DocWatts
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9 hours ago, zurew said:Do you have any special position on theory selection in general? (like what set of virtues should be taken account and how they should be weighed when it comes to theory selection - by virtues I mean stuff like predictability , how many assumptions it has, how much it coheres with other scientific theories etc)
I'll tackle the first question for now, since there's a lot that could be said on the subject, depending on how deep in the weeds we want to get.
My broad 'take' on theory selection is rooted in pragmatic efficacy and ontological pluralism rather than a correspondence model tied to an inferred mind-independent Reality.
Under this purview, a predictive theory is better than its alternatives when it's:
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A qualitative improvement in our problem solving capabilities - the newer theory solves problems that the older theory couldn't. For instance, GPS systems designed solely on Newtonian mechanics would fail to track our position with precision, since the satellites operate under conditions where relativistic time dilation becomes significant. Accounting for this requires the theoretical framework of general relativity.
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It should extend the scope of phenomena that can be mechanistically investigated. Our everyday lives are lived on the mesoscale - that comfortable, human-sized spatial and temporal scale that our perceptual systems are evolutionarily adapted to. A more powerful theory can show us how things that are invisible to us from our everyday vantage point can nonetheless affect us at the mesoscale. Germ theory being the classic example.
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Can predict and explain persistent anomalies that plagued earlier theories. For instance, Ptolemaic gravitation had to be modified in increasingly convoluted ways when observational evidence repeatedly failed to align with theoretical predictions.
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Can offer a better economy of assumptions and theoretical constructs in relation to what it's trying to explain. 19th centuries of light posited a theoretical construct called the Luminiferous Ether, out of the assumption that light was a wave and thus needed a medium to propagate through. When Michelson and Morley tried and failed to detect this medium in their famous experiment, physicists began modifying the properties of the ether in increasingly contrived ways. Eventually, Einstein's theory of relativity made the Luminiferous Ether obsolete, replacing a web of convoluted assumptions with a simpler and more productive framework.
- Theories are akin to gestalts which structure phenomena into a meaningful whole. Two people can look at the same observational evidence and 'see' different things from the same set of environmental stimuli, depending on their interpretative lenses. Gestalts are how a set of isolated elements coalesce into meaningful patterns that we can make sense of.
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Fruitfulness - a better theory should generate new research questions, suggest novel experiments, and lead to further discoveries. A theory that stagnates or closes off the path of inquiry is less appealing. It's not just about solving existing problems, but expanding the scope of problems that we can discover.
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Consistency - we want our theories be internally coherent and externally compatible with other well-established scientific theories. This is why a scientific theory that contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) is a non-starter.
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A better theory recognizes that the territory they're trying to map will always carry some degree of indeterminacy. The paradoxes of quantum mechanics - like waveform collapse and uncertainty - arise from trying to force macroscopic concepts from classical mechanics onto a domain they weren’t designed for. Theories that remain clear-eyed about these kinds of framing limitations are preferable. Rather than denying indeterminacy, they acknowledge where their conceptual tools strain or break down.
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Theories that display meta-theoretical self-awareness are preferable - in short, they don't mistake the map for the territory. Meaning they don't reify their theoretical constructs into fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. A meta-theoretically reflective view of physics, for instance, holds that physics isn’t an objective inventory of “what is,” but an iterative model of how reality behaves, which reflects our practical interests (e.g., building functional machines, predicting motion, manipulating our environment)
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A qualitative improvement in our problem solving capabilities - the newer theory solves problems that the older theory couldn't. For instance, GPS systems designed solely on Newtonian mechanics would fail to track our position with precision, since the satellites operate under conditions where relativistic time dilation becomes significant. Accounting for this requires the theoretical framework of general relativity.
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4 hours ago, Nodar Bakradze said:If philosophy of science is near and dear to your heart, I think you will enjoy reading Karl Popper’s oeuvre.
Karl Popper's been on my reading list for some time now - both for his philosophy of science and his sociological takes.
I thought Kuhn did a pretty thorough job of demonstrating that theories aren't falsified so much as they are abandoned for a another theory with better pragmatic efficacy.
Evidence always underdetermines theory, because there's no such thing as an uninterpreted fact.
A theory that's out of step with observational evidence can always be modified in increasingly ad-hoc ways to 'save' a theory. The history of science shows that the old guard is often recalcitrant to change their views just because of pesky evidence - plenty of folks tried to 'save' the luminiferous ether, or objective space and time. The intuitions that theory selection is grounded in has a ton of inertia behind it.
Eventually the cost for doing so becomes enough high enough that it gets outcompeted by a newer theory that predicts and explains a wider range of phenomena while generating fewer anomalies - which is how we can still have 'progress' within a Kuhnian model of science.
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7 hours ago, Nodar Bakradze said:I wanted to ask you, What are your thoughts on Jacques Derrida’s body of work?
Cards on the table: I've probably read more Thomas Pychon than I have postmodern academic philosophy.
Derrida is the type of philosopher I've learned about through osmosis rather than a deep dive of their work - ditto for Focault, Butler, etc.
Postmodernism has just never excited me like phenomenology and more metamodern oriented philosophy has.
Here's a list of philosophers that I've been influenced by, which my work is to some degree an attempt to synthesize and make more accessible:
- Fransisco Varella
- Evan Thompson
- Eleanor Rosche
- George Lakoff
- Mark Johnson
- Martin Heidegger
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Hubert Dreyfus
- Ken Wilber
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Jonathan Haidt
- Thomas Kuhn
- Julia Galef
- John Verveake
- Thomas Nagel
- Charles Taylor
I'd say the largest influence on my own work is a book called 'The Embodied Mind' by the first three authors on that list - with B&T-era Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Thomas Kuhn being close seconds. (The philosophy of science is near and dear to my heart).
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8 hours ago, zurew said:I can say that the clarity of your writings (not just your book, but your posts on here in general) is easier to track compared how it was before (2-3 years ago)
I think the 'World disclosure for dummies' is a good description, because even I with low phil knowledge can track a good chunk of your stuff and can engage somewhat meaningfully with some of it.
Thanks! I'll chalk that up to the good 10-20 hours a week I've been spending on my book for the last two years - would be a bummer if I hadn't gotten any better at writing during that time!
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On 5/18/2025 at 2:26 AM, aurum said:True.
What about Actualized.org?
In my opinion, Leo has made the new gold standard as a meta-theory.
I'd say what Leo is really, really good at is taking advanced epistemic, ontological, and sociological insights and stating them in accessible language.
Thar said, probably the best thing I've done for my own epistemic development is branch away from Leo's work, and put a lot of time and effort into developing my own ideas (which often overlap with Leo's, but also branch off in some significant ways - and this is a good thing!)
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6 hours ago, Nodar Bakradze said:I really respect your project. Writing on “world disclosure” in an accessible fashion is a heroic feat, keep up the good work.
Thanks, appreciate it!
When I was reading through 'Being and Time' and 'The Phenomenology Of Perception', I remember thinking that there's got to be a more accessible way of conveying these insights.
Grounding abstract concepts in tangible everyday metaphors and familiar examples, and writing in (what I hope is a more) engaging writing style are my tactics to that effect.
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Howdy, I thought I might share another write up from my philosophy book. This one is an in-depth exploration of the coping mechanisms we adopt in the face of uncertainty - their underlying emotional purpose, and how authoritarian regimes exploit the psychology behind these defense mechanisms. I also outline a healthier alternative - attunement - a process-oriented stance where we treat our views as works-in-progress that we fine-tune in response to pushback from the world.
______________________________________________________________________________________________The rise of authoritarianism worldwide isn't just a political crisis - it's also an epistemic one, rooted in how we respond to uncertainty in a complex world.
How We Handle Not Knowing: Attunement And Its Alternatives
Just as you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, you can’t develop an adequate picture of the world without breaking a few cherished certainties along the way. This is easier said than done, however, since we don’t hold onto our mental models in a disinterested way. When the world refuses to be squeezed down into a familiar box of our preferred dimensions, we’re faced with a choice: attune our views to better align with reality, or adopt a coping strategy to maintain our comfortable illusions.
Attunement means treating our viewpoints as works-in-progress that require ongoing maintenance and receptivity to pushback from the world. Its antithesis is withdrawal into coping strategies - ploys for denying aspects of Reality that challenge our preferred narratives. We’ll be focusing on three such evasive maneuvers, prevalent responses to uncertainty that we’re likely to have encountered in daily life: 1) Fearful entrenchment, 2) Fatigued surrender, and 3) Confused compromise.
For the most part, these maneuvers aren’t a deliberate choice - they’re habits we slide into when our emotional needs override our epistemic ones. When our viewpoints become enmeshed with our identity, safety, or sense of belonging, our resistance to changing course can take the form of fearful entrenchment - where we double down on our established views to avoid the discomfort of course-correcting. Fearful entrenchment is a classic sunk-cost fallacy - where we cling to a position despite mounting evidence that it’s untenable, because changing our mind carries unacceptable opportunity costs. This could be a blow to our ego, our social clout, or our wallet.
Conspiracy theories are a telling illustration. When a vaccine skeptic is presented with data that shows a precipitous drop in cases of some debilitating disease in inverse proportion to vaccination rates, selective epistemic rigor becomes a common fallback. The skeptic may accuse public health officials of colluding with vaccine manufacturers to fabricate evidence - while applying no comparable scrutiny to their ‘alternate sources’ which challenge established facts. What’s important to realize is that inconsistency isn’t an accidental byproduct of this evasive strategy - it’s a defense mechanism for deeper emotional investments. The opportunity costs of abandoning one’s conspiracism aren’t trivial. It means abandoning the power-fantasy that we have special knowledge that’s unavailable to the deceived masses. And it may entail leaving a community we’ve been using to meet our identity and belonging needs.
So that’s fearful entrenchment. But what of its oppositional counterpart? If the debris of collapsed-certainties has left a strong impression on us, we might withdraw into fatigued surrender - where we give up any hope of arriving at substantive truth. In this stance, we settle upon an attitude that ‘truth’ is little more than a label for personal preferences and socially agreed upon conventions. A person who’s been burnt by a political ideology might land upon the thought-terminating cliche that ‘all politicians are corrupt’. And if this gives them a convenient excuse to stay home on election day, so much the better - why put in the effort to navigate an imperfect system when you have a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card at the ready?
And if we haven’t given a particular issue much thought or attention, we may default to confused compromise - a cobbled together hybrid that attempts to split the difference. This might lead us to commit to the fallacy of the middle ground. “Climate change is real, sure, but I don’t think it will be as catastrophic as the alarmists are claiming. We should try to curb emissions, but not at the expense of the economy. Plus, I already drive an electric car, so I’m doing my part.” Or else, our position might resemble an incoherent horseshoe, where we arbitrarily pick and choose from incompatible viewpoints. “The common man is being kept down by a cabal of wealthy elites within the deep state, who funnel our hard earned tax dollars to people that are here illegally. We need a strong leader that will put working families first by running the government like a business.”
So that’s the trilogy of evasion. To bring the emotional underpinnings of these evasive maneuvers into sharper relief, let's return to our cooking allegory. Picture a bustling kitchen where a row of cooks are busy making omelets - each working from the same set of ingredients but with contrasting styles.
The Kitchen Of Uncertainty: Four Chefs, Three Failures
Notice the absolutist, who maintains a white-knuckled grip on their one perfect egg, petrified of how they’ll feel about themselves and look to others if it slips from their grasp. This is the absolutist’s solace - when the ambiguity of the world gnaws at us, we can at least take comfort that a definitive answer is out there. Accessible to us in principle, if only we can perfect our methods, purge our biases, and apply the correct form of reasoning. When we ask what’s driving the male loneliness epidemic or why home ownership has become an impossible dream for so many, we don’t want to be placated with a “it depends on your perspective”. Nor do we appreciate “what does it mean to you?” therapy-speak when we have pressing questions that demand answers. When institutions that are meant to serve as trustworthy curators can’t coalesce around an emotionally satisfying explanation, our shared epistemic foundation begins to crumble.
Now observe the relativist, who stands paralyzed amidst the rows of egg cartons, dissatisfied with the recipe book but unwilling to put their own culinary convictions on the chopping block. We’re likely to drift into this evasive maneuver when established authorities have let us down, repeatedly proving themselves fallible or compromised by conflicts of interest. Or else, we find that the answers they offer repeatedly fail to align with our lived experience. This erosion of trust leaves us isolated in our sensemaking. Before we know it, we’re adrift in a sea of competing claims without a clear anchor to steady us. With no surefire method for which experts to trust, we’re at last thrown to our own resources to “do our own research.” On the surface this sounds reasonable. In practice, it can become an exhausting non-answer that sends us to the dark corners of the internet, where we become easy prey for charlatans who promise easy answers to life’s problems.
And occupying the awkward space between our dueling chefs is the confused compromiser, whose dubious hodgepodge of mismatched ingredients is a result of deviating from the menu in an unpracticed way. This approach sometimes emerges out of simple laziness, when we can’t be bothered to pick a lane - but don’t have the confidence to just admit that we either don’t know or don’t care. Or it may result from apathy and exhaustion after swinging like a pendulum from one failed ‘certainty’ to the next. Unlike the relativist who abandons the search for truth altogether, the compromiser still craves the comfort of having answers, just without the rigor required to make them coherent. What our confused compromiser is left with is a patchwork of convenience that offers neither the stability of honestly-held absolutism nor the consistency of thoughtful relativism.
Contrast these problematic stances with the more process oriented approach of the pluralist - who doesn’t fret about making the perfect omelet, because their aim is to become a better cook. After all, if today’s omelet doesn’t meet our expectations, we can learn from our mistakes and try again tomorrow. The pluralist’s flexible approach is rooted in a fundamentally different mode of relating to the unknown, in comparison to our other chefs. Rather than denying ambiguity or surrendering to it, the pluralist seeks to cultivate attentive responsiveness to its eddying currents. It’s a mindset that seeks to demystify without oversimplifying. To acknowledge nuance without surrendering to paralysis. To strive for coherence without forcing false compromises for convenience’s sake.
The larger contrast points to the deeper emotional stakes of our epistemic stances. When we’re at a crossroads, it’s not intellect but intuition that gives us that initial push in one direction or another. Our life experiences predispose us to an instinctive posture towards a lack of epistemic closure. Beliefs, then, largely serve as post-hoc rationalizations of these foundational intuitions. Yet these ingrained responses aren’t set in stone - they can be recognized, examined, and gradually reshaped through deliberate practice.
Because Pluralism is an ongoing practice rather than a set of beliefs, the buy-in is ongoing engagement rather than mere intellectual assent. It offers no fixed answers for how certain is ‘certain enough’, because certainty is a moving goalpost that shifts with the situation. On one level this is intuitive - we all know that picking a restaurant for a special occasion carries lower stakes than policy decisions that will affect millions of lives. Yet between the trivial and the profound lies a no man’s land of consequential everyday choices, where we need to be able to pick a lane while working from incomplete information.
A Pact With Certainty: Authoritarianism's Faustian Bargain
The epistemic ecosystem where these three evasive maneuvers operate has contributed to and sustained a more sinister development. Absolutism, relativism, and confused compromise exist within a complex feedback loop with other societal forces, which bad actors have been all too happy to exploit. 21st century authoritarianism has found its niche within the cracks of this fragmented epistemic ecosystem. Like a weed that will choke off the surrounding vegetation and eventually fracture our driveway if left unattended, these ideologies suffocate truthful viewpoints and demolish our capacity to have productive disagreements. Rooted in the frustrated desire for the comfort and security that comes with certainty and fertilized by the disillusionment when these hopes are repeatedly dashed, modern authoritarianism offers a seductive bargain.
The authoritarian bargain - from Nazism to Maoism to MAGA - is the emotional comfort of certainty without the burden of truth-seeking. It’s the epistemic version of having your cake and eating it too. Emotional validation without introspection, certainty without responsibility, belonging without accountability - what’s not to like? Too bad, then, that the cake is poisoned and the person selling it knows it. Even worse, most of the people eating it know it too, but have convinced themselves that the poison is an acceptable trade-off for the intoxicating feelings it provides.
So how do we resist the allure of these dangerous oversimplifications, without falling into decision paralysis or noncommittal compromise between extremes that should be rejected? The key to navigating this murky terrain lies not in arriving at the perfect solution, but in learning how to attune our methods to the situation we’re embedded in, in accordance with our values. A value is an emotionally intuitive starting point that orients our decision making, grounded in what we authentically care about. In contrast to the normative frameworks that grow out of these foundational orientations, values can usually be expressed in just a few words: curiosity, equity, fairness, justice, purity, recognition, reciprocity, self-reliance, and mutual respect are some examples.
Becoming clear on what our values are is an indispensable part of how we use pluralism to navigate the panoply of perspectives. With a clear understanding of our values and pluralistic rigor as the two halves of our compass, we can begin to get a sense of how we become embedded in our various perspectives - and what to do about it. To that end, we need a sense of which viewpoints we’ve come to on our terms, which we’ve slid into out of apathy or coercion, and which are unavoidable outgrowths of the contexts we’re embedded in.
When authoritarians feed upon our collective exhaustion at the panoply of competing claims about the world, the antidote lies not in clinging to an inflexible certainty, or bowing out of the truth-game altogether - but in the courageous practice of attunement: messy, demanding, and essential for a civil society that can sustain democracy.
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Greetings! If you're tackling an expanded fundamental ontology, you're in good company. And if you managed to grok Heideggar at 22, I'm impressed. Back at the ripe old age of 30, 'Being and Time' was among the most difficult (but ultimately worthwhile) books I've ever read.
My own project pulls from Heideggar alongside Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, Ken Wilber, Fransisco Varella, George Lakoff and others. 'World disclosure for dummies' might not be a bad description, since I'm writing for a non-academic audience that may be ready for more advanced insights -- but doesn't speak phenomenological jargon as a second language.
Look forward to seeing you on the Forums!
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On 5/15/2025 at 9:50 PM, aurum said:I respect your agnosticism on this. Good sense-making means knowing what you know and what you don't know.
What would be examples of valid meta-perspectives?
I'd consider Hanzi Frienacht's approach to metamodernism and Ken Wilber's Integral Theory to be the gold standards. But just like any theory (meta or otherwise), there are higher and lower quality applications of both. Each is useful for seeing how the partial truths of the perspectives that these TOEs (Theories Of Everything) map can be slipped into and out of in a purposeful way - and for giving useful heuristics for when and where these mental models are applicable.
With any meta-theory, there's always that temptation towards epistemic bypassing - since metatheory isn't a replacement for domain-specific expertise. My take on these metatheories is that they're more useful if you've already got a firm epistemic and sociological foundation under your belt.
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42 minutes ago, zurew said:To check how much we progress or digress from the goal we need to know facts about the world , but what if we disagree on the facts? Well we appeal to some norms that can generate those facts, okay, but what if we disagree on those? Then we will eventually end up in a sitation where we cant agree on what make us progress or digress from the goal.
For the record, I think our epistemic intuitions are largely aligned (the first subsection of the chapter I'm writing is called 'perspectives and purposes').
In the above scenario, when we can't agree on shared norms or goals or validation criteria then I'd say we've run headfirst into an incommenserability problem - one that's potentially unbridgeable unless somebody is willing to meet the other party part way on at least one of these pillars.
What makes this potentially really challenging is that our foundational criteria are largely intuition driven - with our intellectual frameworks to some extent serving as post-hoc rationalizations of these emotionally grounded starting points.
Just like the color red remains stubbornly ineffable if we're trying to explain it to someone without vision, certain intuitions can be stubbornly ineffable without the requisite life experience that makes it significant.
Sometimes the best we can do in these types of scenarios is make sure the disagreement doesn't turn ugly. To that end, it can be beneficial to cultivate relationships with people that we disagree with, so that there's a reasonable benefit of the doubt that we're at least disagreeing in good faith.
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4 hours ago, zurew said:Integration doesn't get you anywhere though, unless you can lay down the "right" way how to integrate things.
Unless you can establish normative realism (there are objective standards for what constitutes justified belief, knowledge, or rationality, and these standards are not simply products of human conventions or subjective preferences) - all you have is puzzle pieces that you can put together in multiple ways and nothing tells you which one is the "right" way.
I would argue that all forms of normative realism fall prey to an epistemic, ontological, and existential framing problem.
The epistemic mistake, as I see it, is thinking that there's a single, transcendental way that all the puzzle pieces fit together, and that our perspectives are correct or incorrect to the degree that they're approximations of this god's-eye-perspective (ie, 'correspondence' theories of truth).
Perspectives are always situated within a lived context. By definition, this means that they're inherently localized, partial, and incomplete. This isn't a problem for us in practice, however. When we leave the realm of the abstract and take a look at how actual human-beings use knowledge to guide our decision-making, we routinely make decisions based upon necessarily imperfect information. Reliable knowledge doesn't require absolute certainty - we just need a threshold of certainty that's well-calibrated for what we're trying to accomplish. What constitutes 'certain enough' isn't a fixed metric, but a moving goalpost that shifts with the situation we're trying to navigate.
The ontological mistake is reifying our constructed abstractions as inherent, mind-independent features of Reality. Reality doesn't consist of 'things' as such - because 'things' are constructed abstractions that have no underlying substance without a someone or something that's doing the discerning. They're how our minds slice an undifferentiated reality into manageable chunks that we can more readily understand. Things, then are 'real', but not in the observer-independent way that transcendental frameworks would have us believe - they're instead interactionally real.
There's also a deeper existential misunderstanding here as well - thinking that our lived perspective within Reality is a puzzle to be solved, rather than a mystery to be unraveled and experienced.
Our expectation that there an ultimate or final perspective is as misguided as thinking that there's a full proof set of rules that can tell us when we should kiss a potential romantic partner for the first time. The problem isn't that no one's been able to crack the code- it's that there's no code to be cracked, because the task itself is a quixotic misunderstanding of our situation with Reality.
In a Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it’s attunement rather than perfection that’s sublime. Attunement means calibrating our epistemic heuristics with our purposes. The key lies not in finding the perfect setting, but in adaptive adjustment. Like balancing on a bicycle, it’s a continual process of minute course corrections in response to ever-shifting conditions.
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1 hour ago, aurum said:Multiple approaches can definitely have value.
The masterstroke, in my opinion, is integrating them all together.
Very true! But the rub is that there are also multiple valid meta-perspectives for integrating the same territory. Pluralism might not necessarily go all the way down (agnostic on this point), but it does run quite deep.
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13 hours ago, aurum said:How does one understand accessing capital 'R' Reality without understanding what is capital 'R' reality?"
Also, why is an "inside-out" approach more effective in this case?
Because it starts from where we actually are — rather than taking the end-product of a long chain of abstractions and treating that as our starting point.
Think of it like this: color vision isn't a 1:1 representation of the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form. This would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, human perception evolved to use just a narrow slice of that spectrum — the part most relevant to our survival needs as living beings.
Likewise, we don't reside within a raw, undifferentiated Reality - this too would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, our minds enact a curated version of Reality — one that’s intelligible, livable, and scaled to our cognitive and existential capacities. My term for this human-sized slice of our shared Reality is the Life-World: that shared, experiential world that serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it.
Because we can't completely step outside of our human perspective within Reality, any generalizations we have about capital 'R' Reality will contain the fingerprints of this situated starting point. Mind you, that doesn't invalidate the conclusions we draw - it just means that any inferences we draw about The Absolute will necessarily reflect our own relationship to it.
Just like physics is still valid despite the fact that it's not exhaustive of Reality, when we talk about The Absolute what we're necessarily talking about is our relationship to the Absolute. The Absolute may be what-is, but our relationship to what-is is always partial.
That's my working thesis, anyways. True to the spirit of Pluralism, there are usually multiple vantage points we can approach an issue from that are each valid without being exhaustive. Being-As-Absolute and Being-As-Understanding are no exceptions to that.
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18 hours ago, aurum said:My point is that bracketing the question of The Absolute and metaphysics risks shaping how you understand experience in ways that may go unnoticed.
Understanding of the two, what reality is and how we experience reality, cannot be cleanly separated.
Again, this is just my critique. If you feel your approach is more valuable for what you're exploring, then by all means pursue it.
I've appreciated the constructive criticism.
Half of the fun of doing philosophy are these types of dialogues, where a domain of shared interest is approached through a complimentary set of lenses, each attuned to a different focal point. Very much in keeping with the type of Perspectival Pluralism that I'm encouraging.
Your point about bracketing metaphysical questions is a fair one. You don't have to look further than scientific realism to see how it can give rise to Performative Contradictions - where ontological commitments are smuggled in under the guise of neutrality, while denying any metaphysical framing.
I'd also argue that just because bracketing can be done poorly, doesn't negate its role as a useful tool when wielded skillfully. The type of bracketing I'm doing is a form of phenomenological metaphysics - agnostic toward certain metaphysical claims that fall outside the scope of the inquiry, rather than dismissive of metaphysics as a whole.
Traditional metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel to Whitehead, takes an 'outside-in' approach to ontology. Where you start from the Absolute (or some fixed metaphysical ground), and try to work your way backwards to our situated, everyday position within Reality. It treats ontology as a study of what fundamentally is.
What I'm doing is taking an 'inside-out' approach to metaphysics, which starts from our situated, everyday experience - and tracing how that experience gives rise to categories, distinctions, and ontological inferences. From this vantage point, ontology becomes a kind of reverse engineering - not in order to deny capital 'R' Reality, but to understand how our access to it is structured.
The divergence between these two approaches is rooted in a deeper disagreement over what ontology is for. On one view, ontology aims to describe Reality as it is in itself — timeless, essential, absolute. On the other, it aims to understand how Reality is experienced — how we carve meaning out of the undifferentiated.
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1 hour ago, aurum said:The issue is that this definition of being is far too limited.
Being includes, but is not limited by, anything humans do. It is not merely the act of understanding what people, places, or things are.
Your use of 'Being' refers to the Absolute - the metaphysical ground of all that is (Being-As-Absolute)What I'm attempting to do is shift the question from what Reality is to how we experience Reality (Being-As-Understanding).
Reality itself may be an undifferentiated whole, but it's always accessed from a situated position - a vantage-point rather than an everything-point.
Being-As-Absolute might be what-is, but Being-As-Understanding is how what-is becomes intelligible. The former contains the latter, but the latter is more salient to our human condition within the Absolute.
When we say that something is a type of thing, we’re already in the realm of Being-as-Understanding. Reality itself doesn’t consist of ‘things’ as such — ‘things’ emerge from the act of differentiation, of drawing distinctions within the undifferentiated.
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1 hour ago, aurum said:Claim: If an absolute ground exists epistemically, then it must exist absolutely. Therefore, it is also ontologically absolute.
Counter Claim: Ontology is always situated, because being (whether we're talking about the 'being' of entities or capital B 'Being') isn't metaphysical.
It's instead a form of understanding for a particular someone, which we reify as a metaphysical substance or field due to a category error.
In short, it's the most basic and primordial way that people, places, and things are first disclosed to us as people, places, and things.
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2 hours ago, LordFall said:Good! We should start a list of action steps to take beyond that. As one of the questions on the first page this thread, you definitely don’t protect yourself against authoritarianism through violence. That only gives them the excuse to turn to full on totalitarianism.
As far as action steps, the first thing I would advise everyone to do is to find a local, in-person pro-democracy group to organize with.
Indivisible is the one I joined - it's a nationwide broad-tent pro-democracy movement that has local chapters in every state and most major metropolitan areas (https://indivisible.org/).My local group has in person meetings every month where we share intel about what's happening in our state and the country, and coordinate actions like protests. The two founders of Indivisible have a nationwide 'What's The Plan Call' that anyone can join.
(In addition to Indivisible, there's also no shortage of other pro-democracy groups to join that organize around specific issues, such as immigration, climate change, workers rights, etc).
In addition to finding your local group, you can grab the 5calls app and make weekly calls to your Senators and Representatives about specific issues. The only way that our politicians are going to do what we want is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign telling them to vote NO on Trump's policies and cabinet appointments. Don't assume that just because your local Rep is a Democrat that they'll do the right thing without public pressure. And don't assume that just because your Rep is a Republican that they can't be pressured on specific issues, especially if they're in a competitive seat.
We also need be willing to have difficult conversations with friends and family members who've tuned out of politics since the election. While the trying to reach the MAGA Cult is likely a lost cause, there are plenty of people who aren't hostile to the pro-democracy movement, but aren't aware of the danger we're in because they haven't been paying attention. They might not know that ICE is kidnapping people off the streets like the fucking gestapo, and that Americans are being illegally renditioned to a foreign concentration camp. They might not be aware of that Trump is in the process of collapsing our supply chains, and that he's doing this intentionally to consolidate power. Don't assume people know things that are blindingly obvious to you.
In sum - we need to be spending less time on the internet and more time in-person building the pro-democracy movement within our own communities.Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and powerless. Unless we have the platform of a Leo or a Destiny, there's not much we can do to fight this as individuals. We fight this by building a resilient network of communities that can come together to pursue a shared strategy.
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2 hours ago, aurum said:I'm hoping you take this as constructive criticism, because I do think you're doing good work. I just think there's another level available if you want to go there.
Appreciate it! Your constructive criticism is very welcome.
Mind and world are two aspects of a unified phenomena we call Reality, but that doesn't mean we have access to 'everything, everywhere, across all time' - our limitations matter. Good epistemology (in my view) uses our situated position within Reality as a starting point for making useful discernments from unavoidably incomplete information.
I'm of course open to the possibility that there a levels beyond the epistemic territory I'm exploring - but if that's indeed the case, no sense moving on until the approach I'm articulating has been more fully mined for its partial insights.
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2 hours ago, aurum said:Beyond what you mentioned, the problem is really that Absolute Truth exists.
No strict relativist can accept the existence of Absolute Truth.
Partial agreement. It might be worth clarifying my stance here, since it differs in emphasis from Leo's. I'm less interested in what's ultimately 'real', and more interested in a descriptive account of how we arrive at our conceptual distinctions.
My contention is that knowledge need not have an absolute ground - regardless of whether that ground is an inferred 'mind independent Reality' (materialism) or whether it's purely mental (idealism / mysticism).
Whether our shared Reality is physical or mental isn't what's important here - what's important is that mind and world blend into one another in a circular way. Our lived perspective is the canvas upon which we experience a shared Reality, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the shared Reality it presents. Trying to find an absolute ground in either of these two poles is like asking if a coin is 'really' heads or tails.
The takeaway isn't some New-Age pseudo-profundity that 'you are the whole universe'. It's that the relationship between 'mind and world' is highly porous - less like a brick wall, and more like a permeable membrane where the boundaries are fluid and constant exchange is the norm.
Does all this mean that the Absolute doesn't exit? Not at all - just that it can't be cleanly separated from our lived perspective within Reality. Observer dependent, but not 'made up' or 'imaginary'.
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37 minutes ago, Hardkill said:Thank you. I've appreciated your thoughtful political posts over the years and, I hope you'll consider throwing your hat into the pro-democracy struggle if you haven't already. We could certainly use someone with your nuanced, pragmatic outlook.
Finding my local Indivisible chapter and attending an in-person meeting was easily the best decision I've made since the election. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and disempowered. Our cynicism and despair is their ammunition. Spending less time on the internet and more time engaged in in-person civic participation with people in my community has made me feel much less anxiously cynical than I would otherwise be.We haven't had to fight for our democracy in America in a long-time. But we're not in this alone. Millions of people are standing up this cruel, idiotic regime.
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13 hours ago, Hardkill said:So then, why haven’t the arrests of protestors in Russia led the majority of the population to withdraw their support for Putin’s regime?
Putin has maintained a relatively high approval in Russia despite being an autocrat, because his regime is credited with the country's economic recovery. Russia's transition to capitalism was disastrous for ordinary people, producing a decade of Great Depression-like conditions following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Economic shock doctrine was traumatically ruinous for ordinary people.
Despite being a brutal dictator, Russia's economic situation stabilized under Putin's regime. Conditions for most ordinary Russian citizens improved. While Putin was gutting democracy he was replacing it with a mafia-like patronage system. Millions of pensioners in Russia literally depend on Putin's regime for their survival, since state subsidies are the only thing keeping them destitution.
Trump's approval rating on the other hand is hovering around %40. The first 100 days is the honeymoon period where presidents are usually at their most popular, and Trump's approval ratings are already in the toilet in a historically unprecedented way. His economic 'policy' is little more than an idiotic extortion scheme that will make life much worse for most ordinary Americans -off exactly the opposite of how Putin was able to stay in power.
Americans are about to go from disliking Trump to truly hating him once we're no longer shielded from the collapse of our supply chains from his idiotic tariffs. Economists are predicting empty store shelves by the summer, the domino effects of which will almost surely spark a major recession.
When I say that Trump's regime is weak and unpopular, what I'm referring to is that Trump sucks at being an autocrat. The smart play would have been to move quietly and take credit for Biden's economy. Instead he started a trade war with the world while bragging about how he's taking away out due process rights. It's almost the perfect conditions for galvanizing a large, ideologically diverse resistance to his cruel, idiotic regime.
The democracy that Putin dismantled was in its infancy, within a country that was autocratic for the vast majority of its history. Trump is trying to dismantle a 250 year old democracy with the oldest written constitution in the world. Putin has had 15 years to consolidate his power before launching the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, while Trump is much earlier on in that process in a country with a much more democratic civil society.
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To clarify, I'm not a pacifist. Simply put, nonviolent tactics are much more strategically effective at challenging authoritarian regimes than violent insurrection.
The long term aim with the nonviolent pro-democracy campaign is to separate the regime from its pillars of support, by engaging a large and ideologically diverse cross section of the public. Nonviolent resistance has an enormous participation advantage here, owing to its lower physical, moral, and commitment barriers relative to violent resistance.
Basically, the eventual aim is for the pro-democracy movement to snowball into something too big to suppress or contain. The threshold for this is smaller than you might think - when just %3.5 of a country's population is actively participating in the resistance is when this starts to happen. There's safety in numbers, but this only works if we maintain nonviolent discipline.
Violent tactics on the other hand tend to produce a rally around the flag effect. This is to be avoided at all costs, since it makes a regime's supporters much more likely to perceive the conflict as a zero sum game, pushing them to fight on to the bitter end.
In addition to all that, nonviolent campaigns produce much more democratic outcomes afterwards. Violent conflict is anathema to maintaining a stable democracy afterwards, which is why civil wars - whether in Russia or China or Yemen - produce autocracies, not stable democratic regimes. In the 20th and 21st century almost every successful transition from an autocracy to a democracy happened through nonviolent resistance rather than armed conflict.
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6 hours ago, Hardkill said:I feel like everybody at the protests need to arm themselves with a weapon protect themselves in case the federal government tries to arrest the protestors. I used to be against the idea of civilians having the right to bear arms, but I am now making an exception to that given the serious looming threat of government tyranny we are facing now.
Please DO NOT bring weapons to the protests. Don't give law enforcement or the feds an excuse to crack down.
The primary thing that's protecting us is safety in numbers and goodwill with the public, and that vanishes if the protests are perceived as violent.
Trump's gestapo isn't arresting people at large public protests. ICE prefers to catch people when they're unaware and isolated, who they think they can get away with disappearing.
If you want to purchase a firearm, keep it in your home or personal vehicle. Don't bring it to a nonviolent protest - you'd be endangering everyone around you.
(Note: I'm pro second amendment, just be strategic about when are where you bring a firearm.
The problem isn't an ethical one, it's strategic. In theory, I have no ethical issues with someone using deadly force to protect themselves from being abducted by ICE - gestapo lives don't matter. In practice, the regime would like nothing more than for the resistance to turn violent. Don't give Trump his Riechstag Fire Decree.)
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You know that the Vatican made a good choice when the American Nazis are already losing their collective shit over it.
If Jesus came back tomorrow MAGA would have him extradited to the gulags for not being a christian nationalist - and for not being white.
in Intellectual Stuff: Philosophy, Science, Technology
Posted · Edited by DocWatts
I would say that theory selection is intuition driven, with our intellect largely serving as post-hoc rationalizations of these emotionally grounded starting points. The values that guide our theory choice are a reflection of our life experiences. Moreover, they're grounded in a broader human evolutionary context, and patterned in non-arbitrary ways by the various social and cultural contexts that we're embedded in.
That said, these ingrained responses aren’t set in stone - they can be recognized, examined, and gradually reshaped through deliberate reflection and receptivity to the world.
I'd frame that this is something of a middle path between the perennial and constructivist camps - the former sees human nature as fixed and universal, and the latter sees human nature as fluid and malleable. I'd contend that our dispositions are neither wholly immutable nor infinitely plastic - they're responsive to experience, but not unanchored. We have influence but not control over the dispositions that shape theory choice.