Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor … may be the most well-regarded philosopher in the English-speaking world … [He] has stalked … a “naturalist” view of humanity which assimilates our minds and morals to a purely materialist and empirical program of study.
I think the point is to commit to a higher purpose. Any admission that belief in the sacred is elective undermines the commitment power it provides. To make the commitment work one must convince others that one did not elect his or her sacred values but was forced into acknowledging their sacred nature by the weight of the evidence. You can add it to your list of properties of the sacred: that any choice in selecting it is denied.
The meme won’t survive the weak version of its implementation. You can’t be depended upon to arrive at the correct conclusion and your version is more complex, less animating, and harder to spread.
I agree with your addition. Robin is asking why his notion will not do. I’m answering because Robin’s version of the meme is weaker. Your denial of selection is a powerful addition to the original meme’s staying power.
Put another way: Robin’s is insufficiently compulsive to create the order desired or to successfully guard against the meme’s corruption. We want people believing in magic, not personal metaphor.
I didn’t read Taylor yet, but I’m willing to bet he does not find much interest in the potential sacredness of particular persons. Music!, Art!, Poetry!, that seems to be his battle cry. I do share the sentiment.
I see a lot of people suffering from the combination of believing that the world is strictly material and that material things cannot have meaning. It’s a burden you might not feel, but surly you can sense it in others? If you view this suffering as unproductive then you must grant that a healing, of some sort, is in order.
I do understand that the soteriological aspects of any practice is a good thing, I just feel that throwing it into the gaps of our understanding is a bit rash, at best, and dogma at the bad end.
Is there something you would like us to fill the gaps with, or is it that you want us to acknowledge the gaps, accept the disorder of our acquired values, and learn to live harmoniously with the contradictions that dwell inside us? Endowing us with a desire for order seems to me to have had both costs and benefits.
order is not the only outcome of the urge to should
it is rash and unwise to fill the gaps in with anything for the sake of an outcome, or rather, for the sake of an alignment with an outcome one prefers (or detests)
contradictions are trade-offs, we do them all day long, regardless of desire, regardless of the… gap
this position is neo-Pyrrhonist in inclination, I just do not share its soteriological framework (of salvationn/healing/enlightenment)
Ho, this is interesting. I haven’t heard of the Pyrrhonist philosophy before, but I feel that I’ve advocated for it in abundance. So what you would like is to remove from it the carrot of the good life, and pursue the withholding of judgment for its accuracy rather than external rewards?
I discovered neo-Pyrrhonist writing on following up recently, on my reading Beckwith's Greek Buddha (six-ish years ago), with Doug Bates books, who has just started substack at https://ataraxiaorbust.substack.com/
I see there is a method in suspending judgment that grants more than ataraxia, i.e. the method may provide more 'goods' than a easing of anxiousness, and I suspect this is mostly in an epistemological space, but I have only been following up on this for about a year, working title on this quest is 'the blur'. working notes listed at https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/posts-on-the-blur.html
I am currently migrating from substack to self-host with crossposting to substack. This list at posts on the blur is not currently being moved, so there are only two...
It seems pretty unclear where you and Taylor are disagreeing. Here's a Taylorian argument:
1) Something is a meaningful cognitive relation IFF its object is meaningful, and the meaningfulness of its object explains its being meaningful to the cognitive subject.
2) If the objects of our cognition are exclusively naturalistic, they are exclusively quantitative.
3) No quantitative object is meaningful.
4) Therefore if the objects of our cognitive relations are exclusively naturalistic, there are no meaningful cognitive relations.
5) There are meaningful cognitive relations.
6) Therefore, the objects of our cognition are not exclusively naturalistic.
I think you want to object to either (1) or (2) (or both?) but I can't tell which. If (1), I think your disagreement isn't over the significance of naturalism.
Consider the contrast between saying on the one hand that
-thought A is the cause of thought B only because neural activity A' which instantiates A is the cause of neural activity B' which instantiates B, and
-while thought A is instantiated by neural activity A' and B by B', A' is the cause of B' only because A is the cause of B.
Someone who wants to say "there is meaning in the world" and who wants to adopt the first view is going to have to say that neural activity itself is meaningful (this would be an objection to 3 above) Someone who wants to say "there is meaning in the world" and who wants to adopt the second view needn't say "neural activity itself is meaningful," because they believe that neural activity can encode (causally significant) higher order objects that are meaningful (this would be an objection to 2 above).
Both seem to me to be naturalistic approaches, by contrast with Taylor's reported view. Now that I've looked at Taylor's book though, he's not explicitly making any argument like the one I presented. He's mostly talking about German romantic poets and their response to a (Newtonian) conception of nature. But it seems to me that this is just an impoverished conception of scientific naturalism. We're used to the idea now that things like "patterns" are an important part of making sense of nature.
I guess I want higher order objects that are meaningful because that sounds economical, not because reality demands it. Perhaps I'm being simple-minded here, but the loss of a loved one would be an example I'd contemplate as a quantitative event that bares meaning. Now you may want to say that "love" is what gives this meaning or that "brain" is what gives this meaning. I'd "cheat" by nesting love in a brain as a particular patten of brain activity that bares meaning, require the presence of both love and a brain, and call it a day. Too simple-minded to work?
If meaning is a relation M(a,b), then it need not imply a property P(b) of an object. Something could be meaningful to me, but not meaningful without relation to anything in particular.
That works! But it would make the relation M unlike normal conceived epistemic relations, where I can know the mass of a hydrogen atom only if it has that mass independently of my (or anyone’s) knowing it. I think Taylor wants our relation to meaning to work like that.
I read the relevant link in claim (1) as saying that if P is the property of being meaningful and M is a cognitive relation then P(b) => P(M(a,b)). The other direction does not get used.
Wow. That was strong. Very insightful. It’s not precisely arguing that Emergence is Fundamental. It’s more like saying that it is more likely that laws have only one way of coming into being, rather than two ways, and if you have to pick between emergence and fundamental as your hypothesis of why a law came into being, emergence seems supported by known examples while fundamental looks a lot like a religious myth. The default position then should be emergence until proven otherwise. Makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for sharing, Heretic!
I’d argue that only replicating patterns have meaning; that meaning is a property that appears only in the course of evolution, and only for the things that evolve.
Taylors approach appears to be the last of many rescue operations over the centuries to give our mental life a “deeper” foundation. Yet another re-run of Plato (our mental life comes from above) versus Democritus (our mental life comes from below), in a sense.
I am among those who are open to the possibility that human communities are not long-run stable without some collective mythos anchoring the beliefs constituting the community in “stuff”.
However, as many have said before: A shared belief in metaphysical entities (i.e. that they are “stuff”) may have positive, perhaps even indispensable, effects on our ability to live in communities. But we cannot believe in such entities only because they have such effects for us. We must believe in them because we think they are actually real. The positive effects of such beliefs do not constitute sufficient “meaning-power” in themselves.
Since modern science, including evolutionary psychology, arguably has now solved all the remaining puzzles facing the neoDarwinian paradigm (Democritus has won), Taylors late attempt to anchor our mental life in “stuff” is likely to be as unsuccessful as previous attempts of the same.
Maybe this will doom human societies in the long run. But since there is no alternative, we have no other choice than to wait and see.
The potential for collaboration is not a truth from below or from above, it is a truth from the future. Potential for collaboration, not even a pattern in current matter, weak as it is in the moment, accumulates over time to forge immense function. Survival and collaboration are not meaningful patterns in matter, they are meaningful patterns in potential. Is potential “stuff”? Not really. Can it be worshipped like a god? Most certainly it can!
If humans evolved to have experiences, purposes, moral intuitions, and artistic appreciations as patterns in their brains, there was some selection pressure that caused it. It seems to me the simplest explanation for why these patterns evolved is that they reflect something real in the world. We evolved a fear of snakes because those who weren't afraid of snakes died young to snakebites and never passed that lack of fear to the next generation. The fear of snakes is just a pattern in the brain, but the snakes are real.
wow. i just think stuff fetish is the wrong term. stuff worship ? perhaps. but the view i think you defend is completely materialistic and a very scary universe. but reality and fear are not the same sorts of objects. i am scared but i agree with your view.
Robin calls abstract non-corporeal scared values “stuff” (because they are being claimed as real, I suppose). If you find that label confusing you are not alone. The believers in sacred values would not typically designate their sacred values as “stuff”, just as real as “stuff”. What Robin argues for, and I agree with, is that there is meaning in the material. Rejoice and do not fear a material world devoid of meaning.
"They also aren’t happy with stories about why humans might have evolved to have experiences, purposes, moral intuitions, and artistic appreciations as patterns in their brains. Or as patterns in their brains plus local environments. It is instead important to them that such sacred things be first order objects in our best theory of what the cosmos contains. Experiences, meanings, morals, and art must really all be “stuff” at the same level as everything else that matters in the cosmos. Able to act on other things as directly as other primitives of the universe. "
We can call:
"instead important to them that such sacred things be first order objects in our best theory of what the cosmos contains."
an alignment we feel we should do (I suspect there's no need to explain it with anything more complicated). When we world build a certain consistency is appealing, and curiously it is in doubled-down alignments (one ruler, one people, one god, one religion) that the diversity of experience that does exists has to be then subsumed into a hierarchy as you describe.
Usually when we align things important to us, we do so with whatever we most value when we throw in into the various gaps we feel either explain or present existential risks to our world. (When we feel we should order the world, even if we fail to world that order -- (this is a blame/credit vicious cycle of epistemologically fear).
We often throw god into the gap. But it can be other intuitions or abstractions, like order, balance, or as in the Taylor example romantic neo-magical nostrums.
Evolution works on whether we feel we should organise the world about us, not on how or what we order the world with. much like it gives us hunger but not a recipe for black forest cake. Recipes, moralities, ethos, codes, and their worlds are outcomes, and have no source, and not need to be healed, unless that's your fetish to world with.
I think I like what you’re saying. Let me see if I understood: you’re arguing that evolution gave us a desire for order in our value system but did not specify how we should bring about that order. The sacred then arises as a solution to this problem. Its primary function is as an ordering principle for the values we assign all the rest.
yes, but I feel "desire for order" is a bit strong, but that is the framework we share I suspect,
we just feel we should organise "stuff" about/around us, this includes other people who are doing the same…
— concepts of 'order' and thus a value 'system' are thus outcomes of that urge on our preferences (both individual and customary), which we then meta-order ( up on or in reflection) into things like ordering principles. Especially codes, spoken or unspoken which requires us to talk/behave in common with them. Notions of order are a an outcome of the urge to world our lives about us (it is a Janus dance between self & world).
I do observe some insistence on sacred, even when the person in question accepts a refutation or partial refutation of a particular sacred thing or concept. There still seems to be a desire for a different supernatural to be there. I think quoted passage is another example of this.
I think there might be some disagreement on what "meaning" refers to in these conversations. When I press, it seems that meaning is used as some kind of objective thing, outside the bounds of human or groups of humans agreeing. I can't picture what that could look like, and don't share the desire for it, so maybe I'm not representing it well here. But when meaning is defined that way, you can't get it from recognized patterns, which are a human model. I don't believe such "meaning" exists, personally, and am not sure how our reality would look different with or without it.
> We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create.
Well yes, we are atoms in a mindless universe(as in, the entire universe itself, doesn't seem to be conscious but we should also not at all be closed to the idea. The universe is really bizarre and being a skeptic here is distinct between being a skeptic about Spiderman being a real New Yorker). But we also *are* agents in a metaphysically alert one. We are embodied and embedded in meaning, and meaning is real-- really real, not just made up arbitrarily, but there's a fact of the matter to meaning, and you can only access this through higher consciousness and sentience. The fact that you must, does not make it arbitrary.
> “Strong ethical insights are grounded in what I called ‘felt intuitions,’ … [We] experience them, … feel them as inspiring, and their flagrant violation as appalling.”
Sometimes, yes, because empathy can be a certain pathway towards ethical insight. When you hear of a child being raped, you feel disgust and sorrow. This is not merely chemical reactions that have zero bearing towards any ethical fact of the matter, (they *are* chemical reactions, yes), but they happen here to align with the truth in this case: Child rape is *really* disgusting, and not so merely because we happen to feel so. If we found child rape the coolest thing ever, we'd actually be confused, also due to our happenstance of wiring. People believe that because this gets mapped onto subjectivity, it must be subjective in the sense that it's a matter of opinion or preference, and that doesn't follow at all.
> For them it seems insufficient for meaning, morals, experience, and art to be found in patterns of stuff, e.g., in patterns of brain neuron firings; such things must somehow be directly stuff themselves.
Again it just seems like the answer is "It's both". It is "stuff themselves" as in it is simply true regardless if "stuff" articulates it or understands it, or not. 2+2 still = 4, even in a universe completely devoid of consciousness. That's how truth works. It's true-- period. The same is true for any moral fact(moral facts, have something to do with a real thing, they're not just arbitrary. It's not true to say math is most deeply related to banana cream pie. That is just false. Likewise, it's not true to say child rape is the pinnacle of moral health-- it's simply false. Objectively false. You must be a subject to appreciate facts, yes, but that's not a problem at all for objective truth. Some people are unable to see this, especially smart people, and they invent complex philosophy around this confusion. I would argue that like ideas that try to defend free will, smart people engage in this behavior because it is adaptive to be morally confused-- it's a world that rewards cheaters, so narratives that diminish ethics and certain inconvenient truths will exist in such a world. Smart people are also able to intuit that a morally real narrative can't be enforced-- they know the tyrants can just subjugate them as they kick and scream about ethics, and intuit subconscious,y "This position is a dead end". That's cowardice and dishonesty, which is perfectly compatible with intelligence. All one can do is strictly care about the facts, no matter how inconvenient or psychologically destabilizing they are.
What brought this up now, that it seems new to you again? I'm assuming this isn't something you just noticed, given that it's nearlyidentical to what Eliezer Yudkowsky was writing sixteen years ago when he was publishing on this very blog? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/joy-in-the-merely-real
Saying it's nearly identical is a bit of stretch. Yudkowsky is exhorting us to find meaning in real things. Robin is looking for reasons why some people can't. In fact, that's a perfect encapsulation of the difference between the two of them. Eliezer is a polemicist and Robin is a scientist.
I'd second that. The Yudkowsky post is related but far from terminal. Perhaps it is evidence of the problematical nature of canonization that such an objection is even raised. Beware of the Yudkowsky already said it, I'd say (probably Yudkowsky said that too).
>I don’t see why minds made of atoms can’t be agents who make meaning, agree on purposes, connect with the cosmos, enjoy poetry they don’t consciously understand, are moved by intuitions, learn real lessons from their art, and face real constraints on their art.
I got halfway thru this post with my brain autocorrecting "stuff" to "snuff"
Disgusting pornographer.
"Big Tobacco" apologist!
Rejection is easy and feels good, but is the true dirty act.
I think the point is to commit to a higher purpose. Any admission that belief in the sacred is elective undermines the commitment power it provides. To make the commitment work one must convince others that one did not elect his or her sacred values but was forced into acknowledging their sacred nature by the weight of the evidence. You can add it to your list of properties of the sacred: that any choice in selecting it is denied.
Already on the list.
Ha! Good!
The meme won’t survive the weak version of its implementation. You can’t be depended upon to arrive at the correct conclusion and your version is more complex, less animating, and harder to spread.
Did I suggest a meme? You’ve lost me again, Adam. What are you talking about?
I agree with your addition. Robin is asking why his notion will not do. I’m answering because Robin’s version of the meme is weaker. Your denial of selection is a powerful addition to the original meme’s staying power.
Put another way: Robin’s is insufficiently compulsive to create the order desired or to successfully guard against the meme’s corruption. We want people believing in magic, not personal metaphor.
Your metaphor’s transmission will be inferior to the meme’s; this it knows.
Seems like the error was mine and the dictate to deny the choice of the sacred is already in the model.
Oh, thank you very much then! What a pleasure to be understood!
I suspect you (I, many other modern-minded people) can manage all right without being “healed” by Charles Taylor.
ditto, especially if the rift is the result of politics based on who is best respresentative of said sacredness (usually some Emperor).
I didn’t read Taylor yet, but I’m willing to bet he does not find much interest in the potential sacredness of particular persons. Music!, Art!, Poetry!, that seems to be his battle cry. I do share the sentiment.
the sentiment is not unhelpful
I see a lot of people suffering from the combination of believing that the world is strictly material and that material things cannot have meaning. It’s a burden you might not feel, but surly you can sense it in others? If you view this suffering as unproductive then you must grant that a healing, of some sort, is in order.
I do understand that the soteriological aspects of any practice is a good thing, I just feel that throwing it into the gaps of our understanding is a bit rash, at best, and dogma at the bad end.
Is there something you would like us to fill the gaps with, or is it that you want us to acknowledge the gaps, accept the disorder of our acquired values, and learn to live harmoniously with the contradictions that dwell inside us? Endowing us with a desire for order seems to me to have had both costs and benefits.
order is not the only outcome of the urge to should
it is rash and unwise to fill the gaps in with anything for the sake of an outcome, or rather, for the sake of an alignment with an outcome one prefers (or detests)
contradictions are trade-offs, we do them all day long, regardless of desire, regardless of the… gap
this position is neo-Pyrrhonist in inclination, I just do not share its soteriological framework (of salvationn/healing/enlightenment)
Ho, this is interesting. I haven’t heard of the Pyrrhonist philosophy before, but I feel that I’ve advocated for it in abundance. So what you would like is to remove from it the carrot of the good life, and pursue the withholding of judgment for its accuracy rather than external rewards?
I discovered neo-Pyrrhonist writing on following up recently, on my reading Beckwith's Greek Buddha (six-ish years ago), with Doug Bates books, who has just started substack at https://ataraxiaorbust.substack.com/
I see there is a method in suspending judgment that grants more than ataraxia, i.e. the method may provide more 'goods' than a easing of anxiousness, and I suspect this is mostly in an epistemological space, but I have only been following up on this for about a year, working title on this quest is 'the blur'. working notes listed at https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/posts-on-the-blur.html
I am currently migrating from substack to self-host with crossposting to substack. This list at posts on the blur is not currently being moved, so there are only two...
It seems pretty unclear where you and Taylor are disagreeing. Here's a Taylorian argument:
1) Something is a meaningful cognitive relation IFF its object is meaningful, and the meaningfulness of its object explains its being meaningful to the cognitive subject.
2) If the objects of our cognition are exclusively naturalistic, they are exclusively quantitative.
3) No quantitative object is meaningful.
4) Therefore if the objects of our cognitive relations are exclusively naturalistic, there are no meaningful cognitive relations.
5) There are meaningful cognitive relations.
6) Therefore, the objects of our cognition are not exclusively naturalistic.
I think you want to object to either (1) or (2) (or both?) but I can't tell which. If (1), I think your disagreement isn't over the significance of naturalism.
Patterns in many quantitative objects could encode or represent meaning.
He’s objecting to (3). That seems to me to be the weakest assertion. Why would we withhold meaning from quantities?
Consider the contrast between saying on the one hand that
-thought A is the cause of thought B only because neural activity A' which instantiates A is the cause of neural activity B' which instantiates B, and
-while thought A is instantiated by neural activity A' and B by B', A' is the cause of B' only because A is the cause of B.
Someone who wants to say "there is meaning in the world" and who wants to adopt the first view is going to have to say that neural activity itself is meaningful (this would be an objection to 3 above) Someone who wants to say "there is meaning in the world" and who wants to adopt the second view needn't say "neural activity itself is meaningful," because they believe that neural activity can encode (causally significant) higher order objects that are meaningful (this would be an objection to 2 above).
Both seem to me to be naturalistic approaches, by contrast with Taylor's reported view. Now that I've looked at Taylor's book though, he's not explicitly making any argument like the one I presented. He's mostly talking about German romantic poets and their response to a (Newtonian) conception of nature. But it seems to me that this is just an impoverished conception of scientific naturalism. We're used to the idea now that things like "patterns" are an important part of making sense of nature.
I guess I want higher order objects that are meaningful because that sounds economical, not because reality demands it. Perhaps I'm being simple-minded here, but the loss of a loved one would be an example I'd contemplate as a quantitative event that bares meaning. Now you may want to say that "love" is what gives this meaning or that "brain" is what gives this meaning. I'd "cheat" by nesting love in a brain as a particular patten of brain activity that bares meaning, require the presence of both love and a brain, and call it a day. Too simple-minded to work?
If meaning is a relation M(a,b), then it need not imply a property P(b) of an object. Something could be meaningful to me, but not meaningful without relation to anything in particular.
That works! But it would make the relation M unlike normal conceived epistemic relations, where I can know the mass of a hydrogen atom only if it has that mass independently of my (or anyone’s) knowing it. I think Taylor wants our relation to meaning to work like that.
I read the relevant link in claim (1) as saying that if P is the property of being meaningful and M is a cognitive relation then P(b) => P(M(a,b)). The other direction does not get used.
Emergence is fundamental.
Robert Laughlin - is Emergence Fundamental?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qT9iDcajqMo
Wow. That was strong. Very insightful. It’s not precisely arguing that Emergence is Fundamental. It’s more like saying that it is more likely that laws have only one way of coming into being, rather than two ways, and if you have to pick between emergence and fundamental as your hypothesis of why a law came into being, emergence seems supported by known examples while fundamental looks a lot like a religious myth. The default position then should be emergence until proven otherwise. Makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for sharing, Heretic!
I mean isn't that backwards? Stuff in a pattern is necessarily more complex than just stuff. It becomes more than simply the sum of its parts.
I’d argue that only replicating patterns have meaning; that meaning is a property that appears only in the course of evolution, and only for the things that evolve.
It isn't first order though. But I agree that it's more meaningful.
Taylors approach appears to be the last of many rescue operations over the centuries to give our mental life a “deeper” foundation. Yet another re-run of Plato (our mental life comes from above) versus Democritus (our mental life comes from below), in a sense.
I am among those who are open to the possibility that human communities are not long-run stable without some collective mythos anchoring the beliefs constituting the community in “stuff”.
However, as many have said before: A shared belief in metaphysical entities (i.e. that they are “stuff”) may have positive, perhaps even indispensable, effects on our ability to live in communities. But we cannot believe in such entities only because they have such effects for us. We must believe in them because we think they are actually real. The positive effects of such beliefs do not constitute sufficient “meaning-power” in themselves.
Since modern science, including evolutionary psychology, arguably has now solved all the remaining puzzles facing the neoDarwinian paradigm (Democritus has won), Taylors late attempt to anchor our mental life in “stuff” is likely to be as unsuccessful as previous attempts of the same.
Maybe this will doom human societies in the long run. But since there is no alternative, we have no other choice than to wait and see.
The potential for collaboration is not a truth from below or from above, it is a truth from the future. Potential for collaboration, not even a pattern in current matter, weak as it is in the moment, accumulates over time to forge immense function. Survival and collaboration are not meaningful patterns in matter, they are meaningful patterns in potential. Is potential “stuff”? Not really. Can it be worshipped like a god? Most certainly it can!
All the things in the cosmos are together in ONE place.
Each thing is moved by thee pattern.
Signals give direction.
All signals have value.
Be they intuitive or logical.
Physical or emotional senses.
The whole divides in to parts. 🧬
The parts move around and in and out of each other.
Like water flowing in rivers 💦 and oceans 🌊 and changing into vapor 💨 and snow ⛄️❄️and ice 🧊.
The water flows in and out of creatures 🐿️ and plants 🌱.
Every part is circulating. 💫☄️🪐⛈️🦠🧬🌪️
Everything in the UNIverse fits 🧩 because each part belongs to the cosmic song 🎶 and dance 💃🏻.
That's too positive a message for me. I like at least a bit of brokenness in my UNIverse.
Ok. I forgot to mention: Things unFold 🌱 🤰🏻 then enFold 🍂 ☠️.
But I did say : The whole divides in to parts. 🧬
If humans evolved to have experiences, purposes, moral intuitions, and artistic appreciations as patterns in their brains, there was some selection pressure that caused it. It seems to me the simplest explanation for why these patterns evolved is that they reflect something real in the world. We evolved a fear of snakes because those who weren't afraid of snakes died young to snakebites and never passed that lack of fear to the next generation. The fear of snakes is just a pattern in the brain, but the snakes are real.
Ha! Exactly!
wow. i just think stuff fetish is the wrong term. stuff worship ? perhaps. but the view i think you defend is completely materialistic and a very scary universe. but reality and fear are not the same sorts of objects. i am scared but i agree with your view.
Robin calls abstract non-corporeal scared values “stuff” (because they are being claimed as real, I suppose). If you find that label confusing you are not alone. The believers in sacred values would not typically designate their sacred values as “stuff”, just as real as “stuff”. What Robin argues for, and I agree with, is that there is meaning in the material. Rejoice and do not fear a material world devoid of meaning.
It's a material world afterall. Finding meaning where there's none gives you Kanye West.
"They also aren’t happy with stories about why humans might have evolved to have experiences, purposes, moral intuitions, and artistic appreciations as patterns in their brains. Or as patterns in their brains plus local environments. It is instead important to them that such sacred things be first order objects in our best theory of what the cosmos contains. Experiences, meanings, morals, and art must really all be “stuff” at the same level as everything else that matters in the cosmos. Able to act on other things as directly as other primitives of the universe. "
We can call:
"instead important to them that such sacred things be first order objects in our best theory of what the cosmos contains."
an alignment we feel we should do (I suspect there's no need to explain it with anything more complicated). When we world build a certain consistency is appealing, and curiously it is in doubled-down alignments (one ruler, one people, one god, one religion) that the diversity of experience that does exists has to be then subsumed into a hierarchy as you describe.
Usually when we align things important to us, we do so with whatever we most value when we throw in into the various gaps we feel either explain or present existential risks to our world. (When we feel we should order the world, even if we fail to world that order -- (this is a blame/credit vicious cycle of epistemologically fear).
We often throw god into the gap. But it can be other intuitions or abstractions, like order, balance, or as in the Taylor example romantic neo-magical nostrums.
Evolution works on whether we feel we should organise the world about us, not on how or what we order the world with. much like it gives us hunger but not a recipe for black forest cake. Recipes, moralities, ethos, codes, and their worlds are outcomes, and have no source, and not need to be healed, unless that's your fetish to world with.
I think I like what you’re saying. Let me see if I understood: you’re arguing that evolution gave us a desire for order in our value system but did not specify how we should bring about that order. The sacred then arises as a solution to this problem. Its primary function is as an ordering principle for the values we assign all the rest.
as an example of through similar romantic-ish things into the… gap see https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/52408d86-10bb-4b0d-a71c-dd4c368f56b0
I’ve tried to read it but some twenty paragraphs in I couldn’t still make out what it was about. Your writing assumes much that I do not possess.
or updated migrated version at https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/mark-dooleys-roger-scruton-and-my-modest-proposal.html
yes, but I feel "desire for order" is a bit strong, but that is the framework we share I suspect,
we just feel we should organise "stuff" about/around us, this includes other people who are doing the same…
— concepts of 'order' and thus a value 'system' are thus outcomes of that urge on our preferences (both individual and customary), which we then meta-order ( up on or in reflection) into things like ordering principles. Especially codes, spoken or unspoken which requires us to talk/behave in common with them. Notions of order are a an outcome of the urge to world our lives about us (it is a Janus dance between self & world).
I do observe some insistence on sacred, even when the person in question accepts a refutation or partial refutation of a particular sacred thing or concept. There still seems to be a desire for a different supernatural to be there. I think quoted passage is another example of this.
I think there might be some disagreement on what "meaning" refers to in these conversations. When I press, it seems that meaning is used as some kind of objective thing, outside the bounds of human or groups of humans agreeing. I can't picture what that could look like, and don't share the desire for it, so maybe I'm not representing it well here. But when meaning is defined that way, you can't get it from recognized patterns, which are a human model. I don't believe such "meaning" exists, personally, and am not sure how our reality would look different with or without it.
> We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create.
Well yes, we are atoms in a mindless universe(as in, the entire universe itself, doesn't seem to be conscious but we should also not at all be closed to the idea. The universe is really bizarre and being a skeptic here is distinct between being a skeptic about Spiderman being a real New Yorker). But we also *are* agents in a metaphysically alert one. We are embodied and embedded in meaning, and meaning is real-- really real, not just made up arbitrarily, but there's a fact of the matter to meaning, and you can only access this through higher consciousness and sentience. The fact that you must, does not make it arbitrary.
> “Strong ethical insights are grounded in what I called ‘felt intuitions,’ … [We] experience them, … feel them as inspiring, and their flagrant violation as appalling.”
Sometimes, yes, because empathy can be a certain pathway towards ethical insight. When you hear of a child being raped, you feel disgust and sorrow. This is not merely chemical reactions that have zero bearing towards any ethical fact of the matter, (they *are* chemical reactions, yes), but they happen here to align with the truth in this case: Child rape is *really* disgusting, and not so merely because we happen to feel so. If we found child rape the coolest thing ever, we'd actually be confused, also due to our happenstance of wiring. People believe that because this gets mapped onto subjectivity, it must be subjective in the sense that it's a matter of opinion or preference, and that doesn't follow at all.
> For them it seems insufficient for meaning, morals, experience, and art to be found in patterns of stuff, e.g., in patterns of brain neuron firings; such things must somehow be directly stuff themselves.
Again it just seems like the answer is "It's both". It is "stuff themselves" as in it is simply true regardless if "stuff" articulates it or understands it, or not. 2+2 still = 4, even in a universe completely devoid of consciousness. That's how truth works. It's true-- period. The same is true for any moral fact(moral facts, have something to do with a real thing, they're not just arbitrary. It's not true to say math is most deeply related to banana cream pie. That is just false. Likewise, it's not true to say child rape is the pinnacle of moral health-- it's simply false. Objectively false. You must be a subject to appreciate facts, yes, but that's not a problem at all for objective truth. Some people are unable to see this, especially smart people, and they invent complex philosophy around this confusion. I would argue that like ideas that try to defend free will, smart people engage in this behavior because it is adaptive to be morally confused-- it's a world that rewards cheaters, so narratives that diminish ethics and certain inconvenient truths will exist in such a world. Smart people are also able to intuit that a morally real narrative can't be enforced-- they know the tyrants can just subjugate them as they kick and scream about ethics, and intuit subconscious,y "This position is a dead end". That's cowardice and dishonesty, which is perfectly compatible with intelligence. All one can do is strictly care about the facts, no matter how inconvenient or psychologically destabilizing they are.
👏👏👏
What brought this up now, that it seems new to you again? I'm assuming this isn't something you just noticed, given that it's nearlyidentical to what Eliezer Yudkowsky was writing sixteen years ago when he was publishing on this very blog? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/joy-in-the-merely-real
Saying it's nearly identical is a bit of stretch. Yudkowsky is exhorting us to find meaning in real things. Robin is looking for reasons why some people can't. In fact, that's a perfect encapsulation of the difference between the two of them. Eliezer is a polemicist and Robin is a scientist.
I'd second that. The Yudkowsky post is related but far from terminal. Perhaps it is evidence of the problematical nature of canonization that such an objection is even raised. Beware of the Yudkowsky already said it, I'd say (probably Yudkowsky said that too).
True, and I know some people do, but I have no interest in canonization.
You're right, sorry.
I will say that I linked to one of many posts in the series written from that period that touch on many different aspects of the same set of ideas.
>I don’t see why minds made of atoms can’t be agents who make meaning, agree on purposes, connect with the cosmos, enjoy poetry they don’t consciously understand, are moved by intuitions, learn real lessons from their art, and face real constraints on their art.
Autism spectrum disorder.
Name-calling as a replacement for argument.