Causation is real. It is an ability of mind.
Yeah, the objectivists in particular. Or those who remove themselves entirely from having to confront conflicting goods. Or the narcissistic sociopaths.
As for the pragmatists, they grapple to the extent that they are construe “I” here as I do.
This certainly clarifies very little. Again, let’s focus in on the acting that folks do in regard to a particular context most here will be familiar with. What can we be certain about in communicating the choices that we make? And what is [perhaps] more the embodiment of “I” as an existential contraption?
Pick something that is of importance to you.
And not just “analysis” such as this:
Just more “intellectual” bullshit in my view. Grammar? Passive voice? Name an experience that will take us out into the world such that we encompass values in conflict, and note the manner in which your own pragmatism here leaves you less fragmanted and fractured than I construe my own sense of identity.
Embedded and embodied [here and now] largely in this frame of mind:
I believe that unborn babies have the right to life. And I believe that women have the right to abort them. How do “I” then reconcile that? Well, I can’t. Both sides make convincing arguments. Reasonable arguments. I am drawn and quartered.
And how would my choice regarding any particular abortion in any particular context here not be an existential leap?
How is your own pragmatism not in turn an existential leap to one point of view given one set of circumstances construed in one particular way. How is “I” here not largely rooted in dasein?
What can philosophers/ethicists pin down for us so that “I” is the least irrational and immoral?
Imstead it’s just more “generalization” from you.
Person X? Templates? Let’s bring this down to earth. And this too…
This tells me nothing of what I recognize in my own frame of mind here. When I am actually confronting conflicting goods. And it certainly tells us nothing of your own point of view. Other than as an intellectual contraption.
The texts relate to the manner in which I have come to think about the existential intertwining of identity, value judgments and political power.
Out in an actual context.
The manner in which “I” have become fractured and fragmented with respect to conflicting goods in the is/ought world.
Here I am just struggling to understand how your own rendition of pragmatism apparently leaves you less “broken” when confronting moral and political conflicts in a No God world.
But you almost never come down out of the clouds…
My own fragmentation is not clinical. It is philosophical. I have mangaged to think myself into believing that this…
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
…is a reasonable point of view. How then is it not deemed to be reasonable by others…in terms of their own chosen behaviors when confronting moral and political conflicts.
The trajectory of my own particular “I” here is embedded existentially in this:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
How then is this not applicable to others? What is the existential trajectory of their own moral philosophy? Regarding abortion or any other behaviors that come into conflict over moral and political values.
Instead, it’s back up into the clouds…
How on earth is this “world of words” applicable to me or you given a particular context? Let’s pick one and explore it.
I spent nearly 25 years in radical left wing political organizations. Of course my political leaps/prejudices are going to be more liberal than conservative. But that doesn’t make the conflicting goods go away. That doesn’t make my trajectory above any less relevant regarding my considerably more fractured value judgments today.
What on earth am I to make of this? It really does border on psych-babble to me.
We need to make this whole discussion more concrete.
This would be most people on earth. So, without conceding that your generalization, your universalising what we do, you now say it is a very small minority who does this.
Well it was a criticism of the vague term you used and the existence of those leaps. If you disagree, you could do it in the context of what I wrote. Say, what my criticism of this vague and I think incorrect term missed. Or if you did not understand, say where.
But what you did was to label it, not refer to it, and repeat something you have requested time and again.
Again, let’s focus in on the acting that folks do in regard to a particular context most here will be familiar with. What can we be certain about in communicating the choices that we make? And what is [perhaps] more the embodiment of “I” as an existential contraption?
Pick something that is of importance to you.
And not just “analysis” such as this:
Yup. You write vague academic sentences that are objectivist. I should point that out to an anti-objectivist.
Earlier you universal what one must do. But it turns out almost no one does this.
Does it matter to you that you are doing what you are critical of? If objectivism is the problem you think, but are not sure it is, doesn’t it matter if you act like an objectivist.
If you think serious philosophers are a problem or intellectual bullshit is aproblem, why do you use terms like dasein and existential leaps, when there are very easy ways to convey these ideas in every day language and further there is little justification for the latter`?
You have no memory. I have never said that my pragmatism leaves me less fragmented. I suspect but am not sure, that you experience yourself as more fragmented not because you are not pragmatic. ONe, you are. I have explained how you are before. Two, I think you are hurting yourself, but trying to solve the pain you have in ways that will not help you at all. But of this I am nto sure. You are the one that thinks my pragmatism makes me less fractured. which is weird, since it could have to do with my experiences or my close connections to people or to my inborn temperment or the luck of the genetic draw.
You are asking me to demonstrate your own assertion.
God you are obtuse. How is a lion stalking a gazelle a point of view.
Of course my actions and attitudes are affected by my experiences and milieu.
You repeatedly attribute beliefs to me I do not have.
No, I didn’t generalize. I focused on what you wrote, specific points and pointed out the confusion. I am not trying to solve the problem of conflicting goods. I have said many times I do not think there is a solution. That you do not know this still is absolutely beyond my ability to understand.
How utterly disrespectful.
So, you have one manner of thinking. Doesn’t seem very fractured.
You’re the one who thinks my pragmatism is
an addition to your set of contraptions.
I have less contraptions.
LOL, pot calling…
Then quit fucking whining. You wouldn’t know real fragmentation then if it hit you in the face. You might well have your undies in a knot over a crossword puzzle. A storm in a tea cup. You are presentign yourself as some tortured victim over a conundrum. You are frustrated and focused on a philosophical issue. That’s not fragmented and fractured. DRamatic language that has to do with states you do not have.
Sure, it’s a reasonable point of view. Now what. You can spend the rest of your life complaining about this or you can focus on something else. You seem to think you must pursue the answer to this. That’s a contraptoin I do not share. So I am less tortured than you…
Why?
Because I believe something`?
No because I lack a contraption you have, that compels you endlessly to demand answers to this, as if this was a moral or practical must.
I am less fragmented because I have less contraptions.
Just as otters have less.
And of course I never said it did. Did I?
Did I?
Always attributing things to me I have never said or even thought. I don’t think conflicting goods goes away. I have said that before.
Waht is wrong with you`?
This is concrete shit. You make up stuff. over and over. In interpersonal real life interactions. I have never had to deal with an abortion. I have had to deal with you.
I did do that back when. You disrespected concrete things by hallucinating stuff on me. So I focus on you and the concrete acts and patterns of actions performed here by you. Concrete as it gets.
You make up stuff about other people and about stuff that is very obviously not the case. It’s a problem. It doesn’t seem to matter to you when it is pointed out.
OK.
You need to think I have more contraptions than you and this rescues me. You need that. I dont know why.
Oh, well.
Well, if you include the nihilists who own and operate the global economy, then only a very, very, very small minority indeed.
Look, someone is either convinced that they are in sync with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”, or, as with those very, very, very few like me, they don’t.
I’m just trying to figure out how, in a presumably No God world lacking in objective morality, pragmatists like you are able to grapple with conflicting goods and experience [what appears to me to be] considerably less fragmentation.
I presume it is because you do not construe “I” here as I do. But how “out in the world” does that actually work for you for all practical purposes?
It’s not vague at all. When I am confronted with conflicting goods — from abortion and capital punishment which are matters of life and death, to the most inconsequential of value judgments – I construe myself – my “self” – as fractured and fragmented. In other words, to the point that I have come to recognize that “I” here is largely an existential contraption confronting arguments able to be rationalized simply by starting out with conflicting sets of initial assumptions.
What else is there then but existential [and/or pragmatic] leaps to particular political prejudices embodied over the course of the actual life that one has lived?
Then I ask folks to bring abstractions of this sort down to earth and to note how that is more or less applicable to them in regard to a particular context.
Instead, you invariably choose to stay up in the scholastic clouds:
To which I invariably respond:
Then back up into the “general description” stratosphere you go:
Or so it certainly seems to me.
The only way I could be construed as an objectivist here [as I understand the meaning of it] is to insist that all others are obligated to think as I do. Why? Because I have come to conclude that the components of my own moral philsophy reflect the optimal or the only rational manner in which to construe human interactions that do come into conflict over value judgments.
Okay, but all we can really do here is to shift the discussion to the manner in which we act around and then react towards others when confonting instances in which they confront our own moral values. Either as objectivists or as pragmatists or as narcissistic sociopaths or as nihilists who own and operate the global economy. How others go about rationalizing their own behavioirs.
You certainly seem less fractured and fragmented here than I am. But [I’m thinking] only [perhaps] because we have not brought our own philosopohical narratives down to earth enough times to explore this more substantively.
This part I am completely baffled by. Lions and gazelles never delve into things like objectivist or pragmatic or sociopathic or nihilistic thinking/behaving. It is entirely genetics with them.
Try to reconfigure this point please.
If my aim here is to encounter moral narratives that may well facilitate me in yanking “I” up out of the hole that I am in, I can only pursue narratives like your own in a manner that seems reasonable to me. If the manner in which I choose to do this seems unreasonable to you that [in my view] is often just the nature of these exchanges. You can then choose not to engage me on these threads and move on to others.
If “for all practical purposes” I am drawn and quartered when confronting conflicting goods, when confronting “I” as an existential contraption, when confronting political economy as the final arbiter out in the real world, when confronting my own death as the obliteration of “I”, that is fractured enough believe me.
Okay, but what on earth does that mean? What part of your reaction when confronting the values of others who don’t share your own seems to be more on solid ground? And what part seems instead to be just the embodiment of “I” as an existential contrapment such that you recognize that had your life been very different you might easily have embrace the opposite point of point? And then in turn recognizing that even if you had embraced the opposite value neither is necessarily good or bad.
In a No God world.
Well, if you call me honestly and introspectively believing that this…
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
…is just me whining, then our understanding of the limitations of philosophy out in the is/ought world are clearly not in sync.
Of course: Huffing and puffing. Making me the issue.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
And, by and large, I speculate that this revolves largely around the possibility that I have hit a nerve. Sure, far more with the objectivists, but not altogether out of the question with the “less tortured” pragmatists like you.
That’s what I’m saying: it’s nonsense. But if you mean something by it, then what do you mean?
I told you before: something exists in terms of a context. But the totality of everything has no context in which to exist, so it can’t be thought of in that way: as existing. It doesn’t exist unless you specify what it exists in relation to, and since there is nothing not already contained in the totality that is everything, then there is nothing that the totality can be said to exist in relation to.
But did you orchestrate the creation of the flesh and blood you? Did you give yourself brown or blue eyes?
lol
Yep, so there you go.
There are no “laws” of physics. There are only observed regularities and there is not enough evidence to proclaim them laws.
Mechanical contraptions vs thought contraptions. I get it.
There is no objective reality.
All of em.
Why?
Contraption = concept
The contraption known as reacting applied to a concept known as fact describing concepts known as names, such as John Doe, and concepts such as poisons and yada yada.
The smurf smurfed the smurfy smurf before it smurfed the smurf. All contraptions.
Demonstrate that the color red exists to a blind man. I can only demonstrate what you can see. Simply see that absolute anything cannot exist and there is your demonstration, but I can’t make you see that, especially if you’re determined not to.
First you have to see that existence is always relational. What something is is determine just as much by how the beholder is put together as it does how the object is put together. There is no such thing as a object existing in an objective way.
Where “god and scripture” means “pulled from my ass” lol
Not that I’m aware of nor can imagine.
All of em. You can’t use a thing itself to prove a thing is true. Like the bible is true because it says it’s true.
There are no dots, just is just the whole thing, but you cut it apart and ask how this affects that, but forgot that it’s all one thing and there is no this or that independent of the whole. Cut it this way and see there is a different way of joining them back together than if you had cut it some other way.
Here’s a way to bring it down to earth: Feynman recounted a time he was investigating his estimation of the passage of time, so he’d count and found counting to 48 was about a minute. Then he’d do chores while counting to see if there were any effects (there were none), but he found he could not talk while counting. He was at Princeton at the time and met up with a mathematician who expressed disbelief that he could not talk and count, and found it incredible that he could read while counting. So they compared notes and found that Feynman was using a verbal center of his brain to count while the mathematician was using a visual center, so Feynman could read and count, but not talk; and the mathematician could talk, but not read. There’s two ways of cutting apart the same problem, which is how to use a brain to count. Why one or the other? Idk, that’s a new problem to cut up.
Induction and deduction are not the same as observation and deduction. Observation and deduction are the same thing, just with different sense organs. The empirical proof that empirical proof is relevant is observed empirically. The foundation supports itself. Outside of circular arguments, where is the proof? There is none. How do you prove logic is true without using logic? How do you prove what you see is what you see without appealing to what you see?
Of course.
What the heck? Define existence of existence itself. If you’re going to use it in a sentence, define what it means.
Either the whole determined universe is you or there is no you. Either way works. There is either an environment or an organism, but not both. As long as you divide them up, you’re going to wonder which is determining the other.
But the real question here is can those perspectives be exhausted? Can the universe ever really know itself? No.
There is no moral obligation to choose one over the other. I’d choose the one that causes the least pain to me. Because of the way I’m wired up, that might be the baby. But if I were a lizard, it would be the apple. It’s all rooted in empathy which is a higher cognitive process not found in lizards. Lizards and psychopaths have no mechanism to feel certain kinds of pain.
The only thing that matters is how much pain you feel. You will always do what’s best for you.
There is some meat! 
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y[/youtube]
that’s where I discovered
05:31
at least in this very simple operation
05:33
of counting the great difference in what
05:36
goes on in a head when people think
05:39
they’re doing the same thing and so it
05:42
struck me therefore if that’s already
05:44
true at the most elementary level that
05:47
when we learn the mathematics and the
05:48
bus’ll functions and the Exponential’s
05:50
and the electric fields and all these
05:52
things that the imagery’s and method by
05:56
which we’re storing it all and the way
05:58
we think about it could be really if we
06:01
could get to each other’s heads entirely
06:03
different and in fact why somebody
06:06
sometimes has a great deal of difficulty
06:08
understanding a point which you see is
06:09
obvious and vice-versa
06:12
it may be because it’s a little hard to
06:14
translate what you just said into his
06:15
particular framework and so on now I’m
06:18
talking like a psychologist that you
06:19
know I know nothing about this
change my mind
What is “mind”? As opposed to what?
Actually, when I think about it, until I understand existence itself [if it can even be understood], I have no way of knowing if it can be defined. And you have no way in which to know if defining it is nonsense.
And what I mean by it is simply this: that I think that I exist.
That’s all it takes, right?
Instead, you insist that…
As though infinitesimally tiny specks of existence like you and I can actually assert things like this as anything other than intellectual gibberish.
I did not “orchestrate” my own existence but I do seem to be around to point that out. Then we’re back to situating that observation in an understanding of existence itself.
Depends on how broadly you want to define “laws”. And the assumption that one can actually grasp an entirely objective and all-inclusive definition. One that encompasses all interactions in the either/or world going back to whatever brought into existence the first interaction. Or a precise understanding of why there have never not been interactions.
Come on, in a world where it is presumed that human autonomy does in fact exist, an apple is an apple. Reacting to the fact that someone poisoned the president’s apple and killed him engenders consequences that are construed subjectively [differently] by different individuals.
Only in an entirely determined world would the definition of an apple and our reaction to what any particular apple is used for be interchangable. Or so it seems to me.
That is just more intellectual gibberish to me. Imagine noting this to folks demonstrating outside an abortion clinic.
Yeah, but relationships in the either/or world do tend to stand the test of time. Whereas our reaction to these relationships revolving around things like abortion and assassinating presidents are still all across the board.
Right, like you can actually know beyond all doubt that God does not exist.
On the other hand, one is able to demonstrate that the bible she is holding in her hand exists. Assuming of course that reality here is not a sim world or a demonic dream or something of that sort.
I note this…
And you respond…
What I aim to explore here is the dots that are connected between “I” and the things that I choose to do – go bowling? rob a bank? masturbate? kill someone?
How are experiences of this sort related to “fundamental forces”? What of these experiences can we pin down factually, and what of them can be encompassed morally or rationally or epistemologically?
Again, you see this as addressing the point I am making, but I do not. What I want is to take this sort of “general description” intellectual assessment down to earth. A context in which flesh and blood human beings interact.
Back again to that: defining the existence of existence itself! Something that [in my view] can only be grasped “intellectually” “theoretically” in a “world of words” inside one’s head.
Unless of course you can explain existence itself. Explain why something exists rather than nothing at all. Explain why this something exist instead of something else.
Given, for example, this part:
It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.
And this explains what exactly? Situate this particular observation existentially out in the world that we interact in.
The real question and the real answer? And yet the only thing that I can reasonably conclude is that here and now [or, rather, there and then] you believe this to be true “in your head”. And that this is demonstration enough for you.
I get that part, believe me.
In my view, in a No God world there is no essential moral obligation that a mere mortal can fall back on. But that observation in and of itself is predicated on the existential contraption that is “I”.
There may well be an essesntial obligation that over the course of living my life I have yet to come upon. Maybe in the next thread I click on here I will find it. But even then coming to believe that this encompasses [philosophically, deontologically] an essential moral obligation and demonstrating it in any particular context are two different things.
And what this is all rooted in [in my view] is the particular confluence of genes and memes encompassing “I” here and now out in a particular world construed in a particular way.
Then in what I am able to demonstrate that all reasonable men and women are obligated to believe in turn. Then in connecting the dots here between that and all that can be known about the existence of existence itself.
Which “in reality” I am not even remotely capable of doing. Anymore in my view than you are.
Again, everything here is embedded in a particular context which affords you particular options. The only thing that really matters is the extent to which one of those options allows me to do what’s best for me.
You may believe that saving yourself and letting the baby die is best for you. But others might insist that you were morally obligated to at least try to save the baby first.
Then what?