Heh. I'm not a physicist, but if my understanding of quantum theory is at all correct it is a statistical rather than deterministic discipline. In principle, then, the model could be refined to arbitrary levels of precision, down to precisely predicting the probability of individual quantum events within a system. In that case it falls squarely into the magisterium of science, since it can make testable, repeatable predictions about events, even if they are probabilistic predictions.

My argument is that there are elements of the human experience which, even in theory, are not reducible to testable predictions. As a corollary, the /fact/ that in practice there are still many such elements which are not well understood scientifically (and if you disagree with this, I would invite you to find any psychological study of the past fifty years that has been verified to even two sigma of confidence in one or more follow up studies) means that ANY statement about the relationship between science and understanding the human experience is ultimately metaphysical speculation, including this one.

“It means to make one’s own evaluation, absent of external bias…”

You are really stretching if you think antivaxxers (or at least Covid deniers) are making their decision “absent of external bias.”

What greater bias than the desire to get back to normal, not be told what to do, and not have your life inconvenienced, disrupted, or in some cases put into financial turmoil?

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There is nothing wrong with Rodgers imagining himself a critical thinker. There is nothing wrong with arriving at different conclusions and standing by them.

But Rodgers did not do that. He instead deliberately misled folks. We all knew he was doing this of course, but no one wanted to press the point. To publicly ”go after” him.

Which is a shame. Because what he was really doing, under the guise of his supposed critical thinking, was STEALING. He disinformed, in order that he might play, in order that he would make money.

nothing philosophical here. His episode is the opposite of philosophy. Anti-woke, indeed.

Agreed. You bring up an excellent point on media and coverage. How they spin it, discuss it, focus on it can change the way a lot of people view it. It's a shame we don't create an environment to openly discuss these things I honestly think there could be some positives from it but "cancel" and "woke" culture destroys everything. If people felt less attacked and judged maybe they'd be more open to talk about why they think or feel a certain way.

And that's my very point - the fact that two people agree that THERE IS SUCH A THING as goodness is far more relevant than quibbles over whether or not some given action is good.

Also, using physical analogies to describe experiential realities is like using a piano arrangement to analyze a symphony written for a full orchestra. Every human knows that the experience of being alive is far richer and more significant than can be simply described. To describe a life fully is to live it out. To reduce human relationships and joy and suffering to nothing more than the interplay of chemicals and electricity inside a fatty lump of meat may be factual, in the sense that it is all that can be externally verified (and indeed might "truly" be all that there is) but nobody actually lives that way. We live as though there is some quality of reality in our own experience. It MATTERS when someone is in pain.

Logical positivism proposes a world where none of that is actually true, so whether or not it's the most truthful account of the universe, I'm going to keep living in the universe where I can believe that it's actually ontologically better to feed someone, rather than merely being a societally approved action.

I really liked the idea of "critical" vs. "individual" thinking. Definitely made me examine it from a different angle. And I think it's true people are using it as a shield to avoid criticism because they want to be different. I'm not sure Joe Rogan has ever done much "thinking," let alone the "critical" variety.

Hey now, we are doing that well enough on our own this season!

Ahh. Thanks for clarification. I had issues with that as well, but then, I’m a Pragmatist

Ftp, respectfully.

His (implied) claim that set theories start from empirical observations.

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Curious: "Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute — and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real — or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer — or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man’s consciousness? Are they what they are — or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish? The nature of your actions — and of your ambition — will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics — the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being” — the basic branch of philosophy." ~ Ayn Rand

As a Vikings fan, I'm chuckling

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>Are the arguments against objective ethics/morality, motivated by persons unable to deal with shame and/or thier previous bad decisions?

Some might be, but others are motivated by the fact that those who advocate for an objective morality almost invariably have extremely poor arguments for their position. In other words, those who advocate for objective morality tend to not prove their position, and we are left wondering if their failure is due to them being just wrong. If it is objective, like other facts, such as rain falls from the sky, a demonstration of some type ought to be given, yet that isn't done, and they almost always end up appealing to someone's feelings about facts, rather than demonstrate some fact that is morality. Which suggests that what they are doing is really subjective instead of their claim that it is all objective.

Of course this also depends on how, exactly, one defines "objective" and "subjective" for morality. If, for example, we look at something like David Hume's ethical theory, what determines right and wrong are feelings, but not simply one person's preferences. It is based upon feelings of empathy, that are shared among people who are not regarded as psychopaths or sociopaths (and whose feelings are not corrupted with false beliefs). So, is that objective, since it is felt by many, or is it subjective, because it is based on feelings?

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If anyone wants to read what Hume has to say about ethics, a good place to start is his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals which can be found here (among other places):

https://davidhume.org/texts/m/

Seriously. I don’t know whether Aaron Rodgers is a critical thinker, but I do know that all of the times he’s tried to project himself as a critical thinker, he’s just advocating for easily disproven nonsense.

People that are really smart / experts in one field, can sometimes assume that it makes them experts in other fields. He intuitively knows that I can’t read some google results and then process a live football play as well as he can, but he doesn’t seem to understand that reading a few web pages on topics that he has no education or experience with does not make him an expert on those things.

It's the hipster oath

You can reword it to "tentative, seemingly reliable, predictable and useful conceptual relationships between abstracts and observations" if you like. I think we can usually clump together enough common ground to infer what was meant relative to the general thrust of the argument. I just wanted to be quick and non-weasel wordy with it.

What’s philosophical deconstruction? Like Derrida ‘deconstruction’?

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I don't think you can learn/conceive of empty sets and non-empty sets (or that you think therefore you are) without sensation. While examples are thin on the ground*, the most reasonable self-awareness models rely on an ability to identify the self in one's environment and one's ability to move within it. Without sensation, brains, minds, whatever have nothing to define themselves into being.

*I did look into this years ago and found some rare cases of infants born without the ability to sense and obviously they did not develop properly and were effectively vegetables. Suggestive material exists for people with specific senses absent from birth missing certain experiences of self when dreaming and the like, although plasticity, rewiring the brain to use the visual systems with blindness have also been observed. The general point - that sensation precedes language, logic and self, and these things are genetically dependent on sensation in the hierarchy of knowledge - I think is defensible and reasonable to accept.