On the other hand, my whole point was to note that in contemplating the Tao, I have no understanding of it at all.
In particular how Taoists make a distinction between ontology and teleology as the embodiment of a God, the God, my God, and how they encompass them instead.
Did it all just “pop” into the head of the first Taoists? Were they just fortunate in not having to actually demonstrate the existence of Why and How existence itself came to be as it is, in the manner in which No God folks in the West, will confront the religionists here?
Or is it all just what they believe it is and, as luck would have it, what they believe it is brings them a considerable amount of mental, emotional and psychological comfort and consolation?
That’s precisely my point. There is what we think we know about Taoism here and now. Then there is all that we don’t know about it. Then there is all that can be known about it.
How on earth is this not the embodiment of “I” derived from a particular sequence of experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge. And all the way from the cradle to the grave?
And obviously both ways of arriving at values may change over time. It would seem reading this that the first one is going to be stable and a problem with the second one is that it might change (which could be anxiety causing, sure) but in fact both can lead to changes in values over time. In fact the first pretty much demands it, while many in traditional societies and religions (thus in the second group) often have stayed, for example, in their church, and not changed over time.
Further they are more than two ways…
I’d like to come at it differently. Many religions present a top down set of values. Here are the values, from God, that you need to live up to. To me this splits you against yourself and also presumes that what one needs is an external authority that tells you (generally) what portions of your desires and emotions are bad and that you need to jail.
There can be bottom up approaches, where the idea is that problems arise when you ASSUME you have to have this split: one part jails the other. Contain the beast within and so on.
The interesting thing is modern secular intellectuals and technocrats believe this also.
On the surface they seem like opponents of the traditionally religious. But to me this is only about
WHERE
and
HOW
one gets the top down, split yourself, values.
And both, actually, take side, in the brain against the limbic system.
One could also ask: what if one had a deity (or secular presumptions) who did not think you were made wrong and needed to hate portions of yourself?
Whether the changes occur as a result of a concerted effort on someone’s part to finally probe the morality of abortion in depth, or occur adventiously as a result of changes beyond someone’s control or attempt to understand, it doesn’t get “I” any closer to pinning down definitively if in fact abortion is either moral or immoral. Other than for some “in their heads”.
The part about dasein, conflicting goods and political economy don’t go away.
This part doesn’t go away either:
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.
Or, rather, so it still seems to me.
For me, it remains two different manifestations of objectivsms. One for those who philosophize themselves into a deontological political agenda, and another for those who just stumble into one as a result a particular sequence of experiences, relationships and access to information, knowledge, ideas and ideals.
Religions and their secular equivalents: Kantian deontologists, Marxist ideologues, Ayn Rand Objectivists, liberal and conservative political idealists, Satyr and his ilks worship of all things Nature.
But: however the values are construed – from the top, from the bottom – the objectivists cling to the assumption that their own values reflect an inherent, necessary attachment to one true substantive Self then able to be anchored to the right thing to do.
Also, the argument you make here would, in my view, become more intelligible if you chose instead to illustrate the points by examining them in a particular context. Cite examples of those who come at this from the top rather than the bottom…or the bottom rather than the top.
Hm, what I wrote had to do with what you wrote. What you wrote in response to that had nothing to do with what I wrote. Hm.
Right, but for some reason you cling to a top down way of finding your own values. You may not be an objectivist about values, but the way to get values is top down for you. And you seem to treat this as objective. It’s not.
From the top: Iamb tries to find, via the internet, values that he ought to live by. He does this by asking for arguments that would convince every rational person that abortion is right (or wrong). Once he found an argument it would have to function top down. Let’s say he encounters an argument that proves to every rational person that abortion is wrong. Well regardless of his own feelings, he would then have to judge the choices of female friends who get abortions as wrong.
Me: I am not fond of abortions. That’s how that feels to me. But I want woman to be able to terminate. Those are my values. I find those values in me. They no doubt have to do with a whole range of feelings about what I want and don’t want and feelings I have about other people and the world. this has played out in a couple of instances where women I knew wanted to either discuss or get abortions. I do not think this is the objectively correct moral decision. I don’t think it either can be demonstrated to be so or that I have done this. That’s bottom up. I am not looking for a morality to then MAKE myself conform to.
You sit now with both sets of arguments: pro and con abortion. Both those sets of arguments are functioning top down for you. I am sure you also have preference based values also. That’s a lot of splits. The head telling the feelings pro arguments, the head telling the feelings con arguments. A lot of F&F, because you are seeking objective answers, even if you think they are likely none out there. That’s what you want and you strive to find them. And so the top down process is happening in you and making you more F&F. Most people are top down. Scientists generally are very top down, for example, about morals. Most people are. They presume that they must have a morality to force/compel them, in some way, to do the right thing. You don’t have one, but you are seeking one. One that should convince everyone. With words.
And, by the way, I have done this before, with specific examples.
We’ll just have to allow others to decide for themselves the extent to which this is true.
Here again, however, we need a discussion of an actual context so that you are able to note more perspicuously my “top down” approach to finding values. After all, given that I root moral and political value judgments in the actual sequence of experiences and relationships that any particular individual comes to embody from the cradle to the grave, it’s always seemed considerably more “down” than “up” to me.
Unless, of course, this is a “technical” thing.
No, I try to find arguments that might convince me that the manner in which I construe the embodiment of moral and political values in my signature threads is not nearly as reasonable as [here and now] I think it is.
Only in this way might I come in turn to entertain the possibility that in a No God world [an assumption] all rational people are obligated to think and feel and behave categorically and imperatively this way instead of that.
Encompassed then in a particular set of circumstances.
Or, let’s say he encounters an argument that proves to every rational person that abortion is right. Well regardless of his own feelings, he would then have to judge the choices of female friends who get abortions as right.
Yep, that’s how it would work if a definitive moral argument was discovered/invented. Only, here and now, the objectivists already have that argument, don’t they? Just ask them.
But what if, instead, it is somehow proven that how one thinks and feels about the morality of abortion, is in fact in sync with the components of my own rendition of moral nihilism?
That each and every “I” here is the embodiment of 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.
Then I would shift the discussion to how, if this is the case, another’s “I” is not as fractured and fragmented as mine.
Here for example are your own particular political prejudices [rooted existentially in dasein, in my view] regarding the issue:
So, you are willing to admit that had your experiences in the past been very different, you might well be espousing a conservative point of view instead. And, in turn, given that both the liberals and the conservatives are able to raise points the other side can’t make go away, there appears no way in which to pin down [philosophically or otherwise] anything approaching a deontological agenda.
Me too. Only given the existential parameters of my own psychological makeup here, “I” find myself considerably more “fractured and fragmented” than you. But: It seems entirely reasonable to me that in a No God world one would be drawn and quartered in the face of conflicting goods.
Again, this is your own rendition of me. Your own rendition of top/down.
What I am seeking are not answers but arguments able to persuade me that there are answers. Arguments embedded in the manner in which I approach such things as the morality of abortion on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382
In fact, I seek your own rendition of this “existential trajectory”.
What’s New About The New Atheism?
Victor Stenger answers the question.
And around and around they go. Science and religion probing that which neither camp is able to either access or assess except within that gap between what any of us think we know about God here and now, all that can be known about God, and the relationship between all that can be known about God and all that can be known about existence itself.
Me, I’m still more or less in the camp that insist the burden of proof here lies with those who insist that something does exist. Rather than on those to prove that it does not. It’s like conjuring up a Matrix reality in a film, believing it is true, and arguing that it is incumbent on the skeptics to demonstrate that it is not the reality we live in.
Does anyone really believe that performing scientific experiments regarding prayer is the way to go in establishing God’s existence? After all, an omnipotent God, given His own mysterious ways and His own mysterious reasons can create any result He deems necessary. Then the part where science squares these experiments with an omniscient God. As though they actually have the capacity to freely choose to do so.
Instead, it gets tangled up in all the things we still do not know that we still do not know about everything encompassed in reality itself.
I applaud those in the scientific community who are at least willing to probe these things experimentally. Better that than more or less blind leaps of faith. I just can’t imagine any conclusion able to be demonstrated given the gaps that most intrigue me here.
And I do that. But as usual you speak about what ‘we need’ in this case (a universalizing or objectifization of what you want…)
Your wants are not what we need or one needs or any other of your usual objectivizing your own values.
Those are not mutually exclusive and you repeatedly ask people to demonstrate how one ought to live such that all rational people would have to agree.
Well, actually, since you consider yourself rational, you would then be convinced. Which is exactly what I said you are asking people to do.
You’re heading off on a tangent. I am describing what you are doing and have done in threads for years: asking people to show you those arguments.
Labeling them prejudices is a negative value judgment. You behave, with regularity, like an objectivist.
I said this years ago, you ass. Seriously what is wrong with you.
I made no claim that it would go away. In fact I have generally assumed it will not. What is wrong with you, you ass.
I have never seen you mount an argument that would convince all rational people that I should feel drawn and quartered. Your reaction is your reaction. As usual you are universalizing and making objective your own personal reactions to something. You seem not to notice that there is a wide set of human reactions to change, death, impermanence, sex, and…just about everything.
Well, obviously. What is wrong with your brain. You could try to show that rendition is incorrect, for example, but telling me it is my rendition is moronic.
Well, duh.
First off the fact that you are top down is shown precisely in how you have described your being F & F. You have heard the arguments of two sides of the abortion issue, for example, and cannot determine who is right. That is top down. Ideas in the head causing your values. Objective claims causing splits. EVen if you do not believe in their objectivity, they have led to splits in, as per your own descriptions.
Further, to know that there are answers one would need an example of a specific moral that could be demonstrated. Which is what you ask for. Which means you ask for specific arguments for specific morals, like around abortion, you fucking moron. So the first thing you will get if you ever get the answer of whether their are answers or not is a specific answer. And that will, should it come, immediately obligate you to agree with it. Since it would be a totally convincing to all rational people argument, in favor or against abortion, your moron.
And then it is top down from there. Regardless of how you felt, you’d have to go along with it.
Me, I don’t give a fuck about these hallucinated not present arguments. I am making my way in the world as best I can.
Which is what you are doing also, though you don’t seem to notice. And the truly funny thing is that you cling to your search for a top down process even though it makes you F &F. If you could actually read and take seriously what any other human wrote, I might feel sympathy, and even have at times, but you go back to hitting yourself in the head with your hammer and finding ways not to learn a thing from anyone else and I’ll find it funnier and funnier.
Let’s say there are two modes of secular existence. One is self-assured the other is alienated. By definition, secularity entails a loss of a transcendent source of meaning. A strictly secular person will either find a source of meaning within this life or will find this life essentially meaningless. You claim to be persistently in the latter alienated mode. Right?
No I’m trying to understand what you mean by calling yourself a moral nihilist. You recognize immanent values, e.g. good food, good music, good art, good sex, good careers, good friendships, good accomplishments. And those goods are by no means unique to you. Although there are individual differences in choice and expression in relatively free societies, those are cross-cultural values with socio-biological bases whether or not there is a God or and afterlife.
But: For my own reasons, not for the reasons that you ascribe to me here. After that, we’re stuck.
No, actually, I am not convinced that “I” as an existential fabrication derived from dasein is able to be objectively rational regarding conflicting goods. Unlike, say, the objectivists themselves?
No, I would be an objectivist if I insisted that all others are obligated in turn to construe them as political prejudices. Instead, in my signature threads, I convey the reasons that I think as I do regarding “I” acquiring moral and political value judgments.
Note to others:
This is how he is. If you don’t agree with his frame of mind [or eventually come around to it], he resorts to name-calling.
How flustered he becomes!!
Also, in my view, he claims to acknowledge the point I am making here but he doesn’t own up to the existential implications of it. If you admit that your views on the morality of abortion could be either liberal or conservative depending on the experiences you encountered in the life you lived, then you are forced to confront them as political prejudices rooted in dasein…or you think yourself into believing that there is a way as a philosopher to derive the most rational point of view.
And sure there may well be. But the objectivists always insist that it can only be the way that they think about it. They almost never delve deeply into the part about dasein and conflicting goods. Let alone the reality of political economy out in the real world.
Then, coupled with a caustic personal attack – I’m a “fucking moron” this time – it’s back up into the stratosphere of general description intellectual contraptions:
Okay, let’s try this…
I challenge anyone here to reconfigure this “world of words” assessment of my “top down process” in such a way that it renders my attempt to intertwine top and bottom factors re abortion in the points I raise on this thread – viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382 – at the very least actually intelligible.
As that might relate to the points I raise in regard to God and religion on this thread.
Okay. But he has found values: “good food, good music, good art, good sex, good careers, good friendships, good accomplishments”. Goods. And those are values all rational people are obligated to believe in. If they don’t, they either die, or contradict themselves or [and this may hit close to home for the case in point] make themselves miserable. Now morality, which doesn’t have to be invented because we all are embedded in it, simply grants that to exist socially, those biologically based values be granted to all. The ends, granted behaviorally more or less by all but the sociopath, the argument then becomes about means not ends. Now all we see about old iambiguous is what he puts on the page, so we can only imagine where he falls in the ‘real world’. But, he seems to misrepresent himself and his situation, which is what I suppose Karpel alludes to when he calls the old boy a “liar”.
