Pragmatism Without Goodness
Introduction:
Moral anti-realism is pretty common these days. It is arguably the dominant, "default" position. Fairly often, "pragmatism" is invoked as a replacement for the idea of "the Good." I'd like to argue that, at least in terms of many forms of anti-realism, this leads to substantial problems.
By "moral anti-realism," I mean positions such as:
1. There are no moral facts (facts about the goodness of different acts, people, events, etc.)
2. "This is good" is just another way of saying "I prefer that x and I'd prefer it if you would too" (emotivism).
3. Goodness doesn't exist but is rather a mirage enforced by the dominant party in society and is really just a form of power politics.
I would not include under this label theories that seek to explain morality in terms of something else (e.g. biology). However, I would include most eliminitivist theories, i.e., those which make goodness "just an illusion, like ghosts and elves" (rather than say, a composite phenomenon explicable in terms of other phenomena).
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[b]Argument: You cannot knock out the target of practical reason (goodness) and then claim you can "pragmatically select a moral code," in order to get on in the world. This leads to an infinite regress that, in reality, must terminate in arbitrariness.
Ancillary point: abolishing the target of practical reason ends up destroying all of reason. You can't knock out this leg and still expect theoretical reason (whose target is truth) to stand. Eliminating the good ruins reason as a whole.[/b]
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[B]Pragmatism Without Goodness: [/b]
Let's think this through:
If we don't think any sort of "goodness" exists, how do we choose between different paradigms of morality to use to set up laws, customs, norms of behavior, etc.? Most anti-realists still allow that there should be laws, some set of moral norms that prevail amongst men, etc. Yet [I]in virtue of what[/I] are some moral standards, laws, or customs to be judged "better" (more good) than others?
Well, it can't be because any of them actually are "more good," since goodness is illusory. Perhaps we say something like: "well we should pick the strictures that best prevent violent confrontations, increase economic growth and consumption, allow for an equal distribution of resources, etc." But then the next obvious question is: why are these standards good standards for judging the relative goodness of moral strictures and norms?
Now, if we say, as a final answer: "because those things are correlated and have a casual relationship with the things people tend enjoy," then it seems we have already forfeited on anti-realism. What we are really saying is: "pleasure is goodness, and what is good depends on what maximizes pleasure in the world." Now, there are a great many problems with the "goodness = pleasure" line, but we'll pass over those for now because it is, in the end, not actually anti-realism.
But the problem becomes more acute if we want to stick to our guns on anti-realism. For, unless we default on having any laws or customs at all, any norms of behavior between men, it seems we must select these based on some "pragmatic" standard. By what standard shall our selection occur? How do we tell which option is "most good?"
Well, we pragmatically select a measure by which norms might be judged good! But then how do we justify our pragmatic standard as a good one? It cannot be because it is a really a "good standard." Such a thing does not exist. So we need a third pragmatic standard to justify the second... and then a fourth to justify the third... and so on ad infinitum.
It ends up being "pragmatism all the way down." Yet, we do not ever actually carry out an infinite number of judgements, ending at the limit. Presumably, we stop somewhere, and when we do, we will stop in arbitrariness, the "pragmatic" determined by pure whim, justified in terms of nothing else but pure feeling.
[B]The Denial of Truth[/b]
This same sort of problem crops up if truth is denied. That is, something along the lines of "nothing is either true or false, but only true or false in terms of some particular system. But we are free to pick such systems pragmatically."
Such proposals often claim they "maximize freedom," but instead they reduced all judgements to arbitrariness (the opposite of rational, self-determining freedom). For, if truth is completely relativized, then there is never any truth about which epistemic or metaphysical system is better than any other, even when we limit the judgement to "for some particular purpose." After all, what are our "pragmatic" selections made in virtue of? They can't be made in virtue of any true standard. Again, we will eventually have to stop somewhere, in the bare, arbitrary preference of some standard of what constitutes "better" or "more pragmatic."
[B]"Democracy" as a Solution:[/b]
Another common move here is to make an appeal to democracy. "Who are we to presume what is good (or true)? The standards that are best are the ones that allow the most people to attain their own standard of the good life, while not constricting the lives of others unduely." But of course, to say this is to have already pronounced on the standard by which goodness must be measured. And at any rate, in the realm of truth and facts, it seems that "democracy" is a very poor standard indeed for reaching the truth of things.
[B]The Ruin of Reason:[/b]
As for the point about reason being "ruined", it's certainly quite common for people to deny moral facts and to use facts about "everything being atoms in the void," to justify this. Thus, they clearly think there are at least other sorts of (theoretical) facts but not moral/practical facts.
But reason itself collapses with practical reason removed. For we might ask: "why prefer truth to falsity?" This is a question of which is better, "more good."
Now if we say: "we'll, truth is pragmatically valuable. It helps us create technology, what could be more useful?" then of course we have invoked pragmatism without goodness and all the aforementioned problems follow.
Thus, removing practical reason ruins reason as a whole because there is no longer any possible, non-arbitrary explanation of why we should ever practically prefer one thing over another. Why prefer good faith arguments? Why prefer debate to violence? Why prefer truth? If we have pragmatism advanced as an answer, without goodness, we shall simply regress on these issues until we reach arbitrary whim.
[B]Conclusion:[/b]
I should note here that I am absolutely no enemy of pragmatism or even certain sorts of moral relativism. However, some of these forms simply reveal themselves to collapse into the arbitrariness of "x is to be preferred because I prefer it and I prefer it because that's what I prefer." The choice ends up being in virtue of nothing but its own caprice. That, or, far more often, they turn out to posit that "goodness" is in fact reducible to some standard. That is, "moral anti-realism" ends up being a cloak for hiding the real suppositions about goodness lurking behind it (e.g. the pleasure example above).
There are, of course, good epistemic grounds for preferring some of the positions rejected above. But the claim that "it is difficult to know the good, this we must hew to x, y, and z," is quite different from the claim that there is nothing to know.
Moral anti-realism is pretty common these days. It is arguably the dominant, "default" position. Fairly often, "pragmatism" is invoked as a replacement for the idea of "the Good." I'd like to argue that, at least in terms of many forms of anti-realism, this leads to substantial problems.
By "moral anti-realism," I mean positions such as:
1. There are no moral facts (facts about the goodness of different acts, people, events, etc.)
2. "This is good" is just another way of saying "I prefer that x and I'd prefer it if you would too" (emotivism).
3. Goodness doesn't exist but is rather a mirage enforced by the dominant party in society and is really just a form of power politics.
I would not include under this label theories that seek to explain morality in terms of something else (e.g. biology). However, I would include most eliminitivist theories, i.e., those which make goodness "just an illusion, like ghosts and elves" (rather than say, a composite phenomenon explicable in terms of other phenomena).
---
[b]Argument: You cannot knock out the target of practical reason (goodness) and then claim you can "pragmatically select a moral code," in order to get on in the world. This leads to an infinite regress that, in reality, must terminate in arbitrariness.
Ancillary point: abolishing the target of practical reason ends up destroying all of reason. You can't knock out this leg and still expect theoretical reason (whose target is truth) to stand. Eliminating the good ruins reason as a whole.[/b]
---
[B]Pragmatism Without Goodness: [/b]
Let's think this through:
If we don't think any sort of "goodness" exists, how do we choose between different paradigms of morality to use to set up laws, customs, norms of behavior, etc.? Most anti-realists still allow that there should be laws, some set of moral norms that prevail amongst men, etc. Yet [I]in virtue of what[/I] are some moral standards, laws, or customs to be judged "better" (more good) than others?
Well, it can't be because any of them actually are "more good," since goodness is illusory. Perhaps we say something like: "well we should pick the strictures that best prevent violent confrontations, increase economic growth and consumption, allow for an equal distribution of resources, etc." But then the next obvious question is: why are these standards good standards for judging the relative goodness of moral strictures and norms?
Now, if we say, as a final answer: "because those things are correlated and have a casual relationship with the things people tend enjoy," then it seems we have already forfeited on anti-realism. What we are really saying is: "pleasure is goodness, and what is good depends on what maximizes pleasure in the world." Now, there are a great many problems with the "goodness = pleasure" line, but we'll pass over those for now because it is, in the end, not actually anti-realism.
But the problem becomes more acute if we want to stick to our guns on anti-realism. For, unless we default on having any laws or customs at all, any norms of behavior between men, it seems we must select these based on some "pragmatic" standard. By what standard shall our selection occur? How do we tell which option is "most good?"
Well, we pragmatically select a measure by which norms might be judged good! But then how do we justify our pragmatic standard as a good one? It cannot be because it is a really a "good standard." Such a thing does not exist. So we need a third pragmatic standard to justify the second... and then a fourth to justify the third... and so on ad infinitum.
It ends up being "pragmatism all the way down." Yet, we do not ever actually carry out an infinite number of judgements, ending at the limit. Presumably, we stop somewhere, and when we do, we will stop in arbitrariness, the "pragmatic" determined by pure whim, justified in terms of nothing else but pure feeling.
[B]The Denial of Truth[/b]
This same sort of problem crops up if truth is denied. That is, something along the lines of "nothing is either true or false, but only true or false in terms of some particular system. But we are free to pick such systems pragmatically."
Such proposals often claim they "maximize freedom," but instead they reduced all judgements to arbitrariness (the opposite of rational, self-determining freedom). For, if truth is completely relativized, then there is never any truth about which epistemic or metaphysical system is better than any other, even when we limit the judgement to "for some particular purpose." After all, what are our "pragmatic" selections made in virtue of? They can't be made in virtue of any true standard. Again, we will eventually have to stop somewhere, in the bare, arbitrary preference of some standard of what constitutes "better" or "more pragmatic."
[B]"Democracy" as a Solution:[/b]
Another common move here is to make an appeal to democracy. "Who are we to presume what is good (or true)? The standards that are best are the ones that allow the most people to attain their own standard of the good life, while not constricting the lives of others unduely." But of course, to say this is to have already pronounced on the standard by which goodness must be measured. And at any rate, in the realm of truth and facts, it seems that "democracy" is a very poor standard indeed for reaching the truth of things.
[B]The Ruin of Reason:[/b]
As for the point about reason being "ruined", it's certainly quite common for people to deny moral facts and to use facts about "everything being atoms in the void," to justify this. Thus, they clearly think there are at least other sorts of (theoretical) facts but not moral/practical facts.
But reason itself collapses with practical reason removed. For we might ask: "why prefer truth to falsity?" This is a question of which is better, "more good."
Now if we say: "we'll, truth is pragmatically valuable. It helps us create technology, what could be more useful?" then of course we have invoked pragmatism without goodness and all the aforementioned problems follow.
Thus, removing practical reason ruins reason as a whole because there is no longer any possible, non-arbitrary explanation of why we should ever practically prefer one thing over another. Why prefer good faith arguments? Why prefer debate to violence? Why prefer truth? If we have pragmatism advanced as an answer, without goodness, we shall simply regress on these issues until we reach arbitrary whim.
[B]Conclusion:[/b]
I should note here that I am absolutely no enemy of pragmatism or even certain sorts of moral relativism. However, some of these forms simply reveal themselves to collapse into the arbitrariness of "x is to be preferred because I prefer it and I prefer it because that's what I prefer." The choice ends up being in virtue of nothing but its own caprice. That, or, far more often, they turn out to posit that "goodness" is in fact reducible to some standard. That is, "moral anti-realism" ends up being a cloak for hiding the real suppositions about goodness lurking behind it (e.g. the pleasure example above).
There are, of course, good epistemic grounds for preferring some of the positions rejected above. But the claim that "it is difficult to know the good, this we must hew to x, y, and z," is quite different from the claim that there is nothing to know.
Comments (166)
This should be moral judgments do not express something objective. Moral subjectivists believe in moral facts (or at least some of them do): it is just not the kind of moral fact you are referring to here (e.g., facts about psychology).
The rest of your OP exposes the key element of moral anti-realism that most people who are (defaulted to) moral anti-realism do not (and this is why I call the masses only half-way through Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra): all values collapse into non-objectivity, and all value disputes collapse into psychopathic/narcassistic struggles of power.
A moral anti-realist that hails pragmatism is just exerting their power over others to try to force people to abide by their desires or beliefs without any underlying justification.
One can perfectly (internally) coherently affirm this sort of view, and thusly respond adequately to your critiques, but it leaves a bad taste on ones mouth afterwards (;
A diffuse term indeed, but generally it refers to deciding things based on "practical considerations" or through a consideration of "usefulness." Pragmatism works fine in public policy for instance. We have to look at the best policy we can actually put into practice, what is politically feasible, what we can manage to, etc. But this assumes that we do indeed have some good in mind, or some things we think are appropriate, if imperfect proxies for the good.
Likewise, pragmatism in epistemology, in Dewey for example, assumes that usefulness does, in fact, tie back to something that stands outside current desire and opinion. That's why it can still be coherent. But a pragmatist epistemology that denies the good and the true? It's nonsense.
It depends on what you mean by coherence. Does it contradict itself? But why is contradicting oneself bad? Why is acting with any semblance of reason good?
It might not contradict itself, but ultimately it reduces all action to the momentary or arbitrary victory of some impulse over others. It is inchoate, even if it is not inconsistent.
But, as actually pursued, such a view is almost always inconsistent. Hence why the laity and academics alike constantly have to roll out "No True Nietzschean" arguments. "Yes, transvalue all values, that is good, but not like that!" Nietzsche the fatalist probably spends more time blaming other thinkers than any other thinker in the history of philosophy. He attacks the idea of reflexive, self-determination as a corner stone of freedom and then launches into diatribes about how the masses are pathetic for seeking comfort and the fulfillment of appetites. It's definetly not consistent when taken as a whole.
Once you throw away the claim that being consistent or coherent matters, inconstancy seems sure to follow.
Good points. :up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yep.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. :up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right: many seem to confuse themselves with Moore's Open Question.
As I put it elsewhere:
Quoting Leontiskos
As I understand it, Jordan Peterson is making a very similar argument in his new book, We Who Wrestle with God.
In order for something to be practical or useful, it would have to be purposeful. It must have a desired result. Why is one result more desired than another? Isn't that determined by a value?
One result is better than another. Have more goodness.
And no purposeful activity can proceed without a set of facts to work with.
It cannot deny either what's good or what's true without breaking down altogether.
Full agreement.
No one will ever avoid the presence of truth and good in any statement that has a beginning an end, like this sentence. If I lie, then my falsity highlights the truth that contradicts my lie, showing it to be a lie. In speaking, about anything, you either posit a truth or good, or you attempt to distance (but not eliminate) the truth and the good.
Pragmatism and utilitarianism and any moral anti-realism simply assert we can satisfy the will to truth and good by ignoring the presence of truth and goodness (either in the truth or good of the pragmatic, utilitarian, anti-real statement, or in its looming presence in the infinite regresses youve made clear.)
Total agreement.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is this a fact? Seems to be that its a fact that there's no morality then.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Morality becomes, "Whatever I want to do", or, "There is no morality.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
People confusing laws with morality.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Exactly. Its idiocy for self-fulfillment of one's own ego.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Because I like it, it benefits me, and I don't want to have to think about it beyond that.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is this universally true or false? Uh oh...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My point is that maybe morality applies to those atoms as well. You may be interested in an attempt at an objective moral theory I've posted. Read it carefully though. Many people don't. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15203/in-any-objective-morality-existence-is-inherently-good/p1
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I am. Its intellectual laziness for selfish gratification of one's own ego. Anyone who says, "I can't figure it out, but it would be nice if I could say its because it doesn't exist at all," is the intellectual equivalent of a slob eating potato chips on the couch. With even a modicum of rational thought, one can realize how untenable the idea is.
This may be bias on my part, but I've had the chance to talk live with quite a few of these people, and every single one has come across as an idiot who just wanted to justify doing whatever they wanted to do. My apologies if I'm a bit harsh, but this idea has always just struck me as being terrible and attracts the worst thinkers to it like bear turds attract flies.
This is exactly the sort of thing that leads someone to be an anti-realist so I don't see that as a criticism. An anti-realist is led to the position precisely because they don't see any foundation for objective moral value.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think there is a good Moorean argument for this... simply that anti-realists don't have any problem with reasoning or having their own ethics. Anti-realists just aren't that different to realists wrt ethics.
You arr talking as if there are certain things that just ought to exists and I don't think this is how it works. You may postulate something exists, look for it and then find that you have no evidence that it exists. Completely reasonable to not believe it exists.
I would agree if there was absolutely no evidence of its existence. But we have plenty. Universally there are moral sentiments such as "Don't murder, don't steal," that transcend culture. Most people understand that laws are societal enforcements, but that laws themselves can be moral or immoral. It is used in vernacular and in culture. The job of philosophy is to find those things, find a logical way to verbalize them and bring them into discussion beyond intuitions. As there is plenty of evidence for morality, to say it does not exist is normally someone who is bothered that they can't personally figure it out, so throws up their hands in the air.
Now, if you specifically want to give an argument against it, I can take it seriously. Most are simply lazy people who self-centered motives, but maybe you aren't.
This I think will be a major point of contention and source of engagement, both positive and negative, throughout the course of this discussion. That is to say, this sentence alone could fill a library.
This seems to revert to, or perhaps I neglect to observe that which distinguishes it from: the classic eternal debate of right and wrong, goodness and evil, etc. A common footing or shared truth is: we, at least in most respects, are physical beings. Requiring certain absolute qualities to exist. Air, food, shelter from the elements and that which create existential threats to our bodies. Therefore, things are "good" when the contribute to the existence of life, and things are "bad" when they knowingly become of detriment to said existence. This doesn't define or answer much of course, the most obvious reasoning being "all that glitters is not gold", pragmatically meaning, sometimes the apparent best option is far from. Whether by mere happenstance or the doing and will of another.
So, perhaps your argument is likely to be mirrored or seen as the also classic argument of the old tale: The Tortoise and the Hare. That is to say, both argumentatively conflicting parties both agree on the same truth yet remain in complete polarity and disagreement as to the best means to, and this is the important part, not only reach but maintain such an environment of benefit or "goodness" or pragmatism (which I substitute as a near indenticality of "efficiency").
So we basically have the popular dynamic of debate where no one is "wrong", per se, that is to say we sleep soundly in shared truths, but the methodologies in reaching and prolonging said truths differ to the point of argument. If that makes sense.
Meaning, the reason you feel the need to encapsulate goodness with quotation marks and not pragmatism is the point of disagreement or contention. Others would argue against your assertion one is lessly or rather more poorly defined than the other, I believe.
Or, who didnt want to justify whatever they wanted to do.
My issue with this is that there is absolutely no requirement to postulate objective goodness to explain these things, and to my mind the ontology of "objective goodness" doesnt even make sense.
To be sure. But I didn't write an argument against anti-realism, but rather against those who claim that "pragmatism" is a panacea for it. If people think everything comes down to arbitrary inclination and power struggles they [I]ought[/I] to have the decency to say as much instead of cloaking it (though, no doubt, the committed anti-realist denies this "ought" has any claim on them. Why, after all, is honesty good?)
But like I said, I don't even think most anti-realists believe the position themselves, even if they think they do, since they generally end up pointing to some standards as the benchmark of the good. Even pronouncements about how such anti-realism can enhance freedom or "fight fascism," presume that freedom is good and fascism is not. And indeed, they often make this the standard that justifies everything else. So, I don't even see myself as that far from them in the end. I too put a premium on freedom, I just think they badly misunderstand its essence by only considering it terms of potency/power.
Or less generously you could call it "lacking the courage of one's own convictions," at least as respects some maximalist positions staked out vis-á-vis the individual's heroic ability/duty to stake out there own morality. You know, "question all norms, transvalue and create without limit. What, racism? Sexism? Pedophilia? No, don't create like that!"
For example, it seems quite common for the advocates of "might makes right," to bemoan how "unfair" their opponents are.
:up:
Aquinas makes this argument in a few places in service of different points.
Now if you will all excuse me a moment of embracing polemic... the move to "pragmatism all the way down," seems to come from two different angles:
On the one hand, you have Analytics who, burnt by incompleteness and undefinablity, decided that, since truth couldn't be defined to their satisfaction, it simply could not exist. The rules of their "games" were thus the ultimate measure of truth, and since they had very many games there must be very many truths, with no game to help them choose between them.
Elsewhere in the Analytic camp were those who became so committed to the idea of science as the "one true paradigm of knowledge," that they began to imagine that, if science couldn't explain conciousness, then conciousness (and thus conscience) must simply be done away with (i.e. eliminative materialism, which gets rid of the Good and the agent who might know it).
From the other side came Continentals who came to define freedom as pure potency and power, and so saw any definiteness as a threat to unlimited human liberty. On such a view, anything that stands outside man must always be a constriction on his freedom. Everything must be generated by the individual. Perhaps we can allow the world to "co-constitute" with us, but only if a sort of freedom and agency, which in the end is really "ours" anyhow, is given to the world.
The result is a sort of pincer move on the notions of Truth and Goodness (and we might add Beauty here too.) We might envisage the two armies of Isengaurd and Mordor. The first is motivated by belief that it cannot win. The second, by pure considerations of power, and so it assumes that everyone else must have the same motivations.
And if that's to polemical, I could probably frame it in terms of baseball too, but the whole "everything is power relations," thing makes me think a bit more of conflict.
Gotto love philosophers!
I think you can believe something is good without simultaneously believing that good is an objective property, hence the difference between ethics and the other meta-ethics!
To which the philosophia perennis would respond, well, theres your problem! As everything physical is compound and subject to decay, then your identification with it is bound to result in loss and suffering. But as contemporary culture regards only the physical as the real, then theres no way to make sense of that. I think that is what underlies the mythology of heaven and higher planes of being, although the symbolic form in which that intuition is clothed is no longer part of todays cultural lexicon. Or to riff on the song, 'we are spirits in the material world'.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"nihil extra ego".
1. I'd say there are no moral facts as such, because the idea is a kind of category error. On the other hand I'd say there are human facts, facts about humans and human flourishing, which justify the most socially important moral injunctions. I mean, they are justified just because they are socially important.
2. I believe we all have some sense of the good, but that what various individuals believe is actually good is often distorted by inappropriate social conditioning which can only be remedied by determined self-examination.
3. Goodness or the Good doesn't exist as an object which is open to observation in the way phenomena are, obviously, so in that sense there is no objective good. But I believe there are objective facts about what leads to human flourishing and what works against it.
I mean, we'd have to unpack what "objective" means. Round these parts, far too often it seems "objective" is taken to mean something like "noumenal," "existing 'in-itself' without reference or relation to anything else," or "completely mind independent." I don't know why this definition of "objectivity" is so widespread, given the relatively short tenure of the "objectivity approaches truth at the limit, and objectivity is the view of things as seen from nowhere" camp as a dominant strain of philosophy (or its spectacular collapse). Obviously, I am not a fan.
I would rather say something is objective if the relevant subjective biases are removed. Objectivity is not bivalent. A statement can be more or less objective.
For instance, I don't think it should be controversial to say that "Michael Jordan was a good basketball player." Yet, on some accounts of "objectivity" this is impossible, because basketball is a social practice and all social practices are taken to be somehow less than fully real. Thus, practical judgements made relative to them entirely "subjective."
Obviously , this would make saying anything objective about the human good impossible, since all sorts of human goods are filtered through normative measures. Such measures are indeed socially constructed and historically contingent, although they are not arbitrary.
I do not think it makes sense to say there are no objective facts about what it means to "be a good doctor," "be a good accountant," etc. A doctor who intentionally makes her patients ill so that she can glean more money out of them for treatment is not violating a wholly arbitrary or "subjective" standard about what constitutes "good medical treatment." And such standards are also "objective" in the sense that every mentally competent adult in a community knows what they are. There are, of course questions about what the ideal normative measure should be, but this does not preclude saying [I]anything[/I] "objective" about what being good vis-á-vis certain forms of life entails. It would be bizarre to assert that a mechanic who pours sugar in his customers' gas tanks is being a "bad mechanic" in only a purely subjective sense.
I also don't think it should be a stretch to say that being enslaved, tortured, maimed , and intellectually disabled objectively hinders human flourishing or a person's ability to "live a good life." The human good may be hard to pin down, and it is hard to pin down precisely because it is always filtered through historical/cultural contingency and historically contingent social practices, but this does not require asserting a sort of total nescience about it, such that a child imprisoned in a dungeon by some psychopath cannot "objectively" be said to be harmed.
I can get behind that. I think objectivity is a red herring, particularly if it's taken as a Lockean property that "inheres in an object as it relates to nothing else." I really think this standard was simply a massive metaphysical blunder.
And what you've said jives with Plato's view, which I tend to agree with. Words inherently deal with relative good. You're not going to find "the Good" under a microscope or in the text of a philosophical or religious treaties. But relative good covers much of what we'd term "morality." Indeed, I tend to agree with Hegel that institutions are exactly what objectivity morality in the world, at least to some large extent.
But isn't that itself a consequence of the kind of relativism that you're calling into question? What has been thrown into doubt is the whole category of transcendent truths, which I know for sure will be rejected by many of the participants in this conversation. The 'transcendent' is basically regarded as being synonymous with, or tantamount to, religious conceptions of 'divine law' etc. I think from a philosophy of religion viewpoint, that is the underlying issue in this debate.
Yes, because there is ultimately no rational reason for morality. In absence of an underlying non-rational spiritual reason, morality is simply nonsensical.
You can easily learn to extensively torture and mercilessly kill captives for the mafia. It is certainly a pragmatic choice because they pay you good money for doing that. If you can become an executioner for the official ruling mafia, and learn to enjoy your job, why not become one for an unofficial mafia? It even pays better. It has more perks and more fringe benefits. I don't see any "reason" not to do it.
An objective goodness is a definition of goodness that can be rationally used by everyone despite our own personal subjective viewpoints. Its the difference between, "Rain is heavy cloud precipitation that falls to the ground," versus, "Rain is a feeling of rainness."
The problem is that pragmatism spits out two answers in terms of what it means by "goodness".
On the one hand, you have some notion of functionality or reasonableness. Peirce's idea of the good was about living as a thinking community that was able to sustain its being in evolutionary fashion the biosemiotic idea of goodness. Making life work for us as humans and part of a biosphere.
And he wanted to extend this human-centric definition to the Cosmos as a whole. The Universe is good in the sense it is a universalised growth of the quality of functional and self-organising reasonableness. Logic could apply to the structuring of a sustainable existence.
We could call this principle of the good, as applied to the Universe, pansemiosis. The reasonable universe inhabited by its reasonable creatures.
But the problem is that the Universe lacks actual semiotic mechanism. It is not being organised by an informational code. Life and mind have genes, neurons, words and numbers by which to model existence and so stand outside the Cosmos so as to take mechanical control of its entropic potentials.
It is "good" in a pragmatic sense that a human community can feed and house itself, grow its numbers, repair and reproduce in the fashion of an evolutionarily functional organism. That is the pragmatist good that is easy to recognise. The ability to take sunlight, fossil fuels, or whatever entropic gradient is on offer and turn it into a world in which we can live.
But the Cosmos lacks this level of organismic purpose. It just is what it is. A physical system self-organising to dissipate entropic gradients the Big Bang being the foundational gradient upon which all the material complexity is being constructed.
So from the Universe's point of view to the degree it has one entropification is good as a general goal as it allows the negentropic complexity that functionally accelerates that grand enterprise. A star is doing a cosmic solid in rounding up a dust of matter particles and wasting them to background radiation. It is a self-organising furnace serving the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a way that is "good" from the true pansemiotic point of view.
So pragmatism as analysed by its founder ends up giving two senses of good. There is the functionality of constructive reason and the functionality of entropic acceleration.
From a human point of view, this is why we are conflicted. We both love a fast car and appalled by a fast car. A Maserati is equally a thing of beauty and a thing of waste. It is good as an example of human reason bending fossil fuel to our collective will. And it is also bad as we fill up our world with Maserati's and start to encounter the communal and environmental consequences of chasing that particular entropy accelerating goal.
So yes, pragmatism certainly delivers clear answers on what is "moral" in an objective and measurable sense. But we have to then be sensitive to the dichotomy that the answer provides.
In the end, the goodness of reason-constrained entropification has to be itself a dynamical balance. We have to burn through our world to exist, but also can't afford to burn through it too fast.
This dilemma is usually at the base of moral codes. We kind of always know that trading the short term thrill of freedom for the long term value of collective constraint is the wise way to go.
But humans are immature creatures in the ecological sense. We haven't lived long enough in the world created since the industrial revolution to develop a collective code one respected across the whole planet that will indeed provide the pragmatically functional and good way of life.
Well, in fairness, people can also be part of the Catholic church and rape and abuse children with few consequences (unless you're caught by the secular legal system and sent to jail). Or in the case of Islam, follow a religion which was established by a pederast with a 9 year-old wife.
Behaving like a a mafia boss is pretty much a suitable account of how gods behave in Abrahamic religions. They bully, kill and torment anyone who doesn't follow orders. Sometimes they even commit genocide.
The problem with religions is that they provide no objective foundation for morality. All we have is people's interpretations and personal preferences about what they have determined any given account of a god considers to be good. Hence, even within the one religion, there is no agreement on morality, about abortion, the role of women, trans rights, capital punishment, stem cell research, homosexuality, euthanasia, killing in war, etc etc.
Hard to disagree with this. Well put.
But isnt the implicit end-point of this process non-existence? The heat death of the universe?
I get this view but it seems kind of trivial to me because clearly what is "objectively good" depends on each specific context and what people happen to want and like. Yeah, you could think about that as objective in some sense but it seems kind of trivial.
That's not the deepest problem though. It doesn't necessarily follow from saying that there are objective things that people like, that an obligation to moral behavior is implied (or that what we call moral or pro-social behavior is good, in other words). Clearly, objective morality has already been presumed. Where does that come from? People just seem to agree that we should have moral rules to guide behavior, and that agreement has probably emerged for various reasons related to our biology and the emergence of functioning societies.
You could say that a lot of people agree on this point, but then the same problem regresses again. It isn't implied objectively from the fact that many people agree about morality that we should engage in moral behavior as an objective fact. And I don't need to appeal to objective good to explain why people agree, only biology, social science, physics (in principle). Maybe you could still call it objective good, but it is pretty flimsy given that not everyone might agree and that people can and have engaged in different moral behaviors in different places and times. If objective good is pinned down on whatever people just happen to do, then that suggests it can change, which seems quite a flimsy standard for objectivity. You can label something as "objective" good but if it has a propensity to change with context then it seems trivial.
I don't see it that way. For one, I don't see how "the human good is filtered through context and normative measure," implies anything along the lines of "what is good is reducible solely to what people want and like." The people of the society of A Brave New World certainly like a good deal of what their society offers, but I certainly wouldn't say that Huxley is offering up a utopian vision of human flourishing due to this fact.
Two things here:
First, assume for the sake of argument that Aristotle is right. There are things we can learn about the human good, and what will make us truly most happy/flourishing. Given this, who would [I]prefer[/I] to be ignorant in this regard? Who would [I]want[/I] to be profoundly misled about the nature of the world and themselves and to hold false beliefs that would make them unhappy? Would someone freely choose what they consider to be the worse? Would they intentionally choose to be unhappy? And here, I don't mean choosing between goods such that one is unhappy, but choosing to be unhappy simpliciter, to live what the person themselves would acknowledge to be an unhappy and unworthy life, a "bad life?"
I would say the answer to the above is no, which in turn seems to answer the question of "why should I do what is good?"
Second, you do raise a good point. As Moore notes, we can always ask of something "but why is it good?" or "is it truly good?" without a loss of coherence. Questions of practical reason are "open ended." But Moore misses something pretty important: this is just as true for aesthetic reason and theoretical reason. We can always ask "but is it truly beautiful?" or "why is it beautiful?" We can always ask of any proposition "but what if it were false?" People do this all the time. They doubt reason itself. This is the bread and butter of radical skepticism. "But what if modus tollens is a bad inference rule?" "But what if something can be true and false?" These go along with "what if other minds don't exist?" or "what if the world is flat, or ruled by aliens, or a simulation?"
Reason is transcedent. It allows us to go beyond what we currently are, beyond current belief and desire, in search of what is truly good and truly true. This is why Hegel sees it as our link to the true/good infinite. This is why Plato thinks the rational part of the soul has rightful authority and why only it can unify the soul. If open endedness is a knock against the existence of the Good, then it is just as much evidence that Truth cannot exist either.
People can and do disagree about the germ theory of disease, evolutionary theory, or the shape of the Earth. Not only that, but such beliefs are socially and historically conditioned. If you grew up in a great many social settings, you likely assumed the Earth stayed still and the Sun moved around it. Does the existence of disagreement about these facts, or that agreement is socially and historically contingent, make the Earth's rotation around the Sun subjective or only objective in a trivial way?
That is really good analysis. Both sides want to eliminate the cake, yet eat it too.
Im with you, Count.
I'd add to Wayfarer's term "non-existence", more specifically, the non-occurrence of any awareness via which value can obtain. If so, then this end-point of awareness's very non-being would in and of itself then constitute that which objectively is "the Good" - the objective Good in so far as it being that which ontically occurs as an ontically fixed end-point of awareness which is optimally favorable or beneficial to all sentience when all biases of awareness are removed.
But then, where the non-occurrence of one's self as that which is in any way aware to be claimed as the objective good in the "true pansemiotic point of view", this would then rationally run directly contrary to all aspects of life which seek a continuation of awareness: everything from self-preservation to greater, else deeper, understanding regarding the nature of Nature. And, since the nihility of all awareness (including all forms of awareness regarding personal being and of values) is here deemed the unbiased, and hence objective, Good, the upholding of this quoted claim then rationally reduce to nihilism regarding anything which is of benefit to life - for the continuation of life is the counter to the objective Good as it has just been specified - and likewise rationally reduces to the yearning for non-life (else non-being) as the end-point of awareness-endowed being.
This is a somewhat more formal way of saying that the quoted assumption rationally endorses the cessation of life and all entailed awareness as that which is objectively Good. Couple this with a faith in the lack of any type of afterlife and, in a nutshell, the quoted perspective rationally reduces to an endorsement of suicide in as short a time-span as possible as the absolute Good to be striven for (this then being the end-state of non-being actualized).
If my tersely outlined reasoning here is mistaken, I'm sure I'll be shown the error of my reasoning by more rational musings regarding this issue of what the Good consists of.
I find all this to be a very adequate assessment. Which is to say, :up: As a possible complexity, analytical issues could then emerge as to what the terms "unhappiness" or a "bad life" are supposed to indicate. Even if they make ample sense in any common sense approach. But yes, even the most diabolically evil of evildoers will always choose that option which they find, or else believe, is beneficial or favorable to them - hence, always choosing that which they (mistakenly or otherwise) find to be good in terms of their happiness and life - this rather than intentionally choosing outcomes they find, or believe, detrimental to their happiness or else quality of life. To my current understanding, the Good then being appraised as the end-point of life, else of awareness, wherein absolute (complete and perfect) benefit or favorability for oneself and all others becomes actualized.
So yes, I believe I'm in full agreement to you and the OP when I add that pragmatism devoid of an upheld notion of the Good (which is to be here understood as both universal and objective ultimate benefit or favorability) will be on a par to pragmatism devoid of any benefit-ability (or maybe better expressed "utility") and of any favorability. Or, more tersely saying the same thing, on a par to an im-pragmatic pragmatism.
Well I think human flourishing essentially comes down to what people like and want. I mean, if Aldous Huxley isn't offering a utopian vision of human flourishing, why is that? Because it doesn't offer everything that people necessarily want or it only is focusing on some subsection of what people might want or like while avoiding others.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well this just sounds like appealing to what people want or like which I don't find an objective reason. It's hard to logically imply an ought from an is (which is nothing to do with skepticism) and then again, some people who want odd things, or things that may be harmful to others.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think the difference between morality and the scientific case is that presumably there is some kind of hidden cause out in the world separate from us which we are trying to make sense of and which bears out empirical data that we can use to evaluate our scientific models. But in the moral case the only data we have is our own opinions based on how people want the world to work. So there isn't really a sense in which there is some separate hidden object which we are right or wrong about. We are the analogous hidden object whose properties are contingent on what opinions we happen to have. Its then not clear to me that someone disagreeing objectively means one person is right and the other wrong.
I was listening to a talk by Michel Bitbol yesterday, in which he tore strips off Frithjof Capra (in a friendly way): 'the language of physics is mathematics, and that of Buddhism is Sanskrit. The only thing they have in common, is that most Westerners don't understand either of them.'
But the context is signficant, as he's a contributor to the Mind Life institute, which was set in motion by Francisco Varela to explore parallels between Buddhist philosophy and science. This talk was part of a Mind Life series on that subject.
I would suggest that there's no 'state of ??nyat?'. Bitbol starts the talk by saying 'there's no such thing as a view of the world which fits with quantum mechanics.' At around 12:00 there's a slide with a quote from Niels Bohr, 'Quantum physics is a mathematical symbolism intended to predict probabilistically the outcome of experiments'. He compares that with N?g?rjuna's 'Emptiness is the relinquishing of all views'. It doesn't convey or entail a worldview, as such. (It is true that Buddhism incorporated and absorbed many elements from Hindu cosmology, but that is not especially relevant in this context.)
I think 'Pierciean semiotics' is a metaphysics - a kind of scientific alternative to the creation myth, with the second law of thermodynamics being envisaged as the kind of driving force. But in Buddhism, the 'driving force' is neither a Biblical God nor a physical law. Beings are bound to the wheel of birth and death because of avidya, ignorance. But release from that - Nirv??a or mok?a - is not stasis or non-being. What it is, of course, is said to be impossible to fathom, short of realising it. But that's a whole other thread.
Humans are complex creatures. We could just as well celebrate the idea of live fast/die young. Teenagers often do.
And I thought I was clear there is a difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis.
Humans model their reality so as to control it. That is what creates the complexity of choices. We can burn through our genetically allotted span in any way we can freely imagine. Fast and loose or slow and steady. Goodness lies in whatever is the suitable balance. And that in itself is a vexed question because we have not yet lived long enough in the highly accelerated modern world we have created.
The Cosmos by contrast just is its own model. It does what it does. Whatever its entropification balance, that is the one that has evolved and thus proven itself.
Quoting javra
This misses the point that in the process philosophy point of view, all things are a balancing act. There is no such thing as "existence", just persistence.
And while humans can develop some grand ambitions when they find themselves surrounded by entropic wealth, resources are finite. The Second Law awaits in the long run. Humans can accelerate the Heat Death as a choice. But they can't outlast it even by the most frugal and uneventful of lives.
So the human pragmatic task is to define good as a balancing act within a realistic appreciation of that larger Cosmic (pansemiotic) context.
Buddhism, Continental philosophy and quantum mysticism have so much in common. Claiming you understand is the proof you don't understand. Truth has to be placed beyond the grasp of mere reason to secure the prestige of the priesthood protecting the holy fire.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is a metaphysics of systems science for sure. It speaks to the triadic holism of Nature. So rather than a myth, it is a specific architecture of how Nature self-organises into the Cosmos we can recognise.
If you want to argue against it, you need to engage with its specific claims, not just shake an angry fist in the air.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again Buddhism (like Continental philosophy and QM mysterianism) is stuck on the ground floor of dualising paradox and has failed to climb up to a clear systems view of reality.
There is a murky view of the triadic structure to be found in co-dependent arising and that sort of stuff. Just not the crystal clarity of Peircean semiotics.
One can always cancel away intellectual progress by pointing to the existence of contradictions that seem to defeat the mechanisms of reason. Science can't explain mind. Yadayada.
The systems view is what lifts reason beyond this conventionalised impasse.
I mean even quantum mechanics clicks into place when you place it within the Thirdness of its thermodynamic context. Decoherence sorts things out pretty fast.
??nyat? is not a metaphysical posit. That was the only point.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
You were. I am here applying what I take to be the implicitly maintained common sense interpretation that all of biosemiosis is taken to be fully governed by pansemiosis - hence, to be perpetually governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics in part if not in full, this without exception.
Quoting apokrisis
Not all. Control of Nature is coveted by some. Others seek to be at one with Nature, often utilizing (consciously or otherwise) different metaphysical interpretations of Nature from those who view Nature as a given to be taken control of.
Quoting apokrisis
Yet the Cosmos is constituted in part of sentient beings - rather than being in any way metaphysically ruptured from sentience. This, I so far find, is in full keeping with Peirce's perspectives: wherein all aspects of the physical Cosmos, all its natural laws fully included, are equated to an ever-evolving effete mind - an effete mind whose habits of being are themselves constituted from the activities of all co-existent sentient beings when addressed as a group. The two (biology and physicality) are in Peircean interpretations entwined, rather than distinct.
Quoting apokrisis
Process philosophy as an umbrella school of philosophy tmk simply affirms that all things are in flux, hence that there is no thing(s) which is eternally stable. Which also brings to mind the view you seem to endorse that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is eternally stable, whereas Peirce would at the very least entertain the notion that this law of nature (here granting this human appraisal of what in fact is an unquestionable verity) too progressively evolved and yet evolves together with the evolution of the physical cosmos (i.e., of the effete mind).
If so, then your affirmation here is a reflection of your own personal proclivities rather than a defining factor of process philosophy. Hence, the notion of an absolute and absolutely stable balance between dyads, or opposites, is not a reflection of what the Good necessarily entails within process philosophy.
Quoting apokrisis
Two areas of disagreement:
First, this - because it by all means seems to affirm that all biosemiosis is governed by pansemiosis - yet either a) denounces any valid ontological occurrence of the Good which sentience ought to aspire toward or, else b) affirms that the Good is pansemiosis's very end-state, in which, in part, all awareness ceases to be, thereby again equating the objective Good to non-being (problematic for reasons mentioned in my previous post: it endorses means toward non-being in as quick a time-span as possible via, for example, suicide).
Secondly - and maybe in no way pertinent to the system of pansemiosis which you endorse - to give examples from ready present metaphysical systems: In everything from neo-Platonism to Buddhism wherein the end-state we all "ought to seek" is deemed to be beyond notions of existence and nonexistence - an end-state yet described as complete and perfect bliss and, hence, wherein awareness of bliss is yet necessarily present (even if necessarily devoid of any I-ness) - balance between ready occurring opposites is antithetical to the obtainment of, or else closer proximity to, the Good as these set of systems can be interpreted to appraise the term "the Good". Your system of pansemiosis then presents an ethics, or else morality, in which the ethics, or morality, endorsed by such models of reality are deemed incorrect, hence wrong, hence bad. And this entailment might not be what you yourself intend to specify.
[just edited the typos I've found]
Democratic space must remain inside itself. To put it in Latin: It must be immanent. Tocqueville noticed that aristocratic man was constantly sent back to something that is placed outside his own self, something above him. Democratic man, on the other hand, refers only to himself. The democratic social space is not only flat but closed. And it is closed because it is has to be flat. What is outside, whatever claims to have worth and authority in itself and not as part of the game, must be excluded. Whoever and whatever will not take a seat at the table at the same level as all other claims and authorities, however mundane, is barred from the game.[/quote]
My stance is kinda particular on this matter. I claim that Universality is always virtual, it is under construction and surpasses our subjective particularity, but it is not given once and for all like in Plato.
Our moral judgments are always in a project of Universality. This is why a moral judgment, no matter how particular it may be, is not simply particular but is on the way to Universality. However, if Universality is virtual, there is always a remainder that allows moral judgments to come into play, to gain relative dominance and stability over one another, or even to coexist relatively.
But never in an absolute manner. Never in an absolute manner such that it closes this virtual space where morality and ethics are put into play. Hence, determining how one should act can never be closed to the other and their possible point of view. This is what Derrida called the principle of hospitality, which makes the ethical and moral task infinite; as long as the space in which ethics and morality are played out never closes and is always open to the participation of another. Doesn't this virtual space of Universality impose itself in such a way that we should assume that our ethical and moral judgments are not absolute and are always in play in discussion with other judgments? According to this the least we should do is be open to the participation of the other.
This position is not anti-realist in the sense that it does not close the path from the particular to the universal, it does not deny the space of Universality. Anti-realism fails to recognize a space that exceeds the particularity of judgment and subjectivity, and that allows that judgment to come into play and discussion. It also fails to recognize that judgments can become kinda universal.
But neither is it a realist position in the sense that it does not assume ethical and moral rules given once and for all like in Plato. I claim that there is an excess that constitutes our judgments and makes them project onto Universality. For example, the very language we use is constituted by rules that the subject does not master and that exceed subjectivity. That is a degree of Universality.
Rejecting metaphysics is still metaphysics. The clue is in the use of logical imperatives such as the word "not". A dichotomising epistemological claim is being made.
Personally, I think Huxley's point would have been better served by not having John Savage commit suicide, but simply having him return home. The fact is, all members of the society do seem to get what they want. The rare few who want to pursue intellectual or artistic interests get sent of to their own fully funded Galt's Gulch to pursue their dreams. The rest get to return to the bovine pleasures they were painstakingly engineered for.
But the elevation of pleasure as the sole principle by which the Good should be measured leads to the reductio ad absurdum of absolute utopia being something like human nervous tissue steadfastly managed by AI to produce something like the maximal amount of the infants' simple pleasure in nursing. I think Huxley (and Aristotle) were right that all cognitive function becomes superfluous under such a rubric. The total abolition of any adult level human cognition. Yet I would agree with Huxley that it's ludicrous to suppose that intentionally giving human beings significant intellectual disabilities so that it will be easier to please them is abhorrent and has nothing to do with human flourishing.
Such worlds are completely bereft of beauty. This makes sense if, as Aquinas thought, the Beautiful is emergent from (but not reducible to) the Good and the True. For if pleasure is the sole metric pursued, there is no longer any need for Truthfor theoretical reasonso long as pleasure can be mechanistically provided for. But I should rather like to say that human flourishing involves the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic, as it must for any perfection of freedom.
I'll have to mull that over but this stuck out to me:
This doesn't seem like Plato to me. Indeed, Plato says words cannot be used to bring one to knowledge of the Good (Republic, Letter VII). This seems more like the post-Humean Enlightenment project of thinking in terms of "rules all rational agents will agree too." But I think this is quite a bit different from the classical view of ethics, which focuses on the virtues. For one, the virtuous person [I]enjoys[/I] right action. They don't need coercive, external rules.
I was pointing out that negentropy seems antithetical to entropy, but a systems approach explains why it ain't.
From a human point of view, negentropy might be celebrated as good and entropy bad. That is a position normally seen. But from the Cosmic point of view, negentropy only exists to the degree it better organises dissipation. So it is also good from the Second Law point of view. And probably bad from the human point of view to the degree we let out structure building civilisations run out of synch with the larger environmental entropy flows that must be their "liveable contexts".
So good/bad can be grounded in this larger thermodynamic view. That was my point.
Quoting javra
Being in the flow is just being well balanced as you scoot down the slope on a pair of skis. It is the effort of control minimised so that the outcome has maximal efficiency.
You hit a tennis ball harder by relaxing all the muscles that would otherwise coarsen the silky skill of the shot. Semiotic modelling approaches just make this deep principle explicit.
Quoting javra
Words like sentience are a problem unless you can provide some pragmatic definition. I know what you are vaguely gesturing towards. But by contrast, biosemiosis is a model of the modelling relation itself. Friston's Bayesian Brain even cashes it out in differential equations these days.
Quoting javra
Peirce of course was a creature of his age and there is a lot of residual religiosity in his writings.
Also the genetic code wasn't discovered in his time. He was still working at the level of protoplasmic biology the striving life force of Naturphilosophie. He couldn't anticipate how deeply correct his pragmatism/semiotics was going to be once science properly could get to the bottom of the secrets of life (and mind).
So sure, he left hostages to fortune like "effete mind" which is still perfectly fine as a metaphor, only inadequate as a specific metaphysical claim. Unless you still believe in "spirit stuff" ontologies.
You can dilute a substance. But what is the equivalent when it comes to a process? Especially a process as rigorously modelled as biosemiosis now is, cashed out as I say in Bayesian equations and a general systems science architecture.
Quoting javra
Again, Peirce did reflect his social constraints. We know his father, the way Harvard was run, his reliance on a religiously-motivated sponsor, the general New England fervour. As someone who didn't fit in, he had to at least try to fit in somehow. Imagine Peirce supported and set free within the context of a German or British university in the same era.
But anyway, if all things are in flux then that is how stability is what then evolves from that. It gives stabilising constraints something pragmatically useful to be doing. Giving a concrete persistent shape to existence as a process (of cosmic expansion~cooling, or thermalisation).
It is the mechanical view of reality that has the problem of starting already substantially stable and existent. It is just there, and has nothing then to do. Purpose of any kind even the most basic thermal imperative kind is left out of the metaphysics.
Quoting javra
I use "process philosophy" in tongue in cheek fashion as the best known process philosophers are those who are the bad examples. Peirce was the only proper process philosopher ... as he was really a structuralist. Sort of an in joke here.
Quoting javra
Semiosis is a hierarchical systems model so speaks of top-down constraints the structuring regularity or synechic continuity that emerges from the chaos of tychic Firstness, to use Peirce-speak.
It is the mechanical view that sees laws governing all action. The systems view says the global order only places limits on local action. And what is not forbidden is free to happen.
Constraints are essentially permissive. And indeed as they are themselves part of what must emerge from a balancing they must persist because they leave exactly those freedoms that are the most constructive in terms of building the system in question. Constraints must "do good" in terms of shaping the parts that go on to (re)construct the system - the system that is defined by these self-same contraints.
So the causality is very different from the causality you are criticising here. A global balance between synechism and tychism is what makes for a system that can exist because like an organism it can repair and reproduce itself. It has the entropic metabolism that means as a Big Bang cosmos, it can persist until the end of time itself. Or until it arrives at its own reciprocal Heat Death state, in other words.
Quoting javra
Again, you are reading my words through the wrong causal lens. As well as doing what I completely reject, which is ontologising this unplaced and reductionist notion of "the Good".
That is the misstep I set out to unpick by wheeling in a better causal model of "existence".
Quoting javra
Once more, the mistake here is expecting an answer in words other than "it is a critical balance".
Analysis progresses by dichotomising, but must then continue on to the proper answer. We can't separate the world into the good and the bad, then treat one as the only real thing.
Psychology tells us that what is mentally healthy is to be "in the flow". So not just somewhere between orgasmic bliss and nihilist despair as the two limiting poles of experience, but instead always smoothly surfing the possibilities of the world in terms of well-honed skills.
Being in the flow does feel like acting at the level of unthinking habit, but in pursuit of some generally pragmatic conscious goal. We want to feel "good" and "in control" by having mastery over actions as we move through a life. And we want our communities and societies to be organised by the same flow psychology.
The pragmatic definition of "good" is really very simple from a psychological, sociological and ecological viewpoint the view from the scale of the self, and the semiotic levels that bracket this selfhood.
But we have absorbed this mechanical metaphysics of being helpless cogs in a world machine. We believe in a causality that is flawed and so get confused about how to live a life in practice. Or at least when we get out of the flow of our well-honed daily existence and start to philosophise, then we can confuse ourselves as all the habits and words are wrong for the task.
Semiosis is how to straighten out philosophy from the ground up. Peirce is the touchstone because he created a consistent metaphysics from mathematical logic to psychological phenomenology.
I'm referring to ideas like of the Good, which are found in a hyperuranian topos and cannot be constructed but can be discovered. That is, as simple ideas of autonomous constitution to which humans can have access, but cannot constitute.
Great post, Count Timothy von Icarus.
Quoting Philosophim
Consider the possibility that biases are not always detrimental to rational decision-making. An individual may be fully aware of their biases and still make sound choices. Learning and growth often stem from recognizing that there might always be a better decision available. Bias becomes significant when we wish to find common ground with others, to influence or be influenced, which ironically negates its purpose.
What if one's self-awareness of bias is coupled with the ability to deceive? If a person can convincingly mask their intentions, does that not call into question the alignment of bias and action? This raises a crucial point I think worthy of deeper discussions: the interactions between bias, intention, and morality.
The Essay's by Michel de Montaigne influenced me and this discussion prompted my thoughts here to ponder the ultimate goal of our pursuits:
Do we chase a universal truth, a single narrative to which all must conform? Or do we celebrate differences of human experience, accepting that our biases, when acknowledged and examined, can lead to a richer, more inclusive understanding of the world?
Montaigne echoes this sentiment through Anaximenes' rhetorical question to Pythagoras, highlighting the usefulness of seeking knowledge when greater threats loom over us. A reflection on the purpose and direction of our intellectual endeavors ought to be explored further...questioned even? Do we trust ourselves and our judgement?
Notes and relevant quotes I took while reading "The Essay's" by Michel de Montaigne:
"Si quid Socrates ant Aristippus contra morem et consuetudinem
fecerunt, idem sibi ne arbitretur licere: magnis enim illi et
divinis bonis hanc licentiam assequebantur."
["If Socrates and Aristippus have committed any act against manners and custom, let him not think that he is allowed to do the same; for it was by great and divine benefits that they obtained this privilege."Cicero, De Offic., i. 41.]
Let him be instructed not to engage in discourse or dispute but with a champion worthy of him, and, even there, not to make use of all the little subtleties that may seem pat for his purpose, but only such arguments as may best serve him.
-https://toleratedindividuality.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/montaigne_essays.pdf 181-951 (chapter xxv-of the education of children)
Emulation and contempt ???
The pride and arrogance of so many foreign pomps, the inflated majesty of so many courts and grandeurs, accustom and fortify our sight without closing our eyes to behold the lustre of our own; so many trillions of men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good company in the other world: and so of the rest Pythagoras was want to say,[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 3.]that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know
"Quid fas optare: quid asper
Utile nummus habet: patrix carisque propinquis
Quantum elargiri deceat: quern te Deus esse
Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimur."
["Learn what it is right to wish; what is the true use of coined
money; how much it becomes us to give in liberality to our country
and our dear relations; whom and what the Deity commanded thee to
be; and in what part of the human system thou art placed; what we
are ant to what purpose engendered."Persius, iii. 69]
what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and design of study; what
valour, temperance, and justice are; the difference betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and
subjection, licence and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far
death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended; "Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem." ["And how you may shun or sustain every hardship." Virgil, AEneid, iii. 459.] by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations and irresolutions: for, methinks the first doctrine with which one should season his understanding, ought to be that which regulates his manners and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to dig and well to live.
Amongst the liberal sciences, let us begin with that which makes us free; not that they do
not all serve in some measure to the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also
do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end. If we are once
able to restrain the offices of human life within their just and natural limits, we shall find that most of
the sciences in use are of no great use to us, and even in those that are, that there are many very
unnecessary cavities and dilatations which we had better let alone, and, following Socrates' direction,
limit the course of our studies to those things only where is a true and real utility:
"Sapere aude;
Incipe; Qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,
Rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis; at ille
Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis oevum."
["Dare to be wise; begin! he who defers the hour of living well is
like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but
the river still flows, and will run on, with constant course, to
ages without end."Horace, Ep., i. 2.]
[u]'Tis a great foolery to teach our children:
"Quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis,
Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricornus aqua,"
["What influence Pisces have, or the sign of angry Leo, or Capricorn, washed by the Hesperian wave."Propertius, iv. I, 89.] the knowledge of the stars and the motion of the eighth sphere before their own:
["What care I about the Pleiades or the stars of Taurus?"
Anacreon, Ode, xvii. 10.]
Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras, "To what purpose," said he, "should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?" for the kings of Persia were at that time preparing to invade his country. Every one ought to say thus, "Being assaulted, as I am by ambition, avarice, temerity, superstition, and having within so many other enemies of life, shall I go ponder over the world's changes?"[/u]
"Sic abiit a vita, ut causam moriendi nactum se esse gauderet."
["He quitted life rejoicing that a reason for dying had arisen."
Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 30.]
Is bias inherently detrimental, clouding our judgement and leading us astray from objectivity? Or is it a necessary filter, a lens through which we navigate all the accesses we have to endless information? Bias can indeed distort reality, leading to misconceptions and prejudice. Yet, it also allows us to embrace our individuality and cultural diversity, fostering a pluralistic society where multiple truths coexist.
The key lies in awareness and balance.
Quoting Philosophim :up:
Quoting Apustimelogist
You're not seeing the point. The original question was in respect of:
Quoting apokrisis
Here, you're trying to rationalise 'goodness' in terms of physics, where 'serving the Second Law of Thermodynamics' which is like the scientific replacement for 'serving God's will'.
But the end-point of the entire process is presumably the state of maximised entropy, the so-called heat death of the universe, which you then try to equate that with 'the pure state of ??nyat?'. I'm pointing out that it's a false comparison, it is not what '??nyat?' means.
And no, I'm not 'shaking my fist in anger.'
By some, sure, but how would this relate to the Good as that via which we, for one example, discern that a correct argument is good and an incorrect argument is bad? More specifically, how does entropy (or even negentropy for that matter) account for the goodness or badness of particular reasoning?
Quoting apokrisis
This in itself is not beyond question. But even so, the views I was referring to pertaining to what I termed "Nature" and you termed "reality" have very little to do with being in the flow. For instance, is Nature bad/evil that must be conquered or is Nature good and goodness that ought to be aligned with? This issue regarding control over nature has little if anything to do with being in the flow.
Quoting apokrisis
Together with words like awareness and consciousness I suppose. I'll skip this for the time being.
Quoting apokrisis
Why should stability be valued - aka be deemed good - to begin with? This question to me speaks far nearer to the heart (i.e. core) of the matter at hand.
The in jokes you've mentioned you hold regarding process theory aside, no process theory will affirm that absolute stability of physical being either is or is possible to begin with.
Have to cut this short for today. Will check back in tomorrow.
Or putting something mathematically grounded in a jokey fashion.
What else is pragmatism about as a ground for a theory of truth?
Quoting javra
Nature is its own self-balancing flow. And there is room for us in that.
It is not me that is defending good/bad as valid terms. Im just pointing out why they are so reductionistically deficient.
Using the word control was obviously a bad move on my part. You have seized on the same reductionist connotations to drag this discussion into what I see as irrelevancies.
Quoting javra
Again, you are wanting me to defend wordings that I dont advance.
If good is pragmatic balance, then stability-instability has some good balance. There is indeed the plasticity-stability balance as is modelled in neural network learning models and other models of neurocognition.
It is how brains are known to work. They must learn easily but also not learn too much - add too much destabilising novelty to their hard won memories, habits and skills all at once.
Is it good to have brain that works efficiently, that can both change its mind and have a mind in the first place?
If you agree with this definition of goodness, then it is mathematically supported by models of cognition. Organisms live in the flow of their worlds by having this kind of neural balance.
Quoting apokrisis
I see we analyze this issue via very different schemas. But to first answer your question:
Although more in depth answers would revolve around the pragmatic maxim, to answer in a single word: utility, of course. But then - that different variations of pragmatism as philosophy will address this same issue of truth differently aside - the implicitly maintained premises of this assertion have yet to be made explicit: utility to what or to whom? I here say, utility to that which seeks one or more as of yet unrealized outcomes to become manifest and hence actualized. But this directly revolves around that pesky set of terms you find problematic: "sentience" (literally, that which senses), "awareness", and the far more convoluted term of "consciousness". A rock (granting it is insentient, lacks any form of awareness, and hence holds no consciousness) will hence be in ownership of no truths. The pragmatic theory of truth, much like the correspondence theory of truth, will hence pivot on the occurrence of sentience. No sentience, no truths.
For the record, however, in a substantial number of cases I disagree with the pragmatist theory of truth. For one incomplete example, lies can be very pragmatic (in the sense of, "with a great deal of usefulness") when successfully enacted but are nevertheless not truths - even when they become believed as truths by the very same person which formally made the lie (this being one form of self-deception; e.g., many of Trump's statements and apparent beliefs). But this epistemological issue being for now overlooked:
This notion of pragmatic theory of truth neither addresses the question I've asked nor the substance of the OP. Utility - i.e, usefulness (to further make explicit what this implicitly denotes: useful to our accomplishing our goals/intents) - is itself to be deemed something good on what grounds? To better clarify via example, incorrect reasoning holds the potential to be exceedingly useful - everything from Orwellian propaganda to gaslighting and more. This then implies that incorrect reasoning is good when it is useful to satisfying the intents of, for example, tyrants, autocrats, oligarchs, despots, or authoritarians - specifically, it will be good for those just addressed (rather than those which they subjugate and manipulate via this incorrect reasoning). Yet this just addressed goodness of incorrect reasoning does not make the use of incorrect reasoning to subjugate and manipulate others (this in some respects often being a more complex form of lies told to benefit the ego of the liar, this by having those lied to hold untruths as truths) an ethical good. Or, for those of us who acknowledge global warming and its dire future perils: not changing to renewable energies is, and has always been, good (useful) for petroleum corporations, those who own stocks in petroleum, and those who value status quo stability above all else. But for those who view this usefulness as both shortsighted and egotistic, this same goodness (usefulness) is deemed to in fact be bad (if not outright evil, akin to what tobacco companies have been doing, but far worse).
I so far find nothing of physical entropy - or of physical negentropy - to ground what is deemed good, bad, or even useful for that matter. Instead finding these issues to be intimately grounded in the very nature of sentience, else awareness, else consciousness: in short, this globally applicable nature of sentience being the minimal incursion of suffering and the optimal obtainment of happiness in both short- and long-term time-spans.
You so far seem to disagree. On what grounds do you then justify good, bad, and utility resulting form the Second Law of Thermodynamics? More concretely asked, how does the Second Law of Thermodynamics constrain or else determine that incorrect arguments are bad rather than good even through they are (or at least can be) useful to those who espouse them?
Quoting apokrisis
That's one interpretation of what the nature of Nature is There are plenty others. I've even encountered those online who sustain that the term is utterly vacuous - this as some will say of the term "matter" (Thomas Huxley, who first coined the term "agnostic", here comes to mind) and yet others will say of the term "sentience".
Quoting apokrisis
:lol: :smile: These staple terms are no more valid or invalid than any other staple term, "pragmatic" very much included. I think it's possible that you're overlooking much of what the terms good and bad signify in everyday use. You might not be stating that this just quoted affirmation of yours is good rather than bad, but via your apparently earnest expression of it you are nevertheless implicitly affirming your belief that the quoted statement is of a good, rather than bad, value - this to you if to no one else.
Besides, the very issue of this thread is the notion of pragmatism sans the Good. To which I can quote your previous affirmations regarding goodness - wherein you've addressed "good" as a valid term.
Quoting apokrisis
OK, then please express what you intended by the term "control" so that it is not in line with the dictionary definitions I am so far aware of. Otherwise, the globalized notion you've expressed of "humans seek to control reality/Nature" is anything but irrelevant to the issues at hand.
Quoting apokrisis
I do not find "good" to be pragmatic balance tout court. To be both blunt and concise, I find "good" to be minimized suffering and optimal happiness/flourishing/eudemonia - maybe needless to add, of sentience, awareness, or else expressed consciousness.. And I find "the Good" to be a non-fairy-tale necessity for all forms of "good" wherein the "good" becomes quite literally perfected. The global constraint by which all instantiations of good are determined, so to speak. Else, that which constrains or else determines all actions to being either more good or less good. But yes, this so far seems to require a metaphysics quite distinct from that which you are advocating.
As to "good" being pragmatic balance between opposites, one could then state that an optimal balance between goodness and badness/evil (these two being opposites) is of itself optimally good. But this would be utterly nonsensical for more reasons than I think currently need expression. Taking the yin-yang of Taoism as one popularized example of balance as good, harmony between light and dark (etc.) is in and of itself a good that, supposedly, leads one to Wuji, this as "Wuji" was initially interpreted in the Tao Ta Ching - with Wuji being here possible to then interpret via Western notions as being "the Good". Imbalances between yin and yang lead one astray from closer proximity to Wuji and are thus always bad in due measure. But the yin-yang interpreted as a balance between good and bad will here make no sense whatsoever.
Quoting apokrisis
I'd say this is overly simplistic. Though more psychological than strictly philosophical, I've heard often enough among educational circles that cognitive dissonance, a form of psychological stress, is of significant benefit to learning. For example:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Education
So brains can well be argued know to best learn via the obtainment of cognitive equilibrium that ameliorates an actively engaged in cognitive dissonance. Without the cognitive dissonance, one simply maintains whatever beliefs one has and never gains any new perspective regarding life or reality at large. And the cognitive dissonance part is not easy.
But this is not a theory of truth. This is not the application of the Peircean process of rational inquiry - the truth towards which a community of reason would tend. This is just lying for selfish interests.
The point of pragmatism is to transcend individual minds and overcome solipsism by following a method of evidenced argument. You are talking about social manipulation as being pragmatic. Something else entirely.
Quoting javra
I am happy to have a technical discussion about epistemic method. If you want to talk about the social construction of everyday terms, that again is a quite different inquiry. No point mixing the two.
The example wasn't intended as a theory or truth, but as an illustration of where I find the pragmatic theory of truth wanting (and, again, there are variations to it dependent of the system of pragmatism endorsed)
Quoting apokrisis
Hmm, my post pivoted around the issue of goodness, not around epistemic method.
I'd be happy if you'd answer at least some of the questions I've posed - granting that my latest post was somewhat long winded, I nevertheless did ask (at least a couple of) questions revolving around the issue of goodness throughout. But, of course, that's up to you.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The whole idea of human flourishing is meaningless is it doesn't fulfill things people want or like. You cannot be "flourishing" and simultaneously not enjoying things in some sense or getting something you want out of it.
Clearly, the only way that a utopia can fail is that it has consequences which are things people do not actually want or like. The idea of "good" things is utterly meaningless unless people are receptive to those things because it benefits them, i.e. it gives them something they want or like in some sense.
Yes, I agree 100%. And this sort of gets at why Hegel thinks he can focus on freedom instead of Aristotle's eudaimonia (flourishing). Freedom implies happiness. A person does not freely choose to be miserable. To be miserable implies that one is in some way unfree to actualize one's desires (even allowing that, in practice, one might choose some degree of misery to actualize some higher goodbut no one chooses misery for itself.)
Even Milton's Satan has to say "Evil, be thou my Good," since to choose evil [I]as evil[/I] (as evil vis-á-vis oneself) is incoherent.
But I don't think our options are "the Good and human happiness reduces to pleasure, even completely unfree, infantile, bovine pleasures," or else "flourishing must be divorced from pleasure." For one, a human good defined in terms of such pleasure makes a person entirely reliant on what is extrinsic to them. The Gammas of A Brave New World fall into enraged rioting when their Soma is denied to them, and they would suffer starvation if their keepers ever neglected them. Such pleasure is not only largely bereft of beauty (and so inferior), but it's also intrinsically unstable because it doesn't generate itself.
The inverse of this sort of entirely extrinsically dependant good would be Socrates proclaiming that "nothing bad can happen to a good man," even as he faces execution. Or perhaps St. Ignatius and Boethius' serene and, ultimately, happy outlook, even as they are deprived of all comforts and face ghastly deaths.
I agree, but would add more to this. The Good is the ultimate object of desire. People always choose things for some good they see in them if they are making any rational choice at all. But there is a difference between "what people currently want," and "what people would want if they were continent and possessing of all relevant knowledge." Clearly, we can prefer things that we later realize were extremely bad for us. The Good is not best judged from "any current vantage," but clearly better judged from a place of knowledge than a place of ignorance.
Indeed, for Plato, Hegel, Augustine, and a good many others, it is precisely our ability to ask "but is this truly good?" that gives us any ability to be self-governing in the first place. It is the open-ended nature of practical/moral reasoning that allows us to transcend current desire and opinion, and so not to be completely determined by what we already are. To paraphrase Socrates in the Republic, people want what is actually good, not what merely seems to be good or is said to be good. It would make no sense to "choose the worse," in the very same way that, from the perspective of theoretical reason, it would make no sense to embrace falsity over truth vis-á-vis what ones thinks is the case.
To be honest, I read your post a few times since I am a fan of CSP (as well as Deacon and other's attempts to use thermodynamics to explain intentionality), but it seems to me like you simply assume this and go from there. Perhaps I am missing some key bridge here?
In what sense can anything be "good" "from the perspective of the Cosmos?" Is the Cosmos self-aware? Does it have intentional, goal directed thoughts and experiences? Intentionality?
"But the Cosmos lacks this level of organismic purpose. It just is what it is," would suggest not. So what is the meaning of this "good" that has been voided of all intentionality and cognitive content? What does it mean that "goodness" is defined in terms of such a good? Something along the lines of eliminative materialism would be my first guess, since this global "good" would be bereft of any cognitive content and is simply defined in terms of a statistical fact.
And how can the Cosmos be self-organizing while lacking any self? Wouldn't the words "spontaneously organizing," or "mechanistically organizing by the laws of chance," describe essentially the same phenomena without the equivocal use of "self" to describe a statistically driven mechanical process?
There seems to be a large distinction between "the reasonable universe," which seems to actually be acting "for no reason at all" and the "reasonable creatures," who act for intentional purposes. The use of "good" for both seems completely equivocal. And perhaps this is why you have put "good" in quotes when referring to the universe?
But then, to my mind, it is only the creaturely "good"the only one that actually involves a "self" or any cognitive content, intentionality, and goalsthat bears any meaningful resemblance to "goodness" vis-á-vis mortality. So we seem to be back to where we started, since I don't think very many would deny that the "human good" or "happiness" is conditioned by (if not reducible to) biology, or that such goodness has to do the goals and intentions of minds.
For the first "good" to be good, we'd have to say something like "the universe is happy when it increases entropy at a greater rate." I don't know why we'd think this though, and at any rate, this would seem to assume that the final resting happiness for the universe is not "self-organization" but the annihilation of heat death. This gets at why Aristotle feels he needs a mover behind the world in order to anchor its final cause.
As to the reference to goodness as "mathematically grounded," while I very much appreciate Deacon's work and similar projects by others to ground intentionality in thermodynamics, these absolutely do not in any way give an adequate explanation for how first person subjective experience and purpose emerge. They might "get something right," but it's a very incomplete story. However, the most compelling parts of these sorts of explanations are, IMO, grounded in accepting a process metaphysics that removes the need for "strong emergence" even as it allows for something that is similar in key ways. But such explanations inherently deny reductions. Hence, while consciousness might be describable in terms of mathematics, it would not be what it is in virtue of mathematics.
At the very least, the idea that goodness reduces to entropy gradients seems to need some explanation of how entropy gradients result in phenomenal awareness. But such a reduction is also a catastrophic deflation of the ideas CSP is building on from Hegel, since it would seem to cut away the connection between goodness, rationality, and the "true infinite." To the extent that a mechanical process is sort of arbitrarily driving history based on the law of large numbers, it's sort of the polar opposite of what Hegel was getting at.
I'd gladly challenge that. People want more than they need. Whether or not at the expense of others. And people like things that are detestable. So if this is meant to be a prevailing or base statement of a larger argument, I'd wisely reconsider.
I don't think that is relevant and what people need can always be cashed out in terms of them liking or wanting to be in particular state.
In that sense, what people want or like might obviously be a much broader category, in principle, than what allows people to flourish. But that doesn't mean that what allows people to flourish isn't what they want or like. And really, the only reason why what people might want or like might be broader than what allows people to flourish is that different wants and likes can conflict, whether that is within the same person or between different people.
[Reply="Outlander;913757"]
Presumably, Goodness, at least as the target of practical reasoning, has to have [I]something [/I] to do with what people desire. However, to simply claim that Goodness is equivalent with whatever people happen to desire is to deny any reality/appearance distinction as respects the Good, which in turn entails that no one can ever be wrong about what is good for oneself. This is clearly false, which is why even Thracymachus rejects it out of hand when it is offered up to him as a way to defeat Socrates in the Republic. So it can't be a perfectly straightforward relationship.
Yes, great point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The good for Nietzsche has to be understood not in terms of individual values but in terms of an organized system of values. A scientific theory is one such organized system of
values, with the meanings of the concepts being employed referring to each other on the basis of an overarching gestalt of meaning. Within such value systems , or worldviews, what is true and false can be agreed on, both in terms of moral and empirical issues. When the value system changes, so too do the criteria for marksmans empirical truth. But one is never i ln a situation where there is normative structure at all within which to navigate such issues. Is there an overall evolution of truth from one worldview to another? I think one can argue this without violating the intent of Nietzsches thinking, but it would not be some kind of Popperian progress through falsification.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I am one of those who argue that desire is equivalent to goodness , if one defines desire in terms of anticipatory sense-making. One can never be wrong about the aim of desire to expand options and dimensions of understanding the flow of events. One can only be wrong about the consequences of ones queries of the world. We construe things people a certain way and they end up invalidating our expectations. But this doesnt invalidate the desire to know.
In respect to this, I'd be happy to change my terminology, this in terms of my use of "value" in the context of ethics, if I thought it might be helpful in better conveying the concepts I wish to express. But I so far don't see any pragmatic reason to do so; despite being very open to change.
In today's lexicon, there is the whole branch of philosophical study of axiology, which by definition is the study of values, such that both ethics (and in some ways meta-ethics) and aesthetics are deemed subsets of axiology. In this and similar contexts, "value" is synonymous to "significance" in the sense of "the extent to which something matters and the type of quality of so mattering" (and, hence, in some ways synonymous to "importance"). As one further sub-example, in psychology the term "valence" is defined as "A one-dimensional value [emphasis mine] assigned by a person to an object, situation, or state, that can usually be positive (causing a feeling of attraction) or negative (repulsion)." (reference here). And, to further complicate issues, this just mentioned definition of valence could potentially also be interpreted in the mathematical sense of the term "value" - roughly, a quantitative and hence "mathematical object determined by being measured, computed, or otherwise defined" (reference)
I'm very sympathetic to how the term "value" can be easily interpreted in terms of marketplace exchanges and, hence, monetarily. I however find this pervasive association to be largely due to the materialistic metaphysics and quick to follow materialistic ideologies (to not here say "values") that pervade most societies today (as one possible example, the prioritizing of economy over politics; as yet another example, the thinking of success in terms of financial gains rather than in terms of intent-accomplishments).
So "intrinsic value" can well intend and thereby mean "a significance, or mattering, that has no instrumental utility but, rather, matters in and of itself to those agent(s) concerned". At least two potential examples come to mind: First, an agent's (well-)being will be of intrinsic value to the said agent; an agent's very own well-being holds no usefulness to the said agent but, instead, is that by which all usefulness to the agent is established. Secondly, for those who entertain the possibility of the Good, the Good too would then necessarily also be intrinsically valuable - and hence devoid of instrumental worth in accomplishing something else. And these two examples of intrinsic value certainly can have a lot to do with discussions regarding both ethics and metaethics - wherein multiple agents are at play.
I so far don't see any alternative terminology to that of "value" in today's world that would better serve the conveyance of these same ideas - this despite the term's many definitions and the audiences' tendency to be materialistic in its interpretation of the term. Do you?
Although I agree that the notion of "objective values" at the very least feels exceedingly misplaced.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You are trapped in a search for meaning in an ordinary socially constructed use of these terms. You are not receptive to a technical redefinition that could make good metaphysical sense. So the discussion will just loop.
Stan Salthe is a natural philosopher and biosemiotician who defines three grades of telos sufficient to span the range of natural systems from the physical to the biological to the cognitive.
The Cosmos would have its entropic tendencies. Life has its telic functionality. Cognition can be said to have its deliberative purpose.
So there is a hierarchy of systems. Those with self-organising constraints and gradients, but no informational codes. Those with biological codes. Then those with the benefit of neural codes, and in the case of humans, the sociocultural level of semiotic self hood and telos that comes with verbal and numeric codes.
This is what makes biosemiosis a natural philosophy. It puts us firmly in the Cosmos with its general thermodynamic constraints, but then is a theory of the negentropic freedoms that levels of encoding and world-modelling can buy.
Everyday language is shaped by its need to function as a way to organise everyday society. You need to develop a more technical use of language to have a more technical understanding of our situation as semiotic creatures riding thermodynamic gradients.
:up:
Quoting apokrisis
I will chip in here, even though the objection was not addressed to me, as I've taken the time to read material about biosemiosis, Howard Pattee, Stan Salthe, and others, as a consequence of your mentioning them (and learned a lot by so doing). However, I maintain that what you're proposing is not metaphysics - it's the attempt to re-purpose concepts from the natural sciences, specifically, the second law of thermodynamics, and Schrodinger's concept of negentropy, to fabricate what sounds like a metaphysics, but which ultimately reduces back to physics, within which the only 'purpose' that organisms serve is to hasten the rate of entropification.
The big difference between natural science and philosophy, is that in the former, there is always a gap between knower and known. It seeks objective knowledge. But philosophy considers questions of our own lived existence in which we are inevitably both participants and instigators. It's a very different thing. I believe that's why Wittgenstein said that 'We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.'
https://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/NatPhil_of_entropy.pdf
But is it? Naturalism loosely concerns what can be known objectively, made subject to scientific hypotheses and measured mathematically. I don't see anything in that paper that really strays from that, although it extrapolates a rather speculative interpretation of what the scientific data really means or how it might be interpreted.
But consider this passage from one of the Platonic dialogues, the Phaedo, directly germane to this debate:
Quoting Phaedo, IEP
I'm not going into exegesis of Plato here - there are many other threads that do that - but simply pointing out that the distinction between physical causation and what are described 'real causes' - why some course of action is taken, and not another. The kind of judgement that requires discriminative wisdom.
(This sentiment lived on in Aristotle's 'final causation', the end to which things are directed, which has on the whole has been rejected by modern philosophy as an example of teleological reasoning.)
The Salthe paper concludes:
To which a Platonist response might be: so what?
To which natural philosophy would reply, so what? We're Aristoteleans.
If you have an argument against that approach other than it is not what a Platonist/Buddhist/Idealist/Ordinary Person/Whatever would mean by final cause then trot it out.
And it doesn't even matter if Aristotle did not unpack the point. It is a distinction that has only become possible because of modern science and its understanding of what actually grounds the Cosmos and where negentropic complexity might fit with that in a holistic and hylomorphic fashion.
Stop asking me to do your homework. I've learnt it is a thankless exercise.
The fastest route to non-existence is not a teleological explanation, sorry. You select from Aristotle and C S Pierce those elements which suit your naturalistic account and discard the elements that do not.
Entropy is perhaps (that is, as far as we can tell) a global tendency, not a purpose. The idea that the Cosmos is governed by some overarching (transcendent) purpose is necessarily a theistic idea, that is there cannot be, logically speaking, an overarching purpose without a transcendent purposer.
In case you misunderstand, I am not proposing that there is a transcendent purposer (designer).
It could be if it was planned, but not otherwise.
That's because in Western culture, it is construed that way. Buddhist culture, for instance, draws no such conclusions. Same with various schools of philosophy in the ancient world which construed purpose in terms of discerning the logos of the Cosmos, although that term then became appropriated by Christian theology to mean the Word of God.
Hence the problem!
I don't think this is right. First because it is a matter of language usageit simply makes no logical sense to say there is a purpose if there is no purposer, or a design without a designer.
Buddhism, to my knowledge, at least in its seminal forms, simply doesn't talk in terms of overarching or cosmic purpose.
If you want to claim there is an overarching purpose then your claim must at least be consistent with and coherent within, ordinary language usages. @Apokrisis is guilty of anthropomorphizing if he speaks of entropy as being an overarching purpose, rather than simply a global tendency- such talk cannot be anything beyond metaphor
What could "logos of the cosmos" mean beyond simply "the way things work" in a similar sense as the Dao is understood to be the "Way" things work?
Quoting Wayfarer
What problem?
You're talking bollocks. Science is based on the axiom of the principle of least action. It is enshrined in Newtonian Mechanics, Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Field Theory. And guess what, it appears in thermodynamics too once it is upgraded to dissipative structure theory.
You only understand thermodynamics in closed and gone to equilibrium terms. The Heat Death as it was understood in Boltzmann's time. But the Heat Death is now a de Sitter spacetime story. The Comos expands and cools eternally as a story of constant growth (and contraction). It does come to a halt in eternalised fashion as it hits its Planck scale quantum limits. But hey, that is the effective end of time too.
This journey has a start because the Planck scale defines the "hot and small" that could be the Big Bang's beginning in terms of the reciprocality of its Heat Death the Heat Death being 1/hot and small, or the inverse in being the "vast and frigid".
So as biosemioticians discussing cosmic pansemosis would put it there is a natural tendency, an arrow of time, built in. And all of physics reflects that in its grounding on the (rather metaphysical and holistic) principle of least action.
Listen up. You are critiquing old model thermodynamics which is just a model of equilibrium balances. You need to catch up with dissipative structure physics which shows that equilibriums are something different from the point of the view of something as large and growth-predicated as a Cosmos.
Closed systems are Gaussian equilbriums. Openly growing ones preserve their balance by maintaining a log/log or powerlaw direction of action.
There is thus a good reason why we find the Universe tumbling headlong into a heat sink of its own creation. That is how the Universe manages to exist as a process that persists. If there was not this tellic trick of heading towards its own inverse, we couldn't be here to inquire about it.
What is amazing about the Big Bang is how the Cosmos has kept up its doubling and halving powerlaw equilibrium despite a number of major phase changes brought about a dropping temperature and expanding space. Through Darwininan competition, new modes of thermalising keep self-organising and so keep the larger game going.
Radiation gets replaced by matter as the fuel. Then as matter splutters out, dark energy is able to take over.
Telos is there in natural selection fashion. The critical mass is maintained even through huge material disruption.
But all this is perhaps "too new" for you to realise how old hat your views of thermodynamics is?
Which is what I said and why I cited Salthe as the source.
Quoting Janus
Yep. It elevates the realm of human concerns the purposes of a confused species not long departed from the life of an ape to some transcendent "Mind of God" status.
I prefer a deflationary metaphysics that brings us humans back down to the Earth the reality that we need to do a better job of tending.
Quoting Janus
But, by cosmic purpose, don't you simply mean 'purposes other than those enacted by conscious agents'? In other words, you're conceiving of purpose as something carried out by an actor.
By the way, and as we're now discussing science, have there been any updates to the declaration from CERN some years back that the Universe shouldn't exist?
I can't really tell if it makes good metaphysical sense, that's why I asked all those questions. For example, if such a grounding of intentionality reduces to mechanism, i.e. something like causal closure (is it supposed to?), then I would say such a theory has dire epistemic and explanatory issues.
The thing is, if intentions have no causal efficacy, if everything is determined by mechanismby statistical mechanics, etc.then the contents of phenomenal experience can never, ever, be selected for by natural selection. This has two problems:
The first is epistemic. If how we experience the world and what we think of it has no causal effect on behavior, then there is no reason to think science is telling us anything about the way the actually world is. Natural selection would never ensure that phenomenal experiences don't drift arbitrarily far from whatever the world is actually like because the contents of awareness have absolutely no bearing on reproduction if they don't affect behavior. It's self refuting.
So folks who want to have people accept these sorts of narratives need some sort of "just so" story where "information processing," or some such, when it results in phenomenal awareness, just happens to not allow the contents of awareness to drift too far away from reality. But why should this be?
The second is explanatory. Evolution explains a lot of phenomenal awareness: why sex feels good, why sweets tastes good, why being tired feels such that you don't want to do anything. Yet if awareness doesn't dictate behavior, then sex could feel like torture and it would make no difference for reproduction. The "way things feel," could never be selected for (barring some "just so story" where somehow behavioral outputs drag along the contents of awareness with them).
Finally, there would be the fact that phenomenal awareness would now seem to be a sort of unique, sui generis sort of strong emergence, but not only that, it would be the only phenomena we have ever observed that only demonstrates causality in precisely one direction. Even with the introduction of panpsychism, this seems to remain a problem. I don't think it's unfair to say this one is only slightly less problematic than Cartesian dualism's interaction problem, it almost amounts to the same thing in many respects.
To my mind, those are big problems even for a theory that could lay out an adequate explanation of how first person experience emerges from entropy, information processing, computation, etc., which absolutely none can (and here most authors readily admit thiswhoever figures this out will have a claim to surpassing Newton or Einstein). All we have is multiple competing "suggestive" theories, none of which can gain currency.
On the other hand, if a theory allows for something along the lines of "strong emergence," to get around these problems, I have no idea why we would be talking about mindless entropy gradients and intentionality as good in a remotely univocal or even analogous way. Goodness, as we experience it, would be defined in terms of an irreducible intentionality. This doesn't mean thermodynamics or complexity studies can't inform us about the nature of phenomenal awareness or how it emerges, but it would mean there is no reduction such that the goodness of practical reason can be explicable purely in terms statistical mechanics.
As I see it, the only goodness we can know is the goodness of human intentionality. It seems we find it very difficult not to anthropomorphize.
There cannot be an intersubjectively valid metaphysics worth rational consideration which is not consistent with, and coherent within, the terms of science. That is not to say you are not free to believe whatever seems right to you for living your own life. We all have that prerogative, just don't expect such beliefs to be universally relevant, as science is.
You can be sure the scientists are not looking for any transcendent explanations.
It happens sometimes. The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman gets around to arguing for a sort of vaguely Hegelian objective idealism. The Fine Tuning Problem and some people's problems with multiverse has led to the Von Neumann-Wigner "Conciousness Causes Collapse" interpretation of quantum mechanics to get done fresh looks, and this is sometimes framed in such terms.
I'll admit that it does at least answer FTP. Why is the universe supportive of life? Because possibility retroactively crystalizes into actuality only when it would have spawned life. And why is it set up for complex life? Presumably because this does more to collapse potential into actuality. But honestly, this one always seemed a bit much for me because it seems unfalsifiable in a particularly extraordinary way.
This from a self-described "non-positivist" :lol:
Color me skeptical, but this new view of thermodynamics has now settled:
-the origin of the universe,
-the ultimate fate of the universe,
-how mind emerges and why it has the contents it does,
-and gives us a theory of morality?
I may have been unclear here. The language of values makes sense for those who chose to use it: Weber, Nozik, Rawls, etc. I was thinking particularly of backwards projecting the term onto thinkers from centuries prior. It seems to lead to confusion both because of the other connotations of the word and the way it is commonly understood today (which has bled into everyday life, e.g. "family values," etc.).
The language of "inherit value," used today might actually be a decent enough expression for older aesthetic theories, since the experience of the beautiful is "valuable for itself," and makes no necessary moral claims on us, but it isn't great the moral language of prior eras precisely because they draw a contrast here between the Good and the Beautiful.
Your lack of nuanced understanding is again in evidence I guess if you are a black and white thinker then of course everything will appear to you as such.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I see it Hoffman's argument is a performative contradiction and hence self-refuting.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm always skeptical when probabilities are being assessed from within the system they purport to characterize. Collapsing potential into actuality sounds pretty much the same as @Apokrisis talking about symmetry-breaking and entropy.
I agree with you about such notions, I see them as being merely imaginative or metaphorical, and not subject to falsification, which means they cannot rightly be granted the status of theories. They might have poetical value, though, even in the ancient sense of poesis as 'making'ideas which cannot be determined as being true or false or even predictively accurate may nonetheless be profoundly transformative.
Understanding your posts requires none. You fall back on positivist declarations whenever metaphysics comes up, but then deny that you're doing so.
The truth of this relies on you being an expert in what counts as metaphysics. So...
Quoting Wayfarer
Sources of CP violation have indeed been found. Just not enough.
Rather than just react to catchy headlines, you ought to invest some effort into learning about what you just hope is good verbal ammunition.
Got it. Thank you for the clarification. I'm in agreement.
Such confusion. Talk of "phenomenal experiences" is just the standard sin of reifying a process as a substance. Tell me what process you might have in mind here and we will get a lot further. Consciousness is a pragmatic modelling relation with the world and not a "thing" or a "state of being".
And even if you reify the ability to act mindfully in the world to have a flow of experience that constitutes a semiotic Umwelt it is always going to have a bearing on reproductive success in a biological creature that depends on reproduction to exist.
Yours is the argument that self-refutes. The semiotic approach indeed explains how our phenomenology indeed does "drift arbitrarily far from whatever the world is actually like". The world is not actually coloured, is it? The redness of a rose, the sweetness of its scent, are neurological constructs rather than material properties.
Our primate eyes are tuned to making a sharp red~green wavelength distinction for the pragmatic purpose of ecological tasks like making the very slight reflectance difference of a ripe fruit "pop-out" of the green background of a forest's foliage. Evolution inserts a hue difference that leaps out in a binary fashion when a more "realistic" reaction would be seeing two barely distinguishable hues of grey.
The mind doesn't need to represent the world in faithful Cartesian fashion. It in fact wants to ignore the world as much as possible so that only what matters in terms of significant information "pops out" in ways we just can't miss.
All the worthwhile theories of mind are based now on this semiotic principle. Perception itself is an encoding of telic purpose. What matters in an evolved information processing sense is built into the structure of our sensations let alone our cognition.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Friston's Bayesian Brain seems to have taken the field by storm. We were discussing it 30 years ago when it was still rather radical and leftfield. Now he has the field's highest impact rating even if a lot of that is due to his work sorting out the analysis techniques needed for functional brain imaging.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Strong emergence is just reductionism plus supervenience. A complete non-theory. A way of hand-waving rather than actually explaining.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Good luck with that. I thought you were here to discuss pragmatism in some way.
Logically there can, but one needs to make use of premises other than those of current mainstream religions (the very same with which most of today's atheists are indoctrinated and make partial rejection of).
Try to forget all about "the world was created by a creator" and, in modified general metaphysical keeping, that the universe resulted from either a first cause or else somehow emerged ex nihilo (as though indefinite nothingness of itself brought about the effect of a primordial universe as thought indefinite nothingness were of itself a cause).
Instead of these premises, entertain the premises that existence is either without initial creation or else cause or, otherwise, that no one (human or supernatural if the latter were to in any way occur) can have any knowledge of how old existence is or else of how it started if it at all ever did. Easily referenced examples of systems that do this are both Buddhism and Hinduism.
Then make use of the premise that awareness (in its many plural instantiations) is.
Then, be more concise, entertain the premise of idealism - one wherein everything that is perceptual, including everything physical, is in any number of means brought about by said awareness.
Lastly, entertain the premise that there is a final end-state to this awareness (with awareness's many instantiations) which is existentially fixed (not created, nor caused, nor in any way perishable) and which could be had were said awareness to be so wanting/intending. Quick examples could here include being at one with Brahman via Moksha, obtaining Nirvana without remainder, or to bring things back slightly into Western perspective (a global and complete) henosis with the Neo-Platonic "the One".
While this will not of itself evidence the case that physicality must necessarily then be purpose driven in manners devoid of a "purposer" (which is obviously to me taken to be a singular ego), these set of premises do at the very least allow for the logically valid obtainment of this conclusion (given far many more details and arguments to be presented and made).
For instance, were it to be upheld - such as C. S. Peirce did - that everything physical is effete mind whose natural laws (and systems of stable causality, etc.) are global habits emerging from the activities of (awareness-endowed) mind (again, neither mine nor yours but all coexisting minds in the cosmos in general), then physicality in general and all of its particular aspects will be - or at least could be here validly concluded to be - purposeful though neither holding intentions nor being so due to one single ego as "purposer". Physicality here would then adhere to the laws of thought, for one example, for it is ultimately resultant of them. And such an interpretation of physicality is in general metaphysical keeping with Heraclitus's Logos as well as that of the Stoics - wherein the laws of Nature are in their own way reasonings.
[For further illustration, here is one easy to read summation of Peirce's views:
Quoting https://philosophyisnotaluxury.com/2010/09/the-inquiring-mind-of-charles-sanders-peirce/ ]
Such an understanding of physicality is also in keeping with Peirce's notion of "agapism": a universal process of, well, agape, by which the cosmos in whole evolves. To which can be further conjoined "evolves toward the end-state of absolute agape". Which in turn can be deemed one and the same as, for example, the Neo-Platonic "the One".
As to scientific models of the universe, under such general interpretation of a purposeful cosmos devoid of a one superlative purposer, one could then adopt a Big Bounce model of the cosmos, which is currently a validly scientific model of cosmology regarding the beginning of the (currently known) universe that, though having its critics, has not yet be falsified by evidence.
Such that - to here use more poetic language for brevity - the evolving universe incrementally approaches this end-state of absolute agape (which again can be deemed to be the Neo-Platonic "the One") and then possibly breaks apart from it due to not getting thing perfect, in the process bringing about a new reformation of the early and far more chaotic universe which once again reformulates its progressive evolutions toward the same end-state, this till the time the awareness-driven universe (see C.S. Peirce again as example of this) gets things perfect and the end-state is obtained.
I'm not expecting these affirmations to be viewed as here being validly concluded by anyone. But this skimpily presented post regarding the matter does evidence how having a cosmos with an overarching purpose in the utter absence of a "purposer" is by no means a logical impossibility. If one works with different premises than those commonly employed in modernity.
And, of course, this terse outline of a general outlook should be given some leeway in terms of details being better defined via some modification of what's be stated.
Maybe needless to add, deny the premises addressed, and one will then deny the possible validity of all which has been expressed. But this does not then equate to a purposeful cosmos devoid of intentionality as an agent and of purposer as guiding factor being of itself logically impossible.
----
Short on time at present. I'll post again if replied to in a week or so.
I don't think that will help, because I can't see how saying the Universe has an overarching purpose makes any sense at all without positing a purposer. I will go further; I think saying that anything has a purpose presupposes either that it has been designed for some purpose or that it is in some sense and to some degree a self-governing agent.
In the life sciences there is talk of organs and such things as leaves, claws, teeth, stomachs, hearts and so on as having purposes, but this is really metaphorsuch things have functions, they were not designed "on purpose", even if it is possible, as per epigenetics, that there can be feedback from the environment to DNA. In a sense we can look at the whole Earth as being self-organizing, but it doesn't follow that it has purposes, and even less does it follow that this self-organizing capacity constitutes an overarching purpose, a purpose from beyond the phenomenal realm, a purpose with some end in "mind".
Peirce's characterization of matter as "effete mind" I think should be read more as a metaphor in that matter is being (again anthropocentrically) considered as something that can acquire habits, and in general anything conceived as such suggests a notion of mind. All of this speaks more to our human experience-based presuppositions, and the real litmus test would be as to whether such ideas can command agreement from any unbiased rational agent, as logical, and mathematically self-evident propositions, and testable empirical observations, can.
What you need to understand about my position here is that I do not claim that all questions are capable of scientific answers. Much, even most, of what concerns us as humans cannot be definitively (that is in any intersubjectively testable sense) answered by science or philosophy, and each of us must think philosophically as we are rationally convinced to think, a thinking which is distinct from both scientific and logical justification and purported revelation.
As Karl Jaspers says we have three modes of thinkingreligious, that is dogmatic, faith, scientific knowledge and what he calls "philosophical faith" which is an existential and/ or phenomenological matter, a lifelong. open-ended pursuit of thought for each individual. We accept whatever philosophical ideas that we do accept on faith; no proof or empirical evidence of their truth is possible.
We can engage in philosophical discussion, and we may be convinced by the thoughts of others, or not, but there are no definitive answers to philosophical questions that any unbiased rational agent would be compelled to accept. Philosophy is mostly untestable speculation, yet individuals are justified, in the sense of being entitled to entertain or believe whatever they authentically feel, after making every effort to expunge tendencies towards confirmation bias or wishful thinking, is most true for them. That something feels most true for you, however, does not entail that your feeling is a justification for expecting anyone else to agree with you.
You have your answer: pragmatism says that what is good, is the well-adapted, what survives. That extends beyond living organisms to the whole cosmos.
[quote=The Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer] In popular Darwinism, reason is purely an organ; spirit or mind, a thing of nature. According to a current interpretation of Darwin, the struggle for life must necessarily, step by step, through natural selection, produce the reasonable out of the unreasonable. In other words, reason, while serving the function of dominating nature, is whittled down to being a part of nature; it is not an independent faculty but something organic, like tentacles or hands, developed through adaptation to natural conditions and surviving because it proves to be an adequate means of mastering them, especially in relation to acquiring food and averting danger. As a part of nature, reason is at the same time set against naturethe competitor and enemy of all life that is not its own.
The idea inherent in all idealistic metaphysicsthat the world is in some sense a product of the mindis thus turned into its opposite: the mind is a product of the world, of the processes of nature. Hence, according to popular Darwinism, nature does not need philosophy to speak for her: nature, a powerful and venerable deity, is ruler rather than ruled. Darwinism ultimately comes to the aid of rebellious nature in undermining any doctrine, theological or philosophical, that regards nature itself as expressing a truth that reason must try to recognize. The equating of reason with nature, by which reason is debased and raw nature exalted, is a typical fallacy of the era of rationalization. Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy that, if rightly read, will unfold a tale of infinite suffering. Without committing the fallacy of equating nature and reason, mankind must try to reconcile the two.
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 man frequently 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]
I think this is right. @apokrisis seems to now be using "semiotics" to refer to an anthropological theory of cognition.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. From what I understand semiotics began as the study of intentional sign use (among humans), and then eventually incorporated a study of the way that sub-human organisms utilize signs in a non-intentional manner. Given what @apokrisis says, what may now be happening is that humans are being appraised as organisms that utilize signs in a non-intentional manner, and one use of the word "semiotics" apparently refers to this anthropological theory of cognition.
Of course humans do utilize signs in non-intentional ways, but when someone like apokrisis explicates an anthropological theory to explain the manner in which humans do thiswhich in this case seems to be premised on some combination of evolution and entropyhe is using intentional signs to explicate his theory, and is therefore back to the original sense of semiotics. As you say, this is self-refuting. It is self-refuting in the same way that an explanation of reasoning via reasoning would be self-refuting. In this case it is an explanation of human signs via human signs, or else an explanation of human being (including sign-use) via human signs. Such can never achieve a true explanation. In these cases the explanandum always outruns the explanans. Apokrisis' explanation of human sign use cannot, after all, manage to explain the sign-use he is involved in in this thread.
Quoting apokrisis
Peircian pragmatism or some other? Most of the pragmatism that occurs on these forums is not Peircian, and I would assume the OP is referencing the forms that are common on these forums.
This may be true. Philosophy aint a strong suit on PF.
Mead of course leant into the anthropological theory of cognitionangle with his symbolic interactionism.
Can you fill out your argument here? I'm not sure what you mean by "mechanism". As far as I know modern understanding in biology is organistic, not mechanistic. Also I wonder what you mean by "intentions"do bacteria or plants have intentions in your understanding?
Why would consciousness, the ability to reflect, plan, care and have purposes, not be advantageous to survival?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Who would be silly enough to claim that how we experience and what we think has no effect on behavior? We have every reason to think science is telling us something about the world on account of its enormous and internally coherent complexity and its predictive success.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see your reasoning here. If phenomenal experiences "drifted arbitrarily far from whatever the world is actually like" then we could not survive. It seems obvious that the contents of awareness do have bearings on reproduction and on behavior in general. Who are you arguing against here?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, I'm not seeing who you are arguing against. How could practical reasoning ever be explicable in terms of statistical mechanics and who would be foolish enough to claim that it could? You are responding to @Apokrisis, and I'm not reading him as claiming anything like that.
I did say I didn't understand what he was talking about. I still don't lol, this may be on me. I was throwing out what I see as wrong in most theories of reductive/substance physicalism, to see how he could respond to them. I'm always interested in ways around these, having found few.
That's why I said, at the end "if on the other hand conciousness is irreducible to physics, how are these two "goodnesses" univocal?"
Under most definitions of causal closure, the phenomenal/mental never, ever, on pain of violation of the principle, has any causal effect on behavior. So if something never affects behavior, how can it possibly selected for?
Under reductionism, if physics is "mechanistic," then any and all phenomena can ultimately be explained in terms of mechanism.
Regardless of the relevance of this point in the current conversation, I think it is underappreciated in general. Physicalism is normally defined in terms of superveniance paired with causal closure. It's not defined in terms of casual closure arbitrarily though, plenty of work, Jaegwon Kim's in particular, seems to suggest that jettisoning causal closure means jettisoning a lot of the basic assumptions of substance metaphysics.
Of course, this is absolutely no problem for science because it will posit mental causes whenever it seems like a good explanation. This is, IMO, precisely the problem for reductive explanationsthey must explain why something with no causal efficacy (the mental is just "along for the ride") seems so good at explaining things.
And that's where my post comes from. I see this problem as very dire and difficult, and so "does it fix this problem," is one of the problems I ask of theories of intentionality.
Of course, if a theory isn't reductive, it has to explain how it gets around being so, which also isn't at all easy. But I'm at least sympathetic to arguments that reductionism "must be wrong," even if we don't know exactly how.
I'm 100% willing to grant that experience and thought are processual. I don't see how the really changes anything though. I am referring to the process by which we have phenomenal experiences, "taste an apple," "think about work," or "feel pain," nothing more or less.
You are not describing a process where conciousness "drifts arbitrarily far" from the world. You are describing a process where its contents are based on what is useful for survival. This isn't "arbitrary" or "random." Things are presented based on their relevance to fitness in your description and presumably natural selection is selecting for "what experience feels like," here.
But then you didn't answer my question: does subjective experience ever play a causal role in behavior? Does the way we feel about things dictate how we act, or are organisms' actions entirely explicable in terms of more basic physics?
I'm not sure what to make of the first sentence. "Strong emergence," is defined [I]in terms of[/I] superveniance and is the explicit denial of reductionism. I do agree that it's a way of hand waving though. It's a very popular way of hand waving because of seemingly intractable problems with physicalism defined under causal closure.
I bring it up because phenomenal awareness being explicable in terms of statistical mechanics would seem to suggest causal closure because statistical mechanics is, as the name implies, mechanistic. If it doesn't, how is this avoided?
There is probably a consensus that it gets "something" right. It certainly isn't the case that it is taken by more than a few to present a "fully adequate" explanation of how first person experience emerges, and it has plenty of critics. Indeed, the field seems dramatically less unified than it was two decades ago, which is not the sign of a mature field. You get conferences where like six different, mutually exclusive "ground up" theories of conciousness get presented.
Likewise, the stuff about the universe being cyclical, while certainly interesting, is extremely speculative. Forgive me if I'm skeptical of a skeleton key that seems to open many of the biggest open questions in the sciences.
Quoting Janus
All scientific paradigms rest on an underlying set of metaphysical presuppositions, but it is not job of the scientist to make this metaphysics explicit. Occasionally we get a scientist who is up to the task of pointing to these philosophical presuppositions (Heisenberg, Bohm, Smolen, Prigogine). When a new paradigm replaces an older one, the underlying metaphysical framework changes , along with criteria of what constitutes evidence, proper method, and many other aspects of scientific conduct. The idea that there is only one scientific method, and that science is superior to philosophy because it relies on validation of evidence, is in itself a metaphysical presupposition.
The difference between science and philosophy is that science translates its metaphysical assumptions into a conventionalized language of empiricism, whereas a philosophy fleshes out its underlying assumptions within a less conventionalized language. Neither domain, neither philosophy nor science, is superior to the other in terms of arriving at new metaphysical positions and thus new paradigms. They just use different conceptual vocabularies to get there.
Often, philosophy will produce a new set of grounding assumptions before the sciences get there (Descartes and Spinoza vs Newton, Kant and Hegel vs Einstein, 19th century neo-Kanrianism vs cognitive science. As Jerry Fodor puts it, "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.").
Translating the metaphysics into the language of a science may make it accessible to a larger percentage of the population , and therefore more universally relevant, but by that same criterion the translation of a basic science into technological devices is more relevant that the basic science by itself. In any case, naturalizing and empiricizing it doesnt make it more intersubjectively valid , it just makes the terms of its philosophical validity intelligible to a larger community.
Thanks for the background. :up:
Sort of unrelated, but maybe there is a case for technology "objectifying natural philosophy," in the same way Hegel supposes that institutions "objectify morality." It's the concretization of theory in history.
Obviously, this is a somewhat particular use of "objectifying," in which to "objectify" is partially to "make the terms of philosophical validity intelligible to a larger community." Such an objectification doesn't preclude later negation. New technologies bring about new contradictions and often eventually get replaced or modified beyond recognition.
Just a thought I had, really not applicable to the topic I don't think.
I see I have already attempted to explain this to you ... how biosemiosis is indeed a way to close the explanatory gap, and how mechanicalism is involved in a surprising way.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/667548
And these further flesh out the thesis...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/67659
Are you familiar with Spinoza? He solved this conundrum, Descartes "interaction problem" centuries ago. As I have no doubt you know Descartes proposed two substances res extensa (matter) and res cogitans (mind) with the problem being how two totally different kinds of substance could interact. Spinoza proposed that there was just one substanceGod or Natureand that mind and matter were just different attributes of the one substance.
So, the one substance acts, and we can see that action as a manifestation of mind, or of matter. In modern terms consciousness is understood as non-physical form one perspective (the experience of being conscious) and physical from another (the neural activity that is consciousness). From the neurological point of view, of course consciousness has a causal effect on behavior, just as all neural activity does. Consciousness as experienced is also neural activity, but we are, in vivo, blind to that activity, and so we find it difficult to understand how consciousness could be that activity.
In modern terms you could call this "neutral monism".
The basic phase of science is really just an augmentation of the ordinary process of unbiased empirical observation, of just observing what is there to be observed. Then there is the phase of abductive reasoningdeveloping hypotheses to causally explain how what is observed might have come about. Testing hypotheses consists in making predictions that would seem to follow from them and then performing experiments and further observation to determine if these predictions obtain. That is the basic method of empirical science, and I don't believe that has changed,
Yes, I see.
And as you can see, I wasn't at all hostile to the approach, but I still don't think it answers a single one of the points I brought up.
It also seems like that view is going to run into another problem. Lots of systems function like organisms: ant hives, ecosystems, cities, corporations. They are all shaped by selection forces and are explicable in terms of entropy gradients, and can certainly be described as self -organizing structures. "The Ascent of Information," is a neat, light popsci book on just this sort of take. But then it seems we should actually have tons of minds nested within each other. This is a problem for many formulations of IIT too, you get group minds everywhere, which seems to strain credulity. If Toyota, the City of Miami, and memes are all "concious" they seems to be so in at best an analogous way.
But against this, we might consider global workspace models of conciousness and the decent empirical support that suggests they get something right, which would seem to suggest that something much more definiteness is required to result in phenomenal awareness than having a metabolism, etc.
The solution is even older, it gets posed by Plato in the Phaedo and is there ascribed to the Pythagoreans. The material metaphysics is familiar, since it really hasn't changed much. For the Pythagoreans life was a process. It was said to be analogous to a harmony (tuning) on a lyre. The strings are what we observe around us, matter, the harmony, is us experiencing things. The harmony just is the vibration of the strings (ignoring the air for now).
But as Plato points out, this implies something like causal closure. If intentionality just [I]is[/I] mechanism "seen from the inside" it can never have any sort of causal relationship with mechanism, they are the same thing. Their relation is identity.For Plato, this is a reductio because, clearly, we sometimes do things because we choose to do them, because we find them pleasant, etc.
So I think the same issues show up there. If our experiences were just mechanism as seen on the inside then there is no reason for the content of those experiences has to have anything to do with the underlying mechanism. You need some sort of explanation why mechanism [I]must[/I] produce experienced that are "like" the mechanism that causes them. This seems hard to do if they just are the same thing, but maybe it's possible. Such an explanation doesn't exist though. That, and there seems to be a lot of good empirical support that experience "feels the way it does," in order to motivate us to do things, including misrepresenting reality for selection advantage.
I consider this a difficulty for panpsychism as well. Even if we assume panpsychism, why do we assume that it has to result in experiences that relate closely enough to the underlying/flip side mechanism for us to trust our observation?. There is no prima facie reason they seem to need to. And then there is the issue I pointed to before which is that the psych part of panpsychism is seemingly unobservable "from the outside" and so not only unfalsifiable but also seemingly unconfirmable except maybe by process of elimination of plausible alternatives. This isn't true for all panpsychism, really just those ones that say there isn't anything more to explain because experience is just one side of the dual aspect of one thing, but that's the most common sort.
I just don't see how it is inchoate nor inconsistent nor (internally incoherent). The claim is simple: values are non-objective. Something matters only if one is concerned with it ("thinks or feels" it matters); so nothing actually matters but, rather, only what one holds matters.
It is dissatisfying, but not internally incoherent. I mean, what would you say is an example of an internal incoherence with it? Something like: "a person who thinks that nothing actually matters can't think what they think matters matters"---is that it?
I was talking to Baars back in the 90s at the same time I was talking to Friston. While the workspace story had some metaphorical value, it wasn't a real theory. Friston has developed a real theory. It is mathematical rather than metaphorical. It actually claims to have the status of a mechanics a Bayesian mechanics. It comes with equations.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, this is simply because you have fallen into the Cartesian representationalist trap of reifying phenomenal experience as a mysterious substance. You can't get away from the primacy of the looks and feels. They have become what "must be explained".
To break out of that, you need a more general account of what brains actually are doing which is biosemiosis. Neurons, like genes or words, are ways of informationally constructing a modelling relation between an organism and its world.
So step one for science is giving a mathematically rigorous treatment of this modelling relation.
Step two is to turn from the generality of one mechanism that speaks to all kinds semiotic order that of a corporation or tornado even and apply that back to the human condition. What we as the only biology, and even neurobiology, to be enhanced with the further levels of semiotic technology in our language and logic systems, might "feel" as organisms engaged in just that kind of reality-modelling relation.
Once you add enough social psychology, psychophysics, neurocognition and other good stuff to your understanding, it is easy to see why being on a modelling relation with a world would have to feel like something. How could it not feel like something to be a self engaged in a world in this feedback loop way?
If I turn my head, do I feel my head turn or does the world suddenly spin before me in alarming fashion?
Bayesian mechanics models that modelling relation for us. We build a world of intent and expectation in our heads so as to feel we are in control of the world instead of the world being in control of us. We insert our being into the world as the new centre of its being. Consciousness is the feeling of standing apart in ways that subjugate material reality to our mental whims. A difference between us and the world is what must be constructed so that there is then an us that can be deeply engaged in the flow of the world.
Cartesian representationalism reifies the self and its feels. It only sees the dualistic separation and not the triadic unity.
Quoting apokrisis
Do we build a world of intent and expectation in our heads or in our embodied patterns of material interaction with an environment? Whats the difference between a model and a representation, and the difference between both of these and the enacting of a world through sensori-motor coupling with an environment? Isnt normative point of view (intent and expectation) the hallmark of all living self-organizing systems rather than just conscious ones?
That would be the explanation from within experience. On the other hand, choosing to do things, finding them pleasant etc., are also neural activity. So, there is no ontological difference, but merely a descriptive and explanatory difference.
The latter is of course the deeper phrasing. :up:
Quoting Joshs
A model in the modelling relation sense is there as a machinery of semiotic control over the world. A model in the more usual sense like a plastic kitset Spitfire is indeed just a representation.
So I am making that sensori-motor coupling distinction. Bayesian mechanics is about how brains minimise the environment's capacity to surprise us.
It has all the energy. We have all the smarts. We learn to make it a predictable relation. And that is how we insert an "us" into "our world". That is how a modelling relation arrives at its biosemiotic Umwelt.
Quoting Joshs
Again, what else have I ever said? Humans even acting at the level of habit and automatism have that same hallmark. Metabolisms and societies too.
I don't think I have. I start to feel like a broken record here with how often I advocate for a metaphysics or phenomenology of process. I have long been a critic of representationalism and indirect realism, and an advocate of the semiotic model as a superior conceptual alternative. Descartes didn't invent the idea that we have experiences, this is a basic fact of life explored throughout the history of philosophy. "Why do some things have experiences and others do not appear to?" is not a question that only shows up if you suppose substance dualism. Even idealists of the sort that posit that everything is some sort of "process of mentation" feel the need to offer up some sort of explanation of why presumably stars are not conscious and people are (or else to claim stars are concious in a univocal way).
[Quote]
You can't get away from the primacy of the looks and feels. They have become what "must be explained".
[/quote]
Yes. Since this is generally proffered up as "the biggest open questions in human inquiry," I don't think I'm alone here.
I am not seeing how this is "closing the explanatory gap." This is presenting a certain sort of view of biology and physics, one I largely tend to agree with, at least in that is seems to get some things right, and then turning around to say "how could this not produce the experiences of a human?" IDK, I think most people studying conciousness would allow your core premises, but the idea that inner life of just the sort we have must follow from these premises doesn't seem to follow. At the very least the demonstration is extremely obscured because I can't even tell [I]why[/I] you seem to think the premises imply your conclusion. For instance, saying that we can distinguish between which complex systems are concious based on their possession of an "umwelt" and "self-interested" pursuit of goals just seems to point to terms that assume the very thing in question. It's like saying a drug "makes one sleepy because it possessed a hypnotic property."
What underlies conciousness just happens to line up with our naive intuitions about what sorts of things must have some sort of "inner life," because... "how couldn't it?." IMHO, this is a non-explanation, a hand wave on par with eliminative materialism or appeals to an unexplained "strong emergence." I don't see how this explanation avoids the problems of having group minds everywhere either, which is an ancillary concern, but still an important one.
I'm still not really sure what you're proposing. It seems like some sort of dual aspect theory where certain sorts of mechanism just "have to" produce certain sorts of experiences. But I've already pointed out why I think such explanations have some serious epistemic and evidentiary hurdles to clear, and I don't see how they are addressed here.
For what it's worth, the presentation seems to me a lot like most eliminitivism. You're presenting all sorts of facts and models, ones I largely find interesting and convincing, "good ways to think about things," and claiming all of this is evidence for your position vis-á-vis the explanatory gap. I don't see how it is, the idea that our experiences are just "how certain sorts of systems have to feel" just seems like assuming the conclusion as self-evident. If you want to to convince people (and maybe you don't, but surely most people don't think the explanatory gap has been solved) it might be helpful to lay out the core premises and how the conclusion is supposed to follow from them.
If I have not made the difficulties clear, I fortuitously has an article in my feed that brings up most of the same problems:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-consciousness-is-deeper-than-we-thought/
Except this article misses the epistemological challenges that follow on from lacking an explanation of psychophysical harmony since there is now also no good reason to think experience has to have anything to do with the mechanism underlying it. Evolutionary psychology generally simply assumes that qualia intersect with intentionality to play a causal role in behavior, which seems like a fine assumption since it seems to be constantly verified by experience, but it doesn't explain how this interaction occurs.
Quoting apokrisis
Im thinking of Merleu-Pontys position, where he states:
It seems to me that this deviates a bit from a modeling relation, in that it relies less on symbolization and coding , directed from organism to world, than to patterns of making changes in a world whose features are defined by the nature of that normative activity. Producing a world doesnt mean coding a world but performing one.
No. I can happily leave you with your self-proclaimed mystification.
But the claim is that this performance is based on a mechanism that connects. Take away genes, neurons, words and numbers, and what have you got? Can you still have your organism in a meaningful relation with its world?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think ones explanatory toolbox is limited by the choice to translate philosophical concepts into a naturalistic vocabulary. Im sure youre aware that the pansemiotic empirical notions involved in this discussion draw heavily from Peirces unique synthesis of Kant and Hegel. Assuming your familiarity with their work, would you say that Peirce or Hegel offer a solution to the explanatory gap?
Quoting Joshs
If neural activity just is mental activity, if the two are one thing seen from two different (and conceptually incompatible) perspectives, then there is no interaction between them, and thus no explanatory gap.
Sounds good as this is most surely the epistemic reality, but the claims folk want to make are ontological in the most basic way.
A "just neural activity" point of view is normally as guilty of avoiding the issue as a "I just know I have a mind from direct experience of it" point of view.
The explanatory gap is at least correct in pointing to the failure of the conventional reductionist model of causality employed by even well-meaning scientists. If you end up saying there is all this busy material complexity and ... hey presto, strong emergence! ... then you haven't solved the causal issue at hand.
That is why I set out Peirce's semiosis, Rosen's modelling relation, Pattee's epistemic cut and Friston's Bayesian mechanics as new models of causality that are not just generally holistic but deal directly with the question of how the two sides of the causal equation are joined in practice.
So what is on offer from biosemiosis is an explicit model of the mind~world relation as a self-organising or organismic causality. It speaks to mindful systems in the ontologically general sense.
Of course this then leaves non-science types dissatisfied as they want an specific account of their own phenomenology. They want not an account so general that it covers life and mind in any possible form within the constraints of our physical Big Bang universe, they want to have a science account of why their back itches right at this moment in the hard to put into words way that a back itches, but it must have been itching before you really noticed it, and then when you reach for the spot, it doesn't seem to be actually there, and it was also a little bit pleasurable while also rather annoying, and giving the skin a good dig with your fingers was painful, yet also better. Etc, etc.
So reductionist science falls short. But we can fix that with not just a more holistic model of causality but a completely specific general model of mindful organisms.
The trouble then is that this requires some very deep learning. It is hard work that takes a long time to relearn how to think and reason as a holist and not a reductionist, then as a semiotic holist and not just an ordinary "it emerges" one.
The lay person with an interest in "consciousness explained" has a very long road ahead. They can easily grasp why reductionism it just neurons firing is a causally inadequate account. But even crossing through a grounding thermodynamic level of physicalist holism is a journey too daunting. Biosemiosis may as well be from another planet.
Unfortunately, I lack the background in the kinds of disciplines you mentioned that would enable me to assess whether there has been or is likely to be any success in this enterprise.
So, I look to a simpler way of dissolving a conundrum which I see as arising our of what is for anyone lacking the fluency in the afore-mentioned disciples, an insoluble conceptual incompatibility.
So. I am not arguing that the physical is nothing but the mental or that the mental is nothing but the physical, but that these are two paradigmatic ways of describing and explaining the one thing, and that they are conceptually incommensurable (for most of us if not all of us).
Yes, but the explanation is partly "why do some things experience and not others?" So is the dual aspect supposed to hold for everything? For instance, there would be some sort of phenomena awareness for orange juice in a blender, a corpse, or water in a river?
If everything has this dual aspect, then there is still a question of why certain interactions give rise to certain experiences. There would be the question of why we have a phenomenal horizon at all, since everything experiences and there is constant interaction and a constant exchange of information, matter, energy, and causation across any boundary drawn up to demarcate a person. Presumably anesthetic would work by splitting the unified mind into a jumble of isolated minds? It doesn't seem like it can be turning off the universal dual aspect.
Whereas if everything doesn't have experiences then the gap is still there there is still the question: why does the living body have this dual aspect but not the corpse?
But we know what living organisms have that these things lack. An active semiotic modelling relation with world based on an encoding mechanism like, principally, a hierarchy of genes, neurons, words and numbers in the case of us socially-constructed humans.
This is the central fact you fail to engage with the way that life and mind are indeed mechanistic. A system of informational switches regulating entropic flows in the way anyone can recognise as being alive and mindful. Or in other words, constituting an organism.
But continue to talk past the epistemic cut that is what bridges the so-called explanatory gap...
Quoting Janus
Describing vs explaining is a good way of putting it. The would-be phenomenologist says I can describe, and you can't explain.
But my first psychophysics lecture flipped that one on its head. The professor explained Mach bands as a neural contrast enhancing and boundary making mechanism in the visual pathway. I walked out into the bright sunlight and looked up at the sharp edges of the tall buildings against the sky and for the first time noticed that these illusory contours were indeed right there.
So explanation led to the description the phenomenal experience. It showed that the causal gap had its proper bridge.
You just have to stick with it and bring the whole general show across with you. Arrive at a general explanation that grounds all such specific explanations. Develop a model of biosemiosis, the modelling relation, epistemic cut, Bayesian mechanics, or whatever it gets called.
These particular things do in fact make up the end result of "consciousness" but do not define themselves as the bare minimums to achieve such. Granted, based on that which is currently evidenced or "observable" with our consciousness would suggest ours is unique. But this, though reasonable and socially-acceptable, is not any argument-ending contention when it comes to philosophical inquiry.
There are positions that purport to go beyond the realism-anti-realism binary. Im thinking of poststructuralists
like Deleuze, Focault, Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that of course there are standards of right and wrong, true and false. These are like the banks of the river , which maintain their stable shape against the changing flow of the river. But they point out that the bank eventually erodes and changes, just like the river itself, but much more gradually. Perhaps the changes in the bank are so incremental that we dont notice them, ignoring the drift of sense over time of our formulations of moral goodness. What allows societies to function is not an unchanging foundational basis of the good, but shared intelligibilities and values within a contingent culture. One could say that mutual intelligibility is a foundational good , but the substantive content on which that intelligibility is based is contingent and relative.
Todd May is among those who claim that such thinking sneaks in ethical grounds through the back door:
What May and other critics dont appreciate is that criteria of acceptability are contingent products of differential relations within a community. The challenge for Deleuze and Foucault isnt to determine what constitutes an acceptable ethical content but to avoid getting trapped by any qualitatively contentful ethical principle.
what is at issue here is not how to promote the correct arrangements but how to assess whether an arrangement or practice, once promoted, is indeed active or reactive. In other words, the question is not one of how to achieve a goal, but one of deciding which goals are to be achieved.
The ethical question for poststructutalistsm is not whether and how we achieve just relations but whether and how we deal with the struggle between competing goods, how we manage to think beyond justice understood as singular traditions of the good, so that we can focus on enriching our traditions with alternative intelligibilities, thereby expanding the inclusiveness of our relational structures.
Hey, I'll be maybe a little blunt.
As often happens in this place, lots of opining on what is the case which purports itself as rational demonstration of what is affirmed. All fine and dandy. But I notice that nothing in your reply evidences the logical impossibility you so far assert and logical impossibility is not a matter of mere opinion last I checked. At least not in realms of philosophy.
To help things out, for your claim to hold any water, either demonstrate how any of the premises Ive provided are necessarily false and hence not feasible to use or else rationally demonstrate how the premises Ive provided can only result in the logical impossibility you so far yet claim. Without this, no logical impossibility is evidenced and you remain wrong in your affirmation by default.
Also, so we don't equivocate on the matter of what "purpose" means, purpose here is intended as "The end for which something is done, is made or exists." (reference) Do you hold something else in mind by the word?
In something like Neo-Platonism, then, the universe can be said to exists both because of and for the Good, where the Good / the One is the ultimate end, the ultimate end for which the universe exists - and, here, the universe is thereby purposeful, i.e. serves a purpose/end (note that the One is nevertheless not a purposer, not even an agent). And, tmk, no one has been able to evidence Neo-Platonism logically impossible to date.
Youve made a rather strong claim in saying that purpose sans purposer is logically impossible. So the impetus is now on you to rationally substantiate this claim by evidencing the logic necessary for obtaining this conclusion.
The explanatory gap is a problem for contemporary science and the way it has defined what a proper explanations must look like. I do not think it's a particularly important thing to solve in order to buy into (or reject) Hegel's philosophy of history, politics, concept development, etc. Ultimately, his project is to wrap the subjective and objective in a third category that includes both, since both must be real in some important respect. This project is accomplished (or fails) upstream of considerations of some objective explanation of the emergence of Giest in Nature, at least at the level of scientific modeling.
Hegel certainly has something to say about mechanistic accounts along the lines of Newton's, which only result in predictive models and cannot explain their own necessity so in some ways he is offering a critique of some types of scientific explanation that could be relevant to the "explanatory gap." I think changes in the philosophy of physics have perhaps made Hegel's critique a bit less relevant, although it certainly holds for some sorts of explanation.
:chin: Is there half of an intentional act? Tornadoes have no internal means of continuing to exist, which organisms do.
Actually, theres a question Ive been meaning to ask you (in particular). I was exploring the idea that a characteristic of classical physics was that it is indifferent to context. It concentrates on ideal objects - objects which have precisely measurable attributes, without taking into account environmental disturbances or other circumstances which are less than ideal. Because of this abstraction, its reckonings are universal - they apply to any ideal object anywhere in the universe. But, the point which forced itself on science with the advent of quantum physics, was that context actually meant something. Why? Because the outcome of the experiement depends on the way it is set up - set it up one way, the result is a wave, set it up another way, the result is a particle. So context begins to matter. And this becomes evident also in environmental science and systems science generally, because the environment is a context. And it seems to me that is a major shift that has occured in 20th century science.
Thats all I wanted to ask.
Interview with Friston on Curt Jaimungul's Theories of Everything.
My point was that the basic issue is self-organisation. Reductionist science had the metaphysics that order is random accident. Religion said order was in the mind of God. Thermodynamics became the basis for a new metaphysics of nature as self-organising.
So a tornado is an example of nature being rather lively in this self-organising fashion the "intentionality" that we can grant a dissipative structure. Aspects of the physical world can organise themselves so as to run down entropic gradients. A tornado has in its "body" its localised vortex the information needed to persist and take its next self-reconstructing step across some pressure/temperature gradient.
So we don't have to start life and mind from the reductionist position of a physical world which has zero self-organisation. There is self-organisation in a vortex in the sense that there is information a memory that constrains the dynamics. There is the beginning of the semiotic distinction the epistemic cut which bridges our reductionist notion of "the naked physics" and an organism with a purposeful informational model of its world.
In that sense of the physics already being self-organising, we are half-way there with the physical potentials that a modelling organism then harnesses for it ends.
Yes, I suppose I can see that.
Explain to me how the notion, not to mention the imputation, of purpose makes sense in the absence of an agent that purposes. The issue here is coherence not possibility. In other words, you need to be able to say what you mean by ascribing purpose to the cosmos as a whole before worrying about whether or not you can find an argument or evidence to support your ascription.
There is a post on another thread which you've so far not addressed. Still, as to explanation: if there is an un-created and imperishable ultimate end for the sake of which X does this and that, then there will be purpose that was not created by a purposer. BTW, this ultimate end can be a grand "heat death" just as much as it can be "the Good". If all things mover toward their end, then purpose occurs.
I'll in turn ask, how can a purposer bring about a purpose A in the absence of an end/purpose Z by which the purposer is teleologically determined in so bringing about purpose A. Would not any such act be instead utterly devoid of purpose, hence intent/end-pursued and, hence, in no way intentional/purposive?
At any rate, I'll sign off for now.
It seems easy to talk about ends, "biological function," constraints, or equilibrium in a way that doesn't require an agent. This is how a teleology of sorts if often still included in the natural sciences.
However, I think you raise an excellent point. Are these sort of "ends" univocally related to the "ends" or "purposes" of agents? I'm inclined to say the similarity is only analogous. It isn't completely equivocal, but it certainly isn't univocal either.
Going back on my word to myself and taking the time to post:
Hmm, I was under the impression that @Janus was strictly concerned with how it might be coherent for global purpose to occur without a purposers imposition, to not say creation, of a global purpose in the world. Very much akin the Watchmaker argument as concerns God making a purposeful world (which would not be purposeful in any way sans a purposive God). In an attempt to further address my best current understandings of this:
In here assuming the reality of the Good in a strictly Neoplatonic framework, as example, is the Good/the One the (purposeful) creation of some creator (which thereby holds an altogether different end in mind in so creating the Good) or, else, an uncreated and imperishable, else metaphysically immovable, end that applies to all at least corporeal beingsthis just as much as it would apply to all incorporeal beings (from ghosts/apparitions to gods) were the latter to in any way occur?
Furthermore, is not the Good within this framework expressed as that which either directly or indirectly determines all that does and can exist? Hence not only all of lifes evolutionary transformations and behaviors but all that is deemed to be purely physical as well?
In a Neoplatonic framework, that a rock might here have purpose (an ultimate end toward which it moves, however incrementally) does not then either entail that the rock has any form of intention or that its purpose (hence, end toward which it progresses) in the grand scheme of things was intended by anyonebe such someone either corporeal (human) or incorporeal (god).
Human agents have historically held onto myriad types of final ends for their own being: e.g., from the nihility which corporeal death is supposed to bring, this as the final end pursued by those who seek to free themselves of their suffering via suicide; to the notion of immortality in the form of a literally perfect (and hence eternal) self-preservation as that end to be striven for (with some transhumanist ideals as one modern example of this); to the yearning to become the uncontested top-dog, so to speak, of all that is and surrounds; or, as one here last given example, the eternal paradise of a Christian Heaven wherein one eternally dwells as unperishing ego devoid of any and all suffering, maybe with a harp in hand, under the omnipotent guidance of a superlative ego as creator of everything that is. But then, these many human-devised concepts of a final end to be yearned for and pursuedthis together with that Neoplatonic notion of an absolute unity/henosis with the Oneare most often logically contradictory. Such that, logically at least, not all of them can be true, else real, else correct, and hence right (not at least at the same time and in the same respect).
Of note, it is humans evolved intellect which facilitates humans abilities to envision the many such disparate final ends of personal being. Frogs dont do this too well (or rather at all). So it seems that the greater the intelligence/sapience, the greater too the ability to either align to or else deviate from that which isin a Neoplatonic frameworka fixed final end and an absolute good (to one's personal being included). In parallel, frogs cant willfully deceive others and their own selves anywhere near as much as humans canbut then, neither can they apprehend as many truths regarding reality.
So, to my best current understanding, in a modern and more analytically cogent model yet upholding the Neoplatonic understanding of the Good as final end, the Good would then need to account in one way another for all these discordant various final ends which human agencies can, and at times have, aimed toward. This while also holding a cogent explanation for why these various other conceivable ultimate ends are in fact untrue, else unreal, else incorrect, and hence wrongand, so, are in fact bad ends to pursue or else progress toward. This while furthermore likewise making sense of why the physical world as we empirically know it occurs. Hence, the Goodjust as ancient Neoplatonism maintains (and as was at the very least linguistically echoed in Aristotelian metaphysicsmust then be the unmoved (undetermined and, hence, unlimited) mover (determiner; else, in Aristotelian terms, final cause) of all that in any way is and can existentially be. Itself, as the final end yet to be obtained, being beyond both existence and nonexistence.
And yet the Good in this Neoplatonic framework (as in so many others) cannot be a purposer (at least not as I take the term to have been so far implied by Janus: an ego which purposefully creates and thereby endows purpose): it hence is in no way an ego that can be disappointed or happy in its attempts to bring anything about by striving to itself obtain some end. The Good as final end is of itself not purposeful, but instead merely is. And, in so being, it reputedly endows purpose to everything else both sentient and insentient via any number of means. Via at least some of these means, this will then logially need to include all false final ends that intelligent enough sentience might seek to actualize.
It seems that this is where one starts philosophically questioning what in fact is the genuine and good final end that one ought to do ones best to pursue/intend/remain aligned to (for one's own benefit of minimizing one's overall suffering). This just as one deliberates between going leftward or rightward at a given crossroads but, here, regarding metaphysical notions of final ends to ones existence that maximally, if not fully, satisfy all of ones wants (and, hence, all of ones intents).
While I dont in this post want to write a thesis on my best current understandings regarding a Neoplatonic notion of the One/the Good, in short, there obviously are different final ends which people can both envision and actively choose to pursue this as a guiding factor to our more immediate (needless to add, intentional) decisions. But, logically at least, this array of contradicting final ends we can envision as a humanity then necessarily consists of at least some erroneous conceptualizations of where our being ends. And in assuming there being the Neoplatonic the Good as fixed final end, the Good, aka the One, then necessarily needs to account for all end/purposes that can in any way existentially occurboth those pertaining to sentient beings (deities included where they to occur) and to insentient physicality, both those aligned with the actualization of the One/the Good and those which deviate from this.
Of course, deny the very possibility of the Good/the One being real and all this goes down the toilet. Obviously. But where the possibility is entertained, there will then necessarily and coherently be a global purpose which occurs in the absence of anyone or anything producing and hence creating this global, or else cosmic, purpose - but instead being in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, bound to it.
My current best two cents worth regarding this issue of a possible global purpose sans global purposer.
Ive noted in Richard Dawkins polemics the distinction between real and apparent design. This is crucial to him, of course, because purposelessness is central to his books such as Unweaving the Rainbow and The Blind Watchmaker. According to this view, what appears to us as marvellously designed in nature, really is due to the accretion of many incremental changes that occur over immense time-scales giving rise to what he calls the appearance of design. I wonder if that is also analogous to the discussion here about the nature of purpose, and whether there is any real purpose sans an intentional agent to enact it, as the same considerations will apply here also.
Now the question I have for Dawkins (and feel free to answer on his behalf if so inclined) is that, does his view entail that the only real designs are those created by humans, as humans are, to our knowledge, the only intentional designers that we know of? That does appear a consequence of his view.
Given that Dawkins is a committed naturalist, it seems there might be a fundamental discontinuity in positing that human intentionality, a product of natural evolution, creates 'real' design, while natural processes can only produce 'apparent' design. How do we reconcile this distinction with a naturalistic view that sees humans and their capabilities as entirely natural phenomena, while at the same time denying that nature herself displays or generates designs as such?
It might be argued that human intentionality and the ability to design are emergent properties of complex natural systems. In this sense, human design is an advanced form of the same natural processes that create the appearance of design in nature. But in that case, it is contradictory to declare that design in nature is only apparent, as it is the basis of the human ability to design, which is made manifest in us, but is at least real as a potential in many natural forms.
This is why I keep going back to the question - does the assertion of the existence of purpose (or design or intention) in nature, necessarily imply that there must be a purposeful agency other than human agency? Because it seems the inevitable entailment of such a claim. Likewise, the requirement that Dawkins has to deny the intentionality of design in nature stems from his atheist philosophy.
It's easy: we understand ourselves self-reflectively to be capable of planning and deliberately designing things, and under the normal usage for there to be design implies an agent, such as ourselves, capable of planning and deliberately designing.
I think it does: you seem to presume that under the assumption of naturalism we could never have become the kinds of self-reflective agents who can deliberately plan and design things for a purpose. If that is your objection, then what is your argument against that being impossible under the assumption of naturalism? If that is not your objection, then what is?
So you would agree with the statement all design is artificial?
A number of your core points agree with my understanding. The Good is ultimately that towards which all rational natures strive, so there aren't so much "multiple final ends," as there are "multiple conceptions on how best to achieve the Good." E.g., the person who advances towards what they think will bring annihilation does so because they think annihilation will be "good" in a sense.
Aristotle has it that the Prime Mover must be an intellectual nature. Where Neoplatonism saw its most expansive development was in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition, and there the One was always a person (or three persons of one substance). But these developments (which predate, and to some degree influenced Plotinus via folks like Philo, Clement, and Origen"Middle Platonists") throw in another sort of difficulty in the form of the Analogia Entis. Here, all predication involving infinite being and the Divine Nature threatens another sort of consuming equivocity; at best we can hope for analogy.
But if we consider the Platonic vision of Calcidius, the harmoniously ordered cosmos of Dante, or the "symphony of the spheres," heard by Cicero's Scipio, we seem to be led back to the ends pursued by mindless entities in that these are ultimately ordered to a greater end by the "super intellect," of the super intelligible (e.g. Pseudo Dionysus). The ultimate ordering of finite ends turns on a single point, God "boiling over in love," (Meister Eckhart) and producing a "moving image of eternity," in which the creature can become free and freely pursue the Good.
Of course, the "free creatures" are part of this cosmic ordering, and themselves strive towards the same Good. And to the extent they are free, they pursue this Good as opposed to some merely relative or counterfeit good. So while we have three apparent "levels" here: mindless thing's finite ends, the ends of finite agents, and the Good itself to which all existence is orderer and in which it "moves and has its being" (Book of Acts), they all end up being deeply related.
But I was thinking of the question more in terms of the modern "naturalistic" conception. Perhaps this is a bad frame from which to approach this question precisely because it seems to make the "ends" of "physical systems" and the "purposes" of agents either entirely equivocal, or else too univocal, the latter just collapsing into the former, agents themselves being mere "mechanism all the way down."
Again, my best current appraisals:
I honestly felt no need to read much of Dawkins beyond a thorough reading of The Selfish Gene, in which it is clear to me that he values the immortality of existent being as an end-state above all else, for he equates that which is most immortal existentially (in his interpretation, this being genes) with that which is most quintessential to existence hence, in at least a metaphorical sense, the very selfishness of existents by which this immortality is deemed obtainable (obviously, in his writing, this by genes alone; which, in his perspectives, serve to determine all aspects of life).
He notoriously concluded this same thesis by affirming that, We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Also stipulating things such as: "We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world." Wherein one can quite clearly find an implicit affirmation of an ontological dualism between nature and us, this even though us is deemed fully determined by the underlying nature.
And all this, on a logical and hence rational level, is utter rubbish. Our innate nature in totality is X as determined in full by our set of selfish/immortal genes, but we must then rebel against this very innate nature which materialistically determines all that we do and hold the possibility to do so as to be or else become ethical. How so? Rationally speaking. What one ought do or become cannot be logically obtained in any way whatsoever if it is not in any way allowed as a logically possibility in the very metaphysical principles one endorses.
So far, upon first reading, it seems to me that the issue of intentionality (here only addressing intentioning) you bring up regarding Dawkins' views directly parallels this same type of erroneous reasoning that he makes in the Selfish Gene, resulting in what to me is an absurd worldview.
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I'd also like to point out that there can often occur much equivocation between design, intention, and purpose, this among so called experts (such as Dawkins) and layperson alike. May I be corrected on any of this if need be:
Design, in one way or another, always pivots around the notions of de- (in the sense of from or of) and sign. As one example, a designed table will de-sign-ate the intention(s) of that which designed it at least to those others capable of understanding these intentions. And, so, designs are always intentional. (Hence, a non-intentional design so far to me makes no sense.)
Intention, on the other hand, will always imply a straining, augmentation, and/or effort of some given X to actualize an as of yet unactualized future intent/endhence, Xs effort to make real something that is not yet real as the end pursued in the given intentioning.
Lastly, purpose is of itself merely the end toward which something moves in an Aristotelian notion of movement. As one Aristotelian example, the seeds end is that of fully developing into a mature adult.
Hence, while all designs will be intentional and all intentions will be purposeful, this in no way entails that purpose must consist of intentions or, else, that intentions must result in designs. E.g., the purpose of a heart is to pump blood, but this in no way then implies that nature intentionally brought about the occurrence of a heartand, hence, one cannot then validly affirm that nature (necessarily, intentionally) designed a heart for the purpose of pumping blood. Moreover, say that ones intension (hence motive; hence reason) in moving leftward at a crossroad was to most effortlessly arrive at the market one wants to make purchases atbut this in no way implies that one thereby necessarily designed anything in so intending to move leftward.
So, that all design necessarily stems from some intentioning psyche (that thereby holds some intent in mind and, hence, some purpose/end/intent in so designing) will in no way then entail that all possible forms of purpose are necessarily designed (this by an intentioning X, where X is almost always understood to be a mind-endowed-agency).
Therefore, at least when logically appraised, nature can well be globally purposeful without this purpose having been in any way designed by anyone or anything.
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Id also be grateful for clarity as to what precisely differentiates modern metaphysical naturalism (as compared to, say, natural-ism as intepreted by ancient Stoics via their notion of Logos, to which even the polytheistic gods, were they to occur, are necessarily boundthis, for example, as expressed by Cicero in his The Nature of the Gods, which I deem far more accurate than any modern day rendition of what Stoicism used to be and uphold) with modern metaphysical materialism.
More to the point, from what I so far gather, modern metaphysical naturalism rejects the very notion of ontologically occurring purposethis just as materialism/physicalism does. E.g.:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)
(But to be forthright, I so far find that naturalism is to nature as objectivism is to objectivity. Meaning that, so far to me, it is as wrongheaded to assume that nature ought to be defined by the tenets of (modern metaphysical) naturalism as it is to assume that objectivity is in any way adequately defined by the tenets of (the obviously modern notions of) objectivism.)
As an apropos to this:
Although maybe not with as much detail as you might be, Im of course aware of the historical evolution of concepts in relation to Plotinus the One and the Abrahamic (in many a way, biblical) notion of Godwhereby the two otherwise quite disparate concepts were converged, tmk not by the Neoplatonists but by Abrahamic philosophers.
Tying this in with parts of my previous post, while Ive so far upheld the possibility of global purpose sans a global creator of such purpose, Ill now do my best to make the far more stringent argument that the ancient Neoplatonic notion of the One is logically incompatible with the Abrahamic notion of God as an omni-this-and-that I-ness, hence ego, hence psyche, hence (given the incorporeality and absolute supremacy of the aforementioned attribute(s)) deity.
For the sake of brevity, Ill here simply address all these differently termed attributes mandatory to an (I should add, non-mystical) understanding of the Abrahamic God as the supreme deity or SD for short.
This will be contrasted with the bona fide Neoplatoic notion of the Good which was also termed the One in Neoplatonism, which Ill here address as TD for short.
(Not that I hold the acronyms "SD" and "TD" in high regard, but maybe their use will dispel some of the connotative baggage that might, for some at large, cloud the intended logic with emotive overtones.)
All this will assume reasoning via logic, and thereby dispel any notion of SD being this way and that way in manners that are beyond, and hence unconstrained, by basic laws of thought. In other words, the affirmation that SD is beyond all human comprehension but is nevertheless the way that such and such interprets (obviously, human written) biblical scripture, even when these interpretations of the bible are blatantly contradictory logically (e.g., that SD is literally omnipotent but was however not in control of the not-yet-slithering serpents doings in the garden of Eden; else, that SD is omnipresent but was nevertheless limited to bipedal form separated from the earth upon which he walked when walking through the garden of Eden; etc.) will here be fully eschewed in favor of upholding a stringent logical consistency.
1) Either SD behaves (does things) in a) fully purposeless manners or else in b) at least partly purposeful manners. (There can be no in-between state of affairs relative to these two options.)
2) If (1.a.), then SD is in no way governed by any telos which SD pursues in anything that SD does. Because here there is never any intent (this being one possible form of a telos) actively held onto and pursued, this further entails that SD never does anything intentionally. Because SD then does not engage in any intentional behaviors whatsoever, SD cannot then design anything whatsoever. Here, then, SD cannot impart any type of purpose to anything.
3) If (1.b.), then SD is governed by at least one telos which SD deems worthy of fulfilling (i.e., deems beneficial and thereby good). Because it is a telos (which SD understands as good), this strived for end cannot be yet actualized by SD while SD holds it as intent and thereby purposefully behaves. Moreover, and more importantly, this intent via which SD behaves purposefully cannot have logically been created by SD for, in so purposefully creating, SD will necessarily have yet been striving toward some telos (a yet unactualized future state of being) which SD deemed to be good. A purposeful SD will hence, logically, at all times be moving toward that which is (deemed to be) good without yet having actualized it as SDs intent/enda moved toward intent/end which is logically requite for SD to create anything purposively (very much the creation of so termed everything) and, hence, which cannot be the (purposeful) creation of SD. Hence, in (1.b.) one then logically obtains the following necessary consequence: SD is forever subject to (and constrained by, hence limited by, hence determined by) an intent which SD deems good which SD nevertheless in no way created.
Here assuming (1.b.) for SD, contrast this to TD as defined by genuine Neoplatonism:
TD is that end which, directly or indirectly, ultimately determines all things (including all psyches, with this terminology yet grounded in process theory understandings of things and psyches, and, as reminder, with all deities being by definition incorporeal psyches, very much including SD) without being in itself in any way limited, hence without being in any way determined by something othersuch as, for example, some telos which it itself approaches.
This, in and of itself, I so far take to logically demonstrate the incongruity of the two notions: that of the Neoplatonic TD and the Abrahamic SD.
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Somewhat related to this, TD is take to of itself be the metaphysical pinnacle of intellectthis only in so far as intellect is addressed in the sense of understanding, but is in no way an intellect in the sense of that which understands, or else holds any capacity to understand, other. The latter notion of intellect can only pertain to an I-ness/ego/psyche, something that can only occur in a duality to othernessand something which by entailment applies to SD in variant (1.b.), for, here, SD holds of an understanding of the intent which SD deems good which SD seeks to eventually actualize, and end whish is thereby logically other relative to the creating/designing SD. Whereas TD as the absolute pinnacle of understanding is utterly devoid of any and all othernessi.e., is completely and perfectly non-dualisticand so cannot logically be a psyche/ego/I-ness.
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All this was written in relative haste. But I wanted to post this now, just in case it might be replied to. In short, as far as I so far find, the distinction between the Good and the (non-mystical) Monotheistic God (for mystical notions often enough do not assume God to be a psyche, i.e. personhood) is amply clearand this in manners that make the two notions logically inconsistent with each other. Unless, maybe, one would like to assume some form of a Demiurge as SD which is itself yet bound by TD, i.e. to the (uncreated) Good.
If logical inconsistencies in what Ive just written are found, Id be grateful for being shown where these logical fallacies might occur.
p.s., as to the issue of natural ends of naturalism, Im again unclear on what nature and natural are here expected to signify outside of s straightforward materialism/physicalismwhich I, as always, disagree with.
As an aside, intellectual is a very poor translation for what I take to be the intended meaning. Intellectuals are stuffy fellows - theyre nearly always fellows - discussing arcane conceptions. It conveys none of the dynamism (a philosophical term that has its origin in Aristotle) that the word is really meant to convey. Its more like the pleroma, a endless and timeless fount and source, the source of intelligibility which gives rise to everything and which reason is able to grasp (hence the divinity of the intellect in Aristotelian philosophy.)
Quoting javra
Because it seeks explanations in terms of physics, in which the notion of reason in the sense of the reason for is excluded. Even the physicalists sense of spirit is like that - it seeks to understand it as some kind of ethereal thing, rather than as being, which is what we are, not an object of analysis. Too near for us to grasp.
Very much so. And it likewise also fails to account for the basic principles/laws of thought upon which all formal systems of logic and the supposed coherency of modern day naturalism (here being a full synonym for physicalism(s)) are necessarily founded - this as though these very principles/laws of thought ubiquitous to all sentience (consciously so or otherwise) were to themselves be in some way utterly unnatural (but instead strictly artificial, as in being a human artifice) due to not being themselves accountable for in terms of modern day physics.
And this un-naturalism of basic principles/laws of thought will equally apply to traditional materialism and to all modern-day variants (e.g. those making due with information theory, thermodynamics, and the like).
This logically derived un-naturalism of laws of thought can in turn be found to undermine the very reasoning by which this derivation is obtained as being a factual state of affairs - at the very least in so far as this very derivation (necessarily, via laws of thought) makes all reasoning perfectly, or else radically, relativistic.
And it likewise stands in stark contrast with interpretations of natural-ism such as those I've previously alluded to here:
Quoting javra
For, in this just quoted example, the laws of thought are part and parcel of the very Logos from which the world is both built and construed - and, hence, are an integral part of what is deemed "natural" (aka, in-born, hence innate, and this relative to the cosmos itself) in the fullest sense of the term. (But, as noted, this latter ancient Stoic notion of natural-ism fully accommodates the possible reality of, for example, polytheistic deities as being aspects of Nature at large, to not here get into the notion of "spirit", as in its place relative to the anima mundi (aka, the "world soul").)
There more back and forth than is commonly realized. Jewish and Christian Platonism was already well established in Alexandria generations before Plotinus (e.g. Philo). The great early Christian scholar Origen was an older contemporary of Plotinus and it's not implausible that they were in the same circles since there were only so many educated people, even in a larger city like Alexandria.
A lot of Plotinus also seems quite similar to Gnostic Christian theology that was popular in Alexandria both prior to and during his lifetime. Unfortunately, we don't have much exact history to go on here so it's unclear if these ideas were just "in the air," or if Plotinus specifically borrowed them and then attempted to reify them and remove the specific Christian and Jewish context. Certainly though, the different strains of Platonism being discussed in the city had to influence each other over the years. In many ways the triumph of orthodox Christianity was also a triumph of a certain brand of neoplatonism over competing gnostic and "pagan" forms.
Unfortunately, I think this is really misunderstanding the Christian tradition. It's premised on violations of God's eternal nature, divine simplicity, the Doctrine of Transcendentals, and really the Analogia Entis as well.
God can't be striving towards things "before and after." God is absolutely simple, not stretched out time. The whole of God is always present to God's self (divine simplicity implies eternal existence, "without begining or end," not simply "everlasting.")
Goodness is a transcendental property of being along with Truth, Beauty, and Unity. But God is being itself Deus est ensand in God (and only in God) is existence part of essenceIpsum Esse Subsistens. God [I]is[/I] goodness itself.
You're proposing a sort of voluntarism that I think will only make sense in a sort of post-Reformation frame where the Neoplatonic assumptions of the Patristics are intentionally stripped out, the univocity of being is asserted, etc. I think they would be more than happy to agree with you that their God is not "the God of the philosophers," but this itself is a radical break from the Patristics tradition.
Moreover, they would would deny the existence of TD since the Good is defined purely in terms of God's unfathomable will. But such conceptions are decidedly modern.
I didnt intend to here present that stringent of an argument but, yes, I at least so far find the notion of a Divinely Simple, etc., God who in any way intends (needless to add, this purposefully) any X whatsoever to be self-contradictory:
One can always fall back on God is beyond all human notions of logic, including the basic laws of thought, and hence beyond all human comprehension, but if God is nevertheless understood as having intended and/or intending anything whatsoever then there necessarily is some end/purpose not yet actualized which God strives toward in so intending - hence making Gods actions purposeful - and this will then be blatantly incongruous with the notion of Divine Simplicity, among others.
Divine Simplicity, however, is necessarily applicable to, as one example, the Neoplatonic notion of the One - which is not a god although theres nothing precluding the One from being appraised as the pinnacle of Divinity upon which all else is dependent and, in this sense alone, as G-d/God (such that the sometimes heard of aphorism of God = Good can here make rational sense).
As just one possible example, this one from Jewish tradition:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_simplicity#Jewish_thought
This is (or at least can be) in full rational accord with the notion of the One as described by Neoplatonism (the Neoplatonic descriptions of cosmology here placed aside) and, again, is fully discordant rationally to the notion of God as an intending superlative deity.
As to possible commonalities between diverse traditions - here primarily addressing the Neoplatonic notion of the One and some subspecies of Abrahamic thought - if there is a perennial philosophy, then this would account for different traditions' diverse interpretations of the same Divinely Simple, uncreated and imperishable, essence which, to here use Aristotle's terminology, is the unmoved/unmovable (i.e., changeless) mover (i.e., change-producer) of all that exists. Although, as I previously argued, this could not rationally be an intentioning God (e.g., God as described in the Torah/Bible, imv most especially as addressed in Genesis II onward).
But this is profoundly misunderstanding the classical tradition, Thomism, etc. Pace Maimonides, who only recognizes the via negativa and apophatic theology, the Christian tradition generally, and Thomism in particular, is based around analogical predication vis-á-vis the divine nature (to be sure though, the entire Christian tradition is heavily affected by Pseudo-Dionysus' apophatic theology, and Plotinus' comments on unknowing would fit right in with St. John of the Cross or the anonymously written Cloud of Unknowing). There is no retreat into total equivocity, at least not in influential thinkers. In fact, this is what the tradition is at pains to deny, and this is still a focus of Catholic thought (as set against some Protestant theologians), e.g. Pryzwara, Ulrich, Balthazar, etc.
Probably the biggest influence Plotinus had on the Christian tradition was his conception of divine freedom, so I am not sure how these are supposed to be completely opposed on your view. Pseudo Dionysus certainly builds on this conception of divine freedom, but it remains the same at heart. The entire idea of "an end lying outside of God," and "an end God strives towards," requires knocking out core premises in the classical tradition in the first place.
For example, on a comparison of the view best embodied in Plotinus, Proclus, and Porphery:
If anything, it is Plotinus' whose views trend closer to the voluntarism that would come to dominate some strands of Protestant theology after the Reformation. Not that it trends close to it, but the seeds are there and St. Denys is at pains to walk back those elements (St. Maximus as well).
The source of freedom, the One, cannot simply be lacking in freedom (see: 6.8.7.4246), and pure arbitrariness is not freedom. Hence "ends," although Plotinus, and the classical Christian tradition, understand these analogically.
You don't need an appeal to perennial philosophy, Plotinus grew up in a hotbed of Jewish and Christian Platonism. IIRC he was coming of age as Origen and Clement were at the height of their influence and they themselves are dealing seriously with the Gnostics, who are also big in Alexandria at the time (Gnosticism existing within orthodox churches to a large extent). The ideas are all in the milieu Plotinus is growing up in and being educated in, and of course there were pagan Platonists exchanging ideas with these traditions the whole time as well. But some Gnostic texts strike me very much as "Neoplatonism predating neoplatonism, just heavily mythologized."
Ignoring your placing God in time again (which violates divine simplicity and would be vigorously rejected by pagans and Jews/Christians alike), on this view none of the major Neoplatonists are Neoplatonists.
I'm not here arguing for (nor for that matter against) "classical tradition". I'm simply arguing for lucidity in thought via cogent reasoning and, if provided, accurate references (see below).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Hmm, Plotinus states verbatim in the Enneads that (all underlines and boldface are mine):
Quoting from Enniads 5.3.1.
Firstly, the Divine Intellect is clearly not equivalent to the One.
And, as far as I can make out, the Ones seeking nothingi.e., not being in search or in want of anything whatsoeveris at direct odds with the actuality of a will (cf., https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/will). Ones will or, more formally termed, volition is the sum of one's intentions (be the conscious or unconscious), with intentions necessarily holding an intent/end/purpose aimed at in order to so be intentioning. Because of this, to will is necessarily to seek the fulfilment of some telos or teloi. If there is no telos-fulfillment sought, there can be no will.
Is there some other sense of will you understanding wherein purpose is, at the very least, not a necessary condition of the wills occurrence? (A purpose-devoid willing?)
But, because I so far cant think of any such understanding of the term will, I can only then find the passage youve quoted to utterly misinterpret what Plotinus quite directly affirms (as per the above quote) in putting into Protinus's mouth terms such as (supposedly the One's, right?) "absolute self-will". The One (for that matter, this much like the typically understood Buddhist notion of Nirvana) is in want of nothing, hence devoid of any intent not yet fulfilled, and, thereby, fully devoid of volition, aka will, this as will can in any way apply to the "Intellectual-Principle".
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But please reference the translation of Plotinus youve quoted. I ask because it is utterly discordant to the translations Im so far aware of. Contrast it, for example, with these two online translations here and here. So much so that your translation reads as though its from a different authors different book.
In context:
Quoting Enniads 6.8.7.
BTW, to be clear, it is the last paragraph of the quoted section on which the previously mentioned divergences occur.
But again, the Good is again blatently not equivalent to the Intellectual Principle, but is instead that which the Intellectual Principle seeks as end/telos. Willing (freely or otherwise) is not done by the One / the Good (for the One seeks nothing whatsoever), but by the Intellectual Principle as it's here in part addressed, and this in its seeking of the Good.
Can you reference anything out of the Enniads directly that would, within its proper context, contradict what is here stated in the two quotes, or else in my own evaluations regarding the One?
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As to the notion of freedom in and of itself, the One is affirmed to be devoid of any and all limitsi.e., absolutely unbounded, else in no way constrained, by anything whatsoever (it is in-finite in this literal and non-mathematical sense). I know of no other more accurate or literal description of an absolute, hence perfect and complete, freedom. Do you?
But as to the Christian doctrine of divine freedom which affirms God to have free will which Christ himself had about as much to say as he did the Trinity (Christian doctrine proper, with its Trinity included, being first introduced in the First Council of Nicaea, this 325 years after Christs death):
Please explain how the very notion of free will (however one might choose to interpret the term) can hold any cogency in the complete absence of intention, hence purpose, hence telos one seeks to fulfill.
Ps. Im here asking for cogent reasoning, preferably yours, and not for the questionable opinions of others regarding the matter.
Yup, that's the basics of the cosmology and the hypostases. Nous is the result of the One's vision of itself. In turning toward itself The One sees. It is this seeing that constitutes The Intelligence (1.7)
The difficulty for St. Augustine in digesting this cosmology is that Nous, which is quite similar to the Christian Logos, e.g. in Origen (or the Barbel? in Gnosticism) is obviously not coequal with the One. This ultimately is what leads to Augustine's rejection of the hierarchical model for a semiotic triad as the model of the Holy Trinity.
First, because Plotinus is engaged in [I]analogical[/I] predication and sort of "pointing" as opposed to "describing," he frequently affirms and the negates his affirmations. As he says early on, the truth of what he says is to be found in contemplation not discursive reasoning. Nonetheless, simplicity does not imply a total equivocity of all words, else his project would make no sense.
To embrace an absolute via negativa, to say that nothing of God can be said except that God is not anything, is itself to slip into the very sort of total equivocity you yourself seem to point out as inappropriate.
Second, is your contention that the One is completely devoid of all intentionality and that simplicity demands that it be thought of as an almost mechanistic principle, devoid of any content since any content would introduce limit? Does Nous possess something positive that the One lacks?
I don't feel like arguing something completely at odds with Plotinus entire metaphysics. Even at the level of the Intellectual Principle, the thinker is the same as the thought, and the knower is the same as the known, transcending any distinction between Being and Knowing. Parmenides' "the same is for thinking is for being," sits at the heart of Plotinus' metaphysics and epistemology.
I don't mean to be rude but have you actually read the entire Enneads or any secondary literature on Plotinus? There seems to be a lot of modern assumptions packed into your thoughts here about the difference between thinking and being, a divorce of intentionality and existence, that simply do not make any sense in Plotinus. Something like Perl's "Thinking Being," could help explain the profound difference between Plotinus and the implicit dualism that pervades modern thought when it comes to intentionality.
Anyhow, consider the entire discussion of divine freedom in 6.8. At 6.8.3 Plotinus discusses freedom in created beings. Freedom can't be just doing what one desires, else infants would be free. Freedom is proper to the intellect, one must know what one wills and why one wills. Plotinus uses Oedipus killing his father out of ignorance as an example; here Oedipus is determined by a truth that lies outside his understanding.
But then Plotinus brings up a problem very similar to the one you have raise. If one is determined, by nature, by the Good, then is one truly free? For here the Good striven for must lie outside the person, or even for the Good itself, it seems it would be unfree in that it acts "according to its nature." But Plotinus rejects this objection, and he rejects it particularly for the Intellectual Principle (which as we shall see applies for the Good itself as well).
This seems to be Plotinus rejecting your argument tout court.
Now if we take the modern view of freedom/will where both are defined in terms of potency, we may run into difficulties here. But Plotinus is not laboring under the idea that will is primarily potency and must be driven externally into act. Act and being are united in 6.8.7:
I don't know how you read this to imply "the Good lacks all intentionality." It says the opposite and is essentially refuting your argument. Other things seek the Good, the Good intends itself. Why do you think he is at pains to show that Act and Being are not separate?
The objection that "because the Good is a unity and unique it can intend nothing," is called absurd here. To be sure, words are imperfect, but "since we must use words here," Plotinus speaks of Being united to Act.
A God that intends nothing is an idiot God. It is not a free God (at least not for Plotinus who defines freedom primarily in terms of intellection not potency). It would essentially mindless mechanism.
Whereas a God who lacks intentionality would seemingly lack being on Plotinus view of being. Or if we cannot say it has intentionality because of a total equivocity that no analogy can span, then what exactly is Plotinus talking about in his entire project?
You presented an argument about "Christianity" and "Neoplatonism" in general. I happen to be very familiar with the classical Christian tradition and some later medieval philosophy. I pointed out that you are making assumptions that these traditions would absolutely reject.
What more cogent reasoning do you need? Your premises would be judged false, ergo your conclusion is not demonstrated. The premise "if there is intentionality it must be directed towards something exterior and something temporal," in particular is not going to sail. It's not going to sail on Plotinus' view either.
The quotes in that post are from D.C. Schindler's (a philosopher primarily focused on classical and medieval philosophy, who is fairly prolific and well cited in those areas) Retrieving Freedom not Plotinus.
You're reply, though in no way addressing the questions I've asked regarding what "will" / "intentioning" could possibly mean in absence of an intent/end/purpose sought, might be cogent save for what clearly seems to be its direct contradiction to passages such as this:
Quoting from Enniads 5.3.1.
As I've previously quoted (were it to have been read) in Plotinus's terminology, the One is not Being but the source of Being. That Act and Being are united, as per 6.8.7, then speaks not of the One but of the Intellectual Principle which, via metaphor, is said to "overflow" from the One.
Your confusion stems from thinking of the will primarily in terms of potency. Plotinus follows Aristotle in that the Unmoved Mover must be pure act, not act deriving from potency. You are asking "how can there be act without something external to draw it out of potency?" This doesn't make sense in either Aristotle or Plotinus.
Plotinus is talking about the Good here, not Nous. Earlier, when discussing what freedom is he speaks in terms of Nous to avoid the difficulties of analogy, but Nous does not possess what the Good lacks, which is made clear below and in 6.8.8 and 6.8.9.
Where is there most good? In the Good itself. What is freedom for Plotinus?
He calls denying freedom to the Good "absurd."
What do you think the Act is here? It seems to me you're saying the One is being without thought, which goes against Plotinus entire metaphysics (see the quote from Perl above). The Act does not spring from nature because it is not set over and against nature as in beings (again, pure actuality, not act flowing from potency). But this is clearly not saying "there is no Act." (And this is referring to the Good itself, it is saying this must hold for the Good because it even obtains in Nous, not "it only obtains in Nous and the Good lacks what Nous has")
Plotinus is here arguing specifically against the very argument you are trying to make, the idea that act requires being determined by something that lies external to the Good (or temporality, covered in 6.8.8)
If you look at the next section you will see that Plotinus both denies a univocity of the freedom of beings to the freedom of the Good and yet also denies total equivocity as well (again, affirmation and negation lead the way here).
Section 6.8.8 also speaks to your insistance on thinking of Act in terms of temporality, "happening," "not yet," "striving towards," etc.
To return to the previous topic, this presence of intentionality is as true for Aristotle's Unmoved Mover (which Plotinus is drawing on and makes reference to) as well. The Unmoved Mover is said to enjoy things in Metaphysics XII for example.
Although I dont in principle have any disagreement with the Analogia Entis, it then seems youll nevertheless likewise find disagreement with these passages as well, for they parallel my own statements (boldface, underlines, and brackets are mine):
Quoting https://iep.utm.edu/neoplato/#SH2a
Quoting https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoplatonism/#One
I do acknowledge that Plotinus makes ample use of metaphor in his writing, as well as using terms in a context that is often foreign to us moderners (with his use of "Being", again with a capital "B", as one possible example of such)which can lead to numerous interpretations of what was in fact meant by him. Still, in assuming this is a forum of philosophy rather than a forum of Christian faith and various apologetics for it:
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, Ill conclude that to you intentional activity (or else acts) that is fully devoid of any intent makes sensehere even tentatively indulging the belief that this is what Plotinus in fact intended to entail in the notion of the One. To me, on the other hand, this proposition as of yet doesnt make any sense whatsoeverbut is instead logically contradictory in a priori fashion (this as might be a married bachelor). And since youve made no effort to provide a rationally consistent explanation of how this stipulation of intent-less intentions could make sensebut have so far affirmed that this is what so and so in fact affirmedI find no reason to continue in my attempts to ask you how this might rationally be. Faith that contradicts logical possibility (or experience, for that matter) is not my strong-suitand this includes faith in notions of "the One" being that which intentions in manners devoid of any and all intents.
I don't find anything objectionable in that quote. It's the same straightforward reading of Plotinus I have been pointing to in other scholars. The One is not a being, it is above being (super being). This does not mean "it is not" in terms of simple negation, that is to say "it is false." It does not act in the way that beings act. 6.8 among other places is also clear that this is not a simple negation though. For one, if it was a simple negation, i.e., "the One does absolutely nothing," then the One could not be responsible for any of the other hypostases.
To my main point:
It's thought is not contentless and it can't "just be," without thought (see the quote from Perl). It doesn't act because in it, act and being (knowing and being) are not separate. Again, we have a lot of affirmation and negation here. This should not be taken as a straight forward negation of all act, a dead or mechanical God. God for Plotinus, as much as for Aristotle, must be pure actuality.
Hence:
[Quote]
Where-since we must use such words- the essential act is identical with the being- and this identity must obtain in The Good... Thus "acting according to its nature" does not apply; the Act, the Life, so to speak, cannot be held to issue from the Being; the Being accompanies the Act in an eternal association: from the two [Being and Act] it forms itself into The Good, self-springing and upbringing."
[/Quote]
"Where-since we must use such words," because we are not talking about act in the creaturely sense here since we are talking about the Good.
It's a forum on philosophy which is why I am correcting you on a misunderstanding of a famous philosopher. That's all. The section on divine freedom pretty much considers your exact argument, both:
1. The idea that the One cannot possess freedom (defined in terms of intellection) because intentionality entails being driven by something external to one's self or else being driven by 'one's nature' where 'nature' entails being a composite entity (violating divine simplicity).
2. The idea that the One cannot possess freedom or thought because this would require that it exist in time in order to will anything at all.
Plotinus explicitly rejects both of these, but you seemed to be laboring under the assumption that he accepts them. I am just trying to clear up this misunderstanding for you.
The One wills itself, it isn't devoid of intentionality. How do you have thought devoid of all intentionality?
Part of the problem here is that you seem to assume that "intentionally requires acting towards some external telos," as a premise. This is exactly what Plotinus rejects at 6.8.8.
Intentionality is something like: "the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs." Thought without intentionality isn't thought, but the thought of the One is fullness, a pleroma, not empty.
The problem here is perhaps partly the analogia. You seem to be insisting on what holds for finite creatures for the One, particularly temporality.
This was not considered a problem for Christian Neoplatonists because God's contemplation of God includes everything that follows from God, and indeed created being "lives and moves and [has] its being," only in God (Book of Acts). What was a problem was divine freedom in terms of contingency. So Saint Anselm is still dealing with the issue of: "is the God of revelation just a contingent mask worn by the 'God of the philosopher?'"
This questioning fully ignores that which I repeatedly have asked of you. This doesn't at this point come as a surprise. But, since you've asked as an open question, in non-metaphorical and what I take to be far more up to date terminology: by strictly consisting of literally pure, limitless, and absolute understanding (with strong emphasis on all three terms).
Understanding does not logically require intentioning - this, for example, in the way intentioning requires intent(s) - and yet is a rather pivotal aspect of what is termed "thought" in all cases.
This, then, would render "the One thinks itself in manners utterly devoid of any separateness/division between thinker and the thought(s) it thinks - for it is absolute Unity" into the logically valid "the One understands (which is one validly possible semantic of the term " to know") itself in manners utterly devoid of any separateness/division between understand-er and that which is understood - this in an absolute Unity". [Although, given common interpretations of the word, you might note that the term "itself" can here only be fully metaphorical - an inescapable aspect of communicating via the limitations of the English language as it currently stands.]
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As facts go, I don't. The exact opposite.
But, as others before me, I do not interpret Neoplatonism to be its own form, or else brand, of Creationism. Via which I mean that, in my interpretations of Plotinus' writing, Neoplatonism is not about a Creator and his/her/its creation.
I've by now come to believe that we will staunchly disagree on this point of Neoplatonism not being a form of Creationism. To which I cannot help but shrug and move on.
Go back and read how Plotinus describes freedom across 6.8, which he explicitly ascribes to the One (as I have shown.) Or go read the quotes by two respected scholars I have shared that also explain this.
Like I have said, Plotinus is dealing with something very similar to your argument here and rejecting it. When the Good/One is determined by goodness it is not being determined by something outside of itself or by a mere part of itself (denoting a lack of simplicity). Nor is it striving after something not yet attained (denoting temporality).You are assuming a sort of univocity between act vis-á-vis infinite subsistent being and finite beings, which Plotinus explicitly rejects. This is why analogical talk, affirmations and negations, are required. And this seems to me to be the source of confusion.
Intentionality, not "intentioning." I feel like sticking to the well defined term will (hopefully) help with the slide towards univocity. Understanding requires thought to have content, a content described in terms of "nothing through excellence," or "nothing through infinity," not "nothing in virtue of privation." The One does not emanate the way one domino knocks over another nor in the way a toddler wets himself.
I've asserted no such thing, nor have I been engaged in "Christian apologetics," as you seemed to suggest earlier. I have simply pointed out that you have a very confused idea about Neoplatonism if you think the One is mindless principle, devoid of intellection and freedom, since Plotinus explicitly rejects this, and Proclus, Porphry, etc. follow this point. Likewise, this predates Plotinus in the influences he alludes to, e.g. Aristotle's Metaphysics Book XII:
The created/uncreated distinction is a common way to discuss that which exists by virtue of its essencewhat exists necessarilyand that which does not. This is the difference between subsistent being, which depends on nothing else and "is what it is in virtue of nothing else," and non-subsistent being.
Creationism," is a modern term. In a one sense, the One is "responsible for," "the source of," or even "creates" the world. Likewise, there is a sense in which the One "has being" or "the One is." A strict negation of these terms is clearly not what Plotinus' means, else he would be talking about a fiction, pointing out the impossibility of what he is talking about.
Nonetheless, he denies that the One "creates" and denies it being. This is because the One is nihil per excellentiam (nothingness on account of excellence) or nihil per infinitatem (nothingness on account of infinity). This as opposed to nothing through privation (nihil per privationem). Hence the need for "unknowing," and apophatic praxis to approach it. There is, however, not a lack of what finite entities possess in the One, but rather an analogical superabundance.
At any rate, "creationism" would be a strange term to apply to much the early Christian Neoplatonistic tradition as well, since many of the Patristics hew close to a view consistent with emanation, which is indeed something later thinkers need to try to iron out because there are conflicts here (although not in the way you describe).
Your earlier posts seem to suppose a sort of Biblical literalism, which in turn leads to positing a univocity of being, God as just a very powerful entity sitting over and against the world. But these ideas are almost always explicitly denied in those thinkers who are called Jewish/Christian/Islamic Neoplatonists, because it would indeed lead to serious incongruites if not outright contradictions.
Modes of knowledge are tricky as are final causes. I don't think it makes sense to talk of the "God of the philosophers" "creating the world with a purpose," in the way man creates hammers "for the sake of driving in nails." The late Scholastic distinction between intrinsic/extrinsic final causes and exemplary/objective causes is helpful here. Deely's work on Poinsot and some other Scholastics and C.S. Peirce is a good example here.
Other's stern enough affirmations of my interpretations being unquestionably wrong aside, it might be of interest that the Ancient Greek term for "to know", ???????? (gign?sk?), can have the sense of "to be aware (of)" and "to understand".
For my part, I find Plotinus's writing to be very metaphorical, non-analytical, and at times equivocal, and so I find a literalist interpretation of it to in many ways be nearly as nonsensical as a literalist interpretations of most any poem's true intended meaning. Nor do I interpret anyone as being infallible, Plotinus as no exception. Notwithstanding, Plotinus repeatedly affirms the One to be pure Unity devoid of any and all multiplicity/duality and, as previously quoted, to have the Intellectual-Principle "overflowing" from it - hence not being it itself. I myself find questionable the extent to which Plotinus wants to say that the One thinks/knows itself rather than the intellectual-Principle so thinking/knowing itself; again, as the two quotes that follow to me illustrate, I myself don't find a univocal clarity in his writings regarding this matter. All the same:
As an excerpt from the 5th enniad:
Quoting THE FIFTH ENNEAD: THIRD TRACTATE: Section 1
And then there are passages such as this one:
Quoting THE FIFTH ENNEAD: THIRD TRACTATE: Section 5
To be clear, I do not ascribe to everything Plotinus states as thought it were a necessary truth. Nevertheless, given the Ancient Greek term for "to know", one can then understand Plotinus as a affirming that (be the "Primal Intellection" intended as something that pertains to the One or else strictly to the Intellectual-Principle that overflows from the One) the addressed knower or thinker of itself holds absolutely no duality between the subject of awareness/understanding (hence, of knowledge/thought) and its object of awareness/understanding. This such that the subject of awareness and the object of awareness are one and the same, in a state of absolute Unity.
Here, then, there will be no intetionality in the sense of "aboutness": the awareness is utterly reflexive without any differentiation between awareness and that which it is aware of. Nor will there be any intention upon any intent. Instead, there will be a pure awareness that holds absolute understanding of what it as pure awareness is - again, without any differentiation between that which understands and that which is understood.
Though others have disagreed with this interpretation and will in all likelihood continue to do so, I so far do not find any logical reason to discard it outright. And I likewise can so far find no logical inconsistency in it - this in a non-physicalist cosmos. At any rate, it's the perspective I hold with which I'd answer the question you've raised: namely, regarding "the problem of reflexivity in transcendental knowledge - how the self can know the self". And this subject to me in many a way parallels the Kantian notion of the transcendental ego ... but I've probably written enough as it is.
I'll also add in far more poetic verse - per my best interpretations of Plotinus's perspectives (which, I again should mention, I don't take to be infallible) - for anyone to fully and truly "know thyself" is for that psyche to engage in a complete henosis whereby it becomes one with the One in perfect Unity, thereby gaining a full and perfect cognizance of that upon which all Being is contingent. Which to my mind, when thus interpreted, can parallel at least certain Eastern teachings, such as that of Moksha: the obtainment of absolute liberation and, hence, absolute freedom (from any and all constraints).
Not that this is anything but a perspective, one I so far deem to be philosophically cogent within its own contexts.
If a Neoplatonist slides towards proto-Hegelianism it is the Irish monk Eriugena.
St. Augustine's early attempts to reconcile Plotinus is an interest case of the evolution of Neoplatonism (although Augustine is far from the first to attempt this). He initially maps the three persons of the Trinity to the Plotinian hypostases. The Father is the unified One. The Son (Logos/Word) holds within itself the divine eidos/ideas/logoi as Nous. This allows the Father to have the Son as the object of its love and attention and for differentiation in the knowing relation. The role of Holy Spirit/Paraclete is less clear here. It is either logoi, the specific instantiating power of Nous in the world, or it is the World Soul, the ability of creatures to know. In a few cases it is reduced to simply that which allows creatures to know truth.
But Augustine eventually abandons this for two reasons. First, in the Plotinian cosmology the hypostases are in a clear hierarchy, but post-Nicean orthodoxy dictates that the three persons of the Trinity are co-equal. Second, it's a straightforward denial of divine simplicity.
Augustine turns away from strictly philosophical work by this point to theology and the practicalities of being an influential bishop in an area of the Empire riven by schism. Thus, all his later working out of this is buried in theological treasties like De Trinitate, which leads to philosophers ignoring them.
But I find his solution incredibly creative. It's a semiotic solution. Augustine realizes that for there to be any meaning at all (and thus any being) there must be a triadic relation of: object known/ground/Father, sign through which then object is known/Logos/Son, and that which knows/interpretant/Spirit. Thus, his later solution has the Godhead necessarily in a triadic semiotic relationship, one Augustine finds mirrored in the human soul itself, and in the interactions of the created worlda sort of pansemiosis. Although Augustine avoids the problem of an equivocity of the semiosis involved in inanimate non-living interactions, he does so at the cost of a sort of demotion of the relevance of the material world (and we might say plausibility as well). Material things are so just signs of their ultimate cause here; all things point up the Great Chain of Being (an idea that existed only in germ at the time)
Does this introduce multiplicity into divine unity? Or is the sign relation a unified gestalt that can nonetheless be analyzed by discursive reasoning without being truly reduced into parts (i.e. the whole is more fundemental than any parts)?
Jacob Böehem is another example of this issue. He has all of God's creativity and the Divine Persons springing from the undifferentiated Unground, which is nonetheless unstable because, existing alone and totally undifferentiated its being and non-being are identical. But Böehem's differentiations and process in the Divine Nature are to be thought of not as occuring in time but as a sort of logical implication. There is still unity, but the human mind can only know such unity through discursive reasoning (much like St. Thomas says). There is also Jan van Ruusbroec's conception of the Unground/Divine Darkness beyond all thought continually breaking forth out of itself in the Divine Utterance before returning to itself in Spirit, where the process is a dynamic unity.
I have always found the attempts to grapple with this very fascinating. The personalist idea that persons, not mere thought, are ontological bedrock is another relevant shift here.
Imagine a snake that sees it's own tail, but doesn't recognize that it's seeing itself. At the point of meeting, there are two, but it's also only one.
Or imagine a diamond with many faces. Each face is the whole diamond.
Unity and duality are in opposition and two sides of the same coin. It can't be one, but not the other.