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While there is no outside judge or arbiter of your life's rightness or wrongness you are still just an organism which is programmed through some mixture of socialization and instinct to have certain values and you can't really escape or transcend those values until you die and cease to exist, at most you can change the way you think about them.
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Dec 3, 2016 02:52
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Brainiac Five posted:I don't think this is incontrovertibly true. Few things are. But even if it's a false idea it still seems to be more accurate than the comparatively juvenile beliefs that you can either generate your own set of values independently or that you can receive your values from some kind of deity or higher power.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:27
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Brainiac Five posted:I don't think confusing despairing inevitability with adulthood is good, nor telling people they are helpless and prostrate before artificial gods of socialization. I don't see why you have to despair over the fact that your values emerge from the interaction between your biological needs and the culture into which you are born. It's not as though this means your values are incapable of change, though it does mean that the extent of those changes is determined by factors beyond your control.
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Dec 3, 2016 19:16
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Brainiac Five posted:No, I mean that your beliefs are essentially ones born out of despair. They are built around passivity and inevitability- that your mind is set in stone, and can only be worked on from the outside by gods we call "culture" and "biology". Acknowledging that we don't create our own values out of thin air isn't a passive or despairing stance, and I'm curious what perspective you'd propose adopting as an alternative.
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Dec 3, 2016 19:29
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Brainiac Five posted:Your position is that values are immutable and cannot be consciously altered, and that is what I am calling a passive stance, since it argues that, if you are racist you will always be racist until your biology or culture makes you suddenly not-racist. That is the very definition of passive- you cannot attempt to counteract your racism, because your racism is immutable unless altered externally by what are more-or-less divine forces in your metaphysics. I said the limits of the changes you can make are beyond your control, which in no way rules out the possibility of consciously changing your beliefs. For instance, I hope that with conscious attention you will be capable of moving beyond this rather puerile tendency to debate by telling other people what their position on the matter is.
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Dec 3, 2016 19:41
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Brainiac Five posted:I hope your god Biology cures you of this tendency towards condescension. I don't think there's any contradiction there. You can change your mind as time goes by but your life as you live it now is necessarily going to be in a continuous inner dialogue with the values that you absorbed when you were young. You might abandon an old religion or convert to a new one, you might change your perspective on gender or race, you might become kinder or crueler, but you're not going to ever truly escape the system of values you were raised in, especially since so many of those values aren't really present in your mind as consciously articulated beliefs. This seems like a fairly uncontroversial statement to me. It would probably be easier to determine what we disagree about if you suggested an alternative view.
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Dec 3, 2016 19:59
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:05 |
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Brainiac Five posted:Define "system of values" and "escape". Because if we're saying that racism and nonracism coexist within a single system of values, what is really being said, to my mind, is that systems of values are necessarily broad enough to be self-contradictory, and that they cannot be escaped because they are broad enough it's impossible to hold a set of beliefs external to them. In which case "system of values" is more or less meaningless on an instrumental level. Of course our beliefs and values can often end up contradicting each other. I feel like experiencing those contradictions or trying to assuage them is an almost universal human experience, even if those contradictions don't always rise to the level of conscious awareness. Given your criticism of essentialism I am surprised that you would consider internal consistency to be a requirement. You've already identified quite clearly how our minds produce an artificial but necessary image of a consistent and stable reality filled with stable and discrete objects. The rest of our beliefs are similarly artificial and contingent, right up to our most deeply held convictions. Even our experience of being unitary and free willed agents is contradicted by the fact that we often cannot control ourselves, find our minds torn between irreconcilable desires, or experience our thoughts as happening to us rather than being caused by us. And while I'm pitching this argument at a very basic level of consciousness and perception, you could scale this up to our more articulate beliefs, such as our ethical codes, and I think you'd find the same tendency for contradicting beliefs to co-exist with each other. It would be helpful if you could clarify exactly what you're thinking of when you suggest that self contradicting beliefs are meaningless on "on an instrumental level"? I don't believe that's the case. In fact I would argue that my position is the logical conclusion of your critique of essentialism: our mind itself has no essential quality, like everything else it changes over time and the mind we have today is not the same mind that we will have tomorrow (and "we" will not be the same person tomorrow either). Why is it at all strange that the constantly flickering and changing series of mental events which we falsely interpret as "our" "mind" should not always be consistent with itself?
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Dec 4, 2016 17:33
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