Moral Cognition: Telling Right from Wrong

[@ANascente]

Groundbreaking to me 👏👏👏

[@Cirnenric]

Really useful in clarifying how knowledge is constructed into morale choices.

[@glennjohn3824]

Not really

[@ExistenceUniversity]

@@glennjohn3824 Go outside!

[@TeaParty1776]

Ensign Pulver was the Morale Officer.

[@kphaxx]

We ❤ Greg!

[@jamesvalliant6707]

Super stuff!

[@jessicawalker3100]

Thanks!

[@lauraowens178]

One solution to the Chat GPT issue is to teach "flipped" classes, where the students read the next chapter of the textbook at home first, so that all the teacher has to do in class is answer questions on the material, and then spend their class time working on essays/papers in front of the teacher, where Chat GPT sites are blocked.

[@TeaParty1776]

Interesting, but papers often require much time isolated from other people. And time for walking around while thinking about a problem w/the paper. Or sleeping on the problem. Art Of Non-Fiction-Ayn Rand Teaching Johnny To Think-Leonard Peikoff

[@tomburroughes9834]

An excellent talk in explaining how to think about morality, and far more incisive and plainspoken than the sort of Jungian, quasi-religious junk that Jordan Peterson, for example, comes out with.

[@TeaParty1776]

But JP suffers for all of us. Isnt that more important than crass, vulgar knowledge? As Jesus said, ""So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Wow, give him a guitar and hes a blues musician.

[@zardozcys2912]

Like a blind squirrel stumbling on a nut once in a while😅

[@vinoverita]

The knowledge philosophy treats is always propositional in nature. To suggest otherwise is mistaken. We may use the same word (e.g. “know”) when we say “he knows how to make a crème brûlée,” but such a skill is not “knowledge” in the philosophical sense. Philosophically, knowledge consists in asserting something about some aspect of reality. If the assertion (which is always propositional in nature) is true, it constitutes knowledge. There is nothing true or false about beating egg yokes in a bowl. What is true is that “crème brûlée requires egg yokes.” Even concepts - the building blocks of knowledge - are not in and of themselves knowledge. They are neither true or false. A child who points to the family pet and says “dog” has made a simple apprehension. At best his identification implies future knowledge. But when he utters “dog bark,” he now demonstrates that he knows something about dogs, that he has knowledge of dogs since knowledge consists in asserting something about some aspect of reality. Failure to make this distinction is what leads people to conclude that “animals know how to use tools” and other such nonsense.

[@TeaParty1776]

Concepts are the product of the minds processing of perceptions. First, one perceives a tree, then one can reason about it. Reason is the identification and integration of perceptions....A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition....A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. -Ayn Rand Plato's problem of participation was solved in _Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology_ by Ayn Rand. The solution was briefly recognized in Aristotle's, "the more and the less," perhaps in his scientific study of the sizes of bird beaks.

[@vinoverita]

@@TeaParty1776 Thank you for your response. One cannot reason on a tree or anything for that matter unless one has knowledge with which to reason. Reasoning is the manipulation of knowledge - and knowledge is always propositional. If a toddler perceives a tree and utters “tree,” he has made a simple apprehension. But he does not have knowledge about trees or any means to reason about them until he asserts a predicate to it (ex:a tree is a living organism), which requires the formation and predication of other concepts. If you can’t pronounce “true or false” it is not the knowledge epistemology philosophy concerns itself with. Concepts identify entities, their attributes and relationships. I agree that a concept includes a definition. But I’d add that it also has a perceivable aspect which is the word that represents what the concept denotes. Even if a toddler only perceived one tree and conceptually identified it as such, he would have formed a particular concept. When he perceives others and subsumes them under the same word symbol, he has universalized the concept. This process distinguishes essential from possible qualities among trees.

[@TeaParty1776]

@@vinoverita You have validly applied Kant's philosophy of the unfocused mind. So have Biden, Trump, transgenders, religious conservatives, the Proud Boys and the happy campers in the California tent cities. Heideggers unfocused mind had dread, Sartre's had meaninglessness, Wittgensteins had words, Hitlers had racial intuitions, yours has predicates, all subjective, all split from reality. Kant’s ....argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes-deaf, because he has ears-deluded, because he has a mind-and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.....The entire apparatus of Kant’s system, like a hippopotamus engaged in belly-dancing, goes through its gyrations while resting on a single point: that man’s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity. -Ayn Rand With Kant....to attain a knowledge of the real, we must go out of consciousness. -Henry Mansel, Kant scholar

[@vinoverita]

@@TeaParty1776 >>your has predicates

[@TeaParty1776]

@@vinoverita Obj episte, including Binswanger, starts w/the perception of concretes,from which concepts and propositions are abstracted. Kant starts w/floating abstractions, his a prioris, split from the perception of concretes. Your prior post was not clearly Obj.

[@drstrangelove09]

26:02 it disappoints me in the extreme when Objectivists, especially big name Objectivists, use woke stock pictures... I expect Objectivists be not fall for that crap... and from what I can tell Rand would not have been on board with woke ideology

[@ExistenceUniversity]

Seriously? You are offended by two hands of different color touching... This isn't woke, you're just racist.

[@glennjohn3824]

Or global fear mongering from unelected bureaucrats for medical mandates and travel bans for the flu... objectivism has several weak points in its current state.

[@TeaParty1776]

Define woke stock pictures.

[@ExistenceUniversity]

@@TeaParty1776 Well you can't really define a 3-word sentence, but you can provide a description of what a 3-word term might entail. Giving full strongman argumentation, a "woke stock photo" would be a stock photo whose purpose of existence is to aid the propaganda campaign of wokeness. Woke being an old and at this point poorly borrowed concept derived from Black Americans that saw Jim Crow laws and the such as they were, evil, and that society was on one hand saying "blacks are equal" and on the other hand blacks were still being quietly discriminated against. "Stay Woke" became a phrase to say "Be alert that police and the government still see you as not human". Wokeness today means the same thing but they believe that the veil is covering up an agenda to brainwash you into believing post-modernism is a lie and that rules and laws are objective when in fact reality is a dream and we define what reality is. Being woke is ironically today a way of saying "believing in reality is a dream, wake up and see the dream for the dream it is." Given that wokeness is real and political, I can get a "woke stock photo", i would imagine it being a bearded man sitting in a gynecologists office with his doctor giving him a thumbs up that the procedure of invitro-fertization was a "success". That image would be trying to say "2+2=5", that's what a woke stock image might be. How on Earth two hands of slightly different skin tones being woke is just seeing the enemies everywhere to the point of absurdity, crossing over into just plain racism.

[@drstrangelove09]

@@TeaParty1776 nah.... look at the images... it's obvious

[@rndyh77]

It seems to me that within the first 12 minutes, this gentleman is conflating a moral standard of right and wrong with personal agency.

[@ExistenceUniversity]

And you'd prefer if morality had nothing to do with volitional agency? You can do anything at all, and still be moral because moral to you means???

[@rndyh77]

@@ExistenceUniversity it has nothing to do with anyone’s preferences. There is a reality even though something is wrong, people still do it. Even when they know it’s wrong.

[@ExistenceUniversity]

​@@rndyh77What are you trying to argue. You seem to have just given up the argument all together just to say "who needs morals since we go against our morals daily?" I'm trying to engage with you here but your argument is all over the place. What does "moral" mean to you?

[@rndyh77]

@@ExistenceUniversity we aren’t talking about what moral means to me. This talk is about how objectivism arrives at a moral standard of right and wrong. His assertion at the beginning of the speech implies that we are all going to arrive at the same conclusion 100% of the time, at least if we are truly objective. Even if that were the case, (which it wouldn’t be, because no two people can ever agree on everything - and certainly not an entire population) there will always be someone who chooses what is objectively wrong for whatever their reasons might be. In fact, their choice may not be objectively wrong to them at all.

[@ExistenceUniversity]

@@rndyh77 It's important for me to know what you think moral means as you seem to want to have morality exist but you don't seem to want it to have to do anything with human actions. Morality involves your human body, and your human body is objective and has the same bad for it as everyone elses. You are conflating personal habits and preferences with morality. It is immoral to harm yourself, how can you argue the opposite of that?

[@glennjohn3824]

So objectivism led you to believe a baby is just part of a woman's body therefore she has the right to kill it..? Perhaps you should elaborate on that distinction before ranting against the Supreme Court with such an emotional and nonfactual argument.

[@alexleibovici4834]

> objectivism led you to believe a baby is just part of a woman's body Not a baby, a fetus, in its first 3 month in any case.

[@ExistenceUniversity]

No Objectivism states that a baby is that which is born and independent and is self-sustaining and self-generating and therefore (by the fact it can cry to get what it wants) is metaphysically fighting to survive and therefore has a right to life. A fetus however is not born, not self-sustaining, nor self-generating, it is LITERALLY just a process of the woman's body doing what her body does with it's parts. Outside of these facts, the alternative to abortion to slavery, and slavery is evil and immoral. So you either allow a human body to do human body things and allow that human in that human body to decide if they want their body doing that or not, OR you reintroduce slavery into America because your imagination of a magical sky daddy would be mad if you didn't.

[@glennjohn3824]

@@alexleibovici4834 lol... fetus is Latin for baby. Changing the word doesn't make it not a baby. Try objectivism.

[@hellothere-hx5by]

It is a part of her body, literally physically attached. Rights are freedoms of action, which can only belong to autonomous beings. The fetus is not an autonomous being. It has no capacity of bodily autonomy. It hasn’t physically separated from the mother and developed a separate functioning body. The fetus is a part of the woman’s body, and so she can remove it from her body.

[@ExistenceUniversity]

​@@glennjohn3824"Try Objectivism" would mean looking at facts like the fact that the woman has the body doing the work and her right to life and her body allows her to make decisions about her body and the only alternative is to reintroduce slavery so we can force her against her own will to make us a child that we will steal and use to act as a labourer to society. Taking words and translating them (poorly) is by definition rationalism.

[@glennjohn3824]

You can't just replace Jesus with John Gault and take yourself seriously like the mormons.... lmfao. Wow.

[@ExistenceUniversity]

What are you talking about? Are you entirely insane or just 75% insane. Let's compile what we learned about you today: 1) Hates women, likely never touched or talked to one besides mom and I don't want to psychologize but that cannot be a good relationship. 2) Believes in magic sky daddy and thinks commandments are moral. 3) Cannot comprehend more complex sentences. 4) Spends all day commenting on videos they hate rather than enjoying the beautiful day. Did I miss anything?

[@Shozb0t]

Who should Jesus be replaced with, then?

[@glennjohn3824]

@@Shozb0t why do you seek a replacement?

[@ExistenceUniversity]

@@glennjohn3824 Because Jesus is a terrible fictional person.

[@TheHerrUlf]

Why not? Why should anybody take "jesus" seriously? Explain please.