/lit/ - Literature

lol it's not that deep homie.

>>22889801
>Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.

We do not know the world a lion inhabits.

>>22889801

Think of it as cultural differences magnified to a level we have never experienced. Nobody anymore agrees with him in this respect, but it's interesting to think about.

Also, why not read PI? 100x more interesting than the tractatus. He single handedly gave birth to ways that linguistics is done now.

>>22889801
There's this story about Aristotle thinking that moving objects continue moving in a curve because he was a pseud who never actually bothered to go and check.

This isn't that deep either, the quote just means Wittgenstein was a pseud who never bothered to go and check. It's not that difficult to go and establish communication with, say, wild crows or ravens, if you actually put in the effort, to figure out their language, feather expressions, and what moves them. They are smart enough to figure you out and communicate back. And there is 320 million years separating us from crows, while lions are mammals like us and share more of our cognitive architecture.

>>22889862
Tractatus filtered me pretty hard, I dunno if understanding witt is probable for most readers

>>22889871
It is discouraging how biology constantly seems to be correcting philosophy tbqh

Haven't read him either, but from quotes it seems like he dunked on the entire field of philosophy and exposed academics as intelectual dick measurers flexing with big words without meaning.
If he's that based I shall read him, if not who is?

>>22889871
language =\= communication. Anyone who has a dog knows animals can communicate but language is a whole different thing.
You could argue that trained dogs recognize commands though

>>22889801
Refuted by C. S. Lewis, next.

What if he instead wrote

"If I could understand a lion, it would not speak."

??

>>22889844
therefore we do not know whether we would be able to understand it or not.

>>22890094
kek

>>22889801
Was listening to this when I cam across this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kD7Y6WD5Cg

>>22889871
>There's this story about Aristotle thinking that moving objects continue moving in a curve because he was a pseud who never actually bothered to go and check.
kys retard. it's like you mixed up 10 half-baked criticisms of Aristotle's physics into one giant retarded criticism that has nothing to do with anything concrete that Aristotle had said.

>>22889801
obligatory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu-NdBwF7uk

>>22890063
Look, if you define "language" to include human communication but exclude corvid communication, I'm not convinced you have a useful definition that carves nature at its joints.

Corvids, for context, give names to themselves and can use a trusted human's name when they figure a human's most common original sound must be their name. Corvids count. The meaning of several samey vocalizations joined into a sequence isn't just intensifying. A vocalization can be modified by another, though this is rare because most ecologically relevant events already have short "words" for them, same as it is for us. They have the capability for recursion, although that paper coming out of Nieder's lab wasn't entirely robust (but there is no reason why a complex enough neural network wouldn't have that capability). They use sticks and rocks as makeshift tools. They point with their bills at objects for their conspecifics' benefit, relatively distant objects too. The wild corvids I interact with take no more than 2-5 tries to figure out the meaning of a gesture I make at them, such as open palms or waving or pointing a finger at a spot to perch, figuring it out from context without much of a reward. There is dialectal variation by geographic region, since they pick up their vocalizations from their parents and juvenile flocks (the meaning of a vocalization is not innate). Theirs is a language or your definition of language isn't useful.

>>22891470
>>22889871
>The wild corvids I interact with
NTA but I also have a deep interest in corvid intelligence, social organization, and communication. I've read several books on ornithology and a few on corvids. It seems you're more involved in the cutting edge behavioral research. I wish I could be involved in something like that. It makes me somewhat envious.
I've always found this article on the evolution of padanus tools of New Caledonian crows interesting:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691310/

It appears that something like technological evolution is apparent in New Caledonian crows.

I would prefer mankind to go extinct and corvids to inherit the Earth. I still need to read John Mazluff and Bernd Heinrich, but I did read Candace Savage's Bird Brains and the Cornell Handbook of Bird Biology.
I do agree with you on the evolution of language. What's your opinion on cetacean intelligence?
I used to watch hours of nature documentaries (typically Doclights tend to be better) and vicariously considering the umwelten of intelligent animals greatly appeals to me.
If you're ever in the mood for beautiful, poetic writing on birds, I recommend JA Baker's The Peregrine and A Spicing of Birds: Poems by Emily Dickinson.

>>22889944
check check check checked. It's not easy. But if you've tried Tractatus, you might as well try PI. I mean, if you like this stuff, then you can go to Kripke. We'll be here if you want to post about the books.

>>22891589
I'm a pessimist about humans but idk if that extends to corvids
I believe to feel pleasure or pain, you require awareness. Animals have no awareness, so the harm they perpetrate on one another doesn't actually produce suffering, which means they can't be evil.

IMO good and evil are concepts that only apply to mankind.

it's weird how jews and their logocentrism are still popular in 2024

>>22891807
>Animals have no awareness
Yes they do, retard. You're obviously not the guy I'm talking to.

>>22891821
>Yes they do, retard.
What makes you believe that?
>You're obviously not the guy I'm talking to.
And?

>>22891839
I apologize for my rudeness.
>What makes you believe that?
You can read about research into "theory of mind". We keep finding more and more animals capable of ascribing mental states and intentions to others, indicating high degree of metacognitive awareness. For example, dogs pass the sniff test of recognition. Other animals with high metacognitive awareness include dolphins, corvids, elephants, pigs, Greater Apes, and a few others. Many animals have a much more rich umwelt than we gave credit to.
I think it's a matter of degrees of self-awareness. All mammals and birds are self-aware, but some species have higher degree of metacognitive awareness. Kind of like how some people are more aware of their thought patterns than others.

>>22891858
There is something I don't get
Most of us would agree that human babies don't have awareness, yet they appear to have emotions, desires, and even a personality. And yet, by age 2 most newborns can pass the mirror test. Supposedly humans gain some sense of awareness by 18 months (around the same time), but how many people actually remember living & being alive for significant amounts of time as an infant? I only had very brief "flashes", as if my brain was learning how to become conscious, but it wouldn't become a real, constant state for several years. Obviously some people will say, "I remember being a baby!" but they probably only had brief flashes of awareness. Does anyone really recall spending several years in that state?

My point is I think this stuff builds up in layers. Meta-cognition does not necessarily mean awareness. Not even reason seems to indicate awareness all the time. This is an unorthodox idea, but I seriously believe we're going about the whole "awareness test" the wrong way. We have to understand that awareness does not significantly alter the outward appearance or actions of humans. Metacognition absolutely changes everything, but awareness seems to get way more credit than it deserves, and the proof is that it's so hard to tell when it actually kicks in. No one ever goes "My baby just became conscious!" because it's acting identically to how it would act otherwise. To identify outward signs of self awareness with actual, genuine awareness is IMO a massive misstep.

>>22889801
Yes, essentially. Probably.

Our social environment determines certain structures of "meaning", of how we use language to refer to the world. We use analogy to ground a lot of it, and invoke familiar circumstances and examples in order to coordinate understanding between the other people we want to bring along in the conversation.

Wittgenstein went from an earlier "Tractiarian" period in which he believed that a sufficiently-large enough accounting of objects within an environment would allow us to employ a calculus from which we could derive all possible meaning about objects, and so all possible meaning within the Universe itself.

As you probably know, he went on to disregard this theory. It was "of its time", popular with Positivists, Behaviourists and "Physicalists" more broadly.

The problem with the theory was that "meaning" was impossible to locate within the external object in a consistent way that didn't require a "game" to coordinate it. This being so, meaning itself was technically infinite so long as it relied on a subjective agent to "comprehend" it in some way.

Language was seen as the hardest problem for Behaviourism, the prevailing scientific paradigm of the time. According to this view, all "behaviour" was externally verifiable, and by observing animals in their habitats long enough we can infer from stimulus-response profiles why certain behaviours happen without needing to appeal to "inner-states" or "feelings".

What's more, thanks to demonstrates by Physiologists working with animals, we could now "retrain" people, "program" them to respond in certain ways by changing the environmental conditions alone.

This may sound counterintuitive, but Behaviourists honestly believed that happiness WAS smiling, not the "feeling" associated with smiling. Running made you afraid because it increased your heart rate, not the other way around.
B.F. Skinner was a "radical" Behaviourist: for this guy, there were NO "inner-states" worth caring about, no innate structures. Environment determined EVERYTHING.

Wittgenstein's work, I found out in the book I read about him, was inherited by members of something called the Cognitive Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_revolution

This is where "modern"/"contemporary" philosophy begins from what I can tell. From here on out it's neuroscience and computers and all that fancy stuff. The entry point I've taken recently is reading Chomsky's theories about language acquisition and his problems with B.F. Skinner's disregard for 'internal states'. According to Chomsky, language is so complex and creative that it borders on the infinite: no number of environmental interactions can explain why someone will utter a word at any one moment, much less why we learn so many without experiencing them in person.

Language is CREATIVE, so the brain must house some latent, innate biological mechanism that computes, stores and deploys the "meaning" we associate with language.

>>22891969
This is a mess I'm very drunk please forgive me! Typing is quite difficult!

>>22891907
What you've described reminds me of an anecdote from a friend. He mentioned that after his brother sustained a severe head injury (~18-20 years old), he temporarily reverted to speaking and acting as though he were six years old, complete with the interests of a child that age. This is secondhand and anecdotal, so we must approach it cautiously, but it underscores the mind's intricate layers and potential for regression.

Your exploration of this topic from a phenomenological perspective is particularly intriguing. I concur that the mind's development is a multilayered process, intricately woven with our environmental, biological, and genetic factors. In this vein, examining case studies of feral children might provide further insights, although I've yet to delve into this area. It's clear, however, that the environment plays a crucial role in shaping awareness. This is evident in studies where rats, dark-reared during critical periods, suffer irreversible blindness, or how exposure to anxiolytic music during certain postnatal days can shape future preferences.

This suggests that environmental stimuli and upbringing significantly mold brain plasticity and the layering process of consciousness. While the primary goal might be to adapt and become attuned to a specific niche -- an idea that aligns with the extended mind hypothesis -- the reality is that humans are increasingly adapting to modernity. Most people seamlessly integrate into the structured life of modern society -- paying taxes, commuting, adhering to a strict schedule -- a stark contrast to historical norms. This adaptation and coextension with systemic structures illustrate the layering process of awareness and consciousness. It also segues into what Baudrillard terms the "hyperreal," where our perceptions are often more influenced by the simulacra of reality rather than reality itself.

>>22889801
I think that specific argument was that we wouldn't have any reason to believe we'd have the same grammatical types, even if they were used the same.
Its a retarded argument if only because lions are one of the non-primate animals that we have the most in common with. Its World is 99% identical to the one we evolved out of. A much better example would have been a whale. It'd be interesting to see what mutation language would have when from the start it is able to reach nearly every individual of the same specie on the planet.

>>22892239
If a lion explained to you the joys of killing cubs with his brothers and raping lionesses and eating first even before his children, would you sympathise or understand?

>>22891589
>corvids to inherit the Earth
Heh, not sure I'd agree with that. Their social hierarchies are more rigid than those of canines, and their interactions are quite violent by human standards. If you keep their best interests in mind while feeding them, you have to figure out which corvids are the territorial bosses or dominant members of vagrant flocks, and feed those first, otherwise if you just spread meat pieces or kibble around, fights break out when this year's youngsters get impatient and don't wait for the dominant ones to be done first. Then you end up with injured corvids, drooping wings and all. Mated adults also go super hormonal for a couple months every year during nesting season. And vagrant juvenile flocks are highly competitive and unsafe groups which are thought to be the reason that corvids are so smart. For all their incredible intelligence, they are brutal, fluffy dinosaurs.
>John Marzluff and Bernd Heinrich
Those are the best accounts I know of, second only to personally interacting with corvids yourself.
>What's your opinion on cetacean intelligence?
Regrettably not much of an opinion, though I'm watching with rapt attention the AI-powered Cetacean Translation Initiative, which I hope to repurpose for helping decode crow communication when the kinks have been ironed out.

>>22891907
>actually remember living & being alive for significant amounts
That's just long-term memory formation, which corvids absolutely have. This December I was recognized by a raven whom I hadn't seen for a year, but as soon as he noticed me, he landed a step away from me just like the year before, clearly excited (you could tell it from his feathers moving and bill wiping). This kind of memory is normal for corvids, there are reports of pet ravens returning to a place after a couple years of absence and digging out a cache they had hid. Research on corvid sensory consciousness and theory of mind has this covered, too:

• Nieder, A., Wagener, L., & Rinnert, P. (2020). A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird. Science, 369(6511), 1626–1629. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb1447
• Miller, R., Boeckle, M., Ridgway, S., Richardson, J., Uhl, F., Bugnyar, T., & Schwab, C. (2023). Social attention across development in common ravens and carrion crows [Preprint]. Animal Behavior and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.08.03.551806
• Zeiträg, C., & Osvath, M. (2023). Differential responses to con- and allospecific visual cues in juvenile ravens (Corvus corax): The ontogeny of gaze following and social predictions. Animal Cognition, 26(4), 1251–1258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01772-3

They form long-term memories, there is evidence for sensory consciousness, and they change how they cache based on whether they are observed by conspecifics, a fledgling raven can already follow the gaze of an adult raven, and the gaze of a human at several months old. Yes, they absolutely are aware, all the time.

>>22892251
>would you sympathise
No, but another (fucked up) human being might.
or understand?
Yes. That you think I should have a moral reaction means you also understand it, you just don't apply the same value. Witty's point is more that you couldn't assume lions would develop a language with verbs or pronouns. It might have kwezorg and plewopples instead, and how the fuck do we learn what those are and do if we start with no reference point?
Again, its a retarded argument.

>>22892251
NTA (rather, the A in >>22892286) but yes, of course. That's the cognitive pleasure of minimizing the distortion of a human's perception to understand an animal on their terms. I appreciate crows all the same for all their violence and strict ranking I write about in that paragraph. And I neglected to write about the disabled outcasts that feed separately from even the lower-ranking healthy juvenile flock, or their eating of each other's eggs during nesting season, or crow parents teaching 3-month-old youngsters to hunt sick pigeons whom they don't even eat afterward aside from a few choice bites (urban crows are well-fed). There is a joy in understanding an animal's life in its totality without a knee-jerk rejection of parts thereof as inhumane.

>>22892319
He said we not another fucked up human being. So he was generally correct. Because we would not understand, we would be inclined morally to change the lion or to save the cubs, thats not the same thing as understanding. We are inclined to lock up and correct psychopathic behaviour because we don't understand it, its the only reaction that we have about it.

>>22892286
Still not as violent as chimpanzees though, which we share the closest common ancestor with.
At least the violence of crows and ravens is not as psychosexual as chimps. Do you agree with that?

>>22892330
>is not
are not*

>>22892330
>Do you agree with that?
Yes; as an aside for other anons, "The Naked Bonobo" and "The New Chimpanzee" are nice books on this topic, the former destroys that silly popular conception of bonobos.

>>22892334
So my original assertion still stands. We are merely the stepping stone for the future evolution of corvids.

Wtf

>>22892330
Imagine if humans evolved from some less fucked up species
We would live in paradise

>>22892328
>Because we would not understand, we would be inclined morally to change the lion or to save the cubs, thats not the same thing as understanding. We are inclined to lock up and correct psychopathic behaviour because we don't understand it, its the only reaction that we have about it.
We understand the ramifications of psychopathic behaviors. We might also understand that at another stage of humanity, humans might very well have felt happiness at killing the children of his rivals. That's not beyond the scope of understanding. Even that you say we would try to change its behavior goes against Witty's point. If you can want to change it its because you could communicate with it. Wittgenstein cares about language, not morality or ethics. He means we could not even figure out a way to translate from our linguistic makeup to theirs, that nothing guarantees linguistic translation being possible between linguistic codes.
I would argue the complete opposite and that he himself had begun realizing it in the middle parts of the Tractatus, but he shifted immediately away from it. Imagine a sufficiently alien being and perhaps the degree of complexity becomes astronomical quickly, sure, but lions are mammals, socials on top of that, we have shared cognitive features, emotions, something which is evident in that we can already communicate somewhat with them.

>>22892342
Even gorillas and orangutans seem better than chimps and bonobos, relatively speaking.
>>22892334
Btw, have you researched parrot intelligence and communication much? African Grey Parrots seem remarkably intelligence. I recommend reading the book Alex and Me by Dr. Pepperberg.

>>22892349
>intelligence
intelligent*
Ignore typos, it's late.

>>22892349
>have you researched parrot intelligence and communication much
Not in any specific depth either, but they often come up as a comparison to corvids in the literature, e.g. those papers on relative neuron counts. It's my impression that corvids outmatch psittacines in the raw intelligence, but in practice this is masked by corvid neophobia and general "anxiety," where they have to, for example, check an opening multiple times to make sure food is there, even though they know full well that it is. I may be wrong.

>>22889871
Jesus fucking Christ mate a little be of self-awareness would be a minimum. You are laughing at one of the earliest intellectual giant of the world (that we have record of anyways), the man who invented the very concept of librairies, a man who without his contribution to logic you could never post your shitty arguments on an internet forum because we would never have created the basis for programming codes. Because he fucking didn't check one fact.
Be better man.

>>22892344
Yes we understand ramifications not the cause, that's not remotely the same thing since we go over the ramifications and try to control the actual causes that we still don't understand.
>Wittgenstein cares about language, not morality or ethics
You don't know this and in philosophy, it's almost impossible to dinstinguish btn the two. You can even go as far as argue that through language we gain the metaphysical concept of morality that was otherwise obscure.

>>22892375
>Yes we understand ramifications not the cause
Of course we do. It kills the youngs of its former rival after taking over the tribe. This is perfectly reasonable behavior given a certain moral framework (again, one we had not 100 generations ago). It feels pleasure because it is asserting its dominance in doing so, and because this is likely a deeply embedded cognitive feature which will rely on feelings of satisfaction.
Or maybe there's another explanation, but you see I came up with one that more or less fits within moments. Therefore this behavior is not this completely alien one that we cannot relate at all to.
>>22892375
>You don't know this
Yes I do? I've studied Witty in university (albeit I'll admit its been ~15 years so my memory is really hazy). Witty cared very little about anything besides linguistics, logic and ontology (in a way). His life and interests are pretty darn well recorded.

>>22890554
Karl is the epitome of the midwit meme. In one of the episodes Karl took an IQ test and scored 83, he's legitimately stupid. But goddam if he isn't often right. Semi-related Wittgenstein is clearly the midwit here. What did he think I wouldn't understand about a lion? We're both mammals. Their drives are our drives. Mating, fighting, territory, hunting. If a lion could speak and said "I'm hungry" why would I not be able to understand that?

>>22892393
I don't think you understand what i am saying. There is no way to separate the intentionality of language apart from human morality. He even later admitted that language is a tool, what you are trying to do is refute that? You can't separate it and study it without taking into account the dynamics of human morality like he was trying to do in the tractatus and therefore you can't argue that we could understand a lion and yet try to change it to fit our moral mold.

>>22892395
>"I'm hungry"
Witty's argument (and I agree its dumb) is that it might not say anything that could be translatable into "I'm hungry" to say "I'm hungry". It might not understand that states could be applied to an object. But it might somehow be able to build a language that functions for itself and other lions, which would by definition be incompatible with ours.

>>22892395
Karl is nothing like a midwit lol. He's a brilliant retard. But still, how the fuck could you listen to the Ricky Gervais Show and think
>you know who's the insufferable midwit?
>its not Ricky
>its not Stephen
>ITS KARL PILKINGTON
Like, wtf is wrong with your brain dude?

>>22889871
All Greeks thought that the perpetual motion of the heavens was an open explanandum given that all terrestrial motion is finite: things move back toward the center of the earth (they knew it was spherical) when they are displaced by human action. The heavens are different, they move perpetually. This implies that they have a different nature. The Greeks theorized that the nature of motion in the heavens or the nature of the motion of the heavens themselves was circular or spherical and that circular motion was somehow superior to linear motion (which is "violent" because it results from unnatural displacements of otherwise resting objects, which simply try to resume their rest) and associated with eternal beings, beings that are immune to coming to be / passing away (again unlike terrestrial entities).

All scientists thought this for thousands of years. The reason we have science today is that people who thought this were infinitely smarter than you could even comprehend, guys like Eudemus and Ptolemy who not only theorized but did painstaking experiments and collected reams of observational data on the heavens that remained useful and valid for millennia.

Ancient people weren't dumb. Like OP mentions in relation to Wittgenstein, they had different worldviews.

>>22892404
Ok but lions already communicate a lot of things we understand without language. They are clearly communicating when they bare their teeth for example. Sorry Witty, that quote is pure fart huffing pseud.

>>22892403
>You can't separate it and study it without taking into account the dynamics of human morality like he was trying to do in the tractatus
You very well can and it shows that the most enduring and solid argument he ever produced are those which goes exactly in that direction. The basis of all language now and forever is the development of u-nary non-degenerative atomic expressions. That's the minimum requirement for language to emerge. You need a number of terms first and that minimum logical framework even before you figure out what grammatical types you are going to use.
I honestly don't really fucking care what you are saying because you are talking right beside Wittgenstein's own point. He didn't give a single thought to animal cognition when writing that line.

>>22892408
I think you misunderstood or I mispoke, it's the midwit MEME that Karl embodies - Karl is the retard on the left. The "brilliant retard" as you describe. I fucking love Karl though I think he would try my patience were I his friend. But then, I'd probably just accept him. He's a guy you can have a beer and a game of pool with, a bit of a chuckle here and there, so why worry? Ricky oth is one of the most insufferable cunts on Earth and I despise his arrogance in the early years of the podcast and radio. It just baffles me how much he wants to wank himself off over being better than other people, how much legit joy he gets over putting Karl down.

>>22892418
You haven't read his later works have you? The fucking comment op makes about lions is in his later work in which he denounces the tractatus view about us being able to study it apart from how its used as a tool. I also don't fucking care what you are saying because you are talking beside his points in the PI.

>>22892411
Greek science filters me because without the scientific method it just seems absurd. But it seems that until the scientific revolution, natural philosophy (AKA both science and philosophy) was meant to proceed from logical deduction which necessarily limits how important you consider experimental data to be. For us it's paramount but until recently it was considered categorically inferior because induction is inferior to deduction strictly speaking. It's a weird train of thought but honestly kinda makes sense

>>22892420
Yeah I didn't see the pic-related, so I deleted my post in shame. Sorry for insulting you.

>>22892370
My memory is a bit fuzzy since it's been many years I've read the book, but Dr. Pepperberg talked about an interesting behavioral experiment where she taught an African parrot, Alex, the words for shapes and colors with her "model/rival technique". She was using the toys and normally Alex responded correctly, but once he was purposefully giving all wrong answers because he was bored. Pepperberg eventually put Alex into time-out and he screamed, "Let me out!" and proceeded to give the right answers. I do recommend the book since it balances both research and personal anecdotal experiences in a charming way.
I'm off to bed. Have a good day.

>>22892413
I agree 100% he is wrong, even if you take him entirely for what he meant. And even more so if you do it from a more modern understanding of cognition and linguistics.
It especially annoys me he chose lions for some reason. If you read Aristotle for example, his account of how barbarians acted outside of large communities, it really evokes the "male lion going around killing cubs" thing.
Then again it doesn't surprise me too much given how mentally unstable Witty was himself, that he didn't have a good relationship with animals. I don't want to pseud diagnose him but he had something 100%, even if it was just the result of his fucked up upbringing, and animals seldom react well to those types, in my experience.

>>22892431
Pure class my friend, no worries.

>>22892429
Nothing has changed really, the apriori still structures what people can "see" and notoriously even causes scientists to (as a rule) defend dead paradigms long after they "should" have been deconstructed. Check out NR Hanson's Patterns of Discovery.

>>22892436
Good post. I think the thing is, we're all susceptible to believing our own bullshit at times and ironically the smarter you are the worse it is. Guy was obviously brilliant and brilliant men get used to being right. When it goes wrong, it becomes "this must be right because I thought it." You've got to stay hyper critical to the end. It's one of the reasons I love Scott Alexander so much, he is a bit of a limp wrist at times but he stays forever humble, always open to the possibility he could be wrong. I strive for the same.

>>22892428
>The fucking comment op makes about lions is in his later work in which he denounces the tractatus view about us being able to study it apart from how its used as a tool.
I know, but in that book Witty makes multiple arguments about multiple things. The Lion quote is about how languages can be untranslatable, not about anything else. Its a linguistic argument about the fact that language is a set of rules and how we use grammatical types defines them and we could very well encounter languages that have unknown types that we couldn't translate. It isn't about animal cognition at all.
And you are arguing emotionally. The thing about understanding is ridiculous. You understand what you can make sense of, not what you can morally align with.

>>22892442
Scott is a rare example of someone who can have a deeply researched opinion on something and will actually change it if he gets evidence proving it wrong
None of his opinions are that deep though unfortunately, he casts his net top wide

>>22892444
>You understand what you can make sense of, not what you can morally align with.
There is no way to tell the difference here and you missed the entire point of the book. You make sense of something exactly because you morally align with it. This is the entire point of the is-ought problem and why its still unresolved. Understanding means relating to, not explaining cause and effect. We already know lion behaviour even during witt's time, however, if a lion could talk witt wouldn't need to talk about cause and effect in place of human emotional understanding.

>>22892456
>None of his opinions are that deep though unfortunately, he casts his net top wide
Very true except for psychiatry I'd say
>Scott is a rare example of someone who can have a deeply researched opinion on something and will actually change it if he gets evidence proving it wrong
Yeah Scott (and myself) are religious about the truth and I mean that in the full sense of the world religious. Truth is the sacred, centralizing concept the world (should be) shaped around and that's what drives his (and my) investigations and behaviour. I'm also aware that my religious feelings having crystalized around truth for some reason don't make me any different to those whose religiousness is more mainstream. My tentative conclusion thus far is that intuitive morality/disgust response is genetic so I'm guessing I was just born this way. Though it's undeniably a minority view. I treat conversation as if its purpose were presenting ideas for peer review. It's confusing to me and taken many years to recognize that the more recognised purpose of conversation is status jockeying. Hence even many intellectuals not changing their mind when proven wrong.

>>22892469
>Very true except for psychiatry I'd say
Any good articles?
His depression protocol was alright

>>22892489
Also
>I treat conversation as if its purpose were presenting ideas for peer review. It's confusing to me and taken many years to recognize that the more recognised purpose of conversation is status jockeying.
Then trying to get a good discussion going probably drives you nuts. Most "intellectuals" honestly just can't do it, it's literally out of their reach.

I think to accomplish serious progress a mindset like Scott's is the general minimum. When a scientist makes some discovery and he's dogmatic about it in the face of evidence, but it turns out to be true, it's often the case he just got lucky, because most people are dogmatists by default so by sheer probability some are bound to be right.

>>22892489
Google astral codex ten szasz and you'll find some very entertaining articles with his typically well articulated thoughts on the argument of the myth of mental illness.

>>22892321
If a lion could talk to us, we would not understand why it doesn't negotiate with the lionesses for a better solution as befitting our moral mold. We understand why it does that, but we would not understand why it has to now that it can talk.

>>22892498
Yep. I had a falling out with a lifelong friend about 5 years over - I shit you not - blank slatism. Well, truthfully, the political correctness regarding the truth and (Lionel Hutz) "THE TRUTH". This is a PhD at Oxford mind you and he was already falling that deeply into the orthodoxy. Good God was he a slimy political operator. Now that I'm 5 years older my naive astonishment at how quickly a rather clever and formerly trustworthy friend can start asserting 2+2 = 5 without any compunction has devolved into a state of cynical nihilism. I'm equally as confused as how everyone else seems to just naturally know how to operate in a political sense apart from us autists on this site.
>I think to accomplish serious progress a mindset like Scott's is the general minimum. When a scientist makes some discovery and he's dogmatic about it in the face of evidence, but it turns out to be true, it's often the case he just got lucky, because most people are dogmatists by default so by sheer probability some are bound to be right.
This is painfully accurate. I consider myself a scientist and I'll continue working on discoveries in my area, it's just that what I do can't be done in the light as it were. By all means we can push further into our knowledge of corvid linguistics for example (I'm NTA) because nobody is looking at that. If they were we'd end up pushed out by the likes of my former friend and truth would quickly take a backseat to power.

>>22892507
We do understand - it's because the lionesses don't shame them for it and instead get horny right after. If that's how it worked for humans we'd probably do the same.

>>22892501
im another anon. im reading a little, but its like he agree with szasz?. i dont understand how szasz or apparently this guy can see psychiatry as a masquarade and still consider themselves psychiatris and psychologists, always sound dogmatic or a status based decision.

>>22892524
I think the timeline of articles is something like 2006, 2015, 2020, 2023. Here's the latest: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sure-whatever-lets-try-another-contra
They both make some very clever arguments but Brian is arguing from a place of vastly inferior experience to Scott. Scott does not agree wholly with the Szaszian proposal that mental illness does not exist but Szasz certainly has some anti-orthodoxical points that are without a doubt true.
>i dont understand how szasz or apparently this guy can see psychiatry as a masquarade and still consider themselves psychiatris
I guess it's all about how you define your own identity. Scott likely considers the role of psychiatrist as someone who helps people with mental/emotional maladies and regardless of their origin (imagined, material, combination of both), it's his job to both investigate in order to find causes as well as solutions and to help. No matter how you feel about the orthodoxy there's no hypocrisy in practicing that.

>>22892507
Out of curiosity, what is this "better" solution you have in mind, supposing the resources are as scarce as they are in the African savannah, and supposing the lion's goals aren't yet too far out of alignment with evolution's goals (reproduction)?

>>22892516
Why do the lionesses not shame them lmao, this is not as simple as you make it, and even if that were true it would not explain anything, by virtue of our morality it still leaves the issue unresolved because we expect that it should have some moral responsibility or self awareness, its not on the lioness to change the lion to be 'better'.

>>22892542
I don't have a solution, i am merely addressing the question as he intended, this is a huge problem in ethics since hume introduced it 200 yrs ago and it has never been resolved. Just because we couldn't understand it doesn't mean we have to change anything, and yet we always feel compelled to do so because of our superficial senses of morality.

>>22892536
>Scott likely considers the role of psychiatrist as someone who helps people with mental/emotional maladies
yes, but once you see the inevitable errors that conceptualizing mental/emotional maladies make, the inevitable push for a unified view of mind or human behaviour that cannot be truth. then you should, i think, try to build something new, i dont know what, obviously. but to me they sound like people who deconstruct a concept and still want the concept to be the same.
i think the problem is the identity, but not like he identify like a helper, but as a psychiatrist or psychologist, with all the status, seriousness and life that it lead. thats why the hold like desperate parasites to it, probably thats the human reason behing.
szasz and every critic of the ontological part of psychiatry who still want to be a psychiatrists sound too much inconsequential to me. in brief, this problem make me feel he is exactly what you are saying he is not. (someone who rectify himself if he is proved wrong...(nobody is proved wrong, never, like you said before, people always find the way to be truth... human too human))

>>22892550
>feel compelled to do so
I... don't see what the difficulty is. Judging the lion for the methods it uses to achieve its goals is signaling whose target isn't the lion but at other humans. We thus further our own goals while providing evidence to other humans that we are reliable moral agents they can cooperate with. The lion is only incidental there.

>>22892536
Psychiatry is definitely at least 50% masquerade but Szasz isn't giving it the takedown it deserves. Instead Szasz uses a lot of weasely and slimy arguments like starting off the book by tracing the origins of psychiatry to shamanism without realizing that if mental illness does present itself in a traditional society it will be interpreted as a religious phenomenon, and he just does a boring psychological thing of "Oh psychiatry is just filling the modern man's need for spiritual guidance in a form he can rationally embrace."

Sure it has a kernel of truth to it but that doesn't mean schizophrenia is fake. And when Szasz mentions schizophrenia in his book, it's just to go like "See? See??? The psychiatrists always resort to madness because it makes them look legitimate!!!" and it's like no, man. that shit is real. I'm a diagnosed schizo and I can tell you its a nightmare.

Psychiatry deserves a very strong takedown in book form, but Szasz was not capable of doing that. It's not even worth a read tbqh

>>22892544
>by virtue of our morality it still leaves the issue unresolved because we expect that it should have some moral responsibility or self awareness
We are both humans and don't seem to think remotely alike (meant humorously).
It seems you expect the lion or any actor to have moral responsibility for harming another, the cubs in this scenario? But why? I certainly don't. Harm in itself, even murder isn't uniformly morally repugnant to me. I'm in favour of killing when the situation is kill or be killed. I'm in favour of putting down sick animals or even truly sick human beings. I'm not really even in principle against the slaughter of the children of my enemies. In the case of the lion it's more like the slaughter of the children of his former rivals, at least linguistically I suggest we agree that rival is a more appropriate label than enemy. In REALLY modern terms we might view the cubs as potential future stepchildren and by that view the moral choice would be to not kill the original father in order to fuck with the mother lioness in the first place.
>its not on the lioness to change the lion to be 'better'.
it isn't, I'm simply explaining the why from an instinctive perspective. man doesn't not act on impulse just because, he needs a reason to not indulge his desires. if we pretend it's humans for the sake of morality, men want to fuck women and men will fuck women even if the women don't want to fuck the men. but in human society we use social tools such as shame to control men, not just regarding rape but regarding everything.
so my answer remains the same. the reason the male lions do what they want to do is because no one is stopping them (the idea of lionesses using shame was a little joke inspired by human behaviour).

>>22892560
You may be right but don't forget you are mind reading here assuming what Scott and others think and what their motivations are. I personally strongly disagree with your conclusion but that could be due to fairly intimate familiarity with Scott and his work. To my view guy is integrity personified.

>>22892550
>we always feel compelled to do so
I don't see what the difficulty is. Judging the lion for the manner in which he achieves his goals is signaling aimed at other humans rather than the lion. The lion is only a collateral victim of the advancement of our own goals while convincing other humans that we are reliable moral agents to be cooperated with.

>>22892565
Spot on analysis. I agree completely.

>>22892564
Not necessarily. This isn't about signalling as much as its about failing to relate. If the lion lived in human society and continued doing what it was doing we would still be compelled to change it even before you could argue that people would find him a bad example. I mean we modify dog behaviour all the time even though humans can't be said to learn bad behaviour from dogs. Its a deviation from the herd thing, we do it even if there's no immediate utility extracted from it, it's instinctual and not necessarily utilitarian, that's the entire point of the is-ought argument, its not logically sound to want to do anything about anything.

>>22892568
If it could talk to you, then you would be instinctively compelled to find out why it doesn't change. Its the same thing with meeting a psychopath, its not something that you can resist as a curious human.

>>22889801
>If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand it
These are the words of a man who doesn't understand animals. The only thing that keeps us from EFFECTIVELY communicating with animals is their inability to speak. On a physical level, they're not capable of storing that amount of information for on the fly use the same way we are, if you are around a pet dog or cat long enough, you'll quickly see that we have extremely similar emotional thought processes, which is why good pet owners can form such strong connections with their pets, because they understand them well enough that they don't need words for emotional communication.
For those who don't know, large cats are very much the same as house cats, just bigger so they don't domesticate the same way. If a lion could speak, it'd say things like "fuck you," "I want to kill something," "mehhhhhh" and "yeah baby," (when content), since this is the kind of emotional thought process cats have. You can easily understand animals without words, because they wear their emotions on their sleeves, this guy is a hack who knows nothing.

>>22892577
i dont think its a big deal making things up for status. im assuming it because its the easiest and most common way . the ontological problem of psychiatry is too much of a problem to have a minimum layer of integrity on it.

>>22889801
Yes we would.
>>22889844
We live on earth.

>>22892565
its not about if its real or not. but about if its an illness or not. if "its a nightmare" is enough to prove is an illness, we can nullify basically every emotion, thought or sensation that pscyhiatry put his seal of approve.
every human emotion have nightmarish potential in it.

>>22892629
For better or worse, we define illness to mean anything that (1) affects a minority of the population, and (2) strongly reduces quality of life. People naturally vary in IQ, but we define profoundly low IQ to be a disease (mental retardation) whereas profoundly high IQ is fine. Some people are just naturally gloomy as fuck all the time, and we really don't know why. We created the word "dysthymia" to describe these people, but if you talk to them they appear mostly normal -- they're just really pessimistic.

Mental illness does not come with only negative feelings but often physical problems like constipation, headaches, insomnia, and concrete issues like memory problems. Ultimately labeling it "disease" or not doesn't matter much, google Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions. If you have this problem and its harming you and we have ways of treating it, then yeah why not view it as a disease?

>>22892645
>Mental illness comes with constipation
This explains so much.

>>22892645
>Ultimately labeling it "disease" or not
obviously is not labeling the problem. but the intellectual right psychiatry assume when make it.
we are not talking about physical problems here, we are talking about thoughts and emotions. psychiatry just believe their own lie when talk like that.
there is no starting point of how a human should think or feel. you are proposing one when you are labeling like a disease one thing or another. appealing to majority it just feels inadequate in a conversation of this things. the fact that an entire field is based in that brittle argument should tell something about it.

>>22892692
You sound constipated.

>>22892617
Couldn't agree more, what an absolute pseud, would be like me giving a pithy take on vaginas, a topic I clearly know nothing about.

>>22892692
>the fact that an entire field is based in that brittle argument should tell something about it
This type of heuristic is a very poor way to form an opinion, experience is key. Also, you have to be 18 to post here.

>>22892706
experience is key for what?. experience make you blind or used to the experience most of the time. which is, i think, the problem of every psychiatrist who think they have some more big problems to solve that the argument behind their entire field.

>>22892709
Wrong. You cannot form accurate opinions about something you have no experience with. Just ask someone who barely knows you from high school but watched you from afar - will they know you as well as someone who has direct experience with you? Of course not. Most likely they'll spout off confidently incorrect assertions. This is a general life lesson. Hold off forming a concrete, confident opinion about anything you don't have personal experience. Assume that you may be right but you also may be wrong. There are very intelligent people in every field. Not everyone is stupid or a sheep. There are usually reasons why things are the way they are that aren't obvious to outsiders.

>>22892715
>There are usually reasons why things are the way they are that aren't obvious to outsiders.
this is the same for insiders. dont need toi appeal to authority, just say why im wrong, its that simple.

>>22892721
But you may not be wrong. I'm simply pointing out that you are too confident in your assertions. You are not an expert. If you are a disciple of truth, of rightness, then remain humble. If you are a devotee of ego then keep going as you're going. Declare you're right before knowing for sure.

>>22892727
you are assuming im too confident. i dont even know if i am. i have this ideas and i say it like i feel it, just that. my experience with ontological problem of psychiatry is that is assumed can be a problem to the velocity and clarity of psychiatry, so it tend to be silenced or trying to pass it like a naivete.

>>22889871
Witt thinks language is complete sui generis and unique and totally unlike communications in general because he doesn't think there is a way to formalize the system.

In a lot of ways, his views on language are similar to deflationary views of truth that came out of the early 20th century. "If it can't be formalized, it cannot exist."

Of course, advances in physics from information theory and pancomputationalism actually do make us think we could formalize language, and that we could do so with the same basic tool we use to encode anything from genes to physical variables. It all reduces to bits.

But philosophy of language, particularly due to Witt's influence and the overall linguistic turn, has really not stayed up with advances in information theory, or allowed semiotics and the successes of biosemiotics to influence it. It stays in blessed isolation from advancing fields, content to spin in circles because it's great father "proved" any sort of formal understanding is impossible.

IMO, the linguistic turn also starts to look pretty bad in light of scientific advances. As it turns out, we aren't in a "language box," cut off from the world by language. Understanding language actually uses all the same area of the brain and same sorts of activities as seeing, hearing, etc. You can get all sorts of very specific brain damage and deficits related to language.

But an upshot or Witt's ramblings in PI is that an influential set of Boomers decided science was largely irrelevant for philosophy of language (because of course language is magical and sui generis, because Witt couldn't figure out how to formalize it.)

I think Chat GPT, etc. really shows Witt is just wrong, badly wrong. But Boomers have made his ramblings gospel, a holy source of authority.

>>22892769
>I think Chat GPT, etc. really shows Witt is just wrong, badly wrong
How does this follow?

>>22892802
Creating a system that can pass the Turing Test and use human language effectively now seems eminently possible. Just consider where this will be in 60 years even.

But Wittgenstein makes very big claims about the possibility of being able to define language in code, anything like what we could run through a Turing Machines or cellular automata. Really, this seems to be simply a limit set by his own imagination and (bad) intuitions.

The form isn't important, it's the morphisms that matter. Category theory can do a lot of the work people in Witt's era thought could only be done with sets, e.g. Mazur "When is one thing equal to something else?"

Language, like anything else, seems reducible to bits given some sort of Leplacean Demon to assemble things. And even if this isn't true, the formalization aspect still seems quite possible.

Semiosis doesn't seem to be something sui generis that only humans do. Language fits into the category of communications. Medieval thinkers actually seem to have had better intuitions here. Witt and co build a prison for themselves based on faulty assumptions they are brought to by their own limits of imagination.

It's very similar to how, despairing of discovering a single "one true logic," many logicians decided truth was just definition, arbitrarily defined in terms of some system.

It's not really the guys fault. He is writing at the height of reductionism, smallism, and positivism. He rightly recognized some of the problems with these, but not a proper solution.

Also, there is a bit of an arrogance problem in deciding that "every problem I can't solve is actually a pseudo problem. Rather than work on problems, I will try to demonstrate how everything is a pseudo problem." This isn't so bad in Witt, but it gets unbearable with his disciples, who take this approach as gospel.

>>22892861
How can a machine use human language as you put it separate from the humans. Chatgpt needs constant human correction to even make sense. Its not using language in the sense that we do. It is basically manipulating bits and signals though a human sieve. Its not language anymore than 1s and 0s are.

>>22889801
>"If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand it."
In what way? If a lion spoke english wouldnt he just say something like "prey located, im sleepy, gonna kill those rival cubs, mating time" etc

>>22889804
It would literally have to be.

>>22893064
But "language is use," so if it's imaginable that AI could give effective instructions to people on how to fix cars or diagnoses diseases, which will certainly be possible by fifty years from now, then according to Witt it is absolutely using language. Language is use and machines can manipulate bits and by doing so effectively use human language.

What you point out, that such machines won't "experience" language, the symbol grounding problem, etc. is all simply evidence that Wittgenstein is wrong, that language isn't irreducible to use and games. And indeed, "language is a game," theorists have already had to stretch the term "game" to the point where it has nothing to do with Wittgenstein's initial intuition.

It would be more accurate to say that language is sometimes a game and use is one part of language. It's the reduction that is problematic.

But in any event, if language is just use and games, then it seems increasingly hard to deny that machines will soon master it, and master it in a way that is conceivably formalizable as any computer code must be.

The experiential element of language is of course missing from information theory, and in the black box of the interpretant in Saint Augustine and Pierce, but for Witt it was never a major focus. This seems to now be a mistake, particularly if one trades off Chinese Room intuitions.

Personally, I think the solution is pansemiosis, either something like Thomistic pansemiosis (e.g. the book Signs in the Dust) or something trading off the intuitions of It From Bit and the Participatory Universe, maybe borrowing the relationally of Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics.

But conciousness appears to be strongly emergent, and if it is it is "fundemental" and not going to be reducible to information. Rather, semiosis describes both living and non-living signs and meaning.

>>22893104
I think to refute witt, you'd have to assume that machines could talk to each other or develop their own language separate from humans and still function like they do today. That has not been observed. Machines today are just tools used by humans, them using language is no different from a new chair that now supports your arms in addition to your bum.

>>22889844
Two young fish were swimming along.

An old fish swims by them and calls out to them, "How's the water today, boys?"

The two young fish keep swimming along, then one young fish stops and says to the other young fish, "What's water?"

>>22889871
ancient greeks learned how to walk so you could run

>>22892469
You have to be religious about truth, since religion and spirituality are ultimately about truth. It's a very magical moment when you realize how true all this stuff is.

>>22892536
Scott has described his own practice as medication management, with telemedicine appointments lasting around 20 mins, so it sounds like he's pretty limited as to what mental/emotional maladies he can help with.

Which is fair, as no one can do all things.

>>22889801
If a nigger could speak we would not be able to understand it

>>22892577
> integrity personified

Yeah, but he has a few screws loose. That essay about him giving away his kidney was creepy to me, it's like he doesn't have the emotions of a normal human at all to have written about it in a normal tone.

Hell, I once heard on here from someone who supposedly met him that he's deeply weird in person.

Further, he was talking of his own children recently as "prediction engines", just full on dehumanization.

He has principles definitely, but are they the right principles?

>>22892861
Wait, so you think there will eventually be a 'one true logic'?

>>22893064
>Chatgpt needs constant human correction to even make sense.
Same with toddlers, tho.
1s and 0s are language.
Language is information transmitted through physical medium. All you need to get to it is a physical medium on which you can imprint symbols and a system to interpret it. From there on the complexity of the language is mathematically determined by how many symbols you come with.

>>22892015
This response is at least in part AI generated.I can tell from your inhuman way of talking as if you’re writing a paper, “this suggests” “this underscores” “illustrate”. I’m guessing you had some ideas and asked the AI to clean it up for you?

>>22895028
Yeah this sums up a lot of the Scott's of the world, head in the clouds, completely detached from human reality. He's like a head in a jar who only experiences the world through his intellect. It's the midwits meme again except Scott and his ilk are the inverse of the brilliant retard - they're retarded geniuses. Reminds me of a quote from this article: https://unherd.com/2023/03/why-philosophers-are-so-weird/
"They also seem prone to frequent shattering revelations. At one point, the graduate student says of the first time Callard’s sons visited his apartment: “I remember watching them play on the furniture and suddenly realising: this is the point of furniture.”
I still chuckle about that from time to time.
The thing about this type is they want to separate themselves from themselves and take everything back to first principles. They're trying to build a set of rules to work around without contradictions. That's why they seem so weird. Think of their "ethics". Scott wants you to value a strangers life as much as your own childs, suffering is suffering chud, if some homeless bum is suffering more from not raping your wife than your wife would suffer from being raped then it's your moral duty to let the poor man rape your wife.

>>22895417
That was a neat essay. The other part of Scott that is super interesting is that he's a closeted mystic. Have you read Unsong? The man knows his Kabbalah (also, great novel). He needs to develop this more, because he's doing spirituality wrong, turning it all systematic, when in fact, it is something as freewheeling as the flight of a bird.

If he ever gets it, I'm curious as all hell to see what comes out.

>>22895490
>The other part of Scott that is super interesting is that he's a closeted mystic.
It's amazing how easy it is to read into other people hey. All of this hot air about what is and what isn't when in reality we're all so similar or at least there's so few truly wild variations that we can pattern match each other really quickly with astonishing accuracy. Which is my own long-winded way of saying that I noticed the same thing. He thinks he's hiding it with his rationalism but really he's hiding from it. He has instinctive beliefs in beyond materialism that he can't shake. I haven't read unsong but he did post on the mind illuminated subreddit which I found pretty telling. I can relate to falling for the spiritual utopian promises, the mind illuminated and its ilk offer you all the answers and it's so tempting to believe. But ultimately none of it really works as advertised and Scott's been down that road and found that so he's in his given up stage. We'll see what happens to him, no doubt having kids will change him again. Kids is a good one for these types because it's rubber meets the road realism that is hard to deny.

>>22895512
People like him struggle the most with spirituality. It's a depressing conflict of "You want spirituality to be real but it fundamentally fails you every time". These guys never go for Christianity because no argument for God convinces them, but they will be briefly persuaded by Buddhism and attempt a meditation practice until discovering that the insights you get from meditation are roughly equal to a psychedelic trip, & while they can make you happier they don't exactly give much fodder for the intellect.

So eventually they give up on all spirituality with disappointment.

>>22895417
Always rubs me the wrong way calling average college kids "philosophers". You are not a philosopher, you're attempting to be one, and only a small handful of guys ever make the cut. There are maybe 100 true philosophers from history, the rest doesn't even really matter.

>>22895087
Toddlers understand grammar innately, humans don't teach that, not even remotely the same analogy.

>>22895017
kek anon, I was thinking the same thing

>>22895490
>he's doing spirituality wrong, turning it all systematic, when in fact, it is something as freewheeling as the flight of a bird.
A rationalist can't get into mysticism, it's gonna filter them by nature. The best they can do is find some logical structure & go "Ohh it actually makes sense, see?" while ignoring that the core of spirituality is faith, and that logic is merely post-hoc justification which hardly matters.

Approaching religion in this mindset is like when college professors study rap music and they're like "See guys? This has actual artistic merit, the lyrics are so meaningful!!" No retard, you don't get it. The only reason you accept rap is because you refuse to see it as the retarded hedonism it really is, & you intellectualize it until it becomes something which it's not. Because you are incapable of enjoying it for what it truly is, but you want to like it, so you basically lie to yourself & hope that it sticks. Religion = faith. That's how it works

>>22896160
>People like him struggle the most with spirituality. It's a depressing conflict of "You want spirituality to be real but it fundamentally fails you every time". These guys never go for Christianity because no argument for God convinces them, but they will be briefly persuaded by Buddhism and attempt a meditation practice until discovering that the insights you get from meditation are roughly equal to a psychedelic trip, & while they can make you happier they don't exactly give much fodder for the intellect.
>
>So eventually they give up on all spirituality with disappointment.
Fucking hell, too real bro. This is exactly me.

>>22889944
given the astronomic number of interpretations of the tractatus that are mutually contradictory, it is likely most people who read it were filtered by the tractatus, even if they think they weren't

>>22895054
No. A I am denying that a lack of a "one true logic," makes truth necessarily mere convention. The arrogance is deciding: " I can't fathom how to answer x, so x is unsolvable or a pseudo problem."

>>22896160
>Always rubs me the wrong way calling average college kids "philosophers". You are not a philosopher, you're attempting to be one, and only a small handful of guys ever make the cut. There are maybe 100 true philosophers from history, the rest doesn't even really matter.

This just seems elitist. When does one become a "real philosopher?" When one's books sell lots of copies and people call you a genius? But then this means many great philosophers weren't philosophers during their lives, but pseud failures, only becoming true philosophers decades after their deaths when their work was recognized.

But if it isn't fame that makes one a philosopher then we have to acknowledge that there were many more philosophers. Just think of all the ancient and medieval thinkers we know nothing or almost nothing about simply because their work wasn't persevered. And the "great names," certainly seemed to respect and benefit from their discussions with their less famous contemporaries, and borrow ideas from them quite a bit.

Book sales/the number of people who read a book works on a power law distribution. A small set of books sells all the copies, even for a famous writer with a corpus thousands of pages long lik Saint Augustine. A book having been read a lot makes it much more likely to be read in the future, regardless of merit. It's a positive feedback cycle. This says nothing of merit.

Think what C.S Pierce is most famous for, his tripartite semiotics. This is literally just Augustine's theory of signs in De Dialecta; it's just that hardly anyone reads that work. Poinsot and Cusa probably have an even more developed semiotics but they're simply not popular because no one is reads Poinsot and because people read Cusa for esoterica, and because medieval thinkers in general get ignored for being "too Christian." So the same ideas get recycled, even directly borrowed, and some make people "great names" and others languish in obscurity.

The Cognito is in Augustine's Contra Academicos, but is largely known through Descartes. The Lord-Bondsman dialectic of Hegel is in the City of God. The triadic dialectical is employed in De Trinitate. And this influence is hiding in one of the top 10 most famous thinkers, just think how much is buried in more forgotten thinkers. Augustine for his part was open about heavily relying on others for his ideas.

Popularity does not make a great thinker. If we take Saint Athanasius' Life or Saint Anthony remotely seriously, we have an example of a great thinker who wrote nothing, taught orally, and spent most of his time alone wandering the desert and fasting. He only becomes historically great through his able biographer.

>discovering that the insights you get from meditation are roughly equal to a psychedelic trip, & while they can make you happier they don't exactly give much fodder for the intellect.

I don't know about this. The famous mystics seem to have significant intellectual chops and they were satisfied.

>>22896160
>>22896511
For example, consider Saint Bonaventure's The Mind's Journey Into God, Saint Augustine's beatific vision in the Confessions, Origen's mystical anagogic exegesis, or modern guys like Thomas Merton. The best example would be Saint Thomas Aquinas, who had completed a towering intellectual achievement by the end of his life, had fame and renown, but who after having a mystical vision late in life dismissed his entire corpus as "so much straw," next to the fruits or his ultimate contemplation, feeling at a loss to explain it.

>>22896511
Philosophy cannot be treated like other disciplines. There's no discipline of philosophy in the same vein as math or physics where normal guys can contribute & chip away at problems over their life. Philosophy only advances when very rare men like Hume come along to help us understand why our current methods of philosophy aren't working. Epistemology has to be fixed before the other branches of philosophy can be addressed, but no one who calls themself a philosopher is really concerned with this. So yeah, I don't consider anyone who believes the current philosophical system as good to be contributing to philosophy. If you don't see the cracks in the epistemological foundation, you shouldn't be doing philosophy IMO. If you're not actively trying to address that issue, you're probably not even doing philosophy. I don't take even most of the so-called great names seriously for this reason

>>22896555
What does fixing epistemology entail?

>>22889871
>There's this story about Aristotle thinking that moving objects continue moving in a curve because he was a pseud who never actually bothered to go and check.
Inertia is a scam invented by Newton and disproven by Einstein. Inertia can only exist locally, which is an idealization.

>>22896562
It entails bridging the gap between schools, and understanding why one person's reason is constantly at odds with another's. For instance, when I see analytic philosophy, I often think it's absurd the idea that truth would express itself in such terms, and yet I can't explain why. I'm an empiricist but I don't have the answer for why empiricism feels correct and right to my intuition, whereas it feels wrong to other people. When I read Plato, my intuition tells me this approach cannot yield true philosophy, yet I cannot explain why I feel this way about him while countless other people do not.

You can counter with "It doesn't matter what your intuition tells you, reason is universal", but the point is, our reasoning typically springs from intuition. And our intuitions have different preconceived notions about how truth works, so we arrive at different conclusions. I don't hold myself in such high esteem that I say my notion of how truth works is absolute. Countless philosophers do exactly this, and that's a problem. We need to understand at a very deep level how intuition works, for reason is really a mere super-structure placed on intuition, which seems to be partly reason, but not entirely. That's the first step.

>>22896603
Isn't that the whole point of what kant was trying to do. You just used your intuition to reason about what intuition is. That's the entire deal witth epistemology, what we can know? Answering why different people have different preconceived notions will not allow you to escape that you are using your intuition to arrive at that conclusion. It will lead you to metaphysics about why intuition works the way it does forcing you to answer what is being, and on and on you go back and forth asking 'what is' and how you 'know', the same damn fundamental philosophical questions that plagued the greeks and started all this.

>>22896240
>>22896273
I don't actually think spirituality runs on faith is the thing, it is possible to attain an unshakable certitude (talking 2 + 2 = 4 here) about these matters, though narrow is the way. It can happen so quickly though, look up how Bahiya got enlightened.

>>22889801
Charles Peirce btfo that argument by delving into the phenomenology of transliteration across senses.

For example, the color scarlet is alike to the blare of a trumpet. Why does this statement make sense? The two senses are incommensurate, and share no corresponding qualitative information, but it's certainly apt to describe blue as a cool color whereas red is a hot one.

>>22896603
Isn't what you're describing here just the fact that people have different priors? Life shapes everyone in different ways, but presumably, you're looking for the correct priors to hold?

I think the Hindus have it right, all philosophy can really offer is different points of view, not final absolute answers. Blind men and the elephant.

>>22896784
Based Peirce reader.

>>22896692
I have not read Kant. But from what I know, his categorical imperative seems to violate this entire view. Because morality varies on a person-by-person basis, how would you ascertain that an action is universally bad if even one person believes that it's not? Why should his innate gauge of ethics be inferior to yours?

>It will lead you to metaphysics about why intuition works the way it does forcing you to answer what is being
The most likely result is we realize philosophy is basically impossible. Like trying to build a castle on an island of sand.

>>22896862
"Priors" is too generous a word. No matter how intelligent you are, you're forced into a certain approach toward knowledge to the exclusion of all others. To the extent that their intuition differs from yours, their perspective is literally incomprehensible (because intuition IMO functions much like a sense, and we cannot explain senses to those who do not experience them, it's like explaining color to the blind). So the problem is attempting to use reason to justify a process that may be sub-rational. Reason is really just a tool to organize feelings.

>I think the Hindus have it right, all philosophy can really offer is different points of view, not final absolute answers. Blind men and the elephant.
It sounds odd but I feel that philosophy can exist perfectly complete on the individual level, for one man's intuition, but it probably cannot bridge that gap and extend to others. Your philosophy will arise from your own intuition, so reading Aristotle will only aid you in discovering where your own intuition points, like a compass. At heart, I feel the philosophical answers I seek exist already inside, pre-figured by the layout of my mind, and external information cannot alter this, but only help guide me toward unraveling that inner truth.

But I still look on philosophy positively. If we can bridge these gaps in perspective, it would change the world massively for the better. But if not, it still remains the ultimate way to "Know thyself" and gain a sense of ultimate inner stability as written by the greeks. To understand your own intuition at a deep level is invaluable. The hindus likewise said the same.

>>22889871
>establish communication
I literally communicated with a roach in my kitchen about an hour ago.
I turned on the lights, the roach tried to hide, and I killed it. That's communication. Action, perception, processing stimuli, reaction etc.
You get that shit from nature every single second. Speaking is a whole different process.

>>22893093
No, that's what us as humans would think a lion would say

>>22895087
Not everyone agree with that deffinition of language, for example this deffinition doesn't take into account our inner form of language, how we speak to ouself, we're not projecting nothing there

>>22898461
We are not talking about morality or categorical imperative, you quoted epistemology, if you want to understand it on a deeper level, then you need to read kant. You can't (lmao) critique epistemology when you haven't even familiarized yourself with some of the giants of philosophy and hume too, read him first before kant.

>>22898461
>I have not read Kant. But from what I know, his categorical imperative seems to violate this entire view. Because morality varies on a person-by-person basis, how would you ascertain that an action is universally bad if even one person believes that it's not? Why should his innate gauge of ethics be inferior to yours?
It turns on people being rational and knowing the results of their actions, good or bad. A bad actor will know his actions disincentivise the behaviours that he seeks to exploit, thereby removing the chances for him to act. A good actor knows that when he behaves well, people will be inclined to reciprocate.

It's analogous to the Platonic view of the Good as Order and the Bad as Chaos: moral evil is purely a wrecker that can't persist for ever, as it runs out of things to destroy, and it itself is never anything substantial.

Kant just says that as humans share reason we both know this, therefore we know from reason alone that subjective acts either tend to reduce the aggregate total of similar acts, or not, and anything self defeating is immoral.

>>22898487
>Speaking is a whole different process.
No? That's just more complex communication as enabled by more complex minds. The difference is of degree not of kind. The more different the cognitive architecture is from yours, the less you can recruit those parts of your brain that evolved efficiently to model other social apes, but there isn't really a meaningful difference save for the increasing difficulty and decreasing efficiency in predicting other minds.

In communicating with other humans or understanding humans from different eras, there are already barriers in intellect and experience. Communication with your twin is higher bandwidth than with a Khoe-Sān tribesman. With crows, you can approximate their clarity of mind and better predict their responses by imagining yourself as an anxious child in fever. With a cockroach, modeling its mind, if we might call it that, is entirely System 2. But there isn't a crisp boundary.