Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Thu Jun 30, 2022 11:45 am
So your claim that an FSK - 'entangled with the human conditions' - is foundational for knowledge is false. False. False. How ever often you repeat it. Your own argument undermines itself and collapses in contradiction.
Looking in from the outside at those parts of the dialogue between you and VA, I agree, sometimes, depending on his formulation of the idea, with VA's ideas about knowledge, facts, models, propositions. The way we conceive reality is saturated with our perspective: the senses we have and their limitations. The fact that we experience time (or change) in moments. That we are local embodied beings. IOW our description of reality and experience of reality is vantaged (I think I am making up that word) due to what we are. (we can't have some timeless, non-vantage point, disembodied knowledge of ding an sich. And yes, I have in the back of my mind you objection to the various dichotomies. We don't have some other option. That said one can take steps to try to minimize the effects of this embodied vantage and technology can extend our senses. We can move toward a point we cannot reach. I think he is running with this situation, that our knowledge/experience is vantaged and sometimes claiming there is no reality 'out there' (my phrase) or we can know nothing about it or (sometimes) that any functional FSK (my adjective) create facts. So, sometimes he runs to conclusions that are not merited by the knowledge/conclusions being vantaged. And sometimes he seems to want to eliminate the idea of objectivity, when it suits him, other times assert it when it suits him. Other times he has seemed to argue that because knowledge if vantaged (my word), there is not external world, confusing epistemology with ontology. From we have a particular vantage on sometimes we get to since it is always vantaged, there is
no something independent of us. This would imply that we just project our vantage on nothing OR there is ONLY an infinitely malleable quantum foam out there.
Either conclusion would undermine every single reference he has made to specific scientific research.
And something like moral facts would stand absolutely no chance of being the case.
The irony of the ontological anti-realist being the same person as the moral realist should never be dropped when reacting the VA.
I hit his kind of position a lot. Often there is the word 'hallucination' or the verb 'hallucinate' involved. What we think is reality is a hallucination. We hallucinate the universe. I get this quite a bit in online philosophy forums.
If I hallucinate a talk pink elephant in my bedroom, there is likely NOTHING in the qualities of the room helping the create the image.
If I look at a field and see holes and clumps and nettles and run through it and don't fall down and the blind man next to me at the start falls down all the time there is something objective about my seeing. Perhaps not the colors - though even here difference in color help me understand the shape of the field and see the nettles, etc. While colors may be qualia, they are not completely disconnected from reality and do give real objective information about what I can see.
So, even if my vantage is embodied and specific to a very smart primate which is a life form experiencing time in a certain way and has a specific locations and specific senses, this does not eliminate reality from my perception.
I think VA has very mixed feelings about all of this. He wants to destroy the Muslim FSK and to a lesser extent the Christian one. But he also want to extend science into morals.
He cannot seem capable of imagining that we have a strong motivation to consider our values both universal and objective. And that this is part of the typical social mammal vantaging and involved in all sorts of power struggles. It helps us overvalue our values when in conflict and generally when attempting to universalize our values. And to try to do this without thinking our values are objective and thus should be universal is more painful or anxiety producing. Universal is the goal, objectivity is the excuse.
So, he cannot for a moment consider that his choice of mirror neurons is cherry picking.
That his conclusion that mirror neurons are objective (not vantaged in social mammals) is part of hope, wishful thinking, projection and even a power play is off the table. It is not enough that he wants people to be more empathetic, it must be objectively good to have an empathetic character. Then we have the right to develop the mirror neurons and thus certain character tendencies, which suppressing others. And he really does want to suppress other parts of the brain whose potentials he thinks are bad.
He doesn't seem to realize he starts with a value - care about other people is good, not killing is bad - then is happy when he finds out about mirror neurons, and ONLY THEN says this justifies the moral fact that having an empathetic character is good. Which is about as circular as it gets.
He likes (and so do I) empathy as a significant part of character. But just liking it carries not much weight. How can he go into a meeting with Muslims, or extreme libertarians, etc., if he has to struggle for his goal by saying merely 'I prefer' 'I like'. So, suddenly science is hopping from is to ought and amazing his ought and not someone else's.
You've taken to agreeing with me that evidence and sound argument are all that matter in any context. But you have no evidence for the existence of so-called moral facts, and so no sound argument for the existence of a 'morality FSK' of any kind, credible or not.
Exactly. He wants it to somehow be less objective perhaps than science, but still 75% likely to be true, when in fact NOTHING in his arguments contains evidence of moral facts, just an assertion or two lopped onto IS propositions supported by current science.