Fish In the Afternoon

This is for fun and not to be taken as a final statement of my positions. Here is the original.

Questions

• A priori knowledge – no or yes – no – The a priori is a patterning of the a posteriori.
• Abortion (first trimester, no special circumstances): permissible or impermissible? – permissible – Every body is someone’s body and that body is theirs to do with as they will.
• Abstract objects – platonism or nominalism – nominalism – Everything is Unique.
• Aesthetic experience: sui generis, pleasure, or perception? – Sui generis – Aesthetic experience is a synthesis of appearance into a sui generis experience.
• Aesthetic value – subjective or objective – both – The aesthetic experience is subject-objective, being a synthesized relationship between the Unique and the world.
• Aim of philosophy – wisdom, understanding, truth/knowledge, happiness, or goodness/justice – wisdom – Loving-Wisdom.
• Analysis of knowledge: other analysis, justified true belief, or no analysis? – no analysis – Knowing is a collection of patterned motions and cannot be analyzed in itself.
• Analytic-synthetic distinction – yes or no – no – The analytic is a patterning of the synthetic.
• Arguments for theism (which argument is strongest?): design, cosmological, ontological, moral, or pragmatic? – ontological – All the world patterns the One; this One is God.
• Belief or credence (which is more fundamental?): neither, credence, or belief? – credence – The Unique leans in its knowing and this leaning is always a maybe, a possibility inherent in the relationship between Unique and world.
• Capital punishment: permissible or impermissible? – impermissible – The self-ownership of the Unique precludes its annihilation by the state.
• Causation: nonexistent, counterfactual/difference-making, primitive, or process/production? – process/production – From nothing, the cosmos patterns itself into an echoic ocean, with each event linked to others by their position in the pattern.
• Chinese room: doesn’t understand or understands? – understands – Knowing is a doing and it is the room as a whole that does the act of knowing.
• Concepts: empiricism or nativism? – empiricism – The Unique in itself is a creative nothing; only through relationship with the world does the Unique come to inhabit meaning.
• Consciousness: functionalism, eliminativism, dualism, panpsychism, or identity theory? – (hylomorphic) pan(proto)psychism – All matter is spiritmatter, blessed with the immanent potential of consciousness, realized in the relationship between subject and object.
• Continuum hypothesis (does it have a determinate truth-value?): indeterminate or determinate? – indeterminate – Mathematics is an a priori patterning of the a posteriori in our thought and practice; because of this, it is a tool that contains its own indeterminacies and contradictions.
• Cosmological fine-tuning (what explains it?): no fine-tuning, design, multiverse, or brute fact? – brute fact – The pre-conditions for knowing the fact and the pre-conditions of the fact being true are the same.
• Eating animals and animal products – vegetarianism, veganism, or omnivorism – omnivorism – In right relationship, we can eat animals; in right relationship, they can eat us.
• Environmental ethics: non-anthropocentric or anthropocentric? – non-anthropocentric – Though our perspective is rooted in the human Unique, it stretches out beyond it in a way that does not assume human primacy.
• Epistemic justification – internalism or externalism – externalism – The world is prior to the interior. There is no private language.
• Experience machine (would you enter?) – yes or no – no – The experience machine is just one experience out of many.
• Extended mind: no or yes? – yes – The mind is identical with the world and the tools that extend our en-minded activity are themselves en-minded.
• External world – skepticism, idealism, or non-skeptical realism – idealist non-skeptical realism – The world and the mind are identical. The appearances of the world are facets of the world as the summation of en-worlded experiences.
• Footbridge (pushing man off bridge will save five on track below, what ought one do?) – don’t push or push – indeterminate – One wisely does in the moment.
• Foundations of mathematics: set-theoretic, formalism, constructivism/intuitionism, logicism, or structuralism? – constructivism/intuitionism – Mathematics is an a priori patterning of a posteriori thought and activity and thereby the structure of mathematics reflects the structure of that activity.
• Free will – compatibilism, no free will, or libertarianism? – compatibilism – Free will patterns the will that patterns it.
• Gender – unreal, biological, social, or psychological? – all of the above – When I woman, is the anima that does it biological, social, or psychological?
• Gender categories: revise, preserve, or eliminate? – revise – Let a million genders bloom.
• God – atheism or theism? – (pan)theism – The divine inhabits the world as perichoretic kenosis, the indwelling, self-giving love of creating-begetting-proceeding.
• Grounds of intentionality: phenomenal, primitive, inferential, interpretational, or causal/teleological? – phenomenal – Intention is an orientation of en-minded activity that is experienced self-reflectivity in that activity.
• Hard problem of consciousness (is there one?): yes or no? – no – Matter and en-minded activity are the same.
• Human genetic engineering: impermissible or permissible? – permissible – The possibilities of implementation are too varied to decide the permissibility of them as a class.
• Hume (what is his view?): skeptic or naturalist? – naturalist – Hume demonstrates the limits of philosophy to ground a Newtonian stance towards the natural sciences.
• Immortality (would you choose it?): yes or no? – no – The horizon of death manifests the arena of our mattering.
• Interlevel metaphysics (which is the most useful?): grounding, supervenience, identity, or realization? – realization – Ways-of-talking about the world are bound together in our experience by the mutual realization of those ways-of-talking in the world.
• Justification: infinitism, reliabilism, nonreliabilist foundationalism, or coherentism? – reliabilism – Knowing is a doing. We only know to the degree that we do in knowing.
• Kant (what is his view?): one world or two worlds? – one world – Kant synthesizes his quasi-idealism for the sake of reconciling the Humean picture to philosophical knowledge, showing how the limits of experience relate to the world in which that experience occurs.
• Knowledge – empiricism or rationalism? – empiricism – The interior is a patterning of the world; thought synthesizes experience into reason.
• Knowledge claims: relativism, contextualism, or invariantism? – contextualism – There is no knowledge, there is only knowing, in a place, in a time, in a world.
• Law: legal non-positivism or legal positivism? – legal positivism – The law is a patterning of human activity that has a law-like authority in a given social system.
• Laws of nature – non-Humean or Humean? – Humean – The cosmos patterns the laws like deep canyons in a mountain range.
• Logic: classical or non-classical? – both – Logic is a doing; types of logic do different things.
• Material composition: restrictivism, nihilism, or universalism? – universalism – Everything is the same thing patterning itself infinitely as the many-in-one.
• Meaning of life – objective, nonexistent, or subjective? – both subjective and objective – Life means.
• Mental content – internalism or externalism? – externalism – The world is prior to the interior; the interior is part of the world.
• Meta-ethics – moral anti-realism or moral realism? – moral anti-realism – You cannot touch the good, but only that which the good belongs to.
• Metaontology – anti-realism, deflationary realism, or heavyweight realism? – heavyweight realism – Though at base all there is is the flow of en-minded matter-in-activity, this matter composes all that there is, which exists just as much as the matter that composes it.
• Metaphilosophy: non-naturalism or naturalism? – non-naturalism – Philosophy is a patterning of thought that interrelates with, but is distinct from, the natural sciences.
• Method in history of philosophy (which do you prefer?): contextual/historicist or analytic/rational reconstruction? – contextual/historicist – Philosophers write from a place and a time and a body, and only with these locations in mind can we unravel their thought.
• Method in political philosophy (which do you prefer?): ideal theory or non-ideal theory? – non-ideal theory – To change the world we must first start from attention to the good of the particulars around us.
• Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? – physicalism – All matter is en-minded, though matter it remains.
• Mind uploading (brain replaced by digital emulation): survival or death? – death – The dis-assembly of the anima that enfleshes a particular subjectivity ruptures that subjectivity. Even if it is re-assembled, the subjectivity will contain that rupture.
• Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? – non-cognitivism –Moral judgment is a type of mattering, an intertwining of subject-object that normatively and affectively colors the world
• Moral motivation: externalism or internalism? – externalism – We are always driven both by what is within us and by the world; there is no desire that is not an intertwining of self-and-other.
• Moral principles: moral particularism or moral generalism? – moral particularism – All moral commitment is to a Unique or a Unique together.
• Morality: non-naturalism, constructivism, expressivism, naturalist realism, or error theory? – expressivism – The mattering of moral judgment is affectively-laden, creating an emotional landscape that one navigates in doing-good in the world.
• Newcomb’s problem: one box or two boxes? – two boxes – Rob that robot.
• Normative concepts (which is most fundamental?): ought, reasons, value, or fit? – value – Mattering more specifically, but mattering is closest to value.
• Normative ethics: consequentialism, virtue ethics, or deontology? – virtue ethics – Morality is learning to navigate, disclose, and co-constitute the world as intertwined with the matterings of others and oriented towards the good of those we are committed to. This is accomplished through practice and the training of our intentions and attention.
• Other minds (for which groups are some members conscious?) – all – All matter is en-minded.
• Ought implies can: no or yes? – no – Our commitments many times brush up against the impossible, a tragic limit of our virtue that also creates the horizon of our mattering.
• Perceptual experience: sense-datum theory, representationalism, qualia theory, or disjunctivism? – representationalism – We perceive the space-between as a representation of the intertwining of our faculties and the powers of things-in-the-world.
• Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? – psychological (narrative) view – Our identity is one that we narrate and which is narrated by others.
• Philosophical knowledge (is there any?): none, a little, or a lot? – a little – I know that Schopenhauer was a fucking dork.
• Philosophical methods (which methods are the most useful/important?) – all – Philosophy is an orientation, not a method.
• Philosophical progress (is there any?): a lot, a little, or none? – a little – I am better than Schopenhauer.
• Plato (what is his view?): knowledge only of forms or knowledge also of concrete things? – knowledge also of concrete things – Even if things-in-the-world are shadows of the forms, one knows the shadows in knowing the forms.
• Political philosophy: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? – egalitarian communitarianism – Political community is an extension of friendship and neighborly-care and requires both the attention to the community as a community and an equality between those within the community.
• Politics: capitalism or socialism? – socialism – Capitalism is a death cult.
• Possible worlds: concrete, abstract, or nonexistent? – concrete – At the highest level of representation, the real is a landscape of possibility, within which lies the gradient of worlds.
• Practical reason: Kantian, Humean, or Aristotelian? – Humean & Aristotelian – Practical reason is a pairing of attention and intention that overlaps both with the desire-focus of Hume and the more complex habitual reason of Aristotle.
• Principle of sufficient reason: false or true? – false – The cosmos allows for uncaused possibilities.
• Proper names: Millian or Fregean? – Fregean – No naming is devoid of sense.
• Properties: transcendent universals, immanent universals, nonexistent, tropes, or classes? – tropes – Properties are patterns that we bundle in our activity.
• Propositional attitudes: representational, phenomenal, nonexistent, or dispositional? – dispositional – A propositional attitude is a type of intention, disposing us to particular forms of activity.
• Propositions: structured entities, nonexistent, acts, sets, or simple entities? – acts – Propositions are doings which flow into and out of our propositional attitudes.
• Quantum mechanics: hidden-variables, epistemic, many-worlds, or collapse? – many-worlds – Fuck if I know, but that sounds right.
• Race: unreal, social, or biological? – all of the above – Race is not a static thing, but a doing and a process: racializing. This activity is simultaneously imaginary, constituted from social and historical processes, and bound to biological characteristics that are not racialized prior to these social processes.
• Race categories: revise, eliminate, or preserve? – revise – In the long-run, eliminating race categories might be the goal. However, so long as racialization is a major form of oppression, the goal is instead to revise our racial categories so as to undermine that oppression and allow for solidarity among oppressed groups.
• Rational disagreement (can two people with the same evidence rationally disagree?): non-permissivism or permissivism? – permissivism – Reasons appear differently in the knowing of different people.
• Response to external-world skepticism (which is strongest?): semantic externalist, pragmatic, contextualist, dogmatist, abductive, or epistemic externalist? – abductive – The external world is a required assumption for our abductive practices of knowing, and these abductive practices are generally reliable and central to our epistemic schemas.
• Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? – scientific anti-realism – Scientific knowing does not represent the world as it is, but the world as it operates in our doings.
• Semantic content (which expressions are context-dependent?): minimalism (no more than a few), radical contextualism (most or all) , or moderate contextualism (intermediate)? – radical contextualism – No utterance exists outside of its location.
• Sleeping beauty (woken once if heads, woken twice if tails, credence in heads on waking?): one-half or one-third? – one-half – Sure, that seems right.
• Spacetime: substantivalism or relationism? – relationism – Spacetime is an entanglement of en-minded matter.
• Statue and lump: one thing or two things? – two things – Things are constituted by their intertwining with subjects, and this intertwining allows for multiple patterns of conceptualization to layer on top of the same spacetime bundle.
• Teletransporter (new matter): death or survival? – death – I have a suspicion that if I get zapped and vaporized that I die.
• Temporal ontology: presentism, growing block, or eternalism? – growing block – In some sense time is eternal, in that the highest representation of the universe is a landscape of possibilities. However, time as it is experienced grows from our intertwining and echoing.
• Theory of reference: causal, deflationary, or descriptive? – deflationary – There are multiple, rather than solely one, practices of reference.
• Time: B-theory or A-theory? – A-theory of a sort – Time as it is experienced is form from our intertwining and echoing, and these doings are sequenced, creating the perception of ordered time even as time at the highest representation is eternal.
• Time travel: metaphysically impossible or metaphysically possible? – metaphysically possible – Extremely unlikely, but theoretically possible. I do not know how you do it but I don’t have a good reason that you could not, in principle, navigate time.
• Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): don’t switch or switch? – indeterminate – The right decision is made in the moment through attention to the particularities of the situation.
• True contradictions: possible but non-actual, impossible, or actual? – actual – Our matterings may be contradictory, creating normative and affective landscapes that are internally in tension with themselves.
• Truth: epistemic, correspondence, or deflationary? – epistemic – Truth refers to a wide spectrum of doings and ways that those doings matter to us.
• Units of selection: genes or organisms? – organisms – A gene is nothing without its conjoined expression in the organism.
• Vagueness: epistemic, semantic, or metaphysical? – all of the above – Our sayings are vague, our knowings are vague, and the universe itself has blurred and many times indeterminate lines.
• Values in science (is ideal scientific reasoning necessarily sensitive or insensitive to non-epistemic values?): necessarily value-laden, can be either, or necessarily value-free? – necessarily value-laden – Science is itself a mattering (or a set of matterings), such that it cannot be effectively done without being value-laden.
• Well-being: hedonism/experientialism, desire satisfaction, or objective list? – experientialism – Well-being is a mattering that is unveiled in our lived experience.
• Wittgenstein (which do you prefer?): early or late? – both – There is no contradiction.
• Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? – inconceivable – Our perception of doings already contains the assumption of consciousness; there is no way to have the doings of an organism and not the experience that occurs with those doings.