/philosophy/ - Philosophy

I haven't a clue about Husserl, but I learned cultural relativism in my sociology and anthropology classes. It fits well with my nihilism. I believe we shouldn't judge other cultures for the purpose of studying them as objectively as possible. That doesn't mean to me however, that all cultures are exempt from judgement in all cases.

Sorry for not addressing Husserl.

>physicalism

As a complete systematic project is a failure. Physicalism simply has no real explanatory power.

>cultural relativism

Absolute relativism is incoherent. I forget who it is that makes this argument, but relativism and the problem of judging one system as better or worse than another lies in the assumption that the systems compared are truly conceptually alien. There are differences in concepts, yet, the similarities allow for a critique of the content of concepts that are like our own. We indeed can judge a culture inferior or superior in its developed moral concepts.

>solipsism

The most laughable idealism and skepticism.

>>2863

>Do you think that cultural relativism implies that cultures should be separate?

As I know it, cultural relativism in the field of social science is the suspension of judgement for the sake of research quality. I don't believe it implies any imperative because it's only used as a tool for research. However, I come from a pragmatic background, so my opinion may neglect morality entirely.

>>2865

>We indeed can judge a culture inferior or superior in its developed moral concepts.

But your judgement will be based on your perspective, and there is a cognitive bias to favor what is familiar as well as in-group favoritism at work, so forming an accurate opinion is difficult.

>>2878

And what is the problem? Within the concept is all you need to judge the concept. You couldn't judge a moral concept, nor anything else, any other way.

That you are in a society, and someone else in another, only says that obviously you're not the other, but you're not some alien from another dimension, you're very related and very capable of understanding even what you don't agree with. A society that declares to believe in freedom must live up to the concept of freedom. They may have a weak conception with little thought put into it, but that's not a problem. Like with children, adults see much further and deeper and can judge them even if they themselves are incapable of that judgment at that point of their experience.

>>2865

What does physicalism fail to explain, compared to its alternatives?

>>2897

Physicalism is a member of materialist doctrine, so an alternative I can think of would be behaviorism.

>>2894

I don't doubt your capacity to understand foreign cultures. I doubt your capacity to make a clear judgement despite the variables that make you a biased observer.

>>2905

The problem here is your belief that there can be true judgments outside of our own conceptions and practices, this is nonsense and long been known. There is no view from nowhere, but insofar as we share conceptual frameworks we can make true judgments regarding the absolute quality of concepts. This is why you can judge freedom asnbelief and reality. Material vs propositional truth.

>>2897

It fails to live up to the concept of explanation as giving reasons. All reductive materialism is a disguised description hiding under the pretense of explanation.

Within any mechanistic account then reason for everything is always something outside of it ad infinitum. Nothing has substantive being iof any kind in the end.

>>2909

Well, it's not really a true judgement, is it? It's more of a consensus made from a group of people, or an opinion made from one person.

>>2915

Look up material truth. It concerns an object living up to its concept. It is a true to say that someone's belief and action is false for not fitting thebconceptnof their moral ends. This concept can be analyzed and refined, insofar as one can think it one can judge it. It's not the case that everyone would agree with then conception of freedom, most people are severely autistic on this, but if you can formulate a better absolute version of the moral you can judge everyone else.

This is something that Hegel does. That something objectively ends up being contradictory in truth dies not mean anyone would agree, most.people aren't reasonable in this way.

>>2904

But what alternative can explain something that physicalism can't?

>>2909

>Nothing has substantive being of any kind in the end.

What about the physical?

>>2955

The physical is conceptually void of substantive being due its dependence on laws and the ironic dependence of laws on matter , and empirically it has also been proven to have no substantive being in quantum mechanics.

Substance is that which endures, and physicality has no final permanence in any form.

>>2955

So what's something exactly physicalism can't explain?

>>2969

1. Consciousness

2. Life

3. Itself

An absolute explanation of the world, which physicalism aims to be, has to be capable of in some way explaining these things without appeals to magical leaps of logic (big bang just happened idk) or something like strong emergentism (consciousness somehow emerges from matterial structure, we can't say why or even how, just describe that it does).

Physicalism has to make ridiculous twists of logic counter to the very obvious experience of reality itself when it comes to consciousness and life in order to attempt to be coherent.

>>2958

If I understand your posts, you meant that the physical is what we understand as non-quantum matter, whereas I took it to mean anything someone might classify as physical, including the laws themselves, quantum particles and anything else below them (because they're not immaterial). How much explicative power is derived from choosing this as the fundament can be equalled by other general metaphysical claims, like idealism, but not surpassed. It's possible that because I don't see much of a difference between description and explanation when talking about general claims, having to do with anything, that another can have more explicative power.

>>2990

>itself

All propositions explains themselves.

>life

We do understand some simple living organisms without non-physical explanations. Maybe there is something specific about it science doesn't explain?

>Conciousness

I don't see how conciousness could be immaterial in the first place.

Certainly there are many things, like the Big Bang, which do hint at some non-physical cause, but life and conciousness do not.

>obvious experience of reality

An intuition given out by introspection, it's worthless.

>>3076

Propositions are made by human beings with reason. They clearly and obviously aren't self explanatory at all unless you have intellectual tunnel vision, a common case in philosophical thinking.

Your point about life is exactly what I told you is a failure: description is not explanation. No amount of description explains WHY a bunch of chemical compounds together suddenly enact internal desire and begin to move towards complex forms to actualize the desire to live.

If you don't see how consciousness is not material, you are downright in denial of fact.

The obvious reality of consciousness is not an introspective fact, it's an experiential fact of the most basic kind. It is dogmatic introspection that leads someone to deny the most obvious fact of the matter that any common person knows.

>>3170

>consciousness is a material experience

You really are dull. If you have to read something, read up on the qualia debate. Any attempt to reduce qualia to physical description just misses the point of what qualitative experience is. It's also obvious as fuck that the mind is ontologically different from matter, it is a process and supervenience isn't a good answer to reducing it.

Yes, plants have desires, meaning, they clearly have internal purposes for which their development satisfy. Sunlight, water, nutrients, reproduction.

>facts

Learn some philosophy of science. Facts never have and never will speak for themselves. Theories make sense of facts, even in Newton the facts of the physical laws spoke only in a theoretical framework that the facts did not necessitate.

>>3173

It's also obvious as fuck that the mind is ontologically identical to matter.

I'm not saying to reduce anything. Science will find what science will find. We'll really see if qualia exists or not when it's found or isn't. If it fails to account for something, then there would be a need for other explanations.

I asked about plants to see if you meant that there literally are desires (in which case you would have needed validation). As you meant it metaphorically, I don't see why you picked life specifically, as nonliving objects "want" to fall, exist, and generally be subjected to the laws.

>Theories make sense of facts,

Then why are you bringing up qualia, which as nothing to do with any theory at all? Qualia has nothing to do with descriptive, explicative, or any other kind of power.

If there will be no theory which reasonably accounts for all phenomena, then that's okay, and there is something immaterial. If there is, that's okay as well. Nothing needs to be obvious.

>>3205

>we'll really see if qualia exist

I'm done with you. Scientism is stupid, read some Kant, etc etc.

(seriously, fucking read some philosophy of science. ANY modern philosophy of science.).

>>3212

Ontological idealists presuppose an ontological distinction between the mind and physical

tbh

fam

gcc

>>3212

I only meant the immaterial part of qualia, not the one that is already confirmed.

>>3239

Read this, it's only 5 pages

https://www.academia.edu/9989816/Matter_and_Consciousness

>>3240

Whatever materialism means in your sense just isn't materialism in any meaningful sense. How you can reduce qualitative experience to being physical is a logical leap that just wants to deny that there really is experience at all. Descriptions, again, are not true reductions nor explanatory.

What's the consensus on Neutral Monism here?

>>3395

It logically makes sense, but conceptually it has no meaning. Substance/substrate metaphysics are too problem riddled.

>>3241

I used materialism in the sense that materialists use, which includes something like qualia.

Mental contents become conscious not by entering some special chamber in the brain, not by being transduced into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behavior, and hence for achieving long-lasting effects—or as we misleadingly say, "entering into memory." And since we are talkers, and since talking to ourselves is one of our most influential activities, one of the most effective ways for a mental content to become influential is for it to get into position to drive the language-using parts of the controls. A common reaction to this suggestion about human consciousness is frank bewilderment, expressed more or less as follows: "Suppose all these strange competitive processes are going on in my brain, and suppose that, as you say, the conscious processes are simply those that win the competitions. How does that make them conscious? What happens next to them that makes it true that I know about them? For after all, it is my consciousness, as I know it from the first-person point of view, that needs explaining!" Such questions betray a deep confusion, for they presuppose that what you are is something else, some Cartesian res cogitans in addition to all this brain-and-body activity. What you are, however, just is this organization of all the competitive activity between a host of competences that your body has developed. You "automatically" know about these things going on in your body, because if you didn't, it wouldn't be your body!

Dennett, Kinds of Minds, p. 156

The arguments of Nagel and Jackson, [Searle] believes, show that mental states cannot be identical with any physical states of the brain. These are the two arguments we examined several pages back , concerning first the bat and then color-blind Mary. As we saw, however, those arguments show no such thing. They show only that each of us has a proprietary and prescientific way of knowing about the occurrence and character of one's own internal states. They do not show, or even suggest, that those internal states must be nonphysical or beyond comprehension by the physical sciences.

Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, p. 204

>>3412

How is that not reduction to description? That's jus paying lip service to the problem, but really denying it. I use to buy this line of reasoning, but now I don't since it really is a problem of ontology. The mind clearly is not the brain. That does not mean the mind and brain are not causally linked, that's pretty much what supervenience theories are about. The problem, and it's not a confusion, is what qualia are and why they should exist at all given that all that truly interacts is the physical with the physical.

>>3413

Churchland gets more aggressive on the next page, but you'll just say it's descriptive and lip service.

In any case, I don't know what to make of this demand for eternal things and non-descriptive truth. Neither of the two claimed to have these, and Paul even said he doesn't think there are analytical truths.

Without meaning it cannot seem like the mind and brain are the same thing, there is no prima farcie reason why they are. As for qualia, I would be very cautious about accepting it, as it doesn't provide descriptive or explanatory power.

The exact difference between Searle and materialism is mostly a question of Occam's razor versus intuition. To-may-to to-mah-to.

>>3414

>qualia don't exist

You do know what qualia means, right? Qualitative experience. Please tell me how you can say that is not existent given the fact that I'm having qualitative experiences every waking moment.

No one mentioned truths, I mentioned ontology. I don't even know what one would mean by "analytic truths" being anything. These are human centered constructs, only Platonists think that propositional "truths" exist at all. If analytic truths refers to Kant's own use, not even Kant seemed to think they "exist" anywhere.