a quasi-optimism. While if you were completely honest with your assessment it would be utterly neutral. If it's indeed neutral and not worthy of being called "good" or "bad" then there would be no way of evaluating it at all. — darthbarracuda

How can I argue against your monotheistic Pessimism without pointing out that there is the second thing of optimism, and then beyond that, the third thing which is a neutral balance?

So it is not a flaw for my position that there are these further things which your position wants to deny. I am simply pointing to the stages towards a more complex triadic position.

Because happiness, bliss, joy, etc are simply the lack of suffering. Think about it: if you're not suffering, what are feeling (assuming you're conscious). Are you happy? Are you joyful? If you're not happy and not joyful, then you must have something keeping you from feeling this way - thus you are stressed, anxious, panic-ing, suffering, etc. — darthbarracuda

I dunno. I would say instead it is normal to be feeling all these kinds of things at once in some fashion. Life just is rich and varied in that way.

That is why I object to your habit of monotonic exaggeration. I could focus on just one part of my total umwelt at the moment - like a slight achiness in my back - at the expense of others, like a slight sense of satisfaction in my stomach. I could make my back the center of my world (and ouch, now I'm really starting to notice it). Or instead I could be more honest about my phenomenal state and say in fact it is quite naturally mixed at all times. It is neither up, down or even neutral, in any simplistic fashion.

Of course I accept that if I were currently being crushed in a car crash, or I was out of neurobiological equilibrium and in a depressive fugue, then that internal variety might be a lot more one-dimensional.

But if we are talking about typical mental state, then it is better characterised as vague - an awful lot of nothing much in particular.

Emergence from what? poof! existence, ta-da! — darthbarracuda

Is there no evidence in the world of emergence?

Voids can be objects, since we can predicate them. — darthbarracuda

On what exactly - their lack of predicates?

How do you know this? — darthbarracuda

Neuroscience when it comes to measuring information density. Economics when it comes to measuring ecological footprint.

I mean I know this was more tongue-in-cheek than anything but if that's the case then everything is thermodynamics which makes it an empty term — darthbarracuda

Actually I'm serious. And thermodynamics is a rich enough model of causality to unify our notion of the world.

Don't forget that is how metaphysics started - Anaximander's model of existence as the separation of the Apeiron into the hot and the cold. And now cosmological science understands our existence in terms of a Big Bang making the transition to a Heat Death.

On an empirical note, it must carry some weight what people actually regret in terms of the life they have lived. Pessimism is just so one-note in its complaining. But what do people discover about what actually appear to matter?

Here is one such summary for discussion....
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Pick the bones out of that slightly self-contradictory assortment. ;)

Coming from the opposite vein, pessimists are fed up with the system. — darthbarracuda

I'm not saying there isn't a problem with "the system". I'm just saying that a rather more sophisticated analysis is needed than "life sucks".

As Schop1 said elsewhere, there is a kind of "optimistic mafia" installed in society: you WILL be happy!, you WILL love life!, you WILL support your country!, you WILL smile at death!, you WILL suck up your internal struggles, etc — darthbarracuda

That's how things go - polarisation. Pessimism must frame itself in terms of what it is not - optimism. It has to construct this "other" as a mafia to justify its own desire to become a mafia too.

This is what I criticise. You have to exaggerate the strength of your opposition so as to legitimate yourself as its counter. You want to leave bystanders no option but to declare for either Team Optimist ir Team Pessimist. Philosophy then becomes the loser because your slippery-slopism admits to no shades of grey.

From the negative perspective, social optimism is rather similar to fascism - make the perfect happy bubble and get everyone to conform to it, because everyone secretly knows just how fragile happiness is. You can't have unconformers. Which is exactly what you seem to be arguing here. — darthbarracuda

Yep. Optimism as you describe it is fascist and oppressive. Just as is Pessimism as you describe it. Both are totalitarian in standing at their respective extremes.

But of course what I am "exactly arguing" is something else. I am arguing that optimism and pessimism - to the degree they are natural - would exist as the bounding limits which then make possible the variety of all the feelings that lie in-between. So now I would focus on the nature of that balance, that hopefully fruitful balance, that lies in-between.

If you can point out a flaw in this logic, go ahead.

If you don't feel any of the ways pessimists describe us as feeling, please tell us all why and how you are able to accomplish such a great feat. We'd love to know, as would everyone else. — darthbarracuda

You are not really listening. My point has been that feeling bad, feeling good, feeling neutral, are all part of life's rich and varied experience.

So the very idea of "eliminating unhappiness" is nonsensical on its own. The question is really would you want to eliminate "feeling" in some generalised sense? Can you offer a strong philosophical argument at this deeper ontological level?

And I'm not saying that such an argument can't in fact be made. But I am saying this is not the argument that is being attempted here.

This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of particular-favoring nominalism, for particulars are only understandable within a broader general context. — darthbarracuda

Yes, I am against nominalism because it is only "micro-transcendence" in this fashion. To name a particular or an individual is just as much an act of naming (or semiosis) as to name a general or universal. It is to imagine standing outside the thing in question - a horse, a mountain, a whatever - and to know it for what it absolutely is in terms of some wider framing context.

I don't know what this means. Do you have any examples? — darthbarracuda

Are you kidding? Discrete~continuous, chance~necessity, local~global, atom~void, matter~form, body~mind, flux~stasis, vague~crisp ... the standard list is pretty long.

But this begs the question as to why reality is constrained as it is. Which leads us to the conclusion that there is something keeping it all in line, something fundamentally static, that acts as the joints or structure of reality — darthbarracuda

It answers the question in terms of the emergence of a dynamical symmetry state, an equilibrium balance. An equilibrium has emergent stability because it is a state where continuing (microstate)change no longer makes a (macrostate)change.

There is an entire science of (thermo)dynamics now.

I would argue that objects exists everywhere, at any scale, micro to massive. — darthbarracuda

And so do voids.

So yes, that is what happens when you have complementary limits to being coupled then to the freedom for all balances to be struck within those limits.

So if the universe has the possibility to be clumpy and object like, this requires in matching fashion that it has the possibility for empty spaces. Each possibility necessitates the other. And then if this dichotomy is freely expressed over all scales, then you will have objects and voids of every possible size.

Hence the commonness of fractals or scalefree patterns in nature. Nature expresses this principle - of separation and mixing - everywhere we look.

Certainly a human being is not a transcendent component of existence unless you're an idealists, and certainly we aren't "just" numbers that magically turn into matter. We ourselves exist in our own level, dependent but not identical to these other hierarchies. — darthbarracuda

The natural view of humans is that we are peak complexity. And this can be measured directly in terms of entropy production, as should be the case if existence is ruled by the second law of thermodynamics.

So humans - as negentropy - can be reduced to a number such as the number of barrels of petroleum burned per capita, an entropic footprint.

The Universe is composed of objects and voids - or entropy producers and entropy sinks. And humans are measurably the most concentrated forms of intelligence. Or in other words, the most effective local sources of entropy production our corner of the Universe at least has witnessed.

(So if we ask what the subject matter of philosophy essentially is - even if it is only now becoming apparent - then it is thermodynamics. :) )

In any case I have to wonder why you would be opposed to perfection. Indeed Plato, Aristotle, and others all thought that there were the Forms, or the Telos, or whatnot that we ought to strive to instantiate. They wouldn't have looked too kindly on imperfection. And yet here you are being apologetic for the inherent imperfection of nature...why? Why is imperfection acceptable? Why is mediocrity acceptable? Seems to me that tolerating imperfection is a form of apathy, a weakness of the will. An inherent unjustified affirmation of the normal. — darthbarracuda

You are using very emotional language here. My position of course is that the ideal only speaks of the general limits of existence - and by the same token, limits are only approached, never reached. Then furthermore, the general limits of nature always take the form of complementary poles of being. Therefore the true "ideal" state is always one of some kind of balance between any two complementary poles that define being.

You can talk about such dynamical balances as "mediocre" or "imperfect". But that just shows your metaphysics is fundamentally unrealistic. You are not even understanding the message that metaphysics wants to deliver when it comes to the (self)organisation of nature.

We are just going to go around in circles until you can understand the ground of your own arguments. You are presuming that having two poles of being - like pain and pleasure - is "unnatural" as you would want monistically "only pleasure/no pain". But in evolutionary terms, pain and pleasure exist as boundary states. They are there as extremes so psychologically there then exists the great variety of possible states of balance inbetween.

For anything to exist - phenomenologically - there must be the extremes which together allow the spectrum of what then actually is.

And if we are then talking about the ideal state of this lived spectrum, then somewhere about the middle of it - a state of vague contentment - would seem the natural balance.

However then we have to include the fact that this mentality is meant to be adaptive and learning. So now its "ideal form" has to have an element of irritability. It must be a content balance that is suitably easily disturbed and restless so as to be able to respond to a changing environment.

And here too we find that nature strikes just such a balancing act. It trades off the contentment of stable habit with the irritability of restless attention.

And then even beyond this, nature makes this trade-off over a natural life cycle. An immature organism is all irritability, minimal habit. An immature organism is striving so as to learn. Then at the other end of a life - senescence - creative intelligence becomes dominated by passive wisdom. The balance is tipped towards a life of well-adapted routine, an existence of well-established habit.

So what is natural is complexity of this kind. Once we get away from monistic simplicity and start thinking triadically - seeing ontology developmentally as a business of dialectical separation and then hierarchical mixing - then we get the kind of elaboration upon elaboration that starts to resemble the lives we really lead, the world we really exist within.

Because of the focus on transcendence, it seems to stand that the "subject matter" (if that is even applicable) of metaphysics is ultimately outside the domain of experimentation. Experimentation occurs within immanence, where things change and events happen. But the transcendent doesn't change. Events happen, but event does not. Things change, but thing and change itself do not. Because of the lack of change or occurrence in the transcendent, there cannot be any manipulative experimentation in the sense of "taking control of nature", because if we could take control of the transcendent, this would only necessitate the existence of another, true transcendent. — darthbarracuda

Note that metaphysical intelligibility depends on the duo of the (transcendently) general and (immanently) particular. So it is not really any different from scientific reasoning in employing an epistemic method of theory and measurement, or a modelling relation.

So if we talk about the generality of things as "substantial being", then we support such a claim by offering examples of things that seem "measurably" substantial, like a horse or a cup. Our transcendent concepts are empirically argued using examples. They arise as the inductive limits of what seems immanently to be the case.

Where metaphysics goes further is in apply dialectical or dichotomistic reasoning to generality itself. It derives polar pairs of limits to frame its talk about possibility.

So the world seems full of things that either are changing a lot or not changing much if at all. Or the world seems full of things that are accidental happenings, or at least accidental until we discover reasons why they had to have occurred. From that empirical evidence, we can then generalise towards the complementary limits of what might be the case.

We can argue - with logical rigour - that either flux or stasis, either chance or necessity, are the limits of possibility. And in being able to name the bounds of possibility, we are talking about the reality of the transcendent - that is, the limits where reality in fact has gone as far as it can possibly go.

So the transcendent, the abstract, doesn't in fact exist. Or it exists only in the sense of being a limit on immanence.

The secret of metaphysics is thus that it does not just generalise. It generalises in this particular way - dialectically or dichotomistically - to identify the fundamental categories of existence.

Then science has another trick up its sleeve. It turns the empirical into a matter of measurement. It now turns the world into a play of numbers. Transcendence is brought down to the level of the confirming particulars.

If horse or cup now denotes a substantial quality, science turns instances of "horse" or "cup" into acts of quantification. Or more generally, if existence is poised between complementary bounds like chance and necessity, stasis and flux, science is about measuring the position of particular things in terms of the relative distance to those global bounds.

So science is in the business of micro-transcendence. It turns the fine detail of immanent reality into an "externalised" pattern of numbers.

And so generally we are stuck in an immanent reality. But we manufacture a transcendental point of view by establishing bounding limits both "looking upwards" and also "looking downwards". Looking upwards, we see metaphysical generality. Looking downwards, we then turn the micro view into patterns of numbers - digits read off measuring instruments.

So if this is the way metaphysics has worked out - first learning how to look upwards to generality, then downwards to particularity - might not the same apply to all philosophical disciplines?

Either it should. Or else maybe metaphysics is a different game for good reason. And both answers would be uncomfortable for those other philosophical disciplines.

Even these positions that probably strike as both as unnecessarily "troubled" are, in my view, the better, more positive view struggling to be born. — Hoo

I get fed up with pessimism and antinatalism when it becomes just a back-justification for a bad mental habit that produces the very thing it complains about.

If there were some evidence that this "philosophical" tendency is instead the troubled path to a more positive outcome, then fine. Let's hear more about that then.

But if people are going to make general claims about futility, instrumentality and self-delusion - seek to impose their "truths" on my existence - then they better be prepared for a robust argument. They are making it personal.