Unstable economies allow that too. In fact, I’d argue it’s more likely for people to be deceived and make concessions when they perceive a threat or a big problem that they feel requires urgent measures. Many times dictators have imposed themselves in times of struggle, using excuses like the need for special power for a strong and well coordinated response.
But I didn’t say or imply that ethics is moot. Following our instincts is not moot, it is healthy, it’s a proven way to our survival.
I think the wider term is “evolutionary ethics”.
What it implies is that ethics is relative to our biology. It’s not something universal. However, given that our biology is relative to nature (which is universal) and our development relates to our relationship with nature and the circumstances that made us what we are, ultimately there’s a certain set of instincts that most living beings are likely to have if they are to develop to a certain level of complexity.
If someday we meet with some alien species out there in the Universe (if that’s possible), it’s likely they will have a different set of instincts and conversely a different set of morals. But many aspects of it are likely to be very similar if not identical… things like the survival instinct, the desire to seek sustenance and the aversion towards things that can potentially be harmful, probably they will experience something equivalent to pleasure and suffering, like we do, as a mechanism for punishment/reward through which they have been conditioned to seek certain stimulus over others. They are likely to experience some form of empathy if they frequently interact with themselves and depend on one another (which is likely a requirement for the advancement of communication and joint engineering feats). It’s more likely that our ethical frameworks will have more similarities than differences.
Of course this also means that our ethics are clearly biased towards living creatures… it would be very hard (if not impossible) for an ethic framework to defend the ultimate death of the Universe as something good to seek. Even if it were true that this might be the ultimate destination / goal the Universe moves towards.
I’ll have a look at those books if I can, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just attacking straw men or caricatures of the idea instead of actually engaging in honest argumentation. That’s what I’ve often found.
I mean… he isn’t wrong. Goals / objectives are not something rational. Rationality is just maths and logic. A computer does not have an objective (not even the objective of preserving itself), unless you program it into it.
It’s perfectly possible that at some point in our evolutionary past there were creatures that didn’t really care about looking for food to stay alive, the only reason we do care is because we are descendants of the very few weird mutants who had the urge to seek food… most of the ones who didn’t seek it are not here anymore. To think that it’s somehow a miracle that we exist, and that there must be something special/supernatural about us, is a survivor bias fallacy…
We have objectives programmed into us through our evolutionary development. We define things as “good” or “bad” based on our instincts (our… “heart”), only because they happen to have been selected through evolution. They aren’t really based on rationality (although reason can be used as a tool to try and predict if the action is really consistent with achieving the goals).
So any response that’s in line with our animal instincts that we’ve developed across our evolution is as good of an answer as to what our motivations are.
And remember that Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit.
I don’t understand how it makes sense for a nonprofit to make it so profitable to their executives to manage it… why is that not regulated?
I think that’s the point, he’s saying he’d rather use USA-linked FOSS than non-USA proprietary software.
Can we have meaning without purpose, intention or aims? What about making meaning out of things that are essentially random?
Doesn’t this contradict your previous definition of “meaning”? If there isn’t intention/purpose then how do you reflect on whether the “outcome matches the intention”? didn’t you say that this reflection is what defines meaning?
Maybe I’m missing something? or perhaps you are using a different meaning of “meaning” here?
What I feel we humans do too much is give too much importance to ourselves… we tend to see faces in the cloud because we are constantly measuring reality to our own little pocket of experience… we tend to think the bullet stopped because of something we’re meant to do… we tend to think we got cancer because of something we did…
We keep thinking nature governs itself with the same rules and motivations that we experience in our little minds.
Note that “life” is not the same thing as “nature”. The purpose/goal of life might not be the same thing as the “goal” the Universe moves towards… most of the Universe is dead, non-life. For all we know, the Universe might actually have ultimate death as its destination, and we are actually “the baddies”, we might be the ones who fight against the ultimate “purpose” of the Universe, the ultimate maximization of entropy and the peaceful state of equilibrium where things stop exchanging electrons and we reach a cold thermal death.
I don’t think the Universe “cares” about whether we see faces in the clouds, or what we think about the bullet/cancer hitting/missing us. Life might have the purpose to preserve itself… but that’s because life is shaped by evolution to be that way (and we had to!). We had to use those same thermodynamics the Universe moves towards in order to perpetuate ourselves, sometimes thermodynamics are on our side, but not because the Universe willed it so, but because we adapted ourselves so that it is so (we would not have survived otherwise). I feel there’s a lot of “survivor bias” in most of the existential questions humanity makes itself. We ask ourselves “Why are we here?” while forgetting about the astronomical amounts of trial-and-error that happened to reach this point… it’s like someone wondering “why did I pick the right door?” after having chosen every single other door before that one and failed.
Let me end in a happier note:
I feel most problems become meaningless when we sit back and see things from a broader perspective. We often put too much value in things we believe are valuable, when in reality, they only are valuable because we ourselves place that value on them.
Being able to sit, relax, and just enjoy your time (without being stressed about the things you are NOT achieving) is not a bad way to pass your life. In the grand scale of things, we are insignificant, don’t worry too much about things you can’t change, it’s not worth it.
And for the things you can change to improve life… why worry about it? just do them! There’s literally no logical reason to be stressed about things. Just go and do what you can do and don’t worry about the things that you can’t do.
Hahaha, I do enjoy the conversation :P
Ah, I see… then meaning/purpose it’s not 2 aspects of the same thing, but rather… one is the thing, the other one is the performance/efficiency of the thing.
But… would you say that the use of the word “meaning” in “the meaning of life” is meant to imply “the performance of life at fulfilling its purpose”?
I feel that then talking about meaning without purpose makes no sense, because you can’t evaluate the performance of something without having a goal to evaluate it against.
Meaning of something can be different to its purpose, we discover after its done. This is why Failure has such value in life.
Hmm… but “Failure” is a consequence, not a cause. So I feel here by meaning you are including the evaluation of the consequences of the action, not just the cause/purpose/intention of it.
I feel “meaning” is a word with too many meanings (lol). When applied to an ongoing “action”, it might refer to the cause/purpose motivating the action… but when applied to something that has happened in the past it’s sometimes used to evaluate the consequences of the action and try to retroactively judge the performance of that action based on whether or not it met an overarching “good/optimal” cause (purpose).
When people say “the meaning of life” generally they don’t mean the consequences of life, or how should life be evaluated under a moral framework to determine whether there was a “failure” we should correct, I feel. At least that’s not what I get from the expression.
we can have purpose without meaning, where we know we’re engaging in boring meaningless activity because it’s necessary and functional.
Good catch! …though it feels again like another meaning of meaning :P
By “meaningless activity” I feel we typically imply “trivial”/“not-impactful”/“irrelevant”. And even this definition continues tied to purpose, since to determine whether something is important / impactful /relevant we need a main topic that it measures against (a purpose). Even the most “meaningless” of activities will carry meaning if you see it under the right frame of reference. So this looks to me like 2 different purposes competing for relevance, the activity is only meaningless because its purpose is not as relevant for the main goal in our mind.
That makes sense. However, that means they are just 2 aspects of the same thing, it’s just the position from which you are looking at it which changes.
In that sense, any purpose that is unknown will require reflection, and thus will be a meaning, because we would need to look back to our own deeper motivations to understand ourselves.
I’d argue that purpose is like an onion… behind each purpose there’s a deeper purpose, and it often becomes more and more obfuscated, to the point that most purposes end up linking to deep subconscious wants, desires and instincts. I’d argue that most of our actions are done without being fully aware of the purpose we are following, or at least, not without a considerable level of “reflection” into ourselves. This further blurs the line between purpose and meaning.
In fact, I wonder if it’s possible to act being fully aware of your decisions… because if you were capable of knowing every inch of your mind, wouldn’t that information about yourself have also an effect on your mind? like a snake biting its own tail, the more you learn about yourself, the more new information is added to your mind which potentially changes yourself… making you into a new person, different from the one you thought you knew.
What’s the difference between the “meaning of an action” and the “purpose of an action”? …I feel actions are interpreted through their purpose. I don’t think “to invent a meaning” makes any sense when applied to “actions” unless you are including the possible purpose/motivation of the action as part of what you are inventing for it.
Unless what you mean by “meaning” is “consequence”… but in that case, you are not “inventing” it… consequences do happen, they are factual… at most you can interpret the consequence of the action, in the sense of viewing them through different moral perspectives, but even this would be heavily determined by “purpose”, since all moral frameworks judge reality based on a purpose/goal/ideal.
I feel the popular concept of “the meaning of life” is equivalent to “the purpose of life”… and talking about “what should we do?” as the “only choice that matters” does implicitly set the weight on meaning/purpose, since that’s what directs our choices.
That’s the footnote, the actual text on image hover is:
“Oh yeah and another thing, not a big fan of the English language, or the lack of Trial by Combat in deciding our differences!”
From what I gather, I don’t think it’s about any stance from Codeberg in general, it seems they are attacking “several projects advocating tolerance and equal rights” in particular. They just happen to be hosted in Codeberg.
This might fool some scrapping, but at the expense of making it not very legible for humans too. Also while ti might work right now, if it ever became a popular approach the AI scrapping could easily adapt. I expect they already try to correct for spelling mistakes anyway.
It reminds me of leet-speak. The custom keyboard is not a bad idea though.
What makes Hegel’s “idealism” an idealism is the way it assumes that matter (eg. a stone floating in space) does not really exist beyond the domain of the mind (ie. if something doesn’t involve consciousness, then according to Hegel, it does not exist). His notion that ideas drive social development is not a characteristic of traditional idealism. Pure idealism is not necessarily tied to that.
In other words: there’s Hegel’s methaphysical idealism, and then Hegel’s philosophy of history and society (which is where his dialectic comes in).
All those sociocultural ideas Hegel had, and his opinions on what is it that drives socioeconomical progress, are not necessarily incompatible with even the most extreme forms of materialism (defined by the belief that matter is the one substance of reality).
Those ideas are in conflict with Marxist materialism (which is essentially the materialist version of Hegel’s mix of ideas, which is intermixed with its own set of sociocultural claims), but not with materialism in its commonly used general term in metaphysics (which does not make those claims).
What Politzer calls “materialism” is also not strict materialism in the way it’s commonly used in philosophy of the mind, not even when he does try to link it to it. He toys with the idea of “mind” being a separate thing from “matter” even within his explanation of materialism. And this gets him closer to dualism, not the monist ideas subyacent in what’s commonly understood as materialism. Even in the most generous reading, he’s at most a dualist of properties (ie. an emergentist) but he does not develop his thoughts enough in this respect, his ideas could be perfectly followed by a dualist of substances too, who wouldn’t really agree with the monist view of materialism.
Materialism and Idealism, in the philosophy of mind, are not incompatible with the ideas of the drive of sociocultural change that either Hegel or Marx have when it comes to philosophy of history.
In a strict/pure (ie. not intermixed with separate Marxist ideas) materialist view, brains are machines and all within them is material and physical. Ideas don’t exist as anything but a form of physical electrochemical interactions between the matter of the brain.
In a strict/pure (ie. not intermixed with separate Hegelian ideas) idealist view, all physical properties, including physical things like factories, the products / goods produced, etc. are real and they can be just as primary in the development of society as any real thing can be. Idealism just says that matter only exists in so far we experience it, it does not say that matter is a different thing that’s separate from ideas and that ideas are somehow important and matter is not… no. It says that matter (food, house, factories) is important and it is part of our experience, and experience is part of consciousness, which is part of the realm of mind.
For an idealist, matter IS mind, just the same way that for a materialist mind IS matter. They are both monist views, there is no “X” is “primary” over “Y”… but rather “Y” IS “X”, there is only one realm of reality in both views.
That said, I’m a strict epiphenomenalist materialist that believes in determinism and rejects the idea of free will (beyond it being just an epiphenomenological illusion of our consciousness), I also reject the notion that consciousness in any way or form affects reality. I definitely disagree with Hegel’s views in more than one way.
I understand why you called me idealist. It’s because you were thinking about Marxist materialism and interpreted what I said (in your mind) as if it were opposed in some way to that view.
And yet, I do believe that the material act of punishing the powerful and distributing material goods efficiently and fairly is what can drive change in society… not culture/ideas per se. And in order to do that effectively you need to implement real tools with real physical mechanisms of distributed transparency and control that so far have not been applied in any society, nor do I see socialist States (like China) to be steering in that direction.
That’s your opinion.
I’m also not surprised you agree with “the red-headed philosopher”. Maybe read other philosophers too. It helps building up some perspective.
Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy
He’s definitely mixing things up, so I’m not surprised you mix them too… he’s even involving a “God”, as if this had anything to do with religion. He even talks about a “soul”…
There are theists who are hard materialists (eg. Thomas Hobbes), and there are atheists who are hard idealists (eg. Bernardo Kastrup). It’s also possible be atheist and believe in a soul (eg. Michael Humer) or theist and believe there is no soul (eg. Peter van Ingwagen). The ideas in that book in relation to philosophy of the mind must be a product of its time. It’s full of assumptions and pre-conceived ideas.
And he uses the generic term “materialism” in a way that’s too specific, despite of all the different forms of materialism that exist, I’d say he seems to be more of an epiphenomenalist, or perhaps emergentist (which are just particular forms of it), but he does not seem to develop it well enough to clarify it. However the way he talks about it excludes many other forms of materialism, particularly the more extreme ones like eliminative materialism.
Personally, for a book like this one that’s meant to be an introduction (he does not go very deep), I would have first made clear the difference between dualism and monism… specially given that he seems to like the idea of including in materialism the concept of “matter” and “mind” (or “spirit” as he calls it) as two separate things, which would likely lead many to confuse materialism with a form of dualism after reading this book.
When it comes to your argument, “Ownership” is just an authority position recognized by the state as falling under that term. There’s no functional requirements or powers.
No, the executive power is a power. It does have a function… in the same way, the management/administrative obligations of a position has a function.
A society where “owners” have no actual ability to buy or sell what they “own” and who are selected by society to “own” rather than by virtue of posession aren’t owners at all.
I don’t agree with that, if I can’t sell something that does not mean I’m not its owner, it just means I will be stuck with it (unless somehow I find a way to get rid of it).
I also did not say they don’t have that ability, what I said that if the property is a means of production, the rules of the State would force them to require the approval of the State/Workers for any action related to that property. So if the State/Workers don’t agree with the operation, it would not be allowed.
This is not dissimilar to how in many countries some properties are protected by the State, even when they are privately owned. Some States will try and place laws to prevent certain practices with certain properties. Like forest/woodland and so. Sometimes you will not be allowed to do certain things with your house if the State does not consider it sensible (like how I’m not allowed to install solar panels, because for some reason my city does not want houses in my neighborhood to have anything that could make them look modern -_-U).
We reached max comment depth in the other thread so I cannot reply there… I’ll post the response here to your question:
That’s decided by the State, they are the ones enforcing those rights and demanding those obligations.
This is idealism, not materialism, ie this believes ideas create reality, rather than the inverse.
No, materialism is the view that all of reality can be reduced to the material, while idealism is the view that all of reality is in the realm of the mind / mental experience. I think you are mixing concepts, and in any case, neither of those positions has ever been able to be proven true… I’m perfectly happy to talk about philosophy of the mind (though you’ll find I’m more of an epiphenomenalist… even though all positions in this case have their issues), but it’s a completely different topic and you are not applying the concept correctly here.
If the paper is signed by an official of the US state with sufficient authority, and the laws of the country allow it, yes.
EDIT: I cannot respond to the reply below because we seem to have reached the max comment deph, so I’ll reply here
What comes with this ownership? What “rights/obligations” do I have?
That’s decided by the State, they are the ones enforcing those rights and demanding those obligations.
This is idealism, not materialism, ie this believes ideas create reality, rather than the inverse.
No, materialism is the view that all of reality can be reduced to the material, while idealism is the view that all of reality is in the realm of the mind / mental experience. I think you are mixing concepts, and in any case, neither of those positions has ever been able to be proven true… I’m perfectly happy to talk about philosophy of the mind (though you’ll find I’m more of an epiphenomenalist… even though all positions in this case have their issues), but it’s a completely different topic and you are not applying the concept correctly here.
Thanks. I wasn’t planning to go there anyway…
It’s annoying how the title throws such a general open question and then they don’t clarify this at all… there isn’t even a single match for “USA” or “America” in the whole article, you have to sort of guess.