So, chairs exists and numbers subsist? Is that a common understanding? — Art48

Chairs are mental constructions; they do not exist in the mind-independent world.

Numbers are strange. They are discovered through our minds but seem to be independent of it.

But natural numbers are not constructed the way chairs are. For one thing they are among the simplest things one could image.

Yeah. Let's leave it there for the time being. It was still an interesting chat. :up:

I see him reacting in different ways to is consistent with the qualities I perceive in those different things. That's all I'm claiming. — Janus

Which is fine. But why would you expect otherwise? What epistemic access do you have to compare your view to something else's? So of course, you will interpret the world and other creatures' behavior, in a way that makes sense to you.

They wouldn't react that way if they were blind and felt no bodily sensations, though, would they? If not then we can conclude that they feel the heat and sense the height just as do. I don't know if this is universally true, but it is said that dogs already react instinctively to snakes when they are very young, but would you expect them to do that if they could not sense the presence of the snake? — Janus

Yeah, it would make sense for them to perceive threats for survival. Otherwise, we wouldn't have dogs, which would be bad.

we know they have sense organs and bodies not all that different to ours give us reason to believe that they at least see the things in the environment that we see, and that those things exist independently of us and the dogs, whatever the ultimate nature of those existences are. So, I don't see that I'm claiming anything which is not consistent with our experiences. That said of course we cannot be absolutely certain of anything. — Janus

Yeah, I am not denying that the use experimental medication on mice, then they move on to humans.

But we should be cautious in paying to much attention to outer features (eyes, organs), with inner experience.

But is it not most reasonable to think they are responses (whether innate or not) perhaps to survival, or perhaps to enjoying themselves or whatever, to different things in different situations? — Janus

Of course, there is no doubt, they react to things and are often happy with humans and other dogs, sometimes even with other creatures.

I mean you seem not to want to admit that the dog sees a ball, and yet you say the dog sees me making a gesture or movement. So my dogs see me and I'm an object in the environment. My dogs recognize me—of that there is no doubt. Now they may well not see me in the same way as people do (but then different people may not see me in exactly the same way either). — Janus

You seem to want to say that you know what dogs see. I don't claim to have that level of epistemic access, that is why Nagel wrote and people debate "what it's like to see a bat".

Let me speak in your terms, yes dogs see certain balls they play with. How they see it and most importantly, if it is similar to the way I see it, I cannot say - it's not possible to say because we are not dogs.

I am not denying they see things and play with things. I just think you are claiming to know more than what is possible for us to know. Maybe I am wrong - I freely admit that. Maybe dogs do see balls very similarly to the way we do and maybe dogs see you in a way that other people do. I would be extremely skeptical.

When you say other people don't see you in the exact way - well, I mean - if you mean "exactly the same way" for other people is somewhat akin to a dog also seeing you as other people do, but in a slightly different way, then I don't know what to say here. These seem to be astronomically different.

And again, no bullshit or false modesty or anything, I could be completely wrong. I only say that I just don't find it convincing.

Also you say that dogs will not jump into a fire or from a high place—so it follows that they perceive fire and high places. They also do not bump into trees or walls (unless they are blind which was the case with my mother's cocker spaniel when I was a kid). They behave differently and consistently towards different things in the environment and that behavior makes sense in terms of how we perceive those objects. I don't know what else to say. If you remain unconvinced then I have nothing further to add. — Janus

They do not jump from high places or don't go into fire as soon as they are born! If that is not innate, I don't know what is. So, they don't do something before they even develop into a mature animal. Clearly, they do many things at the very moment they perceive the world, there is no time for "learning from perception" here, it's at first instance.

And that goes for many animals, turtles racing to the ocean as soon as they hatch, birds reacting to mother giving them worms before they can see, etc, etc.

Now, if dogs see fire and high places like we do, again, I don't know. Maybe.

Sure, again, they don't run into concrete things, no animal does that I know of. I am not saying they don't see a world and react to it. But that it makes sense to you (or me, or any other human being alive) says very little about how the dog actually experiences the world, that's a massive leap into claiming knowledge about a different creature.

Ending on a point of agreement, I hope: they may have some basic "ideas", such as play, prey, anger, protection, the basic things all animals need for survival. In so far as we also have these basic notions, there is some overlap, sure. Clearly food, mating, danger and like basic emotions we also have, beyond that, I don't know how they see and experience the world. I can guess, but that's the best we can do.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to deny animals even a minimal amount of intelligence. I have to stress I don't believe that conceptualization is some amazing special ability. The amazing ability here is syntactic language, conceptualization is merely a part of describing language-use. — goremand

That's interesting to me. I think conceptualization of any kind is quite remarkable, even proto-conceptualization. But language is a unique instance, so far as we know, so it is, in a sense, more "special".

The thing is, if you go down this road of "creating associations always involves the use of concepts" I believe you will end up attributing powers of conceptualization to very simple organisms, including machines. — goremand

It's tricky to know where the cut-off point between explicit consciousness (such as elephants or monkeys) stops and mere reaction kicks in, maybe a fish or an oyster. But I do believe there is such a point.

To talk in this manner about machines, is to play with words, it's not substantive as I see it. So, we agree here.

I have tried throwing sticks too large for the dog to pick up. Or bricks. He will chase them but as soon as he realizes it is too big or hard to pick up in his mouth he loses interest straight away. In any case when you say the dog chases movement it seems you agree that the dog and I both see something moving at the same place and time and in the same direction and the same distance. — Janus

Ok, so we can guess that what initially gets them going is motion associated by a gesture you make which is related to "play time". Once the reach the object, maybe they try to life it up, maybe they get confused for a moment and then they look at you or ignore the object.

Here's the issue: why don't they pick up the object? Is it because they experience its structure as being too big and then retreat? Or is it an innate predisposition that makes them realize that this thing is too heavy (not related to structure) ?

I don't know. I think we can agree that the best we can do in the human case, which is the case in which we have the most data, is to try to understand a little why people do what they do - and even that is very hard very frequently.

When it comes to other animals, we are effectively guessing. Maybe they don't pick it up because they perceive a structure that's too big, maybe it's an innate response related to heaviness or pain avoidance.

I have never denied that the dog has a different experience of the world. I have no doubt he experiences the things I experience differently, but the difference is not all that radical and can be made sense of by considering the differences between my constitution and the dog's constitution. The dog sees his food bowl as 'to-be-eating-from' and his bed as 'to-be-laying-in' and given the way I experience those things in terms of size, shape and hardness the dog's behavior towards those things is consistent. — Janus

Here is where we disagree, and I don't see a remedy. I think the experiences are, in large part, very different. Sometimes there can be overlap - no creature is going to run into a fire or jump from a large distance. But whereas I think you are attributing this to shared structure, I think it's an innate response (not conscious) related to survival.

How much we share is very difficult to ascertain, but I think we could be misleading ourselves if we take ourselves to be reliable narrators of things outside us (the world, including other animals). It was no until we began to doubt our shared experiences, that modern science arose.

Also, one should mention dogs are the creatures which we have most co-existed with out of all animals, making them particularly misleading, imo.

Of course animals have intelligence and memory, but how does that necessitate the use of concepts? Memories are just impressions made by particular events, for example an animal doesn't need the general concept of a "child" in order to remember that they have children to feed. — goremand

True. I should have been more careful. I don't know if animals have concepts per se, maybe they have some sort of pre-conceptual awareness.

But they have representations unique to them. The issue I wanted to highlight is that I think it's kind of hard to imagine having perception without some minimal intellectual capacities, because then it seems to me it would be hard to retain the perception.

Examples of animals suffering from abuse and being fearful of humans for a while seem to suggest some degree of association, which goes slightly beyond "mere" perception.

The point is only that given the way we perceive things the dog's manifest behavior towards those same things makes sense. — Janus

Of course, it would make sense for us we are analyzing the world through our human-centric perspective. One cannot help but see dogs chasing balls or peeing on trees, it absolutely makes sense for us to interpret animal actions in a way we can understand. It would be quite impractical (in everyday life) to attempt to "be a bat", to use Nagel's phrase, because we aren't.

The point is not the words, it's the animals experience. My point is not that dogs chase balls, but rather that dogs chase movement. You can throw any object you wish and most of the time the dog will chase it.

Likewise with peeing, we experience it as a dog peeing on a tree. The dog might experience it as marking territory in this place because of particular smell or an ingrained propensity to do this.

. We know we can chase balls but not walls or trees and so on. We can observe that dogs see the same things we do, and additionally there is a consistency there between how we see things and how dogs see things which is demonstrated by their behavior towards those things. I don't see how that can reasonably be denied — Janus

It can be reasonably denied if you assume, as I believe is correct, that dogs have a different experience of the world. This consistency we see with our interpretation of the dog's behavior does not mean that we are accurately describing what dogs actually do, it does describe how we experience dogs.

I should add, that going through a door and chasing a ball at best shows that concrete stuff (stuff you can't go through) is a real thing - concreteness exists. But this says very, very little about animal experience. That's why we need to do animal science, to try to understand, to the extent we can, why they do what they do.

Ok, here goes:

The dog sees the ball as something to chase, the doorway as something to walk through, the wall as something not to walk into, the tree as something to piss against, the car as something to get excited about going in.

So the 'somethings' have roughly the same characteristics for the dog as they do for us. "Wall, 'tree'. 'doorway'. and 'car' are just names, but the things they name certainly seem to be real mind-independent things with certain attributes. — Janus

Let's minimize human attributions to animals. The dog chases something, walks through something, pisses against something, etc.

What characteristics of something makes us chase it? Is it the roundness, the colour? Surely not, for then we would be chasing globes or round candy. We don't do that. These things are round (to us), but we don't chase them.

What characteristics of something causes us to urinate on it? Dogs urinate on other things as well.

We don't know if a dog experiences a ball as an object which is separate from the environment. It looks that way to us, but that doesn't mean it's something like the dog picking something up in a continuous stream of stuff or things. Maybe some things trigger the dog to go chasing and other peeing.

That doesn't mean there is a specific property that resembles anything we have that causes them to do what they do. They chase things that are thrown. They pee on things that make them mark territory.

That does not mean they chase something because it is like a ball or pee because it is something like a tree. It's a disposition in the dog to act a certain way given certain environmental cues. Maybe motion triggers the running, not the shape, maybe scent triggers the peeing. You can say ah, yes, but the scent is given off by trees, maybe, maybe it's the earth or concrete or anything else.

I don't think we will proceed much here. We going to keep going in circles.

I think that is a very strange claim, why are the use of concepts necessary for perception? I would not invoke conceptualization for any reason other than to describe the use of syntactic language, which is an ability only humans and arguably one or two other animals have. — goremand

I think there has to be a minimal intellectual component in terms of memory, otherwise I don't see how a creature could perceive without constantly forgetting.

They very likely have some primitive concepts. I don't think it makes much sense to postulate a creature having perception absent some minimal amount of conception.

But these are very very dark waters. We are quite in the dark as to the nature of animal concepts.

Yes, the claim should be trivial: reality can be (and is) conceptualized in different ways.

But no to the suggestion that matter can be observed without any conceptualization at all.

Yes. That's the working assumption.

if you were to say that all animals observe the same reality — goremand

Close, but not quite what I am saying. I am saying that each animal species (ants, birds, tigers, whatever) interpret the world the way each species does: ants will interpret the world in a certain way, birds in another manner, tigers the way tigers do, etc.

And of course, bats. Can't forget about them. :)

You may be attributing that, not me. I say they clearly see the things we call walls and trees, I'm not saying they see them as walls or trees. — Janus

They see something. What properties they attribute to these things we do not know.

So, it doesn't make sense to say - even if you admit that they don't see them as wall or trees - that this thing they see is in fact (mind-independently) a wall or a tree. It's not a mind-independent fact for us that walls and trees exist.

As I said before we see cats climbing trees not brick walls, birds perching in trees, not stopping and attempting to perch in midair. We see dogs trying to open doors, we see crows using sticks as tools to retrieve food and getting out of the way of oncoming vehicles. We don't see animals trying to walk through walls or birds flying into trees. There are countless examples. I don't know what else to say other than to ask why you don't think the examples I give suggest that we see the same things animals do. — Janus

And I keep replying that we are attributing walls, trees and brick walls to animals' cognition, WALLS, TREES and BRICK are concepts, not mind-independent things.

The fact that dogs try to come indoors or that cats walk on walls is nothing else than our attempt to make sense of what they do. Dogs push (or pull) something, they don't know it's a door. Cats walk on something; they have no concept of a wall.

The examples you suggest seem to me to be an anthropomorphizing of animal behavior.

I grant that there is something like concreteness or not being able to pass through things. But tress, doors and walls aren't things animals interact with, it's what we in our umwelt, interpret them to be doing.

I didn't mean to say that animals have conceptual access to microphysical structures, but that we know by observing their behavior that animals have perceptual access to the same things we do and if things are real microphysical structures then it follows that animals have perceptual access to microphysical structures, This does not mean that we or the animals have perceptual access to microphysical structures as microphysical structures but we both have access to them as macrophysical appearances. — Janus

I agree than neither we, nor other animals have access to microphysical structures. We have the advantage of "seeing" them through sophisticated experiments, or at least important parts of these structure.

We are stuck on the macrophysical issue. I don't think we have access to the same things. We, through concepts and perception do attribute identity to things - which require linguistic capacity (at least).

I don't think animals attribute too much to objects (not saying that you say they have concepts like we do). I think evidence suggests higher mammals can convey when there is prey, food or when it's mating season and the like.

But I don't see evidence that suggests they see the world in a similar way than we do, it seems to me based on what we know, they have very different experiences of the world - each subject to species-specific brain configuration.

I think it's rather deeper than that, but I'll leave it at that. — Wayfarer

Fair enough, we can pick it up some other time. I still think our areas of agreement are far more interesting than those areas we disagree.

Few people here have the respect and are merited by innate ideas after all. :cool:

As I understand, I asked what you meant by structure you told me:

"It's a general idea of form or configuration. Not qualia and shape is kind of abstract whereas structure suggest concreteness and boundedness (however loose). It could be thought of as a localised intensity of energetic bonding in a field that gives rise to chracteristic functions and interactions."

I replied by saying that I did not understand this as stated but guessed you could have meant a "microphysical structure".

Which you replied by asking: "Why not a microphysical thing? Must the physical be different than the metaphysical other than definitionally?"

I said I was not evaluating your claim in any manner, but merely wanted to know if the structure was microphysical. This then brought up a problem to my mind, namely that if we say there is a microphysical structure that exists which is common to all creatures, then there is a tension, which you anticipated by saying:

"I thought you were asking me to speculate as to what the structures we perceive as objects might be.It seems animals will not conceptualize structures in the ways we do or even conceptualize them at all. Perhaps I don't understand your question."

I agreed with this bold part, and I thought this meant we agreed on there being real microphysical things in the world.

But then I got confused when you said:

"OK cool it seems we agree. I think we and the other animals have access to the same basic structures."

Because for reasons you gave previously, animals can't access this microphysical structure.

In short, using Sellar's terminology, I am a realist when it comes to the "scientific image" (with important caveats), but am an idealist when it comes to the manifest image.

I don't know what part of idealism you know think holds true - if any of it. It seems to me you think qualia and other facets of the world are ideal, but others are real.

That's how I see it anyway.

What I explained is that it is the result of, a conclusion drawn from understanding the concept of matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Who understands matter? What we have are theories of physics about matter in microphysical states. Once you enter biology, our understanding of matter decreases exponentially - we don't understand how matter could have the properties we experience in everyday life. That's lack of understanding.

That is because matter is a principle assumed to account for the apparently deterministic aspects of the world, i.e. temporal continuity, while mind and free will are things requiring exception to that, i.e. temporal discontinuity.

Matter cannot be configured in a way other than what is allowed for by determinist causation. This I believe is the importance of understanding the relation between "matter" and Newton's first law. Newton assigns to matter itself, a fundamental property, which is inertia, and this renders all material bodies as determined. So mind, which has the capacity to choose, cannot be a configuration of matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you mean matter as in physics or matter as in everything that is? Because physics does not show determinism, it at best suggests probabilities, which are very foreign to our debates on free will.

If there is emergence - brute emergence, "magical emergence" - which I believe happens all the time, then there is no problem in mind arising from matter, any more than anything else arising from it.

It seems we are an impasse here for the time being. I propose to park the conversation here and we can pick it up in some other thread, maybe by then we could understand each other better,

But I suspect we agree on something like 70% of the main topics, that is, if you still maintain some agreement with some version of Kant (albeit modified), if not then we may have drifted apart, which is fine.

I'll leave the proposal for you to decide.

Because it's materialism, and I reject materialism. — Wayfarer

Because you equate it with scienticism. It does not need to be so equated.

If you reject the scientistic association, then many problems go away. The only remaining issue then, would be if matter came before mental properties, or if mental properties came before material ones.

that is, wherever there’s life, there’s also something like mind, even if it’s not conscious or sentient in the way we think of it. — Wayfarer

That's fine. I call the stuff that the world is made of "physical stuff" or matter, you can call it "energy" or "idea" if you wish. It could cause terminological issues down the line, but content wise, there's not much of a difference.

If so, then complex minds in higher organisms wouldn’t just be the product of matter—mind could also be understood as a causal factor. The fact that mind is not something that can be identified on the molecular level is not an argument against it - as everyone knows, identifying the physical correlates of consciousness is, famously, a very hard problem ;-) — Wayfarer

They could be correlative - maybe.

Yeah, the "hard problem" (which is misleading, imo) is real. Because our understanding is just way too to know how matter could lead to mind - Locke pointed that out many years ago, quite correctly as I see it.

It's something akin to asking yourself does a dog understand itself? Well, not very well. We know more about dogs that they do about themselves, as it were, and we still don't understand completely at all - far from it.

To understand how brain leads to mind would require exponentially more intelligence than we have. I just don't see why I have any reason to deny that experience comes from modified physical (world, immaterial, neutral, whatever you want to call it) stuff.

But that is a stipulation that mind is above matter. What does that mean? Why can't mind be a specific configuration of matter? Is there a principle in nature that prevents mind from arising from certain combinations of matter? Not that I know of.

I agree that, in very crucial respects, we don't know what matter is. We only know a very specific configuration of it - the rest are postulates to make sense of the world.

I thought you were asking me to speculate as to what the structures we perceive as objects might be. It seems animals will not conceptualize structures in the ways we do or even conceptualize them at all. Perhaps I don't understand your question. — Janus

I thought you were saying that all creatures had access to same basic structure. If so, then I was going to reply by saying what you just said "animals will not conceptualize structures in the way we do...".

If so - then I think we are on the same page on this specific topic. Which may be good or maybe it's problematic, I dunno. :cool:

Why not a microphysical thing? Must the physical be different than the metaphysical other than definitionally? — Janus

I was not evaluating your comment, I was asking if this structure is what you think is the same for all creatures - as I did not understand your specific description.

Sorry I overlooked this. I am not following.

It could be thought of as a localised intensity of energetic bonding in a field that gives rise to chracteristic functions and interactions. — Janus

So, some microphysical thing?

What is important to note though, is that materialism is reducible to a form of idealism, not vise versa. This assigns logical priority to idealism over materialism. — Metaphysician Undercover

If experience comes from organized matter, then it comes from the brain of certain organisms.

I don't see these terms as polar opposites. I'm a scientific realist and a manifest idealist: I believe the ordinary everyday world of tables and chairs are mind-dependent. I don't think physics is, despite it being formulated through minds, it still exists absent us.

The only way a strict separation is possible is if you assume that matter cannot be mental in any respect, or that mind is above matter, which is not coherent until someone says what matter is, and where it stops.

It does not create the objective world, but then, what is 'objective' without there being the subject or observer for whom it is an object? — Wayfarer

The world. The actual world. The hard thing to tease out is what belongs to it absent us. That's a hard question. I think the evidence indicates that atoms, protons and so on existed prior to us. So, did planets and several other things.

But I will grant you that qualia did not exist absent a subject. I grant you that we give "meaning" to things. I grant that we individuate objects, and I also grant that we don't reach things in themselves. But I do not follow you in so far as denying objectivity without a subject.

Notice I understand the radicalness of what you are proposing. But I don't think it's true. Not to that extent.

One could be even more radical like Arthur Collier and outright deny that anything exists absent us and be perhaps the only full-blown idealist I know of. And it is very radical. But it's also not convincing.

Radicalness is not an indication of correctness. Not that you claim so, but it's worth pointing out.

That doesn't mean I don't see massive obstacles in making sense of these things. These are hard questions.

OK. Good.

We see something, right? This something triggers a reaction in our minds such that we call it a "tree". We don't see a tree first and then label it as a tree. We see things which we then interpret as so and so.

Their behaviors suggest they are interacting with something which is "concrete", something that can be touched and not passed through.

What does "structure" cover for you? Does it cover the shape of a thing or it's qualia or what? That's a bit unclear to me.

I mean, either the universe is 13.7 billion years old, or it is not. That's a factual statement.

If we never arose, there would still be something there. It must be assumed otherwise how could we exist at all? Something had to happen that led to us, which did not depend on us.

They don't bump into them, and they lift their legs and pee on them They don't try to climb them although they may use them to stand on the back legs and look up to see what's up there making a sound they are intrigued by. Cats climb them and birds land and perch in them. — Janus

They don't bump into something; we conceptualize that something as a tree. Cats "climb" something (as opposed to go up? or latching on?). Yeah, they surely do stand on something. We conceptualize it as a tree - we have that linguistic and alongside that, conceptual capacity to apply the label "tree" to this thing animals react to.

Nothing inside of us could determine the smallest details of what is seen. What is actually out there determines what is seen. Otherwise, you would have to posit that our minds are all somehow connected. — Janus

We are the same species - so we will have the same concepts.

Just as dogs are their own species. As birds belong to birds.

When neurologists study a brain, they assume that what holds for that single individual's brain, applies to all of us, minus abnormalities.

When vision scientists study how we see, they assume that the person's eye they are studying, applies to all people - again, barring abnormalities.

How do we know that and yet do not know that there are structured configurations of energy which appear to us as objects? Wayfarer won't agree with you about the human-independent existence of space and time by the way. — Janus

We know that because mathematics, somehow, seems to apply to mind independent reality. What physics studies are the simplest systems in nature, somehow, we are able to develop theories that describe regularities in nature.

That was Einstein's comment about the most surprising thing about science (physics) that it works at all.

If Wayfarer thinks this is problematic or wouldn't agree with me here, then I'd disagree with him here.

I don't deny mind-independence. I only think it becomes overwhelmingly complex above physics.

How do we know that, by the way? — Wayfarer

Well Eddington confirmed that space and time were actually one thing, spacetime, experimentally confirmed in the early 20th century.

think the fact that we all see the same things and can agree down to the smallest detail as to what we see and that our observations show us that other animals see the same things we do, suggests very strongly that these things are not just mental constructions. — Janus

Can they? Do dogs see trees? They see something for sure, they don't have the concept "tree", nor do we know how they individuate objects. When it comes to other animals, one could assume some of them don't individuate things at all.

There's no necessary law that states that the way we pick out a blade of grass is the way it must be. One can easily imagine another species or an alien not being able to individuate a blade of grass as one thing, but rather several parts.

That we all agree down to the smallest part on how objects appear to us, simply tells us we are all human beings.



Based on what you quote here, I agree with a lot of it, maybe most.

I was no intending to defend you or attack Janus, it's just that the point he made was interesting to me.

As I said I think most of us have thought hard about our positions, and we'd only be willing to change them given extremely strong arguments and even then, it's not a guarantee.

Yes, I think Kantian (or Neo-Platonic) perspectives are very much headed in the right direction. I only add that we must take into account that Kant literally shaped his Critique around Newtonian natural philosophy, which stated that space and time were absolute.

That's a massive reason why Kant says that they are a priori forms of sensibility. This is very frequently overlooked.

Now we know that there is such a thing as time and space absent us, which are quite different from our intuitive understanding of them.

So, it's tricky, as I see it, but it's an important issue in general.

I agree, for the most part. I would even venture to say that experience itself is not ontologically different from matter and energy, but epistemologically different. I don't think we can make metaphysical distinctions. Descartes could, given the state of knowledge back then, but we know more than he could have dreamt.

Yes, I am also a realist in so far as I think science tells us what belongs to the world (mostly physics). But apart from that, I think ordinary objects, so called, trees and apples and river and laptops, are mental constructions. And how much of science is a construction is tricky.

Physics seems to be much more grounded than biology, one could make a case that a different species might have a different biological science, but it's hard to imagine them having extremely different physics.

As to why science works - who knows?

Yes, some versions of idealism do lend themselves for religious/spiritual matters. But it need not be exclusive to one's personal philosophical beliefs, though it often is.

Ah. Fair enough. To be clear "idealism" covers a lot of ground, as does "materialism". It's a matter of what one emphasizes, it seems to me.

Apologies if this is a forced intervention, but you brought up something interesting.

Isn't this the case with most of us? We have a certain view and after having read and thought a lot about something, we choose an option. We will tend to defend that view, unless a very strong reason is given as to why one's view is flawed.

What's always puzzled me about questions such as these is that they tell us almost nothing about goodness.

We should do what is good, granted. Why? Because it is fair, just, correct (good). That says virtually nothing about what goodness is.

We can point to specific acts of doing good things, but it's always been very obscure to me. Kind of like we lack the capacity to scrutinize what goodness is, other than pointing out instances of it.

I feel there is much more to this, but we can't say much about it.

Sorry Anthony I can't participate at the moment. Don't have the capacity to focus too much on W now. But will return soon to this thread hopefully.

Not sure about degrees, but of amount of confidence. As Russell said (forgot where) the highest degree of confidence belongs to my percepts. The second "lower" confidence would be the report of other people's percepts. The last would be our confidence in our theories about the world.

Yeah. As the much cliched quote goes, war is politics by other means. What can be done through war, can also preferably be done through political negotiation - for the most part.

There are a few neocons here and there. That's life.

It's a condemnation of the species that after so many pointless, savage wars we still continue to wage them...