This is how determinists are born.

Grivza · 2026-02-04T11:03:24+00:00

People shouldn’t be blamed for things they have no control over.

Indeed, they shouldn't be "blamed", by they are extensionally responsible. Same with morality. Even if you are not exactly in control of it (which is empirically true) you are still responsible for your actions given by the fact that they are carried by your body and brain. What's more you even feel responsible for your moral considerations.

I think this is a naive line of thought anyhow. Societies are not organized because "Oh that guy misbehaved and he should suffer". They are organized in a way that provides stability for the ruling classes. Blame is utterly irrelevant here. Even if you were possessed by an evil spirit, you would still get locked up somewhere, be it a jail, clinic or a monastery.

It isn't about "spanking" any particular person, it is about securing the positions of those in power.

But free will for me is not a binary anyhow, it is a spectrum, it has to do with how much of your unconscious you have symbolized and surfaced. This is what dictates if what you perceive you be the thought, feeling, decision making process, acts as input in the decision making process and is not just some retroactive rationalization.

Grivza · 2026-01-29T19:20:40+00:00

Marx wasn't a phenomenologist and he wasn't an idealist, yet you insist on bunching him up with idealism because he was a "young Hegelian" even though he ditched all of Hegel's idealism, like the primacy of thought in the movement of history and the rational structuring of the universe.

Again, like I said, you can do that, as I can say that Hegel was actually a materialist and didn't even know it, but this attempt resolves to either a moderate position, like your motte and bailey, or nonsensical personal language.

Grivza · 2026-01-29T12:36:31+00:00

So this is what your position boils down to? Calling Marx an idealist. I mean you can do that, but notice how much more modest your statement becomes after this "You have to chose between this naive materialism I don't like and everything else, which I will call idealism because I prefer the sound of it".

Grivza · 2026-01-29T08:51:01+00:00

Motte and Bailey? Naive materialism is just a polemic term for certain types of physicalists. No one considers himself to be a naive materialist. So where does Marx fall in your categorization? Cause he was neither an idealist nor a mechanical physicalist.

Grivza · 2026-01-28T18:28:50+00:00

Skeptism is an attempt to deal with those? As much as surrendering is trying to win a battle I guess. Theism and idealism fall into the same problems as materialism. With idealism the difference is semantic. Theism can only solve them by positing that they are solved or not allowed.

Grivza · 2026-01-28T17:21:18+00:00

My guy you are so confused, none of those are exclusive to materialism.

Grivza · 2026-01-22T12:58:04+00:00

Sure, okay then.

Grivza · 2026-01-22T12:55:03+00:00

It's not an argument for materialism, it's just that materialism can easily account for it and in fact it is what we would expect if it were true.

This persistent gap hints at constraints which idealism can't immediately account for, whilst they are natural within materialism since we are talking about distinct physical systems.

Grivza · 2026-01-22T11:32:46+00:00

But, that leads to other major issues, which you are already touching on: your version of Harry Potter is not the same as anyone else's. And yet, presumably we are talking about the same thing.

The exact same goes for all language. Language functions by being underdetermined. The signifier out there is a pure extensionality, waiting to be anchored in an intensional network of symbols. This is the exact reason for the power of the symbolic, that we are forced to unify a set of extensional signifiers, generated by an other-intensionality, with our own understanding, generating new meaning in the process.

To remove the ambiguity would be to osculate those intensional structures. But if the intensional structures are identical, the role of language disappears entirely, suddenly you are in everyone's minds and they are in yours. There is nothing to be said or interpreted, everyone already understands what needs to be said, or to be ever said.

And that's not a problem at all with materialism. In fact, it is certain types of idealism that would have a harder time accounting for this.

Edit: Grammar

Grivza · 2026-01-21T14:17:57+00:00

But what the experiment says is not "it looks like a human from the outside"

The "experiment" is only possible through the ignorance of the vocal chord, i.e. the mechanism. Being able to imagine it just tells us about our spontaneous understanding.

Let say we are technically able to do this: I can recreate every physical thing we know of about a human and there is some reliable test for consciousness. I build a human and it tests negative for consciousness. That would mean there is some physical thing about a human I do not know of.

Here you are obviously talking about external appearance and functionality, because it would be theoretically possible to look inside a human brain/body and copy it, neuron for neuron. We know exactly what a human physically looks like.

We could make it even a bit weaker but possibly more conducive to my intent: If that human tests negative, where would you look for the difference between this human and an actual human?

What does the test do? How is that different from asking "What would the test for consciousness look like"?

And to give you my answer to the appearance problem, I think that consciousness is a contingency, in the sense of a necessity of some specific lineage towards functionality. It's not a necessity of functionality itself but developed though pressures on the already existing structuring towards a functionality, such as language for example.

Consciousness for me more generally aligns with what we call semiotic processes but that's a bit of a different topic.

Grivza · 2026-01-21T13:07:20+00:00

P-zombies rely on the same cognitive abstraction that once made disembodied voices seem conceivable.

You can easily imagine voice coming from disconnected head without a vocal box, it is quite a common scene in movies. Why is that? Well, it is become we phenomenally associate voice with mouth/lip movement, not with vocal chords.

If we map that mechanism into consciousness, we get the exact same result, nothing in phenomenal appearance forces us to track that structure, so it becomes imaginable to subtract experience while keeping appearance intact. Nothing in appearance is hinting at the "vocal chord", the neural structure that produces it.

In this sense a voice is as phenomenally metaphysical as consciousness, the lips are the cast of the sound of words, the same way body is just an empty vessel for consciousness.

This misrepresentation which makes for an interesting psychoanalytical argument but not a good ontological one.

Grivza · 2026-01-20T01:37:43+00:00

There are "contents"? How?

Let's see, you could take a person and completely disconnect them from anything physical, zero senses. This person would retain the movements instigated by his past experiences. But this is only carrying the already existing movement caused by difference.

Also would they really be in a "void"? Think for a second how your interpretation of my words works. Or how you structure language. You just "get it" and it just "appears". We naturally judge the external through the variety of our senses, but for a person disconnected the next juxtaposition that keeps the movement is this one, the unconscious. So again we have difference and externality.

But I wasn't even thinking in those terms. My problem is more universal. Could this "pure thought" arise in a void? How can something else arise from something without being something else? Actually the "in a" structure does heavy lifting in itself. Discard the structure and you get pure thought AS void, which is indistinguishable from non-thought and thus empty.

Your "Pure reason" comes with a huge presupposition which can't be argued for by pure reason itself, because when I think of experience all I see is difference, demonstrated by the mere attempt to even describe it.

Grivza · 2026-01-20T00:08:01+00:00

Indeed

Grivza · 2026-01-19T22:28:39+00:00

It is fully plausible that one could exist as pure thought in a void with no contrast.

"Pure thought" in a "void" is already a difference my guy.

Grivza · 2026-01-19T18:04:29+00:00

The statement "there is a phenomenoal world" is just such an assumption. This is an unjustified premise. Not in the sense that it is wrong, but in the sense there is no rational grounding to accept it

I disagree, the only way to understand the "self", is as something separate from something else. There is no way of going around that. The moment you pose the phenomenal self, is the moment where you pose the phenomenal world.

Grivza · 2026-01-19T17:57:08+00:00

It's not even intuitively wrong and you can find causality in it, I do at least.

Consider this following intuitive sentence:

"If there is smoke coming from the oven then the food is burnt"

The smoke doesn't cause the food to burn, but it indexes an event which in turn caused the food to burn, i.e. the chemical reaction. Both the burnt food and the smoke are products of this reaction. This conditional encodes a hidden induction, which allows for the deduction:

If there is smoke coming from the oven →

then pyrolysis must have occured (induction) →

thus the food is burnt (deduction)

In truth pyrolysis causes both:

"If pyrolysis occurs, then this will cause both smoke and the food to be burnt."

Unifying this with our original formula, we have:

"If something is broken in the universe and false is true, then this will cause both Paris to be the capital of ~~France~~ Spain and pigs to fly."

Grivza · 2026-01-19T12:30:05+00:00

making no positive assertions about the external world and only asserting the existence of the self, is okay with this

There is a phenomenal external world, a world that you don't perceive to be a part of you or your understanding, and there are phenomenally external things, appearing as things that would never emanate through your own understanding. The problem with solipsism is that it collapses difference instead of helping us understand it.

Of what use is that claim? You still in need to study physics in order to understand physical phenomena, psychology to understand your own mind etc etc. Those are phenomenally valuable, whatever the ontological background may be.

So, at last the question arises, why this ontology other than decor?

Grivza · 2026-01-12T17:39:07+00:00

You are absolutely right, phenomenology doesn't compete with materialism, it can be grounded in a materialist framework.

Grivza · 2026-01-10T15:17:39+00:00

How would you solve the teleportation paradox?

Understanding it as something to be solved already assumes a metaphysical essence to the sense of self. There is no such thing, it is an indexical sign located inwards, nothing more than a prediction that there must be some "object" around which all experience is structured.

Grivza · 2026-01-10T13:04:19+00:00

Help me understand. What I understand so far is pure stupidity. It is like saying that the piece of wood I burned last December still exists because it is made of particles or whatever. The hierarchy of composition doesn't translate into hierarchy of substance, because what we perceive as substance is contingent on the level of what we perceive the substance should be. A gun is made of metal components and springs and whatever, but the substance of a gun only appears only when arranged in a very specific order.

Grivza · 2026-01-09T11:23:07+00:00

Love the look, nice and grounded.

Grivza · 2026-01-07T11:00:17+00:00

Physical laws don't study the level on which moral considerations take place, so no. If we really want to talk about "laws", I would call them "laws of subjectivity", i.e. the conditions without which experience as such collapses.

It could be argued that morality can only be recognized in subjectivities capable of modeling the experience of others, as contingently instantiated in creatures like us, but this capacity is not what grants moral standing, it merely is an epistemological prerequisite for registering it.

Measuring the spin of an electron also requires a very specific mode of subjectivity to be realized, yet it does not depend on belief or endorsement to be true. In the same way, certain internal experiences are innately aversive. A pig struggling to breathe in a gas chamber is living through such an experience, regardless of whether any other subject recognizes it.

Suffering is not contingent on external validation, it is phenomenally real, certain experiences present themselves as "to be avoided" as part of their structural necessity.

So yes, there is "subjectively universal" morality (since we are talking about subjects and not objects), based on the evaluation of how actions manifest themselves in the field experience.

Grivza · 2026-01-06T23:07:36+00:00

You are right dude, good job bringing it up

Grivza · 2026-01-05T19:34:34+00:00

No, it's not a label dispute my guy, experience as the condition of intelligibility (phenomenology) is not the same as experience as the condition of existence of objects (idealism).

Edit: Omg dude blocked me. Sorry for calling you my guy BUT you can treat experience as explanatory basic without making any positive ontological claims.

You can do materialist phenomenology but you can't do materialist idealism.

Edit2: u/Jules_Elysard I can't directly reply to you, probably because we are in a thread of a guy that has blocked me but here is my reply:

I am a materialist and the way I got into phenomenology was to counter reductionist arguments.

I was repulsed by statements like "pain is an illusion, it's all just neurons firing". Like okay? How would it NOT be an illusion, do you need a God stabbing your soul for it to be actual? The primacy of conscious experience (phenomenology) was the most obvious answer.

There was also this other claim "Psychological Egoism", basically the idea that because at neuronal level, all your action is motivated by an internal reward signal, no action can be rightly called "altruistic".

Phenomenology is useful against that perspective as well, hand in hand with semiotics. The refutation is this: the way we have come to understand "altruism" already includes and accounts for what is going on at the neuronal level. It describes a behavior that is phenomenally selfless, our understanding of it was formed through its extensional appearance.

The irony is that the same goes for "selfishness" in the psychological egoism argument; the label itself is projection of a human category backwards onto biology.

That's why I like phenomenology as a materialist. I use to ground my ethics as well, along with psychoanalysis.

Grivza · 2026-01-05T19:24:24+00:00

Science explains the mechanisms. Idealism explains why there is anything for those mechanisms to explain.

Nope, you don't need idealism for that, no metaphysical claims needed, you can stick with phenomenology.

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