Galen's Soul (SYTO's thread [Fine, "Philosophy Thread"])

Yeah you're absolutely right that my argument against PZs comes from a physicalist baseline. It definitely couldn't be used to convince any kind of spiritual/mental dualist of physicalism. But it's purpose is only to nullify the seemingly active effects of the PZ argument, and shows why they don't have any force against the physicalist. The point is it shows that PZ-advocates do these mental acrobatics and declare it a proof of dualism. The objection to that is to show that if we did the same mental acrobatics from our starting position, it would advocate physicalism. The point is to show that the argument is worthless, and the dualist needs to look elsewhere to justify the invisible stuff.

Most physicalists are perfectly happy with this because they take their view to be the more inherently plausible one (by virtue of theoretical parsimony - it posits the existence of less stuff), so you see this kind of response quite a lot.

 

Alright, what is this madness here?
Sac, you're being a baddie.
You could've just said it's a matter of perceiving only what you wish to see and stop with the pseudo-sciency crap.

 

I agree that parsimony is no guarantee of truth, but in this instance I'm not sure you fully appreciate the scale of the problem. When parsimony is a rationally compelling force it is because of things like this: On the one hand, you can attempt to explain mind using processes that we already know exist. And year on year we seem to be getting better at this. On the other hand, you have to literally invent an entire new kind of thing, not even a physical thing, you suggest that unlike anything else we've ever seen in the entire universe, minds are composed of some new kind of stuff. It would be unlike anything else, the only case of non-physical stuff interacting with our universe that we know of. This stuff, whatever it is, has never been necessary to explain any other problem, and we have no other evidence for its existence at all. If we advocate it we also have to forget about more or less everything we think we know about causation and physics at large. The only reason you might suggest it does exist would be to let you say something about people and minds that secures the position you want to advocate on issues such as free will or general religiosity.

Imagine that you had no previous thoughts or vested interests in this issue. Given that every year we get better and better at explaining mental phenomena using the first approach, it seems you'd have to be utterly insane to start believing the latter from scratch. Now, there are legitimate reasons why you could be convinced of the latter. If, for example, it just seemed utterly hopeless that a physicalist description could ever explain the phenomena, even though the models are regularly replaced with better and more sophisticated ones. In that situation it might seem that, however implausible the dualist model seems on the face of it, we might just have to bite the bullet and go for it anyway. We don't seem to be in that situation though. Arguments of that sort from dualists have been plentiful (particularly surrounding the qualia debate), but I'm yet to see one which hasn't been pretty thoroughly objected. Largely on account of this, support for the dualist position within the philosophy of mind academic community has been pretty steadily declining since the 70s at least. I know majority opinion is no basis for anything, of course, but it isn't just a coincidence. The philosophical arguments for it just don't succeed in showing it to be either a necessary or useful way to understand mind.

In terms of contemporary literature, David Chalmers is probably the strongest remaining contemporary dualist. I've read a number of his books and he makes about as solid a case for it as anybody could hope to. He's a good read and I'd recommend him if you're interested because he certainly makes things harder for physicalists, but his arguments have been pretty heavily examined and they are subject to some pretty damning rebuttals too. Daniel Dennett is a good source of counterargument to Chalmers, whatever else you might want to say about him. If you ever want to seriously put in the time to get to grips with the debate as it currently stands, I'd say you could do a lot worse than reading the arguments and replies between those two. Note that neither of them can claim to speak for everybody in either camp, but they are both pretty readable.

 

Holy crap. Thanks for the novel.

 

Just depositing my soul for admission:



What do you kids wanna chat about?

 

"good
The most general term of approval, both moral and non-moral, whether intrinsic or extrinsic."

"From the beginning, Moore anticipated that his methods could be applied fruitfully to significant issues in moral philosophy. The first chapter of his Principia Ethica (1903) famously sought to analyze the concept of "good" as the basis for all moral valuation. Such an investigation is meta-ethical in nature; its goal is clarity and precision, not substantive normative content.

Although the question, "What is good?" might be answered in any of several ways, Moore dismissed most of the likely answers as irrelevant to his task. What we need is neither a list of specific things in life that happen to be good nor even a set of principles by means of which to identify such things. The proper answer must be a correct general explanation of the concept (not merely the word) "good," applicable in every possible instance. Moore's central contention was that good is a simple, non-natural quality that certain things in the world happen to exhibit.

Although many philosophers of the Western tradition had claimed to define good in terms of some other feature of the world, but Moore argued that such attempts typically confuse part with whole or cause with effect. That every attempt to define good by reference to something else fails is evident from the open question that invariably remains: "Is this really good?" (When a hedonism proposes that "Good is pleasure," for example, we naturally ask, "But is pleasure always good?") The open question shows that each effort to identify good with something else is mistaken, Moore held, and since most of these attempts equate good with a natural property, he labelled their erroneous procedure the "naturalistic fallacy."

Although indefinable, the concept of good is not meaningless, since we use it to distinguish good from bad every day. Hence, Moore concluded that "good" must be a simple, non-natural, indefinable quality that good things have. We recognize it in our experience, even though there is no explaining it; this is a version of ethical intuitionism. In later chapters of the book, Moore himself proposed that good is most evident in our appreciation of physical objects with aesthetic value and in the uniquely worthwhile experience of human friendships. Even many whose notions about morality differ from Moore's would seem to share his basic conviction that they can only be intuited, not defined or explained."

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6k.htm#eth
Mind you ethical subjectivism and cultural relativism are fallacious and unrelated to ethical intuitionism

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 21, 2015, Original Post Date: Jan 21, 2015 ---

Not if it's general enough.

 

You're doing it wrong.
The term of good is indubitably one of the most (if not the most) general, as in unspecific, terms human has ever created, and yet every speech, every toungue in the world has a word for 'good'. And those words are very old, and mostly of local origin, so that there's so many of them. Troughout the entire history the definition of good was (and still is) being constantly changed due to what we hope to be moral progress of humans (as entire societies). And although those changes were heavily complicated, twisted and full of piles of shit, we seem to observe a general tendency.
And so, humans started in the phase of herds. Every man thought and did what was best for himself and his family, the ones and only ones he cared for and about. And obviously, people started to notice that fighting one another isn't that beneficial and the good that comes from it is usually of short-term. Bigger tribes formed. And they were still loyal to their tribe, they still felt like a family. And after they stopped fighting for life all the time, they got bored and created culture, religion (which, at the time, were the same), and later on, even civilization. And as they grew, there formed different social structures. The poor and the rich emerged. And when the poor were working for their ink, paper, and wine, the rich could exploit them as bloody tyrants or noble, enlighted wise men, sometimes called priests and sometimes philosophers. And those philosophers started messing with the religious ideas. So did the priests, but the priests were able to tame the mob and make it follow them just like a herd of sheep (what is now done in the politics and we call it demagogy). So the philosophers had to keep quiet.
And suddenly, one of the religions, a relatively young one, called judaism actually made sense. It wasn't myths, inside-empty ceremonies and all this useless rubbish which was used to explain the principles of nature by the lazy ones who preferred gods over science, or to exploit peons. Jews followed their god to be good. Yahweh, the Creator, demanded from them that they would be good. There were no promises, they weren't expecting to get to heaven after their died. They didn't have to fear hell to be good, like the europeans.
And Yahweh was just. Kind and caring for the good, though cruel for the evil. The God of Old Testament. There came the days of justice. Strict rules were to be followed. The concept of justice spread out to different societies.
Suddenly, Jesus Christ. Yes, him. He came and teached a shocking concept, love. Love, forgiveness, understanding. The idea that you should give up your benefits to the others. You should be ready to give up your life if that means saving the life of someone else, even the worst of your enemies. He taught of a God who forgives. Every man could enter the Kingdom. And yet the idea of sacrifice was what men could not stand.
And there we are, in the times of paranoia. Some people try to forgive, the law tries to be just, and many primitives do only what's best for themselves (and since the other ones don't blindly desire power, it is the primitve, though good looking, who hold it). But the hope exists, that we will one day live in a better world. And after Jesus, people have fought even more blindly over what is good. And they, sometimes purposely, sometimes foolishly, quote once the Old, and once the New Testament, fogetting, or not even noticing that they present values that totally contradict each other. When a man says that we should forgive someone, it's accepted. And if in 5 minutes he says, 'justice must be done', it's also widely agreed on. And obviously, the most (and least at the same time) funny example, people killing 'in the name of Jesus Christ'. Iron logic, man.
Basically, good is a value. One that describes the benefits of a given part of the society, an object, or even an abstract concept. Noteworthy is the fact that it's widely exploited and misused.

 

Screw reading the above, nobody got time fo dat

 

Good isn't relative in the same way physical values are (i.e. height - you can set your zero point anywhere, but the difference in two heights will be constant independently of the frame of reference). A can be more good (not better, more good) than B for mind X. That does NOT imply that A is more good to any other mind Y by the same amount, and in many cases B will be more good than A.

 

[1] Can you say that again? I don't think I heard you correctly. Did you say that I was correct?

[2] I was taught that axioms are only used in a mathematical context, and maxim for a philosophical context. I guess it's the other way around?

[3] Values tend to be a better starting point. Are you familiar with John Rawls' Veil Of Ignorance thought experiment?

[4] As in social creatures? Or as Aristotle refers to them, political creatures. Not too sure what you mean by relationality.

[5] It'd be more clear if you explained your criteria for personhood, as you seem to be hinting that only persons (particularly [maybe exclusively] political creatures who value life and are capable of loving other political creatures) are capable of good.

As Ferne said, the definition of "good" will and should change depending on: the model presented, the branch of philosophy a given model falls into, and the values and assumptions given to arrive to said framework/model (logic isn't subjective, but the inputs are). A definition doesn't necessarily have to fit with every model, across every branch; idk where you're getting this notion from.

Not to mention the definition I posited was arrived to by analyzing countless definitions of good across countless (ethical and nonethical) models, as well as casual usage. The resulting definition was the only commonality among all of them, apparently