I enjoyed listening to this discussion. Kane's channel is a marvelous resource, so it's excellent that you had him on. But I think that if you had chosen to approach matters somewhat differently, while you probably wouldn't have persuaded Kane of the correctness of your view, you would have been better able to illustrate to him the motivations for holding it -- to show him what that view looks like "from the inside," so to speak. If I had been part of this discussion, the main way in which I would have diverged from you is that I would have insisted that goal-directedness is not itself explainable in terms of other things. Teleology is a primitive. You can't explain teleology in terms of non-teleology, because teleology is one of the basic components that all complete explanations have to make use of. Remove teleology, and all explanations become incomplete. If you don't insist on asserting this, and then illustrate the consequences of accepting that claim, then it's going to be very hard for someone like Kane to understand where you're coming from. He's just going to default back to asserting his intuitions about the disjunction between "is" and "ought" statements, and it's not going to be clear to him why he can't do this. Introducing teleology as a primitive metaphysical concept is going to force everyone who doesn't think this way (and essentially no one who has inherited the basic categories of modern philosophy does think this way, because the distinguishing hallmark of modern philosophy is its rejection of both formal and final causality as explanatory categories) to do some serious re-arranging of his mental furniture, but I think it would be easy to persuade someone as open-minded as Kane is to at least go along with it as an interesting and illuminating exercise. If goal-directedness, teleology, final causality, etc. are just metaphysical primitives, then they make up the basic metaphysical structure of reality. Teleology is about goals or purposes, and if teleology is a metaphysical primitive, then it follows that you can't explain anything fully unless you make reference to that thing's purpose. This includes human persons. Thus, what it is good for humans agents to do (i.e. fulfilling their telos) becomes just part of what human agents, in an ultimate metaphysical sense, _are._ And hence, the is/ought distinction collapses. Even if Kane doesn't accept this framing (and I strongly doubt he would), it should at least be possible for him to see how, given this prior metaphysical scaffolding, there's nothing at all mysterious about the idea of a moral fact. He should also be able to see that any response like, "So what if there are moral facts? I don't care about the moral facts," is inadequate. Such a response would be essentially the same as saying, "So what if there are laws of physics? I don't care about the laws of physics." You can choose to ignore the laws of physics if you wish, but if you do so, your ends will be frustrated at some point (planes built with no heed to physical law won't fly). Similarly, you can choose to ignore the moral law if you wish, but if you do so, your ultimate end -- a happy life -- will be frustrated at some point. Furthermore, suppose that someone objected to scientific realism by saying, "So what if there are laws of physics? I don't care about the laws of physics." Most people -- even scientific anti-realists, I would wager -- would not regard this as a good objection. But given the acceptance of teleology as a metaphysical primitive, the "I don't care about the moral facts" objection to moral realism is just the same as the "I don't care about the laws of physics" objection to scientific realism. The core of the issue is that Kane regards the is/ought gap as given. That's why moral realism is mysterious to him. His situation is analogous to that of the eliminative materialist who finds the idea of non-physical mind mysterious because he rejects basic notions like intentionality or qualia, or the scientific anti-realist who finds the idea of laws of nature mysterious because he takes it as given that there are no inherent dispositional properties. It's all about the framing generated by your basic metaphysics. Given his metaphysical primitives, his conclusion of moral anti-realism is correct. But you have very different primitives, and that should be made clear to him. Of course, Kane could just reply, "All well and good, but why should I accept teleology as metaphysically primitive? Why should I bring it into my metaphysics?" The basic answer I would give is that doing so allows you to solve a great many of the canonical so-called "problems" of philosophy. The is/ought problem is just one example. If teleology is a basic metaphysical component of reality, then it pervades material reality as well, and makes its appearance in things like inherent dispositional properties and physical intentionality. If physical intentionality exists, and if physical objects have dispositional properties that are grounded in their respective natures, at a basic metaphysical level, then the problem of induction and the problem of grounding the laws of nature both disappear. It comes to follow that certain effects regularly follow certain causes not loosely or accidentally, as Hume thought, but because of the respective teleologies of the things involved -- that is, _because the things involved are the kinds of things that they are._ There are more examples I could go into (the problem of other minds, for example, also dissolves under this framing, but the explanation is long and involved). This has all been rather cursory, but I think it suffices to make the point. Surely, it is better to have coherent solutions to these problems than not to have them. Because teleology can't be explained in terms of non-teleology -- any more than complex numbers can be explained in terms of real numbers -- any metaphysical scheme that lacks teleology as an element won't be able to provide the resources to solve these problems. Trying to solve them would then be like trying to find the square root of negative 1 in the reals. That's the motivation for accepting teleology as a metaphysical primitive. Kane may not accept any of this, but I'm sure he'd regard it as interesting and as worth exploring and thinking about further.
I did actually introduce the idea that all physical systems are teleological when I mentioned Schopenhauer's argument for a form of panpsychism, and I tried to justify it in the same way you suggest, saying that it provides explanations which are otherwise lacking, but I don't think I was able to make the point all that clear. He said afterwards that he was up for another talk, so maybe next time we can spend more time on teleology and metaphysics.
@@ericorwoll -- I think the problem is just that your idiom is unusual (it once confused me, too). That's what was confusing Kane. Kane comes at philosophy with the same concepts, primitive intuitions and terminology that is all over contemporary philosophy. I would suggest trying to phrase your ideas in his idiom to the greatest extent possible. Make analogies to scientific realism, for example. Talk about how contemporary scientific realists often have to say that the most primitive constituents of nature just have certain dispositional properties inherent to them as part of their basic metaphysical structure, and that if they don't say this, then it becomes very difficult to make sense out of the idea of a law of nature. If you don't believe in inherent dispositions or physical intentionality (that's the term philosophers now use to refer to teleology in the physical realm because they have cultural and historical prejudices against the word "teleology"), then laws of nature are kind of mysterious. Similarly, if you don't believe that teleology pervades reality at the most basic level, moral realism is kind of mysterious.
allow me to translate the whole phenomenology nonunderstanding. neurons flinch from bad things and move towards good things. good/bad is subjective and we call the phenomenon that the neuron perceives when it flinches "pain" and the one where it moves toward thing "pleasure". when an organism "desires agony" im guessing it wants to flinch? why, though, i have no idea. just seems like a reversal of pain/pleasure labels. idk
IMO, the desire for agony or the belief in the pleasurability of pain exists in relation to some perceived notion of Goodness. It's a derivative state that achieves a kind of desirability because of this. Its a phenomenon of consciousness and not one of matter. This is why an animal can't derive pleasure from pain. it doesn't have the capacity to recognize Goodness abstractly, and therefore cant pervert it. To desire pain is to desire something wrong because it is wrong. We all understand this and acknowledge it as "guilty pleasure". Now why we as human beings have the potential to derive conscious pleasure from a voluntary and understood perversion of perceived goodness is another question altogether. It could just be due to a neurological cross-wiring of sorts because of finite real estate within the brain. But anyway we've always known there is a universal human proclivity to derive pleasure from the administration and reception of pain inducing actions. What makes religion and civilization more broadly speaking so remarkable is that it's been able to construct compelling stories against the indulgence of these vices. Also for what its worth I don't think anyone in the totality of their being derives pleasure from pain. U tend to find most sexual degenerates are depressed and disordered. Although of course they are apt to attribute this existential discontent to societies stigmatization of their behaviours, as opposed to some consequence of their voluntary transgression of innate value for perverse pleasure. Ultimately, and it must be said unfortunately, I don't think we are ever going to be able to convince those of a stubborn nihilistic persuasion of the truthfulness of this position, though. I believe that only the emergence of the rotten and poisonous fruits, that the sorts of seeds the nihilist would have us sow would produce, could ever convince them of the error of their ways. And this fact, if nothing else, serves as one of the best arguments for why separation and the creation of parallel communities of the sort Aarvoll/Asha and crew are bringing into being are required. We cant share a socio-cultural space with nihilists who only assert subjective hedonism and therefore equality of access to resources and nothing more, and expect to construct environments conducive to the development of healthy happy children.
I think our values emerge from our neurological biological structure and the way our brain works and is organized. Particularly emotional behavior which precedes language and and we can observe value like behavior in other animals too. For example animals would be able to distinguish between different types of foods, different types of mates, different types of shelters, different types of objects and their usefulness. Watching bird behavior is a perfect example of seeing how very basic creatures display basic social behavior, basic emotional behavior and how they make the most basic value based choices. I would argue that both morality and the sense of value along with social behavior have a deeply hardwired biological and evolutionary component. Even primates which have the ability to use tools display this value based behavior. What we are adding as the human animals we are, is the ability to create and use language. Language allows us to verbalize that evolved sense of morality, of social behavior, of creative and value based behavior that has been evolving neurologically for billion of years. Language the speaker, the printer for a billion years old, very advanced computer system, which has been mute for all this time. So language is the biological element that allows us humans to exploit and maximize and push our biological and cognitive potential and extract it's maximum possible usefulness in relation to a very hostile and unwelcoming reality.
Thank you Kane and Eric
marvellous video,
Great discussion! You are clearly compensating the last discussion with this highly knowledgeable guest ^^
I enjoyed listening to this discussion. Kane's channel is a marvelous resource, so it's excellent that you had him on. But I think that if you had chosen to approach matters somewhat differently, while you probably wouldn't have persuaded Kane of the correctness of your view, you would have been better able to illustrate to him the motivations for holding it -- to show him what that view looks like "from the inside," so to speak.
If I had been part of this discussion, the main way in which I would have diverged from you is that I would have insisted that goal-directedness is not itself explainable in terms of other things. Teleology is a primitive. You can't explain teleology in terms of non-teleology, because teleology is one of the basic components that all complete explanations have to make use of. Remove teleology, and all explanations become incomplete. If you don't insist on asserting this, and then illustrate the consequences of accepting that claim, then it's going to be very hard for someone like Kane to understand where you're coming from. He's just going to default back to asserting his intuitions about the disjunction between "is" and "ought" statements, and it's not going to be clear to him why he can't do this.
Introducing teleology as a primitive metaphysical concept is going to force everyone who doesn't think this way (and essentially no one who has inherited the basic categories of modern philosophy does think this way, because the distinguishing hallmark of modern philosophy is its rejection of both formal and final causality as explanatory categories) to do some serious re-arranging of his mental furniture, but I think it would be easy to persuade someone as open-minded as Kane is to at least go along with it as an interesting and illuminating exercise.
If goal-directedness, teleology, final causality, etc. are just metaphysical primitives, then they make up the basic metaphysical structure of reality. Teleology is about goals or purposes, and if teleology is a metaphysical primitive, then it follows that you can't explain anything fully unless you make reference to that thing's purpose. This includes human persons. Thus, what it is good for humans agents to do (i.e. fulfilling their telos) becomes just part of what human agents, in an ultimate metaphysical sense, _are._ And hence, the is/ought distinction collapses.
Even if Kane doesn't accept this framing (and I strongly doubt he would), it should at least be possible for him to see how, given this prior metaphysical scaffolding, there's nothing at all mysterious about the idea of a moral fact. He should also be able to see that any response like, "So what if there are moral facts? I don't care about the moral facts," is inadequate. Such a response would be essentially the same as saying, "So what if there are laws of physics? I don't care about the laws of physics." You can choose to ignore the laws of physics if you wish, but if you do so, your ends will be frustrated at some point (planes built with no heed to physical law won't fly). Similarly, you can choose to ignore the moral law if you wish, but if you do so, your ultimate end -- a happy life -- will be frustrated at some point.
Furthermore, suppose that someone objected to scientific realism by saying, "So what if there are laws of physics? I don't care about the laws of physics." Most people -- even scientific anti-realists, I would wager -- would not regard this as a good objection. But given the acceptance of teleology as a metaphysical primitive, the "I don't care about the moral facts" objection to moral realism is just the same as the "I don't care about the laws of physics" objection to scientific realism.
The core of the issue is that Kane regards the is/ought gap as given. That's why moral realism is mysterious to him. His situation is analogous to that of the eliminative materialist who finds the idea of non-physical mind mysterious because he rejects basic notions like intentionality or qualia, or the scientific anti-realist who finds the idea of laws of nature mysterious because he takes it as given that there are no inherent dispositional properties. It's all about the framing generated by your basic metaphysics. Given his metaphysical primitives, his conclusion of moral anti-realism is correct. But you have very different primitives, and that should be made clear to him.
Of course, Kane could just reply, "All well and good, but why should I accept teleology as metaphysically primitive? Why should I bring it into my metaphysics?" The basic answer I would give is that doing so allows you to solve a great many of the canonical so-called "problems" of philosophy. The is/ought problem is just one example. If teleology is a basic metaphysical component of reality, then it pervades material reality as well, and makes its appearance in things like inherent dispositional properties and physical intentionality. If physical intentionality exists, and if physical objects have dispositional properties that are grounded in their respective natures, at a basic metaphysical level, then the problem of induction and the problem of grounding the laws of nature both disappear. It comes to follow that certain effects regularly follow certain causes not loosely or accidentally, as Hume thought, but because of the respective teleologies of the things involved -- that is, _because the things involved are the kinds of things that they are._
There are more examples I could go into (the problem of other minds, for example, also dissolves under this framing, but the explanation is long and involved). This has all been rather cursory, but I think it suffices to make the point. Surely, it is better to have coherent solutions to these problems than not to have them. Because teleology can't be explained in terms of non-teleology -- any more than complex numbers can be explained in terms of real numbers -- any metaphysical scheme that lacks teleology as an element won't be able to provide the resources to solve these problems. Trying to solve them would then be like trying to find the square root of negative 1 in the reals. That's the motivation for accepting teleology as a metaphysical primitive. Kane may not accept any of this, but I'm sure he'd regard it as interesting and as worth exploring and thinking about further.
I did actually introduce the idea that all physical systems are teleological when I mentioned Schopenhauer's argument for a form of panpsychism, and I tried to justify it in the same way you suggest, saying that it provides explanations which are otherwise lacking, but I don't think I was able to make the point all that clear. He said afterwards that he was up for another talk, so maybe next time we can spend more time on teleology and metaphysics.
@@ericorwoll -- I think the problem is just that your idiom is unusual (it once confused me, too). That's what was confusing Kane. Kane comes at philosophy with the same concepts, primitive intuitions and terminology that is all over contemporary philosophy. I would suggest trying to phrase your ideas in his idiom to the greatest extent possible.
Make analogies to scientific realism, for example. Talk about how contemporary scientific realists often have to say that the most primitive constituents of nature just have certain dispositional properties inherent to them as part of their basic metaphysical structure, and that if they don't say this, then it becomes very difficult to make sense out of the idea of a law of nature. If you don't believe in inherent dispositions or physical intentionality (that's the term philosophers now use to refer to teleology in the physical realm because they have cultural and historical prejudices against the word "teleology"), then laws of nature are kind of mysterious. Similarly, if you don't believe that teleology pervades reality at the most basic level, moral realism is kind of mysterious.
allow me to translate the whole phenomenology nonunderstanding. neurons flinch from bad things and move towards good things. good/bad is subjective and we call the phenomenon that the neuron perceives when it flinches "pain" and the one where it moves toward thing "pleasure". when an organism "desires agony" im guessing it wants to flinch? why, though, i have no idea. just seems like a reversal of pain/pleasure labels. idk
IMO, the desire for agony or the belief in the pleasurability of pain exists in relation to some perceived notion of Goodness. It's a derivative state that achieves a kind of desirability because of this. Its a phenomenon of consciousness and not one of matter. This is why an animal can't derive pleasure from pain. it doesn't have the capacity to recognize Goodness abstractly, and therefore cant pervert it. To desire pain is to desire something wrong because it is wrong. We all understand this and acknowledge it as "guilty pleasure". Now why we as human beings have the potential to derive conscious pleasure from a voluntary and understood perversion of perceived goodness is another question altogether. It could just be due to a neurological cross-wiring of sorts because of finite real estate within the brain.
But anyway we've always known there is a universal human proclivity to derive pleasure from the administration and reception of pain inducing actions. What makes religion and civilization more broadly speaking so remarkable is that it's been able to construct compelling stories against the indulgence of these vices. Also for what its worth I don't think anyone in the totality of their being derives pleasure from pain. U tend to find most sexual degenerates are depressed and disordered. Although of course they are apt to attribute this existential discontent to societies stigmatization of their behaviours, as opposed to some consequence of their voluntary transgression of innate value for perverse pleasure.
Ultimately, and it must be said unfortunately, I don't think we are ever going to be able to convince those of a stubborn nihilistic persuasion of the truthfulness of this position, though. I believe that only the emergence of the rotten and poisonous fruits, that the sorts of seeds the nihilist would have us sow would produce, could ever convince them of the error of their ways. And this fact, if nothing else, serves as one of the best arguments for why separation and the creation of parallel communities of the sort Aarvoll/Asha and crew are bringing into being are required. We cant share a socio-cultural space with nihilists who only assert subjective hedonism and therefore equality of access to resources and nothing more, and expect to construct environments conducive to the development of healthy happy children.
I think our values emerge from our neurological biological structure and the way our brain works and is organized. Particularly emotional behavior which precedes language and and we can observe value like behavior in other animals too. For example animals would be able to distinguish between different types of foods, different types of mates, different types of shelters, different types of objects and their usefulness. Watching bird behavior is a perfect example of seeing how very basic creatures display basic social behavior, basic emotional behavior and how they make the most basic value based choices. I would argue that both morality and the sense of value along with social behavior have a deeply hardwired biological and evolutionary component. Even primates which have the ability to use tools display this value based behavior. What we are adding as the human animals we are, is the ability to create and use language. Language allows us to verbalize that evolved sense of morality, of social behavior, of creative and value based behavior that has been evolving neurologically for billion of years. Language the speaker, the printer for a billion years old, very advanced computer system, which has been mute for all this time. So language is the biological element that allows us humans to exploit and maximize and push our biological and cognitive potential and extract it's maximum possible usefulness in relation to a very hostile and unwelcoming reality.
Ya'll talking cognitive science
This guy is just English. He consistently resorts to empiricism to justify doubt. Poverty thinking, poverty culture.
Do you have anything better?
great argument bro