So we didn't have consciousness before that? That's amazing. Thank you Germans for all of this rich experience of consciousness!

Amazing to think none of us would be conscious without them

(I've edited this comment over and over like a dozen times now, so sorry for any confusion.)

Could you please elaborate on your point? As stated, I don't see the contradiction between human thought being deterministic, and human thought being capable of deciding which claims to believe.

In your example, I would say that, even though both positions are determined by "invincible cause-effect chains", there's no rule that says both chains have to produce correct beliefs. In fact, since the claims are contradictory, only at most one of them can be correct, which means that the "cause-effect chain" of the other one must have included some step which entailed faulty information, or faulty logic. Or the same could apply to both, if both claims happened to be incorrect in some way.

To give an example, let's say person A lies to person B. If we accept determinism, that means "invincible chains of cause-effect" led to A and B believing different things, but A still has the correct information and B doesn't. The fact that both have these really long "cause-effect chains" doesn't prevent us from pointing out that A happens to believe correct information, and that B doesn't.

It would be better to analyze what value is itself, rather than compare things that we assign value to.

Our current struggle with fallacy-ism is that we use it to argue about stuff in our everyday lives. Sometimes people just don’t need to explain why they like or don’t like something, because we’re emotional creatures. Sometimes we don’t even know why we like or don’t like something, but we shouldn’t be required to give a water-tight example of why we like or don’t like it.

I really like your patchwork analogy because I always think of ideas as a boat with fallacies being flex tape. If I just put flex tape on a tiny hole in the back of my otherwise usable boat because I don’t like water splashing on my leg and making my pants wet, it’s really not that important and more of a personal preference thing.

If I have to wrap the whole middle of my boat so it doesn’t split in half, I might just need to accept the fact that it’s no longer seaworthy.

This. One of the biggest mistakes English class ever did us was convince a bunch of people that fallacious arguments are wrong BECAUSE they’re fallacious.

So often in debate nowadays even among intellectuals we see this unending need to prove someone is wrong through how they say something instead of what they’re saying. As a result “debate” has just become this jostling of seeing who can spot the hole in an argument first and declare it to be wrong.

Jena pog The best collection of minds in a single location since ancient Athens

I wonder if there is any tie to Sisterdale, TX?

There is no meaning to life. The universe is cold and neutral. Yet the negative emotion that we assign to that realization is not neutral. It is negative. Why?. That's not logical. Shouldn't the emotion be neutral too? In other words, nothing has meaning including the fact that nothing has meaning yet we automatically assign a negative value to the fact that nothing has value, thus self-contracting without even realizing it. So I wonder if the solution to that kind of existential suffering is not to find meaning, but to identify and remove the arbitrary emotional response one has to the fact that nothing has meaning. Maybe the reason we do this is that when we are doing something we perceive to be meaningful (even if ultimately that meaning is an illusion) we receive positive emotion. We then, for some reason, automatically attribute that positive emotion to the idea that the task had meaning, so over time we develop a mental association between meaning and positive emotion. I wonder if meaning is just a placeholder concept the brain uses because it cant self conceptualize its own reward system (the mesocorticolimbic circuit) in its unconscious levels of processing. Thoughts?

and not only multiverse, if time happens to be infinite in this universe, all possible atom arrangements will happen and infinite amount of times, and that might produce our councioussness too

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I'm trying to formulate an idea of epistemology and I would like to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Imagine you have three sources of authority in your model of epistemology, A, B and C. Sometimes those sources disagree or contradict each other, so you use another source, which we'll call D, to adjudicate the disagreement and decide which one is correct. Given that type of scenario, would it be logically sound to say D has a higher tier of authority than A, B, and C?

Assuming that's true, a simplified secular epistemology might look like this:

>1. Reason
>
>2. Intuition, sense data, outcomes, authority figures (doctors, scientists, etc.)

And a simplified religious epistemology might look like this:

>1. The Bible
>
>2. Intuition, outcomes, authority figures (pastor, theologian), sense data

Regardless of what you put in the #1 slot, there must be only one authority source in that slot because it there were two authorities there, they might disagree, which would require another higher authority to adjudicate the disagreement.

Does that make sense?

The author sounds a lot like several other Jena set fans I've talked about, who also claim they were more influential than most would say they were, and often have similarly bizarre takes on Fichte. I actually don't have much beef with the Jena set themselves, they're not my cup of tea but generally are fine, it's how they're lauded as trendsetters and revolutionary thinkers by too many people I know much like the author discussed above.

I didn't no read the article (yet), I'm sorry if this is mentioned there.

But there is a whole book called "Fabolous rebels" (Fabelhafte Rebellen in German) covering the whole span of this topic, I really enjoyed reading it!

Oh shit, my bad. I'll correct my comment.

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You know, when you get to a point, everything just seems bad. That's the end of philosophy. "It sucks... but i don't know if that's true."

This isn't an indefensible stance or anything. While I have personally found some knowledge and awareness of cognitive biases to be pretty useful in tuning my own belief formation processes, I get those aren't the same thing as fallacies, though surely in the family. On the other hand, all the way from actually being a philosophy student 24 years ago to just spending more time than is healthy reading stuff like this on the web today, I think I've seen fallacies trotted out as a blunt object that ends discussions and indicts not obviously wrong reasoning more often than not.

But not at all universally. Especially post hoc ergo propter hoc. That is especially pernicious because it works as well as it does in terms of how humans come to build world models from experience. It works quite well when you want to know what happens when you punch a wall. Great for babies.

But it is not at all great for evaluating medical treatment. Saying it shouldn't be trotted out if we don't have randomized clinical trials indicating the opposite is ignoring that understanding of the fact that correlation doesn't equal causation is the very reason we have randomized clinical trials in the first place. Placebo effect, regression to the mean, and good old fashioned positive thinking if an ailment is largely subjective, are very real. A whole lot of treatments appear to work that can be proven to do nothing when they're actually put to the test. If using an unproven treatment doesn't obviously harm you and seems to work and you want to personally continue using it on that basis, feel free, but if you're going to trot that out as meaningful evidence that it actually works, pulling out post hoc ergo propter hoc is 1000% appropriate. Letting that slide is the basis of entire billion dollar industries that either do nothing but drain money or outright con people. Awareness of how causation can truly be demonstrated in complex systems that are not amenable to simply observing sequences of events and inferring what happened under the hood is a good thing.

Bien dit !!

That's cool

It's not for everyone.

I'm curious of what you think is being summarised in the article. The only thing approaching evaluation is the author's woeful misrepresentation of Fichte's thought, and completely reductive and mischaracterized relation of the Jena intellectuals to Rousseau. Rousseau was a of course a significant influence, but not more than the Greeks, Spinoza, Kant, etc.

Let’s not get bogged down with the details. /s. ;)

God I'm sick of hearing about the Jena set. A whole lot of drama and not much original philosophy. It's notable more for being Germany's answer to early romantics than any genuine accomplishment. https://archive.ph/sKHKH sums up a lot of my thoughts on the group and the people who write about them

Fellow Jenaer here!

Still a great place to study, work and have a wonderful life!