thank you for this. It is much needed by myself: lover of poetry, poetical philistine.

Why would China step in? Isn't the example of the a) British Empire, b) Soviet Empire and c) US Empire that Afghanistan is not the place to go, if you don't want to kill your empire? — ssu

Because Afghanistan falls within their presumed geographical "sphere of influence". Every superpower eventually feels compelled to define it's sphere of influence, over which it asserts a paternalizing authority. The U.S. did way back in 1823, with the so-called "Monroe Doctrine". China might view this as it's chance to better define it's sphere of influence. The question is, what might India, itself a burgeoning regional power, have to say about this, especially with Bharatiya Janata in control? Remember, that Proto-Hinduism (Vedic religion) originally entered the subcontinent with those Indo-Aryan tribes, proceeding from the region of Afghanistan, which in a sense makes that region a homeland, a kind of urheimat, for Hindus just as much as is the Swat valley. Besides that, many ancient Indian empires, I think including the Nanda and Maurya Empires, controlled the region of Afghanistan. For such reasons, India might feel some right to defend that region against any Chinese presumption of authority. A China-India conflict would have interesting ramafications, to say the least. If nothing else, such a possibility might give China pause.

thank you.

...a language community is a group of people that uses symbols in a way supportive of their cooperative/coordinated behavior. [...] It is more about the general use of symbols in a way that tends towards the groups continued use of those symbols. — Ennui Elucidator

This is not too "mushy". In fact, I find it quite coherent.

In part, the reason I am interested in religion is in response to the notion of alienation and the continued isolation of the individual. It is as if we had to go through things like existentialism where we rejected dictated meaning to find the freedom to give meaning to that which was previously imposed. Man is a social beast, after all, and so it may have been a fool’s errand to expect man to define himself against the world rather than to carve himself out from within it. — Ennui Elucidator

I must admit that I had not considered that, even though I have personally bemoaned the paradoxical isolation seemingly inherent in modern life, the feeling of being "lonely in the crowd", but it is quite true. I myself have attributed this isolation to a combination of (a) the individual security which pervades modern western culture eliminating the need that we once had for one another, and (b) the psychological effects of product marketing, which seem to have increased self-absorbtion exponentially.

when you define religion as a "language community", to what do you refer? Perhaps that people within a given religion have a common semantic reference, a common set of meanings for the language that they use, fully understood only within the sect?

In my opinion, the most important function of religion is the lending of increased significance to the milestones of human lives. This, of course, is the function of meaningful ritual, and so it follows that in my view, common profound ritual is the most important aspect of religion. It also seems to myself to explain the ubiquity of religion in the human experience. As you note above:

Religion, as understood, is totalizing both of necessity and thesis. This isn't to say that everything is religious, but it isn't so dissimilar from the statement that all acts/speech is political speech. — Ennui Elucidator

Perhaps strangely to some, I myself am an atheist who yet considers religion to be of great importance to the human experience, for precisely the reason noted above, the innate value of meaningful ritual. In a world of people who claim to be "spiritual but not religious" ( as absurd a statement as has ever been made), I define myself as "religious but not spiritual". I simply think that the future will ultimately prove to demand non-theistic religion.

...don’t you think it a bit odd to divorce “spirit” from “spirituality” in a conversation where I am investigating what use some philosophy people might have for religion without god? [...] So we’ve got people who are happy to do “spirituality” without animation/breath/soul but not religion without god. — Ennui Elucidator

This dichotomy has arisen because the very idea of "spirit" has ever been ill-defined in our Western languages. What did the ancients mean by the terms "animus"/"anima"? The semantic field of "animus" is wide enough to build an international airport on, precisely because the Romans really didn't understand what they meant by the term...they were simply trying to describe phenomena the cause of which they could not begin to comprehend. In Latin, the term could mean: life force, soul, breath, mind, intellect, affect, strength of feeling, intention, and any of a slew of individual emotions (courage, vehemence, will, wrath, etc., etc.), and a few other things which I can't immediately recall. The word "spirit" is nearly the same in English: it means everything to the point that it means nothing, and that is the partial cause of the abuse and misuse of the term "spiritual" that we can discern today, as you note above:

The idea of “spiritual” is really a major problem. It is the biggest bunch of non-sense one can imagine wrapped in a bit of anti-establishmentarianism. Besides the nonsense on its face (transcendence thrown in with some bad metaphysics), it is clearly culturally received conditioning that is not an independent invention (or experience) of the person espousing spirituality. — Ennui Elucidator

Yet, as you note,

Someone is born, you want to celebrate. Someone dies, you want to mourn. Not because either event necessitates such a reaction, but because that is what we have been acculturated to do. — Ennui Elucidator

...and the meaningful ritual associated with religion is of great assistance in lendi g increased meaning to that celebrating and mourning...

But if we are looking for exaltation in issues of ultimate concern, for Australians I think the sun is our spiritual centre. — Banno

Indeed, for all we Indo-Europeans! Old "Dyeus Phter" has had more incarnations over the years than you can shake a stick at. In a roundabout way, this kind of makes sense. Without our weak little yellow dwarf of a star, there would be no life at all around here.

Instead, memory is a reconstructive process. — Joshs

How so...how is that thought to work? I am unfamiliar with such a theory.

I must disagree. As evidence:

https://news.mit.edu/2017/neuroscientists-identify-brain-circuit-necessary-memory-formation-0406

https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-basics/memory/where-are-memories-stored

https://theconversation.com/amp/were-capable-of-infinite-memory-but-where-in-the-brain-is-it-stored-and-what-parts-help-retrieve-it-63386

but it is. The human brain stores information in quite a similar way as a computer does, only with a strong biochemical element to the mechanism.

I think this pretty much says it all. From what I've seen, computer scientists tend to view information as physical. What they do is called information technology. — baker

The computing analogy is useful here. Bits and bytes of information are stored on a computer hard drive or other storage device as bipolar charges which can encoded information which can be translated by the software into human languages. The silicon and other media composing the memory chip, and the electrons forming the polarized charges themselves are real things, but the "information" which results from the translation of those strings of charges into human language has no reality outside of the human mind. Facts and ideas only have reality within the mind, and those "mental realities" (for lack of a better term) more-or-less reflect actual, objective reality out in "the universe".

See here, where it is perhaps expounded upon more eruditely than can I: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

The key is, that the creation of information involves abstracting data from phenomena
— Michael Zwingli

Which data? — Prishon

The perception of phenomena yields information within the mind, and said data is compiled from that information.

It is physical because the cause is physical. Is there an actual three-masted Greek ship on the horizon? Yes, or no?
[...]
What has happened is that the cause has triggered a chain of events that results in some physical structure representing the cause in some way. We can say that the information was processed, or changed, in some way, but we can still point to the initial cause as what this new structure refers to. — Harry Hindu

But, Harry, the information and the cause are distinct entities; the reality of the latter need not impart reality to the former. I would define "information" as "any mental abstraction of data from the perception of a phenomenological object or occurrence which contributes to the evaluation of an entity". What if the entity being evaluated is itself not real? If I were to research, in a dictionary of the supernatural, about the supposed ghost of Dylan Thomas haunting the old Chelsea Hotel in New York City, I would gather much information about this haunting. Even so, I think that we can all agree that there is no ghost of Dylan Thomas haunting the Chelsea...if the object of the information is not real to begin with, then how can the information itself based upon said unreality be real?

The key is, that the creation of information involves abstracting data from phenomena, be that phenomena real or imagined. The process of abstraction creates an imaginary data set based upon phenomena which may result from a real entity, a natural object, or from an imagined entity, like the ghost of Dylan Thomas. We see Desmond Doss performing acts of extreme valor during the Battle of Okinawa in WW2, and we say that Doss "has courage", and "displays courageousness". Does this "courageousness" really exist? We have gathered information from our observation of Doss's actions during that military operation. Looking at the data thus compiled, we make the evaluation that "Desmond Doss is endowed with courageousness". But, what is said "courageousness" other than a label for a historical pattern of behavior...a series of past real occurrences? Is this "courageousness" something evidence of which might be found upon a dissection of Desmond Doss? Desmond Doss is a real object, and the actions of that object during the Battle of Okinawa were real occurrences, but the bits of data ("there is an act of courage...oh! there is one more act of courage...etc.") which we gain from observing those real actions exist only within our minds, and not in the universe of reality, and that unreal data leads us to attribute to Desmond Doss an equally unreal abstraction: courageousness. Mental abstractions always result in unrealities. The data sets, composed of bits of information, which are derived from the perception of real objects and occurrences, could only be said to be real themselves if they could exist independently of the objects and occurrences from which they are derived, without those objects and occurrences having ever been...they cannot. The point is, that information gained mentally from the perception of real objects and occurrences has no reality in and of itself.

I have not made any critique or criticized your post. — Alkis Piskas

Hahaha...fair enough, but please don't be afraid to actually criticize my statements. After all, somebody needs to check my thinking, lest (my head having a bothersome tendency to swell, unchecked) this "funny monkey" begin to think himself more and more...

The good thing about not being a "professional" philosopher, is that being occasionally wrong need not engender an occasional existential crisis. Being wrong in my case usually just engenders a shrug. I know this because I can remember once thinking that I was wrong, but later found out that I was mistaken...:wink:

Alkis, let me try to address some of your critiques of my rambling post of earlier.

some memory seems to be stored in cells/tissues outside of the brain, in other parts of the body
— Michael Zwingli
What part of the memorty this is? Where is the remaining memory? You don't mention anything else about memory. Well, these are rhetorical questions, so you don't have to reply because they belong to some other topic. — Alkis Piskas

The vast bulk of memory is stored within the brain. Differing aspects of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. Certain "procedural memories" are stored in the basal ganglia. The major areas involved in the storage of memories are the prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampus. Even so, neuroscientists have been able to make experimental subjects experience memories by stimulation of certain tissues of the body. See here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_memory

it can only be said that the person, rather than the brain, is thinking, because our thoughts are highly dependent upon the state of our bodies and are continuously effected by neurally transmitted information from our bodies.
— Michael Zwingli
most thought, including all rational thought, interpretative thought and emotive thought, occurs as a result of brain activity
— Michael Zwingli
Aren't these two statements-positions in conflict? — Alkis Piskas

I think not. Many of the thoughts produced by the brain are engendered by sensory input from the body. Without that sensory input, many human thoughts would not come into being, and the inner "world" that is the sum total of an individual human's thoughts would be very different. While the generation of thoughts occurs within the brain, the impetus for said generation generally comes from the body, thus it is the person as a biological whole who is the thinker...

This is not the same as saying that thought occurs "within the brain", though.
— Michael Zwingli
It is, therefore, not wrong to say that thought "occurs in the brain"
— Michael Zwingli
Again, aren't these two statements-positions in conflict? — Alkis Piskas

You forgot to include the complementary clause to the second of my statements, which changes the nature of the assertion:

, but that statement seems to deny the full picture of the human experience of thought. — Michael Zwingli

Thoughts are compulsed by the body, and generated within the brain, but are experienced by the person as a whole, as he has emotional and physiological reactions to said thoughts. Don't you think?

The brains in a jar are impossible in principle. — Prishon

Yes, of course, but that is an old, tried and true device used by philosophers to illustrate certain points of truth.

The "inner world" does not reflect the truth of the "outer world
— Michael Zwingli

I dont agree. Why not? — Prishon

I notice that I should have said "...does not always reflect the truth of..." Indeed, much of the time our inner world does accurately reflect most aspects of objective reality, but not always. What I mean by this is that human perceptions of reality are always interpretations of the aspects of reality, but are not necessarily true reflections of the realities themselves.

This is most apparent in certain examples. When I look at a blue sky, a red traffic "stop sign" or a verdantly green meadow, I interpret that I see colors. The colors of my mental interpretations, though, do not really exist, but are merely the way in which my sense of sight in concert with the functioning of my brain interpret the differing wavelengths of the same type of light radiation. People once thought surely that the sun moved around the earth, and across the diurnal sky, daily; this was what their interpretation of their sensory experience of physical reality indicated to them. Now, with the benefit of scientific discovery and technological innovation, we have come to know differently, so that when we see the sun "setting", we now think of the earth rotating on its axis. In like manner, people were at one time sure of the "fact" of human race, that all people on Earth could be shoehorned into one of three "racial categories": mongoloid, negroid, or caucasoid. With the broader view that we have of the world's people's today, though, we can now see that trying to assign or segregate human beings into racial categories defies the reality of a broad spectrum of physical types, many of which do not fit the old categories, and that indeed, the entire concept of human race might just be fallacious to begin with. Before Neo began to realize his innate potential, he thought that the virtual world programmed by machine AI and transmitted directly into his CNS was reality, but then he began to develop his ability to "see the Matrix".

Such examples illustrate that our subjective human perceptions of reality do not always reflect the truth of objective reality. In truth, I'm not so sure that I would want them to. Perhaps our common subjective experiences in creating a "world" are what have enabled us as a species to relate to the universe in ways constructive enough for us to be as successful as we have been. I'm not entirely sure that I would want to be able to "see the Matrix".

Both Russell and Copleston would have profitted from studying Spinoza. Yes.

surely, an important consideration.

Cant we see the inner world as being on equal level with the outer physical world? — Prishon

This is a profound question. The "inner world" does not reflect the truth of the "outer world", which is truth itself...the truth of physical reality. That is why I generally like to refer to said "inner world" as "the/a world" ("the world" when the subjective experience is held in common, and "a/his/her/it's world" otherwise), and to said "outer world" as "the universe" or simply "reality". Even so, for human beings, and from the human perspective, the "world" is every bit as important as the "universe". This having been said, I would estimate that when dealing with matters concerning the individual or group human perspective, the "world" should be placed on an equal footing with the "universe". However, when dealing with questions of ultimate reality, especially with questions of "pure science", the "universe" should be given primacy of place. For instance, we humans cannot, in making our day-to-day decisions, base them upon the absolutely true fact that our bodies, being composed of atoms which themselves are upwards of 90% empty space, are themselves upwards of 90% empty space...

A latter day Archimedes, I shout, "eureka!"

ah, I see. That seems to mean I cannot do it on my phone.

Will someone please tell me how to quote a post in replying here?

yes, and the subjective "world" produced by the brain is dependent and a function largely of the body.

Prishon, I am new to this site and the software thereof. How does one quote a post in replying?

I think your statement true, so long as the brain is remembered to be an integral part of "our bodies, the true us". Indeed, the brain is key to who and what we are, but it is not summatory.

but the brain is not a person. A person is so much more, having an associated "world", which is the sum total of his subjective experiences and sensory input from his human body. As I may have obliquely indicated above, the thoughts produced by a hypothetical "brain kept alive in a jar" would be totally different, and so the "world" thus created would be totally different, from those of the same brain if it were part of a human body...

Alkis, your three essential questions are as follow: "what is thinking?", "how is thought created?", and "where does thought take place?" In response to the first and third of these, it can only be said that the person, rather than the brain, is thinking, because our thoughts are highly dependent upon the state of our bodies and are continuously effected by neurally transmitted information from our bodies. In other words, the brain does not produce thought in "a vacuum". As for where thought occurs: some memory seems to be stored in cells/tissues outside of the brain, in other parts of the body. That having been said, most thought, including all rational thought, interpretative thought and emotive thought, occurs as a result of brain activity. This is not the same as saying that thought occurs "within the brain", though. I think that reasoning, for instance, involves the application of analytic relationships, themselves from memory, to information "taken in" (so to speak) by means of the sensory organs. It is, therefore, not wrong to say that thought "occurs in the brain", but that statement seems to deny the full picture of the human experience of thought.

We must at this point, consider the question of what "thought" is, and what it's essential nature is, and more to the point, what individual "thoughts" are and the "minds" composed thereof. I would argue that, despite the essentiality of thought to the human experience, and the profundity of the experience of thought from the perspective of an individual human being, that thought in general and individual thoughts in particular have no independent, objective reality. Thought is a highly subjective human experience, and one person's thought cannot be said to have any reality outside of the body (using that term as inclusive of the brain) of that individual person. To say, then, that a person's thoughts can be "located somewhere", even though they are the result of the biochemical and bioelecrical activity of the central nervous system, I think is a false consideration. "Thought", rather, appears to be the subjective human experience of those biochemical and bioelectrical activities. Said biochemical and bioelectrical activities are the answer to the second of your questions: "how is thought created?" In answer to the third of your questions, "where does thought take place?", the activities themselves occur within the body, and more particularly within the CNS, and even more particularly within the brain, with all three of those statements cbeing equally correct, but the "thoughts" experienced by the human being comprising that body, CNS, and brain, and indeed the "mind" which is the sum total of the individual's thoughts, cannot be said to be located within the same localities. Rather, they are general subjective experiences of the individual, the individual's subjective experience of his "world" and of the interaction of his body, CNS, and brain with the external environment, and as such cannot be said to be located, or to have independent existence, anywhere. While the physiological activities which result in the subjective human experience of thought can be more-or-less located (even though they are not as yet fully understood), the resultant experience of "thought" and "mind" themselves absolutely cannot, because they have no location, as a result of their having no independent reality. This is similar to the human experience of color, which has no objective reality. Color is a dependent, subjective human experience based upon the objective, independent reality of differing wavelengths of light. While the differing wavelengths of light have existence in objective reality, the differing colors do not, but are rather only subjective human experiences. It is the same with certain physiological (biochemical and bioelectrical) processes of the body, CNS, and brain, as opposed to "thought" and "mind". "Thoughts", like "colors", are not real things, though to we humans they seem to be, and though they have a profound impact upon our lives. As such, they, along with the various "minds" comprising them, cannot be located anywhere in the universe. Am I effectively communicating my concept of this? I hope so...

sure, but the impetus to libertarianism has nothing to do with economic prosperity in general or with GDP in particular...the impetus to libertarianism is individual freedom from governmental interference. To a libertarian, this is a more important issue than prosperity or economic health. Not sure whence the introduction of libertarianism into an economic argument...

From this, one must consider that, while the fact of our human existence might not be a miracle, it is yet miraculous.

very good!

only if you have a few billion years to run the trial...

well, first the dust formed inorganic compuonds, which in turn, and in the right environment, eventually formed organic compounds, out of which eventually (in the right environment...in this case the warm primordial sea) were formed the first unicellular organisms, and the rest is evolutionary biology. So you see, the old saying that we humans are "made of stardust" is true in actuality, albeit in roundabout manner.

any type of "dust", or particulate matter of any other name, has mass by the fact of it being matter... Paricles of dust exert gravitational forces upon each other even when they are lying on your floor, but those forces are not effective on your floor because of the much greater force of Earth's gravity (much more mass).

gravity is a property of the matter itself, a function of the mass thereof, and more effective in the environment of space.

not so. We are considering the formation of large planetary and other space bodies from, essentially, space dust, no? The matter is simply changing form...conforming according to the forces placed upon it, much as within the Earth's crust, a diamond is formed out of a much more voluminous bunch of carbon deposit over time...or, indeed, as a company can create a synthetic diamond out of the post-crematory ashes of your loved one. The formation of planets in space was...is a similar process writ large.

the force of gravity over a long time in the environment of space, which is of course, a function of the matter itself.

the answer seems to be simple probability. With localized random intensifications of energy in pre-universal space having occurred throughout "time", there was bound, "sooner or later" as they say, to be an intesification profound enough to begin the inverse reaction of the mass-energy equivalence reaction described by E=mc^2.

most of that dust has coalesced to form planets and other objects in the universe...including you and me.

for the record, I am with you on this. I think that there is no realm of existence apart from the physical universe, beyond the parameters of which there is only the void...empty space, wherein nothing exists, not matter, nor light...nothing except, perhaps, certain forms of energy. If an idealized thing does not exist within the physical universe it does not exist, but rather only the idea of it exists.

you seem to equate thought with consciousness. If one were to open the cranium of a human, and destroy all those, and only those portions of the brain which are involved in producing rational thought and other types of cognition, yet leave the rest of the brain intact, the human subject would still be capable of consciousness, but not of thought, per se.

What God...which God?

Neither the Judeo-Christian nor the Muslim God could be energy. A hypothetical God? Perhaps, but that would involve adding a new sense to the definition of the terms "god" and "God".