Category: Non-Political Philosophy

What is a Good Friend?

December 16th, 2022

It’s not that they care; everyone should care about everyone. Instead, it’s because they know more about a person that they already care about.
You can look toward a stranger, care about their life, sacrifice your life for it, even. That’s because you know that when a person is falling, they’ll only ever be fulfilled if you catch them. That’s true of anyone.

But if you know more than that, a lot more, things get messy, since you get a much more complex idea of what their fulfilment could look like. If you see your friend on a path to fulfillment, their fulfillment, you support them. If they’re on a path that you don’t think leads to their fulfillment, it’s more complicated, but you still support them.

You support them, because if they continue, they’ll need it, and if they change paths, they’ll need it. But that support, if you don’t think they’re on an in-the-end-fulfilling path, won’t be a pair of hands pushing them forward.
It’ll be a pair of hands holding them up, with a slight backward pull to keep their progress on that path from getting away from them. But your hands are mostly just holding them up.

Do you think you know their fulfillment better than them? The direction of your hands’ force depends on that. Do you push forward strongly? Do you hold up and slightly push? Do you hold up and slightly pull? Do you yank back from an edge and shake their shoulders, snap them out of it?

This all relies on your being self-aware, knowing what you truly know about your friend’s path to fulfillment. The better the friend, the closer the friend, the more you know, the more you need to be self-aware. Yet also the more you can push before your hands will be shaken off, and perhaps rightly so. No matter how close you are, sometimes, not always, but sometimes, a person knows their own fulfillment like no other.

A good friend always supports but, knowing what they truly know, rarely shoves. A good friend is a constant, gentle force. Perhaps it’s not in the direction you yourself want or expect, but it’s gentle, and it’s for you.
Natural Law as a Conditional

December 13th, 2022

Note: This is Part 5 of the “Justice as Conditionals” series.

This idea is the last of those from them period about a year ago when I came up with the core idea of the theory, meaning that all posts after this one will be recent ideas, at most a month old and quite possibly come up with since the last update to the series. This also means that updates will be less reliable and potentially less frequent. We’ll have to see. More important to this post is that this part of the theory is not foundation for further components. What I mean is that while this is something I believe, it is not necessary for the functioning of the rest of the theory. I stress this mostly because this is the only religious segment of the theory and I don’t want people thinking that the theory itself is a religious one.

St. Thomas Aquinas is generally considered the most important theologian of the Catholic Church since the end of the second millennium. This is largely because, though he was certainly not the first to consider reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with that of Christianity, he was by far the most successful figure in doing so. His Summa Theologica is a masterwork of philosophy, bringing together with impressive unity the mainstream theology of Christianity and “The Philosopher” who the philosophers of the Middle Ages respected so much. Though many of the exact arguments given by Aquinas are no longer those held as true by the Church, it is safe so say that the bedrock supporting modern theology is still that laid by St. Aquinas. (As a side note, he has the title “Doctor of the Church,” which is only given to critical theologians who were also saints. It’s a pretty slick title.)

One of the concepts developed heavily by Aquinas is that of the different types of Law. He discusses four types: Eternal Law, Natural Law, Human Law, and Divine Law. The gist is that Eternal Law is the overarching plan of existence, Natural Law is the inclinations and moralities built into human nature, Human Law is the set of laws put in place by humans to govern humans, and Divine Law is the scripture. All of this serve different roles and have significant interplay, but diving into that is a job for some other blog post. Let’s get to how this fits into the theory of Justice as Conditionals.

Remember that a Conditional is a function from behaviors of the recipient to behaviors of the originator. In this digression, we might instead generalize and say that a Conditional is any intentional transmission of information which results in preferences/inclinations in the recipient. We consider this alternate definition because Natural Law is built into human nature, so considerations of phrasing and imprecision are not very meaningful like they are in the analysis of human-generated Conditionals. This generalization exceeds the name “Conditional,” but we’ll use the term anyway for consistency.

In short, I propose that Natural Law itself is a Conditional. This set of unconscious inclinations and a conscience in a person may be considered transmitted information regarding the nature of God and/or morality as the two are related to the actions of the person. Precise information about how the two may behave retributively is not necessarily included, but that’s not an issue. The point of such indications is to transfer the related preferences onto the recipient’s perceptions of their own actions. As Natural Law imprints these inclinations directly, such indirect retributive threat is unneeded. A Conditional is expressing your morality and preferences onto another person in such a way that it impacts their own morality and preferences.

If Natural Law is taken to be a special case of Conditional, we may learn something from the definition of Justice as being the study of Conditionals: the dictates of conscience, away from the more particular moralities we may develop alongside them, are the most fundamental decrees of Justice. In other words, if this interpretation is to be believed, the preferences imposed by conscience and given to some extent to almost all people are an expression of the morality of God. That is, the dictates of your conscience are the Conditionals that reflect True Morality.

Divine Law is probably also interpretable in part as a collection of Conditionals, but that’s a discussion for another post.
On Red

December 3rd, 2022

People speak of consciousness as having “emergent properties,” implying that reality is somehow more than a straightforward grouping of elementary particles and forces. This idea is much like that.
Consider what red is to you. Plenty of people would agree that if we could track the particles that make up your brain, we’d arrive at an explanation for why red is what it is to you: why you perceive it as brighter than blue, why it pumps you up slightly, why it is or isn’t your favorite color.
But this is all about you. When you look at Red, you don’t seem to just feel urges to think or react. That Red is a thing. If your Red and your Green were swapped, this fundamental feeling, this perception, this fundamental unit of visual experience, is the thing which would swap. This is separate from your reactions changing. Yet there is something there we feel we can imagine swapping.
But say there wasn’t. Say it was all reaction.
… You can’t, huh? Not really, not all the way down in your gut. It is so axiomatic, so clear, that there is something more than mere particle interactions that we call “seeing red”, because Red doesn’t seem to lie solely in those interactions.
Red is an “emergent property,” is axiomatically existent to the human consciousness. You cannot fully deny it without fundamentally warping what it means to be conscious.
So who the damn fuck decided what red is to you?!
First draft 9/13/21

Category: Non-Political Philosophy

What is a Good Friend?

Natural Law as a Conditional

On Red