Philosophy is for questioning religion
In a video asking the question What is Philosophy Good For, philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller gives an answer: questioning religion. He even suggests that its part of a good definition of philosophy, but at the very least hes saying that questioning religion is historically one of the things that philosophy has done well, and is one of the most valuable things it does.
This got me thinking. Against the common view that philosophy is a two-thousand-year-old failing enterprise, a body of thought that has produced no knowledge, couldnt we say that philosophy has in fact done pretty well in bringing dominant beliefs into question, revealing their incoherence or baselessness, or just submitting them to rational enquiry?
Philosophy has been questioning religion from the start. From Socrates, who was executed for it, to Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Hegelwho, even when they did not actually deny God, chipped away at the foundations of dogma and the authority of the church, submitted religious concepts to inquiry, or came up with their own more or less heretical versions of Godand then on through the atheist Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, who went all the way and further.
Generalizing, we can say that philosophy is critical: critical of prevailing beliefs, certainly fanatical or fundamentalist beliefs, but perhaps more importantly, beliefs that seem obvious. So it is importantly subversive. And ever since we killed God in the nineteenth century, its had other fish to fry. For Marx it was capitalist ideology, and for more recent thinkers its been the entertainment industry, totalitarianism, the institutional entwining of knowledge and power, and so on.
Generalizing even further, philosophy isor is part ofenlightenment, a means by which humans are freed from domination, whether by nature, myth, religion, governments, whatever it happens to be:
[quote=Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment]Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.[/quote]
I dont have a specific question except: what do you think?
This got me thinking. Against the common view that philosophy is a two-thousand-year-old failing enterprise, a body of thought that has produced no knowledge, couldnt we say that philosophy has in fact done pretty well in bringing dominant beliefs into question, revealing their incoherence or baselessness, or just submitting them to rational enquiry?
Philosophy has been questioning religion from the start. From Socrates, who was executed for it, to Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Hegelwho, even when they did not actually deny God, chipped away at the foundations of dogma and the authority of the church, submitted religious concepts to inquiry, or came up with their own more or less heretical versions of Godand then on through the atheist Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, who went all the way and further.
Generalizing, we can say that philosophy is critical: critical of prevailing beliefs, certainly fanatical or fundamentalist beliefs, but perhaps more importantly, beliefs that seem obvious. So it is importantly subversive. And ever since we killed God in the nineteenth century, its had other fish to fry. For Marx it was capitalist ideology, and for more recent thinkers its been the entertainment industry, totalitarianism, the institutional entwining of knowledge and power, and so on.
Generalizing even further, philosophy isor is part ofenlightenment, a means by which humans are freed from domination, whether by nature, myth, religion, governments, whatever it happens to be:
[quote=Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment]Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.[/quote]
I dont have a specific question except: what do you think?
Comments (359)
Sapere aude!!!
A lot of people would probably agree. In this vein, I guess we've been in a period where the enlightenment project and the presuppositions of science are themselves under scrutiny, and debunking physicalism seems to be a key attraction. More and more people are reaching for the word scientism.
There are two big negatives on the periphery of much philosophical discussion - inadequate philosophy used by atheist polemicists and bad speculative quantum physics used by advocates of the 'supernatural '- a word some people think of as a lazy pejorative. Both approaches turn a lot of people off the more serious arguments presented by both orientations.
For me as a layperson, there's philosophy I can use or learn from and philosophy for academics who relish jargon saturated, recondite deliberations about thinkers so intricate or verbose, no one can seemingly agree about the correct reading of their work.
But some philosophy points not to upward dialectic of Man but of the inherent perennial suffering nature of existence. See: Schopenhauer (suffering Will), Kierkegaard (angst), Siddhartha Gotama (dukkha), Hartmann (social despair), Mainlander (cosmic suicide), Zapffe (over-evolved self-awareness), E.M. Cioran (resigned indifference, disappointmentism), etc. etc.
As we move through cultural history, we are given more chances for sophisticated reflection of the intractable problems of human existence.
To me this hearkens "masters and possessors of nature" which likewise suggests an invalid anthropocentric hierarchy. The truly enlightened perspective sees us as one aspect of an overarching meaningful whole. Whence the religious-mystical history and sentiment of mankind isn't something to be overturned, but rather comprehended in a new way.
[quote=Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment]Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.[/quote]
Their answer to why this is so is that enlightened reason itself tends to go wrong, and we end up dominating nature and each other to the detriment of both. And in becoming aware of this dialectic we might be said to reach something like a more holistic perspective.
I think Russell claimed that philosophy started as a counterpoint to mystery religions and snake oil salesmen. But that kind of reaction has to be rooted in a larger story that's being played out in society.
If you study art history, it's all going to be about how art was expressing the social events of the time. Probably the same with philosophy.
I notice that I'm driven by a need to puncture the image of the brave subversive philosopher by saying "You couldn't have achieved any of that if society hadn't been ready for it." I'm sure they were brave, though.
As I implied, philosophers like to criticize. Maybe those guys were freeing us from our illusions and thus contributing to enlightenment. And Siddharta was quite big on enlightenment, I hear.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ah, history as progress towards antinatalism. :wink:
And religion has been questioning religion from the start. The formation of new religions typically carry with them an implicit critique of older established ones ( Protestant reformation, Conservative, reform and reconstructionist Judaism, etc). Meanwhile, the history of Western philosophy has mostly consisted of questioning one religious metaphysical system in order to prepare the ground for a different religious metaphysical system.
I was watching Rick Roderick the other day and he pointed out that the best books, whether in philosophy or not, are those that produce the most, and the most diverse, interpretations. I agree with him. The idea that philosophers, by means of clarity and brevity, can pin down the meaning of their works, has not stood up to scrutiny.
Thats not to say all interpretations are equally good though.
Although I may have implied that the history of philosophy is one of inevitable progress towards the banishment of religion through the advance of thought, another way to see it is just that philosophy is always there to question religion, not especially as part of a destructive plan but to help religions move with the times, or as you say, lay the groundwork for different religious systems. Or, to prevent the descent into fundamentalism.
One of the other functions of philosophy mentioned in the video is the coining of concepts, and I guess this has been part of how philosophy prepares the ground for new systems.
The pragmatist in me thinks that philosophy should be devoted to the clarification of ideas and the application of critical intelligence to the resolution of problems of all kinds. The quietist in me thinks much the same, but would limit the problems to a particular type--those involving the pretensions of philosophy (those claiming special insight into Truth, Nature, Being, etc.) and their influence on thought and conduct in general. The stoic in me would say it also involves how to live a tranquil life.
And religion is hellbent on making human beings as dependent as possible, necessarily limiting their moral development and any other sort of development that would result in more independent thought and action.
~Benedictus de Spinoza
Quoting Jamal
:up: Yes, of course, beginning with internal critiques of 'mythologies, theologies & ideologies' including and especially one's own (re: "Gnothi seauton").
My 2 drachmas ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/461359
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/614799
... also, a personal appraisal from an old thread "Philpsophy begins in ...":
Quoting 180 Proof
"Ecrasez l'infâme!" ~Voltaire
That's not always true.
Some who question religious tenets through a philosophical lens, seem to have the following choice's if the OP is true.
1. Reconfigure your religion/spawn a variety to 'try again.'
2. Reject your religion.
3. Ignore what philosophical reasoning suggests and 'keep the faith.'
Is philosophy more supportive of irreligious science compared to any affirmation it may offer the religious?
So should the pastor warn his flock. 'If you want to stay true to god, think as I say and not as one may philosophise?'
And, on the contrary, philosophy is the single most successful enterprise of all, for from it did the fields of knowledge we now call "science" rise from.
And Hume was almost surely and agnostic, given his skeptical principles. It was not too easy to be critical of the Church back then, but eventually it could be done.
A pearl of wisdom from Hume:
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
Example?
Dorothy Day
Real question: where did you first learn about Dorothy Day?
Maybe. I think it's more likely, however, that a "religious philosopher" is an apologetic critic of naturalism, irreligion and/or religions (or sects) other than her own.
I don't follow.
Hardly seems at odds with the church in any way. Can you explain?
She wasn't at odds with the Church, so she serves as an example of how
Quoting praxis
isn't always true.
That doesn't make sense.
That's weird. It does to me.
Generally speaking, a good exemplar would think and/or act in a way that demonstrates independence within a religious tradition. If you're suggesting that fighting for women's suffrage somehow defied the church, then you appear to be wrong.
She's the representative of religion here. She worked to help emancipate minorities.
Could you answer my question though? When did you first hear of Dorothy Day? Just curious.
So, that's where I am a little confused. If practicing philosophy, is to question religion and most/all philosophers ultimately conclude that religion has no valid claim to support god, as the mind behind the creation of this universe. Then it seems to me, that using any philosophical base to an apologetic critique of naturalism, irreligion or science MUST fail and the only use of philosophy for a religious person is to reveal all its fail points and force an attempt to reformat their religion into a new version that they think is more convincing.
Is philosophy then not an enemy of any religion whose members want to maintain it?
Why would any theologist ever use the additional label 'philosopher,' if it dooms them to be forever tweaking their faith, slagging off other faiths, or abandoning faith all together?
How does that demonstrate independent thought or action from within that tradition?
Quoting frank
Planet Earth. Why is that significant?
PS: if you're just trolling for fun, please stop.
I'll grant this no problems, but one ought to mention exceptions, like Cornel West.
Granted, such figures are rare, but they exist.
Religious philosophers exist in a philosophical milieu in which questions about religion have come up, a context in which the inquiry into religious concepts has become normal. So Im inclined to look at the big picture rather than the orientations of individuals: that there are religious philosophers shows that religion is being questioned.
I don't think it does. It shows that this statement:
Quoting praxis
is not always true. Dorothy Day represented the Catholic Church. She worked to liberate minorities. Minorities are human beings. So she wasn't trying to make human beings as dependent as possible. She was trying to help them become independent.
Quoting praxis
I was just curious. If it's Top Secret, that's fine. I don't have that clearance.
I see your misunderstanding and how I wasn't clear enough. I meant dependent on the tradition and that would mean within the tradition. I don't know how anyone could be considered dependent on something that they may have never even heard of.
Quoting frank
You thought it was important enough to ask. Just trolling?
I accept that, but are you not taking another significantly controversial step, in that you imply that philosophy is unable to offer any succour to the religious person.
MY question then becomes why do some highly qualified academic theologists, choose to add philosopher or philosophy to their 'title.' They must think it adds to the credibility of the output of their field of study. Are you proposing that the title 'philosophy' or 'philosopher' does not, because it cannot, add credibility to a theological title or field of study?
:chin:
So your point was that religions make people dependent on religious traditions.
A religion is a set of traditions.
Religions endure because people love their traditions. Not sure which part of the earth you're from that you didn't know this. :grin:
Is this somehow against the spirit of philosophy? Maybe sometimes, probably often, but not always. In any case, philosophers can be great philosophers in some ways and still have blind spots.
I am all for being able to further disarm theism by explaining to theists why their efforts to employ philosophy in their arguments are pointless and futile.
I am just musing over what philosophical counter-points they might employ to try to defeat such a claim.
That's a fair reduction to a concentrate, yes.
Quoting Jamal
I am always interested in new arguments to combat what I consider the more pernicious aspects of religion so as I commented to @180 Proof, I am musing on what philosophical counter points they might come up with against your 'maybe sometimes, probably often, but not always.'
Ah, ok. Im not interested in that.
I didn't say anything about people loving their traditions, troll.
Goodness. Somehow I managed to get your goat. :razz:
You certainly didn't manage to get an example.
I think we've trashed up the topic enough, btw.
Ah! ok, but its religion based manifestations, consist mainly of divine directives and the establishment of divine authority via a 'church' style hierarchy. These connect to socioeconomic, political and even community/tribal hierarchies, that are invasive on the everyday lives of a majority of people on the planet, at the moment.
Does theism as a philosophical position, act as a valid support for religious doctrine?
Ok, I appreciate that, as you say, nuff said.
Gladly. It's not always easy to tell when someone is genuinely interested or just trolling.
Fair point. It was more personal taste - and what I should have said is that I am not sufficiently immersed in philosophy to obtain useful readings from complex works.
Sure, at best, but not sound.
Ok, any new argument against the more pernicious aspects of theism I was musing on, based on 'how stupid their best academic theologians are, when they try to add credibility to their position using titles such as 'Religious philosopher,' is total BS because ....... @Jamal said and @180 Proof confirmed, with ........, is not going to bear fruit. :sad:
Thats not to say its necessarily bad or unphilosophical to be anti-X. Nietzsche and Marx went further than polite questioning, and I regard their thought as extremely philosophically interesting. So theres a spectrum of intensity and motivatedness in criticism, but its just criticism as such that I was emphasizing in the OP.
By the way, criticism in my usage is just a synonym for questioning.
Speaking of Nietzsche, I think he'd say your approach shows that you're from a Christian culture where a premium is placed on revealing truths. Christianity was originally about questioning Pharisaic Judaism, especially the emphasis it placed on ritual over the well-being of real people. Protestantism was a re-enactment of Christianity's beginnings, where the prevailing wisdom was called into question.
The difficulty with that endeavour is to arrive at any kind of understanding of what the significance and content of such revealed truths might be, especially if they're understood to be beyond the scope of empirical observation and discovery. It might amount to a rejection of the content of such doctrines as a matter of principle, without being ever being able to know exactly what is being rejected.
You could say that Kant attempted to tackle such an analysis in such works as 'Religion within the Limits of Reason', but then even Kant was bound, to some extent, by his particular religious background, which was Lutheran pietism (although the influence of that is contested.)
I notice a recurrent theme in many debates about religious questions is the regular appeal to the purportedly self-evident facts of existence, facts which everyone is said to know and which nobody of sound mind is able to dispute. Implicitly or otherwise, such an appeal is then taken to be an endorsement of scientific method, which is above all seen as a means to elaborate and extend the range and scope of our knowledge of such facts which is surely preferable to the oft-criticized 'belief without evidence', which religious ideas are said to comprise.
But an issue here is the contest between religious lore, containing many symbolic and allegorical depictions of the human condition, on the one hand, with an attitude from which the human subject is altogether removed, or treated exclusively as phenomenon, on par with any other object of analysis (the 'view from nowhere'). And much of that debate is conditioned by the implicit boundary lines required by the rejection of the content of revealed religion, which usually manifests as the commitment to naturalism, defined in terms of its rejection of whatever is held to be supernatural. And by accident of history, that includes a great deal of pre-modern and ancient philosophy as well, insofar as that had become incorporated into the corpus of theology, and rejected along with it - a dialectical process that has unfolded over centuries.
So already there is a kind of asymetry visible in this dynamic. You have on the one side, the confidence of science, which has given rise to the astounding technology which characterises today's world and with which we sorrounded (and even defined), but which situates itself in a universe which it has already declared is devoid of meaning. As various philosophers (including Adorno) have observed, this is associated with the upsurge of nihilism, and the view of mankind as the fortuitous product of chance and physical necessity. As to the alternative, Thomas Nagel, no religious apologist, puts it like this:
Quoting Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
(See also Does Reason Know what it is Missing, NY Times, Stanley Fish.)
Isn't the view of mankind as the fortuitous product of theism and divine necessity just as lopsided and potentially dire?
Don't you think it's a rather easy charge to make? How could we determine the difference between the purported nihilism of secularism and the potential nihilism of religion? If religion had the same cultural prominence today as it did 300 years ago, would our culture be much less nihilistic? How would we be better off?
Quoting Wayfarer
I think it remains to be demonstrated how this matters other than speculative ruminations about what we may have lost (unclear though that seems).
Religion is not about the well-being of real people. It's about creating and maintaining a strong group bond or 'tribe' through a shared narrative, values, rituals, etc.
It's not fortuitous, but intentional, as a matter of definition.
In Buddhism, the view of 'fortuitous origins' is also rejected, although not in favour of divine creation, but as a form of nihilism.
It's still our fortune that god did it and we may benefit.
But much of this argument hinges on very specific, expressions or versions of religion.
How could we determine the difference between the purported nihilism of secularism and the potential nihilism of religion? If religion had the same cultural prominence today as it did 300 years ago, would our culture be much less nihilistic? How would we be better off?
Being a failed mathematician, I'll get all analytic and point out that the arguments and strategies philosophy provides to us have a more general application than just the critique of religion, and cite the threads on Trump, Covid and the invasion of Ukraine as evidence.
I'd also like to point out that the reason I withdrew from Maths was to satisfy a desire to do more philosophy. Philosophy feels more important than mere maths. Of course, that's an illusion.
Some good general advice would be not to do philosophy if you can avoid it.
(edit: Damn, last post on a page. No one ever reads the last post on a page. The failed mathematician bit will fall flat - but I suspect it's at least partly right. I think I'd be better at philosophy if I had done more maths. Provokative. )
Ha! A jest or a truth?
Serious.
It's not good for you, and probably ought be discouraged in children. Certainly philosophy is not something for adolescent minds.
If you have a choice.
It's situated in the context of the Enlightenment criticism of religion, yes. (I was going to add something about the fact that the word 'religion' has no definite meaning, but I thought it might have muddied the waters.)
Quoting Tom Storm
What is nihilism? It is variously expressed as the idea that nothing is real, or that nothing has any real meaning. As is well known, Nietszche - I'm not an admirer - forecast that nihilism would be the default condition of Western culture, which had supposedly killed its God. Heidegger likewise believed that the root cause of nihilism was the technological way of thinking that has come to dominate modern society, reducing everything quantifiable facts, and leaving no room for the kinds of intangible values and meanings that are essential to human existence, which he sought to re-articulate in a non-religious framework (albeit many suggest that his concerns and preoccupations remained religious in some sense.)
I noticed another of the critical marxists, Max Horkheimer, had similar concerns. His 1947 book The Eclipse of Reason says that individuals in "contemporary industrial culture" experience a "universal feeling of fear and disillusionment", which can be traced back to the impact of ideas that originate in the Enlightenment conception of reason, as well as the historical development of industrial society. Before the Enlightenment, reason was seen as an objective force in the world. Now, it is seen as a "subjective faculty of the mind". In the process, the philosophers of the Enlightenment destroyed "metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself." Reason no longer determines the "guiding principles of our own lives", but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized. Philosophies, such as pragmatism and positivism, "aim at mastering reality, not at criticizing it." (65) Man comes to dominate nature, but in the process dominates other men by dehumanizing them. He forgets the unrepeatable and unique nature of every human life and instead sees all living things as fields of means. His inner life is rationalized and planned. "On the one hand, nature has been stripped of all intrinsic value or meaning. On the other, man has been stripped of all aims except self-preservation." (101) Popular Darwinism teaches only a "coldness and blindness toward nature." (127)
What do you mean by 'the purported nihilism of religion'?
Damn you for adding to my reading list. The prose looks... interesting.
I understand this but I would suggest the case hasn't been fully made and is an opinion or judgement. And people repeat it endlessly so that it's almost, ironically, an article of faith. Modern culture is bereft: discuss.
Martin Luther thought Christianity was a racket of transactional materialism back in the 16th Century when religion was unassailable.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, for me Islamic State or Westboro Church might be seen as examples of more extreme instantiations. But any religion that seeks to restrict the full expression of what it means to be human and denigrate rights, might be seen to have strong nihilistic inclinations - the root of nihilism here being humans are nothing but dirt before god and divine command morality. Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, many forms of Protestantism do this. And the actual functioning of significant aspects of Catholicism, which seem to abandon all moral values in order to protect pedophile priests seems an apropos example. Needless to say, I am not arguing that all religion is bad just that it doesn't necessarily affirm human life.
That's a tantalizing thing to write. Do you feel like exploring this any further so I get the nuances?
I often wonder is there a point where useful self-reflection becomes philosophy? Is it there a demarcation point where we become aware or our presuppositions and vulnerable to philosophical enquiries, demolitions and glib answers. I always found philosophy too difficult and tendentious to get much involved.
Well, for a start, philosophy is pretty antisocial.
For example my immediate response to your "I often wonder is there a point where useful self-reflection becomes philosophy?" was that you have accepted the almost ubiquitous presumption that philosophical enquiry consists in self-reflection. I think that presumption mistaken.
When such stuff is pointed out, folk tend to get the shits rather than enter into a discussion. It's the philosophers' inept response to "everyone likes a good book" - when you read that, do you immediately look for counter instances? That's what philosophical training does to you. :wink:
That's true of course. But when did that original meaning become lost; was there ever a golden era of Christianity, say? Luther obviously though it happened hundreds of years ago.
Quoting Banno
I read it recently. I quite liked it and broadly agree with a lot of it, but its ranty, dated, and often shallow. So far Ive found Adorno more subtle and interesting, and their joint Dialectic of Enlightenment a better presentation of the position, even though its not as clear.
I only thought self-reflection was a frequent starting point (not philosophical of itself) but one that may lead you to explore what is true and to examine the presuppositions held personally and by culture. But as a non-philosopher, I can't say I know what philosophy is. One reason why I'm here.
Quoting Banno
I'm worse than that. If I see people queuing for something, I'm immediately suspicious of it.
So for you, what makes philosophy worthwhile? I think I read you say somewhere that ethics should replace religion. Is that right? Is so, what did you have in mind?
I appreciated it.
Quoting Banno
Sure, these arguments and strategies help, not least in allowing us to ask the right questions. But where Im coming from is that there is a critical and subversive force in philosophy, that it shouldnt just be the handmaiden to science or theology. As it happens this is the thrust of The Eclipse of Reason.
Whereas if you had been a Soviet citizen, youd immediately join it. :-)
Abhorrent but not nihilistic? Not sure how to interpret that. Bad but not meaningless? Meaningful but not right? Do you think abhorrence can be meaningful?
Quoting Wayfarer
If that were the only motivation, and I dont think it is, wouldnt that be self centered and essentially nihilistic in the sense that their actions arent based on values or principles but merely selfishness?
Youre welcome, I enjoyed it.
The only thing Ill say at the moment is that neither I nor Adorno would go along with the alternative to nihilism described by Nagel, since (a) its not a realistic alternative so much as a worldview of former times that cannot be retrieved, (b) it is myth, which is as irrational as nihilism, and (c) the notion that human life without a universal soul is merely human life is anathema.
Quoting frank
I greatly admire Dorothy Day, and find her writings of great value, particularly: The Long Loneliness (autobiography), Loaves and Fishes (about the Catholic Worker Movement), The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, and All the Way to Heaven is Heaven: selected letters of Dorothy Day. She was a pretty tough woman. She will probably be sainted someday--over her dead body! "Don't make me a saint -- I don't want to be dismissed that easily."
She modeled what following Christ means in the 20th (21st) century.
I really can't see how the kamikaze pilot could be interpreted as self-centred when the entire narrative was created around self sacrifice. Same for jihadis (and even though I think their zealotry is tragically warped.) They are indoctrinated to believe that they will receive their just rewards in the hereafter. Whereas, I'm sure that many suicidal mass shooters firmly believe that when they die, there are no consequences in any kind of life beyond. That is what distinguishes nihilism from religious indoctrination.
Nagel's essay is on the subject given in the title - Secular philosophy and the religious temperament. His depiction of what constitutes 'the religious temperament' is not membership of this or that religion, but of a framework within which the individual human life is related to the cosmos as a whole. He gives Plato as an example, saying 'But Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Platos metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly'. I don't think Nagel would portray Plato as 'a believer' or 'a person of faith', either, and I certainly wouldn't want to think of him like that. But then our culture is such that religion is generally associated with that kind of peity.
I loathe and abhor both the Islamic State and Westboro Baptist Church, but you know, I suppose, that WBC is basically a profoundly dysfunctional family.
Not exactly representative of anything other than psychopathy.
As I said, I disagree that theyre motivated only by the promise of reward in the hereafter. I think a large part of their motivation comes from believing in whatever cause theyre fighting for, as well as social pressure. If it were only the promise of reward it would be entirely self-centered and not based on principles or values beyond self-interest. Nothing matters but me is a rather nihilistic attitude, if you asked me.
Also, the example that Tom mentioned about Catholicism abandoning all moral values in order to protect pedophile priests promotes nihilism because it indicates that the tradition is meaningless (without exceptional moral values).
Quoting Wayfarer
I just looked it up and mass shooters seem to have a really consistent profile. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where theyre acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts. Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University
Im not sure if it makes a lot of sense to say that such people are nihilistic. It could certainly be said that theyre focused on their own interests (not unlike how you say that kamikaze pilots and jihadis are focused on their personal reward) and not the well being of others.
By 'nihilism' I understand the belief that nothing human (i.e. mortal, finite, caused, contingent, imperfect) is meaningful or significant or real. Thus, I interpret 'supernatural religions' (e.g. Abrahamic, Vedic, pantheonic, shamanic, animist, ancestral, divine rightist, paranormal, ... cults) as manifest 'nihilisms' which, as Freddy points out, devalue this worldly life by projecing idealizing (i.e. idolizing, disembodying) 'infinite meaning, significance & reality' as originating with and/or only belonging to some purported 'eternal otherworldly life'. :sparkle: :eyes: :roll:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/805551
I did say extreme example, but there are many other churches who hold similar hateful views about women, gay people and culture. The interesting thing for me is there doesn't seem to be an equivalent Hillsboro Secular Humanists. :razz:
But then, the video referenced in the OP would be quite willing to accomodate such a line of argument, I think. As noted, I agree with him that a major role of philosophy is questioning, even interogating, religion. He says that doesn't mean rejecting it. The speaker is Hans-Georg Moeller, professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, and, with Paul D'Ambrosio, author of You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity - which looks very interesting, and also check out the associated Channels on his Youtube profile, from one of which, Deep Noetics:
And I guess I keep saying is that it isn't a forgone conclusion that the former is better than the latter. It seems more about aesthetics or personal taste. There's not a good deed going that hasn't also been done by a secular humanist or atheist, nor a vile crime available that hasn't been committed by a devoted religious person.
Quoting Wayfarer
How would you demonstrate that, apart from, perhaps, being less attractive than religious language (intention, connection and oneness, etc), the latter is in some way inferior - which is essentially what you are pointing to.
We can point to almost any period in history, when religion was dominant - when people believed we were situated as part of a divine plan - and the culture wasn't any kinder or more connected or tolerant. It seems to me that a lot of progressive reform about the status of women, children, gay people was taken up by non religious deists or freethinkers. Hence the old bar-fighting Bishop Spong back in the day:
Are secular humanists unable to be hateful bastards? No, they are able. But birds of a feather flock together, and hateful bastards find their way to organizations where hateful bastardy is welcome. The typical secular humanist meeting wouldn't be that place, and neither would the typical religious organization.
Sure - my little joke was, can we name the secular humanist equivalent to the Westboro Baptists? Former Baptist, now public atheist, Matt Dillahunty often says that the Westboro mob are far more faithful to the Bible than progressive Christians. Maybe. Of course secular humanists are capable of hate. All people are.
I'm not talking specifically about Christianity or belief in the Bible. I'm saying that philosophically, the idea that human life has an intrinsic connection to the cosmic order is better than the view that life is the product of fortuitous causes. I mean, I'm not even going to argue the point, beyond saying that I would have thought it better to be part of a plan than part of an accident ;-) .
But you seem to have red flags about whatever can be called religious. On the other hand what I'm opposing 'religion' to, is 20th C nihilistic materialism. For example - Arthur Schopenhauer is regarded as a textbook atheist. His bitter diatribes against the folly of religion are well known. But then in the SEP entry on Schopenhauer, we read:
So - would Dawkins/Dennett accept Schopenhauer into the fold of scientifically-enlightened materialist atheism?
I expect not.
Yes, its a liberal view thats hard to disagree with, namely that philosophy helps us moderate our ideas and prevents the descent into fundamentalism. It could even be argued that its conservative, in that it positively helps prevailing beliefs to continue prevailing, since moderate beliefs are easier to live with, more stable, less open to attack (motte-and-bailey again).
Even so, I wanted to highlight the basic critical role of philosophy. Its another matter whether the aim of this criticism is to maintain or destroy existing belief systems. As to that, I tend in a more radical direction than Moeller.
What is the meaning of 'post-secular'?
ChatGPT: The term "post-secular" refers to a cultural and philosophical shift away from the dominant secular worldview of modernity towards a renewed interest in spirituality, religion, and the transcendent. The post-secular is a term used to describe a contemporary cultural moment in which the traditional boundaries between the religious and the secular are being redefined.
This shift is characterized by a growing recognition that secularization has not led to the disappearance of religion or religious sensibilities, but rather to their transformation and diversification. The post-secular perspective acknowledges the continued relevance of religion and spirituality in people's lives and in the public sphere, while also recognizing the need for a more inclusive and pluralistic understanding of these phenomena.
The post-secular perspective also emphasizes the importance of dialogue and engagement between different religious and secular worldviews, as well as between different cultural and philosophical traditions. It seeks to promote a more nuanced and complex understanding of the relationship between religion and society, and to explore the ways in which religion and spirituality can contribute to social and political change in a globalized world.
I think of him more as a classic crank (in the Orwell use of the word).
Quoting Wayfarer
Fair enough, but you see I prefer the notion of accident. And I think this is a question of taste. I happen to like the random, the unplanned, the enigmatic.
Quoting Wayfarer
Fair point. I'm not a big fan of any meta-narratives in general. I think I dislike social media and pop music more than religion if that means anything. :wink:
Anyway let's move on. Thanks for your continued nuanced contributions.
In my own perspective, I view philosophy as a tool for expanding on concepts or ideas with a strategy of thought. It's a toolset of conceptualization in which you can test your ideas while avoiding bias.
I think that the idea that one of its purposes or definitions to "questioning religion", isn't really a primary definition, it is a by-product of philosophy's internal logic.
If a primary function of philosophy is to remove biases and fallacies in reasoning, in order to help conceptualization past an individuals mental traps in logic, then it naturally starts to dismantle religion since religion requires a bias towards the faith.
Anyone who's religious and who starts reasoning with philosophy will either fail at that philosophy reinforcing their religion, or break down their religion through the logic found in philosophy. The only reason why religious people have created philosophical concepts is that they intentionally fail at philosophy at a certain level, concluding it with "because God" or similar.
The reason I argue that it's a form of anti-bias toolset is because before we even had a word for cognitive bias or such a concept formulated, it was part of philosophy. The constant demand to include logic. Even in Continental philosophy there is logic. People didn't read Nietzsche and agreed because of some arbitrary reason, but because there was logic in his observation and conceptualization.
It is a form of abstract observation of reality. If scientists observe actual reality, doing experiments, gathering data, calculate predictions, then philosophy is more abstractly observing reality, doing experiments, calculate predictions but not limiting where the mind goes based on the constraints of physical experiments. That doesn't mean it lacks logic more than science, but that the logical experiments uses analogies and thought experiments as its experimental ground.
So the critical role of philosophy is a framework for conceptualization and true observation that removes bias, when done correctly. And through that, the byproduct becomes anti-religion as religion requires bias to that religion in order to function.
Because of this I don't think the critical role is to question religion, it's just that religion becomes the biggest target for philosophy based on its opposing internal logic. And through history we've primarily witnessed the clash between religion and philosophy because of this.
Yes, I like this way of putting it. Feuerbachs critique was similar.
What we see then are different kinds of nihilism: from the devaluation of earthly life in traditional societies to morality and reason as purely subjective under capitalism. Roughly speaking.
Interesting. Seems reasonable.
My own interest in some sort of secular sacredness is in a different direction: immanent and earthly rather than transcendent and heavenly, more like magic than mythology or religion. Art is probably the model here, though its notable that even that model may have been lost, since the rise of postmodern, conceptual art.
Still, theres something about it that makes me suspicious. The idea that philosophy is an independent ever-expanding toolbox, ready to apply to whatever existsthis is surely a fantasy. Philosophy is itself always historically situated, and part of what it does is to apply its tools to itself, even to its own tools, depending on the social conditions.
Im very sympathetic to this. The instinct to identify a use or function might be associated with the instinct to commodify, to put a price on it. Philosophy is attractive partly because its usefulness is at the very least non-obvious.
Even so, I dont think its contradictory to look at some period in history and say that philosophers were important in particular ways that led to good outcomes, or that the philosophical thought of the period sets an example of how to think independently and critically.
The purpose of the tool maker himself is to make tools. He is important to every function because he has none of his own.
Since the dawn of writing, has not the pen been developed to be a better pen? A tool is constantly being improved upon and philosophy has undergone iterations of improvements to sharpen its ability to help conceptualize. And just like a pen or any tool for writing, it has the shape of the time it is used in.
But I think the core principles has been valid since people first had critical thought and questioned each others logic. We could possibly argue that even during hunter gatherer societies, there were arguments on how to best hunt a certain prey or where to find the best source of food. And the most successful were the ones detaching themselves from cognitive bias, without ever knowing about such concepts theoretically. This is probably why philosophy and science has been confused together as well as been argued to be different. They share similarities, but form different functions. One is forming predictive truths, while the other is mentally structuring concepts that functions as principles in thought.
Essentially it helps guide thoughts and ideas through a forest of confusion. Speeding up the process of arriving at logical conclusions in situations where scientific facts aren't fully present to achieve absolute predictable truths.
I do think that it can be applied to anything if the general purpose is to detach conceptualization from the mental traps of bias. A self-examination of one's ideas in order to reach higher understanding about something without adding personal fantasy to the mix.
Because when someone propose a philosophical concept that lacks in logic or rationality, on any level, even abstract ones, it is a failure in philosophy, and when we examine such arguments for flaws, we are looking for biases and fallacies as the prime source for their failures.
Those proposed concepts can be about anything, but the framework seems to be consistent throughout time and the level of analytical sharpness is depending on which historical time we are in, just like a writing tool has been a stick with red paint, to an iron rod marking stone tablets, to a feather in ink, to a mass produced charcoal pencil, to a keyboard. It has sharpened the efficiency of writing, and so we have sharpened the efficiency of anti-biased conceptualization.
Few today can propose philosophical concepts without the internal logic being absolutely watertight. If someone today propose a wildly inconsistent concept (that could have been common hundred of years ago and still pushed concepts and ideas about the world forward), it will be broken down and discarded by its lack of internal logic. Biases and fallacies would be pointed out and the one proposing the concept is required to rework that inner logic. Even in continental philosophy, the inner logic is examined closely. Does it have high probability or not?
Time sharpens any general concept of a tool and that tool will always evolve to be better throughout history.
The concept of a universe devoid of meaning, does not account for the time/moment when 'life' that was self-aware, came into existence. For me, this destroys any notion of a universe devoid of meaning.
Lifeforms such as humans (and not just humans), results in a universe with very definite meaning.
How can concepts such as 'legacy' and 'memorialisation' and 'inherited genetics' and 'natural selection based on a survival imperative,' be devoid of meaning.' I am demonstrating meaning right now, by typing this response. No supernatural input is required to demonstrate meaning, purpose and intent. There is no nihilistic imperative then, as living a meaningful life is fully available. Living life as a nihilistic curse, is a personal choice.
I would also argue that the universe before life, was always moving towards the moment of sparking life. Life is perpetually emergent, all over the universe and always has been. Entropy will end this universe eventually, but if you are a fan of a cyclical universe then, life will resurface during each aeon.
Quoting Wayfarer
Imbeciles like kamikaze and jihadis worship the very self-centred concept of martyrdom.
A horror like Alexander the butcher, placed his glorification and the fact that he will be remembered for millennia, over any immediate threat to his existence. Those who covet martyrdom/glorification and are very willing to make themselves a blood sacrifice to 'save' their fellows, are following such as the christ crucified exemplar. That's why those who wrote the bible made up the christ crucified and then resurrected story. It's very attractive to those self-centred enough to be attracted to martyrdom.
How do you feel about this image and use of the word philosophy?
Additionals: An interesting side question I tend to ask Christian's is, do you think we would have heard of Jesus Christ, if the Romans had let him go free? Would Jesus/god have been forced to harden the Roman hearts against him like he did to Pharaoh in the OT?
@Jamal, @180 Proof should a title like 'The philosophy of martyrdom,' offend your average academic philosopher?
Quoting Jamal
Quoting unenlightened
I might agree, but materialism has no concept of telos. There is no possibility of intentionality outside the intentional actions of agents.
Quoting universeness
Carl Sagan was very interested in Hindu cosmology, partially as a consequence of this idea. (Also because the mythological Hindu time-scales were scientifically feasible occupying billions of years)
Why would such be a requirement for meaning to exist in the universe. Each of us is an individual agent of meaning, purpose and intent, why is that not enough to demonstrate that meaning exists in the universe?
Quoting Wayfarer
I would not choose the term 'very interested.' He found Hindu cosmology to have some common ground with the cyclical universe proposals, posited by science but he assigned far more credence to scientific cyclical/oscillating universe posits that he did to hindu cosmology. Carl also liked the idea that this universe could be contained in a particle and that every particle in this universe, is a universe. He called that a 'nice idea.'
Carl had a wonderfully, awesome, romantic view of human existence as well as a brilliant scientific mind.
I try to mimic him whenever I can.
I think you are right, but only half right. Philosophy helps tear down dogmas, but it also helps construct and sustain dogmas. Opposite any critical philosopher is always a set of orthodox philosophers attempting to preserve the current edifice.
Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler, got into hot water for heliocentrism precisely because it conflicted with Aristotle's physics, which by then had become a dogmatic framework for the Church.
Platonism became the religion of Neo-Platonism with Plotinus, Proculus, etc., i.e. philosophers building up religion. The Patristics framed early Christian philosophy in Stoic and Neoplatonic terms because these ways of thinking were dogmatically held as the correct way to view nature, and anything that radically shifted away from them was necessarily suspect.
Saint Augustine is widely held as the creator of the Western concept of "the will," and the originator of both libertarianism and compatiblism (you see both, since Augustine's thought doesn't fit nicely in one box and changes over his 43 year career). He is also the first philosopher to investigate semiotics, although he's less influential here since no one else picked up on it for a long time.
Augustine challenged Neoplatonic dogmas, both outside and inside the Church (e.g., writing against Origenist positions or Arian emanationist positions that hewed closer to Neoplatonic orthodoxy). Yet, Augustine's teachings also became dogmas in turn, shaping the Western church in particular in a fundemental way. So here we have a philosopher building up religion.
Philosophy is a process that both builds up and helps take down dogmas. Philosophy gave birth to the natural sciences, which were originally "natural philosophy," the social sciences, and a number of humanities fields (e.g. semiotics). You see the same dynamics at work in these fields, where a given paradigm is defended as orthodoxy when challenges to it first appear.
Dogmas exist in the sciences. Physics had a 70 year span where work on quantum foundations was anathema, and orthodoxy enforced by torpedoing the careers of people who dared to investigate the interpretation of QM. Biology has a similar struggle over the Central Dogma that has blown up into public view recently
Philosophy has shown up to help destroy dogmas in the sciences and to help erect new ones. The idea of "philosophy becoming divorced from the sciences," in the early 20th century is itself a dogma pursued by philosophers. Copenhagen orthodoxy wasn't "just the science," it was a philosophical view that claimed it was the absence of philosophy, and thus unchallengeable without "degrading the science by injecting woo filled metaphysics." This was, in retrospect, still a philosophy, and a particularly dogmatic and uncharitable one (e.g., constant claims that almost every topic under the sun is essentially "meaningless").
Scientism is a dogma supported by a set of particular philosophical outlooks. This dogma is defended in the same way the old religions were. On this front, philosophy is still both maintaining and breaking down old dogmas. I read a lot of popular science, and hit books often contain tons of discussions of philosophical topics or metaphysical claims. These topics can often take up the majority of a book ostensibly not about philosophy, even when the same book denies a role for philosophy in modern science.
This is why I am starting to wonder if the claim that "science doesn't make ontological claims, it is merely a set of epistemological methods," isn't simply a No True Scottman fallacy.
There is a basic philosophical issue of how intentionality arises in the first place. Materialism ascribes that to chance - as the outcome of a fortuitous physical process which happened to give rise to bioogical evolution - and there are considerable philosophical implications of that.
:clap:
Quoting Christoffer
Philosophers who are critical of the idea of progress in history point out that while humanitys ability to control nature or achieve freedom from nature, and to make the tools that make that possible (technology), has indeed improved steadily, the same cannot be said for anything else humans do. In living memory there were genocides and famines, and despite having a really cool philosophical toolbox, humanity is as stupid as ever (QAnon, white supremacy, nationalism, and so on and on).
If philosophy is such a great mental technology, as you imply, wouldnt we expect society to have become more rational over time, just as it has become more technological? Why hasnt that happened?
The view I'm sympathetic to, from Adorno & Horkheimer, is that societies have become more rational, but only instrumentally so; the very concept of reason has been impoverished. You echo this state of affairs in describing philosophy as an instrument.
So we have the instrumental reason in science and technology that leads to vaccines, dentistry, washing machines, Zyklon B and weapons of mass descruction. This is based on the use of tools from out of the philosophical toolbox that you describe. So philosophy is there to "guide thoughts and ideas through a forest of confusion" towards ... genocide?
To me it follows that philosophy, as eminently critical, has to step in and say wait a minute, do we really want to be doing that? Philosophy often doesn't do that, I realize. I guess I'm emphasizing and celebrating the times when it does, thereby saying it ought to do more of it. This amounts to an attempt to form a richer notion of rationality than the one we have.
All of that's not so much a rejection of your position as an addition to it.
I know that. That gap does not prevent full recognition by 'philosophers,' and theistic sympathisers or even theists themselves that agents who can DEMONSTRATE meaning, intent and purpose, exist, in this universe and as they are OF this universe their intentionality can be ascribed in it's totality, to an overall concentration of intentionality, whose future effect can extend beyond this planet. So, an intentionality that requires no supernatural agent, other than as a plug invented by ancient theologians out of primal fear. A plug that does not fit the gap you describe.
And that you haven't addressed.
Quick one-liner, or so ..what did you get out of The Eclipse of Reason? What is it the author wants to say, bottom line kinda thing?
Oh, that's easy and I have done so many times on TPF, you obviously don't read all my posts with the enthusiasm I expect. :joke:
It's a gap! so it's vacant for any plug, that's why theist's get to throw any shaped plug at it that they can imagineer, so it becomes a matter or what credence level your own personal critical faculties and rationale allows you to assign to a particular proposal. I can do likewise.
At the simplest level, my origin for the universe, is a mindless spark, that no longer exists but reforms at the end of this universe, we might even use the placeholder name 'singularity.'
if you want something with more scientific rigor behind it, then I vote for the conformal cyclic cosmology of Roger Penrose or > 3d superstring theory, or Mtheory with each universe being created by interacting 5D branes. These extra dimensions of the very small, that are 'wrapped around' every point in our 3d existence, are undetectable to us but are the reason why some posit nonsense such as 'something from nothing.' Quantum fluctuations are probably caused by these extra dimensions. The system is most likely (so for me, warrants a high credence level,) cyclical and eternal.
All of these similar 'cyclical and eternal' proposals are far far more likely and far far more rational that any theological posit (normally flavoured by some supernatural agency with intentionality) I have ever heard and any I am ever likely to hear about.
This leaves the question of: "why do we expect science to progress, such that I trust a physics or biology textbook from 2020 more than one from 1880," but the same thing doesn't apply to other human institutions?
It seems to me that science progresses through a progress akin to natural selection. Theories that jive less with reality eventually get selected against due to their inability to predict or explain all observations. That said, some theories also survive and thrive for other reasons (e.g., because they are elegant and aesthetically pleasing, easier to teach, are politically relevant, etc.).
But why shouldn't the traits of states also undergo this sort evolution? Perhaps there is an attractor within the chaotic systems of possible state systems that causes states to converge on a better outcome. Certainly, one finding in political science is that developed states tend to become more similar over time in many ways.
Anyhow, the claim that things are "just as bad as ever," certainly has its detractors, who can muster a lot of empirical evidence to support their claims of progress. % of deaths due to homicide have been trending down throughout history.
Oxford, a wealthier town, had a homicide rate of 110 per 100,000 in the 1340s, 3.3 times over Honduras' current rate and higher than some war zones today. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-homicide-and-cities-surprises-the-experts.html
Studies of extant hunter gatherers and forensic anthropology converge on incredibly high homicide rates for humans in a "state of nature," at around 2,000 per 100,000. This is 44.5 times higher than the highest nations today, higher than the total death tolls of many major wars. However, a homicide rate of 1.8-2% isn't particularly at odds with what we see for the species from which we descended, so perhaps it isn't that surprising. Slavery, rape, and cannibalism are ubiquitous in human history and only slowly became anathema.https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758
Wars have also been becoming less deadly. Several single day battles in the ancient and medieval world have more fatalities than the leaked figures for the Russo-Ukrainian War occuring over several hours. The Thirty Years War killed 2.5 times more of Germany's population than both World Wars combined. The Huguenot Wars in France killed 11-14 times the share of the population as World War I. If Syria were to experience loss of live on a level with that conflict it would be around 10 times a deadly. Most members of the Wermacht and Red Army survived the Second World War, whereas fatality rates for Latin Crusaders in the First Crusade, an exceptionally large army for the period, were around 66-80+% despite their victory.
US history follows a similar pattern. Fatalities as a share of the population follow an almost reverse chronological order, with the exception being the American Civil War being the highest, although if one includes the small pox epidemic made much worse by the Revolutionary War that conflict remains on top.
Now, this trend could very well reverse in the event of a war where nuclear weapons are used against civilian targets in large numbers, but for now it is a trend that's held across centuries. Obviously it's a trend in a chaotic system though, trending down in the long term but jumping around in a self-similar power law distribution on shorter scales.
Biology also suggests this progress may be taking place. Modern humans retain far more juvenile features into adulthood than their pre-agricultural ancestors. Human beings appear to have undergone a process akin to domestication over time.
Then, on the economic front, we have the fact that the share of human beings living in extreme poverty or bondage (slavery or serfdom) has rapidly declined.
There are certainly arguments against progress, but this is a tough set of trends to explain away entirely. It can't easily be reduced to "just technology," either, as there is ample evidence to support the claim that more open societies and greater economic freedom produces more rapid technological developments and scientific progress. Indeed, this was the whole reason Deng embraced a move to a market economy, because such a system is essential to national power. Thus, we can also see how a move towards greater freedom might be selected for in that it helps states survive conflicts.
Of course, the first philosophers of progress I am aware of, the Patristics, Eusbius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyprus, all tied their conception of progress to the Pax Romana as leading to the eventual fruition of Isiah 2, "they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks," and Psalm 46 "He shall make wars cease unto the ends of the Earth," and towards economic prosperity and freedom (Psalm 72), and then the Empire collapsed. So, we'll see...
She was amazing!
One of the theories for why we have twice as many female ancestors as male is that ancient warfare was the norm. It seems like the remains of ancient humans they find are always covered in brutal injuries. Life was tough.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I thought all the members of the homo genus display neoteny. Did it progress even more in our species?
I would disagree that "questioning religion" should be part of a good definition of philosophy, no more than questioning atheism should be part of a good definition of philosophy. Philosophy questions everything, and nothing should be off the table. In fact, there should be more questioning of much of the academic thinking in our culture, and the cultures around the world.
I agree that metaphysics has taken up much of philosophy, especially when it comes to religious beliefs, but that's because it's so pervasive. The questioning of metaphysical beliefs is a good thing, and the questioning of physicalism or materialism is also a good thing, both play an important role in trying to sort out what's factual. It's true that any belief that is as pervasive as religious belief will take up a large portion of philosophical thinking, but that doesn't mean that part of the definition should include "questioning religion." Part of the definition of philosophy is a critical analysis any belief.
Philosophy, for me, is any critical analysis, using philosophical principles (reason, epistemology, etc), that analyzes any belief or system of beliefs. My definition is much broader in scope than academic philosophy, and it includes the man on the street questioning his neighbors beliefs. Obviously most people are not trained in philosophy, but we're all philosophers to one degree or another. There are just not many that are very good at it.
It's a process that appears to have occured in many cycles. You have evidence of a process of self-domestication within other members of the homo genus going way back, but also evidence for further rounds of rapid self-domestication occuring after the existence of homosapiens.
Anatomically modern humans emerged around 300,000 years ago, while behaviorally modern humans emerged just 150,000-60,000 years ago. Within the latter period you also have another period of rapid neotenization occuring between 40,000-25,000 years ago. This period saw dramatic changes in skull morphology, sexual dimorphism, lower brain volume, and the introduction of genetic disorders associated with domestication that appear to be absent from earlier humans.
The expansion of glaciation also had a major impact on humans, making the species significantly smaller. Wealthy countries are just now reaching the peak average height for males. Agriculture may have been a further blow to average height, but there seems to be less consensus on this.
The big question is how and how much the emergence of civilization (agriculture and later states) affected human evolution. On the face of it, such a huge enviornmental shift seems sure to produce changes in the species over time. At the same time, it's an incredibly difficult question to answer due to the shorter time period and very dynamic nature of how various groups transitioned from hunter gatherer life styles to either pastoralism or agriculture, to full fledged state systems with formal legal systems, organized religions, etc.
IMO, it's impossible to get a valid typology to use in analysis when considering levels of development and we don't have widespread state formation until very recently, which compresses the record, since increases in complexity didn't occur in a linear fashion. Plus, as you get closer to the modern era, the topic gets increasingly politically charged.
But an interesting point that avoids this set of questions is the claim that, over time, culture became more important to human evolution than genes. Culture represents a way to encode information about the enviornment that is able to shift with enviornmental changes much more rapidly than genetic evolution. Such a trend might suggest that humans are on a road to becoming more and more a communal species (e.g., ants and bees being premier examples). This might explain why the nature versus nurture debate has so much life in it. Humans may have adapted to be increasingly malleable to cultural influences, nature causing us to rely more and more on nurture.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210602170624.htm
There is also a lot of evidence that autocracies are not good at spurring scientific progress, and technology is a key determinant in warfare. Market economies tend to out perform command economies in terms of innovation and growth. Autocracies also tend to preform worse militarily for a host of well documented reasons relating to incentives, while on the other hand we have the observed phenomena that democratic states don't tend to go to war with one another (although they tend to have even longer wars when they do get into them with their non-democratic rivals). All this opens up the possibility of freedom being promoted because states that don't promote the freedom and well being of their people are more likely to be destroyed or radically altered by internal or external conflicts.
It's at least a positive idea. The problem is that most reforms seem to only come when a crisis point is reached. For example, I don't see anything like the UN having actual teeth, power akin to the EU or US federal government, until some combination of global warming, global inequality, and migration spur on a world shaking crisis. It would be nice to do more reforms BEFORE things go to shit...
Yes, but the pragmatist/quietist approach would certainly include among philosophy's purposes the application of its tools to itself. And if reason, critical analysis and the careful use of language are among those tools, pragmatists and quietists have been doing just that. Successfully, I think.
What's to be considered, I think, is whether we want such tools to be applied in and to philosophy. If they are, then philosophy probably wouldn't involve much in the way of proclamations regarding Truth, the Meaning of Life, Being (a la Heidegger and others), the Good, the Beautiful, Reality, God and other traditional philosophical concerns, because such proclamations require the creation and imposition of a system of ideas, and the application of the tools I refer to generally precludes the formation of a system that purports to resolve those traditional concerns.
When they're not applied, I think what results is mostly an expression of the wishes, intuitions, feelings and preferences of certain individuals, which may be inspiring and thought-provoking, which appeal to the wishes, intuitions, feelings and preferences of others. Perhaps that's what philosophy is, really.
*This post tends toward self-referential incoherence.
All fascinating! Do you think that what we call religion is one of ways we carry information about the environment without having to physically adapt? I'm thinking of priests whose jobs were to hold the secrets to appeasing the gods, signaling when it's time to plant, and received wisdom about medicine.
If this was true, then to the extent that philosophy creates a vantage point on religion, it's maybe a reaction to an increased pace of change where religion isn't evolving fast enough.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think it's possible that the human species won't hang together long term. I think it will branch, with some branches retaining technology and others reverting to a stone age existence. An H.G. Wells sort of thing.
I agree. But I might suggest that we broaden Moeller's definition from just formal "religions" to more general "dogmas". Dogmas -- authoritarian convictions -- arise in all phases of human belief, including Politics and Science. Ironically, some TPF posters are inclined to make dogmatic scientific assertions (e.g. Scientism) in cases where uncertainty is inherent (e.g. quantum physics). The role of modern Philosophy is indeed to shine light on dogmatic beliefs, but not to counter one dogma with another. :smile:
Dogmatism is defined as avoidance from accepting others' beliefs, ideas and behaviors. Dogmatic individuals have many problems in understanding new ideas. They cannot accept reasonable ideas instead of their incorrect ideas. They do not cooperate with others with different ideas.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5395528/
I think that these are the result of either not listening to philosophers, misinterpreting them, or outright ignoring them in combination with enforcing the very problems that philosophy is a tool against. I.e these things emerges out of the chaos of non-philosophical approaches to questions that arrises in history.
Quoting Jamal
I think history flows in waves and tides, going back and forth between enlightenment and stupidity. After a time of great achievements and enlightenment, people fall into apathy, the knowledge gets boring, people seek new meaning and crave differences, without the necessary work to change things carefully. Right now we live in a time when intellectuals aren't popular, where stupidity and apathy reigns once again. And just like earlier times in history this will lead to a form of collapse. The collapse might be seen in things like the things you mentioned, Qanon, white supremacy, nationalism, but also the Ukraine war and changing global politics and of course the big one, failure to fix climate change.
Such times usually follows an intellectual enlightenment era, in which knowledge once again becomes popular and stupidity and apathy start to be considered embarrassing traits. Such times lead to rapid progress in both technology, science and philosophy. We might see a surge in new thinkers in a few decades, a minor renaissance, like the enlightenment era, post-war era etc.
So I think it's less about society just slightly becoming more rational over time, and more that we historically live in a low tide right now, which feels like we're stuck in progress. As institutional religion keeps falling in popularity, I think rationality will keep on growing. And I think philosophy is a good tool for the mind of anyone living in a society which functions on rationality and reason, but even more so for fighting back stupidity and apathy.
And the tides seem to keep going back and forth faster and faster.
Quoting Jamal
The forest of confusion is what leads to genocide, meaning, failure at philosophy leads to genocide. We can invent anything, but only philosophy as a tool can keep our biases and destructive emotions at bay and make us more morally capable of understanding the practical use of technology without it leading to genocide.
For example, how do we keep developing AI safely? Without it leading to destructive outcomes? Philosophy can help us break down consequences, build up scenarios, inform laws and regulations. We see the difference right now, some are confused, act out in anger at the development, and some act out dangerous concepts without any thought as to what it could lead to. But some are rational and calm. They use reason to evaluate the use and outcome of certain AI systems, they keep forming thought-experiment scenarios and possible positive uses, while informing politicians of rational laws and regulations that keep the good aspects of AI and stop the bad.
Philosophy becomes a backbone tool that helps managing problem solving for things that are new in society. It keeps people rational and levelheaded when there are no rules of conduct in place. It's a force against the chaos that occurs when we face the unknown.
Quoting Jamal
Yes, I agree with that. Like I said about the tides of history, it's philosophy that keeps people afloat, especially in darkness. And I think the anti-bias aspect of philosophy as a tool of the mind makes people better at solving problems without those solutions leading to wars, genocide and more darkness. It keeps us constantly making better choices, while ignoring the tool makes us clash with the world, casting it in darkness.
I think it's the job of everyone of us who recognizes the value of philosophy and who understands the positive function it can have, to show others the value of such a tool and how it can be applied in practice. It lets us understand how we think, so that we can think better, morally and in reasoning.
I might have an overly positive perspective on philosophy, but I think that all negatives throughout history mostly shows a deep failure at actual philosophy. A misunderstanding of some philosophical concept or an intentional misrepresentation of it. Many people in power who understands philosophy, but act dishonest towards its foundation, use the lack of philosophical knowledge in people to their own advantage. Like how Hitler skewed Nietzsche's philosophy into a warped mythology for a gullible population, craving for meaning.
Philosophy should detach us from ourselves, so that we can examine our own thinking in relation to the world and other people.
It's about the instrumentalisation, and relativising, of reason - that reason used to be understood as an objective reality (although I think the world 'objective' is problematic in the context) but anyway, something which steered the world and which man could discern. Whereas it has become increasingly internalised, subjectivised, relativised. Also had insightful comments into the philosophical implications of Darwinism:
[quote=Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 10-11]In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to ones surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirits antagonism to natureeven as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including manfrequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of mans continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the useless spiritual, and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy.[/quote]
'Regarding reason as a natural organ' is a profound shift in philosophy. This is tied to the rejection of platonic realism in mathematics, and the so-called 'naturalisation of reason' which was a major thrust of much 20th century English-language philosophy. It's all well beyond my education and skills to articulate in any detail but I see evidence for it in many places.
Quoting Christoffer
Interesting comments. I'm not going to argue that you are wrong, but my take is that fear and our tendency towards dualistic thinking may lie behind most problems like this. People are frightened and are easily galvanized by scapegoating, quick fixes, sloganeering and appeals to tribal identity (white nationalism, etc). The notion that you are either for us or against us becomes a kind of touch stone for social discourse.
I should think that in times of uncertainty, where fear is brewing and readily activated as a motivating energy (largely thanks to Murdoch in the West) we see people embracing glib answers which promise deliverance and perverse forms of solidarity.
I'm not sure that philosophy as such plays a key role here, but certainly ideas do.
Interesting...I'd broaden the 'questioning' part to questioning tradition and established values, including religion. Also, identifying unexamined assumptions driving thought (most of which probably derive from cultural, including religious, indoctrination).
I'm familiar with the 'creating new concepts' idea from Deleuze (see What is Philosophy co-authored with Guattari). I like the snarky reference to the anals and the incontinentals as failed poets and mathematicians respectively. Anyway, I should find the time to watch the video.
Yes, a study for a curmudgeon...
Quoting Tom Storm
Yeah, that's the misanthropic aspect of critical thinking. It might easily become a source of alienation, hence not for children.
Did you notice The Philosophical Toolkit? There was a bit of discussion around it. Several tools are listed.
I suspect that the (self-conscious?) use of such heuristics is more common amongst the failed mathematicians than amongst the failed writers. That might just be my bias, which is towards critique rather than making shit up.
Yes. The common view is mostly bogus, although Im sympathetic to the backlash to modern philosophy in the same way as that of some modern art.
Questioning things is essential. Socrates/Plato set quite the tone, and fit very well in what you described and that should be the legacy.
Yes, thats what I did in the OP and have been doing in the discussion since. The video made me think, and the resulting thoughts diverged from anything in the video.
Quoting Janus
I thought about that too, but in the video Moeller mentions Hegel rather than Deleuze.
I just read it. Fell asleep. I doubt those heuristics are self-consciously used by either. Continentals might say theyre trivial and obvious at best, rigid and constraining at worst.
What I think philosophers do self-consciously use are concepts such as those described in a nice little book called Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Sets by David Papineau.
[quote=Table of Contents]
Part I: Sets and Numbers
1. Naive Sets and Russell's Paradox
2. Infinite Sets
3. Orders of Infinity
Part II: Analyticity, a prioricity, and necessity
4. Kinds of Truths
5. Possible Worlds
6. Naming and Necessity
Part III: The Nature and Uses of Probability
7. Kinds of Probability
8. Constraints on Credence
9. Correlations and Causes
Part IV: Logics and Theories
10. Syntax and Semantics
11. Soundness and Completeness
12. Theories and Godel's Theorem[/quote]
By making shit up Im guessing you dont mean anything like the coining of concepts proposed by Moeller in the video as one of the things philosophy is for?
We could easily find examples of the use of those heuristics hereabouts. It was their misapplication that was more widely discussed, see for example How (And When) To Think Like A Philosopher. it's short, you might be able to stay awake.
Quoting Jamal
In part. Thinking in terms of Bernard Gert's "I'm a philosopher, so I don't know anything you don't know", a good rule of thumb might be that notions that are peculiar to philosophies must be treated as dubious. If doing philosophy is like plumbing, then it probably should avoid any pretensions of making discoveries.
Family resemblances, language games, alienation, positive and negative freedom, sense and reference. These concepts are at least useful. I happen to think they allow us to make discoveries too.
The bottom line is that reason can become merely instrumental, such that rationality leads to outcomes that are irrational when viewed under a richer notion of reason. For example, it was instrumentally rational for the US and the USSR to each create nuclear weapons, but irrational in terms of the interests of human beings in general.
Reason as the mere domination of nature entails the domination of people by other people.
Its curious that both you and @Banno associate critique with analytic philosophy, because until now (and probably still, not sure yet) Ive been thinking of other kinds of philosophy as critical, and analytic much less so.
We might be using the word differently. What I mean by critical has more in common with ancient philosophy than it does with the anemic approach. In fact, I almost used the word anemic in reply to @Ciceronianus, the sensible no-nonsense pragmatist, but decided it was too rude.
Critique and the philosophy of living well are bound together in Socrates and Plato, also I would argue in Nietzsche and Marx. To ask how best we should live is to criticize how we do live, which in turn is to question beliefs that usually go unquestioned.
Last night I happened upon this comment from a lecture by Adorno. It seems relevant to the (anemic) philosophy-as-toolkit idea:
[quote=Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics]I might point out here that the widespread positivist notion of a neutral form of thought, in contrast to one supposedly based on more or less arbitrary value systems and particular standpoints, is itself an illusion, that there is no such thing as so-called neutral thought, that generally speaking this alleged neutrality of thought with regard to its subject matter tends to perform an apologetic function for the existent precisely through its mere formality, through the form of its unified, methodological and systematic nature, and thus possesses an intrinsically apologetic or - if you like - an inherently conservative character. It is therefore just as necessary, I would say, to submit the concept of the absolute neutrality of thought to thorough critical reflection [ ][/quote]
EDIT: I think what it comes down to is that Ive often been talking about social critique, whereas others are talking about the critique of the philosophical concepts, systems, and arguments of other philosophers. I think I want to bring both of these under my idea of critique, as part of the same pre-eminent function of philosophy. (Although I dont really like the word function here)
Right. I probably haven't read the thread thoroughly enough.
Quoting Jamal
I've since watched the video, and he does mention Hegel in that connection. I have to say I'm a bit skeptical about Hegel's notion of thinking one's time, as though historical moments are monolithic and pure. In any case it needn't be a self-conscious thinking of the times if it is true that our thinking is inevitably constrained by the historical "moment" we find ourselves in.
You are forgiven.
Quoting Janus
Incidentally, did you notice that he mentioned woke politics? That's possibly a clue to his motivation: he sees "wokeism" as a civil religion, and since he questions it, he's questioning religion and is therefore a great philosopher.
Quoting Janus
I find this topic difficult so I won't get deep into it. I will say that if it's true that philosophers cannot start from a neutral transcendent foundation, that their thinking is conditioned by their time, then it might help to be aware of it. Those philosophers who were not aware of it imagined they were building up from an eternally valid ground and producing knowledge applicable for all time, and they produced systems that were fundamentally in error partly for this reason. Kant, for instance, though self-consciously critical and non-dogmatic, in some ways did not take his attack on metaphysics far enough, and ended up with his own elaborate system, dogmatically rationalist in its own way (not to mention quintessentially Enlightenment and bourgeois).
Ever since then, philosophers have been acutely aware of human finitude, our inability to transcend our time, culture, point of view, and so on. This would include phenomenology, post-structuralism, Wittgenstein and much else. Incidentally, this century some philosophers got fed up with all that and started doing what has been called speculative realism, which says, among other things, that we can get access to things in themselves after all.
I doubt that Hegel's notion of thinking one's time entails a view of historical moments as monolithic and pure, since the whole point of his philosophy is to see things in their dynamic, historical, conflictual context, rather than as fixed.
I said I wasn't going to get into it and then I kind of got into it. Never mind.
Thanks, and respect, to both
Reason as an organ, vis a vis, heart, lung, liver? Reason as an instrument, vis a vis, oscope, meter, spectrograph?
Things progress or die, sometimes one is the other. Philosophy progresses, terms and conditions are given new meanings, in attempts to say something nobody else has, tantamount to mere academic oneupmanship.
Cant do anything about it, but also dont have to like it.
Of course, that's an archaic belief system and we know now, thanks to science, that the principle behind all our faculties (including reason) is successful adaption and procreation.
[quote=Horkheimer]This [subjective] relegation of reason to a subordinate position is in sharp contrast to the ideas of the pioneers of bourgeois civilization, the spiritual and political representatives of the rising middle class, who were unanimous in declaring that reason plays a leading role in human behavior, perhaps even the predominant role. They defined a wise legislature as one whose laws conform to reason; national and international policies were judged according to whether they followed the lines of reason. Reason was supposed to regulate our preferences and our relations with other human beings and with nature. It was thought of as an entity, a spiritual power living in each man. This power was held to be the supreme arbiternay, more, the creative force behind the ideas and things to which we should devote our lives.[/quote]
So for Horkheimer its not only traditional societies that had objective reason. In the Enlightenment, reason was still supposed to help us determine the right ends and not merely the means. The change comes with industrialization.
Of course he does also say that the Enlightenment was a step towards subjective and instrumental reason.
I think that the existence of intentionality is the pivotal issue to both philosophy and religion. Religion takes intentionality for granted, and sets up rules and conventions for the guidance of intentional acts, which become traditions. But natural philosophy, science, chews away at the underpinnings of what was taken for granted through understanding of "natural processes", and propositions of causation. This produces a shift in what is taken for granted, natural processes, rather than intentionality.
The two, natural processes and intentionality, show themselves to be incompatible because intention is based on a view toward the future, and causation is based on a view toward the past. So the two look at the activity of the passing of time at the present, in opposite directions.
The two perspectives can be characterized as free will toward future actions, and determinism from past reality. Social conventions shape which is taken for granted, such that we tend to view the other from the perspective which we take for granted, making the other a sort of illusion. The modern environment, of a society shaped by scientific development inclines us to see intentionality from the causation based perspective, such that the mainstream force, or flow of time from the past is primary. Then intention gets modeled as a looping, feedback activity, an eddy in the flow. This lends itself to the "cyclical" representation of intention.
Quoting universeness
The "cyclical" model is probably best presented, in its most comprehensible form, by Aristotle, as the eternal circular motions of the planets. The cause of the eternal cycle is said to be an intentionality, the divine contemplation, a thinking, thinking on thinking. I have argued elsewhere that Aristotle dismisses this proposal, as untenable, though he is commonly cited as a proponent.
The important takeaway though is that such eternal cycles can only be comprehended as requiring a cause. Intention, being incorporated into the system as a looping feedback activity is the only thing available which is capable of producing such an eternal circle. This places intention as prior, in the absolute sense; prior as the cause of eternal cycles, and timeless balances like symmetry, and prior as the cause of semiotics.
It is this recognition, which hands priority to intention, as the view toward the future, rather than causal determinism, (the view toward the past), as the true guiding perspective. This inclines us toward religion. Then we come to understand that natural processes, as we apprehend them, really cannot be taken for granted, and the only thing which can really be taken for granted is the intention, the view toward the future, which when we turn around to see the past, has shaped us in our being at the present.
Religion certainly served pragmatic functions in many societies. It can serve to legitimize the state (e.g., the deification of Roman emperors), it can act as a check on absolutist states (e.g., Saint Ambrose forcing Emperor Theodosius to wear penitent's robes and undergo chastisement after the massacre at Thessalonica), it can act as a legal arbiter (e.g., Saint Augustine mentions much of his time being sucked up by arbitrating property disputes, estates, etc.), it can help solve collective action problems when pushing for reforms (e.g., the central role of churches in the US Civil Rights Movement, and earlier, the Abolitionist movement), and it can help provide public goods in low capacity states (e.g., churches were the main source of welfare programs and education for the lower classes in Europe for over a millennia).
Civil society organizations and the state can also provide these goods. What makes religion and philosophy unique is their ability to give people a narrative about the meaning and purpose of life, an explanation of their inner lives and the natural world.
This is something religion aims at, but also philosophy, and the two can be quite close in this respect. A world view based on Nietzschean overcoming requires that the world be valueless and meaningless for the human to become great by triumphing over this apparent emptiness. A world where man is essentially evil and always on the verge of extinction is required for the somber rationalists to triumph over the immanent disasters by building a just structure in the world despite the opposition of the legions of the selfish. Marxism also is able to offer a religious-like, all encompassing vision of the purpose of human life, one which also ends in salvation.
This is ultimately where I think the instinct to hold on to and defend dogmas comes from. They become like blocks in an arch, kick them out and the edifice collapses.
Right, the myth of progress is certainly itself a dogma in some respects. In many ways there is "nothing new under the sun." For what it's worth, I didn't much care for Pinker's "Better Angles of Our Nature," it seemed naive in many respects. His conception of progress is too focused on it's being directed at the individual level by "principles." The argument for progress as a sort of evolutionary, information theoretic selection process doesn't unfold the same way.
Progress itself can lead to reversals in progress. For example, current declines in battlefield deaths and the size of standing armies isn't a unique phenomena in history. You see the same sort of thing with the advent of the stirrup and the dominance of the mounted knight. Autonomous weapons systems might cause a similar shift.
For a period, technology favored small, professional armies over mass mobilization, and while this reduced deaths in warfare on the whole, it also seems to have enabled incredibly unequal societies were populations became bound to a warrior caste.
I do think Pinker makes a valid point about the "noble savage," and the "Hobbesian state of nature," being particularly well established dogmas in "The Blank Slate." I haven't read "Enlightenment Now," but the summary of the argument for why economic inequality isn't deleterious sounds like nonsense. If anything, inequality within states and between them seems likely to drive the next crisis point and makes solving other issues like global warming significantly more difficult. It's a case of focusing too much on easy to measure economic factors, whole ignoring factors that are as key to self-actualization, e.g., respect, status, etc. I'm more of a fan of Francis Fukuyama, at least his two volume opus surveying theories of state development, not so much the unfortunately more famous "End of History."
That was a good and well reasoned post sir. I disagree completely with your conclusion, but your reasoning was very well constructed imo.
Your conclusion fails imo, as it requires an 'intentionality,' which itself would need to be cyclical.
Theism cannot escape the 'who/what created god/intentionality,' question.
The only path open to humans who exist 'within the notion of time,' is to suggest that the concept of 'eternal' has NO beginning in time. That is the only place for the HUMAN NOTION of 'true faith.'
My highest credence level (personal true faith notion) is that the 'mindless spark' is the eternal spark and your preference is that it is the 'mind/intentionality spark,' that is the eternal spark.
My viewpoint in this makes me an atheist and my main challenge to your 'eternal intentionality,' is to either make it's existence and continuing presence/existence known, NOW, or else, I see no rational reason for YOU to maintain your position. The continued hiddenness of this eternal intentionality, is very strong evidence indeed, that WE, as in the human race, should abandon the notion, because it continues to cause pernicious religious doctrine, and philosophising, that continues to hold our species back and leaves most of us, mired in primal fear of taking FULL ownership and responsibility for our own existence.
Most religions see this planet as expendable, ourselves as wretched, when compared to theistic BS notions of the divine, and 'glorification,' in the afterlife and not in the only life we know for sure, we actually experience. What a f****** waste!!!!! of the main resource we humans have, ........ TIME!
I think I understand that as indicating the direct correlation between medieval philosophy and period-specific religion. Religion says there are Great Benefits Hereafter, philosophy says heres how youll know it when you get there. Archaic indeed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hmmmm. The principle behind our successful adaptation and procreation is instinct, but does it follow that all our faculties, including reason, are instinctive? Wasnt that the manifest point of the Enlightenment, to prove the human beast is naturally equipped for considerations beyond the capacities of the lesser, merely instinctive, beast?
Not picking a fight, honest. Just thinking out loud.
Would you agree that these glib answers and simplified polarization out of fear can arise out of the lack of philosophical approaches? Aren't they the emerging traits of ignoring such a mental tool? And wouldn't such tools be a way out of these?
What would happen if society were to structure some core tenets of philosophical scrutiny as virtues in rules of conduct between people. Just like we have things like handshakes, "hello" phrases etc. we include tenets of problem solving and approaches to difficult topics where emotions can play a negative role and put us in mental feedback loops.
For example, "when faced with contradictory information, never opt in to a specific perspective until more information and facts have been presented to achieve a logically high probability and consensus for a certain perspective". And further, "does the established highly probable perspective feature any known biases for me or the group following said perspective?". And further "Are these biases leaning towards other established and probable topics and what are those implications?"
In a way always putting our thinking into a feedback process where we question ourselves based on tenets of spotting biases, what types of biases, and in a form of Kantian universalization of the answers we arrive at.
If someone, in a social and economic class that collectively start to blame immigrants for the lack of jobs they believe is their right to have priority access to, were to be pushed to participate in these ideas, they can go through these tenets in order to question the validity of those ideas before surrendering to them. What biases has formed in this collective? What biases do I have within this group, within the larger group of the city, the nation, the world? Where can I get access to information about all perspectives of this?
Never settle based on too few perspectives, never accept without knowing the biases at play, always be aware that your perspectives and opinions are formed by influences, distance yourself from your opinions and examine them.
Of course there's a level of generalization I'm doing to all of this in these "short" writings. To invent or install tenets that functions as virtues in a society, they need to be solid and hard to dispute as their function is a foundation of thought, a foundational tool that we can have built in to our culture of approaching knowledge and information. But I think it is possible to form such a framework of tenets that can be applied in practice not only for people who are intellectuals or philosophically literate, but everyone.
In essence, imagine a society in which people are constantly aware of biases. It's part of the culture, like whenever someone utters an emotional rant, people aren't drawn into an emotional counter-attack but instead lifts the biases at play, not as an arrogant response, but through it being common practice.
I think that this would lead to complicated issues in society that tends to stir up emotions and create negative feedback loops, to be mitigated and bridge understanding between opposing parts far more than the debate-heavy nature of today's society.
The ideas are somewhat continued in Banno and Jamal's discussion
What I think is creating societal problems on a large scale is that our culture isn't formed around questioning yourself and your beliefs. There's no established common method. The concept of cognitive bias is something that people generally are unaware of. Some even have a superficial understanding of it, but to understand just how powerful bias is at blocking us from understanding something on a deeper level, the awareness of bias needs to be as common of a knowledge as how to cook dinner or brushing our teeth. Not specific to philosophers, but to all people.
We somewhat already have this in Kantian universalization. People doesn't realize it, don't know about it, but the tenets are there. If someone commits a crime, kills someone or steals something, a common response to that criminal would be "what do you think would happen if everyone did what you did?" This is Kantian ethics at play, without people knowing they apply it in that sentence.
If similar knowledge of biases and approaches to knowledge were to be implemented in society, such as it becoming a frame of mind just like with with Kantian universalization, then I think it would radically change how people tackle forming new ideas, but it also helps holding every-day problem solving within a more rationally based reasoning that mitigates emotional feedback loops. The challenge is to both formulate tenets that aren't too complex to keep in mind as well as installing them into our culture in a way that isn't forced. To show the benefits to the individual, the collective and overall society in a way that people want to follow them because they feel natural.
In my personal experience, this is how I approach daily life. I do not jump onto ideas and opinions lightly, I don't decide on anything before I have a somewhat objective reasoning surrounding it. What I've realized is that there's a calm to this approach. I can exist inside a conflicted space that can lead some to become extremely biased towards a certain perspective and enforce it with all their energy, but without ever doing so or at least be able to abandon such a position as soon as a rational counter-perspective is added to the mix. It helps me hold conflicting ideas in my head at the same time because I've mentally constructed a space in which the conflicted ideas are carefully evaluated and meditated on in a distance to me as a person. Because I'm fully aware of my biases I almost get a negative feeling when I'm straying too far from balanced reasoning. It helps me go through all the possible perspectives of a topic in order to examine it closer and it helps me listen better to other people and spot when they add a new perspective that I didn't have before, adding it to the internal process of reasoning.
It's this personal dedication to such tenets of philosophy as a mental tool that have helped me understand that there's something in this approach that has a positive function both on well-being in conflicting times, but also in having a balanced morality, better problem solving skills, and better methods of formulating new ideas. Of course, this is anecdotal evidence for its effect, but I've seen similar approaches in other people's reasoning to problems and ideas and witnessed a certain calm and ability to not get stuck in loops of emotional and biased reasoning and responses.
A form of extra sharp conceptualization of our own internal reasoning that detaches us from cognitive bias. Essentially thinking about thinking; thinking about your own thinking, thinking about other's thinking, thinking about past thinking... while thinking about a problem or an idea. This is the thought, why is this thought? How did this thought came to be? What other thoughts are there? Why did they come to be? Are these thoughts similar to other people's thoughts? Why? Are there any biases to these thoughts? Are those biases subjectively mine or collectively society's? And so on.
It is a form of epistemic responsibility, extending from just the balanced morality to ways of approaching all internal reasoning.
:up: :up: :up:
As a follow-up to this, imagine your internal reasoning being a room, a gallery, where you stand in distance from your ideas and concepts that you try to examine and evaluate.
Most people are their ideas. Their identity and their ideas and concepts are one and the same.
In essence, they are the artwork themselves, the sculpture of their ideas:
Instead, detach and construct a mental gallery with all the ideas and concept within, but be your own entity examining at a distance, without ever becoming any of the ideas and concepts yourself.
This leads to the ability to walk through the gallery of ideas and concepts in order to evaluate many different versions of the same concept or idea. Whenever someone becomes and is their idea and concept, they become a rigid stuck sculpture and can no longer walk through the gallery and consequently only be able to be examined by others.
Yes to the latter question. This isn't just a supposition of the Enlightenment, but a core component of ancient and medieval philosophy. For Aristotle, reason was what made the human being unique. In the same way the ideal horse is strong and fleet of foot, reason is key to the essence of man; the development of reason was our telos, ultimate purpose. For Neoplatonists, logos spermatikos, universal reasons, was the principle bridging the individual soul, World-Soul, Nous, and the One, the key to the hypostasis between levels of emanation. For Hellenistic Judaism and early Christians, Logos plays a somewhat similar role to that in Neoplatonism, but without the same cosmology. Man's share in the divine Reason is what makes him "in the image/type of God."
The attack on reason seems to come from two fronts. First there is romanticism and mysticism. These traditions claim that not all experience can be properly analyzed or put into words. Ecstatic states, aesthetic appreciation, these important facets of human life are bled out by over rationalization in this view. When we speak of the divine, there are things that cannot be put into words (e.g., Pseudo Dionysus). The existentialist tradition, which is quite strong today (the only philosophy I was introduced to in high school was existentialist literature), falls into this mold to some degree. Perhaps it's not surprising then that it is arguably more popular in literature classes than philosophy ones (but most people have English and often not a single philosophy class).
I think the romantic critique gets some things right.
As to your first question, the other attack comes from scientism. In this view, our sense of reason is shaped by evolution. It is thus arguably as fallible as our other senses, which tell us that the Earth is flat, that the Sun rotates around the Earth, etc. Reason then is essentially ungrounded, emerging from the essentially meaningless universe by chance.
The problem with this latter view is that it is self-undermining. If we have no reason to believe our mathematics or reasoning is valid, then we have no reason to believe in the science that tells us this is the case and no reason to think the world should work in such a way that it is intelligible to us.
That doesn't stop the argument from being popular though. Once reason becomes ungrounded, it becomes terrifying. The ancients lived in a much less secure world, and so what they feared most was degenerating into beasts. Thus, they saw reason as divine. Today we are more scared of becoming machines, becoming slaves to an order we cannot challenge. The horrors of the Holocaust and Soviet atrocities cast a shadow over the allure of reason. It seemed to show that reason could actually make us worse.
IMO, this is a mistake. The brutality of the early 20th century, while a shock to Europe, which had seen relative peace since the Napoleonic Wars, was not at all uncommon historically. Ancient peoples didn't even attempt to hide their genocidal aims at times, making it a point of pride. Indeed, Europeans themselves were being just as brutal outside of Europe, e.g., in the Belgian Congo, during the period of continental peace. Brutality has been the norm, relative peace the deviation, and you don't see the latter without a rational organization of society.
The idea that individual reason can stop atrocities was never going to hold water. Institutions have their own logic. Individuals are the accidents of social structures, not their substance. Individuals can shape institutions, but they are moreso shaped by them. A relatively modern, educated society will have individuals commiting atrocious acts if the larger structures are not rational.
In periods of rapid economic growth, institutional development can lag development of the populace. To quote Hegel, "a[n ideal] state knows what it wills and knows it as something thought." This doesn't mean institutions have qualia, but they have their own goals that diverge from those of their members, their own intelligence, their own emergent sensory systems (think government statistics offices). The faliure of the Enlightenment was to think primarily in terms of the individual and the development of individual reason, e.g., "the legislature will be good if it has good, rational people." This leads to the naive view that political reform is just a matter of replacing bad people with good ones.
Humans have a an innate tendency to focus on agents and don't tend to think of composite entities as true agents. I think the Enlightenment view gets more right than its detractors, but it failed because it failed to take a systems perspective of the logic of societies and failed to recognize the risks of not-yet-rational institutions havening sway over society.
How thoughtful and kind of you to refrain from doing so!
But what an interesting, and revealing, word to choose. "Anemic" as in lacking force, vitality or spirit. Philosophy should be forceful, vital and spirited..powerful. Examples of proper philosophy would include Bergsonian proclamations of elan vital, then; or perhaps expositions of the Will to Power, or rhapsodies regarding the ubermensch. Something more manly, maybe, like Hemingway's "grace under pressure" or masculine and spirited or spiritual, like the English philosophy of "Muscular Christianity." I could go on and on, but don't wish to seem rude.
It's true we don't encounter such clamour (or glamour) in pragmatism or analytic philosophy. But we don't see it in ancient philosophy, either. In antiquity, such thinking would have seemed merely silly. It seems to have arisen in the 19th century. And perhaps that's what philosophy is, now. It strikes me that the appeal of such thinking is emotive, sometimes even mystic, sometimes even religious. For me, the expression of such ideas is best left to artists or the religiously inclined who are certainly better at it than those who call themselves philosophers.
Core component, yes, but more than a supposition for Enlightenment doctrines. If it, that is, reason itself, is already supposed, it only needs be theoretically demonstrated as the case, and if it is a logical proof should be sure to follow, sufficient to justify the theory.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Wouldnt a systems perspective of societies fall under the purview of anthropology? Im not sure how much a discipline anthropology was in the 16, 17, 1800s, there still being minor kings, clan chieftains and whatnot doing the job of a soft science. Maybe the Enlightenment failed as you say, but I rather think the liberation of the individual mind, as you also mentioned, wouldnt be a failure.
What is a not-yet-rational institution?
Maybe, but I think it's unclear. I wouldn't say these answers are glib, so much as deep and instinctive. I have no idea what, if any solutions might work, but I have a strong intuition that you are unlikely to get very far trying to use reason to talk people out of a position they didn't arrive at through reason.
Quoting Christoffer
You advocate your particular approach of reasoning because this is a fundamental value through which you already view life. Good for you and good luck trying to get others to agree. But are you essentially saying here: 'If everyone thought they way I do, the world would be better?' Don't most people think that, even the prodigiously irrational ones?
Trying to reeducate society along appropriate philosophical principles sounds totalitarian (I know that's not how you intended it) and is not going to happen, it's entering a speculative realm where I have little to contribute. :wink:
Now that would be an "anemic" response, as in lacking substance. (Merriam Webster Online)
Fair.
But dont take it personally and dont get me wrong. Im not recommending the Will to Power, elan vital, macho glamorous clamour, or anything like that, and I think my posts show that I dont do that kind of philosophy and that Im not a fascist. I just felt that philosophy defined so generally or neutrally, and without the critical aspect (in the sense of social critique), was somewhat anemic.
Haha, so only the "great philosophers" question religion (read "all collective social phenomena"?)? Or do the ordinary philosophers also question, but their questions are not great?
Quoting Jamal
That sounds right...question everything, including oneself and the presuppositions that live beneath the questions; from whence do they come?
Quoting Jamal
I don't know about this; Kant's categories at least seem to ring true and space and time as the pure forms of intuition too. Are they no longer viable? Aristotle's categories? Goethe said He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth. "The poverty of historicism" says Popper.
Modernity seems to me to predominately reflect a kind of narcissism. Can we see our own reflections in the cesspool?
Quoting Jamal
Right, though in saying "monolithic" I wasn't thinking of the dichotomy between fixed and dynamic, I was thinking more of the 'monistic/ pluralistic' dichotomy: meaning that I don't think historical moments have just one "zeitgeist" but are rather boiling cauldrons in which many geists grapple with one another for supremacy. From where I stand "the state" looks like a kind of monstrous fiction.
I think the change came with the Renaissance conception of humanity. Many of the Renaissance humanists held philosophical views of dubious orthodoxy, but they held the world wisdom traditions in high esteem, so they still recognised a transcendent source of values, a summum bonum. That is what was to change. Reason is still valued today, but whenever it is praised, you can bet your boots that the it is 'reason validated by empirical observation'. The focus shifted, whereby the attributes that had been assigned to the Divine are now accorded to nature herself, as there is nothing 'above' or 'higher' than nature; nature 'creates herself' (understanding of which is the holy grail of naturalism. I've noticed a book recently on the debate between the humanist Erasmus and the fundamentalist Luther, Fatal Discord, which he says lays the groundwork for many of these attributes of today's worldview).
Quoting Mww
I was hoping to start one. ;-)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
'In the Aristotelian scheme, nous was the faculty that enables human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle (and also for Aquinas and scholastic philosophy), this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including imagination and memory, which other animals possess. For him then, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way - which is the basis of Aristotelian realism - and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same logical ways. (And these universal categories were adapted by Kant.) Derived from this it was also believed in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual must require help of a spiritual and divine type (see SEP, Divine Illumination). By this type of account, it also came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it.'
This deeply resonates with me. I can't help but see the concluding phrase reflected in Wheeler's 'participatory cosmos'.
//I also can't help but believe that a great deal of so-called empiricist and naturalist philosophy is basically irrational in nature, as it has abnegated the idea of a transcendent reason, in favour of the merely instrumental.//
Quoting universeness
That's because, and pardon me for saying, your conception of God is anthropomorphic, based mainly on your stereotyped depiction of (and rejection of) religion. That's not something particular to yourself, by the way.
Well then. Couldnt have chosen a better battleground than the suggestion that reason has been, or is being, eclipsed. In what world is that not a singularly foolish notion?
This last takes me back to some work I did on organisational decision making many years back; work that applies as well to individuals as to organisation. You use the metaphor of someone perusing a gallery at leisure, making calm, considered decisions. Trouble is, this is rarely what happens. Nor is is even ideally what happens. Organisations and individuals are embedded in a world in flux, were circumstances change spasmodically as often as smoothly, but also where the decision made changes the way things are.
One is tempted by the analogue with a strange attractor, after , but even a strange attractor is rhythmic and predictable compared to the path of even a simple institution, or with the unpredictable events of a lifetime.
Take any pivotal life decision, be it moving to a distant city or committing to a partner or accepting a job offer. Everything changes, unpredictably, as a result of the decision. Because of this, while there may be a pretence of rationality, ultimately the decision is irrational. Not in the sense of going against reason, but in the sense of not being rationally justified. It is perhaps an act of hope, or desperation, or sometimes just whim.
And this not only applies to big choices, but to myriad small choices. Whether you have the cheese or the ham sandwich had best not be the subject of prolonged ratiocination.
Most of our choices are not rationally determined; and this is usually a good thing, lest we all become Hamlet.
Then there are heuristics. is somewhat dismissive of cutlery, but it does make eating easier, not to mention smoothing the social aspects of the table. It's usually not possible to see the bigger picture, to understand the furthest consequences of one's choices, and even when one does, as perhaps was the case with the beginning of the arms race, the problem can be intractable, or at the least appear so. Sometimes the best one can hope for is to be able to sort stuff out in the long run. So we rely on heuristics.
pointed to the tension between wanting ethics to be taught while being suspicious of the impact of self reflection. Part of the trouble is, despite the pretence, we can not, do not, and ought not make all our decisions only after due ratiocination.
It is writ large in today's world.
What are 'our best' theories, and why do they entail that such knowledge is not possible?
But those mavericks known as 'rationalists' have the temerity to claim that we actually have rational insight!
Source. Bolds added. I've put that up as a microcosm of the larger issue, which is the fundamental irrationality of naturalism.
Some further reflections on same:
[quote=Alfredo Ferrarin, The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy] We may be sorrrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual 'I'[/quote]
[quote=Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism]As a philosophical conception, Empiricism means a theory according to which there is no distinction of nature, but only of degree, between the senses and the intellect. As a result, human knowledge is simply sense-knowledge (or animal knowledge) more evolved and elaborated than in other mammals. And not only is human knowledge entirely encompassed in, and limited to, sense-experience ...; but to produce its achievements in the sphere of sense-experience human knowledge uses no other specific forces and means than the forces and means which are at play in sense-knowledge.
Now if it is true that reason differs specifically from senses, the paradox with which we are confronted is that Empiricism, in actual fact, uses reason while denying the power of reason, on the basis of a theory that reduces reason's knowledge and life, which are characteristic of man, to sense knowledge and life, which are characteristic of animals.
Hence, first, an inevitable confusion and inconsistency between what an Empiricist does -- he thinks as a man, he uses reason, a power superior in nature to senses -- and what he says -- he denies this very specificity of reason.
And second, an inevitable confusion and inconsistency even in what he says: for what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients - sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.[/quote]
Sadly yes. But not so much in the Cool Kids sandbox, ammiright?
Quoting Wayfarer
Edit?
Given the innate human capacity for intuiting quantity, and the innate human capacity, not only for the use of conceptions but also the a priori construction of them, in relations .why do we need an indispensability argument with respect to mathematical objects?
Theres no need for a science to inform us that the intersection of two lines immediately facilitates the conception of a relation between them, which is then represented as angle, and theres no need for a mere belief in the validity of the conception angle as a mathematical object, when such object is necessarily given as a principle hence contradictory to deny.
-
Worthy reflections, as is usually the case. Benacerraf notwithstanding.
Intentionality isn't cyclical. That's the problem with the materialist/physicalist representation of it, it ends up being cyclical, when in reality there is nothing to indicate that it ought to be. Since the materialist representation shows time as flowing from past to future, instead of from future to past, the only way that it can accommodate intentionality which relies on a future to past flow of time for conception, is to allow for that looping aspect. This creates the cyclical representation of intention. In reality, time only flows one way, into the past. The future (May 13 for example) will become past as time flows into the past. So the materialist representation of time, which shows the past as prior to the future, and therefore things in the past as causing what will come to be in the future, is fundamentally wrong. And the only way that they can allow for the real flow of time to have an influence on the way that they understand and represent time, is through these loops, which inevitably become externalities, and infinite cycles.
Quoting universeness
The conventional Christian conception of "eternal" is "outside of time". Time is measured as it passes, so only past time is capable of having been measured (measurable), and the future is therefore outside of time. All real time, as measurable time, is in the past. But the true cause of what will be at the present, must be prior to the present, therefore in the future, so this cause must also be outside of time.
There is another way to apprehend this. Imagine that there is a beginning to time. At the moment when time began there was necessarily no past time, yet there was necessarily future. And for time to begin, there must be a cause. Therefore, this cause was necessarily in the future. For time to continue passing there must always be a cause, and this cause is always in the future.
Quoting universeness
So, that is the rational, explained above. As time passes, there must be cause of things being as they are, at each moment of passing time. Since time flows from the future to the past, the cause of things being as they are at the present must always be in the future in relation to what comes to be at the present. This is the cause which is always outside of time (eternal), as prior to time.
We experience this cause which is outside of time as intentionality. Whenever we want things to be in a specific way at a specific moment as time passes, we make an intentional act, and this causes the situation to come to be as we desired. The act of the will is prior to what comes to be from it. So intention is how we as human beings, partake in this eternal cause which is always prior to time.
Quoting universeness
That the future is always hidden from us, and no part of it can ever be sensed by any of our senses, in no way indicates that it is not real. It is logically necessary to conclude that the future must be in some way real, or else time could not be passing. As explained above, the cause of time passing is always in the future in relation to the present.
Quoting universeness
The idea that we ought to take full ownership and responsibility for our own existence is utterly ridiculous. Do you not allow that your parents are somewhat responsible for your existence, and that your schoolers are somewhat responsible for your ideology?
You may recall that empiricism disdains any such conceptions. No lesser light that Steven Pinker wrote a book on it. (As it happens, the last Christmas gift I was ever to receive from my dear departed mother. :fear: )
I just wrote an elaborate refutation of the transcendental deduction of the categories, but the dog ate it. So I'll just say that I don't think I'm an unqualified historicist; as I say, I'm confused about the issue. I think Kant and Aristotle were great, but I also think their philosophies suffer from a lack of historical and social awareness (although it occurs to me that it's precisely because they ignored all that that they achieved what they did, rather than despite it).
It's more difficult to see in their theoretical philosophy than in their ethics and politics: Aristotle defended slavery philosophically without considering that his defence was a result of his class and his society, and Kant's emphasis on autonomous reason in retrospect clearly reflects his Enlightenment bourgeois milieu.
Quoting Janus
I see what you mean. Interesting point. I don't know what Hegel would say to that.
Consider the requested pardon, granted. Your are wrong, as I am willing to envisage a god image as it is presented to me by a proposer, anthropomorphic, animist, disembodied esoteric/ethereal, pantheistic, etc it's all the same woo woo BS to me. There are many followers of religion who behave stereotypical, there are also theist sympathisers who type stereotypical responses to criticism of theism. I would include you in that categorisation. I don't see any particular value in this side alley you are attempting as a response to my point, it is not a useful or even credible answer to it, at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Apologies, I mistook you for someone who might have an open mind. Ill keep out of your way in future.
Your own words 'will become' in the context you use them, contradicts your 'time flows into the past' claim, 'will become' has not happened yet. The expansion of the universe allows for 'future' to exist as more 'distance' is created, which creates more 'time' or 'spacetime'. So the flow into the future is constant but can be experienced at different relative speeds, depending on observer reference frame (time dilation).
Entropy will convert all available energy into spacetime eventually. This is akin to CCC, as at some point the size of the expansion is all that will remain and AT that point, size becomes meaningless and the universe becomes again, the same state as a singularity and a new Aeon begins. NO intentionality required.
For humans, time is an 'individual experience' as is past, present and future. I think Carlo Rovelli, describes this best, currently.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Which is why it fails, as such a notion is meaningless and irrational.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What do you mean by 'real time' in the context you employ it?
All measured time is relative, are you referring to proper time, as described here?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This sentence makes no sense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Thank goodness for that!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ok!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not necessarily true, there may have been a previous Aeon. So the moment you describe here is a recalibration of a notion of a 'universal time,' reference frame.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see any use for the word 'necessarily' here but yes, the notion of future becomes valid at this point, due to spacetime inflation/expansion, NO intentionality required.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, the end of the previous cycle, NO intentionality required.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Why?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, the cause is the expansion of spacetime and it happens during every time unit/duration.
The rest of what you typed is just based on your bizarre ideas, regarding how time works.
Don't be afraid of my use of terms like 'woo woo BS.' I am open minded enough to allow any actually valid, rational, well reasoned, supported evidence you have for your claims. You are of course free to stop exchanging views with me anytime you choose, but I will remain available to you, should you find any 'better' evidence for your claims.
Philosophy is like a swamp. Swamps are for staying out of, in the first place, and for getting out of if you can in the second.
[quote=a mother's son]While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.
[Chorus]
But I mean no harm, nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.[/quote]
Ehhhh hes a psychologist and a computationalist to boot, so not to be invited to the Cool Kids sandbox.
Yes, that is exactly the sort of analogy I have in mind. Attractors have been invoked as a more rigorous description of the mechanism of apparent "natural teleologies," in some cases.
Attractors can be found in complex systems filled with conscious agents. For example, businesses all make decisions about pricing separately, based on a rational assessment of their costs and profit margins, yet a general industry-wide inflation rate emerges as an attractor. Gradual changes in grammar and linguistic fluctuations have also been identified with attractors and spontaneous organization. What we choose to say and how we choose to say it is often something we focus on, an action with intentionality, and yet our individual choices are shaped by the larger dynamics of contemporary language. People simply don't talk the same way they did in 40 or 50 years ago, even the same individuals. Phrases come and go. Foot traffic also follows patterns of spontaneous self-organization.
Looking for market level attractors in the behaviors of a single firm or individual is simply looking in the wrong place. It's like trying to explain state change or turbulence by looking at a single molecule. You won't ever see the bigger picture looking at one individual, but the bigger picture is still shaping what the molecule does in a profound way.
I get that people find the "intelligent composite entities," thesis metaphysically dubious. It flies in the face of both our focus on the individual and tendencies towards reductionism. But, if the theory holds no water, why is it that models of higher level market data, models in international relations that treat the states as the deciding subject, etc. all are far more predictive of future observations than attempts to predict state behavior, future market prices, changes in consumption, etc. using analysis strictly of individuals? Why does the logic of an electoral system (e.g. winner take all, first past post) predict if it will produce a two party or multiparty system so well across cultures and times?
At least in IR, which I am most familiar with, psychological assessments of individual leaders are considered a dubious means of predicting state behavior, and are thought to be most relevant in autocracies, least relevant for liberal states. This is what you would expect in the "state as an emergent agent," thesis. You can't chart the path of an individual based on market attractors, but things like swings in regional housing prices, or surging structural unemployment in a given field, obviously shape individuals decisions to move to a given locale or which vocation they enter. When tons of GI's buy homes in suburbs due to incentives shaped by intentional government policy, that's individual life choices producing an output guided by an institutions explicit rationality.
Unfortunately, natural selection is the most well known complex systems process, and, for partly philosophical (and arguably dogmatic) reasons, it is drilled into students that natural selection does not involve final causes. Animals don't evolve because they want to. Evolution was supposed to be the great answer to questions of design and intentionality.
The problem with this view is that natural selection can be found everywhere, in all sorts of systems, and these systems often involve conscious agents. The creation of dog breeds is an example of natural selection, the enviornment shaping a species' genetic traits, that can only be explained in terms of the intentions of human agents. Likewise, when cultural norms effect how humans mate, we have agents' rational decisionmaking involved in selection.
There are arguments for natural selection in business survival, language, etc. All involved conscious entities and intentional decisions.
The expansion of the universe cannot be discussed in terms of "speed", or as you say "relative speed", because this is not considered to be a motion at all, or even the cause of any relative motion. If it were motion, then there would be motions faster than the speed of light, and that would contradict the premises employed in the detection of such "expansion". So it is incorrect to say that 'distance' is created. And physicists have no principles whereby they could explain or describe how spacetime could actual expand. "Expansion" is just a term they use to refer to what is unknown or confusing to them, as other terms like "dark energy" and "dark matter" are used in the same way, to refer to things which escape the predictive capacity of the hypothesis.
So it is your idea which is contradictory. And since you use reference to the unknown in your attempt to justify the real existence of the future, this just serves to demonstrate how faulty your premise is. You are claiming that it must be real because you can put a name to it like "spatial expansion".
And, you haven't shown how my words are contradictory. We can readily talk about non-existent things, your idea that things in the future must exist because we can talk about them is unfounded, and proven untrue through your own demonstration.
Quoting universeness
So this is your real explanation? One cycle begins at the end of the previous cycle. How do you propose to determine the point which marks the beginning and end, when each point on the circle is the same as equidistance from the centre? That's why circular motion is said to be eternal. Your cyclical model really provides no reality for a beginning or end, just an assertion that the beginning of one cycle was the end of the previous cycle.
We could say the same thing about the present moment, the beginning of one moment is the end of another moment. There's nothing wrong with saying that. But unless we can determine a real boundary between moments, such statements are meaningless. As is your statement about the beginning and ending of cycles, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's absolutely meaningless.
Quoting universeness
There you go, reference to the unknown "expansion of spacetime", and your contradictory explanation of it, in your attempt to argue that something is known. The "expansion of spacetime", "dark energy", "dark matter" and such names, just refer to anomalies which are observed as an effect of the application of theory. Instead of recognizing that the observational data which is inconsistent with the applied hypothesis indicates that the applied hypothesis is incorrect, as a good scientist adhering to the principles of the scientific method ought to do, you simply give the anomalies names and pretend that these are real things that you can talk about.
How is that different from assigning the name "God", and pretending that God is a real thing we can talk about. Well, in your case there is a multitude of fictional things (gods) to talk about, one for each place the hypothesis fails, and each failing hypothesis, but in the case of theism, there is only one, "God".
And of course, you apply the fictional and meaningless "time unit". Until the real boundary to the proposed "unit" is demonstrated, this is meaningless nonsense in any ontology.
If you happen to stumble into the swamp, beware of the lurking alligator who has no desire to leave the swamp.
Of course, I'm not saying that these mental tools are effective towards changing someone else's perspective and concepts, even though they are probably more effective than other forms of influences seen as they deconstruct and evaluate their perspectives and concepts without emotionally attacking them. But, these mental tools are effective when the entire group uses them. This is why I'm advocating for it being part of a cultural practice, something that is common practice, or at least common practice in situations that benefit from it. If society viewed it as common as a practice as a normal handshake between people, then deviances from it would be considered rude, especially in a sphere of debate.
So while being less observably effective against people that lack in this toolset, it is when all in a group uses it that it reaches its full potential.
Quoting Tom Storm
It may sound like that since I used my own subjective perspective as an example, but that was merely to describe the experience of using it as well as the importance of calmness that it produces. The lowered stress levels in situations where people often get riled up and emotionally pressed (which usually also leads to further enforcing biases).
But this way of tackling reality in an internally distanced form is not just my own personal experience, it can be observed in many people. A sort of confirmation of this mental tool was when reading about Bertrand Russel's perspective on the matter. He advocates for a similar detachement and ability to spot biases, using a scientific approach to more areas and topics than just science:
Quoting Bertrand Russel
Quoting Tom Storm
But that is of course a valid point. How can society restructure itself without totalitarian powers pushing for such a change? Mostly a non-totalitarian change happens through collectively acknowledging a positive trait and way of life that then influence society and culture naturally and through the people's own will.
I think this is more a form cultural praxis that doesn't in itself hold any opinions or values. It's more of a toolset, a strategy of thinking, something that can be notably positive as a system in everyday use. People in a free society wouldn't just change into following this praxis on someone's demand or recommendation alone. People usually change into a new praxis because they recognize the value of it and then collectively raise children with this praxis as part of their culture. But they would only do so if it had a core positive value that is measurable.
I think that this system would benefit society and I hope that by showing the positive implications on the individual and society, people would want to use this mental toolset or mental strategy as part of everyday life. Not by forcefully reshaping culture, but by simply asking: do you see the benefit of this? Is this something you think would help you navigating the complexity of reality and society better? Is this something you think would benefit a group solving a problem or conceptualizing new ideas? Is this something you think would help mitigating and deescalating conflicts? If you think it might be so, it might be worth a try to use this way of thinking when conceptualizing, evaluating ideas, solving problems, debating topics, deescalating conflicts and forming strategies.
Quoting Banno
I think the metaphor primarily is about being careful not to become an idea or concept. I.e we attach ourselves too heavily on what we believe, to a point where we are unable to defend the idea without defending our own identity, as well as when we defend our identity we start to defend the idea. Being a frozen rigid sculpture is the final form of our bias, unable to move, only to be easily examined by others. In a toxic debate, everyone is their own statue, some in groups against other groups, but no one is shifting, moving around, looking at each others ideas in different perspectives, we only see things two-dimensionally. Things can change, but nothing fundamentally changes if everyone is rock solid. Society can go through decades without change if no one starts to move around in that space examining all statues.
Quoting Banno
It is primarily an approach to thinking when it is possible to be applied as well as something to fall back on when entering chaos. Careful people somewhat already takes a step back, they try to see the big picture and make informed decisions. But they do so without fully understanding how or why they do it, there's no framework for their internal process and it can lead to bias traps. Having a clearer strategy of the mind makes spotting biases easier. Imagine yourself in the gallery when making a pivotal life decision, you might be able to see an unintentional or unnoticed bias when making the choice to move to a new city. You are able to examine the reasons without falling into emotional reasoning since the reasons are there infront of you, not part of your identity. This detachement becomes a sort of inner interlocutor, you examine a statue, ask it questions and compare it to the others. In the pursuit of forming a grander overview and perspective of what the entire gallery is saying.
And of course, small choices doesn't have to be part of this. Mainly because this method focus on larger conceptualizations, ideas and knowledge. Smaller decisions mostly comes out of instinct and intuition that have roots in already established higher concepts.
Many of these instincts and intuitions are trained on the larger internalized concepts, which forms a framework around our identity. If we are constantly distancing ourselves from the concepts and ideas that are always in flux, we become better at changing our instincts and intuitions if they end up needing to be changed. Like, if your health requires you to stop eating too much cheese, people will still have problems changing these habit behaviors. By distancing yourself from how you value health versus eating cheese you might be able to restructure the instincts better and faster than trying by force, which often leads to people falling back on old habits (which in itself is a result of a certain bias).
In general, when and where you need to enter the gallery is a form of intuition in itself. The ability to know when the mental tool is needed is harder than using the tool itself. But a rule of thumb would be that whenever some concept or idea have conflicting parts and risks of destructive bias, training yourself not to initially fall into either of those conflicting parts and instead enter the gallery to review them as the first step in a thought process.
But essentially, this mental toolset is for the higher concepts, the complex ideas, values, ideologies, solutions to complex problems and most critically when approaching others who has conflicting ideas to yours. If you and the one you debate against are together moving around the gallery and examining each other's ideas and concepts, you are both acting as researchers evaluating each others concepts instead of getting stuck in defensive arguments based on each others biases. If you both are equally good at using this method, there won't be any real conflicts, fist fights or inabilities to reach a higher place of understanding. While both might not reach agreement, you both learn and increase a better understanding of not only the opposite idea, but also your own. It is beneficial for both in either way, as well as promoting a calmer way of dealing with conflicting ideas in society. Even being able to acknowledge each others emotional investment in each idea as being their own statues, leads to understanding the emotional aspect of an idea and how it affects each other's reasoning.
The full effect is in play if all participants follow the same mental strategy when existing in conflicting positions.
Quoting Banno
Cutlery doesn't remove the risk of messy eating, only that eating generally becomes less messy.
Any toolset cannot be the final best toolset. We don't know the final form of the best hammer, only that we have a pretty good concept of what a good hammer is after all iterations so far. The way I think of these mental tools is an extension of Bertrand Russel's ideas, without me even knowing so when I started thinking about them. It may be because his ideas influenced modern science, modern culture, and modern philosophy to the point that as being part of this culture I naturally use his ideas and built upon them.
I can only hope I add something valuable in doing so, something that further iterate on the mental tools he promoted.
Quoting Banno
I think forming an instinct out of knowing when to use the method is key. In general, whenever something is at risk of negative bias, whenever an idea or concept is at risk of being destroyed by bias, it warrants entering the gallery. Like being able to almost feel that bias follows where I'm going, so I can tread lightly so as to not be turned to stone.
Ahhhh, ok, gotcha.
No, there would only be 'relative motions' which are faster than the speed of light, no actual 3d point in the universe is moving away from its adjacent points at faster than light speed. But the notional 'leading edge' of the expansion may be relatively moving away from a local, gravitationally bound, non-expanding galaxy like the milkyway, at faster that light speed.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well there is the evidence from spectroscopy of redshift, there is the CMB (for expansion evidence) and there are the Hawking points suggested by Roger Penrose, which may provide evidence of an earlier Aeon.
I assume your preferred word for what is unknown or confusing to you is 'intentionality,' or perhaps even god and you believe that is more rational than expansion, dark energy and dark matter. :roll:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What 'circle' are you imagineering? Chaos <------> Order, by-directional, time resets, the cycle could be an oscillation, no circular imagineering required. The state of 'singularity' can be the placeholder for the beginning and end, as it is in the current big bang model.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You can choose to label the big bang singularity state, god or intentionality, if you choose to, but it's god as a mindless spark, no intentionality required.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Don't forget the swamp people who live there and get filmed for their TV show called ....... no surprise ..... Swamp people:
Dewey and other pragmatists (e.g. George Herbert Mead), proposed that philosophy should be applied to the resolution of social problems. I don't know if they engaged in "social critique" as you define it, though.
It's important to remind ourselves that strange attractors can be either a description, or a metaphor. SO, to take on your example, the market is not a strange attractor. Some of it's behaviour may be described using the mathematics of strange attractors; and the looping behaviour of a strange attractor may be a neat metaphor that helps us picture market behaviour. But the market is the market.
I was not able to follow your discussion of natural selection. Dog breeding is not an example of natural selection - quite the opposite. We are able to use selection to our own ends. But what was the point fo raising the topic?
That intentionality effects genetic selection. If dog breeding isn't natural selection than either humans are supernatural, magic, or all mutualism, parasitism, symbiosis, is not natural selection.
But I'm still not seeing a connection with the OP or the sideline on ratiocination.
I get that and while I don't disagree with the principles you outline - there is also the big problem that what you suggest is not going to happen and is effectively like suggesting if we all behaved like Gandhi (or insert idealised human being of your preference), there'd be world peace and love all about us. Which may well be true. But 'if' is a monumental hurdle. Anyway - no point going on about it as it's off topic. :wink:
Either that, or nothin'.
So given that, what is it that philosophy is supposed to be questioning?
One way of flipping things around is to notice that the heuristics of philosophy, the cutlery, might be considered as ritual. That seems the thrust of @Jamal's critique: that in invoking tools one is reducing philosophy to a religion.
@Wayfarer would put transcendence in the prime position. The trouble there is saying anything truthful. Such arguments are in danger of becoming either mere ritual again, or nonsense.
And Hope - I suppose that's what Pinker, and Timothy, is on about.
I see transcendence as central to religion,, and ritual, although prominent in many religious contexts, is not so in all, as I said earlier in this thread. As I also said earlier there is some ritual in nearly all aspects of human life. I think hope goes hand in hand with the notion of transcendence when it comes to religion.
You are correct. Although both terms are used, more so "natural selection," in terms of initial domestication, and "selective breeding," in terms of ongoing efforts. You see both in the self-domestication literature, even for humans. I like to think of "selective-breeding," as a subtype of natural selection guided by intelligent agents who are aware of how the breeding fulfills their goals, since humans are part of nature, if that makes sense? The division seems somewhat artificial. Archaic man didn't know a lot of things, but presumably they knew what they were doing when breeding docile animals to each other, even if the initial self-domestication happened without human intentionality. That children resemble parents seems to have been understood since the beginning of history.
To circle back, I don't think markets as a whole would be attractors, the attractors would show up in phenomena like general inflation or deflation rates. Individual prices are generally determined by individual vendors based on intentional analytical reflection about their business, but in a period of general inflation the behavior of most vendors is slowly attracted towards a common % increase in the price level across a given sector. The common behavior doesn't undercut the fact that individuals planning price changes are being very intentional. I haven't seen as much work making this claim for the phenomena of market equilibrium (harder to define quantitatively), but I assume someone has made that connection.
The point about the need to include institutional agency to explain social-historical phenomena is too far afield for this topic. I will make another thread about it when I have time and can dig out old sources so it doesn't seem like total speculation (or at least not just my own speculation lol).
I've just realised what the missing word is in nearly all these debates: it is esotericism. Here, I was going to say something about the content of esoteric philosophy, but really it will suffice just to call it out.
I just listened to a lecture on Lloyd Gerson's most recent book Platonism vs Naturalism: the Possibility of Philosophy. In passing, the lecturer mentions that in this book, Gerson deals with the more esoteric aspects of Platonic philosophy, which are often omitted from other sources. Whereas it is precisely those aspects that most interest me. (A book that @Fooloso4 has mentioned a few times comes to mind, Philosophy Between the Lines, although I haven't read it.)
I got interested in philosophy through my encounter with Eastern philosophy, which is often esoteric. ('Upani?ad' is derived from the term for 'up close', i.e. they are teachings given directly from master to student. Not that I myself have actually been 'up close' but the kinds of ideas found in The Teachings of Ramana Maharishi, for example, are derived from those in the Upani?ads.) Whereas esotericism is almost entirely walled off from 20th century English-speaking philosophy. If it can't be expressed in plain language, well then, not really a suitable subject for discussion - nonsense, in fact. (I suspect that the influence of Gilbert Ryle is writ large in all this although those other names you frequently mention like Austin and Davidson would be like-minded, I'm sure.)
Anyway, now at least I've come to recognise this - only took 10 years.
There's that quote from Baba Ram Dass, with which you may agree:
I think this quote (its sentiment being critical in the conversations we used to hold) crystallises how many might consider what is essentially the ineffable demarcation in this subject, between finding meaning and loosing yourself in meaninglessness. Or something like this.
But who wouldn't be the Hermit, leaving mundane concerns behind to seek illumination; then perchance to be Zarathustra, edifying the masses...
But that's not how things work. It so often is more about buying that hundredth Rolls-Royce and fucking the underaged.
The demarcation is that the esoteric is identified with religion, and religion has a meaning that is culturally specific. So to venture into the esoteric is to push a lot of buttons - hence 'defensive materialism'. This is held by those not consciously advocating for scientific materialism per se, maybe not even knowing what it really is, but it is a kind of default, because the alternative is identified as being associated with religion - and that, we could never admit, because
Quoting Banno
Splendid illustration, thank you.
I knew folk involved in Siddha Yoga who used to have mystical experiences when Gurumayi came to town. Such visits were also breathless, orgiastic festivals of, 'She looked at me, she looked at me!' more in keeping with Beatlemania, including the requisite merchandising - books, videos, posters, t-shirts, etc. I found the entire thing decidedly shonky and the adherents ended up no happier, no less materialistic than before they decided they had penetrated the esoteric. But I guess this does not mean the is no esoteric to 'know'.
Well, to be sure, there is, by following the teachings and becoming enlightenedor not. That is, that the Guru fucks children does not in itself mean that their teaching is wrong - just that they themselves are immoral. And that's indicative of the whole shonky logic of the enterprise. Technically, they are closed off from criticism by statements that are neither verifiable nor falsifiable and hence immune to critique, but on top of that there is the additional layer of concealment inherent in there being an "inner circle" - you don't know what you are getting in to.
It's dishonest all the way down.
The jacket copy of the book referred to above Philosophy Between the Lines:
More than risk. It's fait accompli.
"Philosophy proper" - the sort of philosophy done by true Scotsmen?
That it was practiced does not mean that it was good practice.
The secrets hidden by the inner circle of the Pythagoreans allegedly included the existence of irrational numbers, hidden for fear of undermining the theoretical basis of the Pythagorean world view, hidden to avoid critique.
The rejection of esotericism is not mere prejudice. Openness, exotericism, is central to a rational attitude.
Which is layers upon layers of syncretic Greco-Roman mystery cults, gnostic ideas, and the appropriations (and taking out of context) of both Judaic understandings and Homeric literature to create the legendary Jesus.
That this coincides with liberal values is a result of those values having been developed as rationality was being explicated, in the light of the flowering of scientific methods.
I notice you have not presented any argument as to the benefits of esotericism...
To openly speak against the Creed, or any firmly held dogma for that matter, can be compared to suicide (Socrates, Jesus for example). In the case of The Inquisition, it wasn't even necessary to "openly speak" out, to be punished. The Freemasons enjoyed a unique position.
I must say I have a soft spot for the Cathars who believed the physical world a sort of prison, and whose belief of course was persecuted by a lesser version of gnosticism (aka Catholicism/Orthodox Christianity). The Law was like the physical world, to be discarded for the Logos- that's the Greco-Roman gnostic element. The savior that dies and resurrects bringing salvation is the mystery cult aspect. Combine these, you get Pauline Christianity (what becomes eventually Catholicism/Eastern Orthodox/Protestantism.) I find it ironic that the Catholic church had problems with sects that "out gnostic-ed" the already "gnostic" Catholic/Orthodox consensus (post-Nicene creed of savior god that overturned the physical (Law) for a higher Logos).
More to the point in this context is that salvation is available to all who will believe. That is what is behind the notion of equality in the first place. In pre-Christian cultures society was rigidly stratified. One of the reasons gnosticism was suppressed was because of its alleged elitism. (But then, Calvin has the Doctrine of the Elect, the difference being that nothing can be done on the part of the believer to be counted as a member.)
Quoting Banno
I didn't start off wanting to argue for the role of esotericism so much as recognition of it as an often-unstated issue. The question was about the role of the transcendent. In plain language, there is no role, nothing to discuss (positivism, basically.)
In esoterica, there is the use and understanding of symbolism, by which things are communicated that can't simply be said in plain language. 'What are those things? Show them to me!' will come the plain language reply. To which the only answer is a shrug.
Case in point - the apocryphal origin story of Ch'an Buddhism. According to legend, the Buddha gave this teaching in silence during a gathering of his disciples. He simply held up a flower and gazed at it, without saying a word.
The Buddha's disciple Mahakashyapa, who was known for his deep understanding of the Dharma, was the only one who understood the meaning of the Buddha's gesture, which he communicated by smiling, while the others in the assembly tried to guess at doctrinal answers. The Buddha then acknowledged Mahakashyapa's realization with a subtle smile, indicating that he had transmitted his teaching to him directly, beyond words and concepts.
The Flower Sermon is considered to be a pivotal moment in the transmission of the Dharma from the Buddha to his disciples, and from one generation of Zen practitioners to the next. It represents the idea that true understanding cannot be conveyed through words or concepts alone, but must be realized through direct experience. The story of the Flower Sermon has been retold and celebrated in Zen Buddhism for centuries as a symbol of the ineffable nature of enlightenment.
That said, Ch'an has produced and maintains a vast canon of teachings and commentaries. The Ch'an 'ko-an', famously exemplified by 'the sound of one hand', literally means 'public case' or 'public document'. I don't think it's an all-or-nothing proposition - the role of discourse is valued in Buddhism, but so too the acknowledgement that the fulfilment of the teaching is beyond it.
Are you sure esotericism is the word you want? Perhaps you want ineffable.
Aren't they two different facets of the same thing? The point being, the communication of the ineffable was part of the role of philosophy. Interesting fact: Plato was a mystic, as defined by textbooks: 'initiate of the Greek mystery religions' (probably one of the orphic cults). This is why, I believe, it was said that in addition to the written dialogues, there was an unwritten component, although some of it was to become spelled out in the later tradition. A large part of Platonic philosophy was the preparation of the student so as to be able to grasp what was being taught, and I'm not sure that could be understood in propositional terms. Very much as described in Pierre Hadot's 'philosophy as a way of life'. It is those qualitative aspects that have been mostly redacted out of modern interpretations of Plato and philosophy generally.
Well, no, not prima facie; do you want to argue the case?
And still, that it happens does not imply that it ought happen.
I was introduced to Steiner a few years ago. Figured out halfway through Philosophy of Freedom esoteric theosophy, re: occult science, want the ticket.
Bloody well deserved, considering what they accomplished with no electric power
Daccord.
This capacity, to create, to construct, through the application of mathematics and geometry is what gave the Freemasons a unique position in relation to the Church. The Church needed the masons for the construction of their earthly structures, so it also needed that mathematics based ideology held by the masons. The masons were allowed to maintain their parallel belief system, and any parts inconsistent with those of the Church were allowed to be held in secret. Therefore, so long as the beliefs were kept secret, the Church could turn a blind eye and not exercise persecution.
This element of secrecy has left the early history of this masonic guild, prior to themselves recording data, shrouded in mystery. But you can bet that this parallel belief system is as old, if not older than the Inquisition, which we know about through the documented history recorded by the Church. Evidence is to be found in the adoption of educational materials from Arabia, into the west, such as the "Arabic numerals".
[quote=Wikipedia]Freemasonry describes itself as a "beautiful system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols".[38] The symbolism is mainly, but not exclusively, drawn from the tools of stonemasons the square and compasses, the level and plumb rule, the trowel, the rough and smooth ashlars, among others. Moral lessons are attributed to each of these tools, although the assignment is by no means consistent. The meaning of the symbolism is taught and explored through ritual,[8] and in lectures and articles by individual Masons who offer their personal insights and opinions.[/quote]
Quoting Banno
The more pertinent question is, 'do you see the usefulness of esotericism'? Whether or not the end is good or evil (relation to "ought") requires prejudice to answer.
Have you ever wondered about the example used by Wittgenstein at the beginning of the "Philosophical Investigations"? The example is derived directly from stonemasonry:
This book is loaded with esotericism, hidden meaning, and I think that's why Wittgenstein's philosophy is commonly called mysticism. To disregard, and pay no attention to this aspect, the hidden meaning, is to miss out on an important part of his philosophy. If you believe that "private language" is impossible because Wittgenstein produces a logical argument which proves that private language is impossible, while simultaneously demonstrating esoterically that "private language" is very real, then you've misunderstood Wittgenstein.
The issue being that the contrived definition of "private language" which lends itself to the logical proof is not consistent with how one would commonly understand "private language". So the logical proof just demonstrates the impossibility of an imaginary, fictional "private language". Meanwhile, real private language is true and happening, and demonstrated by Wittgenstein. This sort of logical proof (unsound or false definition) is what Socrates and Plato exposed as providing the rhetorical power of sophistry.
Why would people not be able to change? Have we not changed behaviors and ways of life, culturally, over decades and centuries based primarily in what people find the best way of life at the time?
But the method is not just positive when used in a broader sense. Would you agree that it can benefit your own thinking process? If so, or if anyone find a positive use for it, then it basically functions just like any other epistemological concept for reasoning. Just like in stoicism where a tenet is to step back and not be overwhelmed with emotion, it is similar in nature but for the detailed process of reasoning without bias.
I would argue that it primarily benefits the one using them and people around them. It can help their ability to solve problems and to discuss complex topics in spaces where emotion often drives the plot. But if society were structured around them more broadly I would argue that they would benefit society exponentially.
And in 2023, we have a problem with identity linking to values, ideologies and knowledge. That people today cannot discuss their knowledge without them handling that knowledge as part of their identity. This have led to a massive spike in the use of biases when reasoning because the emotions that comes out of wearing ideas as part of an identity blocks people from being able to change knowledge when being exposed to conflicting ideas.
For many people today, new ideas that conflict with the current knowledge becomes a threat to their identity rather than just being a threat to the sphere of ideas and knowledge that they adhere to in the moment. Someone questioning their idea is equal to that person questioning their existence.
This is why this detachment framework helps sever the link between knowledge and identity while making it easier to spot the biases that binds someone's knowledge to identity.
So, I think you are simplifying the concept a bit if you view it just as some "Gandhi concept" since the benefits are both broad and specific.
I'd also say that this doesn't really go off topic because the main focus was the question on what philosophy is for and that an answer is for questioning religion. But it's in this that I say that that is just the result of its core function of removing bias from solving complex questions. And in using a method that is primarily focusing on spotting and removing bias we're essentially doing philosophy at its very core.
All other things then becomes a result out of this. Reasoning in religious ways is primarily based in biases. Removing biases and any religious argument falls apart. Religion is also a more long form version of the times we live in now in that religious knowledge almost always binds with identity.
There's no difference between a non-religious topic of discussion that features identity-bound biases and a religious one, they are both analogous of being a frozen bias-statue in the gallery rather than walking freely exploring all perspectives and ideas as external entities.
So to answer this thread's main question, philosophy isn't about questioning religion, it is about removing bias and as a result it becomes a perfect method for questioning religion.
And if we have a method that improves our ability to spot and avoid biases, that would essentially be applied philosophy as an everyday praxis, which I think would be very beneficial to society, but also the individual's well-being and ability to handle reality better.
I've never had the sense that God or Nature is trying to communicate with me via occult channels. But my study of Information & Quantum theories has led me to agree with Plato & Aristotle : that a First Cause of some kind is a necessary conclusion from the open-ended chain of causation in nature. Yet even those philosophical pioneers didn't make any claims of esoteric knowledge . . . did they?
I don't know why that presumptive Creative Cause remains cloaked in mystery. Yet one possibility is that it is not a sentient being, but a merely a directional Principle of Nature. Another possibility is that the cloak of invisibility (transcendence) is necessary to allow sentient creatures to exercise moral free choice, without feeling coerced by an all-powerful ruler. Perhaps just to see where such an unbiased open-ended experiment might go.
Ironically many mystery seekers seem to be imagining and hoping for a loving & punishing Genesis type of Creator. One who whispers in the ears of favorite sons, to give them an advantage over the clueless, those blind to hidden variables. I can understand the urge of curiosity, but my experience with esoteric prophets (in literature) indicates that vulnerable blind faith is necessary for those who hope to obtain such secret knowledge --- by their own efforts, or through deals with insiders.
Yet for me --- instead of secret codes --- a direct -- or at least "open" -- channel of communication would be preferable. But my cautious skepticism ("trust but verify") leaves me open to accusations of not being sufficiently open-minded. In the real world though, unguarded minds are easy prey for false prophets & political predators. Therefore, some kind of Faith Filter seems advisable : just open enough to let the truth in, and to screen-out falsehoods. :smile:
Esotericism as claims to higher knowledge :
Somewhat crudely, esotericism can be described as a Western form of spirituality that stresses the importance of the individual effort to gain spiritual knowledge, or gnosis, whereby man is confronted with the divine aspect of existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism
Not relevant to the discussion. We are not talking about whether people change or not. We're talking about a theoretical, programatic intervention to deliberately build change in thinking, with a specific philosophical approach. We disagree on the feasibility of this project. That's all. Let's move on.
Plato's writings make frequent references to Orphic myths and beliefs, such as the soul's immortality and the importance of leading a virtuous life to attain salvation. Some have argued that these references indicate that Plato was initiated into the Orphic mysteries, while others suggest that he may have simply been familiar with Orphic ideas through his study of ancient Greek philosophy and religion.
It is also worth noting that the Orphic tradition was one of many mystery religions that were practiced in ancient Greece, and Plato may have been influenced by other mystery traditions as well.
Appropriately, nobody knows for sure. But regardless there are esoteric elements in Plato, not least the tradition that his most important teachings were not committed to writing, but were transmitted from master to student directly. And neoplatonism, so-called, which was the later Platonic tradition, is one of the principle sources of esoteric philosophy in the Western cultural tradition.
Quoting Gnomon
'Many mystery seekers' are dupes lead by con men. A lot of it is projection. If you know anything about psychoanalysis, you will know of transference, which occurs when a patient's unconscious feelings and desires are projected onto the therapist. You can imagine the scope for that happening in spiritual groups. But not all fall victim to that. There would be no fool's gold were there no gold, as the old saying has it.
I brought up the subject of esotericism in relationship to 'the transcendent'. The transcendent usually refers to a state or aspect of reality that surpasses the limits of ordinary physical existence, such as a dimension of reality that exists beyond the sensory world. In religious or philosophical contexts, the term 'transcendent' is used in relation to the deity or (in Buddhism) the state of being of a Buddha.
'Transcendental' by contrast is a philosophical term referring to something that is fundamental to the experience but which cannot be directly perceived or measured. In Kant, the term 'transcendental' is used to describe fundamental principles or categories of thought that are essential to experience, but are not themselves revealed in experience. Kant's philosophy of transcendental idealism holds that the mind actively constructs experience around such categories as time, space, and causality, that are necessary constituents of experience but which do not appear to us as elements within experience.
Both 'transcendent' and 'transcendental' imply a reality or being that is beyond or outside of ordinary experience or perception, although they differ in their specific applications and contexts. That is why the language of the transcendent is necessarily symbolic or allegorical (although it's also interesting to consider the sense in which the writings of German idealists were esoteric.)
One of the books I encountered in Buddhist Studies was called 'The Twlight Language' by Roderick Bucknell and Martin Stuart-Fox. The main idea of the book is to describe the esoteric language and imagery used in Buddhist texts and teachings, including the Pali Canon, Mah?y?na sutras, and Tantric teachings. It examines the use of symbols characteristic of Buddhism, such as the lotus, the mandala, and the chakra, in their role as catalysts for meditative awareness. It also demonstrates the skillful way in which Buddhism plays on words, uses double-meanings and other devices as 'skillful means' for conveying or provoking insights beyond the strictly empirical. This book provided an excellent compendium of the use of symbolic language to convey esoteric insights.
Don't you think that might itself be rather a biased judgement?
The proposal you're suggesting is really like adopting the persona of the imagined 'Mr Spock' character from Star Trek, Spock, the Vulcan, possessed an enormous IQ and encylopedic knowledge, from a terrestrial point of view, but was often caught out by what we would now describe as his lack of EQ (although that term had yet to be invented,)
Reading your posts, you're basically coming from the perspective of Carnap and the Vienna Circle positivists, for whom anything connected to religion and metaphysics was nonsensical, and whose sole imperative was to put philosophy of a firm scientific footing. I don't necessarily want to go down the arduous road of trying to convince you otherwise, other than to suggest that positivism was, by the second half of the last century, regarded as a failed philosophical movement.
This and the following three paragraphs are very nice. Thanks.
I think you misinterpret what I've meant. It is not a project to force change onto society, it is a mental toolset that people have to evaluate by themselves if it is useful, just as they would with any other system that helps people be better at complex mental tasks and to avoid unnecessary stagnation of progression in solving problems and dealing with complex questions. There are a number of philosophical concepts in existence that would be good if everyone used, and even if not everyone uses them they have influenced history and science.
What I suggested was a system of philosophical thinking that helps fight back against bias, especially when we live in a time when our biases have fused with identity, leading to polarized conflicts in which ideas aren't compared and evaluated, but instead identities clash.
It's not a project of reforming society, it's a mental model that could reform if it was ever popularized as a norm of complex thinking.
Quoting Tom Storm
And I'm not sure you read it all, but I circled back to the main topic.
Quoting Wayfarer
Bias is a broad term and it doesn't just mean a failure in an argument or deduction, but also how things gravitate towards a preferable reality. What I meant by religion being biased is that all arguments in religion has a bias towards the specific religion they come from. They (through history) can create great philosophical questions and be highly intelligent deductions, but in the end, as soon as something can't be explained, they always conclude it with a connection to the religious fantasy that was preconceived of the argument.
Philosophy, on the other hand, requires consistency against bias. If the argument requires a preconceived idea to function, it becomes circular reasoning, a confirmation bias and falls apart.
This is what I mean when saying that philosophy isn't for questioning religion as a primary function, because that is a secondary emerging function that simply comes out of the primary function of removing bias from thinking about complex questions.
If you think about all philosophical topics and arguments, they're all trying to do one thing, remove bias and fallacies from an argument in order to arrive at a conclusion that can be agreed upon.
Some arguments may be less deductive and more inductive, and therefore more "likely" than mathematically rigid, but even such arguments function on maximizing the probability of the conclusion being correct.
Any other form of reasoning that includes biases and fallacies without a rigid framework to fight them, fails at philosophy and becomes emotional opinions, fantasies, guru gobbledygook etc.
Even more continental philosophies requires a form of structure, a form of inner logic that doesn't summarize itself and conclude with something preconceived.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not so sure it goes that far. The method I propose is about distance from ideas and concepts in order to be aware of your own biases and be able to understand conflicting ideas and concepts better when evaluating your own. In a way I would say it incorporates EQ far better since it places others perspectives, concepts and ideas on equal positions to your own in order for you to evaluate the idea and concept you have. Essentially, it has an empathic component in removing initial judgement of others ideas before careful measurement.
Becoming more analytical does not automatically equal becoming lacking in empathy. It can also be the opposite, that a lack of empathic intelligence leads to biased thinking since others ideas and concepts are being judged before hand, regardless of them being valid or not. This is also the form of bias that happens with religious thinkers when in a discussion. Other people's conflicting ideas are filtered through their bias towards their religion and they're not empathically evaluating these ideas but instead judge them before any step of actual analysis of their validity. Lesser religious thinkers get stuck in this first step almost instantly. We can see that in the vast amount of theological threads on this forum in which any counter-argument results in them looping around in circular reasoning.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't draw the hard line as positivist in that sense of "guilt by association" against religion. What I'm focusing on is the existence of bias and fallacy within ideas, concepts and reasoning. These aren't bound to religion, but they are a failure at philosophy. Everyone can do it and religious thinkers can also create arguments that are in fact solid. But I'd argue that they then aren't producing a religious argument, but instead they succeeded at a philosophical one. My point is that bias and fallacies are common traits in religion because of how many arguments fail to go past the "because God" or "because of this religious text". When an argument doesn't rely on that, it doesn't matter if it's a religious thinker or if the concept is more continental in appearance. There are plenty of metaphorical arguments in religious writing that functions as solid philosophical ones, but as I said, they are then technically no longer religious arguments since they don't have a bias towards the beliefs of that religion and instead rely on rational reasoning without biases.
Essentially, if the argument has a bias, if its reasoning is filled with fallacies, then the author of that argument needs to restructure and work to remove those. A primary function of philosophical discourse is to spot each others biases and fallacies, to fine-tune each others arguments. Because if we back up and look at the process with some distance to our opinions: if someone creates an argument that is without bias and is reasoned without fallacies and you cannot find any holes in it, then why would you considered it wrong even if it is against your convictions? True philosophy is basically helping each other to reach that point, and being able to rid yourself from biases and fallacies means being closer to successfully conclude your argument. In philosophy, we're not really fighting to convince others of our beliefs, we are fighting to arrive at some sort of rational and reasonable truth about whatever topic that philosophy is about. So, because of this, I conclude philosophy to primarily focus on fighting biases and fallacies since they're at the dead center of a failed philosophical argument.
I'm not sure you are following my words either. As I keep saying the chances of this happening are close to nil. But I'm glad you're thinking about these sorts of ideas. More people should. Take care.
What I think is this is an excellent, coherent and articulate analysis and summary of the role of philosophy to humanity. It clearly has a rightful place in tying together all human disciplines, and steadying them, moderating their dominance over one another, and thus danger to one another. Philosophy does this by being innately flexible and applicable.
The "art of thought" can approach any field of study.
As nothing can be mastered without thought other than pure ignorance.
I think you ought to distance yourself from this concept of "preferable", and take a look at the way you use it. The word is a relative term, so it only holds meaning in relation to an end, a goal, or a person's intention. So, whenever the word is used, we can ask, 'preferable for what purpose, or what reason?'.
Your phrase "things gravitate towards a preferable reality" doesn't make any sense. If we qualify "reality" with a way of looking at reality, perspective, or ontology, you'd be saying that things gravitate toward a preferred ontology. The problem though, is that it requires effort to achieve ends, goals intentions, so "gravitate" is not an appropriate word here, because it signifies a lack of effort, going with the flow or something like that.
Now your sloppy use of words has left us with a bifurcation in potential interpretations, each going in opposing directions. By "gravitate towards", do you mean a type of going with the flow, which would incline one to proceed toward any random end or goal, as a sort of laziness, or do you mean making a concerted effort toward an identified goal or end? As you can see, these two are completely different, and there is really no way to tell, from your use of "preferable" which you are talking about. Does "gravitate towards a preferable reality" refer to the lazy attitude of ill-defined goals and lack of ambition, or does it refer to the attitude of having specified goals and making effort to achieve them?
This can be because I'm kind of advanced in the English language, but it is not my native tongue, so I can end up in semantic traps.
When I say "things gravitate towards a preferable reality," I'm referring to the interpretation of "reality" that makes us feel most comfortable. Such preferences can change, and we can gravitate towards different comfortable realities depending on how our beliefs evolve.
The reality we find most comfortable is one in which we have clear and comfortable interpretations, regardless of their validity. Such bias often arises from the anxiety of the unknown. We tend to eagerly embrace a narrative of reality that offers us the most comfortable existence.
This inclination to gravitate towards comfort is something we all experience, but the primary role of philosophy is to challenge and cut us off from this gravitational pull. It aims to prevent us from falling into comfort, into bias, and keep us rationally grounded.
I hope that clears up the confusion of that sentence?
You assume that religions can only be based on acceptance of dogma, or belief in God, so any religious argument must be 'biased', because not grounded in reality, but only in belief. That as soon as a religious philosopher comes up with a solid argument, then it's no longer religious, but philosophical. You basically assert that religion can only be based on 'fantasy'. But that itself is bias!
Are you aware of the phenomena of religious experience, as distinct from 'mere belief', and of the role that mysticism played in Greek and later in European philosophy? That there are experiential dimensions of religious life, far beyond what is presented in religious dogma? Are you aware that Thomas Aquinas, for example, introduces his arguments with philosophical objections, and then painstakingly addresses those objections before setting out his point? That there are religions, such as Buddhism, that are not based on belief in God at all?
Up until arguably the 20th century, philosophical spirituality was a fundamental current within philosophy itself, very much part of, for example, German, British and American idealism. And as for the idea that philosophy itself comprises empirically demonstrable arguments grounded in facts that all rational observers must assent to - this is very much the kind of argument that positivism tried, and failed, to advocate. Positivism has nothing to do with 'guilt by association'. Positivism is 'a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism'. And that's pretty well what you're arguing.
Quoting Christoffer
What 'rigid framework' in particular? Which philosophers or schools of philosophy would you look towards that will produce this ideal, rational society where everyone acts rationally at all times, only taking into consideration the relevant facts and acting with perfect detachment?
Define what religious belief is? Is it a proven claim? A deduced conclusion? If something isn't proven or doesn't possess any internal logic, if it is based on wild assumptions, what is it?
Is it biased to define religious beliefs based on precisely the most basic text-book definition of bias? Meaning, a leaning towards something specific, in this case, that religious belief?
How is religious belief not biased?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I'm not talking about experiences or definitions of religion's purpose for people. I've talked extensively in another thread about the importance of rituals, traditions and the emotional experience that religion can produce (with the bottom line being that if we were to remove religion and not find replacements for these parts we are robbing society of valuable important practices for our well being and psychological balance). Such experiences can also help in philosophy, but the philosophical claims you make cannot be part of such, or else they are tainted by whatever belief you have, i.e based on a bias.
What I'm talking about primarily is that conclusions can't be made through a religious lens without a bias towards that specific religion. Without the ability to prove a religious claim in any logical manner, the conclusion is essentially biased. We can of course use religious metaphors and analogies, but the final conclusion cannot assume religious claims as facts, truths or universalized ideas.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, he used Aristotelian reasoning. However, when we speak of the history of philosophy, we tend to pick out the logical conclusions that has a sound philosophical grounding and dismiss the rest of the stuff that was deeply rooted in the religious beliefs of the time. It's not until very recently that philosophical scrutiny reached a point that we usually call scientific in quality. Point being, philosophy has still been about countering biases regardless of which time it was in, it's precisely why people like Thomas Aquinas are well known, due to his careful reasoning and keeping Greek philosophical traditions alive based on Augustines previous work. However, throughout the history of philosophy, the scientific understanding of the time influenced what was considered non-biased conclusions. In the ancient greek the metaphysical understanding of reality, the physics of its time was considered actual scientific conclusions, but that's because the type of scientific methods we see today didn't exist. What was belief and what was truth has been mixed together throughout history, only to begin being dismantled during the enlightenment era when we start to develop a better framework for how to conduct science.
This is why philosophy was considered the scientific norm rather than how it is today with science and philosophy being separate entities. So while the assumptions about reality were affected by a lack of modern scientific scrutiny, philosophy still functioned on an inner logic and rational reasoning. The problem was always that non-scientific assumptions that were considered truths due to the lack of modern methods of science, blinded philosophers from making conclusions outside of that framework. It still managed to poke holes into the biases of religion and it's probably the clash between philosophical logic and religious belief that led philosophy towards the modern methods of science. I.e it is the attack on biases that moved discourse forward and helped arrive at new and alternative conclusions at each era of discovery.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is what I also described above. The history of philosophy is filled with clashes between its fundamentals and the current time it existed in. But the fundamentals have always been there and it's because of them that we've evolved into what philosophy is today. And I haven't said it should be grounded in only "facts", I've said that arguments in philosophy requires a rational logic that removes biases and presumptions. If it isn't doing that, it's just fiction, anything goes. That doesn't mean we can't use metaphors, story and analogies to tell an argument, it just mean that the conclusion needs to hold together. If the conclusion is anywhere close to relying on "because the spirit" "because God" "because faith", then it is in fact fantasy, it is faith and it is religious belief.
The problem with the way you frame my argument is that you essentially lock it down to a positivist framework almost as a straw man. But we can still make philosophical conclusions in moral philosophy that doesn't have a scientific fact behind them. And they still need to have a logical conclusion that we can agree upon. For example, there's a logic to Kant's universalization and even if there are no actual scientific facts backing it up, and even if there are objections to it, it is a concept that is extremely well argued for, has an internal logic, and can be expanded upon in newer concepts and ideas. This logic doesn't come out of religion, there's no bias to some presumptions, but an idea about the consequences of actions being universalized. It is a non-scientific conclusion that is still logical.
So I don't see how you interpret that as a positivist framework? I'm pointing out how philosophy acts to reduce and remove bias from arguments and how religion functions on a foundational bias towards the specific religion those arguments are formed within.
Quoting Wayfarer
What's the praxis of philosophy? What is it that you actually do when doing philosophy? Is it just looking up in the night sky and have some ideas about reality? Is it just deciding some rules you like about how people should act against each other? This thread's main plot is essentially "what is philosophy?" So what is it? If it's not religion, not science, how do you define it?
You say it depends on the schools of philosophy, on which philosophy you like etc. Is it? Doesn't that then essentially become whatever anyone can think of really?
What is not philosophy? Does it generally exclude approaches that rely solely on faith, dogma, unsubstantiated claims without reasoned argumentation and critical inquiry?
So when I position philosophy being about reducing and removing bias when forming arguments, isn't that generally an overall definition of philosophy's function? Because it doesn't seem to matter which school of philosophy or which philosophers you like, it doesn't matter which time a specific philosophy was formed, there's always the process of eliminating bias and fallacies from the arguments created. Of course, the conclusions then becomes dependent on the times they are formed in, but the general core function still persists, if you produce an argument with a bias that breaks its logic, you have failed at philosophy. That doesn't mean Positivism, that means a dedication to inner logic of an argument. If that argument is about things like morality, there's no scientific facts to rely on, but the conclusion has to have a rational logic, it has to exclude your pure beliefs, exclude your preassumptions about morality, in order to function as a moral idea in philosophy.
This is the conclusion I draw as an observation of the history of philosophy. What is the commonality throughout, the most basic function that we can ascribe to philosophy?
And as of my description of ways of reasoning that is good at removing bias. What opposite "attachment"-based system is it that you position should exist instead? When I say that detaching yourself from bias to be able to argue rationally, what way of philosophy is the opposite to that which is better? I'd like to hear in which way philosophy functions if you attach yourself to bias and wear it as part of your identity? What is the opposite of what I described, seen as you seem to have objections to that method?
Those of Eleusis, by my understanding. Eleusis was quite handy to those in Athens; not far away at all, relatively speaking.
But being an initiate didn't make one a mystic, at least as we understand the word. Many were initiated, including Alcibiades who is infamous for mocking the mysteries in public. Augustus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and even Commodus among the Roman Emperors were initiated to those mysteries; Julian as well, of course, being one of the last to be initiated. Cicero too. Aristotle also. I'm not sure any of them would have been called "mystics" as we use the word, with the exception of Julian.
The term has been used in different ways, but for a better idea of how it has been used in the western philosophical tradition. In simplest terms it means to appear to be saying one thing while saying another.
There are many quotes from and about the ancients, but it is not a practice that was limited to them.
Since there are a couple of current thread on Descartes I'll start with him:
Impossible. Can't be done. The term covers such a diverse range of cultural phenomena, that it has no single meaning. There are those who say that the word itself is an impediment. But one thing it's not, is a compendium of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles proposing a testable hypothesis.
Are you familar with Plato's dialogues? Socrates, as you're well aware, was sentenced to death for atheism, but the Phaedo, the dialogue taking place in the hours leading up to his execution, is one of the main sources for the defense of the immortality of the soul. Is that a religious dialogue, or is it not, by your lights?
Are you familiar with the early Buddhists texts and the account of the awakening of the Buddha? What 'wild assumptions' do you think are conveyed in those texts? For that matter, what issue are they addressing?
Quoting Christoffer
I'll go with the approach articulated by scholar and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot.
[quote=IEP;https://iep.utm.edu/hadot/#SH5a]According to Hadot, twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic philosophy has largely lost sight of its ancient origin in a set of spiritual practices that range from forms of dialogue, via species of meditative reflection, to theoretical contemplation. These philosophical practices, as well as the philosophical discourses the different ancient schools developed in conjunction with them, aimed primarily to form, rather than only to inform, the philosophical student. The goal of the ancient philosophies, Hadot argued, was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing. ....
For Hadot... the means for the philosophical student to achieve the complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the students larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (PWL 84). Hadot acknowledges his use of the term spiritual exercises may create anxieties, by associating philosophical practices more closely with religious devotion than typically done (Nussbaum 1996, 353-4; Cooper 2010). Hadots use of the adjective spiritual (or sometimes existential) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions (6a), are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than reason alone. They also utilize rhetoric and imagination in order to formulate the rule of life to ourselves in the most striking and concrete way and aim to actively re-habituate bodily passions, impulses, and desires (as for instance, in Cynic or Stoic practices, abstinence is used to accustom followers to bear cold, heat, hunger, and other privations) (PWL 85). [/quote]
The philosophical issue with modern science, in particular, is that it leaves no place for man as subject. Science relies on the fundamental techniques of objectification and quantification, and can only ever deal with man as object. It is embedded in a worldview that isn't aware that it's a worldview, but thinks of itself as being 'the way things are'. And there's no self-awareness in that.
Quoting Christoffer
Positivism, again.
Quoting Ciceronianus
The Oxford Dictionary used to state that a mystic was 'one initiated into the [Greek] Mystery religions', although the definition has now been broadened.
Quoting Wayfarer
Much broader, in fact. Of course, if we define "mystic" as an initiate into the mysteries, there were one hell of a lot of mystics back then. There were a good number of mystery cults. But it means something more, now, which I think can't be associated with the Eleusinian mysteries.
Merriam Webster:
Mystic; noun
[i]1: a follower of a mystical way of life
2: an advocate of a theory of mysticism[/i]
Mystical; adjective
[i]1. a : having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence
the mystical food of the sacrament
b: involving or having the nature of an individual's direct subjective communion with God or ultimate reality
the mystical experience of the Inner Light[/i]
Mysticism, noun
[i]1: the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality reported by mystics
2: the belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience (such as intuition or insight)[/i]
Cambridge Dictionary
Mystic, noun:
someone who attempts to be united with God through prayer:
Mystic, adjective:
relating to magic or having magic powers, especially of a secret, dark, or mysterious kind:
I think we use the word differently, now. What distinguished the ancient mysteries was knowledge of a sort, which was arrived at through rituals which were secret, hence mysterious.
Cicero wrote of the Eleusinian mysteries in his On the Laws:
For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those mysteries. For by means of them we have transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy but also for dying with a better hope.
A more ecstatic, magical mystery cult was that of Dionysus. From what we know of the mysteries of Eleusis, they were more refined. A kinder, gentler mystery cult. The revelation wasn't received in the mist of frenzy, or in a sudden burst of communion with God, but through contemplation and ritual, over a period of days.
:pray: :clap: A splendid affirmation, thank you.
Great resource, thanks, that's another of those book I must get around to.
[quote="Fooloso4;808175", Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914):]
[Forbidden ideas] are different in different countries and in different ages; but wherever
you are, let it be known that you seriously hold a tabooed belief, and you may be
perfectly sure of being treated with a cruelty less brutal but more refined than hunting
you like a wolf. Thus the greatest intellectual benefactors of mankind have never dared,
and dare not now [in America, circa 1877], to utter the whole of their thought.
Charles Sanders Pierce, The Fixation of Belief, Philosophical Writings, 20[/quote]
cf what happened to Thomas Nagel.
Now the point is that gravitating towards what is comfortable is not necessarily gravitating toward what is good. But people can be trained through good moral education to gravitate toward what is good and this is equally a "bias". In other words, biases can be good too. The issue though is that such training requires effort, and it is a special type of effort. It's the effort of the teacher, which is made for the good of the student, the effort we make to train our children. This effort doesn't bring any good to the one who makes the effort, it brings good to the one who receives the training.
So, we can allow our children to gravitate toward what is "comfortable", or we can make the effort to train them to gravitate toward what is good. In the sense that each is a tendency to "gravitate toward", they are both types of biases.
Quoting Christoffer
I do not see how this is at all possible. Since our biases arise from our training, what we have been taught, they cannot at all be related to the unknown. Our biases are deeply seated in our knowledge, and anxiety toward the unknown is something completely different from bias.
And you even describe bias as providing a form of comfort, so how could this possibly arise from anxiety of the unknown? If there is anxiety of the unknown there is no comfort, and vise versa. Bias is related to the known, and if it exists as a sort of comfort, then it is a type of self-confidence in one's own knowledge which excludes one from such anxiety toward the unknown. But just like I explained above, bias does not necessarily direct one toward comfort, biases may direct us toward making an effort, which is clearly not a comfort. If the person is trained to have great respect for the unknown, and this would involve a certain amount of anxiety toward the unknown, then this sort of bias could certainly be good, as motivation toward scientific endeavours and such things which would help us obtain knowledge.
Quoting Christoffer
So I think you have this completely wrong. Philosophy is not about countering biases. Biases are inevitable as a fundamental aspect of human existence. Philosophy is concerned with distinguishing good biases from bad, such that the good can be cultured. And, it may be argued that other disciplines like science and religion deal with culturing biases. Whether such biases are bad or good is a judgement for philosophy to make.
Ok, then let's take a step back here. It may be that I experience you misinterpreting what I'm saying due to us not agreeing on clearer definitions.
What I use the term "religion" for in this context is primarily in claims about reality, i.e in religious beliefs that have no supported claims either in facts or any logical framework. I'm not talking about the use of religious teachings that have been used for thousands of years for moral explorations, phenomenological explorations and existential meditations on the human condition etc. These parts are more linked to what I referred to as the important aspects of religion that society needs to be careful not to eradicate when dismantling institutional religions. There are extremely important parts in religious texts throughout history that are just as important as any continental philosophy exploring the human condition using more poetic representations of such explorations.
Where I draw the line, however, is when specifics are boiled down to something similar to factual claims. If someone speaks of "soul" and actually means some ethereal part of the divine that's trapped in our flesh, and uses this as a factual premise in their arguments, that is an unsupported claim. It's this type of claim that I refer to as biased. It is a bias towards the preconceived belief of the soul as something actual, something part of physical reality or supernatural reality that in itself hasn't been supported either. It's arguments that functions on these biases that philosophy consequently dismantled, if not in the time they were formed (due to historically inadequate methods of actually knowing how the world worked), then in historical times after when more factual understandings emerged.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is not a religious dialogue because the method of inquiry tried to use factual premises. However, it is a partly religious dialogue in light of what we know today.
What I mean by this is that the problems with asking this about Phaedo is that it excludes what each historical time concluded being facts about the world. In the Ancient Greek things like Empedocles and Apeiron were considered the same as we view electrons or the Higgs field. So just as we conduct philosophy today and rely on science as a source of factual premises when formulating arguments, so too did they in the same manner. This means that the context in which they draw empirical understanding through their dialogue, were based on facts that we know today aren't facts. Their understanding of the soul is therefor different to how we view the soul today, where, if we try to use factual knowledge, we might form arguments around neuroscience, mind upload technologies etc.
This is very important when we analyze historical philosophical texts. We need to understand the difference between a philosophical discussion that relied on factual premies based on what each historical time had as a factual foundation, and those that relied on religious beliefs. They are two different things. The former can survive and change throughout history based on recontextualisation when new discoveries in science adds to the factual foundation that society is built upon. We can take Phaedo and recontextualize the dialogue into a modern framework, discarding or changing aspects of it based on up to date scientific understandings but keep the dialogue's foundation. An argument that has bias towards a religious belief is however locked into that framework. It never gets past the belief, regardless of newly discovered factual foundations.
Phaedo is also not concluding anything, it is a dialogue that at its best forms concepts of duality that we still use today. The concepts that were formed by it has little to do with any support for the soul or the immortality of the soul, but instead were concepts that created a new framework to explore new ideas in. This is something that differs from what I mean by religiously biased arguments which focus on making religious conclusions rather than explore in the form of expanding perspectives.
Quoting Wayfarer
In light of what I wrote on Phaedo, you can deconstruct that in a similar manner. What are religious conclusions and what are conceptual explorations in pursuit of further perspectives?
The key is still that bias locks your perspective into a rigid and non-moving framework. It's this that philosophy constantly dismantles.
Quoting Wayfarer
This:
Quoting IEP
Is basically what I'm talking about. This is fighting bias. This is philosophy. And I think the misunderstanding you make about what I have written is due to misinterpreting (or maybe because I've been unclear), the difference between a formed conclusion and conceptual exploration. Much of what Hadot is talking about refers to a meditation for the purpose of dismantling biases, towards habits, passions and... religion. This is the difference between religious arguments, religious beliefs, religious thinking and... philosophy.
What i think is unfortunate is that we use terminology that is closely linked and somewhat owned by religious beliefs and religious institutions. Spiritualism, meditation etc. This confuse people into mixing everything together, rather than look at the practical implications of expansion of the mind, meditation and ritualistic behaviors to focus thought and reasoning. Neither of these have anything to do with religion in their function, because neither of them require religious belief.
Why did Einstein take daily walks? His habits were ritualistic behaviors that focused his mind. One of the most scientific thinkers in history utilized a framework of rituals, expanded his mind through Gedankenexperiment. Neither of this is religious or belief systems, but mental tools.
My gallery analogy is a form of Gedankenexperiment-type method. Aimed at detaching yourself from your ideas and biases. Aimed at combating the passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits and upbringing.
Quoting Wayfarer
And I have not lumped together science and philosophy, I have held them separated. What I am trying to show is that philosophy functions as a form of guided meditation that requires you to act against bias when forming conclusions. In that sense it is more similar to science than religious belief as religious belief is essentially biased to the religion that is believed. You cannot form rational conclusions in religious arguments since they are bound to a specific pre-existing belief. Philosophy, even in ancient practices, aimed at mentally remove biases, even religious ones, in order to explore everything. This is why real philosophy survives time, while religious claims does not. And this is why there can be real philosophy in religious texts, at the same time as other parts of the same texts can be religious hogwash.
The challenge for the philosopher or any explorer of thought, is therefor to distinguish hogwash from the profound. Metaphor from the actual. Pure belief from the rational, bias from an open mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
So no, it's not positivism, as you can read above, it is acknowledging historical context, and through that, understand what is and what isn't philosophy. That exploration isn't the same as conclusions and that claims requires an understanding of their historical context as well as what the aim of the claim is.
One problem is that you have labeled me a positivist, so you are now biased towards that label. You read what I write in that context and you will mentally discard what is problematic for the conclusion that I am a positivist. But I guarantee you that I'm not, I'm just more based in the historical context we live in at the moment, in which there are so many scientific explanations for so many things that it becomes irrational to do philosophical arguments without that context being a part of it. That does not mean positivism, it means that I, just like with Phaedo, structure my philosophy based on the history I live in and what factual foundation there is at this time. I explore in this context and form my anti-bias out of it. If someone claims something as a deductive conclusion based on arguments formed in historical times that had factually incorrect understanding of the world and universe, then it doesn't matter if that conclusion has an internal logic that were accepted at the time, it is still incorrect and biased towards that understanding, especially if it's formed through religious belief. If it's however not concluding anything, but opening the door to exploration of a topic, then it's still philosophy, even if it has problematic factual ideas.
The bottom line is that context matter and bias is connected to conclusions. Philosophy fights bias, in order to meditate our thoughts towards better understanding and conclusions that form stepping stones for further exploration. Bias is a quicksand that people get stuck in and drown if they're not careful, and its philosophy's primary function to act against it and has been long before philosophers knew of the concept of bias.
Of course, but then again, what is good? How can you guarantee that the good that your moral education teaches people actually creates a good bias? What if your moral education isn't forming the good that you thought it would and people are now having a bias that is instead morally questionable?
To say this requires you to already have a bias towards what you believe is good and we are again back in the realm of belief and bias towards such beliefs.
Isn't it then better to have a neutral system of anti-bias so that good is always evaluated by not having a pre-existing belief bias?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Our biases is us favoring certain knowledge over other. We favor those things out of our emotions, our craving for comfort. The comfortable "truth" is the one we defend and form our world-view on. This means we evaluate new knowledge not by their own merits, but by how they relate to the knowledge we favor, that we are comfortable with.
Therefore, detachment from bias makes us better at evaluating the knowledge we have and the knowledge we are confronted with.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The anxiety of the unknown is the anxiety towards the opposite of the knowledge that is comfortable. A comfortable "truth" is preferable to an uncomfortable horror of nothing. We don't embrace not knowing or non-knowledge as comfortable. So we are desperate to form knowledge, form some explanation. Even if that knowledge is wrong we don't care, it is the only answer we find comfortable in face of the opposite.
Comparably, there's another approach to this in eastern philosophy and that is to embrace the nothing, to apply a positive emotion to it. Rather than falling into bias, it trains you to accept the idea of not knowing as a positive state of mind. However, this is only good for the well-being of the self and does not function well in a progressive society that functions on developing mankind forward. The choice is for people to choose either path.
Bias is an error in perfect understanding. It blocks holistic perspectives and closes the mind to new ones.
You cannot conclude there to be good biases without first concluding an answer to what a good bias really is. And to form such an answer requires you to explore a moral realm without bias, since you would otherwise just apply your own bias of what you believe is good before concluding and applying it as a collective bias that others should follow.
So how would the teacher reach an objectively good bias?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, how can you distinguish good biases from bad if you don't form arguments in a mental space where biases do not exist? How can you deconstruct something if it is essential to the human existence? That would imply that all of philosophy is circular reasoning, one bias following the next ad infinitum.
And yes, it is part of the human condition to have biases, it's part of our human psyche, which is why acting against it, understand it and understanding its behavior has been the single greatest method for human advancement. We cannot question the status quo without acting against our biases, without detachment from them.
Think about a society formed by some "good biases" that has been decided by philosophers. How does that society progress? If the good biases is the foundation of all knowledge and praxis in that society, how can people in that society expand their knowledge further and change? Isn't it exactly through thinking beyond biases that philosophers explore concepts further, evaluate previous ones and expand our understanding? This is what I'm talking about, biases locks people down, locks their thinking into a rigid system. And philosophy has always been about exploring concepts beyond the currently knowable, beyond the biases that exist.
Do you mean not subject to empirical validation, according to the standards of science?
The problem I have is that you're casting your net too wide when you denegrate anything that can be described as 'religious' in those terms. If you said 'fundamentalist' or 'dogmatic', then I might agree.
Quoting Christoffer
A meaningful description of the teachings of Buddhism would not be feasible in a forum post such as this without many pages of text. Suffice to say that the aims of the Buddhist teaching are conceived in terms of liberation from the ongoing cycle of death and rebirth (sa?s?ra) and realisation of the state of Nirv??a. The account of the Buddha's awakening, based on the oral tradition, preserves the record of this as the Buddha is said to have realised it. The realisation of this state is something that subsequent generations of Buddhists are understood to have re-traced and re-capitulated (which is why, for example, the term 'Buddha' is not limited to one individual, but designates a class of being.)
Buddhist cultures have incorporated traditional cosmological models, which are clearly empirically unsupportable in light of current science. But then, the Dalai Lama has acknowledged that "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims. However he's also said What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter.
Quoting Christoffer
Positivism was coined by the French scientist and philosopher, August Comte, who founded the disciplines we now refer to as the social sciences. He theorised that culture evolved through three stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, the final stage being the scientific, or positive, stage. So Comte's idea of positivism was historical, and you're assuming a similar framework. This is not 'bias' on my part, it is an empirical judgement based on the evidence.
Quoting Christoffer
If you examine Platonist philosophy, it clearly comprises many elements which are more closely related to what we would now understand as religion than science. As Hadot says, and you agree, this involves critical reflection and self-awareness, and the other disciplines mentioned in that passage, but Hadot also says that this conception of philosophy as a way of life has been deprecated in modern times:
You're a careful thinker and writer, and while I appreciate that, I think you're casting your net too wide. There are elements (I won't call them ideas) within religious culture that are indispensable to the human condition even acknowledging that whatever about them has been shown to be false by scientific methods ought to be revised or discarded.
At back of this debate are conceptions of reality. Does reality comprise physical objects determined by physical laws (that is, scientific materialism/physicalism)? Alternatives include various schools of idealism, dualism, panpsychism, and phenomenology - none of which are necessarily religious in nature. It is possible to argue the case without reference to religion, although rejection of physicalism might often suggest philosophical views that seem close to religion - too close for comfort, for a lot of people.
Yes, this is exactly the issue, how are we to determine good biases from bad. You were talking as if all biases are bad, but now you appear to accept that some might be good. So, on what bases are we going to distinguish good biases from bad biases?
Quoting Christoffer
No, like I explained, biases are a natural and essential part of being human. Therefore it is impossible to be bias-free, and any attempt at "not having a pre-existing belief bias" would be a completely unrealistic attempt due to that impossibility. Such an attempt would just turn into a matter of gravitating toward keeping the biases which one is comfortable with, and eliminating the others, because it is impossible to not have any bias. Then we end up still having biases and no principles for distinguishing which biases we ought to have and ought not have.
Quoting Christoffer
Your proposed "detachment from bias" is unrealistic, impossible for a human being to achieve, analogous to a mind separated from its body. It is not the human condition, nor is it a possible condition for a human being, so forget about it, and move along to something more realistic.
Quoting Christoffer
Do you accept as true, the proposition that "perfect understanding" is impossible for human beings to obtain. If so, then you ought to recognize that your goal of being bias-free is not a reasonable goal for a human being. This conclusion necessitates a completely different approach to biases. Instead of attempting to reject all biases as fundamentally unwanted, we need to accept that it is impossible to reject all biases, therefore we need some principles by which we can decide which to reject. Do you see that these "principles" cannot themselves be biases, but more of a versatile, or universal method for assessing biases.
Quoting Christoffer
This is not true. My demonstration that there are good biases came from your assumption that there are bad biases. So from your premise, that we ought to rid ourselves of biases, because they are bad, I demonstrated that if there are bad biases there is necessarily also good biases. So the conclusion is derived from your premise of bad biases, and there is no need for me to show what a good bias is..
Furthermore, all that is required to further this process, is a definition of what constitutes "good". Once we have that, we can judge biases as to whether or not they are consistent with, or have that quality. "Good" would be defined in such a way as to be a principle, to serve as a method for judging biases, without itself being a bias.
Quoting Christoffer
All that is required is to have a process for judging biases which is separate from the biases, a process being an activity, whereas a bias is a static belief. The process therefore cannot itself be a bias. This is why science is based in a method, "method" signifying a process.
Quoting Christoffer
It appears like you have the idea here, when you talk about a "method". But it is not a matter of acting "against" biases, as you state. Nor is it a detachment from bias, as this is impossible. It is simply a way of acting which recognizes the reality of biases and the need to cope with them. To deny them, or pretend a detachment is self-deception.
Quoting Christoffer
Let me take what you say here about the "soul" ad make an analogy. The concept of "soul" is a very difficult and complex subject in philosophy. It requires great study to understand the soul, Plato's "Phaedo" is a good start. But then there is Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and many others. So when a learned philosopher makes a claim about "the soul as something actual", I would assume that this philosopher has some understanding about that matter. That philosopher probably even understands that Aristotle defines the soul as actual, and explains the logical reasoning why the soul must be defined as "actual". Therefore we cannot say that such a claim is "unsupported".
But you could call that a bias if you like. Then however, when a learned physicist refers to a photon as something actual, we should assume that the definitions produced from observations of the photoelectric effect which incline the physicists to speak of a photon as an actual thing, constitute a bias in the very same way.
Quoting Christoffer
:fire:
Quoting Christoffer
:100:
Quoting Wayfarer
So do you consider Spinoza with his counter-biased more geometrico, for instance, a "positivist"? The author of the monumental (though suppressed for centuries) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which had inaugurated modern biblical criticism and strongly suggested that all "revealed faiths" and "transcendent beliefs or ideals" are mere superstitions (i.e. dogmatic fairytales & fables) by your lights, Wayf, is he just confusing metaphysics with "scientism"?
Btw, I think "Mr. Spock" was more a Stoic-caricature in the 1960s than the Spinozist he seemed to be portrayed as by the 1990s.
The post I was commenting on had no discernable resemblance to Spinoza, nor any mention of him. And I said way back I reviewed the video and agree with his comments about questioning religion, but questioning religion does not amount to the declaration that 'all religion is false' (which incidentally is not something I think Spinoza would have agreed with.)
@Christoffer - do you have any views on Spinozas philosophy?
Perhaps youre right, but that in itself is a bias, re: embracing a mere comfort, albeit in the negative.
Here, therefore, is a case where no answer is the only proper answer. For a question regarding the constitution of a something which cannot be cogitated by any determined predicate, being completely beyond the sphere of objects and experience, is perfectly null and void..
Quoting Christoffer
Biases are themselves arguments, properly referred to as conclusions of aesthetic judgements, formed nonetheless in a mental space, a non-cognitive mental space. It is thereby self-contradictory to suppose a bias-free mental space, when it is in a mental space where all biases reside. It follows that the determination of good or bad relative to an aesthetic judgement, itself merely a judgement contingent on the first, still presupposes the mental space in which it occurs.
All that being given, it is then the case the object of the judgment, and the object of the bias which follows from the judgement, may not even relate to each other. In the former is found a objective conviction with respect to the conclusion of a judgement, in the latter is found a subjective persuasion regarding the validity of the conclusion, i.e., I know this is correct, but I dont like it.
The real problem manifests in instances where the conviction is not so much met with opposing persuasion, but with outright rejection, i.e., I know this is right but I am not going to accept it, and this may be referred to as pathological stupidity.
Assuming sufficient rationality, while there are mental spaces in which there are no biases, the good/bad relation of standing biases are not determinable in them. Which stands to reason, insofar as to judge a relative quality makes explicit the necessity for maintaining a consistency in that which is being judged, by that which is judging. In other words, to judge the good or bad of a bias makes necessary being in the very arena ..in this case the mental space ..where good/bad and the bias itself, are relatable to each other. Which, ironically enough, reduces to the judgement of good/bad with respect to biases, is itself a bias.
Quoting Christoffer
With the exception to human existence, which is necessary for, but utterly irrelevant with respect to, circular reasoning, it is the case philosophy in the form of pure metaphysics is circular, iff it is not held to a logically regulatory critique. One bias will naturally follow from its antecedent conditions, and because .
.education may furnish, and, as it were, engraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose is, in the absence or deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse .
.. judgement is a peculiar gift, which does not and cannot require instruction but only exercise, biases are often as easily overcome as they are established.
A few thoughts, from a more limited perspective.
Maybe fundamentalist and dogmatic are good descriptions if it summarizes the arguments as being ignorant of valid objections to them. I.e they dismiss reworking the argument based on valid criticism.
It doesn't need to be of empirical scientific validation, but at least logical and hold together without unsupported claims as foundational premises. Writing out poetics and fantasy within an argument is all good and well as long as they aren't functioning as being logical sources for the conclusion's validity.
I really dislike reading pure logic in philosophy, I like the writer to have some skills in painting their idea with some colors, it's just that the internal logic of the argument needs to have some consistency that isn't just within the mind of the writer (i.e biased to that internal belief).
And then there need to be a clarity in what an argument is doing. Is it asking questions, exploring a concept, or is it making a statement, a conclusion. I think many confuse a claim/conclusion with exploration and starts to make conclusions without actual support in the text (in an exploratory text) or make a poetic and exploratory text when they should bind together clear premises for a conclusion (making it muddy, looking at you Hegel!).
Then it is also vital what type of philosophy you are writing about. If we're doing moral philosophy, then the logic has to connect to human behavior and psychology, which can be messy and factual claims can be tricky with the whole ought/is problem. But if we are discussing philosophy that relate to facts about the world, such as physics and cosmology, then there's no point in making claims that have little to no roots in what has actually been scientifically measured and tested. Ignoring that is pure bias towards the beliefs of the writer.
So, we can go into pages of details in this epistemological overview of philosophy, but the guiding principles is that the more scientifically factual a claim, the more empirical it needs to be and the more phenomenological or focused on the human experience, the more exploratory it should be. But regardless of that, bias has a negative play. Even in the most exploratory writings there has to exist some internal logic that can be somewhat universalized and not just function within the beliefs and mind of the writer.
Quoting Wayfarer
That type of anti-bias is in the realm of philosophy. It recognizes that empirical evidence demands a change to arguments and ideas, which is how philosophy should progress through history. The important part, however, is to distinguish a conclusion/claim of truth based on exploratory reasoning and one based on deductive logic. I'm objecting against making any conclusion or claim that only has exploratory writing underneath, since there are no actual premises in such arguments to support any actual claim.
The first part related to the cycle of death and rebirth is exploratory arguments that cannot conclude with actual claims of death and rebirth in the traditional sense of reincarnation. But they are exploratory in the way they link to ideas about cycles, in nature, in thinking, in history etc. Such ideas does not have truth-claims, but are observable explorations of holistic concepts about the life, death and the universe (and people like Schopenhauer took inspiration from). As long as we view them as exploratory, just like with Phaedo, they are profoundly important as concepts and frameworks of exploration. We could also stretch them to agnostic dialogues about actual reincarnation, but the important part is to be careful not to slip into making truth claims that functions on pure belief alone.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, which is why I focus on philosophical claims either changing or are reworked based on new discoveries and understanding in science, or understanding concepts as explorations in thought that doesn't claim truths.
It's when religious truth claims and conclusions are made based purely on the belief biased to that religion that it stops being philosophy and becomes biased delusion. It's when the filter of religious bias or any bias exists as a closed door for further exploration, making someone stand their ground purely based on their belief, or that they become confused as to what is a truth claim and what is exploration in their reasoning.
Quoting Wayfarer
In this I have to agree that the line I draw around the definition of philosophy and its purpose becomes more leaned towards certain schools than others. While I think all have exploratory functions and importance for the ability to reach depth in any subject, some schools of thought sometimes goes too far into "anything goes" and in my opinion that just blows up any ability to agree upon any definition of philosophy or for anyone to be able to reach any foundation of knowledge for existence itself. Arguments like the "brain in the vat", for example, while interesting, has become a go to claim that just dismisses the entire fields of neuroscience and psychology whenever someone tries to make philosophical claims based on that scientific foundation.
If there aren't any foundational agreements about how we approach reality (like accepting verified scientific results), then it simply becomes "anything goes". And of course knowing the difference between truth claims and exploration. We can explore ideas about the mind that are wildly speculative and perhaps even spiritual, as long as no one claims truths that have no foundation in verified science about the mind.
It is within confusing this difference between conclusions and exploration that I think most fail in philosophy. Both in writing and in reading.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I'm asking in a larger critical context. Because there's a faulty logic in claiming there to be good biases and bad biases when such claims are values that essentially requires a detachment from bias in the first place in order to reach a claim of what is good or bad.
Which means that the argument fails by its own logic and becomes circular reasoning. You claim there to be good and bad biases, but to reach those values you need to be unbiased and in doing so you are doing what I'm talking about, unbiased reasoning.
Bias is neutral, there are no good or bad values. In human reasoning and cognition it is merely a description of how the we gravitate towards something based on our emotions or paths of least resistance in our thought processes. Basically because it's part of how our minds work. Our minds seek patterns and summarize reality without rationality, much more than actually understanding a detailed and holistic view that is objective or detached from our cognition. To do that we need to apply a method that we follow and train ourselves to process what we learn and experience in a more careful way.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, biases are natural, but they are not good or bad as you claim since such values are arbitrary. And if we are talking about knowledge biases, yes, everyone has biases and therefor it is the purpose of unbiased methods of reasoning to improve our ability to reach conclusions and truths that are objective or broad rather than the subjective truths of our stupid minds. Without methods like this we are simply just spitting out opinions that cannot be foundations for concepts that function in a broader context and society, they just become like any twitter thread: a long line of irrelevant noise biased towards each individual subject's beliefs.
I think you are mixing together praxis with bias. Philosophy focuses on unbiased reasoning in order to sometimes reach a praxis that we use in society. That doesn't mean "good bias" or "bad bias", it simply means that something like Kant's categorical imperatives are concepts that he argued for without biases to any beliefs and then we implement them as principles and praxis for how to figure out effective and functioning laws.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not. It is, as I've been saying, a core tenet of philosophy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The goal of philosophy is to reduce bias in reasoning and arguments. Without doing so, you are not doing philosophy, you are just telling loose opinions and that is not philosophy, that is just normal talk.
Explain what this universal method of assessing biases is, because so far you are just saying that we need to arrive at good and bad biases, but what exactly is the process you propose? How do we arrive at such conclusions? How do you reach them? If you say that we cannot do anything without bias, then how do we reach an understanding of what are good and bad biases? It's just circular.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I'm saying that biases are neutral forms of gravitation towards certain things and in doing without knowledge of doing so, it breaks any ability to form objective or universal reasoning that functions as broader understanding or universal truths for the many. It's the process of arguing with bias that is bad, not that there are bad biases. That is a faulty understanding of what bias is as a natural phenomena in human cognition and how it relates to unbiased reasoning.
The rest of your reasoning then becomes faulty because you interpret bias wrong in the first place.
Bias is a natural and neutral manipulation of the ability to reason outside of your own beliefs. Without mitigating it through unbiased reasoning methods, you fail to universalize your arguments to function as broader truths or claims.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How do you arrive at good? You just claim us to arrive at that without explaining how we arrive at that? It's basically like saying, "once we have the concept of good acts, we can then form principles of morality that we can follow", and then argue about some ideals that still requires the "good" to be defined. You still don't seem to see that this argument is faulty, that it is a circular argument in which you describe a system that relies on axioms that needs to be argued for and proven absolute, before you propose how to use them. You are only describing how to use them... whenever we arrive at having such axioms.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So... you are basically describing philosophy and critical thinking for arriving to a place in which you can judge biases? So, basically what my definition of philosophy is and the entire point of philosophy? To be able to do unbiased reasoning.
I think you have entangled yourself further into this circular reasoning.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But, it is not, because the methods are common practice in philosophy. It's how we structure deduction, induction, analogies, metaphors etc. They're based on a systematic framework for thinking and arriving at conclusions that challenge our biases so that we can think past them.
The problem is that you believe that because of the natural state of biases in our cognition, we are unable to work past them through methods and instead need to surrender and incorporate bias into our methods.
You still need to use unbiased methods and critical thinking in order to arrive at a value system for what is good or bad biases. So the main objection becomes, why should we not use such unbiased methods as a primary method for everything we try to figure out, seen as they are neutral and more universalized and doesn't rely on reasoning that is manipulated by biases?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Prove the soul's existence. That is the problem. How is any of what Phaedo describes supported other than through Ancient Greek's factual concepts of reality which were based on undeveloped methods of science? Concepts that are proven false with empirical evidence today.
That a learned philosopher's claim should be considered true because that philosopher has some arbitrary understanding of it, is basically appeal to authority.
"Soul" can be used as metaphor, we can use it as exploratory concepts, just like reincarnation, the cycle of life and death can be discussed as frameworks of broader subjects. But if you are to arrive at a supported claim of an actual existence of a soul, you definitely need to have deductive logic and even more so actual empirical evidence since this is a claim about reality. As I've described, these things change throughout history, but we are at a time in history where science is an empirical field of such accuracy that the demand on philosophy when making conclusions like "the human soul is real" requires a lot more than an "appeal to authority".
Today, Phaedo is not even close to a sound argument. The entire dialogue relies on false assumptions about physics and the universe. It relies on that time's understanding of reality, but that today is nothing more than pure belief.
The problem is that people today take the historical relevance of Phaedo as evidence for it being true in its conclusions. It is through what I describe as the confusion people have today on how to approach much of old and ancient philosophy as exploratory rather than deductive. The claims that are made have faulty logic when updating them today, so they should only be used as exploratory concepts used for metaphorical exploration of the idea about a soul.
A good example of this is Ghost in the Shell, in which the soul is called a ghost and through that the philosophical concept handles the digitalization of the self as a separate entity from the original body. You can use Phaedo when exploring these ideas, but the conclusions it propose are not factual or supported as deductive claims about the soul.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A photon is a real thing. It is measurable as both a wave and a particle in experiments like the wave function collapse in the double slit experiment. We also have inventions and technology that utilizes photons as well as all electronics that use things like electrons. It is not a bias to "believe a photon to be a real thing", it is an empirical truth that would otherwise make the computer you write on to be running on pure belief, which I doubt.
Still, we don't embrace it, the unknown is uncomfortable and emotions is of great importance to the self-programming of our thinking. Which, leads to us seeking out the comfortable ideas that can explain it, even when unexplainable. In essence, we become religious and biased to that religion if we let that fear program us into certain concepts just because they remove that fear and comfort us.
I have never met a single entity that does not fear the unknown. We can be intrigued and curious about the unknown, but it is at the very core of human fear and fear is one of the strongest emotions we have, emotions that program our natural thinking process.
Quoting Mww
That is a good description of biases. But I wouldn't call biases arguments themselves. The process of our mind concluding an aesthetic judgment is as you say a bias, but it is not an argument, it is more related to an emotional response or judgement out of emotions. Just like when I experience art I do not form an argument on why I like it, it is an emotional response that forms a preference.
So yes, we can argue that nothing is unbiased in our normal thinking, but that's not really what I am proposing or describing. I'm writing about methods to avoid bias. Methods to primarily structure your argumentative thinking and thought process so that you become aware of your biases and force yourself to turn the arguments premises or concept around and view everything from another perspective. As principles of a praxis in reasoning so that you do not let your biases shape and form your conclusion.
In the analogy of the gallery, I tried to describe this difference by describing the state of being unaware of your biases when forming an argument as like being a statue in which your identity and your opinions/arguments are one and the same. You cannot view your own neck, you cannot move or look around, you cannot form a holistic view or get closer to other statues. If you instead detach yourself and imagine yourself as an individual who explores ideas and concepts as separate objects that can be studied at a distance, you can force yourself to detach yourself from the emotions that manipulate your reasoning and in so doing, be able to see your biases standing there as their own statues while reviewing all sides of them together with all sides of the statue that forms the argument and concept you are trying to create.
It's a form of stoic approach to reasoning, not just through stepping back from emotion, but stepping back from existing purely as a subjective being, in order to detach yourself from living inside the argument yourself and be able to instead view it from a distance and all perspectives. The better at this a person is, the better they are at knowing themselves and their biases. They can argue for something and understand what aesthetic judgement they instinctively have because they essentially approach their own ideas as if they were proposed by another person.
Quoting Mww
And judgement is sharpened and fine-tuned and becomes more automatic the more a method of detachement is exercised.
Essentially, as we aren't robots, anyone's initial reaction is emotional. We reject or embrace. The novice falls into either camp through their biases without knowing or understanding how or why. The scholar, on the other hand, understands the concepts of biases and emotions, understands how they function, understands the definitions and concepts of reasoning. But they let all of that knowledge exist in the same internal place, without a defined form, existing inside them without boundaries between them as a single entity. The scholar is almost like Mary in the black and white room, they understand all the details but doesn't know them as there are no separation between them. Then there is the master, who have trained their mind to function in a detached and distant perspective from their emotional identity. They won't reject or embrace anything before a concept has been studied in relation to other concepts. They only acknowledge that something is in fact a concept and idea, never attempting to apply critical thinking to it without it first being detached from themselves and their identity and emotions. Intuitively understands how incoming information is affected by biases and that aesthetic judgement is not the same as critical thinking.
The master is essentially a duality of a person, living with two internal sides; one as the automatic identity, like the unconscious mind moving through time, while the other is the conscious mind, studying. One is emotional, judging, reacting, biased and acting on instinct. The other one is standing back and observing the first and all information that it consumes, it observes how the bias creates judgements, how emotions drive actions, but it accepts this as separate from studying the information. Over time, the second one forms the foundation of the first one by objectively studying the information it consumes and how it reacts as part of pure understanding.
The concept is to split yourself and live with one part that is emotional, biased and automatic, while the other is an invention that you force being an observer and researcher of the first. By letting these two sides internally argue you essentially reach clarity about your own shortcomings and biases. Just knowing about the concepts that limit our ability to form logical conclusions or understand something on a deeper level isn't enough to effectively have a functional internal reasoning, we essentially need to function as two different people who are locked in an eternal argument.
Since the best way to spot our own biases and shortcomings in reasoning is to discuss with another person who evaluate our ideas, we can use this as a mental method and thought process in order to function better in reasoning as an individual, even if it requires to always live in this split form and always internally argue between the two internal sides.
I'd argue that I favor Spinoza's rationalism far more than positivism. I would even argue that even if positivists are closely related to science, even in science we have theoretical physics which can arrive at objective discoveries through math without actual observations, which positivists require. Positivists become blocked by their own methods while in science the theoretical and deductive can guide where to look, test and observe in order to verify. So I'd say, that even from a purely scientific perspective, Spinoza's rationalist approach has more practical use and function than positivism.
Wouldnt that be bias in its conventional sense? Or perhaps, if not conventional, then psychological? Being the red-headed stepchild of metaphysics, rational psychology is a poor substitute for critical reason a priori, but at the same time, the implementation of the one presupposes the misuse in the minor but the utter neglect in the major, of the other. I should rather think the value immeasurably greater in recognizing the rules for critical thought, than the mere occasions for the exceptions to them.
. For, as the world has never been, and, no doubt, never will be without a system of metaphysics of one kind or another, it is the highest and weightiest concern of philosophy to render it powerless for harm, by closing up the sources of error .
But you are right, in that all-too-many do invoke comfort at the expense of reason.
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Quoting Christoffer
That may be true, and you would fare none the worse for it. But youre forced to admit the possibility of those that do not hold such fear. Makes sense, doesnt it, that if there is no knowledge, empirical knowledge that is, of something, then how can it be known as sufficient to cause fear? With so much being unknown, just seems quite wasteful to fear it all, so why bother deciding which is worth fearing and which isnt, when all of it is equally unknown?
Besides, if it be granted knowledge is experience, then to fear the unknown is to fear an experience never had. Ive been both remorseful and quite happy regarding experiences Ive never had, but Id categorically deny being afraid of them.
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Quoting Christoffer
Its much simpler than that. To understand the impossibility if such detachment in the first place, is to recognize a different set of conditions which determines the mental space in use for any given circumstance.
I get what youre aiming for, but I submit there is no escape from oneself. There is, not the detachment from, but only the relaxing of, one mental space in order to favor the other, and the space being called upon is determined by the certainty required.
Ill admit though, that this kind of rationality makes explicit the intrinsic duality of human nature. If one doesnt accede to such duality, then hes welcome to philosophize under conditions where it isnt necessarily the case.
Anyway, carry on.
That's a tough question. Religion does attempt to explain the transcendent, and that is where religious inquiry tends to focus today, but historically religion also tried to explain nature and metaphysics in the way that science and philosophy do today. "What exists and why? How was the world created and where is it going? How was first person experience created and how does it end, or does it end at all?"
There is a mix of all the subdisciplines in metaphysics, ontology, causation (e.g., as a result of the Divine Will), substance/essence, etc.
Religion also seeks to explain and enumerate ethics. Philosophy of mind often gets into the mix (e.g., Neoplatonism and the World-Soul - Soul relationship). Epistemology also ends up intertwined with religion, but not quite to the same degree. Same for aesthetics.
Organized religion also sometimes fulfills roles more often fulfilled by the state these days.
This makes religion tough to categorize. It is fluid, filling holes left by the absence of other institutions. It is also ubiquitous, existing in all human societies. At the highest level, I would say it is the organizing principle for human societies. Religion defines "what life is about." Religion creates meaning and purpose.
Other disciplines can fulfill some of these roles. The state can try to fill them with nationalism, science can fulfill questions about what the world is, philosophy can fill most (all?) of these roles. I think it's noteworthy though that when these other disciplines try to fulfill these roles they tend to become more "religious-like," i.e., more all encompassing, more dogmatic, more defensive about criticism, etc.
Now, philosophy is critical and subversive, but one must realize that after all things are destroyed by philosophy, then it only has one thing left to destroy, that is itself. What will happen when philosophy becomes the new religion and must kill itself?
That's certainly an interesting flip-around, but I don't think it's the thrust of my critique. I think I was just saying that alongside the development of the cutlery there is also its biased application in criticizing prevailing beliefs (though also at the same time its biased application to shore up those beliefs), and that reducing philosophy to cutlery is to miss out on one of the things that makes it good. I tried to support this with the observation that philosophy cannot be neutral anyway.
To take your notion seriously in the light of what I've just said, we might say that philosophy as ritual merely reflects prevailing beliefs, such as religious beliefs, and thereby stands as yet another theology.
Philosophy as a neutral toolbox also suspiciously parallels the thesis that in the modern and especially the industrial era, reason became instrumental, with no thought to ends. If there is such a parallel, I don't think it's a coincidence.
Thanks Benj. Your view is shared by several people in this discussion. I think, though, that I wanted to emphasize something else: not just philosophy's innate flexibility but its innate subversiveness. Plainly it's flexible, applicable to anything, and one can use the tools of philosophy not only to question religion but to support it. However, I'm saying two things. First, even to philosophize in support of religion (or other prevailing beliefs and institutions) is to bring it into question, which makes philosophy innately subversive. Second, to do this knowingly, that is, in a biased fashion to criticize prevailing beliefs, is more in line with this innate subversiveness and thereby more philosophical (or is at least better philosophy).
What are foundational premisses? You will know that foundationalism in physics is a contested issue, due to the many conundrums and imponderables thrown up by quantum mechanics. Foundationalism in mathematics was likewise called into question by Godel. Rudolf Carnap said 'In science there are no 'depths'; there is surface everywhere.' The tendency in 20th century philosophy has been to avoid foundational claims altogether which are typically regarded as the province of metaphysics and idealist philosophy.
It is commonplace to disregard all religious texts as dogma from the start. But in the Western philosophical tradition, much of what was great in pre-modern philosophy had been absorbed (or appopriated) by theology, and so has been rejected because of this association. And I would contend that these are the sources of foundational insights, at the origin of metaphysics.
Quoting Christoffer
I agree with your stress on detachment, which is also prized in philosophical spirituality:
Quoting Meister Eckhart
However, scientific objectivity does not do justice to this idea, as within it there is no room for the subject of experience.
Quoting Christoffer
I agree. This is where the cultural dynamics of Christianity come into play. Religious studies scholar Karen Armstrong says:
Quoting Karen Armstrong, Metaphysical Mistake
The insights of classical philosophy are not accessible to the common man, the hoi polloi, who are offered salvation on the basis of faith alone. That would appear to be in conflict with Christianity except that, a Christian would say, by the practice of charity and selflessness, those same depths can be realised even by the not-particularly-educated. But when belief becomes the defense of creedal orthodoxy in defense of polemic, then it's another matter. Religious practice is, or ought to be, 'a science of the self'.
Quoting Christoffer
Is actually a gloss on Gilbert Ryle's Ghost in the Machine, which in turn was based on his critique of Cartesian dualism. Descartes philosophical model has the unfortunate implication of reifying the mind as a kind of 'spiritual substance' or thinking thing. It is very different from the hylomorphic dualism of Aristotle. And no, don't agree that the insights of the Phaedo are merely superseded or obsolete, although plainly they need to be interpreted. That is what hermeneutics is for.
Rationalism and positivism are both scientific tools, they are complimentary imo.
The fork and knife together are better for eating most meals, compared to using the fork alone or the knife alone. The main problems arise when folks insist that proposals arrived at via such as theology, metaphysics, personal intuition, or personal introspection, are fact or highly probable.
I think that is the basis of philosophical objections to religious claims, yes?
I was going to write a grand summary at this point but Ive got nothing.
As I explained, it was your premise that biases are bad, undesirable, or whatever words you used in your anti-bias rhetoric. From this premise I produce the logic to demonstrate that if some biases are bad, then some must also be good. If the logic was faulty, you'd be able to show why, instead of just repeatedly asserting that it is faulty. In reality, it is only the premise which you insist on, that biases are not desirable, which potentially makes the argument unsound.
Quoting Christoffer
I already explained why what you propose is impossible.
Quoting Christoffer
You are being inconsistent. If you take an anti-bias position, as you do, then you imply that biases are bad. If biases were neutral, then there would be no need for an anti-bias position. However, your description of how we "gravitate toward something", along with the premise that the actions produced from such a gravitation may be judged as good or bad, produces the valid conclusion that biases may be judged as good or bad.
Quoting Christoffer
So, just like some opinions may be judged as good, and some judged as bad, because they influence behaviour in this way, the same can be said for biases. The word "bias" being used to describe how we "gravitate", and such gravitation may be be judged as good or bad.
Quoting Christoffer
Unbiased reasoning is impossible. I explained that to you already, and I think Mww did too. You are ignoring this very important fact. Premises are biases, and we cannot reason without premises. Notice the prefix, "pre" in the word "premise". The premise is what we enter the reasoning process with, as a preexisting assumption, a "prejudice". A skeptic might subject the premise to analysis, and a reasoning process, to judge for soundness, but that reasoning process would itself require premises, which would need the same skeptical treatment, and this would create the appearance of infinite regress. Since it is impossible to proceed through an infinity of premises for skeptical analysis, we must conclude that all reasoning is biased, due to the biased nature of the premises.
Quoting Christoffer
This is clearly wrong. Such a goal is logically impossible to obtain, therefore it is irrational to hold it as a goal. Any attempt to obtain what is demonstrably impossible, is an irrational attempt. When a proposed goal is known to be impossible, we need to dismiss it as a goal, and adopt something which is possible, as our goal.
Quoting Christoffer
The method is logic itself. We use logic to assess biases. You need to allow a separation, in principle between the form (logical process) and the content (beliefs which constitute biases). With this separation we have in principle, i.e. in theory, a pure unbiased process, logic. However, such a pure unbiased process would be absolutely useless because it would not be applied, and application requires content. But inherent within the content is bias. You might talk about some pie-in-the-sky conclusions which are totally free of bias, but those would just be meaningless symbols with no content. If we give meaning to the symbols (content), then we add bias to the system.
Quoting Christoffer
This is where you show your inconsistency. You are speaking anti-bias, yet claiming biases are neutral. If you really believed that biases are neutral, then you'd need to jump over the fence to my position, and drop your anti-biased approach, because anti-bias would be unfounded. If biases are neutral, then you have no reason to be anti-bias, and your anti-bias attitude is irrational.
However, since you describe biases as a form of "gravitation", which implies an inclination to act, it is really the case that biases, according to this description are not neutral at all. These acts of gravitation can be judge as good or bad, and so the inclination toward them, produced by the biases, can also be judged in that way.
This is your inconsistency. You assert "biases are neutral", yet you describe them as something which can be judged for goodness or badness. If they are inclinations toward action, "gravitation", they can be judged in that way, therefore they are not neutral.
Quoting Christoffer
Your misunderstanding is clear here. You do not acknowledge the reality that it is impossible to argue without bias, that would be a content-free argument which is not an argument at all. Once you recognize this, as a fact, then you'll move on to see that a logically valid argument can still be bad, if it involves bad premises, and the bad premises are derived from bad biases. This is referred to as "unsound"
Quoting Christoffer
This is an expression of your failure to separate the reasoning process (form) from the subject matter (content) being argued. If a person adheres to the proper reasoning process, bias does not manipulate the ability to reason. However, biases will influence the conclusion because the same bias which goes into the content of the premises will be reflected in the conclusions.
Quoting Christoffer
There is no circular argument here, "good" is definable, and as such, that definition will provide a grounding, a base or foundation. That I have not defined it is irrelevant to my argument. There is no need to define it until you accept the reality that it has a purpose, and needs to be defined.
The important point here, is that it is possible to define "good", therefore it is possible to judge biases on the basis of this definition. To reason meaningfully without bias is impossible. So you need to drop your goal, as impossible, and I've proposed a replacement, a goal which is possible. The reason why your position is impossible, is because you approach from a bad bias, the idea that philosophy is anti-bias. It's an irrational position, which is not a true representation of philosophy, so I can say that it is bad, as false.
Quoting Christoffer
You need to read some of the material I mentioned, or others. It's a lot of reading. Here's the simple form of the argument though. There's two basic premises. 1) A living body exists as an organized body. 2) When a body comes into existence it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else. Do you see that the necessity of 2) requires a cause? That a thing is the thing which it is, and not something else, requires a cause of the thing being the thing which it is. Without that cause there is no "thing", which is an ordered structure, only disordered randomness.
And the cause of a thing necessarily pre-exists, temporally, the material being of the thing. In the case of 1), the organized living body, the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul. Notice that the soul is necessarily non-bodily, or non-material, as necessarily prior to the being of the body. You can rebut by saying that there is no need to label that cause as "soul", but what's the point? We still need to recognize the reality of that cause, so taking its name away is not going to be helpful.
That is an extremely simplified rendition of an understanding of the soul, but if you show an attempt to understand, I will expound for you, if you have questions.
Quoting Christoffer
This is wrong. A photon is not measurable as a wave. Hence the so-called wave function collapse whenever a measurement is attempted. This is analogous to the argument for the soul above. The particle, photon, or electron, is the ordered "thing", the body with material existence. Its existence, through wave function collapse, requires a cause. Without that cause there is no thing, and without the soul there is no living body.
I'd say that's akin to basic confirmation bias, but your previous post described bias pretty well. In the simplest form, a bias is simply a statistical pull towards a preferred state. It can be aesthetical in that I prefer red wine because of taste and therefor I would argue that red wine is better than other forms of drinks. And it can be larger in that I am afraid of the implications of nothing after death so I seek comfort in anything that says there's something after death and because of it I start to defend religious claims of the afterlife.
It is part of normal human cognition and probably normal for any type of physical system as well, purely in statistical terms. But it doesn't have an intrinsic value of good and bad, it is a neutral phenomena. And because it affects all as a natural thing, we need to fight this natural instinct just as we have cultivated other cultural behaviors that took us from an animal state to a societal state. Just as any other instinct that we humans have as animals, we should fine-tune our behavior to be everyday vigilant of how bias affects us and our thinking. Just as we don't shit on the floor, hit someone who stands in our way and do not speak our deepest minds in every conversation, I think people should form a new cultural behavior in being aware of biases. Just being more aware could change how we process new information and interact during conflicts.
Quoting Mww
I don't think we can change the fear of the unknown as a state since it doesn't really relate to an awareness of the concept, but rather a psychological state of our human condition. It is part of our fight or flight mechanisms, we fear the darkness as we don't know the dangers within. This, as so many other things in our psychology has shaped even our higher levels of thinking. So I've never met anyone who's truly unafraid of the unknown, it is part of our basic psyche.
Quoting Mww
Yes, we cannot split our brain in physical two, the duality cannot be real, only simulated. But I position it to be such a simulated space. Just like you can run a virtual operating system within the operating system on a computer in order to run tests that are dangerous for the main system, we can reject inhabiting a concept or idea until it has been tested in this simulated or virtual space. Just like Einstein's Gedanken labs we mentally distance ourselves and evaluate rather than trying to inhabit the space.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you are making semantical connections where there are none. Foundational premisses in this context simply means the foundation of the argument for the conclusion, not an "ism", just the basic structure of an argument. And my point was that rationalism in a comparison to positivism, does not need empirical observation as a requirement for the argument's premisses, but rather that the premisses have a logic in its reasoning.
Quoting Wayfarer
And this is what I've said as well, just that it is vital to understand such insights as exploratory and not deductive claims about reality. We can have profound insight into the human condition, without there needing to be a scientific realm to it, as long as the claims doesn't conclude as objective facts about reality. We can speak of "soul" as exploratory concepts, but if anyone claims the soul to be a real thing, they have a burden of proof to such a claim and if that proof is simply a religious belief, it is not philosophy anymore, but evangelism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, there is, as long as that experience is discussed exploratory and not as objective claims that otherwise require scientific evidence. But even so, as I pointed out in rationalism vs positivism, you can still use critical thinking and logic when exploring topics of experience to find inductive arguments which isn't really possible in positivism due to its requirement of factual observations.
Quoting Karen Armstrong, Metaphysical Mistake
If I return to what I wrote in the other thread about "if science will replace religion", it is what I mentioned there that the "do" is an important part that many atheists ignore as an important realm of religion. My position there was that there should be more effort to include the practices of rituals and traditions without incorporating the fantasies of religious belief. That "rituals" and "traditions" are not religious in themselves, but functions as acts that are important for our well being. Rituals, for instance, can be anything repeatable that doesn't need to have an obvious practical reason in everyday life.
Non-religious calligraphy is an example of something that does not require any religious aspect, but still functions as a ritual that can have a massive impact on our mental well-being.
We can "do" without the belief, and I'm a big promoter of such practices as part of everyday life as help ground the mind, lower stress and have the ability to produce a spiritual experience without the belief in the supernatural.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I agree. The problem is that there's no separation of the institution and the practice for most religious people. Since there's no clear focus on "the science of the self", the religious beliefs promoted by religious institutions become the norm and center rather than the self. Even if someone has the goal of converting to a religion on the basis of self-exploration, they are soon blasted with the "truths" of the institution and learns that they will never be able to reach their wanted goal if they don't accept the fantasy first. Basically, accept the belief dogma, or else never get salvation.
It is basically this that I think needs to change in society, there has to be a place for people wanting to explore the self without being conformed to group think, but religion in society is basically all institutionalized. Even independent spiritualists conform to a group of similar-minded inventing their own religious beliefs rather than exploring the self.
It is to a point so prevalent that I'm thinking it might be impossible to be in such a state without conforming to an institutional religious belief bias. And because of this I'd argue that a true science of the self requires a non-religious approach of self-exploration. In what form is hard to say, but as a personal experience, my exploration of my own self is a journey to understand my own psychology, my own inner workings. I have found that a purely rational and scientific exploration of my self to possess a sense of spiritual sensations without me adhering to any belief systems, institutional dogmas or fantasy, but purely out of a sense of journey to pure understanding my own biological entity and exploration of the experience of being one.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is not what I'm saying either, only that the arguments used rely on outdated understanding of the physical world and that the arguments need to be updated to the updated physics we have today, because they are a foundational part of that dialogue. We can't ignore that the claims about the physical world are false by what we know today in physics.
Quoting universeness
Rationalism and Positivism are two approaches in which positivism requires only that which can be observed and measured in such ways, which excludes things like theoretical physics. The problem with positivism is that science is just as much about precise prediction as it is about verifying through tests. Positivism is actually quite bad at science in that regard since almost all scientific methods rely on predictions that are later tested if possible. A positivist would have a hard time accepting Einstein's equations before anything was verified and they would likely oppose quantum mechanics, even when we have invented technology that relies on observations that haven't been verified as theories yet.
Quoting universeness
And yes, it is basically what I've been argued for, summarizing it as philosophy's purpose being about reducing or removing bias from reasoning. Because bias is a mental lean or gravitation towards a belief that has no actual support and then use that belief as the foundation for a truth claim. Because philosophy doesn't just function as a tool against religious belief claims, it functions against any claim that has a biased belief built into it. And even when it is exploratory it is used to focus our thinking past our basic messy minds through removing our subjective influences, i.e our biases.
Quoting Jamal
I'd like to hear in what way it is biased? There's been many and long arguments between different points of views so I'd like to hear how you arrive at that summery.
There's a difference between saying that biases are bad for rational and critical thinking, and saying there are "good and bad biases". So you form a counter-argument based on a misunderstanding of what I wrote, which means the counter-argument becomes misaligned in the discussion.
You need to demonstrate examples of good biases and how you deductively arrive at valuing them as good. Otherwise you are begging the question.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What are you talking about? I pointed out that your argument requires you to unbiasedly show what is a good bias and what is a bad bias in order to conclude that nothing can be argued without bias.
I pointed out that you break your own logic by saying that nothing can be argued without bias and then explains how we need an unbiased system to know what is good or bad. It is a never ending circular argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Are you saying there are no neutral things that we can sense is of negative to us? Death is neutral, but we sense it as negative. Nature is neutral, can it be negative towards you?
Bias is neutral because it is a natural phenomena. This neutral phenomena makes it problematic for us to conduct critical thinking as our basic psychology works against us. Another thing that is a neutral phenomena is our sexuality, but our society isn't built for the type of sexuality that exist in nature. We don't go around and have sex with everything around us. We are able to suppress and behave outside of these biological systems in order to function better in society.
The same goes for bias, it is a psychological phenomena related to how we process reality, it is part of the fight or flight system to summarize our perception and cognition in order to act adaptively faster than what would happen if we were to process each moment by that specific moments summery of information around us. It is neutral.
If I describe how bias is bad for critical thinking then you need to understand what that means. The neutral phenomena of bias makes it hard for our mind to process complex concepts without conforming to presupposed groupings of information. This is the psychology of bias. The bias itself is neutral, the effect it has on critical thinking is bad.
Which is why I say that philosophy's purpose is to remove bias or reduce bias as much as possible when we attempt critical thinking to solve a problem or construct a new concept. Because if we ignore it we will only be able to construct new ideas that are influenced by prejudice in the premisses for the conclusion of that idea.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The problem with your argument is still how you judge what is good or bad in the first place. How do you judge it? You need to explain that because it is at the core of your argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not impossible, it is called critical thinking. Mww didn't say that either, if you read our discussion we are more in agreement than I think you interpreted.
What you are doing here is a false dichotomy. Unbiased thinking does not turn off the natural bias in human psychology, it is a process of reducing bias. To remove bias from an argument is to spot the bias you have when conducting critical thinking so you can remove it from the argument. That process is not "being able to think without bias". When I describe a mental process of unbiased thinking I'm describing the process of spotting biases and detach them from the line of thought required to form a concept or idea. It has never been about transcending to a place of non-bias, it has always been about mental tools and methods for being aware of bias and actively excluding them from the argument that is being constructed.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Only if you adhere to false dichotomy about this. You are proposing a black & white error in reasoning by saying this is clearly wrong because you don't seem to understand the concept of unbiased reasoning and summarize it as trying to remove bias completely rather than it being a tool to spot and suppress bias. That you interpret me saying "reduce bias" with "remove bias" shows this false dichotomy in play here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are not showing how you can evaluate what is a good and bad bias. You are basically describing my own theory of duality in mind for critical thinking, just in other form. So you are basically saying that we need critical thinking, which is unbiased in form, in order to evaluate what is a good or a bad bias? You describe a separation in which one part is evaluating the other through logic, which is the same as what I describe when talking about mentally stepping back and observing the automatic self at a distance, spotting its behavior of biases and categorizing them as blockages of the concept being formed.
This is why I find what you write confusing, because you counter-argue what I write, but then enforce the same notion of critical thinking that I'm already talking about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it is you who either doesn't read what I write carefully or misunderstand me so much that you form the false dichotomy that makes you argue against me based on that misunderstanding. I don't have to jump over the fence to anywhere because I've been consistent in what I write, you have just misinterpret it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Gravity is neutral, how do you interpret gravity as "an inclination to act"? I mean gravitation in its literal sense. But you attribute gravitation to acts of good and bad, I really don't understand how you reason in this? It's basically a wild misinterpretation of what I write and then you form a large concept around that misinterpretation before saying I'm wrong.
You need to start with understanding what I write before counter-arguing, otherwise you will just tumble down in a rabbit hole of confusion. Read what I wrote again:
Quoting Christoffer
Carefully. Biases... are a neutral form (a neutral psychological process that is a part of how our mind works) of gravitation (like gravity in standard physics, pulling) towards certain things (the belief that our mind filter certain information through).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again,
Bias is a neutral process.
The negative effect that bias has on critical thinking makes bias bad for reaching valid conclusions.
I'm not the one who attribute biases to be either good or bad, that is you:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then you describe gravitating as an action, when its use in its literal sense as gravity. It is not an act, it is an event.
So, you are wildly misinterpreting what I write and form large objections out of this misinterpretation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
False dichotomy again. Unbiased thinking is not removal of bias it is spotting bias and reduction of bias when forming an argument or concept.
Quoting Christoffer
To explain again, the process of arguing with bias is bad, not that there are values attributed to different biases, that is once again your stance as per the quote earlier. In critical thinking, a vital part is unbiased reasoning, this is the process of spotting what biases that appear in your reasoning so that you can tackle them. It is not to be able to reason free of bias. "Unbiased" is a clearly defined term that exists, it isn't made up here by me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it's a failure of understanding my writing on your part. To once again explain my own writing in detail:
"Bias is a natural and neutral manipulation of the ability to reason outside of your own beliefs."
Bias is a neutral psychological phenomena that is manipulating our ability to reason outside our beliefs, because "beliefs" in this psychological definition is describing whatever group of current information that is helping us speeding up our cognition in order to process reality around us based on pre-programmed prediction models through past information. I'm talking about psychology here, how our minds work and what bias means in our thought process. Because of this process we have a constant process of bias being a filter in front of new information, a filter that distorts our ability to produce new concepts that aren't influenced by our own prejudices. These psychological prejudices have the function of enabling us to act fast and not get stuck in cognitive loops whenever we try to do any type of basic task or problem solving in everyday life.
This manipulation and suppression of our ability to reason outside of these cognitive faster lanes of thinking requires us to find methods of suppressing this internal process in order to reason more objectively.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about here, then its no wonder you misinterpret everything I write.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are talking about a universalized good and bad since you position them as foundational, so of course you have to define it. You position there to be a definable good, you propose it to be an axiom that will function as a foundation for all further reasoning. That is a high claim to make and requires you to provide an example.
Can you provide ANY example that functions as such an axiom of foundation?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Demonstrate it, quote something or whatever, I want to see an example of this since it is over and over the core of what you write. Since you position such a strong "you are wrong" against me I want you to demonstrate that I am wrong by showing an example of forming such an axiomatic value of a bias.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How is this not just biology? Animals have sex, biology produce a body, the nature of the body is the result of evolutionary changes to form that body. The reason the body is what it is, is due to the genetical information guiding the cellular formation based on previous evolutionary guidance in relation to the environment of past lineage of that species.
These premises have nothing to do with how a body becomes. It is perfectly explainable through biology and physics.
So then:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The reason matter forms into the body is because of energy (primarily from the sun) forming into matter through the natural ecosystem. At the stage initial state of impregnation, the matter that is consumed by the mother forms the matter of the child during the growth process, after birth the same process continues but in the child's own form consuming matter.
You boil down to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the premises. Neither of them can be deductively formed into "the cause of it being the thing which it is, is the soul." That is a perfect example of you using your conclusion in the same form as "because God". It is biased to a belief in a soul, there is no evidence of a soul in this argument you propose.
The cause you are talking about is an invention that precedes the arguments and its premises. You ignore biology and talks about some abstract cause that has nothing to do with the actual formation of a body or consciousness.
You are also not explaining the soul in any common understanding of it. It is neither explained in psychological terms or biological. It is basically the first cause argument that always ends in "because God."
Let's break down the premises
Premise 1: This premise asserts that a living organism is a structured and organized entity. It implies that there is an inherent order and arrangement in a living body.
This is either just intelligent design or just an obvious observation of the state of a physical thing.
[i]Premise 2: When a body comes into existence, it necessarily is the thing which it is, and it is not something else.
This premise suggests that when a body comes into being, it takes on a specific identity and nature. It cannot be something different from what it is.[/i]
This formation is biology based on genetics and the environment, basically nature and nurture. It cannot be something other than forming from that, it is also just an obvious observation.
[i]Conclusion: The necessity of premise 2 requires a cause.
Claiming that the fact that a body has a specific identity and nature requires a cause. In other words, there must be something that determines and brings about the body's specific form and characteristics.[/i]
And this is basically nature, biology, genetics, evolution etc. Nothing in this cause has any connection to "soul". It is basically ignoring what we know about biology and physics, applying a cause that is supernatural in the form of something external to reality, neither proven or supported by the premises of this argument.
This argument is biased to a belief in the soul. It is presupposing a soul before making an argument for it. There is no connection between the conclusion that the "cause" is a soul and the premises and there's no connection between "cause" and soul other than just saying that it is.
So no, you haven't proven the existence of a soul. You have proven there to be a cause of a body's existence, which is not a soul. You have not proven why that existence isn't the result of biological and physics causes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You apparently have no knowledge in physics. The wave function collapse occurs due to the photon being affected by itself producing a collapse in different realities down to a single outcome, depending on schools of interpretation in quantum physics. The cause that you mention is itself, demonstrated by the experiment and it is not analogous to your broken argument for the soul. A photon is a boson particle that is a real thing, if you don't believe this, just travel to CERN and speak with people who actually knows these things.
It is stuff like this that informs me why you are so deeply confused by what I write. Your mind seem to wonder all over the place and you have no insight into how broken your arguments are in their logic.
I have agreed with the vast majority of what you have typed on this thread, but I think you are harsh on 'positivism.' Without it, Einstein's theory of relativity would be declared fact. Big bang theory would be declared fact, and this would perhaps mean science would not continuously challenge and scrutinise both. No theory in science is ever declared fact, because of stances such as positivism.
You yourself keep suggesting that empirical testing/evidence, is the final arbiter.
To me that's what positivism asserts as well, it stands as a good, much needed guardian against accepting anything on faith alone. Sometimes there is little choice but to accept something on faith, but positivism dictates that you should remain reluctant to do so, and I think that's a wise stance to take.
Even the fundamentalist Arab muslims like the advice of"trust in god but tie up your camel"
Hadith on Reliance: Trust in Allah, but tie your camel
By Abu Amina Elias / November 17, 2012
Anas ibn Malik reported: A man said, O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah? The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, Tie her and trust in Allah.
Sure. Its an explanatory device, and nothing more. That were capable of such speculations, though, thats the wonder of it all, methinks.
I believe in the reality of the soul, but language is misleading. To claim that the soul is a real thing, is already to misunderstand the subject of the discussion, because there is no such thing in the empirical sense. But then, neither does the mind exist objectively. (One of the unfortunate implications of Descartes' dualism is mind as 'res cogitans', 'thinking thing', which is an oxymoron.)
We can infer that others have minds, but the mind is never an objective reality for us. We only ever know the mind in the first person, in its role as the capacity for experience, thought and reason; even then, it is not known, but what knows (ref.) But what it is that thinks, experiences and reasons is not an empirical question (and indeed that is 'the hard problem' from the perspective of the objective sciences).
The Greek term for soul was 'psyche' which is, of course, preserved in modern English, in the term 'psychology' as well as in general use as another name for mind. There is an unresolvable debate over whether psychology really is a scientific discipline due to the intractable nature of mind from an objective point of view.
So for mine, 'soul' refers to 'the totality of the being' - synonymous to 'mind' in the larger sense that includes the unconscious and subconscious domains. It is more than simply the body although we're clearly embodied minds (and whether there is or can be a disembodied mind is perhaps nearer to the actual question.) But it's also far more than the conscious mind, the aspect of our own mind that we are able to articulate. So by the 'totality of the being', I mean, taking into account all of our history, our talents, inclinations, proclivities, and destiny. That is what I take 'soul' to denote, and I do believe that it is real.
Quoting Christoffer
Of course. I understand that this is part of what is required by the art of philosophical hermeneutic, re-interpreting an ancient text in light of subsequent advances in scientific understanding.
Perhaps an aside but, IME as a born, raised and educated ex-Catholic, the distinction between orthodoxy and Ms. Armstrong's emphasis on orthopraxy lacks much of a difference in so far as in the main, ceteris paribus, religious practices and religious beliefs are strongly correlated.
If you say that biases are bad for rational thinking, you are saying that biases are bad in that respect. I used that premise, that there are bad biases, to demonstrate that if there are bad biases, there must also be good biases. Therefore you position, that all biases are bad for rational thinking, is incoherent.
Quoting Christoffer
No I don't need to give any examples of good biases. I explained why already. I made the demonstration using the premise you provided, that there are bad biases. From that premise I was able to demonstrate that there must also be good biases.
You are still not recognizing that the problem is with your premise, that biases are bad. This is itself a bias which by that premise is bad. But since there are bad biases, there are also good biases, so all you need to do is replace that bias with a better one. However, you are firmly wedded to your bias, and you adhere to it as if you think it is a good bias, while all the while insisting that there is no such thing as a good bias, in a completely incoherent manner.
Quoting Christoffer
I went through this already, biases are a natural and essential part of the human being. Therefore it is impossible for a human being to be unbiased. And, a person's biases are evident in the premises of one's arguments.
Why do you think I need to show what constitutes a good bias, in order to demonstrate that a human being cannot argue without bias? That makes no sense.
Quoting Christoffer
You keep making this assertion without demonstrating anything, where's the circular argument you keep mentioning. I explained why there is no circle. Good is proper to the process, logic, it is not proper to the bias. It is only your faulty premise that biases are bad, which forces the conclusion that there must be good biases.
See, you want to adopt the proper premise, that biases are natural, and fundamentally neutral. You keep saying this about biases, as if you understand the reality about them, but then you contradict yourself by insisting that biases are bad. Because you hold this bias, that biases are bad, I am required to communicate with you on your own terms, the terms you understand, therefore speaking about biases as if they could be bad or good, and so I am compelled to show you that your bias is a bad bias.
If you would give up that bias, that biases are bad, then we could proceed to talk about them as something neutral, and perhaps make some progress. But if you keep insisting that biases are bad for rational and critical thinking, when in reality biases are an essential part, as a natural part, of rational and critical thinking, then I'll have to keep showing you that there must also be good biases which actually support rational and critical thinking. Then your bias gets exposed as a bad bias. So give it up please, release that bias, then we can start talking about biases as a neutral part of rational and critical thinking.
Quoting Christoffer
OK, if "bias is neutral", as you say here, then will you rescind your claim stated above, that "biases are bad for rational and critical thinking". You cannot have it both ways. If they are bad for rational and critical thinking, then it is impossible that they are neutral.
Quoting Christoffer
I really can't believe that you cannot grasp the incoherency in this statement. Do you understand what "neutral" means? If the "phenomena of bias" affects critical thinking in the negative way which you describe, so that you can say that it is "bad" for critical thinking, then it is blatant contradiction to say that bias is "neutral". It is neutral in relation to what? Obviously not in relation to critical thinking, because you affirm that it is bad in relation to critical thinking. In what respect do you think that bias is neutral, when you describe it as bad?
Quoting Christoffer
This is all nonsense. You recognize that true "unbiased reasoning" is impossible, yet you desire to retain your irrational goal of unbiased thinking, so you replace "remove bias" with "reduce bias" as an alternative to "unbiased". But bias is not a quantitative thing, so this really makes no sense. And all you are left with is replacing one bias (to be truly unbiased) with what you think is a better bias (to have a reduced quantity of biases), while you have no stated principle to say that one of these bad biases is better than the other.
Quoting Christoffer
Right, because I am demonstrating the defects of your theory. I describe your theory in my own words, then show the faults.
Quoting Christoffer
And if you would continue with your "stepping back and observing the automatic self ", you would see that "the automatic self" is the problem, not the biases. Biases are inherent, essential, and integral to concept formation. They facilitate concept formation, they are not "blockages". The "automatic self" however does not deliberate, it does not exercise free will, and this is where the problem lies. An individual will have numerous biases, and if these act like gravity, then the problem is with your concept of the "automatic self", which does not resist the pull of gravity (the bias) through its capacity of free will.
Quoting Christoffer
In no way can gravity be represented as "neutral". Neutral would be like something balanced, an equilibrium, but gravity is a force which pulls in one direction. A force is not "neutral".
Quoting Christoffer
How can you make such blatantly contradictory statements? Bias is a neutral process, with a negative effect. You really do not understand the meaning of "neutral", do you?
Quoting Christoffer
Obviously I cannot understand your writing. It's blatantly contradictory and incoherent.
Quoting Christoffer
You my friend, are the one who has positioned good and bad as foundational, by assigning "bad" to bias in relation to critical reasoning, when biases are foundational to reasoning. You see biases as having a foundational role in thinking, then you turn around and say that this role is bad. It is you who needs to define good and bad. You have even stated, "These psychological prejudices have the function of enabling us to act fast and not get stuck in cognitive loops whenever we try to do any type of basic task or problem solving in everyday life." And you want to say that this is bad for critical reasoning, when critical reasoning is necessary for many our basic tasks? By what definition of "bad" do you claim that the ability to act fast and not get caught in cognitive loops when assessing a situation, is something "bad"?
Quoting Christoffer
OED, good:"1. having the right or desired qualities; satisfactory, adequate. " See, a definition of good is highly possible.
Quoting Christoffer
Right, the photon causes itself to have a wavefunction breakdown. Tell me another, buddy.
There is, as I've noted in another thread just now, a tension between philosophical rationalism and naturalism. I think it's because philosophical rationalism in some sense ascribes reason to the Universe at large. In the Aristotelian system, that is implied by the fourfold nature of causality, which proposes that things exist for a reason, whereas that has generally been rejected by science after Galileo. There was also the widespread belief in the 'logos' which was understood as an animating universal principle (perhaps unfortunately) co-opted by Christian theology as 'the Word'. I don't know if Horkheimer elaborates on that point, but from what I've read, I think he's identified something similar in what he describes as the 'subjectivisation' of reason in the modern era as a consequence of the erosion of objective (or, better, transcendent) reason.
Quoting Leon Wieseltier, The God Genome
Yes, Horkheimer's account is pretty much in line with yours, but there are three things to note here.
First, with the Greeks, subjective and objective were not separate, logos being originally subjective--"I say"; so subjective reason is not new. Second, logos as the animating principle of the universe was just one manifestation of objective reason, another being the reason of the bourgeois Enlightenment. Thirdly and most importantly, he does not lament the loss of past manifestations of objective reason and does not see objective reason as necessarily transcendent.
He discusses some attempts to bring back objective reason:
[quote=Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason]Today there is a general tendency to revive past theories of objective reason in order to give some philosophical foundation to the rapidly disintegrating hierarchy of generally accepted values. Along with pseudo-religious or half-scientific mind cures, spiritualism, astrology, cheap brands of past philosophies such as Yoga, Buddhism, or mysticism, and popular adaptations of classical objectivistic philosophies, medieval ontologies are recommended for modern use.
But the transition from objective to subjective reason was not an accident, and the process of development of ideas cannot arbitrarily at any given moment be reversed. If subjective reason in the form of enlightenment has dissolved the philosophical basis of beliefs that have been an essential part of Western culture, it has been able to do so because this basis proved to be too weak. Their revival, therefore, is completely artificial: it serves the purpose of filling a gap.[/quote]
Then he launches a critique of modern Thomism.
EDIT: It might also be worth noting that in his later years he became even more pessimistic, and more sympathetic to religion.
When I was studying comparative religion, I had a theory that the kind of enlightenment prized in yoga and Buddhism - not Enlightenment in the European sense! - was similar to what the early gnostic schools had been based around. And that the victory of what came to be Catholic orthodoxy was because it was much more politically expedient to organise belief, than the esoteric knowledge represented by gnosticism which it ruthlessly suppressed (even up to the time of the Cathar massacres).
I found a scholar by the name of Elaine Pagels, whose book Beyond Belief affirmed a similar thesis. It concerns exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic text that was found in Egypt in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi Library discovery. Through analysis of the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas, Pagels demonstrates its themes of self-discovery, spiritual enlightenment, and the pursuit of a direct connection with the divine. She reveals the influence of Gnosticism on the Gospel of Thomas and examines its contrasts with orthodox Christianity and the political and theological tensions that led to the suppression and exclusion of Gnostic texts from the canon of the New Testament. She explores the power struggles within early Christianity and how the emerging orthodoxy based on the Gospel of John sought (successfully) to define and control the faith. And as always, history is written by the victors.
At the time I was doing this reading, I had the view that this was a watershed in the history of Western culture, and that had more of the gnostic elements been admitted, it would have resulted in a much more practice-oriented and 'eastern' form of spirituality. The fact that these exotic forms of religion have had such a huge impact in Western culture the last few centuries is because that approach was suppressed in, and absent from, its own indigenous religious culture. That's what made it 'weak'.
I was not quite happy with his criticism of Darwinism, because he often fails to distinguish Darwinism and popular Darwinism, the latter including Social Darwinism.
Otherwise, I found the sections about positivism, pragmatism, and Thomism a bit tedious, partly because they are very much of their time and not fit for purpose--regarding the first two--in a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy or pragmatism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Interesting. I'm happy enough to agree that "the victory of what came to be Catholic orthodoxy was because it was much more politically expedient to organise belief, than the esoteric knowledge represented by gnosticism," but since my conception of history is much more materialist (in the Marxian sense) than yours, I don't accept your emphasis on the primacy of ideas. That's not to say, by the way, that I believe in a crude economic determinism or the one-way causal power of the mode of production, but it was no accident that the gnostic element wasn't admitted, and therefore I think that such a counterfactual history doesn't tell us much.
Unless, maybe, we ask, "what would society have had to be like to allow gnosticism to take hold?". But then, gnosticism is what it is owing to its heretical, outsider status, and how much of that character would have been preserved in its institutionalization? Think of how much the words of Jesus, as accepted in Catholic orthodoxy, were performatively contradicted in medieval Europe.
There is no way of distentangling religious thought and social reality or of preserving the purity of a set of ideas, unless they have become museum pieces. And even then, we interpret them.
But the claim that the soul is a real thing, a thing that exists before birth and survives our body death, is something that plenty believe is an actual thing. A thing that either physical or ethereal exists as an entity in which our experiences, memories and sense of being remains and exist outside of us. It is precisely this that has no evidence or support whatsoever and remains in the realm of religious belief, fantasy and delusions.
However, as you view it, soul as something closer to our "mind", in similar manner as one would view concepts like a "mind upload" and what that would mean, for that there is logical support. Which is what I mean when I say that rationalism can provide arguments that have an inner logic even if there's no scientific and empirical support yet. If there is a logical and plausible possibility to upload a mind, that could be viewed as a "soul" that becomes detached from the body. In the most common view on soul, it would be precisely that by definition.
But that is very different from the idea of a soul that exists before birth or something that remains after death. If we are talking about the energy of the body kickstarting at the formation in an egg and the energy flowing away after death as heat, then I would never call that by anything other than what it is, energy, and energy is not a soul.
An objection I have to the use of religious terminology of natural phenomenas is that it uses language to apply a spiritual meaning where there shouldn't be one. It is like when evangelists move their goal posts of what the definition of God is every time a scientific discovery shows that their previous beliefs are clearly wrong, God is in the sky, he is the sun, he is all around us, he is the first cause, he must be whatever is outside our universal bubble and so on. Applying God to whatever fits the scientific understanding of the time and never giving up the term "God". That is a religious bias that forces that person to always include God into a concept of reality. But it is just shifting goal posts to fit the biased religious narrative.
This use of religious language for concepts that really doesn't have to do with the religious concepts of a soul creates unnecessary hurdles in dialogues and discussions of the concept.
What you describe is not something I would call a soul, because that term has too much religious baggage and when you mention a soul, my interpretation goes straight to the religious interpretation of something existing as a transcendent entity of experience beyond our world that is detached from our body, for which there's no support.
What you describe is something I am also ascribing to, that there is a totality of something, a holistic thing that cannot be described as purely a thing of itself. I usually talk about that as emergent effects creating a holistic concept. This primary and overarching concept of being does not really have a name, that I can remember, that doesn't unnecessarily connect to religious concepts and beliefs. In latin, maybe animus corporis, but even that is just "the soul of the body".
My point is that I think religious terminology muddies the waters of understanding certain concepts in better and more precise ways. I think we ought not to use soul for something that isn't specifically religious in meaning.
Quoting Wayfarer
And I think a problem today is that many take old and ancient philosophy literally because they are considered relevant today, without doing so. Due to this, many think they have solid arguments today based on them, when they are in fact, in their literal interpretation, flawed or not working with today's knowledge.
I view old and ancient philosophy as support for modern arguments. They function as metaphors, analogies, exploratory systems that help navigate the complexity of modern arguments, because modern arguments have a heightened complexity due to how much is explained in science. For instance, metaphysics today requires an almost perfect understanding of physics, to a point where it might be more relevant to just do physics than wander around in metaphysical confusion.
Quoting universeness
I was merely pointing out that positivism have a problem accepting things like theoretical physics due to it never using observable testing in its process. I don't think we actually need positivism because science overall is basically what positivism is. What I mean is that positivism is a school of philosophy and in philosophy there's not much observable testing being done, which means that positivists should just do science since there's little difference between them. If analytical philosophy is about exploring concepts through logic and positivists require observable testing, then it's just the same as philosophy and science, rather than rationalism and positivism. The criticism I have to positivism is that philosophy needs a level of exploration to function well and the rigid stance in positivism makes it better suited to just be science instead.
Quoting 180 Proof
That quote was from Wayfarer which I responded to, just so you don't answer me as if I quoted it. :wink:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm starting to think that you are just intentionally distorting your interpretation to keep making the same argument.
What you try to force feed into the discussion is that there are good and bad biases. To say that biases are bad or negative for critical thinking is a fact about critical thinking. It does not mean that there are good and bad biases. You need to read up on the psychology behind this concept and how it relates to critical thinking.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No you didn't, you made no actual argument that shows any of that. And yes, you need to give examples of that because if you claim there are good and bad biases, you need to actually show some example of that. You have a burden of proof when you claim this and you have not provided an argument showing that there are any value scales attributed to specific biases. Stop with the nonsense.
Bias is a concept in psychology. If you cannot apply to the definitions of a concept that is widely accepted, then you are just applying your subjective fantasy to already applied terminology. It's like if I was to say that the state of matter that is a liquid is considered preferable to the state of gas and when water becomes gas it goes from good to bad. It is nonsensical.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, bias is a neutral phenomena that is bad for critical thinking. This is a well known and acknowledged fact in psychology and you are just wrong trying to force any other interpretation of it just because it doesn't fit the narrative of your argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You do not understand what critical thinking means, therefor it is impossible to explain the phenomena of bias in psychology and how critical thinking functions to mitigate it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
p1 You assert that there are only good and bad biases.
p2 You assert that arguments in philosophy are made by good or bad biases in the premises.
p3 You assert that to reach an understanding of what is a good or bad bias you need to use logic and rational reasoning that doesn't have biases.
Conclusion: Your premises does to function together. p1 is a claim of biases having arbitrary values, without any example or logic behind such a statement. p2 is a claim that premises in an argument functions on values in biases for the premises used, disregarding how deduction and induction actually works. p3 is a claim that in order to know what is a good or bad bias (and which would provide evidence for p1) we need to use logic, deduction, something that is essentially unbiased. This means that p3 counters p2 since we need arguments of unbiased logic that doesn't have biases in the premies, but in p2 you claim there are no unbiased premises. So you need p3 to support p1 but then p3 counters p2 and your final conclusion counters p3.
So no, you are just confused.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Biases are a neutral psychological phenomena. The effect of bias on critical thinking is negative. Critical thinking is the process of removing personal beliefs in the process of deduction and induction. The effect on critical thinking by bias is that it introduces belief and arbitrary preferences to the process, meaning, it has a negative impact on what critical thinking is aiming to do. I.e The effect of bias on critical thinking is negative or bad.
If you cannot understand how these two (neutral and bad) can exist together in this context, then you are either not capable of understanding it or you are just trying to force a a faulty interpretation onto it in order to get your argument to work. But in the end you are just misinterpreting or not understanding the basics and therefor you build an entire counter argument on false grounds.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A neutral psychological phenomena. Is hunger a good or bad phenomena? Answer me that.
Then answer me this, can hunger be bad for the health of the individual?
If you cannot apply concepts in psychology when we are in fact speaking of psychological phenomenas, then you are just ignorant of the scientific foundation for what I'm writing about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh, the irony.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As psychology describes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The irony
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Exactly, you describe my theories in YOUR own words, distorting them and confusing yourself to the point of nonsense and ignorance of psychology.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You do not understand what I'm talking about. I'm taking the concept of the system 1 and system 2 as a foundation for deliberate separation in mind when conducting critical thinking, so as to internally observe the reasoning being made. If you don't even understand the basics in psychology, I cannot help you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's a neutral physical force in terms of your usage of "good" and "bad" as values. When you say a "good" and "bad" bias, you are not talking about a plus and minus, larger and lower, maximum and minimum, higher and lower effect, you are talking about human value systems applied to a neutral force. The force itself does not have good or bad values. "Good" and "bad" are human concepts of arbitrary values, they aren't applicable to gravity as a force. The force itself does not have such values, but the effect of falling from a skyscraper is bad for you. Which is what I'm saying when I say that biases are a neutral psychological phenomena and that how they affect your critical thinking is bad for reasoning.
I'm starting to wonder if you have a problem reading and understanding text overall since I need to explain these basic semantics of it all.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh... the irony again.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, you don't understand simple english and the semantics of my argument. And it's you who have claimed there to be good and bad biases and that philosophy has a purpose in finding out which are good biases and which ones are bad. It is just an uneducated mess that ignores psychology and the entire core of critical thinking, which is a core tenet of philosophy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You said:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, when you answer with the textbook definition of what "good" is, you clearly show that you simply don't understand english or are unable to interpret text correctly enough to understand what I actually asked you to define. I asked you define what good is in relation to how you use the value of "good" to be applied to a "good" or "bad bias.
So, with the textbook definition of "good" that you provided, how do you arrive at a conclusion that a bias have "right", "desired", "satisfactory", "adequate" qualities and not the opposite to those definitions?
All those definitions of "good" are just as arbitrary as the word "good", which means it doesn't matter that you have the textbook definition of "good", you still need to apply the arbitrary value as an objective category for the bias you are evaluating.
In essence, how do you find out if a bias is "right"? If a bias is "desired"? If a bias is "satisfactory"? if a bias is "adequate"? Without it being an arbitrary value for the bias?
Because, as you should know about deduction and induction, the premises need to be true, they cannot be arbitrary opinions or else your argument fails.
It is this simple semantic logic that renders your entire conclusion about "good" and "bad" biases broken and you seem totally oblivious to it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I said, you don't understand quantum physics, or you only care for your subjective understanding and won't care for the objective, just as you don't do with psychology. And if you don't seem to understand the simple semantics of the above, then how would I ever be able to explain quantum physics to you?
I believe that you approach a very significant and important ontological subject here. If gnosticism turns one inward in a spiritual quest, this activity can only be a part of the overall process which produces enlightenment. That is because in the act of finding oneself through the inward process, one's true position in the environment, one's social context, cannot be revealed, being dependent on the reality of the changing circumstances of a spatial-temporal existence, the external surroundings. So the spiritual revelation derived from turning inward is only a halfway point in true enlightenment, because finding oneself also requires putting oneself into context through a return, or turning outward.
Understanding the nature of the turning back outward is the pivotal issue. This turning outward is represented in Plato's cave allegory as the philosopher's return to the cave after seeing the light. Notice I described it as "putting oneself into context". This is because we recognize that through the capacity of freedom of choice, we have the power to create our own social context. So one's place in the social environment need not be where the forces of nature have put that person, it may be a place which the person has prepared for oneself. The common representation could be "home".
The reason for my claim of ontological importance, is that this inward process, with the consequent turn around, alters one's perspective on social conformity. Without the inward adventure we tend to perceive the environment and social context as causing us to conform to the norms and conventions which have shaped our learning process. Causation is represented by external relations. Ontologically, this gets represented as the top-down formal causation of conformity.
However, with the inward journey of enlightenment, we approach the causal force of the will, and we can apprehend the true causal force of social conformity as coming from within, the will to conform. This justifies the materialist (Marxist) bottom-up type of causation as the true nature of the causal force which produces social conformity. What is required for the reality of the social contract is more than just a passive consent to be ruled over, but an active role in causation. In other word, we do not go through the gnostic journey to find oneself, arrive at the residual "will", and think now it's time to roll over and be flogged.
Ok. :chin:
Is this a rewording to make a statement that you agree with? If so, what youve got here is a truism, since institutions are social reality.
I certainly don't care, if a person who chooses not to accept a theory, as absolute fact, until it has irrefutable empirical evidence to back it up, calls themselves a positivist/logical positivist/neopositivist philosopher or a scientist or both. I do find cumbersome language for the sake of more accuracy, does have a 'too far,' cut off point. I prefer 'tin of beans' to 'A metallic cylindrical receptacle, sealed at both ends, containing legume vegetation, suspended in a flavoured condiment.'
We come into the world with proclivities, tendencies, traits, character, talents, and so on. These are all characteristics of living beings that are not reducible to physical forces. (One of the motifs from Buddhism, which is said to eschew the idea of soul, is that each individual is actually a 'mind-stream' (citta sant?na) that manifests from life to life - a process, not an entity.)
I agree that using the term soul carries religious connotations and that its not an especially useful term. But I dont agree, on those grounds, that it is a meaningless term, or connotes an obsolete or supestitious idea.
Quoting Christoffer
That is typical of fundamentalism, not so much of the classical tradition.
Quoting Jamal
I understand that marxism will generally depict religious ideas as being product of culture and society. But consider Buddhism, if you can call Buddhism a religion. It is certainly a social institution now, but it originated as a renunciate movement, deliberately outside social convention.
You are not getting it Christoffer. You recognize that bias is a natural, inherent and essential part of any thinking, yet you insist that there is a type of thinking, "critical thinking", within which bias is bad. Since bias is an essential aspect of thinking, then to remove it from thinking would incapacitate and annihilate the thinking. Therefore we cannot say that it is bad for any type of thinking, because it supports that activity, "thinking", as a necessary part of it. So to remove bias from any type of thinking would make that activity impossible. Therefore to remove bias from critical thinking would actually be bad because as a form of thinking it relies on bias , and to remove the bias would make it impossible to perform that act of critical thinking. Therefore, since critical thinking is a form of thinking, and bias is a necessary and required aspect of all forms of thinking, bias must be good in relation to critical thinking, and it cannot be bad.
It seems to me, like your education allows you to recognize that bias is fundamentally a neutral aspect of thinking, yet you have a deep seated bias which tells you that bias is bad for critical thinking. Since you cling to this bias, you cannot draw the logical conclusion that since bias is a natural, neutral, and essential aspect of all thinking, it cannot be bad for any type of thinking. Instead, you continue to repeat your bias, holding it up as a "fact" about critical thinking.
Quoting Christoffer
Well, if you cannot understand how it is contradictory to say that a neutral phenomenon is bad, I don't see much point in continuing this discussion.
Quoting Christoffer
That is the correct answer, I am not capable of understanding that because it is contradiction. Sorry if this disappoints you when it means your attempt to deceive me has failed.
Quoting Christoffer
Clearly no force is neutral, as "force" means to exert power or effort, and "neutral" means to not be inclined toward movement in any direction. So your attempt to rationalize your contradiction in this way, fails miserably.
Yes, good and bad are human judgements, but so is "neutral" a human judgement as well. And you judge bias as bad for critical thinking, so you cannot also judge bias as neutral, without contradiction.
Quoting Christoffer
I suppose you're referring to the semantics of deception here, also known in philosophy as sophistry.
Quoting Christoffer
By your own description of bias Christoffer. You said that a bias is a gravitation toward what is preferable. Doesn't "preferable" imply what is satisfactory or desired? Since this is the definition of "good", then we ought to conclude that biases are good. Where do you get this idea that biases are bad?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sounds to me like this is accurate. Even a quest to remove biases is itself a bias, even if it might seem to be a performative contradiction?
Is a potential task of philosophy to question and perhaps dismantle axioms (beliefs, biases) one holds to find enhanced approaches to thinking and living? I can't help but find myself in a realm of 'good' biases and 'bad' biases and how this is determined strikes me as needing to be bias led.
[quote=David Loy; http://transnational.live/2020/11/22/terror-in-the-god-shaped-hole-confronting-modernitys-identity-crisis/] The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.[/quote]
And as such, a product of culture and society. But sure, it wasnt institutional. Not sure what the point was here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Thats the way I roll :cool:
But Im not sure what youre getting at. Interesting though.
The point is that its not a product of culture and society. It preceded them, as did the axial age religions generally.
:up:
That's what I was telling Christoffer, they are what we enter the logical process with, the premises.
Quoting Tom Storm
I suppose that's a fairly accurate description of skepticism, to dismantle fundamental beliefs, making a deeper analysis. But not all philosophers have this attitude. Some feel like they've come up with something significant, an important original idea, and so they work to put this idea across to others.
I believe there are two sides to philosophy, reading and writing, or taking information in, and putting information out. The reading is the skeptical side, because in doing so we are always considering new information, and how it relates to the beliefs we currently hold, all the while being skeptical of the information being read, as well as the information already held, and looking for consistency amongst all the other material we are familiar with. Writing on the other hand involves a different type of thinking because we feel a need to make sense to others. They are looking for " the point" of the passage, the principle, the idea, or belief which you are trying to put across. This "point" becomes the bias which you are demonstrating.
We could label these two ways of thinking as analysis and synthesis. Analysis is a divisive process (deconstruction for example) where we take apart ideas and beliefs, finding their constitutive elements, relating them to the ideas and beliefs we already hold (biases), to find inconsistencies and incoherencies. The goal is just to recognize where and how the consistencies and inconsistencies appear, because neither side of contradictory beliefs merits rejection just on the basis of contradicting the other side. Which of the two sides gets rejected is decided by the synthesis process. This is an effort to build a whole, by relating various ideas. So which of the two contradictory beliefs gets saved and which gets rejected depends on the whole which is being created. This is where intention plays its very important role. The purpose (Plato's "the good") defines the whole, so it provides the basis for rejection or maintaining the elements in synthesis.
You can see here how bias is fundamentally purpose based. We choose our premises, axioms, and presuppositions, based on the purpose we have in mind. There is a common tendency, which I would say is a significant misunderstanding, to portray the bias in a determinist way. This perspective would model the bias as a product of past learning, which gets reinforced over time like a habit, through experience, to produce its strength. But this completely ignores the basic and fundamental fact, that we can, and actually do, freely choose our biases. So the bias is misrepresented as produced by some underlying innate feature, rather than as freely chosen through intention. The reality is that we choose our biases according to our intentions, and a long lasting, deep seated bias is representative of a strongly held intention.
Quoting Jamal
Neither am I... but that's the way I roll. According to what is expressed above, not having any specific intention, or point to be made, is the essence of being unbiased. Now I'm showing my bias.
I'd say that's just nature and nurture, coded information in genetics as a continuum through generations as nature, and cultural knowledge past down as nurture. If that concept aligns with that then it can have poetical value, but for me it's better to call a spade a spade so as to not add confusion into already complex concepts.
I tend to do this because I'm also working with fiction, so I tend to keep philosophy clean of poetry and live out my poetic output in fiction.
Quoting Wayfarer
As above, I think the term has meaning especially when working with fiction as the poetry in fiction relies on imagination and as such, something like "soul" has great importance in conveying a story's meaning, but with more interesting paint than the purely factual.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have found most religious people to be far more fundamentalists than they even seem to be aware of themselves. Most can be very balanced in conceptual thinking up until a point where they switch into fundamentalism, and that switch can have an almost Jekyll and Hide vibe to it when witnessed during a conversation.
I'm not sure there is a "classical tradition", a religious life seem to be mostly very subjective even if practices as an institution looks collective. The individuals within the same religion can widely rely on very different interpretations and practical use of said religion. Some might be very secular, not even mentioning their belief system, while others carry their personal interpretation as a T-shirt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it's you who continuously doesn't get it. You are pretty much approaching this topic in just the kind of way that I described in my analogy of the gallery, being a rigid statue who are unable to see anywhere but one single direction. You are locked into a thought process that makes it impossible for you to understand a simple logical description of bias that is both based in a broad and fundamental understanding of basic psychology and how it relates to the concept of critical thinking, which is a core aspect of philosophy. And your constant repetition of the same obvious misunderstanding makes you constantly repeat the same conclusion over and over, ignoring the faulty premisses you provide. There's no point in trying to explain this to you when you're stuck in such a loop.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Seriously, now you're just acting stupid. A rock falling is a neutral thing, a rock falling on you is bad for you. If you cannot understand that a bias, a neutral psychological phenomena and that this phenomena is bad for critical thinking are two distinct different things. and exist together, you are either purposely just ignorant or you have a serious lack of understanding language or something.
In the end you just ignore everything that doesn't fit your argument or narrative. Your entire schtick relies on my concept being faulty in this neutral/bad logic, so you try to force this notion onto the discussion in order to be able to win the argument. It's petty and dishonest and I don't think it's wort continuing discussing in that manner.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it is simple english and logic. A phenomena can be neutral, how that phenomena affects a certain thing can be negative. If you cannot understand how these two coexist you ignore simple logic. Like I said, a falling stone is neutral, a stone falling on you is negative. If you disagree with that, then you are just ignorant.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are applying arbitrary values of good and bad (emotional human judgement) onto a thing that is neutral. Bias is neutral just as gravity, in that it does not inhabit any arbitrary human values in the form of "good" or "bad. A neutral force can have a negative or positive effect on something, and that is not the same thing as it inhabiting an arbitrary value of good or bad in itself. Your argument relies on there existing an objective good and bad value that exist outside of human values, and such a claim have a burden of proof to show what these values are, comes from and why they exist. How can this be confusing for you, I don't understand. It is pretty basic stuff.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, physics are neutral, there's nothing arbitrary good or bad about them. If you say that "neutral" is a human judgement of physics, then you need to explain how you define physical processes. If they are not neutral in the form of not having arbitrary values, then what are they? If you ignore to answer this you are ignoring a vital part in what holds together your reasoning.
There's no point going further if you do not understand these basics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"Preferable" means whatever is preferable in your psychology. You are biased towards liking hamburgers, so your thinking while planning dinner might be that you lean (gravitate) towards ordering hamburgers than the more objectively concluded healthy eating of a sallad. If you are unable to understand that this kind of pull towards preferable arbitrary and emotional values of your subjective and individual preferences has a negative effect on your critical thinking when you try to form an objective conclusions of a complex concept, then you simply are uneducated about what bias actually is in psychology, and don't know what it means in the context of critical thinking and also don't understand the importance of critical thinking in philosophy. Which seems obvious based on the incoherent and confused way you have structured premise-based arguments earlier.
Quoting Tom Storm
This has been my argument throughout this thread. I think it is the primary task of philosophy to detach yourself from bias when doing critical thinking in order to be able to view a concept in all directions and not just through the filters of what you prefer.
Quoting Tom Storm
How can you objectively conclude a certain bias to be good or bad? What is a good bias? This question has not been answered in this thread so far and I don't think it ever will be. It is like stating that there are good and bad morals, and so far, moral philosophy has not reached an end point. Anyone claiming to know for certain what is good or bad in ethics haven't gone deep enough down in that rabbit hole.
I asked ChatGPT to list some biases that can affect us in some ways. In critical thinking I wonder if anyone can attribute any arbitrary values to these that would help critical thinking.
Quoting Wayfarer
While the above list constitutes certain types of biases, I've also focused on those kinds of biases that you mention here. A bias can both be an argumentative bias in reasoning (the thing that is bad for critical thinking), but also be a strongly held but unexamined belief might constitute a bias. Meaning, something that isn't a failure in an argument, but a "pull" towards a preferred perspective that makes it hard to both understand a concept fully and also hard to form a concept objectively or universally.
A core part of philosophy is that what I say needs to have a logic that others can agree on. If the logic of my argument is only logical for myself and in my world-view and through my personal opinions, then it is just subjective opinions and doesn't constitute philosophy.
Philosophy is a form of subjective thinking in an objective form for a collective space.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly, it is difficult to spot it and therefore I'm arguing for methods to review one's own thinking when trying to form arguments or concept. And because it is hard, we both need good methods and praxis of structuring our own thinking and also the collective space (like this forum) to shed a light on the biases that still might linger in our arguments. I think that's why the art of discussion throughout the history of philosophy has been a core aspect of philosophy. We need methods for both the subjective and the collective but both are required in tandem for a concept to be fully formed.
Quoting Tom Storm
Me neither, I've tried to point out that his argument is based on a flawed understanding of a basic thing. Bias is an always existing neutral psychological phenomena that is a core part of our human mind and cognition. This bias has a negative and bad effect on the ability to conduct critical thinking (which is not all that people do and therefore the value of "negative" or "bad" is applied to specifically how it affects critical thinking), often taking the shape and form of some error in thinking found in lists like the above. So it is the job of a philosopher to use methods to reduce or remove bias from an argument so that it holds together in a logic that others can agree is logical.
It is the foundation for how we structure deduction, induction or any kind of philosophical thinking. If you cannot convince another through rational reasoning, or at least shown the seed of a valid conclusion that can be built upon by yourself or the other, then you're not doing philosophy and instead just debate opinions. It's the basic difference between "I don't agree with it because I don't like it" and "I don't agree with it because the argument does not show a clear logic or holds together". The latter is not an emotional reaction but a continuation of the thought process from one part to another. If both are good at philosophical dialogue, the first speaker will understand the objections and restructure or rethink the previous argument into a better logic until it can be agreed upon. If the conclusion reaches a point where the conclusion is a basic "maybe this", then both would agree that it has partially shown an internal logic and that it is worth keeping as a concept until further understandings and discoveries add to the building blocks of future progression of said argument.
Even if "logic" is mostly used for analytical philosophy, I'm using the word here more broadly as even the most continental argument requires a kind of logic that makes it objectively relevant for the group that reads it. "I like pasta" has a logic only to you, "I would argue that pasta is liked by a large group of people in the world" is a logic that others can agree upon. And this is not really empirical and analytical, which means that in continental philosophy, especially post-modernists, their logic has to do with a sense of logic, a sense of intuitive structure that holds together. Like "hell is other people", does not have any analytical and empirical core, but it does have a logic to it. In the context it is used, we understand the idea and concept Sartre wrote about.
Quoting Jamal
An interesting think when reading psychology is how basic humans are. We are essentially still the animals who evolved cognition as an animal trait to have an edge in nature and that culture and society as we view it today seem an emergent thing coming out of this advanced natural trait of higher conceptualization and adaptation through cognition. So, I think we need to include nature into that, everything humans do is a product of our nature, culture and society. We could, however, also argue that the definition of culture and society can be applied to other animals as well, like a group of gorillas have a form of culture and society. But for the sake of simplicity and importance of remembering that humans are still animals with instincts and intuitions within our formed culture and society.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An idea without philosophical scrutiny is not philosophy but just opinions. Philosophy requires more than "I have an idea" or "I believe". People in normal everyday life do not conduct philosophy in the way philosophers do and putting these two approaches on equal footing is not correct.
Dissent seconded. Everything a human does is related to . more than a product of ...
Logically, the implication is that a culture or society is necessary for a human to do anything, which is quite absurd, insofar as the notion that humans did things before there were cultures or societies for their activities to be a product of, is hardly self-contradictory.
There are fundamentalists in areas other than religion.
Yes, true.
Theres a term that is distinct from both the subjective and objective, and that it transcendent(al). The detachment of the sage in philosophy has a different quality to the detachment of the scientist because it is concerned with more than what is simply quantifiable. But of course in secular culture, everything is viewed through what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame which brackets out consideration of the transcendent(al).
I agree, but it is still an active detachement even for the sage. When I go through everyday life I do not apply the complex thought process I use in philosophy to detach myself from my biases. So it is an active mode that I need concentration for. Of course, I would like to have that concentration more as an automatic thing in my unconscious approach to everything in life, something that I do more regularly, and I'm constantly training myself to be better at it in any situation, even in everyday life, but it has a sense of life long dedication that takes a lifetime to master because it is an act against the very nature of our basic psychology. Just like we do not eat off the ground, everything in modern life is a forced behavior to act against basic instincts of our animal self.
Indeed. 'Being' is a verb. ;-)
Since living in societies is part of what it is to be human, the notion is indeed self-contradictory. A society is a human social group; proto-human apes had social groups; it follows that there have never been humans that didnt live in a society.
Thats not the real issue though. The real issue is the one you allude to, regarding the causality. Id say roughly that its a two-way, reciprocal causality between the way we live and the way we think, with, probably, our practices as in some way primary.
Ok, thanks.
I think you should embrace the animal nature of our basic psychology and stop pretending to be something were not.
Clearly it's you who's acting stupid. Gravity is not "a rock falling". We might say gravity is the cause of the rock falling, but since it always causes the rock to fall down instead of falling up, it cannot be said to be neutral. A cause, since it affects an object in a specific way, and never in the opposite way, cannot be said to be neutral.
Quoting Christoffer
You do not even remember my argument now, or you're intentional avoiding it. I argued that if you premise that biases are bad, we must allow that some are good as well, or else we'd have to conclude that thinking is bad, since it employs biases as a base aspect. So you insisted that biases are neutral, to support your claim that bias is bad for critical thinking. I am only insisting that your position is incoherent by way of contradiction. You are the one insisting that biases are both neutral and bad, not me. I'm merely pointing out the obvious, that this is contradictory.
Quoting Christoffer
Obviously, it's you who is not following the principles of logic. If the effects of a phenomenon are said to be negative, then that phenomenon cannot be said to be neutral in relation to those effects, without contradiction.
So, if bias is said to have a negative effect on thinking, then in relation to thinking, bias cannot be said to be neutral, it must be negative.
What are you proposing Christoffer? Are you suggesting that we remove bias from the context of thinking, so that we can look at it as something neutral while its affect on thinking is looked at as bad? How could we do this? Are you Platonist? Do you suppose that we could assign independent existence to something like an idea, a belief, or a bias? Then we could look at the belief as existing independently from the human act of thinking, and say that as independent from thinking, the bias is neutral, but when it comes into the context of human thought, it's bad in that relation.
Quoting Christoffer
You can insist that all judgements of good or bad are arbitrary human judgements, if you like, but as I said, so is the judgement of "neutral" then. And, it is obviously contradictory to judge the same thing as both neutral, "and bad, in the same respect. I'm not referring to any sense of "objective good" here, I am referring only to your judgement, that bias is a neutral part of thinking, yet it is also a bad part of thinking.
Do you agree that this is what you are arguing? You are saying that as a part of the act of thinking, bias is neutral, but also, as a part of the act of thinking, bias is bad. Why don't you see this as contradictory?
Your gravity analogy doesn't really work very well because we do not judge the acts of gravity as good or bad, as we do the acts of human beings. So in the case of gravity we have to place "neutral" in relation to a different pair of opposites. That's why I used up and down. Obviously gravity is not neutral because it always moves things downward.
Quoting Christoffer
Physics is a discipline, a field of study, therefore it is judged as good. No subjects of study are neutral or else a person would not be inclined to study them. They are studied because they are judged as good.
Quoting Christoffer
Sorry, I can't understand what you are asking. As I said above, "neutral" in the context of physical processes would have to be defined by something other than good or bad, because we do not judge these activities in relation to good and bad. Therefore if a physical process is judged as "neutral", neutrality is defined by something other than good and bad, because good and bad are not even possibilities.
That is why your analogy fails. You take gravity, which is not judged as being good or bad, and you compare it to a human property, "bias" which you do judge as being bad. Then you try to say that bias is like gravity in the context of good, bad, and neutral. Obviously this doesn't work, because bias is a human disposition which can be judged as good, bad, or neutral, gravity is not. So the neutrality you assign to gravity is out of context, not neutral in the context of bad and good, and you argue by equivocation.
Quoting Christoffer
This makes no sense logically. You provide no logical demonstration for why you think salad is more "objectively concluded healthy eating" than hamburgers. What you are arguing is to replace one bias (preference) "hamburgers" with another bias (preference) "salad", and you add some big words (objectively concluded healthy eating), to make it sound like one of the biases is having "a negative effect on your critical thinking", and the other bias is somehow exempt from being subjected to critical thinking, as somehow unbiased, or objective. I mean, you might say that "science" tells you that salad is more objectively healthy, but that's just a fallacious appeal to authority, unless you lay out the argument.
Quoting Christoffer
The problem here, as I've already pointed out, is that you recognize bias as a "core", and therefore essential part of human cognition. This implies that it is a necessary aspect of all forms of thinking, and as a necessary aspect, it is "good" in that relation. Therefore we cannot say that there is any form of thinking in which bias is bad, as it is necessary to all forms.
What you fail to understand is that all forms of so-called "critical thinking" proceed from biases, and these biases are essential and therefore good for that critical thinking. So you propose this form of "critical thinking" which can produce an endless list of biases which are labeled as bad, for having a bad effect on other forms of critical thinking. This supports your claim that biases are bad for critical thinking. However, you don't even seem to realize that your form of "critical thinking" is based in your own bias, the bias that bias is bad for critical thinking. So your form of "critical thinking" is based in a bias which is necessarily just as bad as all those other biases, because all biases are bad in relation to critical thinking, by your own premise.
Your argument is self-refuting. Biases are natural as a core part of thinking. Your proposed form of "critical thinking", naturally has a core bias, therefore. Your core bias is that biases have a bad influence on critical thinking. Your core bias, that biases have a bad influence on critical thinking, by your own argument therefore, has a bad influence on your critical thinking.
So I watched the video, and my thoughts were as yours to the extent one could continually pull back the focus to greater generalizations, to where we don't just say philosophy is the tool to challenge "religion" as we define that term specifically, but as to any prevailing ideology. If, for example, the ideology du jour is wokeness, we use philosophy to challenge that to assure ourselves of its validity.
Consistent with this was his 2nd reason for why philosophy is of value, and that was it coined concepts. This would therefore allow for some timeless truth to emerge, as in whatever it is that we learn from realizing that wokeness, for example, had certain negative characteristics, that could now exist as a newly understood concept we could use elsewhere.
The problem I see is that he is defining the value of philosophy in terms of philosophy. That is, he explains, perhaps without realizing, not how philosophy is used as a tool on other disciplines, but how it internally works.
That is, wokeness (our example) isn't something outside philosophy that philosophy subjects to criticism, but wokeness is itself a philosophy. Being a philosophy, it must adhere to philosophical challenges, like coherence, logic, empirical testing, etc. That is to say, was the video really just saying that ideologies of whatever particularity are fundamentally belief systems founded in human rationality, and if they can't survive intellectual challenge, they necessarily fail in their attempt to be a philosophy in the first place?
Marx said that he stood Hegel on his feet, since Hegel saw everything upside-down. But then Hegel agreed with Marx that everything humans do is a product of culture and society; they just disagreed as to what the most significant cultural and societal drivers are.
Good.
Quoting Christoffer
Better.
..which is, without doubt, the foremost logical catastrophe, like ..ever.
(Disclaimer: not exactly sure you mean, so Im begging anticipatory forgiveness)
Only in (primitive) 'creationist'-based cultures; however, not so according to Brahmins or Daoists (or, for that matter, either classical atomists or Spinozists) for whom nature itself is eternally naturing (à la autpoiesis).
6.372 So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.[/quote]
I notice in modern discourse that even the notion of laws is called into question. This goes back to the discussion about the erosion of the idea of an animating cosmic purpose.
So ..metaphysical reductionism to a certain point is an explanatory necessity, but beyond that point is inevitably illusory?
.6.373 The world is independent of my will .
Well, I guess 'laws' does imply a 'lawgiver' in the crudest traditions of anthropomorphising. And 'laws of logic' are certainly seized upon constantly by zealous apologists (like William Lane Craig) who need a magic man, himself without apparent explanation, to explain reality. No one with an apophatic theology draws attention to 'laws' this way.
This is similar to the problem which I see with Christoffer's approach to bias. Christoffer sees that critical thinking can be very effective for detecting biases which inhere within logical arguments. But then Christoffer has the audacity to insist that the effect which biases have on critical thinking is necessarily negative, without recognizing that this is itself, just a bias. So Christoffer shows an understanding of how critical thinking works, internally, but does not understand how it is applied toward understanding and judging the variety of biases which actually occur in practise. The critical point is that biases are judged relative to other biases, as the intrinsic of subjectivity of thinking cannot be annihilated.
Instead, Christoffer is swayed by that personal bias, that all biases are bad for critical thinking. And this is a misunderstanding of how critical thinking actually works in practise to pit one bias against another. So this leaves Christoffer with an undermined argument, because that bias which Cristoffer applies in the argument, the idea that all biases are negative for critical thinking, must also be bad, by that premise.
This made me consider abiogenesis and natural selection from the notion of bias.
I don't think it's logical to assign bias of any kind to such processes, even through it seems personally intuitive to me, to assign a positive bias to both because I would not be here if such happenstance had not occurred. I asked chat GPT, "Is natural selection biased?"
Its answer:
[b]Natural selection is not inherently biased. It is a fundamental mechanism of evolution that operates based on certain principles, including variation, heredity, and differential reproductive success. Natural selection does not have a deliberate or conscious bias; rather, it is an outcome of the interaction between organisms and their environment.
However, it is important to note that the outcomes of natural selection can be influenced by various factors, which may introduce biases. These factors include environmental conditions, selective pressures, and genetic variations within a population. Natural selection favors traits that increase an organism's chances of survival and reproduction in a given environment. If certain traits provide a reproductive advantage in a particular context, they are more likely to be passed on to future generations.
Biases can arise in natural selection when certain factors favor specific traits or individuals over others. These biases can be due to environmental changes, such as habitat fragmentation or human activities, which may alter the selective pressures acting on a population. Additionally, sexual selection, a form of natural selection driven by mate choice, can introduce biases in the evolution of certain physical or behavioral traits.
It is important to distinguish between the concept of natural selection, which is a scientific process, and the potential biases that can arise within specific evolutionary contexts. Natural selection itself is a neutral process, but the outcomes of natural selection can be influenced by various factors, including biases.[/b]
Is not all of our society based on us taming the animal nature of our basic psychology? Haven't we all introduced cultural restrictions so as to function past our instincts and desires in order to overcome the horrors of nature? We, of course, do this better or worse depending on the individual, but ascribing to a higher level of self-control does not equal me trying to be something that I'm not, I'm trying to achieve more control than just natural apathy since it is something I can actually achieve through self-control.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How are you ascribing "up" or "down" as non-neutral? You still don't seem to understand the difference between two different values and two arbitrary emotional different values. You say "good" or "bad", which means arbitrary values that we humans apply to something through our emotions, everything else is neutral since they don't have such arbitrary values. The thing itself is neutral, gravity is neutral, "up" and "down" is neutral, and there is no value of "good" or "bad" in of themselves for these systems. If you say something is "good", then you are emotionally describing the thing. If you say a falling rock is "bad", you are emotionally describing how you interpret it. A falling rock in itself is not "bad", there's no such description of reality outside your emotional interpretation of it. It is this distinction that I'm talking about and you just never get it, which is a basic descriptive understanding of language. If you cannot understand this, then you cannot produce a functional argument because you have confused together a neutral phenomenon with your emotional interpretation of it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I said that bias is a natural phenomenon that is negative/bad for critical thinking.
How many times do I need to say the same thing?
negative/bad for critical thinking.
bias is a natural phenomenon = bias is a neutral system in our cognition, it has not emotional value.
negative/bad for critical thinking. = that this neutral and natural system is creating a negative and bad effect on the ability to conduct critical thinking.
I've described this so many times that it is becoming a farce that you cannot understand this simple sentence. Seriously, it's like speaking to a child. Your entire argument is built upon you not understanding a simple sentence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Just stop it. A falling rock has no arbitrary value of "good" or "bad". If the rock is falling on you, then you can describe that effect on you as "bad" or "negative.
This is a kindergarten level of interpreting things correctly.
It is not a contradiction. If this is so hard for you to understand, no wonder you are so confused throughout everything you write. And the rest of your writing just hangs on this misinterpretation of simple things.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What are you talking about? This is just delusional confused nonsense. I'm talking about the physics of gravity. You're simply unable to understand language it seems.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And on and on and on you are misinterpreting the one simple sentence that your entire argument hangs on. I have never said bias is bad. Bias is neutral, and natural, just like gravity. Do you think your brain isn't part of reality? Just like gravity?
Gravity causes a rock to fall, that is not "good" or "bad", that just is.
Bias causes our cognition to focus our attention towards something, it helps us simplify our perception of reality in order to navigate through it. That is not "good" or "bad", that just is.
Gravity can cause a rock to fall on you, that event can be described by you as being bad for you.
The bias effect on our cognition helps us navigate reality, but when doing critical thinking it produces an unbalanced understanding of a concept due to how it steers our thought process. This effect on our ability to conduct critical thinking can be described as bad for it.
If you are unable to understand the differences here, then you are ignoring simple language understanding.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:rofl: No, a salad is objectively better for your physical health based on science, it is a fact, we know this and it is not up for debate, regardless of your inability to understand simple reality or language. That is the point. If the goal is to eat healthy, then your bias toward liking hamburgers can affect your ability to choose a salad instead of a hamburger. Bias affects your ability to reach a valid conclusion. But it is not bad for you if you try to navigate a forest away from the danger that you assess lurks in the bushes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, no no no no no. You are constantly making slippery slope arguments in which you just continue from not understanding to a conclusion that follows that misunderstanding and it's getting tiresome.
Bias is a core part of our thinking, it is essential for some uses of our cognition. Critical thinking is a method that we as humans have invented in order to think past our biases because biases aren't helpful when trying to assess complex concepts that do not relate to situations where bias has a positive function.
Positive and negative in this context have to do with what bias is as a function. For fast navigation through reality, avoiding dangers; being able to go down a street and not constantly getting hit by other people, or cars; or being able to reach a destination on that street because your mind summarizes information in a way that helps you find what you are looking for. For this, bias has a positive effect on your function as a human with cognition.
But when you are conducting critical thinking, that same bias process that helps you on the street will be negative on your ability to objectively reach conclusions that are valid outside of your subjective preferences (which is the entire point of critical thinking to reach past). Critical thinking requires you to not summarize information based on your unconscious preferences or pattern recognition systems. So for critical thinking to function, you need methods of bypassing biases in your conceptualization. It is the entire point of unbiased critical thinking.
It sounds more like you don't know what bias actually is, or understand these concepts of psychology. You mix together arbitrary values with neutral systems, seemingly without understanding that just because we are humans doesn't mean that we don't function on neutral systems like the rest of nature.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is objectively wrong about what critical thinking is and you have so far not demonstrated any such "good biases".
You simply don't know what you are talking about because I don't think you have read enough on any of these topics, but you continue to insist on interpretations based on such uneducated foundations.
Quoting Wayfarer
So far, nothing in science says it is impossible that nature formed on its own. If organic matter can form and lead to life, so could the initial form of matter and energy have formed from something else. The something else might even exist as an infinite loop of raw never-ending energy in which the probability of fluctuations is always a given, in which case the probability of something forming from it is always given. And as such, something is not forming from nothing, but from an absolute constant something and there's no such thing as nothing throughout all forms of existence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Just stop with your constant misunderstandings and misinterpretations of my argument. You don't understand what bias is in our cognition and you ignore that critical thinking in its very definition of the method is including You simply don't know what you're talking about and thus cannot interpret what I write based on such a faulty understanding of these topics. I have raised many objections and you've just moved goalposts and ignored the problems raised.
Quoting universeness
There are different types of bias definitions. We can use it as a statistical pull towards certain things like increased mass makes matter biased towards each other forming a celestial body.
Bias is an inclination toward something, or a predisposition, partiality, prejudice, preference, or predilection.
Or something like cognitive bias, which is the one that's negative for critical thinking.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.
So, in abiogenesis or any form of physical process in physics, there are biases that function, by the definition of the word, to focus together matter so that it forms something else. Think of molecular structures that have a bias between their molecular bonds holding them together.
Natural selection is also functioning as a form of bias. It has a bias toward what functions best in the environment and what needs the smallest deviations to function better. That's why we don't see wild strange and big mutations, but smaller changes that over hundreds of thousands or millions of years reshape the biosphere.
Cognitive bias, however, is a cognitive system that helps us navigate through reality. It is the reason we don't get overwhelmed by our surroundings. It's part of our pattern recognition system which speeds up our ability to interpret our surroundings. This bias has formed to make us adaptive and cognitively fast at evaluating dangers and opportunities in nature, it's why we structure together a knowledge base of knowing that a part of a forest usually has more berries that are good for us and that certain parts of the savanna feature dangerous animals.
So when we face new information, we always process it through our biases. In order for us to be able to conduct critical thinking, we need to actively notice the biases at play in our interpretation. If we prefer something, that's because we've learned through chemical processes like dopamine or serotonin that we had a good experience with it and we unconsciously form a bias towards that good experience. It's our internal Pavlov's dog, basically.
This means that when we face that new information and we start to interpret it and if we are educated in methods of critical thinking, we actively spot our biases that unconsciously play mind tricks on our interpretation and analysis of that new information. We use it in order to not let our natural instincts come in the way of forming a valid conclusion. Just like we don't go around and have sex with everyone we meet or eat anything that could be food, we have overcome our natural instincts through critical thinking.
That this process of critical thinking is not a common practice in everyday life in our modern culture is precisely the argument I've been making in this thread. It is just in these past 100 to 150 years that we've been discovering just how problematic bias is on our ability to be rational beings. So it's harder for us to make critical thinking a common practice, compared to eating food at a table and not screwing everything that could make us experience pleasure. With those things, we have nurtured our instincts to function better as a society, and my argument is that so too can we do with critical thinking. People just don't seem to fully understand the psychology of bias on a broader scale yet. And yet we've had things like critical thinking for a long time... it is just now that we know more about why it functions so well.
No, not at all, broadly speaking we've organized and cooperated essentially in order to gain power (by conquest and eliminating competitors). Of course, that power is not distributed evenly so it's hard to claim that everyone has always been onboard with the basic plan. Religion has proven handy for the endeavor by having the power to bind tightly-knit groups of people through shared narratives, values, and purpose across wide regions.
You wrote "everything in modern life is a forced behavior to act against basic instincts of our animal self". Not sure how you distinguish what is animal and what is... human? but in any case, the animal is there and will always be there.
That's just the narrative of the elites. Society is more than that, it is all people included. Do you see many killings on your street? Fights for money? Do you see people getting it on at the supermarket? We have cultural restrictions for a society that people follow and most of them without them really being a written law. People act today in accordance with societal norms and those norms are partly formed by us taming the basic instincts and drives we have deep down.
I wouldn't say anything of that comes from religion or such power structures, not in anthropological looks at history. People have always formed society before religions formed. Groups gathering larger groups, initiating trade, collaborations etc. Those came before a collective of village stories formed larger religions that then took power. Society forms out of a group's need to function as a collective and such collaboration requires a suppression of the individual's desires and subjective will, not by force but by their own will to be part of the group.
Quoting praxis
Maybe a poor choice of words, by animal I simply mean acting on just our instincts and desires, like apes before we formed culture and social groups. The animal is always there, yes, but we have suppressed it so much that we don't nurture our children into anything other than that suppressed state. Otherwise, we wouldn't have society as it functions today. And looking at how many actually break these cultural agreements in society, I'd say we're barely able to. We even have fiction where people can live out their fantasies of being the bad person, breaking all norms. People like characters like Walter White in Breaking Bad because he cuts through the mundane suppressed norms.
In my opinion, being able to act against my own instincts and desires, my pure animal self is part of me reaching a little higher as a human. I aspire to think more clearly than my biological state wants to allow me, and more advanced than my nurtured programming has formed me. It doesn't mean I'm no longer an animal, only that I'm not held back by biological systems that I don't really need to follow.
Elites don't want it known how people are manipulated.
Quoting Christoffer
No, but it's estimated that there are over a thousand homicides daily across the globe.
About two months ago someone stole my wallet from the car parked outside. Not sure if I would have bothered to fight them for it.
Quoting Christoffer
For just one example, industrial food producers exploit our 'basic instincts and drives' for profit, dishing out unhealthy foods that lead to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc. People eat it up anyway. This has been going on since the beginning of civilization and is only getting worse as time goes on. This is completely normal. It is also completely irrational.
Quoting Christoffer
Actually, there's evidence that states were only initially successful in forming where people could not easily escape, because of geography or other local conditions. A lifestyle of agricultural work, disease, and war wasn't so attractive, as one might imagine.
Quoting Christoffer
I just don't get the dichotomy. It's also odd because animals aren't capable of heinous acts that humans knowingly perform every day.
This is a false distinction. All values are derived from subjects, therefore fundamentally subjective. There is no base difference here, that's why they are both called "values". Quantitative values, like 2, 4, 6, are no different in principle from moral values. The fact that quantitative values have a wider range of acceptability than most moral values is not sufficient to warrant a separate category. What would be arbitrary would be any proposed to principle of separation.
Quoting Christoffer
Christoffer, nothing has any inherent value of good or bad, these are all judgements that we make. So this is irrelevant. What is relevant is that to judge something as neutral, and then also judge it as bad, is to contradict yourself.
I think I see the root of our misunderstanding, it is in the difference between the way that we each use the word "neutral". There is ambiguity here, and ambiguity supports equivocation, so I'm going to propose a way to avoid the ambiguity with a good clean definition of "neutral".
Let me explain the two different ways "neutral" seems to be being used. In the first sense, "neutral" is a judgement which implies that the thing judged, as neutral, can be neither good nor bad. In the second sense, the thing judged as "neutral" might be either good or bad, depending on the situation, or the person making the judgement, or something like that. For example, doing what you are told to do is sometimes bad, and sometimes good, so it's "neutral" in the second sense of potentially either good or bad, but not neutral in the first sense of neither good nor bad.
So to take your example of gravity, if we call it "neutral" in the first sense, then in whatever situation we find it, we say that it is neither good nor bad. And if gravity causes a rock to fall on your head, or some other bad thing to occur, we don't blame the rock falling as being bad, nor gravity as being bad, we might blame the person who set up the situation as bad, or even you yourself as being bad for getting yourself into that situation where you got hit on the head.
If gravity is "neutral" in the second sense though, we allow that gravity itself is either good or bad, depending on the judgement. Then when gravity causes the rock to fall on your head, you might say that gravity was bad in this situation, because the rock falling was bad, yet your enemy might say that gravity was good in this situation, because the rock falling was good..
Further, we can apply this distinction between the two senses of "neutral" to our judgements concerning bias. In the first sense of the word, bias is always neither bad nor good, no matter what the situation is. It is the type of thing which cannot be judged as bad or good. In the second sense of "neutral", we'd say that bias is sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the situation, and depending on the mode of judgement.
What I propose is that we restrict "neutral" to the first sense, as the true sense of neutral, meaning neither bad nor good, and always fulfilling that condition. The other sense, is a flimsy sense, and we ought not use "neutral" here, but some other words. We could say for example that whether the thing is bad or good is unclear, or contingent on context or other factors, or simply not objective. But this is not to say that the thing is "neutral", if we remove the ambiguity from "neutral", and restrict the definition.
Now, I'd like you to make a choice. What is the nature of "bias" in your mind? Is it "neutral" in the first sense, such that we can never judge bias as bad or good? We'd have to judge the actions of the person using the bias, as bad or good, but the bias itself would be truly neutral. We would never blame the bias, just like we would never blame gravity, we would blame the actions of the people involved with the biases instead Or do you think that bias is the type of thing which could be either bad or good, the judgement being contingent on context. This would mean that the same bias might be good in some situations but bad in other situations. And it might even be the case that the one bias, in one situation, might be good from one person's perspective, and bad from another's.
I want you to give proper consideration to these two possibilities, and choose what you truly believe. Then, I think we can make some progress in this discussion, by adhering to whatever characterization of "bias" you choose.
Quoting Christoffer
So this would be an example of the first sense, what I called the true sense of neutral. If we say a falling rock is neither good nor bad, and it could never be bad or good, no matter what it happens to do in this act, and so we have a true neutrality.
Quoting Christoffer
This is an example of the second sense of "neutral", the flimsy sense. You are saying that bias sometimes has a good effect, and some times a bad effect. In your gravity example, this would be like saying gravity caused something bad, when the rock fell on your head, or your enemy would say that it caused something good. So you'd be saying that the effect of gravity, the rock falling is not truly neutral (#1), but neutral in the flimsy sense (#2), because sometimes the rock falling (or what the bias causes) is judged as good and sometimes it's judged as bad.
Quoting Christoffer
And again, this is the flimsy sense (#2). You have now replaced "good" and "bad" with "positive" and "negative", but that makes no difference. If the effect of gravity (the rock falling) is sometimes positive and sometimes negative, then we cannot say that the gravity is truly neutral (#1) because whether gravity is good or bad in specific instances is contingent on how we judge its effects as good or bad. If gravity is truly neutral (#1) then the rock falling is always neither good nor bad, and only a person's actions relative to this event are judged as good or bad.
So, think about it please Christoffer, and let me know in which of these two senses do you think bias is neutral, the true sense, or the flimsy sense. I believe that this discussion is pointless unless you provide me with some clarity on this. Then we can proceed to look at what bias is, from that clarified perspective. Either bias is a truly neutral thing, neither bad nor good, like we might commonly say of gravity, and only the activities of human beings relative to the bias can be judged as bad or good, or bias is a type of thing, which in some situations is good, and others bad, like doing what you are told to do.
Many different cosmic purposes have been imagined; they are as diverse as the cultures that have imagined them; they each tell different stories.
Say there is a cosmic purpose; how could we ever discover it; then all of humanity decide what it is and agree?
If that would be impossible then what use to a global humanity beyond being perhaps interesting fictions could the diverse stories that are recorded or that might still exist in certain enclaves be?
By doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing, I would hope.
Personally I remain unconvinced that there is a grand scheme, but I think that how to live is an important issue, and that any one who cares about it just has to muddle through and hope for the best.
1. Is it possible that there is no cosmic purpose?
2. Would life be worth living, or would human existence have value, if there were no cosmic purpose?
I answer yes to both. I think it follows that there wouldn't be much point in arguing for a cosmic purpose even if I personally felt there was one, since I would still admit that I could be wrong. Unless I wanted to advocate a myth, i.e., a noble lie.
If there is one, I think it's an inexorable and ubiquitous process like gravity: whether or not we "know" it, we cannot not fulfill this "purpose" because we are infinitesmal, ephemeral constituents of the cosmos. As the cosmos goes, so we go necessarily. :point:
Well, I can certainly see the attraction.
Most of us who see the mechanics of capitalism already know how. It's the brilliant system of making slaves that want to be slaves. Hijack their desires, manipulate their needs, build a dream. Then send them an invoice and accumulate wealth until you have control over the market and so much market power that politicians come to you rather than the other way around.
Regardless of that, how do you treat your neighbors? The point is, society is also how we treat each other, and even if I'm Baudrillardian in my view of society holistically, not all interactions are purely controlled, many are a fundament to society in the way we do simple interactions.
Quoting praxis
That's just capitalism and the market manipulating and hijacking people's sense of reality. I'm not talking about the market, I'm talking about how people act towards each other on a day-to-day basis, interactions with eye contact. We manage to suppress ourselves to be better people toward others. If that weren't true, then you are just as bad as any other who exploits people, you are then the same as the ones you criticize. But I hope you are not, and that's my point. Just because some exploit and use people for their own ends doesn't mean that all are doing it. Some may be gullible enough to be controlled, but some aren't.
Quoting praxis
Rome didn't, it formed out of trade. A hill on which all gathered to trade grew larger and larger and then a village formed around the market and the village grew to the city of Rome. In this place, if people didn't suppress their inner desires and instincts, they wouldn't have grown. They grew on the untold social contract of civilized behavior. People didn't follow it because of others in power oppressing them or under threat of violence. That came much later. They followed it because they understood the benefits for everyone.
Quoting praxis
Dolphins rape other fish as a form of masturbation. Higher cognitive functions seem to make an animal able to plan advanced forms of searches for desires and pleasure. It simply looks like there's a need for even higher cognitive abilities in order to suppress the advanced forms of heinous acts that are mostly found in higher cognitive animals. The kind of heinous acts you speak of are mostly seen among humans who are acting purely on their desires and emotions. Essentially, even highly intelligent people can act on pure animal drives. Some even have the funding to bypass social contracts by owning the rules of society, so they just surrender to their instincts and drives because they're untouchable and are able to. But even if they are highly intelligent, they're not the high level of cognition that I'm speaking of.
If humanity wants to view themselves as in control over their own nature, transcending past our pure animal selves, then that requires self-control and suppression of our animal desires to a higher point than people are currently reaching for. I think I'm talking about a form of stoicism that isn't really stoicism in the way of stepping back from emotion. I think what I'm aiming for is being able to have a high range of emotions that never overwhelm control. Through understanding them with great insight and accepting them and knowing how these emotions act on your thinking, it is possible to suppress them when the thinking process requires higher complexity.
The point being, if I can act according to a social contract through self-control with the intent of having interactions that create a beneficial atmosphere in a group, then I should be able to step up the game and act on more self-control in thinking about complex concepts through bypassing my biological shortcomings in cognition. The key is high-level introspection.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is confused nonsense. Arbitrary values of "good" and "bad" are not the same as mathematical values. If you think that, then you should be able to apply this to evaluating moral acts in terms of "good" or "bad", but you can't. Otherwise, we would have solved all questions in moral philosophy through math. Maybe you don't know what "arbitrary values" mean or maybe you just play out a deep confirmation bias, which would be ironic.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You still don't understand the difference between a neutral thing and how a neutral thing can generate bad outcomes in specific circumstances. Even when I try to explain it like if I did so to a child, you still just continue your confirmation bias on this topic. I've said enough, you simply just don't care and always just retreat back to your faulty interpretation and write out from that. That is textbook confirmation bias and you seem unable to understand this even when I'm pointing at it with thousands of arrows.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A rock falling on you is not neutral for your well-being. The rock falling is neutral, the rock falling ON YOU is the specific case in which it is bad FOR YOU. The same goes for bias and critical thinking. Bias is neutral. But bias IN CRITICAL THINKING is bad FOR CRITICAL THINKING.
You just can't seem to understand that linguistic difference or your confirmation bias is too strong for you to see past this blindness.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Further confused nonsense. This is about the difference between human arbitrary values and non-human values of something. Because you try to apply arbitrary human values to something that has none.
The force of gravity is neutral because it does not have any arbitrary human values of "good" or "bad". A rock falling because of gravity does also not have any arbitrary human values of "good" or "bad".
The event of a rock falling on you does in itself not have any arbitrary human values of "good" or "bad".
However... and here is the difference that you never seem to understand:
A rock falling ON YOU, means that your well-being, your emotions, and your entity as a human being has become part of an event and IN THIS CONTEXT, the rock falling on you is "bad" for you because the arbitrary value is applicable for the human involved.
A tree falling in the woods that no one knows about is neutral in terms of human values of "good" and "bad". A tree falling on you is bad for you.
Hot coffee is a neutral state of physics for that liquid. It is not neutral in terms of equilibrium in the math equations of its physics... butit is neutral in comparison to human values of it. No human can objectively say that this state of physics for the coffee is objectively "good" or "bad" because there are no such arbitrary values that can objectively be describing the fact that it is hot. You cannot say that hot coffee in terms of physics is "good" or "bad", because those values are based on human emotions, subjective judgments that cannot be objective.
We can however conclude that if you burn your tongue on that hot coffee, that level of heat was bad for your tongue, for you. That you mix together the pure physical description of hot coffee with how you would react if you burned yourself on it is why you are confused.
You don't seem to understand how language works here. Or you don't understand the difference between a neutral phenomenon and how humans use values of "good" and "bad". We should just hope that you don't stand under a falling rock like a deer in headlights just because you cannot comprehend the difference between a falling rock being neutral in itself and bad for you if it falls specifically on you.
Quoting Jamal
Yes to both. My personal take on applying some grand purpose to everything is that it is an act of desperation. It's a cognitive fight or flight mechanism in front of the fact that there isn't any grand meaning or purpose because there are zero hints at any of it anywhere other than in people's pattern-seeking minds' delusionary dreaming-up fantasies wherever they can find a pattern confirming their beliefs. Essentially confirmation bias for existential needs.
But why care about there being some meaning or purpose? Why is that important? I have never understood why there has to be something grander beyond what already is in order for things to have a sense of meaning.
Even just with basic nature, even though concepts like abiogenesis and everything we know about the universe and physics, even just with the sense of being something that is capable of feeling and experiencing this reality is in of itself a grand wonder. Why can't people just accept things for what they seemingly are and be in awe of such grandness?
Many who lose their faith and religion seem to falsely believe that atheism means that everything becomes pointless. Many go into depression because of it. But I think all of that is just a form of religious propaganda. There are such wonders in just accepting things as they are and no one seems to even talk in those terms anywhere.
It is also risky to focus the mind's eye on some grand purpose or meaning beyond everything because it loses track of the ball. It makes people apathetic about caring about the things that are right in front of them. Like trying to solve the problems in this world that threaten this world and the well-being of its inhabitants. If people stopped dreaming about some grander purpose, we might just find that we have a purpose in caring for what we can care for, for the sake of us and the world we live in.
I'm curious about what the ultimate goal is. Is it being as clear-headed and rational as possible or is it about well-being?
I am forever harping on about the need for each of us to OWN our OWN notions of awe and wonderment and stop crediting theistic or theosophist sources for GIFTING us such.
Many scientists, free thinkers, cooperative people who work with each other in benevolent common cause, now, and in the past have demonstrated, almost every day of their lives, care for life outside of their own life and care for the world we live in. But for me, I love the idea of a 'grand purpose,' but I view it as a 'totality' of all the 'purpose' that lifeforms such as humans generate.
WE create purpose and meaning and WE are OF the universe.
Carl Sagan said so many great quotes about the idea of human purpose and potential.
"I don't want to believe I want to know!"
"No such thing as a stupid question"
"We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
"The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous."
"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent."
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition."
"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena."
"We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars"
What's wrong with suggesting that such 'encouragements,' from the legacy of folks like Carl are MY personal 'grand purpose?' It need not, mean that I am forever deserving of the 'you are a dreamer' and 'you need to take off your romantic goggles and see the REAL world, for the first time.'
Holding on to my notion of 'grand purpose' does not mean I don't constantly scream at how horrible life can be for soooooooo many. I can only try my best to be part of the solution!
universeness
Maybe. I think it's more likely, however, that a "religious philosopher" is an apologetic critic of naturalism, irreligion and/or religions (or sects) other than her own.
I've spent the past 15 years as a regular atheist poster on William Lane Craig's "Reasonable Faith" forum. (17k posts)
In my experience theists are more apt to use philosophy to maintain their own religious beliefs and the religious beliefs of others than they are to get themselves out of the psychological trap of their religion via philosophy. (Although it can be hard to gauge, since I don't know how many might have deconverted after they stopped participating on that forum and I know of a couple who stopped posting on the forum for a long time, and when they returned they were agnostics or atheists.)
In any case, while I would say philosophy played a significant role in me personally losing my religion, I'm skeptical towards the idea that philosophy plays more of a role in undermining religious belief than it does in sustaining religious beliefs.
For the religious, IME, philosophy is a rope around their necks more often than a way to pull themselves out of themselves. Thinking for oneself, like courage, is much much harder for most than ritualized make-believe (i.e. false hope).
Maybe this is because most philosophy is bad philosophy.
Nice idea for a thread...
Sturgeon's law does seem applicable.
I don't know enough about the subject to make that case.
Right, I still do not understand, because as I've told you, your attempts to explain are incoherent. Unlike a child though, I am quite able to demonstrate the incoherency of those attempts.
Now, I've laid out very clearly the ambiguity of your use of "neutral", and the resulting equivocation in your attempts to explain your usage. This equivocation is what allows you to persist in pretending that what you say makes sense.
Quoting Christoffer
Obviously, if you judge the rock falling on you as bad for you, then you cannot without contradiction judge the rock falling as neutral. You have judged it as bad for you. I mean come on Christoffer, get over this bullshit contradiction and get on with something reasonable.
I made a proposal last post to resolve the ambiguity in your use of "neutral" so that you can rid yourself of the consequential fallacious equivocation. Are you prepared to narrow your use of "neutral"? Does neutral mean that the subject which "neutral" is predicated of, is neither good nor bad, or does it mean that the subject might be either good or bad depending on the circumstantial specifics?
By this passage here, you appear to choose the latter, the rock falling is either good or bad, depending on the specific case. Do you agree, and accept this as your choice for use of "neutral". This would mean that the same bias might be good in some situations, like helpful in rapid decision making, but it might be bad in the case of critical thinking. Do you agree with this? And do you also agree that the same bias might be bad for one person, yet good for another person, like the rock falling on your head is bad for you, but good for your enemy?
Quoting Christoffer
"Non-human values"? What are you talking about? "Value" is the worth, or desirability of something. By "non-human values" are you referring to the desirability of something to another type of animal, or to God or something like that?
Quoting Christoffer
You are not making any sense Christoffer. What is your proposed difference between "human arbitrary values", and "the arbitrary value is applicable for the human"? First you say that the falling rock has no human arbitrary value. Then you say that it does have arbitrary value in relation to the human involved. What I see is that you are saying it does not have arbitrary value, yet it does have arbitrary value. That is contradiction.
Please address the issue of my last post Christoffer, and answer my question so we can rid ourselves of the ambiguity in relation to the word "neutral". If you do not, I will assume that your refusal to address this matter of ambiguity is an indication that equivocation is your intent.
No, they're not, they are many different attempts to explain since you never understand simple language semantics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes I can, a rock falling has no human value in itself. The event of it falling is not the same as the event of it falling on you.
A car traveling on a road and then hitting you is bad. But according to your nonsense logic, that means a car traveling on the road is bad as well.
Pouring boiling water on your hand is bad. But according to your nonsense logic, that means pouring boiling water is bad as well.
A rock falling on you is bad. But according to you nonsense logic, that means a rock falling is bad as well.
I can on and on with such examples of simple english descriptions of events and show how something in different context are either neutral or bad. But it doesn't seem to matter since you simply just don't understand these simple basics. And understanding these basic terminologies is the most basic essential requirement for understanding what I wrote. Since you don't understand it you structure long slippery slope arguments out of this total misunderstanding of these basics. Which means there's no point in going further in this discussion.
The simple point you don't understand, maybe because you simply don't know what bias actually is and refuse to research on the matter, is that bias in of itself is a neutral function of human cognition. But in the context of critical thinking, it is bad for any valid conclusions out of that process. This simple fact is a known fact, it's within the definition of the purpose of critical thinking, it's part of the basics of what critical thinking is all about. But you are just stubbornly trying to make your faulty arguments conclusions true that critical thinking includes "good" and "bad" biases, which is simply not correct. It is simply a wrong interpretation of what critical thinking is about. If you are unable to understand this, then you are in fact just a perfect example of what I'm talking about, the inability to adjust and adapt thinking when faced with new facts. You can look up these facts yourself, but I doubt you will do it or you will simple cherry pick out of confirmation bias.
This is why I focus so much on the importance of mitigating and fighting bias in philosophy because the knowledge of what bias is seems to be so low in the world that science magazines constantly put out articles about how it affects our ability and yet no one seem to know what it is or how it actually functions and affects critical thinking.
For some it seems to just be a word about some error in arguments, but it is a fundamental part of our cognition that, without awareness of how it functions, renders the ability to do critical thinking impossible.
Your interpretation of bias is plain wrong. It is like arguing that our visual cortex is working on either "good" or "bad" seeing, which is just nonsense.