I suppose I am casual when I feel it's appropriate, and more erudite when I feel similarly. Sometimes it's nice to "let your hair down" -- even in a serious discussion. — Moliere

Yes, I'm the same, or at least try to be. It's very welcome as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, that's been noted. I don't hold out much hope for MathJax as a feature request, to be honest, but I'll add it to the list.

Yes, I agree. It's a fallacy that inadequate technology is somehow good for that very reason. And that's why my "distraction-free mode" idea (above) could work: we're not forcing people to use it. It would be a button next to "Preview", and people would use it because it'd be a pleasure to use.

Yes, but this is about what people are used to. That a slow process involving several full page loads might force people to take their time is not a recommendation of that functionality--it is an indication that people haven't got used to the faster way of doing things.

Actually I don't think that's the whole story. I think the functionality could be improved so as to make a discussion less like a quick-fire comments thread. Personally I'd like to be able to expand the compose box to a larger "distraction-free" mode. Imagine the preview popup but with editing ability. I think I might add that to the list of feature requests.

One reason it's a bit less formal is the technology. The posting functionality works like Facebook comments. It's almost too easy to post, but things may settle down. Maybe it's up to us all right now to discipline ourselves a little bit; how the (ex-)PFers post in this forum is really what will influence the posting habits of newcomers.

But I would like to know if the formality has changed or not. — darthbarracuda

Not sure what you're asking here.

The best possible future for humanity, in my view, is one where we collectively agree to cease reproduction and live our lives for as long as we desire to. We would be abstaining from forcing people into existence while pursuing our dreams for as long as we can sustain them.

I suppose it was only a matter of time.

Yes, very good points. Trying to find the time.

Yes, I was also dissatisfied with the somewhat complacent treatment of memory. Here's Louise Barrett writing from the standpoint of a psychology and ethology heavily influenced by Gibson and embodied cognition:

A storehouse metaphor leads to storehouse experiments, which lead to storehouse memory.

So, just as with experiments on robots and other animals, there is also our frame of reference to consider with respect to experiments on other humans—what looks like a stable structure to an observer from the outside may, from the perspective of the person performing the task, be a more dynamic process of re-creation (or even simply creation). Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard give the example of a fountain: the shape of the water as it sprays out is not stored anywhere as a structure inside the fountain, but results from the interaction of the water pressure and surface tension, the effects of gravity, and the shape and direction of the jets. This gives the fountain structure—not a static, stable structure, though, but one that is continuously created. It is quite possible that memory could have this kind of “structure” and be completely different from our everyday idea of memory.

This is especially likely to be so given that the conscious recall of words is a very specialized human activity. Most of our everyday activities that involve memory are not like this (driving or walking to work; preparing a meal), and it certainly doesn’t capture aspects of the daily experience of other animal species. We also learn and memorize many things implicitly—we have no conscious awareness that we have done so, but our behavior changes in ways that refl ect our experience—and this kind of implicit memory is undoubtedly common to other animals as well.

What we call memory may be much more like the activity of the robot mouse in its maze environment: a process of sensorimotor coordination distributed across animal and environment, in which the animal actively engages, and not simply the storage and retrieval of (explicit) internal representations. — Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain

In the last line she could have said "not simply the storage and retrieval of (explicit) representations", leaving out the "internal", because a more dynamic account of memory goes against storage and retrieval as such, whether inside or out.

However, if we take Clark and Chalmers to be referring merely to conscious recall rather than memory in general, I think their argument is at least a piece of the puzzle, despite your concerns. (Again, I'm still trying to find the time to say more about this).

Welcome!

Notice that in saying "welcome!" I am not referring to anything :D

I don't see why it would be deflationary realism. It's just deflationary. It has nothing to do with realism (or antirealism). — Michael

I see what you mean.

I don't find it at all problematic for an anti-realist to accept the truth of "chairs exist" and "chairs are not experiences, ideas, or words" (e.g. by arguing for the coherence theory of truth and showing that these two statements cohere with some other set of specified sentences). The fact that one is arguing for a non-correspondence account of truth is why it is not realist. — Michael

Put like that, it looks like a matter of taste whether you want to call that position anti-realism or merely something like deflationary realism. What makes the difference is when you say that objects are ontologically dependent on experiences, ideas, or words.

Welcome. You're just in time to join our Sein und Zeit reading group.

andrewk and Nagase. What's taking them so long?

It's the end of an era. Want a new job?

Cheers darth, welcome to the party.

* Numbering of posts, so that yours would read "1" and mine would read "2" — Moliere

Added to the OP for the next round of requests.

Thanks shmik, it's in the works and we'll let everyone know when things are set up.

Welcome Harry :)

I missed that one Harry! Oh well, let's hope we get some similarly good responses here.

Welcome Ying.

This site actually comes with a blog, which I turned off because the header link got in the way of the subscribe link. One use for that is to post OP's about current events. Or there's nothing stopping us setting up a Ghost blog, or another kind of site, at a subdomain.

Incidentally, I noticed that the Refugees discussion was the first one to be indexed by Google.

Thanks for your support :)

For some reason I'm having to manually set subscribers to subscriber status, and when I do that it calculates the subscription expiry, which is always one month, even if they paid for six months. I'm going to have to get that fixed. In the meantime, ignore anything it says about your subscription expiring on November 26th.

Oh, and sorry no, no green names here.

the thesis becomes somewhat trivial, simply offering a novel definition of "mind." — Hanover

They anticipate the objection that their thesis is merely arbitrarily terminological:

... in seeing cognition as extended one is not merely making a terminological decision; it makes a significant difference to the methodology of scientific investigation. In effect, explanatory methods that might once have been thought appropriate only for the analysis of "inner" processes are now being adapted for the study of the outer, and there is promise that our understanding of cognition will become richer for it.

What I find exciting about this area of philosophy is that here, philosophy really does make a direct, noticeable difference. Research in psychology, cognitive science and robotics is actually guided by philosophical positions in quite a clear way. And when an agent's cognition (and it is still the agent's cognition, not the system's) is treated as distributed through an agent-environment system, the experiments are very different from what they're like under an internalist paradigm, and progress is made where before it was not.

... what occurs outside the brain is fundamentally different than what occurs internally. — Hanover

This is not denied in the paper. But what exactly do you mean? The question is one of relevance: is this fundamental difference relevant to what we call cognition or mind? After all, petroleum is fundamentally different from rubber but driving a car involves both.

Anyway, I will try to write a longer post when I get the time.

Thanks m, and welcome.

Not really a fan of the initials thing Tiff.

And we should be clear: some people are talking about a logo, but I thought this thread was just about the favicon (though of course they're often the same). The favicon is done. As for a logo and branding, I wouldn't want to be half-assed about it, but I haven't got time for it. In fact, the initials would be okay in a nice font like the one we're using right now in the header (the font is called Lobster), but if we're serious about branding that's out of the question because it's just the default branding of PlushForums: https://plushforums.com/

Not too concerned about it right now. The forum looks pretty nice.

I guess that doesn't solve the problem of what to use right now as the logo on social media.

Has anyone invited Brainglitche, formerly Brainpharte?

I've asked the developers for 'my threads' already (see the list in the OP). In the meantime just bookmark the discussions you take part in. The Lounge is like PF's Community / Off-topic. It's for social, not-remotely-philosophical stuff. At the moment there's a lot in there about PF, of course.

Great to see you here 'stino. You've written some great posts already.

A simple function in principle, but whether the developers are willing, and when they'd get around to it, I don't know. I can ask.

Google's started indexing the discussions:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Athephilosophyforum.com

Promising.

Maybe Paul has a point about not being in a rush to grow, but my feeling is that we need to be visible in the search engines just to maintain the turnover of active members we'll need as some members inevitably drift away or become inactive for a while. And anyway, I liked the constant arrival of new members at PF and want to achieve that here on a smaller scale. We don't want to be the ex-PF members club, right? Reminiscing about Banno's red cup, blue blood, and goats.

Although I admit it's been quite useful to use PF's IP address search to identify mystery members.

8-)

It's time for me to do the same.

I think in some ways the question is inapplicable to these creations. I tend to think the point, perhaps, is that there isn't anything to necessarily think about.

A painting of, say, the crucifixion from some Renaissance master is pretty straight forward in terms of what it's conveying and what we are to think and feel about it. But a lot of modern art is deliberately un-straight forward in terms of what it's trying to convey and how we are to react to it. Take Duchamp's Fountain, as you show us above. What the hell am I supposed to think when seeing some New York urinal? Who knows. Maybe even Duchamp doesn't know.

This is actually the reason why I don't like this kind of "art." It strikes me as a pointless waste of time, since art for me is transportative - it takes me out of myself for a short while - whereas staring at a urinal or some paint splotches on a canvas do not have such an effect. They mostly make me irritated. There are exceptions, of course, but modern art has always rubbed me the wrong way. — Thorongil

You seem to be lumping together abstract paintings with Duchamp's urinal, all under the category of "modern art". In doing so, there's a lot you will miss. Duchamp's urinal is one of the first examples of what we now call conceptual art. This is art that mocks artistry, skill, training and mastery, and renounces what was always fundamental in art: the artist as maker, applying his or her hand to a material. Many conceptual works, like those of Damien Hirst, are not actually made by the artist; they are assembled by assistants or gallery staff according to the artist's instructions. When challenged on this practice Hirst speaks with contempt about those who apply their own artistry: "A man who is great with his hands might as well make macramé." Apparently it is the job of artists to create concepts. The true artist then, for Hirst, is now a kind of stunt philosopher.

When you complain about "modern art" what you don't see is that this conceptual stuff is a world away from what painters such as Rothko, Pollock, Kandinsky, and Picasso were doing. These were brilliant, immensely skilled people who were driven to stand in front of a canvas and make things (Picasso for instance is widely considered to be one of the most technically accomplished painters of the twentieth century). I would say, that is, that they were true artists.

I am not seeking to change your taste—there is no special reason why you should be interested in looking at colours and shapes and textures arranged in certain ways—but I would like you to consider a different way of looking at abstract paintings, and at least recognize that, unlike charlatans such as Damien Hirst, these painters were doing something eminently, even traditionally artistic. They were making objects for people to look at, with their own hands, struggling to capture or explore aspects of nature and perceptual experience. These objects didn't usually have a message. They didn't usually try to tell stories. Rather, they invited people just to use their eyes, for the hell of it. What can be more straightforward than that?

Skilled, trained, and dedicated painters, who wanted to make a mark on the world, and who a hundred years before would have painted figuratively, wanted to try different ways of representing reality, or they wanted to explore, among many other things, the beauty, balance, and sense of energy, space, or movement that is achievable by the manipulation of basic forms and colours and textures. These paintings don't have to mean anything. Even so, I would class these artists as maintaining a millennia-long tradition, one of personal mastery and creativity.

It's easy to dismiss Pollock, but he didn't apply the paint randomly. His paintings were made with utmost care, and the result is expanses of paint with a buzzing sense of both harmony and chaos, fascinating to look at. And the Rothko, just look at it! Imagine the sheer optical pleasure of standing in front of that towering glowing canvas, and the intellectual satisfaction inherent in the experience of being confronted with one's own perception. People want to make such things because they see how deeply beauty runs through the world, right down to its basic constituents, and they have an urge to make things nobody has seen before, to extend the field of what can be made.

Even if you think abstraction is a blind alley, that a painting cannot be transportative without being figurative, it is really quite unfair on these painters to associate them with conceptual art.

And just where do you draw the line between the figurative and the abstract? What do you think of these landscapes by Turner, Cézanne, and Strindberg?







Maybe I can disarm you with an appeal to Schopenhauer. As you know, for him music was the highest art, and within the realm of music he placed absolute music, which is not about anything in particular, above program music, which is tied to a non-musical narrative (a love affair, the seasons of the year, and so on). Music, when done right...

...does not express this or that individual or particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in themselves, abstractly… — Schopenhauer, WWR 289

If abstraction is so good in music, then why not in visual art? I'm not saying that it is equal to music in its range and depth, and it is true that abstract art cannot evoke the emotions as music can, but there is much it can do without the burden of narrative and representation. If Schopenhauer had lived later and been less temperamentally conservative I think he might have approved of abstract painting.

And perhaps, @Bitter Crank, some of the above goes a way towards responding to your questions in the OP. I think I know what you mean when you say these works can seem, under a certain aspect, "empty and dull", though I don't think I agree.

There's something wonderful that John Cage once said:

When I hear what we call “music”, it seems to me like someone is talking; and talking about his feelings or about his ideas or relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic, here on Sixth Avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. I don't need sound to talk to me, I'm completely satisfied with it by itself.

If I say that abstract art is somewhat akin to this attitude—for example I might say that painters no longer wanted their paintings to chatter at the spectator but instead allow space and colour to act—then it might be asked, "so what?" Isn't this a bit vacuous, a bit non-committal? A bit empty and dull? My answer, other than "not really", will have to wait.

I asked support about this and they asked if you had an accurate system time on your computer and what timezone you are in or your computer is set to.

I sent an email with all the feature requests. They said:

"Thank you for your feedback. We always consider new options for our roadmap."

And when I pressed...

"We have a major release planned for November, after which we will consider feature requests. Minor feature development depends on demand, and it's too early to assess at this point."

So presumably they've been added to their feature request list and might or might not be included in a release following next month's release. I don't know when that would be.

The features we asked for would certainly be nice to have--especially being able to see the categories at a glance in "All discussions"--but I think the forum's still a pleasure to use without them, so I'm not too disappointed at the slow pace of development.

Great stuff Street. That's a very nice account of the illusion from Morris. And on the whole I'll struggle to find anything to disagree with in what you've said. But one thing strikes me (and sorry if this is too much of a side-issue):

While the traditional understanding of perception turns on the idea that we see the world ‘as is’, attention to phenomena like illusions show that this is not in fact the case. Citing the work of psychologists Claudia Carello and M. T. Turvey, David Morris notes that when wielding an object with our eyes closed, the ‘felt’ length of the object (a cane, a tennis racket), is often quite different from the object’s geometrical length. The reason that this is so is quite simply that we do not perceive the object’s geometrical length. Rather, we perceive what Carello and Turvey call it’s ‘wieldiness’. — StreetlightX

Is the geometrical length to be privileged here, as the "as is"? While wieldiness, and illusion, are objective in just the way you describe, is measurement more objective? Or is it maybe just a different kind of objectivity? Doesn't the contrast between on the one hand perception as part of the way we are implicated in the world, and on the other hand the measurement of the "as is", invite the kind of thinking that leads us to the idea that perception is but a distortion of reality? But clearly these are different fields, viz., the perceptual field and the geometrical field, so how do we avoid this hoary old appearance-reality dichotomy that always seems ready to jump out from the next corner?

It's Hypatia. F5 to see it if you're still seeing Kant.

I say we're all spending too much time thinking about bloody icons.

If you refresh your browser you should see that Kant has been unceremoniously replaced.

What about this one of Hypatia?


Here it is at favicon size:


I could maybe up the contrast a little.

This is the Fayum mummy portrait from Roman Egypt, now at the British Museum.