Hume was an idiot

Yes, absolutely. I am in awe of how well you write these things.

There exist levels of is’s and of oughts, like patterns in the tectonic fabric of life-spans and history-spans. These patterns appear, if not actually fractal, then at least highly geometrical, to me. From the 5th dimension (consciousness) we can observe these patterns crisscross each other and create wider and more concentrated effects, gatherings of power. The individual is as you say, “allowed” to live by virtue of his situation (or is not allowed to live, as the case may be), and assuming he is allowed to live will go through those stages of realization as you say. The ought generates from the is of the individual, but the is of the individual is the product of the oughts of others. (These oughts of others also repeating the pattern, as being the is of other individuals or social relations, which themselves are the consequence of the oughts of others…).

So there exists a spiraling-upward of is/ought relations in which humans are caught up, like a fish haplessly pulled up into the sky by a spinning typhoon. We are pulled up by the assumption of the vast history of which we are a representation, and the entirety of our lifespan exudes and reflects upon this history, and contributes toward the growing history that will shape the next stage of is/ought relationality; the upper limit, the threshold.

We need to find oughts that are able to produce a greater is from a lesser, to paraphrase what you said… yes, this is perfect. What other “moral” obligation could be greater than this? What could morality even mean, other than this? But it would mean the mere playing-out of the total-historical necessity of the individual’s own is, which is the sort of morality that I have been examining here and critiquing as insubstantial. So at this point (and thank you for entering this discussion, by the way) I conclude that there are two levels or degrees of morality, one being the kind which Hume responds to and which is actually nothing more than the naive expression of an is, in a form which acts upon that is in a way so as to blind or potentiate certain aspects of itself to itself, but always within the confines of the extant is-ness, and then there is the morality that deliberately situates two is’s next to each other, in order to produce a variance, an acceleration between them, in order to ‘shift’ the impetus and power from one to the other.

Morality at the behest of is, is as a consequence of ought, as a consequence of (lower) is… this is literally a tectonic formula, f(x) and f’(x’), for instance, within the fabric of existing materialities, such formula as acts to directly raise those variables to which it applies itself.

I’m equally confused as to how you can still be misconstruing my position so horribly. I hate to suspect it may be intentional to some degree. My position is that pain ought to be avoided if not for some greater pleasure or benefit.

That pain ought to be avoided is the starting point, not the conclusion. The conclusion is generally of the form that I ought, or ought not, do this or that. I derive the ought from an is based on that axiom.

And for the record, I would never call Hume an idiot. He is something of an intellectual hero of mine. I’m not even saying the is/ought problem isn’t a problem. I just don’t get how it is. That could very well be due to a lack of understanding on my part.

You disagree that poison is always harmful? The moment it is no longer harmful, it ceases to be poison. So, yes, poison is always harmful by definition. I can prove it by inviting you to look up the definition or ingest poison and report back.

Arsenic, cyanide, mercury, snake venom, etc have all been used as medicine.

So if you ingest arsenic and it kills you, then arsenic is poison. If you ingest arsenic and it doesn’t kill you, then arsenic is not poison. If you ingest arsenic and it cures you of a disease, then arsenic is medicine.

The amount of a substance factors into whether it is a poison. Carbon dioxide poisoning only happens when there is too much of it. Carbon dioxide isn’t even close to being a poison… until there is too much of it.

People have died from drinking too much water.

Yeah, that was my first thought, but…

If it harms you, it’s poison. Just about anything you can ingest, including medicine, can be poisonous.

Yes, absolutely.

Yep, that’s called water poisoning.

MM - thank you, I hope I will continue to make as much sense.

Yes, there is automatic morality and deliberate morality. Let’s look at these through the lens of Nietzsche, who laid the groundwork for morality be understood in terms of its components, “drives”.

The task as you outline it means: to disentangle the drives that make up the “Humean” morality , and see them in light of “good and bad” or “weak/diseased and strong/vital”. This is deriving an “is” from an “ought”. We can define, as Nietzsche would do, the typical Northern European Christian in terms of what he believes and how he acts in response to his beliefs.

For example, what distinguishes a (Nietzschean) strong man from a weak man within the bounds of European Protestantism (I keep the context limited to avoid contradictions where possible) is that the strong man will necessarily be a sinner, and, if he is a Christian, be troubled by that. In this Christianity, strength equals unhappiness. Its slightly less forbidding in Catholicism, the Church arranged for that with confession, intoxication, celebration, etc.

So Humean morality here would be simply very confused. It would not be able to distinguish the person from his context, thus it would not be able to see the two different drives (vital strength and Christian conviction) as different origins, different “is”'s. But to create morality from the given conditions, which is what we’re “planning” here, we can disregard the Christian conviction itself, and work with the strength with which the conviction is held instead. So then we have a) vital strength and b) strength of conviction. We have these two components of a man, without having an ought. Now we can produce an ought for these two strengths to attain to, strictly to maximize the value of these strength to the one who has it.

Now to draw to this logic to our own situation, to situation of a present-day human, and for this experiment we need a strong one. In order to derive a greater is from a lesser using an ought, we have to observe the lesser is, the present. What we need to do for that is to distinguish the drives of which he is composed, disentangle them, establish what shall(/can) be the top-drive, and then interpret all these other drives in terms of their value to the top drive.

For this, the top drive has to be “symbolized”, made Signifier of a logos.
In the case of the strong Protestant/sinner, this is precisely what Nietzsche did.
The method is sufficiently given by Nietzsche, but only in the form of his application of it, which departs from a very specific context - the Northern European man defined to himself in terms of protestantism. It still holds value extrapolated as Man defined in terms Christianity, but is already less potent there. He did not perceive the drive-structure of an Italian as well as he perceived his own.

So what matters to us here is not Christianity or Anti-Christianity at all, that is Nietzsche’s problem. Our directive is to dissect our own drive-structure, identify these drives not by their actual objects, but by the type of objects to which they may pertain.

Something else; you mentioned consciousness as a 5th dimension perspective. Could you explain this?

Consciousness is a perspective on and of 4-dimensional material relations, such relations being 3-dimensional material structures “vectoring” through time. Time is only a “dimension” with respect to whatever is able to constitute itself as a consequence of being an entity that has temporal structures and experiences-- basically, memory and then later projection-imagination. So to view the body as this kind of 4-dimensional structure lets us view consciousness as the “5th dimension” through which the body as 4-dimensional coheres and organizes itself even more essentially. If the body is a kind of perspective upon 3-dimensional existence modeled in a 4th dimension, then consciousness seems to be a kind of perspective upon 4-dimensional existence modeled in a 5th dimension. The “time of time”, or t^2.

The word ‘poison’ is commonly used as a wrapper around a set of substances which, when ingested, usually cause physical harm. The way that you are using it seems to be tied to the result of ingesting the substance. The fact that the result is unknown ahead of time and the variability of results makes it difficult to use the word correctly.
For example:
A: Did you put poison into his wine?
B: Yes I did.
A: Is he dead or sick?
B: No
A: Then you did not put poison into his wine.
B: Err

Or
A: Put poison into his wine.
B: What is poison in this case?
A: Something which causes him harm and makes him die.
B: I don’t know what will harm him until he ingests it and reacts. Poison is only poison in hindsight.

Right.
Now, in order to begin creating a morality, we would have to map this consciousness.
whereas philosophy until Nietzsche has been an exploration of consciousness from within, culminating in Kant who established the limits of consciousness as objective a priori considerations, the philosopher has now become aware that he needs to step out of his consciousness if he is to judge its validity. That means that philosophy has become fully experiential - the perspective on consciousness can only be verified by applying this consciousness in a higher order, including more consciousnesses.

In a sense this would mean to step out of the 5th dimension into the 6th. I propose that this dimension be viewed as vision of power, or consciousness of power.

There is also rational morality.

The good thing about rational morality is that you can actually KNOW it, not just guess at it.

Which you still have to implement deliberately.
By deliberate morality I mean a system of behavior that is consciously adopted in order to attain a certain goal.
Automatic morality is unconsciously implemented to attain no specific goal but to be acceptable to the people from who this morality was adopted.

What I see as a deliberate morality is a morality specifically designed to attain a goal. This morality must be rational in order to attain that goal.

In short, what is a rational morality to you?
Can you explain the reason why this morality is rational?

Then, can you explain it without basing the explanation on the purpose it is meant to fulfill?
I would think that you can’t, that for a morality to be rational, there must be a purpose to it.

Setting aside the is-ought problem, which has received attention here, it’s unclear to me what you see in some of Hume’s other positions that qualifies him as an “idiot.” For instance:

Are you saying that Hume claimed that there is a gap between cause and effect, and that he was an idiot for claiming so? If that’s what you mean, where does Hume make that claim? It seems to me that you have misunderstood his basic position.

And in this:

You’re implying that Hume’s position is this: “Induction is problematic.” But you haven’t really said why. In what follows, you say:

Are you suggesting that Hume was not armed with the philosophical knowledge of the difference between the two? Of course he knew the difference between induction and deduction. And finally:

You seem to be implying that what Hume thought was problematic about induction can be solved by means of the correct application of it (as a kind of inference, perhaps?), but where does Hume, in discussing induction, “do it” incorrectly? In each of these cases, you seem to me to have basic misunderstandings of Hume’s positions. On what grounds, then, can you call him an idiot?

I actually like Hume, I was being deliberately provocative. As for induction, causality and is-ought, these are problems for Hume, although not fatal ones of course. My point was to refine these a bit, but being new here (and this subject has been beaten to death so many times) a new sort of approach is needed, or at least I thought so.

In effect, Hume introduces two voids, one between induction and deduction, and the other between is and ought statements. My point was essentially that both of these voids are somewhat “lazy” thinking and, while reflecting accurate issues are by no means the final word concerning them; each void can be more properly viewed as the necessary result of a particular lack, a lack of perspective/consciousness capacity.

In the case of the first void, deduction and induction diverge from the common ancestor… consciousness itself. Consciousness IS the unity of both, and the proper relation of each to the other in a larger synthetic system. It is not a “problem” that induction is not deductive, just as it is not a problem that deduction is not inductive. As Hume notes correctly, people will claim deductive certainty from inductive observations, which obviously is false certainty. However this is merely another problem of incomplete perspective, and not a reflection on induction and deduction themselves. Proper thinking and perceiving requires the use of both, and each limits and conditions the other.

In the case of the second void, is and ought are not statements about essentially different kinds of things/facts; ought always reduces to is (either correctly or incorrectly). Ought is the application of certain “is” to other “is”, the one modeling or reflecting the other to produce a “value”. Values are the basis of oughts, usually implicitly and often naively. Hume’s guillotine does not demonstrate the irrationality of “ought” (normative) claims, rather it mistakes from where normative claims come and what they truly are.

I’m having an especially difficult time comprehending the following sentence:

Do you mean to say:

If so, I must confess: I have absolutely no idea what any of that means.

Here’s something much more interesting: the “problem” of induction was not “introduced” by Hume (if that’s what you are referring to when you refer to “gaps” and “voids”). It was stated in almost the same language as Hume stated it, earlier by Leibniz. And furthermore: the “problem” goes at least as far back as Sextus Empiricus. Much more interesting than trying to assign laziness to Hume’s thinking: why do you think he revived it?