this is interesting...

Bingo. That’s exactly what he does all the time, which makes conversing with him futile.

:laughing:

Okay, sure, if you know what I mean. :sunglasses:

Once again, an abstract accusation regarding my “mental disorders” here that does not actually involve noting what it means to have a mental disorder relating to discussions that are most pertinent to me philosophically: “how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change.”

We’ll need a context of course. One in which you note how in regard to your own moral and political value judgments, the points I raise in my signature threads are applicable to you. What on earth do you mean be that. Specifically.

Instead, it’s straight back up into the intellectual contraption stratosphere you go:

Note to others:

You tell me how this confirms that I have a “mental disorder” in being “stuck” in not having a clue as to what this abstruse mental masturbation has to do with the lives we live predisposing us to particular sets of moral and political prejudices.

Doubting what in what particular context? Doubting that the Supreme Court basically upheld the Texas law on abortions in that state? Or doubting that the morality of abortion can ever be pinned down objectively? Doubting that our individual opinions on abortion are derived more from the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, or that “serious philosophers” can actually construct a deontological argument in regard to the obligation of all rational human beings when choosing what to think about abortion morally.

A “mental disorder” here.

Instead [sigh] cue the skyhooks:

Again, I suspect, there are any number of moral and political objectivists here who are considerably more disturbed with my “fractured and fragmented” frame of mind than the possibility that those on the other side of issues like abortion may actually be more rational than they are. It’s not that “one of us” might be wrong and “one of them” right, but that there may well not be a right and wrong assessment at all.

And, ironically enough, I suspect that because of the reactions I get from those like yours here. I can only exprapolate here based on the reactions I did get from the objectivists over the years. Especially the part where they make me and my “mental disorder” the issue rather than, given particular contexts, how they do not construe their own self as “I” do here:

Any moral objectivists reading this willing to take up the challenge?

You’re the one who brought up brain chemistry, right? I’m just taking it further out on the metaphysical limb. In other words, if the discussion does not unfold in precisely the manner that you think it ought to unfold for “serious philosophers” then you get to decide what points are relevant or irrelevant. What direction to take them or to not take them. Anything I surmise to avoid actually bringing these didactic – pedantic? – “worlds of words” down to earth. What Will Durant once called “the epistemologists”.

Now that’s a crack.

Well, sure. To the extent that she is actually able to nudge me closer to getting up out of the hole I’ve dug myself down into philosophically, why wouldn’t that console me? Or why wouldn’t it console me if she slid down down into it with me and we were are least able to empathize.

What, are you suggesting here that there might actually be medication that will bring me up out of this philosophical hole I’ve dug myself into? A pill for it? A vaccination? I think what I do about “I” out in the is/ought world becasue it seems reasonable to think as I do given the assumptions I make about human interactions in a No God world.

Talk about you and I being in two entirely different discussions!!!

Well, here [for me] the discussion then shifts to the gap “in our head” between it’s all chemistry but we are still morally responsible for the things we do or it’s all chemistry and we are not. Is the sociopath perfectly okay with things because he or she was never able to not be perfectly okay with them. Is the gap between the psychopath and the sociopath basically just an illusion created in the brains of human beings that are wholly/solely in sync with nature’s physical, material, phenomenological laws?

Could I have never not had a mental disorder?

Is this your own entirely fated/destined leap here:

Actually, “for all practical purposes”, I don’t really have a clue as to what in the hell you are talking about here. Why? Because there is no actual existential context being discussed at all. How – experimentally, experientially – would you go about demonstrating to us how “chemistry underlying my morality” unfolds when you go into political discussions here given your own political prejudices which I construe [in the real deal free will world] as derived largely from dasein given the points I make on this thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529

This from the guy who is now following me around from thread to thread in order to embody this futility over and again. :sunglasses:

I am not following you around from thread to thread, I am just looking at different threads and responding as I see fit. I noticed Gib’s description of how you interact with others and it fits you to a T. Maybe you should work on that.

We’ll need a context of course.

You pick it.

You mean an example? Just look at our interactions in the determinism thread. That’s you as described by gib to a T.

No, as I noted to Gib above, I mean a context in which we explore our respective moral philosophies, given the extent to which your own sense of self in the is/ought world is or is not aligned with mine here:

Given, in turn, the points I raise on this thread – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529 – regarding human identity [re moral and political value judgments] in a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change.

But you say you don’t believe in moral and political value judgments, contingency and chance, remember? According to you everything was dictated by the “laws of matter” at the Big Bang, so if you think this who cares about the other stuff? You are just a falling domino.

What I have tried to argue is that you a NOT a falling domino, but, as gib said, you always filter my arguments back through your own without addressing what I am saying.

YOU: We don’t have free will because of the laws of matter. Therefore if Mary has an abortion she could not have done otherwise.

ME: What if the laws of matter aren’t laws at all? Consider that (I give reasons). In that case, the laws don’t force Mary to do anything because they are not really laws. They just describe what Mary does (and what gravity does, etc.)

YOU: Oh,that’s just an airy-fairy abstract contraption! What I want to know is how Mary is responsible for her abortion in a world in which the laws of matter dictate that she must have an abortion. How do you explain that, hmm??

ME: Mmm… I don’t have to explain that. I just gave you a counterargument, that the “laws of matter” are not laws and don’t dictate what Mary does, and therefore Mary could have done, other than what she did.

YOU: Oh, OK, but under your mental contraption, how can you hold Mary responsible for what she did, given that the laws of matter dictate that she had to do, what she in fact did?

:-k

Are you beginning to see the problem of how you interact with others?

I’m betting not.

No, I said that “here and now”, rooted subjectively in dasein, “I” don’t believe that in regard to conflicting goods and to contingency, chance and change in human social, political and economic interactions, moral and political value judgments can be predicated on one or another font [religious/secular] enabling someone to demonstrate that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to think like they do.

And, no, I make it clear, in turn, over and over and over again, that the assumptions I make in regard to determinism and the laws of matter, are, as well, just a complex and convoluted combination of an ever evolving educated guess and a wild ass guess on my part given “the gap”.

The same as you.

I don’t argue that I AM a falling domino…only that [compelled or otherwise] it is “here and now” what I “think”, think or “think” I am. After all, how on earth, as an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in the vastness of all there is, could I possibly know that with any degree of certainty? I just point out it’s the same for you and peacegirl and her author.

But I don’t know if I or Mary has free will because neither she nor I can possibly grasp wholly what it means to speak of the laws of matter. Only arrogant theorists like you are in the general vicinity of that claim.

Yeah, I’m exploring the existential parameters of Regularity Theory on the determinism thread.

Yes, that’s what it is so far to me by and large. A world of words defining and defending each other.

Like your own “world of words” here. What I’m interested in instead is how the Regularity Therorist demonstrates to Mary that given his own understanding of determinism she either is or is not morally responsible for aborting Jane into oblivion.

Yeah, this part:

How do you?

No, I’ve only had it reinforced here yet again that unless I agree with you that I’m the problem here, I don’t think like you do about it and that makes me necessarily wrong.

Logically, by definition, right?

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

You’re doing it again! Are you really this dense???

Here, I’ll bold it for you: I don’t believe that the laws of nature are actually laws, and therefore I do not believe that they dictated what Mary did, and therefore Mary could have done, other than what she did.

WHY do you continually ask me to help you explain what YOU believe, and not what I believe? This is a perfect example of your posting style as described by gib, and it’s why conversations with you can go nowhere.

I’m as dense as you need me to be in order to convince yourself that you are least dense among us.

You believe any number of things up in the theoretical clouds where definitional logic and technical assumptions rule the roost. And no conversations can go anywhere here with you and gib and your “serious philosopher” ilk, because it’s all about how others can only get you if they agree with you. Up in the intellectual contraption clouds.

But: about what in particular in Mary’s life?

:laughing:

You’re either really stupid or trolling, or both.

I have SPECIFICALLY stated that anyone can get what I am saying without AGREEING with me. To get what I am saying, but disagree with it, is precisely where conversation begins, not ends.

But you end all conversations by refusing even to ACKNOWLEDGE what someone else is saying. I tell you I am contesting your claim that Mary cannot do, other than what she does, because the “laws of matter” force her to do what she does. I am CONTESTING this. I am saying, but look, the laws of matter aren’t laws at all, they don’t PRESCRIBE, they DESCRIBE, and so … etc.

But then you repeatedly come back and demand to know how Mary could have done other than what she did, given that the “laws of matter” force her to do, what she does!

You keep asking me to defend a claim I do not even agree with! Why, for fuck’s sake???

Again, you’re either trolling or really stupid, or both.

On the other hand, you are making me the problem here because in any manner that you claim to understand nature unfolding it is the only manner in which you were ever able to claim it. And, however you make your distinction between the laws of nature and scientific laws and the behaviors that Mary chooses, you have no more capacity than I have to demonstrate empirically that your theoretical constructs reflect either the optimal or the only rational explanation regarding the phenomenal relationship between determinism and moral responsibility.

Clearly, if you actually were able to resolve this philosophical/scientific conundrum that goes back thousands of years now, how would you not be the center of attention throughout the scientific and philosophical communities?

Free will? Determinism? Compatibilism? Moral Responsibility? Pood resolves it!!!

Thus…

Contesting it, how, by positing a neo-Humean “Regularity Theory” that would be gibberish to those like Mary struggling to understand if she is in fact morally responsible for killing her unborn baby/clump of cells?

Again, how would you demonstrate this? If you could make a YouTube video doing just that how would it unfold?

Yes, I make my own educated/wild ass guess here and assume that the human brain is but more matter wholly in sync with what many in the scientific community have no problem at all calling the “laws of matter”; and that, given this, we do what those laws of matter compel our brains to compel us to do. No exception until there is a definitive explanation as to how the human brain is the exception…given a thorough understanding of how mindless matter did indeed configure into self-conscious matter able to opt freely to choose this instead of that. Or, if determined, are still able to be held morally responsible for what we do.

Note to others:

Let me ask you this…

If you were absolutely convinced that someone was a troll, really stupid or both, why on earth would you follow them around from thread to thread [theodicy, god and religion etc.] read their posts and even respond to them?!!

Pood.

He is a troll. Ignore him. Not like the ignore function… just don’t reply.

I’ve given him my personal proof for pro choice 3 times now. It’s as solid as a math proof. He just ignores it.

If ONLY anything Biggum’s would do was interesting rather than rude. :evilfun:

:banana-angel: :banana-blonde: :banana-dreads: :banana-explosion: :banana-fingers: :banana-gotpics: :banana-guitar: :banana-jumprope: :banana-linedance: :banana-ninja: :banana-blonde: :banana-explosion: :banana-fingers: :banana-fingers: :character-beavisbutthead: :banana-explosion: :banana-linedance: :banana-ninja:

That’s right. I’m not conforming to your expectations of how this discussion should go. I tried that before. It doesn’t work.

The fact that a discussion with you doesn’t work unless we bring our points down to a specific context would lead me to believe, if I didn’t know any better, that you are incapable of dealing with abstractions or generalizations. That’s what I would think if your whole philosophy, your nihilism about some of the deepest metaphysical questions man has ever asked, wasn’t one of the most abstract and generalized perspectives I’ve seen. At this point, I’m still not sure what’s going on in your head, but in moments like this, I wonder if you’re playing you games deliberately.

But if that’s what you’re challenging them with, then that is your point. Therefore, you would be right (and they would be wrong) if it turned out that there isn’t a right and wrong assessment at all.

But this is a distraction from the main point I was making–a distraction geared towards moving the conversation in the direction you want it to go. My point was that maybe a fear that you are right, or even that there may be no right answer, isn’t the only reason people disagree with you. And that you might want to think a little deeper if you’re truly determined to understand why people disagree with you, that you might want to not just stop at the most convenient supposition (convenient for you) and consider more (shall we say) disturbing or “painful” possibilities (disturbing or painful to you)–like the possibility, off the top of my head, that (oh, I don’t know) they are right and you are too disturbed by the prospect of their being right? That would still be a disagreement, and it would still stand in need of explanation, but in this case it’s not that they are too afraid/disturbed to agree with you but that they are frustrated with you, with their attempts to not only get you to understand their point of view, but to get you to stay on track, to actually follow the conversation (to not simply drag it in the direction of your well-rehearsed philosophical scripts).

You’re assuming that making you the issue cannot possibly shed any light on the actually issue of the thread. Often enough, the reason the conversation veers towards one of the interlocutors being the topic of discussion is because things about that interlocutor, if brought to light, can be game changers with respect to the way they think about the topics the thread is supposed to be about. To use a metaphor, it is a way for the user of a computer it is “engaged” with to keep the user/computer communication going when confronted with a bug or a glitch. The user has to take some time out to investigate the computer itself, to make it the main focus, to try to figure out what’s wrong with it rather than the task you were previously trying to get the computer to do. Once fixed, the hope is, the “conversation” the user was engaged in can continue. Now, it may be naïve, it may be offensive, coming back to the philosophical context, if one “user” were to think of his/her interlocutor as a “machine” that just needed to be “fixed”–so I can appreciate the defensiveness–but the point is, the intention isn’t to give up on the topic under discussion, to avoid it and make you the issue in order to draw people’s attention away from the fact that you may be right and they may be wrong, but to try to correct something in your thinking, or your attitude, or the fact that you are (unconsciously) ignoring certain points, or using poor logic, in order to “fix” you like a computer, and hopefully get you to (at least) understand and appreciate the other person’s points if not get you to agree wholeheartedly. It can be offensive and degrading–I get that–but it is not (always) the same as wanting to avoid or deny that you may be right.

It’s less about me wanting the discussion to follow a strict and pre-determined path that I dictate than it is about you not willing to venture outside your comfort zone, outside the narrow set of tenets and pre-canned one-liners (or two- or three-liners) you’re fond of using. I’m saying that you exhibit patterns in your style of philosophical discourse that are unlike others I’ve seen. I’m reminded of a discussion here on ILP between obsrvr and someone else (I forget who) about the question of free will and determinism (a question you seem highly invested in and is very relevant to your points most of the time), but the thread took a turn into the question of whether circles have an infinite number of (tiny) sides or no sides at all (it’s all curve). Both parties took strong stances on the relevance of the question: we have to decide whether circles have an infinite number of sides or no sides at all in order to answer the question of are we fully determined or are we free? I personally thought that stance was ridiculous (how the hell will the fact, if it is one, about circles having sides or not shed one bit of light on the question of determinism and free will?). But you know what? They followed the discussion in that direction anyway. Most people would. Most people invest a lot of their pride and convictions into the arguments they make, and it can lead them to defend themselves on points that have veered far from the original topic. You exhibit quite a different pattern, a less common one. You go to great lengths to keep the topic within the limited sphere of what you’re used to, what interests you, so it’s a different (minority) pattern. Nothing wrong with it in itself, but it indicates to me a comfort or a need to stick close to your philosophical home, so to speak, rather than that I’m insisting on “my way or the highway”. You just don’t seem comfortable allowing the conversation to go in directions that are new to you or in directions that you’re not used to. And sometimes, it seems, you try to veer the conversation in the direction you want it to go regardless of whether or not it’s relevant to what you’re interlocutor said.

Not at all, it’s just me being a dork, as I often am.

Then that is something you seek, isn’t it? It must at least be part of what motivates you to post here at ILP. I get that the “dismalness” of your nihilistic point of view may be no big deal given all the other things in your life, and that other distractions can easily pull you out of it, but it seems to me like something you wish to do without, something that is causing you some pain even if it isn’t dragging you down entirely, an emptiness that can only be filled by someone dragging you out of your hole or coming down into it and empathizing. The only advice I can give is to try to focus on getting out of your hole rather than pulling someone down into it. No one wants that, especially because you offer absolutely no incentive for them to do so.

No one said it was irrational. What I’m suggesting is that it is an emotional disorder–an over reaction to things that most people are able to dismiss without batting an eye (without actually resolving). I’m suggesting that you don’t have to be so bothered by these considerations, that medication might ease the pain somewhat (however much pain there is). It says nothing about whether you’re right or wrong, about whether you’re being rational or irrational. I would appeal to your very nihilistic outlook. I would say: if you can’t be certain of anything, if you don’t ultimately know what really matters and what doesn’t, why not try switching to a different (happier) perspective even if you have to force your brain to do so? You don’t have to stop trying to figure out all this metaphysical nonsense, but do it without the pain and depression, do it out of inspiration or ambition, make your whole campaign easier to deal with. Who knows, you may just become better at it.

Well, if we’re going down the “brain chemistry” road, then I would say it more or less presupposes that none of us are morally responsible for what we do. This doesn’t bother me because even in such a context, there is at least the equivalent of a “moral burden” for the things one does–a need, a drive, on the part of society to protect itself from the harm of both the psychopath and the sociopath. If we are not morally responsible for the things we do, if everything has been predetermined from the beginning of time, then we can’t help defending ourselves and society against the harms of the psychopath and the sociopath–we are in the same boat together as far as freedom and moral accountability goes–so for the same reason we would let the psychopath/sociopath free, we would also have to allow ourselves the freedom to persecute him. In other words, there really isn’t any practical difference, and so for me, this is a moot point.

I’m not sure what you mean by “fated/destined leap”–but if you’re asking if this is the hill I would die on, no. It happens to be my thoughts at the moment when I posted it (and it still makes sense to me now). But I’m open to other suggestions, other theories of consciousness, how brain chemistry, subjective experience, and reality all relate to each other. But currently, my views on consciousness are that whatever our brain chemistry compels us to do, think, feel, perceive, believe, etc. it will always result in a particular perception of reality which we can say we are aware of (thanks to that brain chemistry).

I don’t think you don’t get it. I think this is a convenient move you have in your arsenal to avoid certain complexities you would have to delve into in order to respond to my post in the way it deserves.

Whatever that means. Based, for example, on what your own expectations are for on how this discussion should go. I have made it abundantly clear what my own main interest in philosophy is. Not yours? Then move on to others. What works for me is comparing and contrasting the components of conflicting moral philosophies as they pertain to particular sets of circumstances involving both conflicting goods and [inevitably] contingency, chance and change.

Okay, then in regard to what you have moved on to. As long as it is not encompassed in what I construe to be “abstruse mental masturbation that has little to do with the lives we live predisposing us to particular sets of moral and political prejudices.”

Great. Avoiding yet again the particular example I note.

I know: Let’s ask women in Texas with unwanted pregnancies if they doubt this particualr Supreme Court ruling. Before or after they read Descartes.

I’ve made it clear time and again that my interest revolves more around the “serious philosophers” here taking their didactic intellectual contraptions, their “worlds of words”, their language games, their definitional logic, their “theories” down off the skyhooks and confronting actual contexts involving conflicting goods.

No, my point is to bring their point down to earth in order to explore their argument that there is in fact an objective morality.

Again, only when the discussion revolving around a particulat set of circumstances unfolds can they bring to my attention all the other reasons they disagree with me. Let me know when I go off track, or seem unable to follow the discussion.

Only here I have come to extrapolate from many, many experiences with objectivists over the years that, to the extent you don’t accept their own “one of us” conclusions, you become “one of them”. That is why you do all the things they accuse you of. That’s what you’re guilty of. Not “getting” them = not agreeing with them.

Go ahead, ask them.

Once again though with you the discussion is always about discussing itself. And never about an actual context in which conflicting goods are construed given the components of our rerspective moral philosophies.

To wit:

And:

And:

Great big blocks of words that make almost no reference at all to the “for all practical purposes” lives we live that, over and again, come into conflict over value judgments. Just follow the news for a week. What of philosophy and ethics there.

Anyone:

Choose a context relating to a moral/political conflagration that matters most to you. Are you or are you not a moral objectivist in regard to your moral narrative/political agenda here? How do you not see your own Self as I do: rooted subjectively in dasein given the points I raise in my signature threads.

Anyone see a hidden fallacy here?

Um, I think maybe the fact that all his examples of me making the discussion about him are responses to him making the discussion about me.

Is that a fallacy?

Again:

Spot the fallacies there.

Note to Alan Sokal:

Stay out of this, okay? :sunglasses: