Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 11:57 am
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 12:53 pm
Oh my word, the nutter has just attempted to define "meaning" as something
reducible to the instinct for survival
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 10:15 am
All humans are endowed via evolution with a neural based faculty for a sense of meaning reducible to the instinct for survival of the individual and therefrom that of the human species.
Now to be fair, he did teach himself to do philosophy solely by awarding himself gold stars for genius in the Kant homework he set and marked for himself. So perhaps he has absolutely no idea what redicuble means in this FSK thing that we do here.
But still, oof. After all that grumbling he's done about Logical Positivism, he now proposes his own clumsy reduction that's orders of magnitude worse than theirs.
It seems like you understand that sentence and are critical of it. Even after reading your opening paraphrase, I don't know what it is trying to say. I would guess, and it is a guess, that some huge step in the.....deduction(??)...is missing.
To a rational being, yes there's a bizarre void somewhere in that nonsense, but that's us expecting some sort of actual meaning to words and stuff. VA has started whole threads devoted to there not really being any meaning to words.
He also absolutely never analyses anything by any second vector under any circumstance. If he starts by analysing what thing is made of, he will only ever do that, and is quite incapable of analysing what purpose it must serve to continue being named thus. Thus when covering the notion of meaning, he wouldn't ever think that there is a relationship with understanding that must remain after the reduction.
Nor would he wonder if the substrate into which he hopes to reduce the concept is the right sort of thing to exude the properties of said concept. So to you it probably seems quite wild to reduce our capacity of understanding to nothing but an instinct to run away from sharp teeth, but he doesn't need that second vector getting in the way.
The broad outlines of his argument are fairly stable: Evolution* has created a bag of meat and juices called homo sapien (in the monkey naming sciences FSK). It exists because it has a drive to continue eating & fucking without getting eaten or fucked. Everything that it ever does "reduces" to these principles, including morality, language, reason.
To be kind one might say he doesn't understand what reduction means. But he has spent years of effort to become a world leading philosopher so obviously that's not accurate. Also the context of the original quote makes it look a lot like he does intend the usual meaning of reduction - although that subsequent paragraph is a complete shitstorm of barely coherent gibbering and I may not be able to back up this secondary claim adequately if pressured.
More importantly, one of the major issues with his work has always been an implicit reduction of those things to that one, so it's more likely that he has come to terms with the need to make it explicit. Dumb idea though that may be.
* Evolution fulfills a bunch of religious functions in his works, it has some sort of directional quality with moral outcomes that a random force of nature probably shouldn't be imbued with.