To give this some application: murder is wrong, means: after running around with the other sheep watching this one kill that one, and this one die and that one live on, and after living myself so I can judge this myself, I propose a rule that murder is wrong, that each of us equally enjoys life more than death, and each of us has no individual right to take another one’s life.

To reframe this to see if I am getting it right this would be something like: "I find all these murders unpleasant, you all do too. So let's not murder."

But then this seems to circle back to individuals' desires, or am I missing something?

What do we say to the sheep who says, "I personally enjoy the murders. Why should I follow this rule?" That is, what is the answer to the nihilists' question: "why is bumping bad?"

Is the answer "because that's what makes the most sheep happy?" But then why is this good? We could be like Nietzsche and denigrate the herd. Is the answer in human nature?

I guess an example for contrast might be helpful. Consider Plotinus. The Good is the first principle above intellect, the first principle responsible for (although transcending) being. A sunset's goodness and beauty are according to its participation in being, rather than anything related to individuals.

Or we could consider Aristotle. There is a human telos, but rather than it simply being the ground for our preferences, it is also defines the perfection/actuality of a human life. Actuality is better than potentiality, so the life of theoria is higher (more divine), a greater actualization of freedom and purpose. However, this would remain true even if we had a horrible society, maybe something like A Brave New World, where no one agrees with this claim, because it isn't grounded in the individual(s). That is, what the sheep are currently saying doesn't determine the good. It's possible we could have a bunch of very vice addled sheep after all.

By contrast, even the Kantian deontology seems to me to be grounded in the individual. The unconditional good is the good will of the individual, acting in accordance with rationality. There is an overlap with the earlier, dominant tradition in that there, good behavior is also in accord with reason, but there is a strange flip where it is no longer necessarily the case that being good is good for you. Indeed, you sort of end up in a place where you're most praiseworthy when you are doing things you hate out of a sense of duty, which IMO is an indication that we sheep have begun stumbling down the wrong path.

Violation! The fact that the stair has a bottom shows we are dealing with Hegel's "bad infinity."

Anyhow, Aristotle claims that we cannot have an actual infinity, only a potential one. However, Hegel famously rebuts this claim with the Essence chapter of the Greater Logic, a text that is infinitely dense and impenetrable.

I think it's a good analogy in some respects.

Two things worth pointing out:

1. That people differ in their opinions is as true for what are generally taken to be "is facts" as it is for "ought facts." For instance, you can find plenty of people who continue to argue that the Earth is not roughly spherical, but rather flat, or that its surface rests on the inside of a sphere with the Sun and Moon at its center. Similarly, if you spend any time on mathematics forums you will invariably come across people arguing that division by zero should be equal to infinity. We could also consider the endless Facebook debates about simple arithmetic with ambiguous notation and confusion over whether PEMDAS is supposed to work in the order of the acronym (multiplication before division), or if multiplication and division have equal precedence going left to right.

People often point to disagreement as evidence of the subjective nature of morality. However, if disagreement represents good evidence that morality is subjective then it seems we have good evidence that everything is subjective. My position would be that people can simply be wrong about things, and often are. This in no way entails that knowledge is impossible, just that disagreement may be common.

A similar issue comes up when the historical variability of morals is used as evidence of their subjectivity. If anything, scientific claims vary more through time than moral ones.

2. Consider why it is that everyone dislikes rancid food. It isn't just that rancid food is offensive to our tastes. Eating rotten food is a very good way to get yourself sick. From an evolutionary perspective, we can identify how our reaction to rancid food is a sort of defense mechanism to stop us from eating things that will harm us.

So there is a link here to human nature in two ways. First, in terms of the almost universal disgust people feel vis-á-vis rancid food, second because in a fairly obvious way rancid food can be "bad for us," making us ill.

The analogy works on two levels then. That certain acts seem almost universally morally offensive would seem to point to tastes grounded in human nature. These tastes aren't uncaused; there is a reason for them. That reason would seem to be tied to the human good.

Of course, a person might have a condition where rancid food simply isn't disgusting to them (psychopaths in the moral analogy). However, this doesn't negate the link to human nature. Such a person is going to be more likely to get food poisoning, resulting in harm to them. Likewise, psychopaths are far more likely to end up is prison or killed, neither of which is good for a person. The variance in their tastes seems to run counter to the human good; it is in some way defective, diseased.

People also sometimes eat disgusting tasting things because they see a higher good in it. I don't think anyone ever ate mescaline cactus and thought, "this is delicious." People might develop a taste for high proof whiskey, but I doubt anyone takes a sip of pure grain alcohol and says "yum, just the flavor I was hoping for." Rather, people consume these things because they are hoping to get some sort of higher good, and it is possible over time to acclimatize one's tastes to such things.

You can see a similar sort of thing happening with moral norms. Where the analysis goes wrong, IMO, is when this is taken to mean there can be no linkage to the human good. All too often in modern philosophy there is a tendency to think that if a relationship is dynamic and difficult to formalize it simply cannot exist or cannot be analyzed.

Ethics takes place in a social sphere defined by practices. You can't talk about "human nature in itself, cut off entirely from context." It's like asking "what are the differences between men and women simpliciter." People don't exist simpliciter. The differences exist in a dynamic range of contexts, but that doesn't mean there are no differences. Likewise, language exists in the context of social practices. That doesn't mean it doesn't "relate to how the world is," outside of social practices. We wouldn't have a word like "carcinisation" if multiple different lineages didn't develop the traits associated with crabs through convergent evolution. Carcinisation predates human language, and human language has a word for it because it exists.

But practically speaking, we live in herds and interact with other decision makers, and there are limited burgers, and we all agree that society, with its trading and divisions of labor, is beneficial

This is certainly how modern ethics has tended to frame things. I would argue though that this framing is essential to why it tends to collapse into emotivism. It's based on a sort of bourgeois metaphysics where self-interest and the individual lie at the center of the universe. Such a system is allergic to assertions of "Truth" with a capital T because it infringes on the individual's prerogative to determine what is true. But of course, such a position already has to assume certain things about truth and knowledge for it even to make sense that safeguarding the individual's right to "their truth," is something worthwhile or even possible.

We have to assume an objective, mind independent group of herding animals called “other persons with other minds” exists in order to construct some form of ethical line, like “stealing money is OK but stealing a child’s life through murder is NOT OK,” and we have to interact with the other herd members to bump into these lines and seek enforcement of these lines by saying “no, stop it” or “yes, do it.”

This is certainly the case. However, IMO we need to be careful about seeming to put such an ontological assumption prior to human nature (and thus practical reason). A person only has the words and understanding that are a prerequisite to expressing such an "assumption" because one is a member of the human species, the "rational/political animal."

Animals do not seem to question the ontic status of their enviornment. The drive to even consider such assumptions seems bound up in the fact that "all men by nature desire to know..." No one wants to have false beliefs. They do enter into a skeptical frame thinking "I sure hope I am wrong about what I come to believe." Skepticism itself assumes that it is worth doubting whatever pops into one's mind, that there is a value in knowing truth. But then this is essence (and the practical reason it includes) acting prior to the skeptical moment.

Despite the delusions of all people, morality is the only thing going on. Morality is objective and true. All acts are only of course moral acts in that they SHOULD be judged morally. There is no act, no substantive state, that is not merely a succession of choices amid free will. This universe is alive. It emerges life as a natural law. The seeds of life exist as choice down to the sub-atomic level. Choice is effectively the only act thing in the universe. States are all the consequential arrangements of matter and energy and we will say consciousness as well. Really though we could JUST say consciousness because matter and energy are both just forms of consciousness.

These and other seemingly absolute statements seem sort of at odds with your prior claims that no one can know anything and that any pretension to knowledge is a sort of delusion/vainglory, no?

That is incorrect.

All morals are forced to be hypothetical ought-judgments. We cannot know. So all beliefs are effectively hypotheses.

But I take it you don't actually know if what you've just. claimed is true or not. Is it only a hypothesis? Weren't you saying something about how people shouldn't speak/write in such a way that they seem certain about things, but instead should always piously acknowledge their ignorance. But then...

Consequentialism is a dangerous lie. Deontological morality is the only thing that makes any sense...

The good is objective.

Etc.

look like knowledge claims.

All thinking is incoherent.

You should have led with this.

Aside from the piety of declaring ignorance, you might want to consider not being so rude lol.

This is a good thread. I will just point out a few things.

First, an additional argument that might help out with these claims can be found in the part of the Summa Contra Gentiles in the section On The Human Good. There, St. Thomas points out that we must have some ends in order to explain action. If we have no ends, then we will not have any reason to act one way rather than another, nor any reason not to simply be passive. When people say acts have no moral valence, what they often imply if that they are done for no particular ends.

Not all ends are concious. We do not generally breathe because we have the end of staying conscious and comfortable in mind, but we can clearly infer this is the end of the activity.

His argument to a final end is perhaps a bit more shakey, but it is worth pointing out. If there is no final end, then it seems motion requires an infinite regress of ends. (It is too long here to really lay out in detail, IIRC this discussion is from chapter 25-30 to somewhere in the early 40s).

This of course conflicts with how teleology is generally seen today, e.g., in terms of constraints in physics and function in biology. But I think drawing a parallel is probably still possible.

Second:

A popular view would hold that acts exist on a moral spectrum, such as the following:

| Heroically virtuous | Mildly good | Neutral | Mildly bad | Heinous |

According to this objection the “neutral” acts are not moral acts.

There are a number of places where Plato talks about normative measure, most notably in the Statesman. In Plato's Statesman: A Philosophical Discussion, Michelle Barney has a really good article on this. The rub is that people, including Socrates in the earlier dialogues (particularly the Protagoras) often want to put normative measure on a scale of reference where there are clear rankings of "greater than" and "less then," akin to the number line or the ranking above.

The point Plato pulls out is that normative measure often doesn't work this way. In particular, he does this with a clever bit of self-reference by having the Eleatic Stranger ask if his speech on weaving has been "too long."

Well, how do we know when a speech, movie, play, etc. has been "too long?" It really depends on what the end of the speech, etc. is. Certainly, a speech can be too long, but it's not the sort of thing we can determine on a scale like a number line. Some speeches can be very long and still be "too short," depending on their topic.

But in the modern view, we seem to want to reduce everything to quantitative measure that can be placed on a scale like the number line, where we can point to "more is better," or "variance from this point is worse." It's clear that this isn't always the case in normative measure. Plato makes a similar point in the Phaedrus when he has Socrates discuss what would happen if he claimed to be a doctor because he had all sorts of medicines, but then has no clue "how much" he should give to a person.

Normative measure is filtered through practices, which are socially established, even if they relate to non-social phenomena. MacIntyre has a good section on how practices are established and how they define "internal goods," in After Virtue. For an example, being "a good chess player," is established by a social practice, although it is fairly objective. Someone who cheats to win chess pursues a good external to the practice, since you cannot "play a good game of chess," while cheating.

The point here is that I think part of what trips people up in ethics is the way in which the good is often filtered through practices that help us define our ends. These practices are socially constructed, but they are not arbitrary. They relate to "how the world is," prior to any practice existing and evolve according to things other than social practice. However, it seems impossible to reduce them to things outside social practices, and the human good is certainly quite bound up in practices and normative measure.

Practices relate to internal and external goods, and are situated within the pursuit of the higher human good. Without a "human good," it is impossible to explain how practices evolve. Practices make determining goodness difficult if we don't take account of them because they will seem arbitrary if we look at them in isolation, without their relevance to the human good. And they give us trouble because they are not easy to quantize into a model like the number line.

Hume famously denies this sort of good exists. However, I think he essentially just begs the question here. It isn't trivial question begging because he shows what follows from an attempt to reduce everything to the mathematical physics of his day, but it still assumes that oughts aren't observable in the way facts are. Obviously, for Aristotle, the human good is observable, and there are fact statements about (which entail ought statements.) This interacts with normative measure in an indirect way, in that Hume's view seems to end up denying normative measure if it isn't careful, even though it obviously exists. No one goes out to buy a car or house without any idea of what would make them
good in mind.

In the thread I had on bugs in computer games, instances where "canonical rules are 'wrong,'" the issue seems partly to lie in violations of multiple interelated levels of normative measure (e.g. what makes for coherent rules, what makes for a good game, etc.), as well as a violation of the human good (reducing pleasure and introducing frustration). When people have a hard time seeing how this relates to "goodness" overall, I'd argue that part of the problem is following the thread through multiple interlocking levels of practice, each with their own standards of normative good which are based on, but not reducible to, the human good.

There seems to be space in realist accounts for both what Husserl calls the "truth of correctness" (true/false) and a "truth of completeness" (awareness/ignorance). I think the intuition that there can be gradations of knowledge generally flows from an understanding of knowledge in terms of completeness and perfection.

Vis-á-vis completeness, a set of statements is more true if it truthfully describes more of what a thing is, and more false just in case it attributes false things to the subject of knowledge or precludes true things. It's possible to have descriptions that are more complete than others, but which also have more elements of falsity mixed in to them. These can still seem to represent "more knowledge" of a thing, a "better grasp on its intelligibility," than a description that is entirely accurate, but extremely sparse on detail (accuracy versus completeness). There is a sense in which, as completeness increases, accuracy becomes more difficult.

It's easy to draw comparisons to the idea of entropy here. As a description becomes more complete, there are fewer ways the world could be and still be wholly consistent with the description. The formalization of completeness might be something like a thing's Kolmogorov Complexity, the description that allows it to be uniquely specified (and we might add "constructed" to avoid problems in the philosophy of information akin to the Meno Paradox). This is finite, whereas there is an infinite number of true propositions that can be made in reference to any thing because we can list all the things that are not true or it, which appears to have no limit.

I also don't think you need bivalence for realism. It's more of a metaphysical question as to whether all statements about the future have truth values, or if potentially/actuality and potency/act are required for an accounting of the world.

The attempt to reduce truth and knowledge totally to propositions isn't intuitive. At the very least, it misses something psychologically intuitive.

I've tried using this example as a more intuitive way to summarize the "more is different of computation."

When you have a grain of table salt and you add more grains of table salt what do you get? More salt. Our terms don't change. And the intuition in a substance metaphysics where particles are ontologically basic is that the world sort of works like this. Yes, we can make many different kinds of things depending on how we combine our pieces, but all the properties of things can ultimately be traced to their physical constituents. In a universe where grains of salt are basic you might be able to make very many different salt structures, salt castles, salt railways, etc., but salt is always salt.

Computation does not seem to work this way. If I start with the input 1 and then add to my input, the prime() function is not going to output more of the same. 1,2, or 3 result in the same output, 1 (true for prime). If we add to our input again we get our first 0. Add more and you get 1,0,1,0,0,0 (5,6,7,8,9,10).


I am not sure if it is a good vehicle for the explanation though. Whenever I have seen explanations of how process deals with superveniance (superengraphment in process) and emergence the examples have been extremely complicated and technical, and I feel like this one might miss something in that you can ask the question "but doesn't it all reduce to dominoes, squares of Turing Machine Tape, etc." I guess the tricky move is in not seeing the substrate as ontologically basic, which is how we tend to think of it.

4. Cognitive Science
Cognitive scientists might argue that the self, while being a constructed narrative, is not necessarily an illusion but a functional entity. The "self-model" used by our brains helps in predicting actions and planning future activities, which is crucial for survival and social interaction.

This of course requires the epiphenomenalism is not true, and in turn that reductionism and causal closure are not true, in essence ruling out most popular formulations of physicalism. The self, being something that exists within phenomenal awareness can have absolutely no effect on behavior under causal closure. Likewise, we cannot eat sweets or have sex because these are pleasurable. Our actions must be wholly explained in terms of our physical constituents, whose actions are in turn wholly determined by physics. If things that are useful for survival and reproduction "feel good," this is merely accidental, having nothing to do with behavior or function.

And, as Jaegwon Kim seems to be able to demonstrate, if substance metaphysics accurately reflects reality, i.e., if thing's properties of things inhere in their material constitution, reductionism pretty much has to be true.

It seems that either way, at least one of our fundamental intuitions/assumptions is wrong. Either consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with function and behavior (which brings up a host of epistemic issues since natural selection will not ever directly interact how consciousness seems) or "what things are and what they do," is not wholly determined by "what they are made of." You'd need something new: information theoretic contextuality, process metaphysics, Deacon's metaphysics of absence and constraint, pancomputationalism (also process) - something that radically departs from the dominant view of what physicalism is re supervenaiance and causal closure.

That, or explaining how elimnitivism and epiphenomenalism make sense and how they don't result in intractable epistemic issues that make them self-refuting. If I knew a good answer, I'd write a book, but I assume the former is a more likely solution than the latter, that the science of consciousness is in a position similar to physics before Einstein, in need of a paradigm shifting rethink of its most basic assumptions.

If conscience is thought of as a sort of "set of moral first principles," à la Aquinas, it seems possible to explain how people can often get things so wrong when it comes to judgements about politics.

Conscience has the easiest time connecting to proper judgment/discernment when we do not have to reason very far from "first principles." E.g., in simple cases of child abuse, armed robbery, etc., it is relatively easy to make judgements about which acts are morally unacceptable. The realm of international politics is significantly more murky, both due to its complexity, the trade-offs faced by policymakers, its unpredictability, and due to the problem of most people not being particularly well informed about issues they take a stand on.

People often base their claims in these cases on things that are shown to be patently false. Here, to the degree the individual can be held responsible, the defect isn't so much in conscience as in theoretical reason and epistemic virtue (both of which are ultimately necessary for proper moral judgement).

Goodness can be deployed in a twofold manner: in itself or for something else. The former is intrinsic (goodness), and the latter is extrinsic (goodness); and, as such, the former is intrinsic valuableness, and the latter is extrinsic valuableness. Intrinsic goodness is legitimately called moral goodness and is the subject matter (along with other related dilemmas and topics) of ethics proper: ethics, as a science, must be objective—for it cannot be a viable study if each member is studying something else than another (and this is exactly what happens if the study itself were subjective).

Since you seem to be building off Aristotle you might look closely at this part. The idea that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," or that "x in-itself is what it is without relation to some knower," is a fairly modern invention. I don't think it is going to tend to play nicely with ancient and medieval ethics. For Aristotle and later Aristotlean's like St. Thomas, things are defined by their relations to one another, such that "in-itselfness" cannot be the gold standard for knowledge.

The ancients and medievals were concerned with absolute good, rather than what we would tend to think of as "objective good," today. The absolute, to be truly absolute, must include both appearances and reality, the relative and the in-itself. One reading of Plato is that only the Good is good "in-itself." When we move to applying the good to the world of appearances, wherein lies all human ethical decisions, we have moved to the realm of relative good (forms might also be said to be good in-themselves in a different, more complicated way).

So consider what Aristotle says about human telos in Book X of the Ethics. He seems to have a lot in common with Plato here. The highest human good is contemplation because it is human reason that is the most divine part of the person. This is a reaching out to the Absolute, rather than an attempt to locate the "in-itself goodness," of things, which is going to be impossible.

Only an undivided noetic grasp of the Good gets at the Good in-itself. Words, human discursive reasoning, etc. is essentially processual, meaning its subject is not present to us "all at once," and so grasping the Good in this way relativizes. Likewise, words point to relations, to appearances. Thus, we can only speak of relative good. This is why Plato points to the historical figure of Socrates, the good man, rather than attempting to answer Galucon's question about "why would we ever prefer to be the man who is truly just but who is punished and denigrated rather than the man who merely appears just and is rewarded and celebrated?" And I think this grounds Eckhart's view of the truly just man as "becoming justice itself."

However, this does not entail any sort of all encompassing moral relativism. Ethics certainly is relative, based on the role one is in, one's culture, etc. Yet the Good still grounds it. It's sort of like how one cannot point to the "objective," "in themselves differences" between men and women. Men and women always exist within a culture that shapes how any differences between the sexes manifests. The range of possible contexts for these differences to manifest in is essentially limitless. However, this doesn't mean there are no true differences either. The absolute view includes all such possible contexts, rather than trying to reduce them out of the equation.

For St. Thomas and later Aristotlean's only God (Being itself) has substantive Good. You can get this from readings of Plato as well. It's less clear in Aristotle but Book X seems to point in the same direction (Aquinas' commentary on book X is interesting).

Eudamonia is an interesting state, because it has communal, inter-dependencies which are required for one to achieve it in a maximal sense—e.g., a person cannot, no matter if they are a psychopath or ordinary citizen, achieve a maximal state of eudamonia if everyone else around them is tremendously degenerating. Thusly, the most (positively) intrinisically valuable state is universalized states of eudamonia (i.e., universal flourishing and deep happiness); and this is ‘The Good’.

The opening parts of Axel Honneth's Freedom's Right has a really good summary of this sort of social freedom and how it interacts with other sorts of freedom, and the connection between freedom and flourishing. This area is the core focus on Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which is actually fairly straightforward as far as Hegel's writing goes.

And if the good for man involved a social element, the individual cannot be the sole measure for even relative good.

Personally I am not religious, yet the concept of sin makes intuitive sense to me.

It is to go against one's conscience, which I would interpret as going against one's higher self (God).

This is the intuitive idea behind Aquinas' ethics. It is always bad to deny one's conscience, even if one's moral reasoning is ultimately in error (however we can be negligent, and thus to blame, if we could have corrected our error). Natural Law then is largely the application of this to the aggregate, based on the primary principle of "do good and avoid doing evil."

I think the tradition has stood up so well even in the absence of its grounding in theology and human telos precisely because it is intuitive.

Of course, there is no shortage of people who CLAIM to know God’s will. There are priests and pastors who CLAIM to know what God wishes and what God does not wish. If I become a Catholic, I’ll be told God wishes me to go to Mass every Sunday. If I become a Jehovah’s Witness, I’ll be told God does not allow blood transfusions. If I become Hindu, I’ll be told God doesn’t want me to eat beef. If I become a Muslim, I’ll be told God doesn’t want me to eat pork. Etc. Etc. Etc.

There has never been a shortage of people making contradictory claims about all manner of things. Is the world flat? Does dark matter exist? Why does the sun rise an set? What is the cause of various illnesses? Etc.

But surely nature tells us many of these things in a way such that we can come to know the truth of them. The same is said of sins and the Natural Law.

But being told by some human being what God wishes and God does not wish is a very, very different thing than being told by God. It’s difficult to imagine two things more different: one is a work of man, the other a work of God.

Consider probably the single most influential passage for natural theology in Romans 1:

18 For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 19 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse. 21 For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

24 Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.

Saint Paul continues in Romans 2 on righteous gentiles who have not heard (and so are not subject to) divinely revealed law, but who righteously obey the natural law.

Romans 2:12 For all who sin without the law will also perish without the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For the hearers of the law are not righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified.14 So, when Gentiles, who do not by nature have the law, do what the law demands, they are a law to themselves even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts. Their consciences confirm this. Their competing thoughts either accuse or even excuse them 16 on the day when God judges what people have kept secret, according to my gospel through Christ Jesus.

What would it even mean for God to reveal his will to someone?

This made me chuckle given your handle. He speaks from a burning push of course!

Exodus 3:2 And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

3 And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.

4 And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.

5 And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.

6 Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.

Here is the better St. Augustine passage I was thinking of from De Trinitate:

For people have doubted whether the powers to live, to remember, to understand, to will, to think, to know, and to judge are due to air or to fire or to the brain or
to the blood or to atoms or to a fifth body (I do not know what it is, but it differs from the four customary elements); or whether the combination or the orderly arrangement of the flesh is capable of producing these effects. Some try to maintain this opinion; others, that opinion. On the other hand, who could doubt that one lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and judges? For even if one doubts, one lives; if one doubts, one remembers why one doubts, for one wishes to be certain; if one doubts, one thinks; if one doubts, one knows that one does not know; if one doubts, one judges that one ought not to comment rashly. Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, one would be unable to doubt about anything at all.40

Hume famously denied finding any real self during introspection, finding instead a "bundle of sensations," in the Enquiry.

But I encountered a pretty good argument against this in "The Rigor of Angels: Kant, Heisenberg, Borges, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality."

Eddington writes:

Kant realized that Hume’s world of pure, unique impressions couldn’t exist. This is because the minimal requirement for experiencing anything is not to be so absorbed in the present that one is lost in it. What Hume had claimed— that when exploring his feeling of selfhood, he always landed “on some particular perception or other” but could never catch himself “at any time without a percepton, and never can observe anything but the perception”— was simply not true.33 Because for Hume to even report this feeling he had to perceive something in addition to the immediate perceptions, namely, the very flow of time that allowed them to be distinct in the first place. And to recognize time passing is necessarily to recognize that you are embedded in the perception.

Hence what Kant wrote in his answer to Hamann, ten years in the making. To recollect perfectly eradicates the recollection, just as to perceive perfectly eradicates the perception. For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all. If everything we learn about the world flows directly into us from utterly distinct bits of code, as the rationalists thought, or if everything we learn remains nothing but subjective, unconnected impressions, as Hume believed— it comes down to exactly the same thing. With no self to distinguish itself, no self to bridge two disparate moments in space-time, there is simply no one there to feel irritated at the inadequacy of “dog.” No experience whatsoever is possible.

Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity.”34 As contained in one moment. Think of experiencing a flow of events as a bit like watching a film. For something to be happening at all, the viewer makes a connection between each frame of the film, spanning the small differences so as to create the experience of movement. But if there is a completely new viewer for every frame, with no relation at all to the prior or subsequent frame, then all that remains is an absolute unity. But such a unity, which is exactly what Funes and Shereshevsky and Hume claimed they could experience, utterly negates perceiving anything at all, since all perception requires bridging impressions over time. In other words, it requires exactly what a truly perfect memory, a truly perfect perception, or a truly perfect observation absolutely denies: overlooking minor differences enough to be a self, a unity spanning distinct moments in time.

I'm always fascinated by this issue, the difference between conciousness as naively grasped versus what it reveals itself to be when carefully studied. However, I am quite skeptical of the eliminitivist position. Top often is seems like a bait and switch, at least when it is rolled out as an answer to, "from whence conciousness." Because, of course, showing conciousness is not what we naively take it to be is not equivalent with explaining it or "explaining it away," as Dennett puts it — something he seems to think he accomplishes, on which I disagree.

The reference to "Funes" here is to Borges' short story "Funes the Memorius," about a man whose head injury curses him with a completely perfect memory. It's a really thought provoking story on this topic and not long.

St. Augustine's consideration of the self building on self-evident triads is an interesting approach too. The one in Confessions is probably the most well-known, but in the second part of "De Trinitate," he builds a remarkable edifice of these, one of the more interesting treatises on philosophy of mind sandwiched into a theology text.

I am talking about these three things: being, knowing, and willing. For I am and I know and I will. In that I know and will, I am. And I know myself to be and to will. And I will to be and to know. Let him who can, see in these three things how inseparable a life is: one life, one mind, and one essence, how there is, finally, an inseparable distinction, and yet a distinction. Surely this is obvious to each one himself. Let him look within himself and see and report to me. (Confessions)

The photo is hung up on my wall. The flower is 1,000 miles away. There is a very literal spatial separation between the photo and the flower. The flower and its properties do not exist in two locations at once.

There is spatial separation when any property is instantiated. Properties are only instantiated in interactions. A thing having a photograph taken of it is just one type of physical relation in which a thing's properties manifest. The viewing of that photograph is another.

Our intuition is that direct interactions should be something like one billiard ball moving another, but modern physics shows that this sort of directness is extremely hard to pin down and is quite murkey.

I'm inclined to say than that a thing's effects are signs of it. Directness then should probably be looked at from a phenomenological perspective. A painter doesn't seem to be present in their paintings. The person painted is directly present in a way. This leaves room for some ambiguity, it probably can't be strictly formalized, but then again you can't really do that with the physics of physical interactions either.

The point as applied to logic is this: we only find logic in between the concepts and premises we posit, in the relation that is joining premise to conclusion.

Aristotle makes just this point in the Posterior Analytics.

[71a] All teaching and all intellectual learning result from previous cognition... This is also true of both deductive and inductive arguments, since they both succeed in teaching because they rely on previous cognition: deductive arguments begin with premisses we are assumed to understand, and inductive arguments prove the universal by relying on the fact that the particular is already clear.

Aristotle, in Metaphysics, IX 10, distinguishes between two kinds of truth: truth as the correctness of speech and thought (true vs false propositional knowledge), and truth as the grasping of indivisibles (ignorance versus awareness) (asyntheta, adiaireta).

A lot of discussion of adiareta looks at how it can come prior to propositional knowledge as a sort of basic sense awareness. However, I think it would be appropriate to say that propositional knowledge must reinforce and "make more full" our awareness of terms as undivided unities. For, if we had to "unpack" all our propositional knowledge about complex things every time we used them in thought we'd never get any thinking done.

However, me might also think of adiareta being in some ways unconscious/subconscious processing, something I've written about before in the context of R. Scott Bakker's "Blind Brain Theory" (https://medium.com/@tkbrown413/blind-brain-theory-and-the-role-of-the-unconscious-b61850a3d27f)

One of the things that often gets missed in discussions of metaphysics that draw from physics is the way in which computation — which we increasingly use to describe how the world moves from state to state (causation) — is how computation is inherently step-wise and processual. 2+3 = 5 is taken as simple identity, instead of something that becomes.

And this leads to all sorts of problems, like the "scandal of deduction," where it seems that no new information is ever developed by deterministic computation. The problem here is to miss precisely what you highlighted, that thought is essentially processual. Eternal relations, taken as what is most real by positivists, are an abstraction from such processes.

Wittgenstein takes the opposite view in the Tractatus, calling belief in a causal nexus a "superstition," and pointing to eternal entailment relations as what is more real. I think this is a mistake. What we deal with is becoming, even when we work with syllogisms. Such reasoning is, as Aquinas says, dividing and concatenating, it is discursive and processual.

There is a long history in philosophy in giving epistemic preference to the immutable and eternal, since truths about these things should always be true. Plato really cements this trend, and you can see all through the history of philosophy: Hume's relations of ideas vs matters of fact; Kant's analytic/synthetic, etc.

What later versions of the divide do though is they miss Plato's focus on the unity of knowledge, the way in which the grasp of things goes beyond the discursive. So we end up in a weird place where trying to know what must be most unified through these discursive means. We try to get to reality rather than appearance, the in-itself rather than the relative, while still firmly stuck in the mode of knowing that is discursive and relativising.

The epistemological point is this: we will never be finished coming to know, even one thing.

If a thing is what it does, its relations to all other things (properties), then it seems impossible that we should ever grasp them in their entirety. Even if we were to grasp much of what a thing is, it would not be present to us "all at once," since thinking is processual.

However, a thing's relation to mind is the relation in which the most of its properties can be brought out. A thing only does so much during any given interval, not all of its properties are actualized. Only in the knowing mind can these be digested in discursive knowledge and the made present in a unified term.

Complete knowledge cannot be a view from nowhere, since appearances are part of what a thing is. The absolute contains reality and appearance, so the absolute view contains all appearances, a "view from everywhere," that must also be "all at once," the God's eye view.

Surely this is the rub? Most direct and indirect realists alike would assume that a photo is epistemically better grounded than an artist's impression? Even if the artist is an eye-witness at the scene?

Sort of. An artist's rendering or a skillful photographer can utilize their skill (a sort of pictorial syntax) to bring out more of a thing's properties, "what it is." For example, skillfully wartime correspondence don't just shoot photos randomly, they seek to bring out the essence of events. Likewise, an artist might be able to bring out certain properties of a thing better than some carelessly shot photograph. Anatomical diagrams are a good example here, particularly the way in which they abstract away variations in individuals and attempt to show the essential nature of some organ, system, etc. The artist can do things like abstract the circulatory system away from the rest of the body.

Under any ordinary reading, the flower is not "directly presented in" or "a constituent of" the photo. The photo is just a photosensitive surface that has chemically reacted to light.
— Michael

Things are phenomenologicaly present in pictures. This is how we speak of things. A person can be "in" a picture. A picture is a representation of a person but a person is not a "representation of pictures of them," even though both share a likeness. To simply discuss the properties of the photo is to abstract away the very mind in which likeness and representation exist. I think it's simply an unhelpful move to try to understand representation without reference to the subject to whom the representation appears. But for the subject, phrases like "hey, that's my brother in that photograph," are not mistakes or untruths. People are made more or less phenomenologicaly present in representations.

Anyhow, perception seems like it would be better described by analogy to a lens rather than a picture. A lens is something that can affect how things appear. But it is also something you look through actively. The agent is involved in what the lens is pointed at. It is something through which we see, rather than what we see. When we look at something through a lens, we do not tend to say we are "seeing the lens," even though all the light we see passes through the lens and is affected by it.

Pictures are more static. The agent viewing a picture isn't actively involved in what is presented, which is not how perception works.

Awareness of some things is only possible via language use.

Exactly. A lot of phenomenological treatments go a step further, claiming that one cannot be aware of the intelligibilities of things without language. Language is what allows us to both explore the intelligibility of things (dividing and composing á la Aquinas/Aristotle) and in turn to develop a noetic grasp of their natures (essential vs accidental, genus, species, etc.). There is, of course, awareness prior to language, and animals are aware of things, but this would be the sort of awareness associated with Aristotle's "sensible soul," not the "rational soul." This sort of awareness does not allow us to be agents of truth in that it cannot allow us to "say things about things."

I'll admit that I was initially skeptical from this view point, but I find Husserl's explanation of how predication emerges from the phenomenology of human experience quite convincing. It's not that this view necessarily replaces the Kantian view of certain properties of mind shaping how we come to the world, or the neuroscientistic view of how our faculties are grounded in biology. Rather it's a "yes, and..." addition to how the nature of experience creates the ground for predication, which in turn allows for language, syntax, and the grasp of intelligible edios.

Perhaps there are species somewhere in the universe with an intelligence on par with humans whose grasp of intelligibilities is not like this. If we were a solitary species, something more akin to a tiger, language and conversation might not be so essential to how we grasp the world. But it seems true in the human case at least.

One cannot become aware of something that does not exist(purely imaginary things) without language use.

Or incorporeal entities/properties, e.g. economic recessions, complexity, information, chaos, order, communism, liberalism, Catholicism, etc.

Secondhand info exists. The recent public usage of "CRT" is evidence of how one can become aware that there is a theory named "Critical Theory" based upon false belief about the theory. If based upon false belief, and it counts as an awareness that there is such a thing as "Critical Theory", it could be said that they know Critical Theory exists. Such awareness/knowledge seems to require propositional belief though, so it's not a good example of the criterion/outline you've offered, although it seems to be a case of "false awareness".

That's one way of looking at it. I think the Aristotlean view would tend towards saying that this is an awareness of something, namely a propaganda narrative. The person is simply mistaken about what they are aware of. That is, they have both false propositional beliefs about CRT and they are also simply ignorant of many facets of it. They are aware of a real thing, CRT, but their awareness is quite incomplete, for they are ignorant of much of it.

In the case of UFOs, we are aware of other people's experiences of what they take to be extra terrestrial craft. Those people are aware of some sensory experience they have explained in terms of UFOs. Something caused that experience, and so the awareness of it isn't false. It is an awareness of something. Rather their propositional beliefs about the causes of that experience may be false. Similarly, chemists used to think they were aware of phlogiston when they saw flames. We now realize they were aware of the process of combustion. The awareness was of something (not false), it just has false beliefs attached to it.

I would think it's impossible to become aware of something that one does not believe exists. I do not see how one can become and/or be aware of something else that they do not believe is there.

Consider the case where the Loch Ness monster is real. Someone sees a huge ripple in the loch, like something big moving under the surface. They ascribe this to some normal animal or a drone. In reality, it was Nessy, the last elamasaurus!

Well, in this case they have been made aware of Nessy, or at least effects produced by Nessy (which are signs of their cause). They just have false propositional beliefs about what they experienced vis-á-vis it's causes.

This is, of course, just one way to look at it. But I think the Aristotlean frame is useful here in that otherwise we very quickly slip into having the opposite of awareness become falsity rather than ignorance. However, I do think there is a difference between ignorance and false belief, and that it's helpful to keep them apart.

Sokolowski talks about the problem of "vagueness." Vagueness often creeps in when people talk about a topic they understand poorly, e.g. quantum mechanics. Vagueness is the product of a mix of ignorance and false propositional belief, a sort of haze over something, a poor grasp of its intelligibility such that we not only predicate the wrong things of a thing, but are also simply ignorant of what might properly be predicated of it.

The Phaedrus is also helpful here in the "love" is normally excluded from the analytical frame in a way moral goodness is not (at least not from the Enlightenment on, where it increasingly becomes something that must be "demonstrable to all rational agents."). We generally don't demand that people explain "being in love" in stark, analytical terms, or even allow that such can be given an adequate description.

The Phaedrus starts out with the terrible speech, laying out a sort of cold, analytical love based on rational self-interest because this is a relative sort of love defined in terms of relative goods. The love of the last speech is instead ecstatic, the lover of absolute beauty is in a way "out of their mind," but at the same time has a firmer noetic grasp on beauty than the analytical lover who sees beauty in relative terms. "Genuine love, by contrast, cannot be “explained” exhaustively, which means that it cannot be “situated” in any manifest way relative to self-interest, precisely because it has an absolute character, or, rather, because it represents the relation to an absolute object." (Schindler's Plato's Critique of Impure Reason)

This reminds me of how Plato describes the philosopher as wanting to couple/mate with the Good in the Republic. There is a going beyond the self and participation-in.

Being is love with Absolute Beauty starts to look a lot like being in love with Absolute Good though. Normally, the Doctrine of Transcendentals (the communicability of Good, True, Beauty, and Unity) is identified in its earliest form in Aristotle, but it seems to also be in Plato to some degree too.

I've often read in discussions of Plato on this forum that he never claims that Socrates or anyone has ever seen 'the form of the good'. Yet in this passage, and even though Socrates has said 'God knows whether it happens to be true', he nevertheless says 'anyone who is to act intelligently....must have had sight of this.' That seems an unequivocal confirmation that the form of the Good is something that 'must be seen'.

It can be seen, but not demonstrated. That's Schindler's thesis anyhow. In each of the three images Socrates creates in the middle of the Republic something has to come from outside the image to introduce the absolute. E.g., in the divided line, the absolute (Good) cannot lie on the line because the absolute contains both appearances and reality — what is good relative to other things and what is good in itself. In the cave analogy, it is Socrates himself who interjects and "comes in from outside."

This points to the historic Socrates, the man who lived a good life trying to help others, who was willing eschew wealth and comforts for the Good, and who ultimately died to demonstrate it. At the center of the Republic then is not a mere demonstration or argument, but an act, the act of the good man who must decend back into the cave because the absolute includes everything, including those trapped in the cave, even if it means suffering and death.

The nod to the historic Socrates is the answer to Galucon's earlier demand that the Socrates of the dialogue demonstrate how it can be the we would prefer to be the just man who is ridiculed and punished instead of the unjust man who is praised and rewarded. He can direct us to the summum bonum but he can't dissect it and demonstrate its goodness without losing something, rather the "whole body," of the reader must be turned to it.

...now, Plato affirms that the [lower] four levels [of knowledge] all present the qualities of a thing (τὸ ποῖόν τι), and only the fifth level corresponds to that which the soul in fact seeks, namely, the being itself.19 it is in relation to this concern that we ought to understand Plato’s ordering of the levels. If he groups knowledge and right opinion (along with νοῦς) together on a single level, it is because there is some feature they share in common, which distinguishes them from everything else.The feature Plato identifies is that they lie in the soul.

Notice, Plato is here talking specifically about the form of the relationship implied between the soul and reality. he is not, in other words, talking about truth or falsity, stability or instability, which is typically at issue when he dis- distinguishes between knowledge and opinion.21 instead, the significant issue in this context is place, i.e., the locus or terminus of the soul’s movement toward reality.

This is why he does not need to distinguish knowledge from right opinion in this particular context, because they both reside “in the soul.” What is important to Plato in Letter VII, and the one thing he insists on here, is that they are distinct, both from words (names or definitions) and shapes (images) on the one hand, and from the reality itself on the other. right opinion and knowledge may be “true” or correct in themselves—in fact they necessarily are by definition—but they nevertheless remain penultimate in relation to the soul’s aspiration to the real. it is also precisely this that gives them the same “rank,” as it were. unless reason is essentially ecstatic, it would make no sense to line up knowledge and opinion next to each other.22

The problem with debates between skeptics and dogmatists, or, in modern language, between “coher- entists” and “foundationalists” or perhaps between “relativists” and “absolutists,” is that both sides typically assume that knowledge has no other form than that of a possession that is able to be formulated propositionally. one side claims that some of these formulations have absolute and universal validity, the other claims that none do. But neither sees the mode of knowledge that Plato indicates here is genuinely absolute: it is not the soul’s possession of a thing, and so it is not a conceptual content that can be verbally formulated, but is rather the soul’s dwelling with the being of the thing itself, a relation that, precisely because it transcends verbal formulation, provides in fact the only genuine basis for one’s words.

There is an incredible tension here: the heart of a matter is what is most vulnerable; precisely what is most important cannot be said. and if it cannot be said, one can never give a fully adequate description of it or argument for it—at least not in words alone.

But by justifying it in this way, we are implying that its own goodness or necessity is relative to these reasons. a verbal defense will be adequate to the extent that a thing’s goodness is in fact reducible to these (relative) reasons that can be given for it. if such a defense succeeds, then it implies that the interlocutors accept the relativity of the thing’s goodness. it follows that to assume that all things can be given justification by argument is to assume that there is nothing good in an intrinsic way, nothing good in a more than merely relative sense. something that was good in an intrinsic sense would ultimately not be able to be justified in terms of anything but itself—and this includes any of its qualities, be they essential or accidental, which can be articulated in a proposition, for even an essential attribute is not the being of a thing, but the verbal sign of an aspect of it. socrates can defend justice only by being just to the end.36 one can thus give powerful arguments on behalf of, say, justice, and defend them in a manner that keeps one from seeming “ridiculous,” as Plato says, but all the while one remains at the penultimate level in relation to the being of justice. We can understand, then, why socrates refuses to give an “adequate” verbal account of the good and insists that he can speak of it only in the mode of belief. in other words, he cannot speak as if what he is saying represents knowledge of it (506c), and so whatever he says remains an image rather than the reality itself (cf. 533a).37 he thus shows himself in the Republic to be taking seriously what the author of Letter VII asserts; a modest silence about the heart of things is no false modesty, but a modesty that acknowledges what it means for something to be true in a more than relative sense. in this respect, Letter VII provides a decisive confirmation of our interpretation of goodness as the cause of truth: a thing is true because it exists in itself in a manner irreducible to its relations, and this is just what it means to participate in absolute goodness.

In Plato, there is a transcedent reaching out to things known, unlike Aristotle's conception of the mind coming to "be like" that which it knows. But I don't think they're really that different. Plato's framing has the benefit of showing how the quest for knowledge and the good allows us to reach past what we currently are, whereas Aristotle's has the benefit of showing how it transforms is internally.

I think overall, Plato is more optimistic about making this move. Aristotle has a similar goal in Book X of the Ethics, but it's less clear if man, hoping to "become like what is most divine," can ever reach that goal, which is why Aquinas has to add infused contemplation/grace into the equation in his commentary on the Ethics to allow the human being to actually achieve happiness in the beatific vision.

Augustine's expressionist semiotics is helpful here too. Signs can only direct our attention to the immutable. The grasp of it lies outside all signs, just as a proper grasp of a geometric proof lies outside any of the drawings used to direct one to understanding it.

My gospels used to be (some maybe still) Heraclitus, Plato/Aristotle, Nietzsche and the others, and then Kant of course

An interesting mix. Plato and Aristotle have a pretty similar vision of the human good, but Nietzsche and Kant's seem very different from each other and from Plato and Aristotle.

I think existentialism, to me is the philosophy of modernity, and we are still in its era

I think this is absolutely true. I would imagine the Nietzsche is the philosopher most read by the general public today, and Sartre and Camus are probably up there. I always check bookstore's philosophy sections just to see what is considered marketable, and the section is generally small (shrinking) with the same few titles. Nietzsche almost always has the most shelf space.

It really seems like the movement came to dominate popular culture and the arts after WWII. And I'd agree that we still seem to be in that era. Although we seem to have hit a sort of second stage where something like Nagel's ironic stance on the Absurd has become more dominant than the deadly seriousness of the earlier era.

The positivism/reductionism that inspired modern existentialism does seem to be cracking up. If scientism is one half of the modern secular "religion/world view," then you'd expect the philosophical side to change when science moves away from reductionism. After all, while you don't need reductionism/smallism to justify the absurdity of the world, the case for its absurdity is often made through appeals to "everything being meaningless particles in the void."

But that view seems to be declining in the sciences, along with the "anti-metaphysical" view, whereas in philosophy proper at least "objectivity" has increasingly been redefined in order to make it coherent, so that it is no longer the "view from nowhere," or a synonym for noumenal and "in-itself."

The other reason for change I see is how the message of existentialism, the drive to "create yourself," has been co-opted into the self-help literature of late stage capitalism, increasingly applied to career success, having a "grindset," side-hustles, etc. This cheapens it and ties it to relatively noxious parts of modern culture and individualism run rampant. Plus, it seems at odds with societies undergoing rapid declined in social mobility.

The other thing is that the increasingly histrionic political/social enviornment seems at odds with the ironic turn of existentialism. The political climate in turn has turned up the volume on identity, and of course much of identity politics seems to tie existence up in essence.

I don't know what comes next though. There is DFW's "post-irony," a sort of new sincerity that looks back prior to the modern era. The science writers turned social critics of our era (Pinker, Rovelli, etc.) tend to put forth a sort of pragmatic liberal neo-enlightenment humanism, but I just don't see it taking off. You might lump Harris in there too.

It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world i

And by 1788 we get Legrange's Analytical Mechanics boasting that it has no diagrams, only algebraic equations, because these involve less of the human sensory system in the understanding of mechanics and so are more objective. Ontic structural realism, things just being the math that describes them, seems like the terminus point for this trend.

I recall hearing a story about John Wheeler posing a question about "what do you get when you write down all the laws of physics, all the most beautiful equations we've discovered?"

"A bunch of chalk on a blackboard, not a universe."

Which I guess was his lead in for pitching "if from bit," and the participatory universe idea. The idea of the first concept being that you need some real ontological difference, not just math, to explain the world.

It's worth considering how the description of the polis is framed originally as a means of describing how justice improves the self-governing soul.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is an interesting continuation of many of the themes in The Republic, but it gets at the social level, the need for an organic self-determining consensus, in a better way.

Of course Hegel gets accused of being a totalitarian too, but I don't think this is really a proper reading. He is more just a fatalist who hadn't quite grasped the role advocacy organizations play in society, probably because they really didn't exist yet in his day.

Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre were the first philosophers I read and I initially took it as a sort of gospel. But having now read a lot more philosophy, I think there is a way in which they are very much speaking to a specific historical epoch, whereas when I first read them, it seemed like they should be responses to "all thought up to this groundbreaking point where the Absurd was recognized."

But moral nihilism, extreme relativism, and radical skepticism are as old as philosophy. I don't think there ever was much of a movement that thought what was good was obvious, ethics trivial, or one that believed in any "objective/inherit meaning/value," that stood apart from an agent who knew these things. A certain sort of relativism is sort of the norm in ancient thought, with its disdain for "barbarian ways," whereas something like awareness of the Absurd shows up in ancient literature (e.g. Ecclesiastes is around 450-200BC IIRC).

And that's why I now think of them more as responding to their specific era and the rise of positivism and scientism, which also spurred an anti-modernist fideist backlash in religion as well. From the first you get "in-itselfness," "meaning-of-itself," and objectivity as the gold standard that all knowledge, including moral knowledge, needs to meet. From the second you get the idea that the good is obvious and has been through all history, and cannot be shaped by context.

You also see self-government and self-control morph from being the key thing that you need to be free, to often being seen as a sort of tyranny enforced from the outside. It sort of strikes me that industrialization and the attendant alienation from one's labor, and compulsory education might have something to do with this.

Which is more just commentary on my own initial ignorance. I would have to go back and read them again to see if there is a historical awareness of this in the texts themselves. I've read Nietzsche more recently and I didn't really see it. It seems helpful for a framing of the views though.

And when you find the absurd you don’t forget the truth and meaning of it.

Ha, just so.

I would read the text first, but I have two recommendations for secondary sources.

The first is Wallace's "Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present." The book isn't really about mysticism, at least not in the sense of being about mystical experiences and contemplation. It's instead a very good treatment of Plato's entire philosophy. You might even want to skip the review sections on modern philosophy or on Hegel, it's really the Plato chapters (most of them) that are the best. It has one of the most clear explanations of the case for the reality of the forms out there.

The second is Schindler's "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason." This is perhaps a better source just on the Republic because it has a pretty extensive review of theories on each section of the book. I'll just warn that the introduction is a little off topic, but you can skip it and come back to it without missing much. I found it interesting though.

I read this one more recently so I don't know if it will stick with me the same way, and I will say it isn't quite as clear and concise, but I did think it was quite a good treatment and it offers a lot of other viewpoints up as well.

The Teaching Company also offers some good lectures on Plato. They are ludicrously overpriced on their website but Amazon, Audible, and Wonderium have more affordable ways to listen to them. Michael Sugrue's course on the dialogues as a whole is very good, although obviously spread pretty thin.

David Roochnik also has a course just on the Republic. I thought it was good, having more time to go into detail, but it just didn't seem to pull everything together the same way.

I'll leave an except from Wallace I really like:

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.12

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.


Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present - Robert M. Wallace

This idea of freedom as self-determination and of the intellect being able to unify the person and make them most fully themselves ends up playing a big role in Aristotle (Book X of the Ethics), Boethius (the Consolation), St. Augustine, and St. Aquinas' view of the human food in the Summa Contra Gentiles, although they all develop it in novel ways. Aquinas and Hegel also expand it into discussions of essence and the intelligibilities of things in a very interesting way.

Or, if the idea of the Platonic ascent really strikes you fancy when you get to the cave, check out St. Augustine's "beatific vision" with St. Monica in Book IX of Confessions.

It seems to me that I know my parents. I do not know them perfectly, as God knows them. I do not need to know them perfectly to know them at all. It would be more speculative — more dishonest — for me to claim that I know nothing of my parents than to admit I know something about them.

As St. Thomas says in his commentary on Boethius, all knowledge is received in the manner of the receiver. The human intellect's grasp on the intelligibility of things is necessary finite, imperfect, discursive and processual. We do not grasp things in their entirety, nor is what we grasp present to us all at once. This is simply the nature of human knowledge, that it is not angelic knowledge. But this does not make it such that there is no such thing as human knowledge, only knowledge from the "God's eye view."

. I admit to knowing nothing, but I claim to be aware of many things. Those are not the same things to me. Indeed, people react less well in general to someone claiming some awareness than they do to someone lying to them and claiming knowing. This is a terrible problem with understanding in most people. It is inherently more correct to applaud and suffer with the person only claiming some awareness. That is the gist of my claim stated fairly plainly.

I take it that you then might agree with the following claims, that human beings are intrinsically motivated to seek truth, to attain to veracity

By veracity I do not mean a virtue; it is something more elementary. It is in us from the beginning. Veracity is the impulse toward truth, and the virtue of truthfulness is its proper cultivation. Veracity is the origin of both truthfulness and the various ways of failing to be truthful. Thus, lying, refusing to look at important facts, being careless or hasty in finding things out, and other ways of avoiding truth are perversions of veracity, but they are exercises of it. Curiosity is a frivolous employment of it. Veracity means practically the same thing as rationality, but it brings out the aspect of desire that is present in rationality, and it has the advantage of implying that there is something morally good in the fulfillment of this desire. It also suggests that we are good and deserving of some recognition simply because we are rational. Veracity is the desire for truth; it specifies us as human beings. It is not a passion or an emotion, but the inclination to be truthful. The passions are not the only desires we have, and reason is not just their servant; we also want to achieve the truth.

If we cultivate our rationality we become truthful, and if we frustrate it we become untruthful or dishonest (or merely pedantic), but it is not the case that truthfulness and dishonesty are two equivalent alternatives for us
to pursue. It is not the case that we are defined by veracity (rationality) and that we can cultivate it in these two different ways. Being untruthful is not one of the ways of being a successful human being.

Robert Sokolowski - The Phenomenology of the Human Person

However, I think there is a misplaced sense of piety if we begin to claim that we do not know anything of our parents, anything of arithmetic, or anything of ourselves for fear of error. This strikes me as the "fear of error become fear of truth," that Hegel discusses in the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit. For, "as a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth."

No one lives as if they actually "know nothing." Phyrro of Elis, the arch skeptic of ancient Greece was himself caught running away from a wild dog, apparently confident that it would indeed harm him if it bit him. As Aristotle remarks on such skeptics, they obviously believe they know some things, as they find their way to the Lyceum to bother him, following paths that take them there, whereas if they truly knew nothing they should not prefer one path over any other when they set out to travel to some place, or should not even assume that walking will get them from one place to another.

One cannot live into veracity while thinking they truly know nothing. To be sure, we can always doubt, just as Moore points out that we can always ask of something "is it truly good?" or just as we can always ask "is it truly beautiful?" or "why is it beautiful?" This is part of the reason that truth, beauty, and goodness were proposed as transcendentals by the scholastics. Reason is transcedent, ecstatic. We can always go past current beliefs and judgements (moral or aesthetic as well). This is what makes reason special, it's ability to transcend who we.currently are and make us into something new.

But it is a mistake to take this property of reason as grounds for doubting everything. This makes veracity impossible. We can not overcome a doubt of reason itself with reason, and this is the risk of misology. Yet embracing misology is to fail at living as a rational agent.

As Plato says in the Phaedo:

No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places …” (114d)

Belief in reason itself is a noble risk, and reason shows us we know some things. We know them in our manner, not in a divine manner. This does not mean we lack all knowledge.

Now if your point is merely to use the word "know," in a very uncoventional way, such that people don't "know their parents," or "know that two and two makes four," because radical skepticism can always ask of anything "but is it really true?" this does not seem to me like a worthwhile exercise. Not only that, but it seems that many of our experiences are not even open to this sort of doubt. If I am in terrible pain, I might very well ask, "ah, but am I truly in pain?" but to deny that I know the truth of this matter is simply self-deception. Being in terrible pain is an ostentatious reality. Likewise, if we cannot know our own propositional beliefs, then veracity becomes impossible, for we cannot even know what we hope to improve.

Beyond the possibility of a mistake, the task of decomposing thoughts on the axis of time is very troublesome, and I would be interested to know if there was ever a philosopher to undertake this task. For example, when we think "red car", does that take less time than if we were to think "the happy swimmer dove into the shallow lake"? Surely one has many more concepts than the other, but ultimately — at least for me —, both give one single mental image that can be realised at a given instant of time. So is it a single thought when we say "X therefore Y" because we are uniting these concepts or is it the thought of X followed in time by the thought of Y? I expressed this worry before in the thread:

I have been kicking around ideas on this for a while. In Eddington's "The Rigor of Angles: Kant, Borges, Heisenberg, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality," he discusses a philosophical treaties by Heisenberg that tries to apply his famous uncertainty principle to language. His basic thesis is that words (and so propositional, syntactical thought) can have more or less dynamic or static meanings. In science, we try to speak very precisely and rigorously, using many words to be clear. This ultimately makes our language less dynamic, causing it to cover less cognitive ground. The more we try to focus them on to just one thing and fix that thing, the more the words lose their purchase on what we are describing.

I think we can tie this back to limits on the "cognitive bandwidth," conciousness has. R. Scott Bakker has written some good stuff reviewing studies on the quite limited bandwidth/bit rate of human propositional/linguistic thought (inner monologue being a prime example). Long descriptions essentially get too long and the flood of precise detail makes us lose the thing being described. For us to understand complex propositions about complex topics, e.g., some proposition about "Hegelian dialectical," we cannot stop to unpack our propositional knowledge of all the terms. We must have studied the terms and internalized them so that we have a "grasp" of their intelligibility such that they can be "present" to us simply, without unpacking.

We might liken this simple grasp to Aristotle's second sort of knowing, adiaireta. It's more a noetic awareness of the thing. It might be cultivated and informed by propositional knowledge, but it's opposite is ignorance or lack of awareness of a term, not falsehood as in propositional thought.

So for instance, we might paint a word portrait of the Mona Lisa quite well in a paragraph. If we try to be super detailed and start listing precise dimensions, hex codes for the colors used, etc., we can have a description with way more precision that we nonetheless read and have no idea what it is describing. By contrast, Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," captures the substance of an art work in a dynamic way that a very static description cannot.

This is also why I think we can get endless milage out of some of the more poetic, vague philosophers. They don't fix their subject to the same degree, and this allows their words to cover a more dynamic range.

I think there is a good convergence here with some more phenomenolgical works on knowledge (e.g. Robert Sokolowski) and also St. Aquinas' understanding of the "God's eye view," where intelligibilities are present "all at once." The "view from nowhere," or "view from anywhere," errs by failing to account for how knowing occurs over time and how more and more abstract and rigorous formulations lose their grip on intelligibilities. The "view from nowhere/anywhere," really wants to be the God's eye view, where intelligibility is simply present, but the desire to excise God from an explanation led to excising mind as well, leading to incoherence where "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," and so the true view of things is "how they are conceived of with no mind."

The goal of understanding then is a sort of contemplative grasp that can then be used in the dividing and combining of discursive thought (e.g. Aquinas' description in his commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate).

Well, if we take it that adiaireta, awareness of something, is a sort of knowledge, it seems like we can possess it without formulating any propositional beliefs about a thing. We can have false propositional beliefs about something, but I'm not sure if we can have a "false awareness" of something. So, at least this sort of knowledge seems possible.

Further, if we think of knowledge as grasping the intelligibility of something, or "making our mind like it," it seems like we can do this either well or poorly. There is a gradation here, not a binary known/unknown. But whenever we act in knowing something at all, there is adiaireta, which is at least some sort of grasp of the phenomena.

I tend to like the ancient and medieval understanding of knowledge as being more or less perfected, as opposed to the total reduction of knowledge to propositional beliefs and their truth values so common in modern analytical philosophy. It seems obvious to me that I know my brother for instances, but I can know him more or less well than I currently know him.

I agree with your point that to doubt anything other things must be certain, or at least held to be certain.

It seems that most forms of "we cannot know anything about the world," rely on a certainty that there is indeed a world and a real truth about it out there. I just don't know how advocates of these theories can claim to know this given their position.

I think there are a lot of concepts that are not decomposable, that is, you cannot break them down into component parts without losing something. Perception might be one of these things. It's easy enough to describe perception. E.g., "you see a beautiful sunset over Death Valley."

If you try to decompose the experience into what causes it though, you end up losing elements. No amount of talk of neurons or light waves, B-minimal properties, etc., no matter how informative, seems to avoid losing something.

Every object can be defined with its relations to all other objects.

Right, there are some pretty good arguments out of the Thomist camp that all properties of things have to involve how they relate to other things or parts of themselves. For example, John of St. Thomas points out that even substance is constituted of how it relates to other substances. I think a parallel might be drawn here to information theory as well. Describing anything meaningfully requires some sort of difference. I think some good metaphysical inferences can be drawn from what is minimally necessary to describe anything.

Which makes it kind of funny that arelational knowledge of "things-in-themselves" became a sort of gold standard of knowledge in some areas of philosophy.

But then what does it mean for something to simple? That it relates to all things in just one way? I am not sure what fits that bill. That it cannot be decomposed into constituent parts without losing something? A lot of things seem to be primitive in that way.

It just doesn't seem very convincing. The experience of being aware of an experience is phenomenologicaly concurrent with it. Certainly, it's true that we don't have an experience "in no time at all," but it seems like a mistake here to take experience as being decomposable into smaller and smaller intervals, with certain parts having to follow others in serial order. Understanding seems to occur as a sort of parallel, composite process (which makes sense given our cognitive architecture).

I think the issue might be conflating the process of developing a thought into a propositional form, and the experience of self-awareness itself. For example, in the passage from Augustine above he spends a paragraph unpacking inferences made from an experience of knowing and willing that occurs in an instant. These two are divided in propositional thought, yet if a line drive is hit to us while playing baseball, our experience doesn't seem to involve first knowing that the ball has been hit, then willing our body to move to catch it. We do all of these together, seamlessly knowing, willing, and acting. Likewise, in introspection we experience and experience our own experiencing together.

My point is that we can be aware of a particular thing without believing or knowing anything about that thing, we can believe a particular thing without being aware of or knowing anything about that thing, and we can know how to do something without believing anything or being aware of doing the thing.

Examples may help me to grasp what you're saying here. The above, as written, seems plainly false to me. I would argue that all three candidates/examples/suggestions are false, as they are written.

You might consider here Aristotle's two types of truth, which gets at this distinction.

Aristotle, in Metaphysics, IX 10, distinguishes between two kinds of truth: truth as the correctness of speech and thought, and truth as the grasping of indivisibles (asyntheta, adiaireta).2

The first kind of truth involves complex articulation: it requires that the things in question be “combined and divided.” If in our thinking and speaking we combine and divide things as they are themselves combined and divided, our thinking and speaking will be true; if we combine and separate things in ways different from the ways they themselves are com-posed and divided, our thinking and speaking will be false (Metaphysics, IX
10, 1051b2–9). It is important to note that this form of truth has falsity as its opposite. If I say, “Snow is white,” I have composed a statement. I have put thoughts together. If snow indeed is white, my statement and my opinion will be true; if snow is brown, my statement and my opinion will be false. It is the statement and the opinion that are true or false. In De Anima, III 8 (432a11), Aristotle says that being true or false belongs to an "intertwining of things thought, a symploke¯ noe¯mato¯n.” In this passage, the term we have translated as “things thought,” noe¯mata, needs to be clarified, and we will have more to say about it later. The intertwining of things thought is a syntactic achievement.


The second kind of truth involves not complexity but a simple grasp of simple things (Metaphysics, IX 10, 1051b17–33). This kind of truth has ignorance, not falsity, as its opposite. Suppose I am engaged inconversation and someone begins using the word eisteddfods. If I have never heard that word before, I do not take in anything when I hear it now; and since I do not take anything in, I cannot be mistaken. I do not get anything wrong; I simply do not know. My deficiency consists not in falsity but in ignorance. Or suppose something is happening before me and I am completely bewildered by it. Again, I fail to take anything in, and my thinking is not false; it is simply uninformed, which is different from being misinformed. To be exact, I should say not that my thinking is uninformed, but that I simply am not thinking. I have not gotten there yet. I may be trying to think, but I have not succeeded in having a thought, either simple or complex. In the first kind of truth, by contrast, I do have a thought (that snow is white), but it might be false. In the second kind, my mind does not rise to the level at which falsity is even possible.

I would add that our limited cognitive bandwidth requires that we make frequent use of this second type of truth. In statements, predication, etc. we say things about things, or we evaluate such statements in thought. However, when we do this, we cannot "unpack" all this detail. I can say something about, say "Russia," without either of us having to unpack all our propositional knowledge about Russia. There is both a subconscious and pre-concious element to this. Subconscious because we use terms as shorthand for a huge network of connections, pre-concious because the objects and processes we perceive are organized into discrete "things," automatically. It is this automatic demarcation that allows for the phenomenology that gives rise to predication and syntax in the first place (Husserl's argument).

I'm not sure if this is much of a criticism. Thought is essentially processual. The very effort to understand a claim like "I think, therefore I am," relies on "prior cognition," as Aristotle says. "This is also true of both deductive and inductive arguments, since they both succeed in teaching because they rely on previous cognition: deductive arguments begin with premisses we are assumed to understand, and inductive arguments prove the universal by relying on the fact that the particular is already clear." (Posterior Analytics)

But simply because thought "is" in the context of becoming doesn't mean "it is not," anymore than an eclipse can be shown "not to be," simply because it occurs over an interval.

Notably, I think the common complaints here are dealt with quite well by Augustine, who has his own formulation of Descartes' famous proposition. There, the theory of mind binds together being, knowing, and willing, such that the three are intrinsically related in forming the "I"

I am talking about these three things: being, knowing, and willing. For I am and I know and I will. In that I know and will, I am. And I know myself to be and to will. And I will to be and to know. Let him who can, see in these three things how inseparable a life is: one life, one mind, and one essence, how there is, finally, an inseparable distinction, and yet a distinction. Surely this is obvious to each one himself. Let him look within himself and see and report to me. (Confessions)

I would think most people would like to avoid:
- Doing things that are ugly/disgusting
- Looking stupid or embracing falsehoods
- Preforming practical tasks poorly/incompetently

These can have a moral component, but they don't need to.

This lines up with the proposed "three types of judgement:"
-Moral/practical - good/bad
-Theoretical - true/false
-Aesthetic - beautiful/ugly

Unfortunately, these all tend to be open ended as well. As Moore points out, questions of goodness are open ended. The enduring legacy of radical skepticism shows that truth can always be questions. Likewise, "is it beautiful?" or "why is it beautiful?" is also open ended.

People don't want to be seen as having either bad judgement (of any sort) or of being unable to follow their judgement, i.e., lack of self-control.

I think this ties in quite well with Robert Sokolowski's reformulation of Aristotle's "man is the rational animal," as "humans are agents of truth." We don't want to be seen to be doing things that show poor judgement because ultimately it reflects poorly on our ability to live into veracity, to be agents who are accountable to truth.

Of relevance:

For if intellect understands itself to understand, it must first be given that it understands some thing and then understands itself to understand: for the understanding that intellect understands is of some object. Thus, either we proceed to infinity or, if we come to some first thing understood, that cannot be understanding itself, but some intelligible thing.

Summa Contra Gentiles

This seems to justify: "I am" as opposed to merely: "thinking is," because there is both thinking and the recursive awareness of this thinking as thought. What is the "I" but this very sort of self-awareness in thought? But if there is self-awareness, some self exists, since it would seem that a "self" or "I" is definitionally just this very sort of awareness.

Whereas, it seems possible that a goldfish or fetus might experience some level of first person subjective experience, but not any sort of recursive self-knowledge.

Descartes' doesn't bring this out fully, but I do think he implicitly answers the big criticism against his famous line. For it is not simply that there "is thinking," but also that there is recursive self-awareness of thinking. This is what motivates the statement in the first place.

This excludes the error of the ancients who completely removed the final cause from things and held that everything comes about from the necessity of matter.

Aquinas commenting on the silly ideas of a bygone error in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Funny how ideas go in and out of fashion.

Just bear in mind that the protean nature of religious belief is not unique. You'll see the same thing in scientific articles and public health datasets being mustered to prove anti-vaccine arguments, or in the endless debates over public education (e.g., is offering optional advanced mathematics classes in high school good, or an engine structural racism, etc.)

That people can disagree wildly on things doesn't necessarily entail that knowledge is impossible. This is true even when there isn't consensus. We'd hardly say that there is no truth of the matter as to what makes for a good or bad education, simply because there is a large diversity of opinions in the education policy space, or that there can never be an adequate explanation of consciousness just because we currently lack one and are left with a wide diversity of opinions.

From a theological perspective, such diversity is often seen as necessary for the progress of human understanding in the same way a plurality of political movements is required for the historical development of political institutions. E.g., modern liberal democracy only has universal education, restrictions on child labor, rights to unionize, pension/health systems, etc. today because it faced the challenge of socialism and was forced to sublate it, making key socialist policies part of itself. A similar phenomena would seem to be at work in the parallel strands of faith.

Or this is at least the explanation some theologians take, e.g. it's sort of the explanation of plurality laid out in the current catechism of the Catholic Church (rather than, we are right, everyone else is wrong).

It's worth distinguish between "the philosophy of science," and "the philosophy of x science." The stuff you find in handbooks of "philosophy of biology," or "philosophy of economics," is central to the work of scientists in those fields. It generally has to do with paradigm defining theory, methodology, etc., and the articles you find in these texts are about a 50/50 split of scientists from that field and philosophers who specialize in that field (who have generally completed graduate work in the field as well).

"Philosophy of science," tends to be much broader, and not intersect with the sciences to nearly the same degree. It is fairly common to see people with PhDs in physics or biology described as "philosophers of," those fields, but it is uncommon to see a scientist described as a "philosopher of science." The latter is much more general.

The other place you see philosophy intersecting with science is in interdisciplinary areas like information science, complexity studies, etc.

If you look back at how the terms for "science" were used from St. Aquinas up through Hegel's day, there isn't really wasn't too much a distinction. A science was any systematic study of an area of inquiry. Sciences were unique in terms of having different methodologies, and different first principles (following Aristotle's ideal of a science that can be deductively derived from first principles). But "science" was not a discrete form of inquiry.

I could see considerable merits to going back to such a view. "Science," is not really a special sort of sui generis thing, distinguished from all other areas of inquiry. We have only come to think of it in this way due to a short period of history where "anti-metaphysical," views were in vouge. But of course, this didn't get rid of metaphysics, rather it dogmatically enshrined a certain metaphysics, with negative consequences for the progress of science. Only now are we really getting over the hangover caused by this.

Lines of inquiry should be judged on their relative merits, not credentialism. You constantly hear academics bemoaning the negative effects of silos and turf wars, and yet it remains a common tactic to invoke these silos as a means of ending debate (e.g., "developmental biologists cannot speak to evolution, it isn't their specialty," being invoked as a counter to EES). Particularly, the replication crisis and problems with the relationship between economics, public policy, and incentive structures should call into question the absolute authority of "scientists," in their own field of study. For example, being an economist alone does not make one necessarily better equipped to judge the validity of statistical methods.

There seems to be two different conceptions of information being mixed together here.

The shortest possible way to write a program that produces a given string is called its Kolmogorov Complexity or algorithmic entropy. Shannon Entropy by contrast take a given string and then measures the amount surprise in it, based on how likely the string is compared to some background distribution.

Questions about how to view statistics (frequentism vs propensity vs Bayesianism vs logicalism, etc.) affect how we interpret information.

From the perspective of Shannon Entropy, you might say that a computation that outputs pi up to some very high number of decimals produces zero information. Even though there is a very large number of digits, they all occur where they occur with a probability equal to 100% given the program input. This ties into the "scandal of deduction," the finding that deterministic computation/deduction produces no new information.

It's also worth noting that the program that outputs pi doesn't really contain your genome. Information is necessarily relational. We could map your genome onto any string with a sufficient amount of variance, but such information doesn't exist "in itself."

A simple random bit generator produces all possible finite strings given enough time, but that doesn't mean that the Kolmogorov Complexity of all strings is equal to the simplest random string generator. You need a program that will output some string, e.g. your genome, and JUST that thing. So, while a program that outputs pi might output very many possible encodings of your genome, the program still needs some way to recognize that encoding, halt, and output it. So the information in your genome isn't really "in" the program that outputs pi, anymore than a random string generator "contains" the information for all possible programs/strings.


I wrote an article on this a while back for 1,000 Word Philosophy, although they weren't interested in the topic.

https://medium.com/@tkbrown413/introducing-the-scandal-of-deduction-7ea893757f09

And a deeper dive:

https://medium.com/@tkbrown413/does-this-post-contain-any-information-3374612c1feb




I think there is a ton of relevance to metaphysics, it's just that bad inferences are sometimes made. Paul Davies has a great anthology called "Information and the Nature of Reality," with entries by Seth Lloyd, Terrance Deacon, and others, including philosophers and theologians, that is quite good.

Information theory has allowed for a unification of disparate fields, from physics to biology to economics to cognitive science. This alone makes it of philosophical merit, a set of general principles that has explanatory and predictive power across the social, life, and physical sciences.

This is a pretty common example in logic textbooks, but it is not the case that if A -> B then ~A -> ~B. To see why, consider a lawn with a sprinkler system. A person sees it has not rained (~A), but then goes out to find the lawn is wet (B). This is possible because there are many ways for the lawn to get wet (B). If it rains, the lawn will be wet, but the lawn might also be wet for other reasons.

I know you disallowed hoses, sprinklers, etc., but in that case, when the only way for the lawn to get is from the rain (A), you should frame it as an iff/biconditional.

To get ~A -> ~B the starting premise would need to be "if and only if it rains (iff A) then the lawn will be wet (B),or A <->B. In such a case, B also implies A.



This would be "denying the antecedent."



But Corvus seems to be assuming an iff relationship, in which case the inference would be valid.

And the person for whom the drug has made it possible to continue living by making life bearable has a differnt perspective. I don't think its so easy to avoid from the perspectival nature of most matters

Ok, but this is really missing the point. Saying "different things can be good or bad for different," people doesn't even require perspectivism, let alone the claim that "good" reduces to simply "I prefer."

If "good" is just equivalent with "I prefer," then people can never be wrong about what is good for them. This seems ridiculous, because we all have memories of times we preferred to do stupid things that were bad for us. E.g. if someone spends a bunch of money on a health supplement that does nothing for them except give them liver failure, are we going to say: "the supplement was good for them at the time they took it because they felt it was good at that moment?"

Such a claim seems to make it so that introspection is impossible. People can't ever look back at their own lives and make meaningful practical or moral judgements if good and bad is simply current emotion.

Do you think there is a fact of the matter as to whether people are cowardly or courageous, honest or deceitful, and so on, or is it just opinion all the way down?

IMO, this is a tricky question, because the post-Enlightenment mode of seeing the virtues wants to have it that all the virtues are the same, always and everywhere, for "all rational agents." But I believe this is a deeply flawed way to looking at the virtues.

It is like asking "what are the social differences between men and women simpliciter, without reference to any particular culture?" The question is interminable because men and women don't exist outside of societies and social practices. We might as well ask how lungs work without reference to any surrounding atmosphere.

The virtues exist within a social/historical context. Particularly, they are formalized in "practices," which define an internal good/telos for a given practice. For example, take chess. Chess is a social practice. Its rules and what it means "to be a good chess player," are social constructs.

Yet it would seem mighty strange to say that "there is no truth about who is a better chess player," if I play Gary Kasperov 100 times, and lose swiftly in each game. But this is what the extreme relativist ends up committed to, because of the assumption is that "if something is a social practice it is entirely relative." Because chess is "just a social construct," we end up with weird claims, like "any Chess player is equally good at chess as Barry Kasperov."

Because of this, people often move to a sort of naive, static formalism. Something like: "someone is good at chess just in case they win most of their games." But this fails too. I could beat Kasperov if I cheated and used a chess computer. Yet successfully cheating would not make me a "good chess player." Being a good chess player means playing good games of chess. Someone who plays top players and losses all their games might demonstrate better chess aptitude than someone who wins all their games against novices. In a practice, the good/telos is defined internally (although not arbitrarily, even in Chess the rules evolved to make games fair and interesting).

The same is true of less morally trivial practices. In many cultures, there are strong ideas about what makes one a "good doctor." There is "bedside manner," etc. Being a doctor is a social construct, but it does not follow that my two year old son is equally as good of a doctor as the head of surgery at Mass General because medicine in a social practice.

Medicine clearly isn't "social practice all the way down," however, even if it always exists as a social practice. There can be a truth about what helps or harms a patient irrespective of current practice, and these facts can in turn be used to redefine and reform the practice.


When you read the Iliad, it is clear that Homer's characters are not confused about who is showing virtue and who is showing vice. People are confused about the virtues today because they want to apply them outside of any context. This simply doesn't make sense.

You can critique practices from an internal frame, showing how current practice fails to fulfill the telos of the practice, or from an external frame. However, you can't critique practices "from nowhere." Relativism often makes its hay by conflating the relativity of social practices with relativity within practices, which seems plausible if one is stuck in the Enlightenment mode of thinking of virtues in terms of "universal absolute goods," but reveals itself to be ridiculous when Kasparov is made to be just as good of a chess player as a toddler.

I had a chat with an American friend of my father who said that in his view Trump is one of the most courageous, virtuous men in America right now. Now our take on this will obviously be that this is absurd. But he made his case rationally. I just think his reasoning was bogus.

I think this combines multiple issues. Disagreements about Trump often center around disagreements about facts. E.g., "he didn't actually do x, y, and z, those are lies created by deep state RINOs in Trump's cabinet," etc. People widely agree that it would be bad for Trump to have called America's war dead "suckers," they just don't degree that it happened.

One thing to note is that people can hold contradictory beliefs, or a practice can evolve such that it contradicts its own purposes. For example, during the Civil Rights movement, many critiques of the Jim Crow system was that it was in contradiction with the principles enshrined in the Constitution (an internal critique). The evolution of practices is contingent, but it isn't entirely arbitrary. Hegel makes a pretty good case for such contradictions motivating practice/norm evolution, and how practices and norms evolve is guided by human goals and purposes.

:up:

My first thoughts as well. "I know no one can know," seems to fall into the same bucket as "it is absolutely true that there are no absolutes," etc.

In particular, there is the problem that, if there is no access to "reality," then presumably there is no reason to set up a knowledge/belief, reality/appearance distinction in the first place. But claims that beliefs are "merely appearance," presuppose such a distinction.