Morality is fake and doesn’t exist

Do you think they exist in the same way that apples do?

Well, according to nominalism, or at least according to one version of nominalism, there are no apples out there in the world. This is because the word “apple” is a reference to a universal. A universal is something that can be instantiated; something that has instances, known as its particulars. Apples can be of different sizes, shapes and colors; they can exist at different points in time and space; they can have different chemical compositions; and so on. Clearly, the word “apple” refers to a universal. It refers to something that can exist in many different forms. Thus, a nominalist would have to argue, rather strangely, that apples do not exist; that they are mere concepts or names.

I don’t think this is helpful at all.

You can define existence, truth and reality as identical for simplicity, but you lose out on utility from all the nuances that you can get if you define them differently.

Consider Popper’s pluralism of existence across 3 worlds: physical stuff, mental stuff inspired from the physical, and structured concepts inspired by the mental. You might say a spade that you’re picking up is real because it has a physical manifestation, but an imagined, dreamed or hallucinated spade isn’t real even though it exists mentally - and these definitions give you extra explanatory power through differentiating between existence and reality. You might say that the fact that you are holding such a spade, if you are, is true, but the fact that you are holding 2 spades is false, if you’re not - even if you are maybe imagining that you are holding a 2nd spade in your other hand. This differentiates between existence and truth by validating the existence of falsity in the mental world if not the physical - which can apply to both the real or the not-real.

Perhaps you would rather step away from this common way of using the words in question in favour of a less efficient way of using them - by saying that it exists, it is real and it is true that you are holding a physical manifestation of a spade, not holding an imagined spade, and the imagined spade exists as an imagined spade, and it is both real and true that this is the case. In this case you would just swapped one way of explaining the same thing with another one that tends to require more words to explain: semantics. You would have gained simplicity in definition at the cost of efficiency, in order to neither gain or lose any explanatory power. I would simply ask: what’s the point?

We all know that you aren’t going to run into fictional characters in the street, but you can either apply Occam’s Razor to the words you use to describe their existence, reality and truth - or not, not that Occam’s Razor is objectively mandatory…

I think this whole thread is turning into a bit of a mess over what words to choose to describe what we all know are identical things.

Maybe more like oranges.

Rather than discard morals and values altogether on the one hand, or absolutize them on the other, I would rather get creative with them.
My morals and values are grounded on my thoughts and feelings about how the world, and the people and things in it, should be.
Feelings come and go, I try to find some consistency in them (value(s), however imperfect.
People, places and things feelings are reacting to also come and go and one thing leads to another, I try to find ways of maximiizng what I consider to be good, while minimizing the bad (act consequentialism).
Overtime, I find some consistency in this too, which become my morals (rule consequentialism).

Morals and values don’t have to be objective, anymore than beauty does.
We try to bring value to the world, just as we try to beautify it.
For me, essentially morals and values are a response to the world, rather than mere emotional reactions to it.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with reacting to it.
There is a time for plans and principles, and there’s a time for reaction, improvisation, spontaneity

Not because God said, or because society, something external compelling us, but because that’s how we feel, that’s how we want things to be.
We’re never all going to agree, and we don’t have to, some conflict is unavoidable.

Would you not agree that these are values that you hold?

I would say that morals are grounded on ones values, if one possesses oneself. If not, a persons values are unknown to him and morals are imposed on him from the outside, which is deplorable and yet all too common.

So do I, with more and more succes over the years since I work with the self valuing logic.
Id be interested to learn where you are successful in finding consistency, and where it proves especially difficult.

I first had to discover how much of what I considered good is actually extremely bad for me. Im talking about the “love” given by certain people from my past - such “love” can be a true curse. When people value you in their terms, and when these terms are bad for you, and you go along with that, even in the slightest, that can ruin your life.

It is good to find out how people love you, what it is that they see in you. What they love in you may be your downfall or unhappiness or weakness. Especially the latter is common.

I find the dichotomy objective/subjective very problematic. Every statement requires a perspective, that seems to be an objective truth, yet it implies that truths must be subjective.

Values also determine which parts of the world come to us, arrive in our consciousness. So indeed it is more than a mere reaction.

And it is much easier to improvise and react with success if one has solid principles and a clear consciousness of them.

I agree.

Apples and mathematical sets both exist. Both are real. Both have substance, both mean something, both have effects on other things. Both are something delimited and which is not something else.

I see from you only the typical bullshit materialist arguments; rather than acknowledge that mathematical sets exist, because it’s crazy to say they don’t since we can actually talk about them and use them and know what they are, just try to turn the tables and make the other person explain their fundamental ontological categories. It’s deceptive.

Your standard is “dur I can like see it and pick it up so that’s what ‘exists’ means”, that’s fucking retarded, pardon my French. Things exist if they exist, its truistic. Whatever happens to be the case is the case. Ideas exist, as ideas. Apples exist as apples, numbers exist as numbers. Would be nice to develop a comprehensive ontoepistemological system of categorization to relate the how/why of all those sort of things to each other, but philosophy is too stupid for that. It’s still trying to think backwards, from “do maths exist?” as if that were a legitimate premise. You can’t think backwards from false questions, you have to think forward from true questions and build from there. Anything else is cart before the horse metaphysical bullshit and has nothing to do with philosophy.

Proper philosophy proceeds from a real and certain question and creates step by step explanations that build on and up from there. What is a mathematical set? A group of numbers, or a group of things other than numbers. What are numbers? Quantities. What is quantity? The fact that there can be one or more of something. What is “the fact that there can be one or more of something”? A basic logical fact, deriving from the fact that everything isn’t all one thing; deriving from the fact that differentiation exists and relation is possible. The basic facts of differentiation and relation lead to the further fact of quantity. But how to understand quantity in terms of sameness or difference between things quantified?

This is because we can always scale up our consideration and understanding to a point where similarities are understood to exist between even very disparate things. We derive this understanding of sameness from the fact that such sameness is the case in fact. An apple and an orange look, taste, feel, smell and sound different, but we nonetheless understand there is a sameness between them and thus we understand what it means to quantify an apple and an orange as “two of something”. This is so basic I shouldn’t even need to lay it out, but apparently I do. So that same operation is taken to further levels and you are able to generate sameness between even more disparate things, like apples and mathematical sets.

Why am I the only one doing any of this fucking work? You pretend to be a philosopher and I don’t see any evidence that you are. Empty materialism and evasive simplistic questions meant to shift the onus on the other person and put them on the defensive by framing issues in obfuscating ways is not… philosophy. Asking “do they exist in the same way” is not at all touching on the basic point I made, that they both exist.

You are choosing to ignore this, and shifting the goalposts to “how” or “in what way” do they exist. We aren’t even there yet, that would take a fuck lot more work of the kind I just exampled briefly above, but I’m not going to sit here and do it for you. I don’t think for other people, fuck that.

Both apples and mathematical sets exist, that is a fact. You can acknowledge this as either true or false if you have any interest in being honest. And then only after we get to an agreement on that issue can we begin to do some phenomenological, ontological and epistemological investigations to try and get to some of the how/why/what does it mean.

Which version of nominalism is that?

So what does it mean to be a “type”?

Well to start with tokens, you experience this whole plethora of sensation and some areas of it appear to change from one point to the next comparatively little, and then the next point along might be comparatively suddenly more different - and this might even be the eventual case in all directions from that initial point, creating what might be termed an “outline” - within which is a thing distinct from that which is outside of that thing’s outline: a token of a thing.

Exploring more around that particular token, you might find another outlined area that accords with the initial token’s area. For now, it might be sufficient to identify one token as similar to another. This might continue to happen spatiotemporally until you have lots of sufficiently similar tokens stimulating similar neural pathways and identifying as a similar enough thing… a type of thing. Name it as you will.

Take in an entire sensory experience more or less at once, and certain tokens of things may appear as sufficiently similar enough to a sufficiently distinct degree to be 1 type, and even more things might appear as sufficiently similar enough to a sufficiently different degree as an even more abstracted “type”. Different sets within different sets.

Now do the same thing you did with tokens, but with types - and you get abstract relations.
How about doing the same thing with types of movements rather than simply static appearances - and you get the abstract notion of behaviour.
Why stop there? Do the same thing temporally between behaviours, to get reason and to even infer intention from an expected pre-cursor to a recognised behaviour.
And what do we have here? From just the basic ingredients of a discriminating experientialism and memory, we can perceive customs, pre-dispositions: morals.

Well fuck me, looks like morality isn’t fake and it exists :icon-rolleyes:

Yeah, it is pretty fucking obvious that morality exists.

:laughing:

Nice absolutely black and white reduction of everything I had said so far in this thread. Obviously you read very little here, and thought about it even less.

Now, don’t be like that. Wheres your sense of humor anyway?

Next - how can you be so sure that it is obvious I have read very little here, “and thought about it even less”? I dont see how you would get that from what I wrote.

:-k

I can assure you that I have thought in depth about the existence of morality. I am not limited to older philosophical ideals.

Platitudes spoken reveal the equally shallow minds that speak them.

In the case that he has either blocked my posts (can you do that?) or doesn’t read them anymore, he may have missed why your response wasn’t at all an absolutely black and white reduction of everything he said so far in this thread.

If I were forced to guess, I would guess you are either half my age or on drugs.

If you are on his “Foe” list then your posts will not show by default - he would have to purposefully click to show the post.

Yes he’s all about censorship viewtopic.php?f=6&t=193931#p2697763

Jesus, that would be ironic wouldn’t it!!!

He certainly isn’t deficient in irony:

Racists are scum but morality doesn’t exist.

Free speech is an inalienable right but we must censor the immoral racist scum.

Then he uses words like “kek”, but he’s not racist.

This is all so confusing :confused: Perhaps he’s pms-ing? :confusion-shrug:

Funny you should say that - I was thinking the same thing.