What is meant by the politics of living things, exactly?

The essay is from 2018, I saw the link in Graham Harman's blog:

https://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/latour-and-lovelock/

Latour tries to find a way between New Age ecology and scientism towards proper political ecology.

Some tributes:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/09/bruno-latour-french-philosopher-anthropologist-dies

https://twitter.com/AimeTim/status/1579071935295549440

And two discussions/ interviews from 2018:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703

And from the Guardian, 2020:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/bruno-latour-coronavirus-gaia-hypothesis-climate-crisis

All discuss the "politics of living things", the main theme of his last works. Hi died aged 75, the news came yesterday.

RIP

came back to say this (great epsiode!) and that there's also a recent two part interview with him on ARTE

https://youtu.be/sYfwkTgEpmE

In a highly detailed interview, renowned French philosopher and political scientist Bruno Latour sets out his thoughts on the climate crisis as well as his own philosophy. Interview with Bruno Latour (1/2) ARTE.tv #Documentary Available until the 15/05/2023

That was bad, that comment section was something else too. Lol she seems like a redditor

Philosophize this has a episode on him. https://open.spotify.com/episode/18EcRKjgFzoSPGzzXKVprK?si=uAknfhsdQMmLnwXazM2rYQ&utm_source=copy-link

Well in fact I’m afraid that’s a thing he cannot do anymore.

“He is the author (alone or in collaboration) of works such as The factory of law. An ethnography of the Council of State, The Life of laboratory, We were never modern, The Microbes. War and peace (on Louis Pasteur) and the last Where am I? written in the midst of the Covid crisis.”

His last book at 74 was titled “Where am I?”. Idc who you are that is kind of fucking hilarious.

Now kith

Can someone direct me to a thread maybe dealing with this.

The nobel prize in physics went to some peoples discovering the universe is non-local. What is the philosophical implications of such a discovery?

#Science in Action. Not mentioned. Definitely deserved to be.

🍷

I wonder how does the author define terms like 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable'.

Thank you for your reply! The subjective perspective certainly is interesting. I do have a question for you though (just to understand how you think). Do you think that objectivity exists and it can be discovered? Objectivity being something that is always true and is always applies everywhere.

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Any assertion is rooted in subjective observation... which is derived from the limited sensory input a human can experience, over a limited (cosmologically, speaking) span of time.

"Wrong", like "Right", is a temporary perspective rooted what one chooses to look at. For example, Obi Wan Ethics - If you hold to A Certain Point of View, it's ok to lie to a kid if it'll help ensure he's willing to murder his father.

To put it all another way, yes, most observations may be understood to be of temporary validity... Your future self may have different goals and/or intentions.

Which may mean the choices made when you think about what future "you" would prefer... are the ones you'll be glad to have made. Ain't a perfect guiding principle, always; can depend on how far ahead one goes.

Well, we may all be constructs in a simulator for others - NPCs in a holodeck, and when we're not serving others... we dream of our lives in a world where what occurs isn't controlled by a program; it's insane, and often destroys itself... then is recreated, cuz the programmers who designed us felt empathy for the artificially created sentience they made.

Just a possibility.

This premise appears to dismiss the potential for dark matter to interface with the energy which fuels individual choice?

Seems unwise to start by discounting 95% (+/-2%?) of the universe's alternatives to understood physics.

self-reference 🥂

>Ethics shouldn't be as hard as rocket science.

That is true. Ethics should be much, much, much harder than rocket science. Ethics should be harder than quantum mechanics. Morality should be the hardest thing the human brain ever has the opportunity to consider, and if you aren't working that hard, you aren't being moral.

The esteemed professor of philosophy from Duke demonstrates the paucity of his approach in his final sentence, which hinges on the word "might". "Might" is not sufficient for any moral claims, one way or the other. As in so much philosophy, resigning yourself to conclusions which rely on 'maybe' or 'could' or "might" is pointless flum flummery. What we need is "is", and "does", or at least a conscientiously moralizing "should".

His central example exacerbates the problem: honor killings. His analysis leaves no possibility of any ethics other than 'cultural norms'. There is a seed of a worthwhile approach in his premise, that focusing on "the act" is problematic, but immediately grabs the stick by the wrong end by suggesting we should focus on how 'we' respond to the act, hopelessly leaving morality to founder as, again, 'cultural norms'. The problem with the traditional approach to ethics is that it seaks to be physics, and when simplistic logic is insufficient for considering moral claims, there is no recourse but to reject the notion that morality exists in any way.

It is not the act which determines if something is moral, but the reason for the act. Most notably, but not necessarily entirely, whether that cause is honestly and accurately elucidated responsibly. Honor killing is always wrong, and would be even more wrong, not less, if the purported functional reason cited, to restore honor to someone other than the victim, is true. Is all killing wrong? No. Is all murder wrong? That depends on how it is justified, and, yes, includes "cultural norms" to some degree. In our culture we couch this in gedanken of low hanging fruit to determine whether a particular intentional killing is legally murder or "justifiable homicide" or "self-defense", and suffer from this approximation of morality. Is honor wrong? No, but this demands an honest and limited (but not necessarily "well defined"/mechanistic) understanding of what "honor" is. Is honor killing wrong? Yes, always, in each and every case.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

Stupid and unnecessary comment

>The notion that moral judgments are not just true or false claims about human conduct helps explain the failure of ethical theories as far back as Aristotle’s. These theories started out on the wrong foot, by treating morality and immorality as intrinsic to the actions themselves, instead of our responses to them.
>
>
Factoring human emotions into moral judgment explains much about them. Why they are held so strongly, why different cultures that shape human emotional responses have such different moral norms, even why people treat abstract ethical disagreement by others as a moral flaw. And most of all, this meta-ethical theory helps us understand why such disputes are sometimes intractable.

Basically, this is emotivism-the idea that statements of moral value indicate nothing more than personal preference, and implore the listener to agree.

Rosenberg is known for being a brutal nihilist who completely rejects the idea that morality exists, and claims that the only thing that causes us to be "good" is a "core morality" we mostly happen to share intuitively. His book The Atheist's Guide to Reality is a good read, even though I agree with very little of it.

​

>Still another way of attempting to justify moral judgments goes back to Aristotle: What is morally right is what virtuous people do. We can see what is morally right by observing how virtuous people behave. The very existence of honor killing reflects the problems this approach faces. The practices one culture identifies as vicious are virtues in other cultures. And there is no culture-free point from which to adjudicate such disagreements about what counts as a virtue.

This isn't entirely accurate-Aristotle doesn't claim that virtuous actions are "morally right"-he had no concept for morality divorced from reality the way we do. Virtuous actions are just that, virtuous. They lead to eudaimonia, the state of human flourishing in which a human is living in accord with their function to the greatest possible degree.

Aristotle recognizes the fact that different cultures have different ideas about what constitutes human flourishing, but he doesn't take this challenge seriously-they merely describe different forms of good citizenship in relation to a different polis, and (depending on the polis) good citizens are different from good men.

Aristotle is wrong about many things (slavery, women, physics), but he's not wrong about the idea that there are certain behaviors which lead to a more harmonious, happy, and effective human life, and the capacity to engage in those behaviors constitute virtues. He believes that if you're temperate, courageous, prudent, etc. you will have lived a better life than if you didn't have those virtues. You can say he's wrong about that, and there are certainly problems with his virtues, but it's hard to deny that it's better to be cowardly, bad at decision-making, prone to addiction, etc. If you want to argue that's true, I'd wonder in what sense you want to claim it's true, because it's not in any sense relevant to actual, day-to-day human life as far as I can tell. That's Rosenberg's problem, in my view-he's concerned with morality rather than virtue, and if you're concerned with a metaphysical morality while also having a materialist ontology, nihilism is your only real option.

> Nah. It is an effort to explain to people who understand physics but little else why other peope, who don't understand physics, understand more than they do.

Except you can’t do that effectively if you don’t understand physics in the first place.

> You're mistaking what is conventional within physics for what is meaningful in real life. "System" is the wrong word for a single substance, even one so profoundly important to physicists as Bose-Einstein condensates.

What? No. A system is any portion of the universe chosen to be analyzed. Anything outside the system is considered an environment, and it is ignored except for its effects on the system. System is a perfectly valid word to mean what I intended to mean, and it absolutely can refer to a “single substance.” What even does that mean? If I want to know why a metal is lustrous I can’t treat it as a single thing. Its luster arises from quantum mechanical effects arising from its atomic scale structure and properties.

> It is used to model one very specific and particular (pun intended) kind of quantum system, which is really important because that specific "condensed matter" is a macroscopic substance, unlike most quantum systems, which are sub-atomic, so small that even using the contrast macro/microscopic is actually weird.

Condensed matter doesn’t apply only to one specific kind of system. It applies to a huge range of systems. It is in fact so broad that it’s the single largest sub field within physics, and has significant overlap with other disciplines. Things as mundane as metallic surfaces, salt crystals and as exotic as superconductivity, BECs, and liquid helium fall under the umbrella of condensed matter, as do most phase transitions.

And again, you’re missing the point. I gave it as an example. I also gave other examples, too. Over the years, quantum coherence has been observed in bigger and bigger systems, from large particles all the way to the 40 kg mirrors used in the LIGO experiment, each of which was placed near its quantum mechanical ground state.

> Nobody disputes that deterministic objects "demonstrate quantum mechanical properties"

Are you really that dense? Nobody except for the person I was talking to before you jumped into the conversation. I literally made my arguments to a person disputing what you’re saying no one disputes. It seems like you’re just being contrarian at this point.

> So the use of one example of a "macroscopic thing" demonstrating quantum properties (which, as far as I know, aren't observable as distinct from conventional properties in BEC without special equipment and in highly restricted circumstances) really doesn't have the weight you think it would, in this discussion.

That might be the case if it’s what I did. But it’s not. And you’d know that if you weren’t basing your responses to me based on brief skims of relevant Wikipedia articles about condensed matter, for example. Once again you’re outing yourself here. You not only don’t understand the physics, you don’t even know what entire fields within physics refer to. There’s a reason why I said “condensed matter” and not “BECs.” That’s like confusing “Newtonian mechanics” for “the mechanics governing how balls roll.”

> Not a strawman, just an example of what it would take to justify saying that QM effects "the macro world" of everyday objects.

No, very much a strawman. We haven’t proved that Newtonian mechanics works for every conceivable macroscopic system, either. Nor can we do ever prove such a thing: science relies on induction, and while we can’t prove the validity of inductive logic in science, if that’s the point you’re making then it applies to every iota of scientific understanding ever, not just to QM.

> AKA language. AKA discussion. AKA the real world.

And here you’re using language to deliberately misrepresenting my meaning. My point was, whether it’s about “how” or not is a matter of semantics, it just depends on what we each meant by “how,” which can be interpreted different ways. But it’s telling that instead of engaging with my lengthy argument after that word, you’ve latched onto this one word to make a pithy point with little bearing on the argument at hand, instead.

> A very important issue, in theory. Why is it that you have trouble excepting that proving something in principle to other scientists isn't the same as having an effect on the rest of the world?

How many times must we complete this circle? I show you that it’s been proven in principle, and you say “okay but prove that it has an effect on the world.” So I give you countless examples of ways that it has an effect on the world. And then you ignore all but one and say “but prove that it’s always true.” Do you truly think you’re being reasonable here?

> "Relevant". What a pleasantly useful dragging of the goalposts halfway down the field that is.

Please explain how that word shifted any goalposts.

> I never disputed that QM is relevant in those examples.

So wtf are you on about? The other person did and they’re who I was talking to. You jumped into a conversation between two people to have your own side argument with the wind?

> I just did a better job of it, and I thought I'd be helpful and explain what it is you were doing wrong in that regard.

Of course you think you’ve done a better job. You also think you’re more qualified to talk about quantum mechanics than Bohr and Einstein were, and that your personal philosophy makes you immune to falling for misconceptions. You have a very high opinion of yourself; of that much I’m sure we can agree.

> You have it backwards. The parts I don't engage are either trivial or accurate. The sections of your comments I directly address are mostly just the more illustrative mistak

No, you consistently ignore important points that derail your entire argument. If they’re accurate, you’d have gone away already. If you view them as trivial, then you clearly don’t understand them.

TL;DR Stick to arguing about things you understand. You don’t understand quantum mechanics.

I agree that morality is an emergent aspect of human society, but I can't swallow the idea that it's determined by group consensus. There is no such consensus, except perhaps on the most banal possible moral claims such as "arbitrary murder is wrong."

> I am not making a contradictory claim, I am asking a question.

Right. The answer to your question is it's a "by definition" issue. If we ignore the loaded colloquial use of the word, "chaos" is the name for psuedorandom phenomena that arise from deterministic simpler conditions. Stuff that is not deterministic would not be strictly classified as "chaos" in my opinion, it would be called something else. Chaos is the name of an observed phenomena. Chaos Theory is the name of the branch of science that studies that phenomena.

> Thus, a theory, one without substantive accompanying evidence comparable to that which exists for other theories that have been elevated to a higher epistemic level based on broad scientific (and other) consensus.

Bro what are you smoking we've studied plenty of chaotic phenomena the whole idea of chaos is that you can have deterministic functions that produce pseudorandom output. All of the entire corpus of scientific literature is based on the fact that we haven't found an exception to this rule yet. How can you imply there is not significant consensus on this issue?

> I find it odd how seemingly close minded and insular science has become in the 21st century, which is rather contrary to the self-serving self-description of the domain and the actors within it.

I find it wack how smarmy people can be when they don't understand the basics of what they are talking about

Summary: There are three types of legal regimes. Reasonable law regimes are democratic institutions that respect the rule of law. As a result, citizens are morally obligated to obey the law when pursuing reform. Unreasonable law regimes are authoritarian, yet the government still has ideals of legitimacy that they seek to live up to. Under these regimes, civil disobedience is morally justified to force governments to live up to these ideals. And under non-law regimes, there is no legitimate relationship between the government and the people. Necessity is a justification for even violent acts under these regimes.

But how much does the continuity of self plays a part in it? Even if it is assembled exactly the way you were when you were born, would that be you? Or would it need to be exactly as you are in this point of time? What happens if you are reassembled right now with different atoms but exactly as you are, would you experience that consciousness? This questions really intrigues me, because it makes me think we are only what we are right now in this blink of time, and in the past or future there’s another conscience that only inherits our memories or is constructing ours. Or maybe we are just everything everywhere at once just experiencing this fragment of reality, like if you were looking at this page of the book at this moment.