Philosophy Now Forum

It seems to me it has been established pretty well that metaphysics is best when it is guided by evidence.
 
So another contention in this argument seems to be that of whether holding people responsible for their actions is appropriate or not

I guess I would be interested in knowing if there is scientific evidence that can conclusively point us to one position or the other? I know much science has been devoted to the issue of crime and punishment and to good deeds and reward. But what is the best approach, producing the best outcomes for everyone? And would completely eliminating either punishment or reward be desirable?

Naturally there are a lot of variables at play and "good" vs "bad" in outcome can be controversial as well.

What does science have to tell us about good or bad behavior, besides the hypothesis standing so far that it is deterministic in nature?

Let's take for the moment that behavior is indeed determined.

Does fear of punishment or a sense of responsibility cause humans to act differently? Has there been experimentation to that effect with conclusive findings? In other words, which scenario will most inhibit bad behavior while at the same time being humane and agreeable to all in society (including victims)?

thoughts?

BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 5:58 pm straightforward argument—one that merely points out the dangers of elevating subjective conviction over verifiable truth

No one here, myself included, would or could deny “the dangers of elevating subjective conviction over verifiable truth”, moron, so the basic assertion is your joust against windmills.

The real issue has to do with “truths about life” that have no relationship to science or to verifiability in areas pertaining to science, nor the verifiability of mathematical equations.

You confuse separate domains.

There are indeed problems associated with subjectivity, but science facts and science methods can offer no help in that very human domain of knowledge and understanding.

And your primary error is in this area. You simply cannot understand what is put forth.

Because you are a moron.

[From Greek mōron, neuter of mōros, stupid, foolish.]

That is honestly what I think. And you are (I hope!) adult enough to accept it.

Still, I can only thank you for appearing here with your reductionist insistence. It has been interesting and very useful.

Where truth is the tyrant, and to keep in balance, we do require periods of inebriation called fantasies. The consistent kneeling before truth is no fun at all. Occasionally the mind requires a holiday...a truth of its own often eliciting others in its wake.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 6:48 pm but science facts and science methods can offer no help in that very human domain of knowledge and understanding.

Good news for you, now with the Trumpian turn, religious nuttery could be back big time. Placing the domain of human knowledge and understanding outside the "physical" universe (going crazy) and spitting on science, could once again become the norm.

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 6:47 pm It seems to me it has been established pretty well that metaphysics is best when it is guided by evidence.

The "evidence" is in the need, not all needs being of the same quality or intensity. The human mind is not a monolith!

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 5:48 pm I think the crux of the issue is that metaphysics needs to be grounded in evidence. Evidence is provided by the sciences.

Gary, if one's metaphysics suggests that the universe is the literal mind of a higher (incorporeal) consciousness, then it follows that the phenomenal features of the universe must be created from a "mind-like" substance, right?

Is that not a reasonable assumption derived from the premise?

And the point is that that is precisely what the "scientific evidence" is revealing.

As I have pointed out many times before, science,...

(more specifically, quantum physics)

...is implying (at least to us metaphysicians ) that the underlying essence (or substrate) from which literally everything in the universe is created, seems to be an infinitely malleable (informationally-based) substance that is capable of being formed into absolutely anything "imaginable" (just like the substance from which our own thoughts and dreams are created).

Furthermore, if you look out into the universe, the freakin' thing even looks like the interior "spatial arena" of a human mind - just more ordered.

The point is that science is indeed grounding metaphysics...

(or, at least the metaphysics I am promoting)

...in "evidence" (not to be mistaken for the word "proof").
_______

Dubious wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 7:03 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 6:47 pm It seems to me it has been established pretty well that metaphysics is best when it is guided by evidence.

The "evidence" is in the need, not all needs being of the same quality or intensity. The human mind is not a monolith!

Yes. I agree completely. But there does seem to be a necessity for groups of people who differ in their brains to come together and form somewhat uniform policies for society to follow.

One proposal is to eliminate punishment and reward and seek only to reform and the other is to have punishment and reward as incentive. My question is, (whether we are determined or not) is there evidence that incentives change human behavior? And that includes behavior of victims. In other words will victims feel that justice has been served if a particularly egregious criminal is merely "rehabilitated" and then returned to society? Or is at least some form of sanction needed to give victims peace of mind?

seeds wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 7:08 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 5:48 pm I think the crux of the issue is that metaphysics needs to be grounded in evidence. Evidence is provided by the sciences.

Gary, if one's metaphysics suggests that the universe is the literal mind of a higher (incorporeal) consciousness, then it follows that the phenomenal features of the universe must be created from a "mind-like" substance, right?

Is that not a reasonable assumption derived from the premise?

And the point is that that is precisely what the "scientific evidence" is revealing.

As I have pointed out many times before, science,...

(more specifically, quantum physics)

...is implying (at least to us metaphysicians ) that the underlying essence (or substrate) from which literally everything in the universe is created, seems to be an infinitely malleable (informationally-based) substance that is capable of being formed into absolutely anything "imaginable" (just like the substance from which our own thoughts and dreams are created).

Furthermore, if you look out into the universe, the freakin' thing even looks like the interior "spatial arena" of a human mind - just more ordered.

The point is that science is indeed grounding metaphysics...

(or, at least the metaphysics I am promoting)

...in "evidence" (not to be mistaken for the word "proof").
_______

If science is indeed grounding metaphysics then that's great. I have no qualms with that.

BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 9:14 am

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 3:52 am

BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 12:56 am But alas, why bother? When you can simply feel the truth, why get tangled up in the messy business of proving it?

You have, for me at least, helped me to re-realize something of importance: the things I believe that I know, and which as you say (there is some sense to it) are unverifiable, are yet the things that become “operative truth”: the truth I live by.

I am in no sense immune to the problem that you bring out however.

So much in literature, in art, in music, involves the communication of the incommunicable.

The full Carlyle quote is interesting:

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is.

Thomas Carlyle

If all beliefs, no matter how unverifiable, become "operative truths" simply by being deeply felt, then truth itself loses any meaningful distinction from mere preference. What stops one person’s sincere conviction from carrying as much weight as another’s, even when they are mutually contradictory? If the only criterion for validity is subjective certainty, then nothing is ever truly falsified, and everything is permitted. That is not a pathway to understanding; it is a blueprint for chaos.

This is the danger of elevating personal conviction over empirical verification. It creates a world where no belief can be meaningfully challenged, where faith and delusion hold the same epistemic weight as rigorously tested knowledge. And what follows from that? Never-ending conflicts, war, killings, eternal pain and suffering—because if one person's deeply held belief justifies action, so does another's. History is littered with the consequences of this thinking.

Carlyle’s passage, for all its poetic weight, only reinforces the problem. Yes, people act according to what they believe is true—but what matters is whether those beliefs correspond to reality. If someone's "vital relation to the universe" leads them to see others as enemies, as obstacles to be eliminated, as heretics to be purged—what principle exists to correct that belief if we refuse to demand verification?

If truth is to mean anything at all, it cannot be reduced to whatever one feels most intensely. The only way to separate knowledge from illusion, progress from regression, is through methods that do not rely on personal intuition but on external validation. Otherwise, we are left with nothing but competing fantasies, where force, not reason, becomes the final arbiter of truth.

I agree. However love of empirical truth may be expressed through poetic language, and love of one's own fantasies may be mediated through explicit language. The medium should not be taken to be the message.

Just as modern academic science is founded upon common- sense causes and effects, so poetry is founded upon everyday social intercourse, as has been demonstrated by English poets from Shakespeare and Chaucer, through Keats and Wordsworth, to Dylan Thomas.

Dubious wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 6:58 pm Where truth is the tyrant, and to keep in balance, we do require periods of inebriation called fantasies. The consistent kneeling before truth is no fun at all. Occasionally the mind requires a holiday...a truth of its own often eliciting others in its wake.

A reasonable measure of entertainment and relaxation is good. But to seize the day without any personal responsibility for tomorrow is bad.

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 7:02 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 6:48 pm but science facts and science methods can offer no help in that very human domain of knowledge and understanding.

Good news for you, now with the Trumpian turn, religious nuttery could be back big time. Placing the domain of human knowledge and understanding outside the "physical" universe (going crazy) and spitting on science, could once again become the norm.

Tyrants always try to disempower others. Truth is best sought by disinterested minds.

BigMike wrote: ↑Fri Feb 07, 2025 7:54 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Fri Feb 07, 2025 6:43 pm My operative description in that really determining, inner and intuited sense, is my awareness (belief, feeling, understanding) that I have come into a world (world: a sphere of existence among what I sense are innumerable worlds of varying sorts with different qualities and destinies) through a sort of descension. I.e. from an existence on a non-material plane to one in this particular flesh-and-blood world where all of us reside.

I could of course say more but that is the basic outline.

In an “ultimate” sense that is my determining understanding that I “practically lay to heart”.

And that view (which is a dawning view, not fully understood and sometimes not believed (consciously) does seem to influence my “vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and (my) duty and destiny” here.

Ah yes, the classic I have descended from a higher, non-material plane routine. Truly, Alexis, your dawning view of the universe is breathtakingly original—never before has a human being entertained the idea that they’re a mystical traveler from a realm beyond flesh and blood.

It’s especially delightful how you hedge your cosmic autobiography with “not fully understood and sometimes not believed (consciously),” a poetic way of saying I kind of make this up as I go along, but it sounds profound, so let’s roll with it.

Tell me, do you recall your departure from this non-material plane, or was it more of a whoops, I slipped into a mortal coil situation? And what duty and destiny do you have here, beyond dazzling us with florid metaphysical musings? Do share. I, for one, am dying to know the details of your interdimensional itinerary.

I fear the details would be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 6:48 pm

BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 5:58 pm straightforward argument—one that merely points out the dangers of elevating subjective conviction over verifiable truth

No one here, myself included, would or could deny “the dangers of elevating subjective conviction over verifiable truth”, moron, so the basic assertion is your joust against windmills.

The real issue has to do with “truths about life” that have no relationship to science or to verifiability in areas pertaining to science, nor the verifiability of mathematical equations.

You confuse separate domains.

There are indeed problems associated with subjectivity, but science facts and science methods can offer no help in that very human domain of knowledge and understanding.

And your primary error is in this area. You simply cannot understand what is put forth.

Because you are a moron.

[From Greek mōron, neuter of mōros, stupid, foolish.]

That is honestly what I think. And you are (I hope!) adult enough to accept it.

Still, I can only thank you for appearing here with your reductionist insistence. It has been interesting and very useful.

Ah, Alexis, ever the master of projection. You accuse me of confusion while spinning a grand metaphysical tale about souls making decisions on our behalf and somehow whispering their divine commands into our neurons. And yet, I am the one who doesn’t understand? The irony is staggering.

Let’s be clear: your notion of a disembodied soul issuing orders to the brain is not just unscientific—it’s incoherent. If the soul is immaterial, how exactly does it interact with the material brain? By what mechanism? Where does this grand conductor of human will reside, and how does it exert force on neurons while remaining immune to empirical detection? If you want to claim that some nebulous "self" exists beyond material reality, you need more than mere assertion—you need an explanatory framework that doesn’t collapse under basic scrutiny.

You sneer at the distinction between verifiable and unverifiable truth, as if the latter deserves equal standing, but that’s precisely the problem. When you remove the requirement for verifiability, anything can be true—contradictory beliefs, supernatural fantasies, even outright fabrications. There is no limit, no boundary, no method for distinguishing reality from delusion. You accuse me of "confusing separate domains," but the only confusion here is your refusal to acknowledge that unverifiable claims are, by their very nature, indistinguishable from fiction.

And let’s talk about reductionism, since you love to hurl the word as if it were an insult. Understanding human behavior as the result of physical processes is not reductionist in any pejorative sense—it is the only coherent approach backed by empirical evidence. Your alternative? An invisible, undetectable entity issuing commands from some ethereal dimension, conveniently beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. That’s not a sophisticated perspective—it’s a relic of pre-scientific thinking, dressed up in flowery rhetoric to give it an illusion of depth.

So no, Alexis, I am not the one failing to grasp what’s being put forth. I understand it perfectly: you want to smuggle mysticism into serious discourse without meeting the burden of proof. You want a special exemption from scrutiny, a pass to declare unverifiable claims as meaningful knowledge. But reality does not grant exemptions. If your soul exists, if it makes decisions, if it interacts with the brain in any way that has consequences in the material world, then it must operate through physical means. And if it operates through physical means, then it is detectable. If it is not detectable, then it is indistinguishable from nonexistence.

And that, Alexis, is the actual reason why you refuse to engage on these terms. Because deep down, you know that once your claims are held to the same standard as everything else in reality, they collapse. And all the poetic musings in the world won’t change that.

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 7:02 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 6:48 pm but science facts and science methods can offer no help in that very human domain of knowledge and understanding.

Good news for you, now with the Trumpian turn, religious nuttery could be back big time. Placing the domain of human knowledge and understanding outside the "physical" universe (going crazy) and spitting on science, could once again become the norm.

Could be?

There is a very interesting philosophical and sociological conversation that is potential about the lunacy that seems to run so free in American culture. It is certainly real. Ungrounded fanatical religiousness, fantasy, unleashed speculation, paranoia enhanced mythic paradigms in combination with psychological issues (mental illness), and a hyper-developed movie and on-line (screen time) environment, all of this is a recipe for social hysteria and the madness of crowds. No doubt about it.

Science facts, science methods, nor the conclusions of science per se, can offer nothing as a remedy for this sort of thing.

BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 7:51 pm…

All has been “duly noted”.