If I read any SF in the near future it’ll be Ubik again so I can say something interesting in your possibly forthcoming discussion.

And a big nose. A nose than which none greater can be conceived.

very bizarre and rather hard to follow — Noble Dust

Perfect!

I hadn’t even heard of that one.

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain. — Andrew4Handel

Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way? — Andrew4Handel

I think of my subjectivity as my point of view. My point of view is my own--only I can stand right here, right now--and expecting someone else to share it is to expect them to be me, and that doesn't make sense. It's too much to ask. Does this count as being closed off? Maybe it would if we didn't have language to communicate what we perceive and feel (having lived in countries where I don't know the language well, I know the feeling of isolation and powerlessness)--but then if we didn't have language we wouldn't be the kind of creatures who worried about being closed off. Maybe it follows that the conditions that lead us to think we are closed off--a rich inner life that owes its existence to the essentially social fact of language--are precisely those that allow us not to be.

Though I'm sure some people are just "built different" and maintain constant Zen — fdrake

Dicks.

Yep, and this is in line with the common sociological observations about our society of atomism, isolation, and individualism. Sometimes I feel like my interest in philosophy and politics is just an anachronism, like there’s no actual public sphere where any of it could matter. This is a feeling I resist, because I’m an optimist of sorts.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

But does a self help book really change your perspective, or does it just give you one to try on for a while? That’s pedantic though.

Otherwise, this is an interesting thread because I find myself agreeing with what @T Clark and @Michael have said, which has never happened before.

The complementary blue, rather than orange, is designed to undermine any suggestions of Irishness.

let their actions speak for its value — Mikie

Does that go for Heidegger too?

:up:

In the old forum users could pick their own theme but we can’t implement that here. We can’t even change the background colour of the main discussion area—the white is too bright for me but there’s nothing I can do.

Unfortunately we have members who are in the southern hemisphere, so that would not be fair.

EDIT: I could have worded that better.

Also, I was procrastinating.

merely a random change-up based on being tired with the old purple colour — Benj96

:up:

No symbolism.

By the way I've moved this to the Feedback section.

I am unable to understand that sentence. That is to say … huh?

An interesting alternative example to use is fishing, because fish are lacking in the furry cuteness that evokes our sentimental anthropomorphism.

I don't much like or approve of hunting for sport except for fishing, where you put the fish back alive, or else you kill it only so that you can eat it. So maybe the significant distinction, if there is one, is specifically the killing for sport, which is not a part of fishing.

:lol: :up:

Embrace Your Contradictions: How Hegel’s Science of Logic Can Help You Achieve Wholeness by Owning Your Inner Conflicts

How the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements Can Change Your Life.

Well, I am also in partial agreement.

Unfortunately the thing which distinguishes philosophy from self help and infotainment; argument and systems; is also something which makes philosophy unbearably dry. — fdrake

Isn’t philosophy, at its best, distinguished from self-help by its deep and original insights, rather than, or as well as, by its arguments? Self-help often strikes me as dishonest, manipulative, boring, and essentially individualistic, whereas good philosophy follows the ideas and respects the reader enough to think they can follow too.

My point here is that this actually makes it more exciting. Also, important philosophy is always critical and radical—again, exciting rather than dry.

Having said that, I guess there’s usually a barrier of dryness in presentation.

Rereading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by Theodor Adorno, his introductory lecture course given in 1959.

Clear and deep and great fun to read, highly recommended for anyone interested in Kant, whether you’ve read the CPR or not (though some familiarity with the ideas is definitely required).

Was my initial reaction just an instance of snobbery, a kind of intellectual elitism? — Mikie

Is snobbery or elitism always bad? — Tom Storm

Having good taste isn't bad -- but probably being a snob is. — Mikie

Elitism judges the things, snobbery judges the person. Elitism holds up the best for everyone to see and appreciate if they can or want to, but snobbery merely holds up certain credentials as evidence of your superior status and the inferior status of everyone who is not in that class or in-group. Snobbery is always bad, but elitism isn’t.

In this case @Mikie, because you say, “I'd prefer my nephew (and anyone, really) read direct sources,” you’re an elitist but not a snob. You think the primary sources are the best and that your nephew has the potential to read and appreciate them.

On the other hand, Aristotle can be a chore to read, so there’s nothing wrong with making things more digestible. That’s why we read introductions and secondary literature. I think the crucial difference is that pop philosophy, unlike secondary literature, is often dumbed down, written to please people or to catch the attention or to sell books, not to enlighten or teach.

The lack of replies would also lead me to believe no one really finds value in the OP so there's nothing to really learn. — Darkneos

I don’t think so. It’s a good OP. It just takes a bit more time and thought to reply to it compared to many others. I suggest you stop posting in this discussion if you don’t have anything intelligent to say.

One that I found even more philosophical, but sort of sickeningly so, was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. If the majority of PKD novels feel like weird acid trips, that one was beyond the pale for me. I feel kind of scarred for life on that one, lol. — Noble Dust

This will have to be my next PKD :grin:

I’m curious about the original crime.

I’m upset about this because they gave my posts several approving replies and thumbs-up.

Looks like the original @Hoo was banned seven years ago, in our first year, but I see no problems with their posts and can’t see any mod discussion about banning them.

Mysterious and unfortunate.

... philosophy should seek its contents in the unlimited diversity of its objects. It should become fully receptive to them without looking to any system of coordinates or its so-called postulates for backing. It must not use its objects as the mirrors from which it constantly reads its own image and it must not confuse its own reflection with the true object of cognition. — Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics

Here the significant dimension is concept/object, where the struggle is to get hold of objects without conceptualizing them. This is impossible to do in philosophy, but that's ok, because it's negative dialectics: it's trying to do what Wittgenstein said could not be done, though not with any naively hubristic metaphysical system.

From this perspective, an idea is a conceptual thing in a world of conceptual things called philosophy, or art or culture, or some other more granular "field of sense"--but the philosophical task is to uncover the real. This goes back to my first criticism: it's assumed by Adorno that the real is the material, whether the material is a table, or the relationship between an employer and an employee, or the freedom to flourish. And while these might have different strengths of conceptual flavour, that doesn't matter much, because this is historically relative and there is always in these cases something real in them. So probably the worst move to make is to try so hard to prove the realness of ideas that you invent a whole landscape out of them. That just confuses the concept/object dichotomy and reifies concepts unknowingly, thus obscuring the essential relationship between them.

Yes, I agree unreservedly.

These questions were discussed long before science existed and are interesting in themselves. — Art48

As I said to Wayfarer, despite appearances what I was referring to was not so much ontology as such, or the problem of universals, degrees of reality in Platonism, and so on, but more about the motivations behind the particular ways these ideas appear in contemporary concepts, like the mindscape.

So there’s a scale of thingyness and an independent scale of abstractness. — Jamal

I like considering more than one dimension. — green flag

Two might not be enough but it's better than one, so I made a 2D ontology chart, without much thought as to how pointless or wrongheaded it might be.

This thread has an identity crisis. May I suggest...

"An example of how supply and demand, capitalism and greed corrupt eco ventures, plus what is God?"

Sure, but I was mostly referring to the focus on “exists”.

I think instead of saying math isn't in space and time we should say that math methodically ignores the actual, local spatial and temporal situation — green flag

I find that agreeable, but mathematical Platonism is rampant around here.

Are numbers and other abstract objects universals, and are universals real? Old questions.

Whatever the answers, I’m quite happy to say numbers and properties exist, along with thoughts and tables even in the case that they are abstract and dynamic. This is because to say that something exists isn’t to say all that much. It just sets things up (semi-literally) so you can deal with them. I see being in the same way. I can’t shake the thought that the controversies over what exists are motivated by a fear of irrelevance in the face of physical science. Otherwise, why worry?

EDIT: if there seems to be an anti-philosophical note at the end there, it’s just in the way of provocation.

Ideas, meanings, and thoughts are just not very thingy, are they? The static ontology of medium-size dry goods doesn’t feel right. (Some would say that a static ontology doesn’t even work for them either, which I suppose is process metaphysics.)

But numbers are more thingy than thoughts, while at the same time being not or less mind-dependent, and not situated in space and time. So there’s a scale of thingyness and an independent scale of abstractness.

Cool. Problems that fix themselves are my favourite kind.

Just sent you a private message. Look out for an email.

Yep, I do understand. I just couldn't see the point of making the distinction in the way you and Russell want to make it. For me, all these things exist. In logical terms, existence quantifies over a domain of discourse. That could be e.g., the domain of natural numbers or the domain of fictional characters (what about the domain of universals? :chin:).

Although to be honest, I'm more interested in ideas and thoughts than I am in universals and abstract objects, because that's what seems most radical/incredible about the concept of the mindscape.

Whereas, what I'm arguing is that I think the very idea of there being 'degrees of reality' is no longer intelligible. So there are no 'different ways' in which things can exist - we say that things either exist, or they don't. Tables and chairs exist, unicorns and the square root of 2 do not. — Wayfarer

Again, you are conceding that the gold standard of existence is that of physical objects. You seem to accept physicalist assumptions perhaps without realizing it. Because to say that something exists in a certain way is not to say it is more or less real than things that exist in a different way.

Russell says "we shall find it convenient" to say of universals that they subsist, and not that they exist, but it's not much more than one way of making the distinction. It's a concession to physics to say that only things that are in time exist.

And do you accept his classification, wherein ideas do exist, and it's only universals that don't?

Yes, but why concede to the physicalists that the things of the third realm don't exist?

So as not to lose sight of the differentiation, I suppose. But another way of paying attention to the differentiation is to say that something exists in a different way. My question is what the difference is between these terminological choices.

I think it's a concession to both reductionism and reification to accept that only physical objects exist. That's partly what motivated Markus Gabriel's ontology, in which tables, quarks, numbers, nations, and ideas all exist. There are alternative theories that do the same kind of thing, like critical realism and speculative realism.

He believed that these abstract objects existed independently of the physical world and the mind, and that they had a different kind of reality that was not reducible to either physical or mental phenomena. — Wayfarer

But you want to go one step further and say they don't exist?

they don't exist, in the sense that chairs and tables and other objects of perception exist — Wayfarer

What’s the difference between saying they exist in a different way, and saying they don’t exist but they’re real? What have you got against the use of “exist” for ideas, numbers, etc.?

What about nations and conversations?

If both tables and numbers are real, but only tables can also be said to exist, then it looks like you’re downgrading numbers just because they’re not objects of physical science.

I think @Art48 is right to question your terminological critique.

If you are interested in those particular philosophical topics, then it would be great if you started discussions about them. But note that what is in this thread is just an informal Lounge chat.