We are the only animal with reasons
And this is where all the problems lie. It makes us wholly existential and not just causal. It is our fall into time. Exile from Eden. We make the cultural standards and personal reasons to meet those standards. We just arent caused but have reasons for why we do something. We know we could do otherwise but we also know doing so might lead to future negative consequences.
Being caused to do something is instinct, or conditioning. Having reasons is based on self-aware goals. I need to get to X. I want to get Y accomplished. Sometimes we are not aware of why we want X. Schopenhauers theory of a general Will fits. Survival, comfort-seeking, boredom, embedded in cultural and symbolic thought.
Having reasons is a burden. It means we choose to do something and we think it leads to various consequences for doing so. It isnt just an impulse that drives us with absolutely no awareness.
Being caused to do something is instinct, or conditioning. Having reasons is based on self-aware goals. I need to get to X. I want to get Y accomplished. Sometimes we are not aware of why we want X. Schopenhauers theory of a general Will fits. Survival, comfort-seeking, boredom, embedded in cultural and symbolic thought.
Having reasons is a burden. It means we choose to do something and we think it leads to various consequences for doing so. It isnt just an impulse that drives us with absolutely no awareness.
Comments (74)
Dont know if it is possible unless sleepwalking or in a trance.
C[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]5[/sub]OH was the common factor in zinloos geweld! Under the Dionysian spell, si, si! Have you heard of naked fanatics? :snicker:
Yes.
My dog's behavior appears intentional. I've never found the attempt to categorize humans in an entirely special class persuasive. It appears just to be one of degree.
I agree. Your statement reminds me of the kind of stuff Immanuel Kant wrote about in his life. If you haven't read any books about him I suggest that you should because I believe it is likely you share some of the same thoughts as he did and his work might help you with some of your questions.
Also I suggest that you may want to read up on "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind " as it talks about possible issues with how early humans became "sentient" and how being sentient may be a byproduct of evolution (ie something that is counter-productive) and not something that is as useful as we often think it to be.
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
Quoting schopenhauer1
You are correct in many ways, being sentient can often be more of a problem than it is helpful.
Man isn't really driven as much as obtaining a reward and satisfying our desires as much as we are driven to try to avoid as many negative consequences as possible, and in that way we are really not that different than animals when you think about it. Even our efforts to obtain "positive consequences" are really nothing more than an effort to avoid the negative ones (ie by going after thing that give "positive results" one doesn't have to make as many decisions that might involve negative consequences). As far as I know neither animals or human's with our "sentience" can easily bypass the biofeedback loop that revolves around the pleasure/pain principles that evolution has hardwired into our brains and bodies which isn't all that different than a controller built into an electronics system. We like to believe we have free will but it is a given that we are still chained to the system that evolution choose to give to us.
Whether it is possible to be able to use high capacity thinking without the problems that come with sentient is something I don't think anyone knows.
:groan: They used to draw lots you know ... shipwreck survivors ... to decide who was gonna die so that the others could feed. Have you heard of Richard Parker (watch Life of Pi starring the late great Irrfan Khan :death: :flower: (that's 2 r's mind you)!
Is this just something they did when the survivors where willing to be civil about the situation and accept their fate? For some reason I imagine sometimes the stronger/more vicious survivors would decide to kill some of the other survivors so they wouldn't have to bother having to test their luck with drawing straws or whatever.
In one of Stalin's gulags created during his collectivization plans prisoners where placed on a barren island without food/other supplies. They didn't bother drawing lots since there was no food and so they had to come up with ..alternative plans on how to survive on a island with no found coming to the island and no way to grow or scavenge food on the island to feed themselves. Needless to say, it wasn't a great plan since their opinions were very, very limited
:up:
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting.[/quote]
The survivors probably lied about drawing lots - any detective worth his salt can figure that out.
Danke for bringing that to my attention. This reversion to basic instincts is well-documented. A reminder of our animal ancestry/heritage - we're all just one bad day away from becoming the guy you don't wanna meet in a dark alley. I hope some of us can keep their sanity & humanity despite.
It reminds me of a quote from the Joker said while being interrogated in prison.
Their morals, their code; it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. You'll see- I'll show you. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They'll eat each other. See I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve.
- Joker
Me either Peter my Parker.
Is intentionality the same as "reasons" though? That's tricky, but I think they are two different things. A dog certainly has intentions (to get food, go for walks, play fetch, etc.). I don't think it would be the same to say dogs have reasons, however. A reason would be a self-recognized understanding of why you are doing something.
This isn't being pedantic or mincing words either. Intentions can come about through various instincts of play and food. Reasons are based on semantic abilities of symbolic reasoning. "I am doing this because I want X" is a self-aware statement. It is not simply that "I want X".
Thing is, we get to choose our reasons. "They're only as good as the world allows them to be".
So don't put people on an island without food. Build a world that allows people to work for each other.
But instead we do ethics through pop culture.
Shouldn't this whole thread be relegated to the "life sucks" garbage bin?
So this is the hill you stand on... Ok, so maybe all animals have reasons since we don't "really" know.
Either way, it's more the implications, not this point I am trying to get across. You knew that though. Or perhaps you didn't..
Quoting 180 Proof
Yes, I understand that. Have you ever at least felt you had a reason you did something? We must also make a distinction between the "rationalized" reason (what you believed you believed) versus, hidden motivations. Psychologists used to invoke the subconscious. Not sure if that's still a thing.
No.
Quoting Banno
So imagine a world where you didn't have reasons, but everything was purely done from instinctual drives. You didn't "have a reason".. you didn't even have what @180 Proof referenced as post-facto rationalizations. I mentioned fall into time and Exit from Eden, etc. The implications of an animal that survives and gets along through reasons. Then I mentioned cultural standards. We judge what we want and need on the foreground of the cultural standards. It is fully an existential way of being. It isn't that we just do things "for the fun of it" (even octopuses do that). It is that, at least consciously, must give ourselves reasons for why we did things. We got up because we were hungry.. We were not impelled by the food uncontrollably. Conditioning may be involved that unconsciously skews our preferences for reasons. However, we still find reasons nonetheless. I haven't made any deeper claims about where our reasons come from (habitual learning, conditioning, cultural conditioning, psychological makeup, basic drives to survive and be comfortable and to seek entertainment or equilibrium).
https://waaa.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast072922_whales.mp3/radiolab_podcast072922_whales.mp3_ywr3ahjkcgo_717274d1b0e3146c987a0aa1743ab9c7_36521884.mp3?awCollectionId=15957&awEpisodeId=1233831&sc=siteplayer&aw_0_1st.playerid=siteplayer&hash_redirect=1&x-total-bytes=36521884&x-ais-classified=streaming&listeningSessionID=0CD_382_250__15df7bbb0187782f2ae19ef2577f07944f2a64bf
Way to not get the point :meh:.
The idea of reasons is connected to the development of language. It is the basis for logic and concepts. Rationality and reasoning are done on that basis but that doesn't mean that other aspects, such emotions don't come in as well, and irrationality. It is one thing to be able to find reasons and that is a starting point for philosophy and another to follow them always. It may be easier to come up with the a posteri or a priori aspects of reason than to live according to Kant's moral system. So, human beings are rational but even then human reason is limited and it probably requires a lot of discipline to develop reason to its furthest possibilities.
How else do we decide as to who has reasons? I mean this seriously : What should we assume if we meet a space-faring race that we can't communicate with? That they are simply sophisticated tool-using lizards (or mermen, or whatever)? Only humans have a claim on this ill-defined thing?
A number of species seem to recognize themselves in mirrors - bonobos, elephants, magpies. If they're self-aware, do they not have reasons for acting?
The point is, it's one of those poorly defined concepts that we all assume we know. Like saying, "I can't define art, but I know it when I see it." (By the way, it's probably NOT true that elephants can paint - at least not without a lot of cruel training.)
I call bullshit.
You are missing the obvious. Society requires us to have reasons for our actions. It is the "burden" of being civilised, or even just socialised.
Most folk thus grow up learning to just fabricate excuses for their actions. They become expert sophists. They explain away why they did what they did in some socially-acceptable formula of words.
Actually learning how to act on reason is rarer. Rather than an imposed burden, it becomes an effective skill. It means life can be lived with rational goals in mind. Life can be shaped by measurable purpose.
Of course, you still have to work with the world that is given to you. Self-actualisation can't transcend the given world, only operate to best advantage within it.
So you still get to complain about the "burden of existence" if you have made that your larger goal in life. :up:
Yes, I agree with you about language and its centrality in reasons versus cause/effect. There is something that is different between the statements "My reason for..." and "The reason why.." (and it doesn't pertain to a human).
Maybe but that's where we have to do comparisons. What does it mean to have a reason to do something? I would think it requires linguistic use.
Very Schopenhauerian of you.. But when you go to the fridge to get food, or you decide to pick up a book, or you decide to get this and not that product, are you not coming up with reasons? Perhaps your character make-up makes you "do" something and then you reason it later, you still have reasons for why you did it. Cultural things like learning new information, associations with certain experiences, and testing out new things might be various "reasons" for doing something. Disorders, unconscious habits, conditioned responses, etc. might be something different, and more akin to what other animals are doing though the line is blurry.
Also, very un-Witty of you not to purport that language use goes hand-in-hand with reasons. Language becomes the parsing of objects in the world, having self-identity of what one is doing with those objects, and being satisfied with abstract outcomes of those actions, and purposely manipulating objects to gain outcomes.
Ooof.. is that a slight against any tribal society that doesn't have "civilization"? You save it by adding "socialized" though.
Quoting apokrisis
That seems like a false dichotomy of "social formulas" and "acting on reason". Both seem off to me.
"Social formulas" idea seems to make reasons a sort of nominalism.. Completely post-hoc fiction.
"Acting on reason" idea seems to imply some sort of "higher reason" like the Stoic idea of Universal Reason that is accessed by the sage.
Rather, reasons are formed by way of a being that can self-identify as an individual that can produce outcomes in the world and knows there are choices that lead to those outcomes.
But then you have to, in order that the titular issue not meet with the facts.
As stated to apokrisis:
Quoting schopenhauer1
You seem to be on the "social formulas" idea. Post hoc fiction seems a bit much. I can tell you why I decided to go to the park.
You are the only on referring to them as a fiction. Post hoc, yes. Fiction, no so much.
And you continue to ignore the point that reasons are attributed to animals, plants and rocks as much as to humans. Your OP has no standing.
I think this makes sense only in a neuroscience kind of way.. The neurons fired before the decision was made.. or maybe a "free will" versus "determined" kind of way.. But that's a slightly different point. Rather, I am simply claiming that we have "reasons" not whether neurons fire prior to linguistic formation of the reason, or whether the reasons were determined.
The fact is, you would still say, "I went to the park because..." if someone asked and you weren't trying to evade it. Of course, yes, you could have been sleepwalking there, in a trance, drugged and unconsciously taken to the park.. But if you decided to go consciously and without some mitigating factors, you had reasons..
Quoting Banno
They are attributed, but doesn't mean they have reasons. Rocks obviously don't have a reason for why they might roll. Rather they were effected to roll from a cause. That difference was stated in the OP.
According to yourself, you have no reason for this.
Or instead, cultural anthropology shows us that tribal order doesnt expect the giving of individual reasons, just knowledge of collective custom.
Civilisation shifts the social conversation to a different space where you are suppose to construct your own systems of constraint. You get to have your personal freedoms if you swear allegiance to the abstractions of Enlightenment values.
So same thing in some lights. Very different in others. I wouldnt want to mindlessly lump them together as you are at risk of doing. :razz:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Or instead, just how cultural anthropology would frame the shift in semiotic scale from hunter-gatherer to cities and social democracy as a way of life.
Quoting schopenhauer1
How does one come to self-identify as an individual except via social construction?
A failure to understand this fact is at the base of much modern angst. So no surprise you must fail to understand it and thus preserve your right to complain about imposed burdens rather than accepting that your persona is a co-creation of the company you choose to keep.
Reading gloomy old philosophy texts could have been where it all went wrong.
You seem to think that I've claimed we do not have reasons. I haven't, but it's this sort of irrational jump that renders your posts unworthy of response.
Cheers.
I'm sorry, get over yourself. I don't even want to fathom the [s]reasons[/s] causes for your smugness be they personality disorder, inflated sense of self-importance... I don't give a hoot.
If I misinterpreted you then go on and tell me how. All I've gotten is "Things and animals are attributed with reasons" and "Humans make post hoc reasons". Those things do not contradict my claim that we are an animal that has reasons.
You think you are too good to respond.. That is the reason you are positing. I can say, really you are an over confident excessively self-satisfied personality type.. Smug.. Or the cause is presenting oneself as that on this forum. That might be more of a cause than a reason though. Your reason presented to yourself looks different from a psychological vantage of the causes behind your reasons.
I like having the ability to predict possible consequences and the power to generate reasons to explain my actions. I like choosing certain courses of action. There is no better combination for a good and ethical life. Theyre all boon and no burden. Why are they a burden for you? I ask because there has to be a reason for it but its not made explicit.
The difference being the difference between syntax and semantics.
Can you elaborate more on your theory here? Are you thinking of a specific study? Does anyone in a tribal society act simply because they wanted to, or is it always tribal custom? It can't be that caricatured. X wants to see the buffalo because he likes seeing them run in large groups. Y doesn't care, but he does want to go to the watering hole because he likes swimming and catching fish. Both however follow customs of the elders and ride horses to battle the neighboring tribe. If you asked X why he is near the buffalo, he might say that he likes to watch the buffalo and so he ga e his reason for watching the buffalo.
Quoting apokrisis
The company I choose to keep has been dictated by the "revelations" of that allegiance sworn to Enlightenment values..that is to say the modern day socioeconomic behemoth.
You can be a tribal society or you can be a part of civilization, but none of that is something you can choose. Neo-tribal doesn't count as its an awareness of civilization and moving away from it, not an organic order arisen purely from interaction between natural world, tribal customs, and members of tribe and neighbors.
So individuals with reasons is a human event that is magnified by cultural practices of Enlightenment values. We call this modernity. It has been diagnosed by the Existentialists and existentialists.
(I think) plants reason (without a brain): I saw this cactus plant outside my sister's house. I noticed that its body is flat & almost vertical. My hypothesis: The catcus has this shape because it wants to present the least surface area to the sun at high noon when it's hottest to reduce water loss via evaporation. However, it needs light for photosynthesis and its flat body ensures that it harvests light maximally during the cooler mornings & evenings.
:cool: :flower: Awesome!
Do you see a distinction between a cause and a reason?
A superb question "because" ...
?
Dont get what youre asking.
Yep. I am thinking particularly of Catherine Lutz studies of self-regulation in Ifaluk islanders and how they frame right and wrong not as personal but public values. There are good collections of such anthropology in Harre and Parrott's The Emotions, and Harre's The Social Construction of Emotions.
So the argument is not that tribal custom always prevails over personal impulse. It is that the tribal view sees the reasons for their behaviour being constrained as concretely external the customary way. And civilisation was all about teaching folk to internalise things.
The constraints on the self became abstractions to be contemplated internally. We had to "see" right and wrong as impersonal truths that we might know directly through reason, and so see through what were merely the contingent truths of some ragtag band of unphilosophical, not even rational, savages.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But the difference with civilisation is that it promises you a material world which can be organised with abstract freedom. The possibility of constructing a heaven on earth. :razz:
Not my fault that the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Revolution before the tribal mindset could complete its evolution towards an angelic state of accord.
So choices become possible with reason. But fossil fuel wanted to be burnt. We became its vehicle. That wasn't how the Enlightenment was meant to play out.
This is the world that has actually been given us. You can either accept its challenge or ... spend your short life pointlessly complaining.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Don't forget the Romantic reaction which is a deeper source of the problems now. Existentialism sits on that side of the divide.
Enlightenment civilisation can turn us into good and pragmatic citizens. But romanticism makes us dream of becoming our own gods. Or at least supermen. Or failing all else, at least social media influencers. :up:
False dichotomy and contradicts yourself.
If the burden of reasons falls on the individual as an "allegiance to Enlightenment" then it cannot be external customs any more that provides reasons, but our own. That is in the existentialist wheelhouse. That is to say, meaning, motivation, authenticity of one's own goals and roles, and the like.
Surely making widgets may be the height of humanity's work. But widget making in itself isn't inherently meaningful.
If what is meaningful is survival, then we have many avenues of protest.. Camus' Sisyphus is laughing absurdist, Schopenhauer's is the life-denying ascetic who starves himself into Enlightenment.
But if your only answer is more varieties of widgets, because life begets life begets life, then that is as banal and nihilistic as all the Romantics.
Let's see, you have communist/socialist ideas of "working together" like a propaganda poster from the Soviet-era. You have Ayn Randian ideas of the "Mighty Entrepreneur".
Only truly ivory tower academics elucidating their tripe in their ivory towers truly thinks there is meaning in a field of academia (usually a science or social science)..
Usually it is blowhard arsehole who touts on about working for technological innovation.
Usually it is political propaganda to get more people to keep the game going.
No, it is about the interaction between a self and its society that is meant to be the rational relation. It is the rationality of this two-way street the relation that strives for a win-win solution.
Both sides are saying "let's be reasonable about this". Life is about striking the pragmatic balance.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Now you have gone off into one-sided Romanticism. The self as the sole arbiter.
This monism is at the root of all your problems. Your model of mind is solipsistic. All that exists is your experience the "inevitable" pain, boredom and suffering of having been born. You frame your world as one where all burdens have been imposed on your passive experiencing and you seem to lack any authentic agency. But in reality, your mind if formed by social construction as well as inherited genetics and neurobiological habit. Then on top of that, there is this new level of semiosis that has opened up with the Enlightenment's theory of the civilised human condition.
Some of us seem to find it a positive step forward. Living in a civilisation is rather comfortable and entertaining. We get to have a lot of personal freedom to the degree that makes collective sense.
The problem is that the utopian promises haven't truly planned out because the Enlightenment didn't dig deep enough to understand "rationality" at the level of nature itself. Nature is a thermodynamic enterprise. Those are the rules that all organisms must play by. Civilisation requires a more sophisticated theory of itself for its progress not to turn into a self-delusion.
So sure. There is much to criticise. Rationally.
But that starts with accepting that the human condition is semiotic and thus a hierarchical structure of relations, not an atomised collection of solipsistically isolated and passive consciousnesses, weighed down by un-asked for burdens, and being self-deluding to the degree they deny the existential horror of it all.
But humans are a form of life and are not Life (whatever abstraction you are using here). That is to say, there is no necessity in what we value.. There are strong tendencies perhaps, but not necessities. Even the idea of a "maladopted life" makes no sense in the human realm... If what you mean is that it leads to extinction, then that is STILL a value statement.. One that we are ascenting to, not one we are necessarily bound to. So at the end of the day you are making a hypothetical statement into a categorical one. You are turning contingent social customs and personal decisions of life and lives into LIFE (apokrisis' notion of right/wrong). Nature might balance itself out or what not, but we have no reason to be bound to balancing forces or not bound to balancing forces as individuals or societies.
Now, this doesn't mean I am recommending immediate destruction or anything else. I am only pointing out the holes of your manufactuered naturalistic fallacy (LIFE and its necessary BALANCE as applied to humans who have reasons.. even if those reasons arise from interactions of society and individual due to how linguistic brains process information in a social framework.. so you need not go on about how our minds are shaped by social interactions.. I'm well aware of that thank you.. the difference is that the the origins of the linguistically capable mind is not the same as the CONTENT for which the individual mind thinks.. You can bring on a more basic idea of determinism at some deeper level, but that is not what you seem to be saying as you are implying we are bound by necessity rather than choose through contingency about our reasons, aims, goals, etc.).
Quoting apokrisis
No it's just that on a philosophy forum, I am not going to elucidate the whole development of DNA molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, neural networks, child development, social customs in one breath. I simply state how we have our individual reasons, whatever the factors are that allows that (and recognizing it is indeed an iteration of individual with society).
Quoting apokrisis
The problem is this is in the realm of (theoretical) description and not the normative. That is a category error. It's also not saying anything other than life life's.. Well yeah. Okay. But this human life doesn't "just" life.. It can choose any number of things and give reasons for it. So no, I can't let you get away with turning a human life into LIFE as if it is that determined. It's all hypothetical imperative regarding culture and individual decisions. That is a matter of value, and choosing one. Mind you, there is no "right" one. Balance here might be used as a weasily word to imply both descriptive and normative, but it cannot be both. You are either giving your opinion or describing some cycle. One does not become the other though.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, here is a normative claim written as if descriptive. Still based on one's opinions on a hypothetical imperative. We can no longer just say (like academics in the 19th century).. THIS is what we should be aiming for. IFF we want this, then PERHAPS we should do that to get this. But WHY we should want this.. WHAT we are trying to aim for are totally out of the realm of the descriptive. You can invoke balance and thermodynamics until you are blue in the face, but that will get you no more closer to a reason for doing any thing. And hence here we are with reasons.
My metaphysics is constraints-based. And a constraint is inherently permissive. What is not prevented is free to happen. Or indeed, must happen eventually, in the long run, at some point. :grin:
So you are arguing against a different worldview here.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You are showing you dont understand my position - which is that of natural philosophy or systems science.
Reality is a system of relations. Reality becomes stabilised at the point where its contraries - as in its global constraints and local freedoms - come into a steady dynamical balance,
This is a value free view of reality. It just is what it is. That is the only way that anything can be in terms of persisting existence.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Existence is irreducibly complex in its hierarchical organisation. You cant just wish the fact away if you want to make metaphysical level claims about the human condition in the real world.
Quoting schopenhauer1
A dynamical balance is only normative in the sense that it underlines the fact that a system must dissipate to persist. That is step 1. Then step 2, it has to be evovable to survive perturbation to that dissipative structure.
So adaptablity, creativity, spontaneity and even foresight are part to the same picture as the normative habits that are the history which has so far shaped a system with the power to persist.
My metaphysics doesnt shackle the natural world in the mechanical way you want to presume.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Then we become the only animals with unreasons. And not particularly equipped to persist as part of reality.
Not sure how you came to that conclusion based on what I said. In that quote I just said how there is an iteration of individual and society which implies "hierarchical organization" and multitudes of interactions of biological, social, individual, and the like.
Quoting apokrisis
Ok, another way of formulating the existentialists' point. We have "gone off the existential deep end" so to say in that we need reasons. You can't put the genie back in by saying simply, "But we are part of a system". Yeah, I am not disputing that. Whilst that is true, anything else you impute as "maladapted" or otherwise (too much Romanticism) is mere opinion/normative values of thou apokrisis, and not of any descriptive value. Basically, it's just YOUR idea of solving various hypothetical imperatives.. IFF then.. Basically saying, "IFF (you have apokrisis' vision/values) then PERHAPS the best way to get there is this...
Ive said some things you might disagree with. Basically that because we have reasons, and because perhaps of ours Enlightenment customs, there is nothing of necessity we can impute. It would only be apokrisis solution s to his preferred hypothetical imperatives. Read previous post for more details.
For example, are you as free to be an airatarian as a vegetarian or carnivore? You can have all the reasons you like. The question is do you have actual choices?
And then, civilisation as the ultimately rational social structure is meant to maximise your personal choice. You can head to the supermarket gluten-free or Asian aisle.
Life in general is like that. A mix of general constraints and particularised choices. We can turn food into a moral dilemma. But we still must eat food. Go figure. And I didnt invent this world. I just comment on how it is.
:100: :fire:
Quoting schopenhauer1
:sweat: Poor schop1, "blue in the face" in denial ...
It seems "balance and thermodynamics", however, is the reason for "a reason for doing any thing" insofar as anything can be done at all. Besides, our "reasons" seem to be (mostly) ex post facto rationalizations.
Of course, and you are making straw men of what I am saying. And actually, there are people who are extreme ascetics, etc. And I actually agree with you that the choices are limited. So I am not sure what you are getting at. Again, what I was answering was:
Quoting apokrisis
That is not descriptive. Forces may have created us.. Forces may destroy us.. But whatever it is, what we do individually or as a group is based on various reasons.. Post-facto or otherwise. It is not instinct, it is not, any dictate of the universe. It is all hypothetical imperatives- the part of what I said which you chose to ignore. Apokrisis thinks that we should X, so we should X. If you want this, then do that. And what if we don't want this or to do that? Mind you, it doesn't matter if your conclusion is, "Then extinction", as that is a reason along with the rest of them.. not an unbending rule or dictate one must follow.
Quoting apokrisis
Tangential to my point. Not really what I am getting at. Rather, why we do anything. Our motivation. Our goals. Our decisions. It isn't simply dictated by instinctual drives. It isn't even that we have some learning mechanisms. We have symbolic brains that make meaning of the world by parsing them out into conceptual frameworks, by iterative interactions of individual and the group. Besides some conditioning, and some instinctual impulses, a lot of it is based on various reasons from X causal links that we probably cannot fully trace.
We aren't doing things because apokrisis thinks there needs to be balance. If balance works in some universalistic way, that is a category error to apply it to our reasons. Rather, humans have a lot of things that look silly to you or me.. Even justifying the continuation of a system to allow choices to be silly is a normative claim. It's just apokrisis' ideas on X, nothing more. Hypothetical imperatives all the way down.
Do you believe that being an airatarian is conceivable dietary choice?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Why do you persist with this strawman? I simply point out that there are constraints. And so also the resulting freedoms.
You can pick your nose or scratch you bum and it makes no difference to me. You just can't pick my nose or scratch my bum without some very good medical reason and appropriate qualifications. :razz:
Quoting schopenhauer1
So now you are rehashing what I said about semiosis in humans involving a hierarchy of levels.
But @180 Proof said it. The giving of lingusitic reasons for every action we take is (mostly) ex post facto rationalizations. A rational society doesn't require that kind of deliberation beyond the point that it has some collective utility.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Strawman.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again you have utterly failed to reply to my argument, just tried to strawman your way out of it in tedious fashion.
Oh wait. It is!
Ok, but there's gotta be something you don't like about yourself, oui monsieur? Nobody's that perfect!
Having a good understanding of how the world works is a prerequisite for living life in relative comfort and avoiding the worst that it has to throw at you. It is good advice to tell someone that they must learn to set more modest expectations for reality; to correctly perceive nature and by doing so learn to participate in it. Go with the flow.
That being said, the human mind dreams about how the world could be better, even if it contradicts fundamental constraints of reality. It is in the nature of a human being that they will strive for conditions that are impossible to attain.
Perhaps if a square were conscious, it might wish it were a cube - but it is stuck in two-dimensional geometry. If reality is a river, then humans are the little eddies that briefly emerge, opposing the current, before being swallowed up again.
Metaphors aside, humans want more than reality can provide. We always have and we always will.
My argument is that this is a historically recent thing. And predicated on the "unlimited" energetic resources unleashed by the Industrial Revolution.
The Enlightenment was the precursor in it got us thinking about how to transcend the old social order to become more rationally organised as a species.
But inadvertently that led to the world of "satanic mills". Dreams of better became dreams of power and consumption.
@schopenhauer1 says this means the whole Enlightenment project is a sham, a ruse, an enslavement. I say it could be merely the right dream derailed. We could fix it.
(Of course that is a little too late now. We don't have the controls even to lay our hands on.)
Quoting _db
Ever had contact with people living simple lives? It isn't that impossible to match your ambition to your possibilities. It is only been a short time since the industrial revolution that the dream of being the "limitless" species has become socially institutionalised.
Just do it, as the adverts say. And why would they say that?
We don't know this. Reason may be a more or less affair, with sudden leaps in capacities due to the development of something like the language faculty (which animals lack, though they don't lack communication) and the emergence of self-consciousness.
Animals may have rudimentary reason, though less likely self-consciousness or reflection. But we cannot rule this out. Reasons can lead us to problems, sure, but they offer solutions to problems, which is rather helpful.
Yes, I said as much that it has to do with language in my OP.
Traditional practicing Jainists reason to die of starvation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallekhana
So yeah people can even "reason" to starve themselves to death. It's rare, but that's not the point. The point is there is no fixed instincts anymore. There are definitely drives, but through the mediation of our language-cultural-personality contexted brains, it doesn't just present as.. see food/eat food as you well know.
Quoting apokrisis
And that brings me to the larger point that you seem to be giving a prescription for a description. We SHOULD do X is a prescription. But there is no one way that LIFE (for humans) has to proceed. We CAN decide to not have children, to suicide, to do any number of things. There is much contingency in human decisions. Of course we are limited.. by gravitation, by the laws of the physical universe.. But that would be a gross straw man to equivocate that with the types of human reasons I am discussing here. To do so would be either highly ignorant or purposefully misleading. Either way, it would be incorrect.
Still strawmanning.
Quoting schopenhauer1
My point is that existence is a hierarchy of constraints. And that constraints indeed define the freedoms at each stage.
You are thus not free to choose your freedoms. They emerge from the system of constraints. That is why you can complain that your choices are imposed on you and feel like a burden. Or instead, you can be grateful to have so much sophisticated choice in living a human level of life.
So how was I not agreeing here in different wording?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Anyways, now we are just talking past each other. You are trying to describe the emergence of degrees of freedom, and I am talking about what it means to have these freedoms as a species. The implications of being a species with reasons rather than mainly instincts (I will include in that conditioning, etc.).
.
That is another way of saying you were strawmanning me. :up:
I mean, I have no problem with your theory of constraints.. As far as I know that's not too controversial.. Maybe a bit beyond the physics to a sort of meta-physics (in the literal sense of the meta theory of the field of physics). But the topic of having reasons that I am discussing is what it means to be a species that has reasons.. The fact that we can do things a different way.. That there is no right way for anything. Any time you put a goal in mind, you are simply putting your "spin" on it. I called that a hypothetical imperative. Yes, if you WANT that, one way to get that is THIS. But no one has to want that by necessity nor do it in that way that is prescribed.
Any time you try to define a "way" you are now just giving your "reason". That is fine, but the ruse comes in when you mistake the reason for a definitive REASON as if it is a necessity. Rather, it's what you think makes sense, but that's just what you think. It aligns with your reasons and reasonsings. At best, it's a hypothetical imperative for providing ways to attain ends, which people may want or not want.
To have reasons but no purposes is incoherent.
As humans, we are constrained by meanings. Our worlds are constructed to have preferences and intentions that we can actually apply our intelligence to.
You seem to be conflating the two senses of the word "reason". One talks about our reason to aim our efforts towards some end. The other talks about how we could then rationally act towards that purpose.
So one is the final cause, the other the formal cause. They do go together in being the downward acting causes in the Aristotelean causal analysis the complex systems approach. But this seems a sign of how your argument is all confused.
Quoting schopenhauer1
And so we disappear back into your confused story where all possible desires are simply arbitrary and dispensible.
We can eat only air and starve. That is "reasonable" as one could decide this is a good way to die.
If your goal is indeed death, then wouldn't it be reasonable to pick what you consider the best way out?
What would be your preferred choice? Your worldview might demand it be as horrible and messy an exit as can be imagined as that would be most in keeping with the extreme pessimist perspective on how nasty it is to be alive in any way. :smile: