Your materialism is a form of idealism, that collapses into solipsistic conclusions.
When you limit the scope of phenomenal objects to be only those objects that have a physical quality, that is positivism. It has a nice way of erasing anything human from your analysis. Thought, emotion, social connection, motivation, the will to act all become purely subjective, hence are excluded from the category of objects that are real.
Your inability to process basic fact is admitted in your own description:
no significant change can be brought to masses by purely thinking about them
This is true, but you have no theory of praxis. There is a kind of contemplation that is purely subjective. Like daydreaming for instance, though this could be influenced by objective factors. There is a type of contemplation that develops the self so we are better able to take action, such as studying. And there is contemplation that leads directly to action, like when someone finally decides to leave their abuser, or develop a new flavor of ice cream, etc. These last two forms of contemplation are both subjective and objective. They become objective because they change something in the phenomenal world, they are verifiable.
Money only exists in the form of bits in a computer, or pieces of paper, some people say “money isn’t real,” but it clearly is as there are consequences if you don’t have any. The same is true with the law. It only exists physically as a piece of paper with some writing on it, but it actually took politicians, lawyers, input from citizens, all this unsubstantial stuff in order to create it, and if it is broken (what object broke?) the police can arrest you and you get punished by a judge. Do laws not exist?
Money and Laws are social relations. They have no substance, but they are real and verifiable, the paper they are printed on is only symbolic of what it is, how it came into being, and what effects it has on society. You can’t account for any of this, which is why you can’t understand the problem. You can imagine an individual body, you can imagine society and government, but you can’t connect them. You can’t see how society is made by people or how people are made by society.
The way to fix this is to center the human in our analysis. Maybe a tree exists with or without human work, but many trees are planted. Oil exists in the ground independent of our labor, but what turns in into gasoline is people working on an oil rig (built by people) extracting it, transporting the crude via truck or pipeline (all built and operated by people), refining it (in a refinery built by people), transporting the fuel to a gas station (operated and built by people), and put into your car’s gas tank by you, and that was done for some reason. You witnessed to something in your environment, you thought about it, which led you to want to drive somewhere, which made you want to fill up your gas tank.
Maybe you wanted to buy a video game, created and marketed to you by people. Why did you want that game? So you could play with friends, or you want to compete on leaderboards, or you played the last game and want to play this one. Out of joy or competitiveness, all these feelings lack substance, but they made you do a thing, and as long as you return home with the game, your contemplation and action became objective.
This is why it matters that we are responsible with other people, and we account for their feelings and thoughts. Hell, influencing peoples thoughts and opinions is a multi-trillion dollar industry. If they didn’t exist before, the do when others try and influence them.
things that can not be measured don’t exist.
Where people are concerned, they do exist. Because it influences peoples ability to act. You can act in a way to free other people or you can oppress them, and the qualities of freedom and oppression are not measurable, but their effects are substantial.
I’m not sure if your attitude is based on a need to harm other people, or if you really don’t understand. In both cases, what brought you to it was not totally your own. You were exposed to chauvinism in a way that led you to adopt a crappy attitude, or you were taught things a certain way (which is tbf how we are all taught to some degree, though it is wrong). You internalized this, thought about it, said something gross, and people reacted negatively. This is all objective, but only some of it is verifiable.
This particular misunderstanding you exhibit is one of my favorite topics, and my answer to it is the product of like 15 years of research and discussions. You say
scientific worldview starting from 1800
It arguably started before, but it was thoroughly disproven in 1844. Yet it persists. That persistence is not substance, “worldview” isn’t substance, the year 1800 isn’t substance. But it is phenomenon. You’re confused, but hopefully that’s all it is. Hopefully you’ll reconsider and be able to do better. Human development is objective, but it is not inevitable. This is the difference between your deterministic and vulgar attitude and reality.
In other words, you are an idealist who uses physical phenomenon to disappear much that is real. If we want to become a better materialist, then we have to center people and everything about humans in our analysis, not objects as something that exists independent of human intervention.
That was enlightening.
However, I detect some limiting value judgements.
I’m not sure if your attitude is based on a need to harm other people, or if you really don’t understand. In both cases, what brought you to it was not totally your own. You were exposed to chauvinism in a way that led you to adopt a crappy attitude, or you were taught things a certain way (which is tbf how we are all taught to some degree, though it is wrong). You internalized this, thought about it, said something gross, and people reacted negatively. This is all objective, but only some of it is verifiable.
This is a limiting perspective.
Attitudes toward nudity are culturally specific.
It’s likely not as taboo or shameful in cultures where nudity is mundane.
The taboos & rules we follow in our culture don’t need to be that way, and we know that.
We know we don’t need to see things the way we do: our arbitrary value judgements are a matter of perspective.
Hopefully you’ll reconsider and be able to do better. Human development is objective, but it is not inevitable. This is the difference between your deterministic and vulgar attitude and reality.
It’s not necessarily vulgar.
We can take their materialism to an extreme and map all that mental, subjective experience to physical neural states beyond our precise comprehension & merely acknowledge that correspondence exists.
That neurochemistry includes some degree of randomness, as do some physical phenomena, so this physical-only view of reality isn’t completely deterministic.
It resolves to the same effect as your model of understanding reality, which abstracts away that physical detail into practical concepts more conducive to the way we think.
Anyhow, I think it was a good point that society doesn’t need this backward shame & judgement around nudity or whatever activity goes on in people’s heads.
However, society does, and it’s not about to evolve without serious effort.
Taking someone’s picture and turning it into a deepfake nude and then sharing those picturea, such as the OP, is bad because it violates their consent. Social attitudes toward nakedness aren’t material in this instance. I personally don’t care about public nakedness, except where hygiene is involved. Of all the social norms I’d overthrow, that one is pretty low on the list, its impractical.
Concerning determinism, I was mostly responding to this
the things of interest in the world are those that are “conserved quantities”, like if a hypothetical variable jumps around randomly, it’s not a good data source because it’s volatile and random
To me the phrase “not a good data source” indicates a preconception of rationalism, the assumption that the world is essentially logical, therefore we can intuit anything about the world with pure thought. Because events proceed logically, then events can be understood by evaluating their place as link in a logical “chain.” I don’t dispute this outright, but personally I can’t stand prefiguration. I think it is alienating from actual reality because instead of engaging with reality, and the people in it, we engage with reality through this logical chain. Everything has to fit, else it is illogical.
This is one of the most insidious logical errors that people make. The way to account for contradictions in logic is to apply the logic of contradiction, change and relation: dialectics. But most of the time even this is unnecessary and can also be used to alienate the subject. In either case its impractical to interact with a logical method, the method is only there to help us determine material reality so we can interact with material reality directly.
I think it’s okay to be like a soft determinist, someone who understands that what happened before effects what happens next. But its easier to do historical materialism by just centering the perspectives and reactions of people, than it is to try and conceive as historical events like links in a logical chain, which often happens with history as history usually ends up justifying the will of whoever is in charge. The best historians, even when they have ideological biases, are able to disseminate messy facts independent of anyone’s narrative
We can take their materialism to an extreme and map all that mental, subjective experience to physical neural states beyond our precise comprehension & merely acknowledge that correspondence exists. That neurochemistry includes some degree of randomness, as do some physical phenomena, so this physical-only view of reality isn’t completely deterministic.
Can you elaborate on this? I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.
I was being a little rough on the poster because I didn’t realize they were being provocative, so certain terms I used, like vulgar, have a negative connotation, but what I meant was it was a kind of orthodox materialism that inhibits change, that is oppressive rather than liberating.
i’d say your comment is well-thought-through, and my comment was also kinda provocative.
Of course i’m aware that the world cannot be purely understood by the material objects around us. I was, however, raised under the assumption that it can be understood that way. I guess i just wanted to hear somebody else confirm my own suspicion that that’s not true, after all.
A lot of people can sense it, but can’t describe it. My own ability to describe it is amateurish, clunky and abstract. I work with a lot of people who dedicate huge parts of their lives to helping people, who can’t describe it. The social scientists who worked it out are famous, but that part of their work is deemphasized even though it defines their work. And because it is deemphasized, their proponents and followers have committed any number of mistakes and just downright catastrophes.
I’m glad to hear you were doing a social science experiment and I’m glad I could provide some validation.
Your materialism is a form of idealism, that collapses into solipsistic conclusions.
When you limit the scope of phenomenal objects to be only those objects that have a physical quality, that is positivism. It has a nice way of erasing anything human from your analysis. Thought, emotion, social connection, motivation, the will to act all become purely subjective, hence are excluded from the category of objects that are real.
Your inability to process basic fact is admitted in your own description:
This is true, but you have no theory of praxis. There is a kind of contemplation that is purely subjective. Like daydreaming for instance, though this could be influenced by objective factors. There is a type of contemplation that develops the self so we are better able to take action, such as studying. And there is contemplation that leads directly to action, like when someone finally decides to leave their abuser, or develop a new flavor of ice cream, etc. These last two forms of contemplation are both subjective and objective. They become objective because they change something in the phenomenal world, they are verifiable.
Money only exists in the form of bits in a computer, or pieces of paper, some people say “money isn’t real,” but it clearly is as there are consequences if you don’t have any. The same is true with the law. It only exists physically as a piece of paper with some writing on it, but it actually took politicians, lawyers, input from citizens, all this unsubstantial stuff in order to create it, and if it is broken (what object broke?) the police can arrest you and you get punished by a judge. Do laws not exist?
Money and Laws are social relations. They have no substance, but they are real and verifiable, the paper they are printed on is only symbolic of what it is, how it came into being, and what effects it has on society. You can’t account for any of this, which is why you can’t understand the problem. You can imagine an individual body, you can imagine society and government, but you can’t connect them. You can’t see how society is made by people or how people are made by society.
The way to fix this is to center the human in our analysis. Maybe a tree exists with or without human work, but many trees are planted. Oil exists in the ground independent of our labor, but what turns in into gasoline is people working on an oil rig (built by people) extracting it, transporting the crude via truck or pipeline (all built and operated by people), refining it (in a refinery built by people), transporting the fuel to a gas station (operated and built by people), and put into your car’s gas tank by you, and that was done for some reason. You witnessed to something in your environment, you thought about it, which led you to want to drive somewhere, which made you want to fill up your gas tank.
Maybe you wanted to buy a video game, created and marketed to you by people. Why did you want that game? So you could play with friends, or you want to compete on leaderboards, or you played the last game and want to play this one. Out of joy or competitiveness, all these feelings lack substance, but they made you do a thing, and as long as you return home with the game, your contemplation and action became objective.
This is why it matters that we are responsible with other people, and we account for their feelings and thoughts. Hell, influencing peoples thoughts and opinions is a multi-trillion dollar industry. If they didn’t exist before, the do when others try and influence them.
Where people are concerned, they do exist. Because it influences peoples ability to act. You can act in a way to free other people or you can oppress them, and the qualities of freedom and oppression are not measurable, but their effects are substantial.
I’m not sure if your attitude is based on a need to harm other people, or if you really don’t understand. In both cases, what brought you to it was not totally your own. You were exposed to chauvinism in a way that led you to adopt a crappy attitude, or you were taught things a certain way (which is tbf how we are all taught to some degree, though it is wrong). You internalized this, thought about it, said something gross, and people reacted negatively. This is all objective, but only some of it is verifiable.
This particular misunderstanding you exhibit is one of my favorite topics, and my answer to it is the product of like 15 years of research and discussions. You say
It arguably started before, but it was thoroughly disproven in 1844. Yet it persists. That persistence is not substance, “worldview” isn’t substance, the year 1800 isn’t substance. But it is phenomenon. You’re confused, but hopefully that’s all it is. Hopefully you’ll reconsider and be able to do better. Human development is objective, but it is not inevitable. This is the difference between your deterministic and vulgar attitude and reality.
In other words, you are an idealist who uses physical phenomenon to disappear much that is real. If we want to become a better materialist, then we have to center people and everything about humans in our analysis, not objects as something that exists independent of human intervention.
That was enlightening. However, I detect some limiting value judgements.
This is a limiting perspective. Attitudes toward nudity are culturally specific. It’s likely not as taboo or shameful in cultures where nudity is mundane.
The taboos & rules we follow in our culture don’t need to be that way, and we know that. We know we don’t need to see things the way we do: our arbitrary value judgements are a matter of perspective.
It’s not necessarily vulgar. We can take their materialism to an extreme and map all that mental, subjective experience to physical neural states beyond our precise comprehension & merely acknowledge that correspondence exists. That neurochemistry includes some degree of randomness, as do some physical phenomena, so this physical-only view of reality isn’t completely deterministic.
It resolves to the same effect as your model of understanding reality, which abstracts away that physical detail into practical concepts more conducive to the way we think.
Anyhow, I think it was a good point that society doesn’t need this backward shame & judgement around nudity or whatever activity goes on in people’s heads. However, society does, and it’s not about to evolve without serious effort.
Taking someone’s picture and turning it into a deepfake nude and then sharing those picturea, such as the OP, is bad because it violates their consent. Social attitudes toward nakedness aren’t material in this instance. I personally don’t care about public nakedness, except where hygiene is involved. Of all the social norms I’d overthrow, that one is pretty low on the list, its impractical.
Concerning determinism, I was mostly responding to this
To me the phrase “not a good data source” indicates a preconception of rationalism, the assumption that the world is essentially logical, therefore we can intuit anything about the world with pure thought. Because events proceed logically, then events can be understood by evaluating their place as link in a logical “chain.” I don’t dispute this outright, but personally I can’t stand prefiguration. I think it is alienating from actual reality because instead of engaging with reality, and the people in it, we engage with reality through this logical chain. Everything has to fit, else it is illogical.
This is one of the most insidious logical errors that people make. The way to account for contradictions in logic is to apply the logic of contradiction, change and relation: dialectics. But most of the time even this is unnecessary and can also be used to alienate the subject. In either case its impractical to interact with a logical method, the method is only there to help us determine material reality so we can interact with material reality directly.
I think it’s okay to be like a soft determinist, someone who understands that what happened before effects what happens next. But its easier to do historical materialism by just centering the perspectives and reactions of people, than it is to try and conceive as historical events like links in a logical chain, which often happens with history as history usually ends up justifying the will of whoever is in charge. The best historians, even when they have ideological biases, are able to disseminate messy facts independent of anyone’s narrative
Can you elaborate on this? I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.
I was being a little rough on the poster because I didn’t realize they were being provocative, so certain terms I used, like vulgar, have a negative connotation, but what I meant was it was a kind of orthodox materialism that inhibits change, that is oppressive rather than liberating.
i’d say your comment is well-thought-through, and my comment was also kinda provocative.
Of course i’m aware that the world cannot be purely understood by the material objects around us. I was, however, raised under the assumption that it can be understood that way. I guess i just wanted to hear somebody else confirm my own suspicion that that’s not true, after all.
A lot of people can sense it, but can’t describe it. My own ability to describe it is amateurish, clunky and abstract. I work with a lot of people who dedicate huge parts of their lives to helping people, who can’t describe it. The social scientists who worked it out are famous, but that part of their work is deemphasized even though it defines their work. And because it is deemphasized, their proponents and followers have committed any number of mistakes and just downright catastrophes.
I’m glad to hear you were doing a social science experiment and I’m glad I could provide some validation.