The rocks, all along, were the most dedicated quietists.

The creation of this thread is motivated by a claim made by Chet Hawkins:

Knowledge is only belief.
— Chet Hawkins

Chet elaborates:

So I could/should rest on that statement alone as it is incontrovertible.

But the quislings out there will want to retreat behind 'facts' and 'knowledge' delusions. So, it's best I turn my hat around and address the concepts more thoroughly.

But let's take this outside.
— Chet Hawkins

I think there is a valid distinction between knowledge and belief, although I also think that much of what is generally considered to be knowledge might be more accurately classed as belief. It may well turn out that I am sympathetic to Chet's belief. Let's see...

Chet says that statement is incontrovertible. I would like to see an argument to support that contention. — Janus

I'm afraid I'm more inclined to these approaches:



And laid out an excellent argument against the statement "Knowledge is merely belief" -- sometimes, to expand on @fdrake, knowledge is action, and has nothing to do with what people say! A totally orthogonal category to yourthe notion that knowledge is merely belief.

Same, especially cuz it's the weekend.

I just kept the first guess cuz no one else said it was bad, meaning anyone interested is good to go :)

From the 6th--7th ? To use your previous format:

Sunday, 06 April

I have it set for 10am NZD which is
5pm Saturday EST
2pm Saturday WST
9pm GMT

O yeah.
Especially cuz it's not like exposing yourself here will help you professionally. :D

that's the thought that keeps me coming back: while we're a collection of weirdos thinking our thoughts in an attempted free way, we try to keep it seperate from the professional consequences of our thoughts.

That seems the closest one can acomplish when it comes to free thought.

To say there is no evidence of a type we cannot have is to say nothing at all. — Arne

That's the bit I'm struggling with.

I believe @ToothyMaw has a notion he's coming from.

I'd like to understand that notion, cuz I think that's the only thing we can really do on a philosophy forum -- understand one another.

If there's no evidence @ToothyMaw -- then I'm asking how you decide between the likelihoods of guesses. It's ok if it's not rationally thought out or just a guess, cuz that's what I think -- but I'd have a follow up in that case.

If we have no evidence, and no probabilities, on what basis can we say that our guesses are better guesses?

You still say that a prediction in favor of an earth-like afterlife has more predictive power than Eternal Torture afterlife. And even that an ET afterlife might be more likely than an earth-like afterlife. But then note that this is different from what potentiates a good guess based upon our perspective.

what makes a guess good is not just whether or not it satisfies the condition “the afterlife is an eternal hell” or “the afterlife is earth-like”, but rather that it predicts specific events, how many of those specific events occur, and in what order. Also, their causes and consequences, but that introduces much more complexity, so I’ll leave that alone. But how many events can we truly guess if it is ET? Probably very few - even if we accurately guess that it is indeed ET for everyone across the board. — ToothyMaw

Considering we have no knowledge of the afterlife I'm still inclined to say we cannot truly guess about events in any afterlife; that is, from our perspective, there is no better guess because we don't know what we're talking about.

I'm not just saying that an earth-like afterlife is more predictable, but rather that we can compare the likelihood of an earth-like afterlife to any other, and conclude, based on the potential for accuracy within each possibility - earth-like or ET, in this case - that the earthy predictions stand to be truer than other guesses. — ToothyMaw

So we compare Afterlife 1 to Afterlife 2. How do we do this comparison?

You say "based on the potential for accuracy within each possibility"

So that's not probability, but a potential for accuracy within a possibility, and it's not based on evidence. So what's it based on?

How does one evaluate the potential for accuracy within a given possible afterlife?

I am also arguing not that there is only one most likely afterlife based on the fact that earth-like afterlives can be more accurately predicted, but rather that the proliferation of ideas about earth-like afterlives stand greater chances of being more true when compared to any one unearthly possibility - such as ET. — ToothyMaw

Why would the proliferation of ideas about any unknown influence its chances of being true?

If we are to judge whether an idea is more or less likely to be true then we can either --

Stipulate the likelihoods in order to make a computation.

Or have some measurable in order to compute likelihoods or at least be able to make comparisons between probabilities.

If what you're saying is that assuming the afterlife is earth-like then it would be more predictable then isn't that a bit obvious?

But for the latter -- I don't think you can count "number of ideas" as a unit for judging likelihoods.

As such I think neither proposition -- ET or Earthlike -- can be evaluated on the basis of likelihood since there is no evidence for either.

I think all we're left with is a generic appeal to what makes sense to us, and clearly that differs between people.

First off, I don't see how you could support the assertion that eternal torture is more likely. I think you would need some evidence. — ToothyMaw

Fair. I agree there. We need evidence to support assertions of likelihood.

But then I think -- we have no evidence of an afterlife being a particular way. At least I would not count various intuitions of persons as "evidence", though it seems you might.

When I say that the fear of death is adequate as an explanation, I mean that all the theories of the afterlife are directed towards that fear, rather than the literal words they use. "Hellfire" afterlives are usually part of a culture where some actions are bad and avoiding those actions is the most important thing.

There's an interesting relationship to be had between what people do with their lives and their beliefs about an afterlife -- but for the most part I don't think it holds for most people. Most people will do what people do, regardless of the truth of their view towards the afterlife, because none of us have evidence about it -- so my suspicion is that all thoughts on the afterlife are something like fiction.

I suppose that's why I brought up Vulcan Olympics, though it didn't work.

Is it equally likely, for instance, that someone might mount a jetpack on a pig and send it flying, or that a pig might sprout wings? In both instances the condition that pigs can fly, which is unlikely to be true, is met, but, given certain constraints, such as the near impossibility of sprouting wings, one conclusion is more likely than another.

Thus, a guess about what might happen in the afterlife, although unlikely to be true, could be more likely than another, even if both could accurately explain why the afterlife consists of certain events - why pigs can fly. — ToothyMaw

In you first example you're talking about things we know about.

But the afterlife? Because we don't know about it we cannot say what is more likely.

I can say what persuades me that there is no afterlife, but unless that argument sits well with you I have no method of proof for what an afterlife might be like, even if it might not be.

Furthermore, there are no constraints regarding what might be possible if the afterlife is not earth-like. Thus, if there is a similar chance of the afterlife being some sort of eternal hell or earth-like, the fact that the equally likely earth-like afterlife could be more accurately predicted indicates that those who have ideas about an earth-like afterlife have more predictive power regardless of the truth of whether or not it is earth-like. — ToothyMaw

I think this is the bit that's causing me to reply most -- if there are no constraints then there's no predictive power. It's an imaginary. Just like since there's no evidence for any of the afterlives, we cannot infer that one afterlife is more or less likely than another -- we have no evidence as these are just beliefs that arise due to the fear of death.

Oh sure.

I could have also been more careful in reading, and so forth.

That was super cool.

The organ version has become too cheesy to evoke -- that was a great rendition.

Mkay.

I thought you were saying the opposite in describing Sartre as misinterpreting Heidegger here:

The notion that existence precedes essence is pop-psychology. Heidegger says our existence is our essence and Sartre misinterprets Heidegger as saying existence precedes essence and now all proceed as if if "existence precedes essence" is an existential given. It is not! — Arne

So you're more saying "these are not fundamental" -- which I hope you see we agree on.

Reading over again -- yeh. I don't believe there are any fundamental tenets of existentialism, and "existence precedes essence" is one I'd count as not being a fundamental tenet.

I was caught up on the notion that Sartre misinterprets Heidegger.

And I make my argument for the sole purpose of cautioning "someone who is trying to understand all that is existentialism." Please see original OP. — Arne

Gotcha.

First thoughts and all that.

The notion that existence precedes essence is pop-psychology. Heidegger says our existence is our essence and Sartre misinterprets Heidegger as saying existence precedes essence and now we all proceed as if if "existence precedes essence" is an existential given. It is not! — Arne

I've heard that claim before. I think they were both creative philosophers with very different aims, but somehow the philosophy bridged them.

I don't think it's a misinterpretation -- at least no more a misinterpretation than what Heidegger does with Aletheia; the man got criticized for not representing the notion historically correctly, but I do remember Heidegger's name and not the critic so there's that -- I just think they were both creative philosophers with different sentiments dealing with similar themes in wildly different circumstances.

EDIT: Though, to be fair, in my quadrivium of existentialists I pair Heidegger to Levinas, and Sartre to Camus.

I know Simone de Beauvoir was a contemporary, too, and I haven't mentioned her.

I do think that existentialism has something of a masculine energy to itusually.

EDIT2: Well... things change. There's definitely feminist existential phenomenology, among other things -- but the quadrivium which sets the stage in my mind is masculine. Derrida spoke of Levinas' work as obviously written by a man (and I agree there -- there are criticisms from other angles to be had; not that the masculine is bad, but the attempt at a universal frame kind of cuts off all the non-masculine existential-phenomenologists)

Meh... I'm not satisfied with that. There's a relationship there, but I don't have it thought out.

the fear of death is an adequate explanation for why people bring up the notion of an afterlife.
— Moliere

Another good point. — ToothyMaw

To use your precision/accuracy distinction...

We can see the general commonalities between various descriptions of the afterlife -- some of them have hellfire, some of them depersonalize you into a nous of some kind, some of them are re-occuring, some of them give rewards for doing good things in this life.

With how I read you: You're saying these guesses are imprecise, but perhaps accurate, and if we accumulate these guesses we might be able to say which or the other is more likely.

I don't think the distinction between precision/accuracy is relevant here. I tried to think through it and it just doesn't make sense to talk about precision/accuracy with respect to, say, fictional characters.

We can say "Bilbo Baggins is shorter than Gandalf", and I think that's true. But we cannot say how precise/accurate that statement is -- we infer it from the story on the basis that Bilbo is a Hobbit, and Hobbits are shorter than Wizards, and Gandalf is a Wizard. or something like that.

This seems the same to me as applying the precision/accuracy distinction to the afterlife, along with plausibility.

Aesthetics is somewhat like this in that we're looking for ways to reason about how we make decisions on art. That's why the topic interests me a lot as a possible philosophical jumping point.

But it's not an easy topic to do more than simply state our opinions on. It's hard to do philosophy here.

I definitely do, sorry if I came across as unwilling to engage. — ToothyMaw

Oh no worries -- I was just making a bit of a joke. You were right to give more focus.

That's actually good. Maybe you could point out what doesn't make sense to you? — ToothyMaw

Cool. Let's start with this part:

Agreed. I bypass this discussion, however, by stipulating in my argument that one either goes to an afterlife or one doesn't after dying. This is true regardless of whether we can evaluate the proposition 'there is an afterlife'. Then, to follow, if there were an afterlife, what might we expect it to look like? From there, my (bulleted) argument is mostly straightforward. — ToothyMaw

I'm going to try and draw an analogy here to point out how this seems like a difficult question to answer with any sort of probabilistic reasoning about the veracity of what might be:

Suppose on Vulcan they host an Olympics, very much like our own but instead with Vulcan sports. By virtue of the form "Either one goes to the Vulcan Olympics or one does not go to the Vulcan Olympics after being evaluated to go to the Vulcan Olympics by the Vulcans"

Does this sidestep whether or not the Vulcan Olympics exist in order to then talk about the more probable paticulars of the Vulcan Olympics? How could we possibly evaluate something which we have no familiarity for?

To bring it back to the difference between Eternal Torture vs. an Earth-like afterlife: With how much we know we'd be just as much in the right to claim that the Eternal Torture afterlife is more likely.

Or, at least the philosophical difficulty that I see is -- how could you make your version of the afterlife more rationally appealing? Or, if philosophy be not defined by rationality, just philosophically appealing in a manner that isn't simply a statement of our intuitions on the manner? How do we make arguments about such an ephemeral notion?

A thought -- perhaps we should do a Saturday-to-Sunday timeslot rather than a Friday-to-Saturday timeslot.

Heh, you mean you don't want to just hear my opinion on the matter? :D

Fair enough. Though reading through your post again I can say I'm not sure I understand your chain of reasoning.

It seems to me we can either evaluate the proposition "There is an afterlife" as true or false, or we cannot evaluate it as true or false. If the former then I'd say the premise is false, and if the latter then I'd say we have no way of knowing what it would be like if it exists -- and that the fear of death is an adequate explanation for why people bring up the notion of an afterlife.

That would kind of defeat the purpose of having an afterlife I think if one stops being oneself upon dying. — ToothyMaw

Exactly! :D

An afterlife would look like waking. What would we remember? What do we remember upon waking up?

In a sense every day we wake is an afterlife.

But I have to say I think Epicurus' argument against an afterlife in the most literal sense convinces me. I don't have memories of before I was born, and so why would I continue to have memories after my meat is gone?

@AmadeusD confirmed w/ me that he hopped on early and left some 30 minutes in, and I joined about 30 minutes late and nothing was going on.

I'm down for a retry. The time was fine for me, but if there are other times that work internationally then I'm down for that too -- it was just a first attempt, but not the last.

Pardon an intrusion into a discussion about past philosophers. — jgill

:D

I can't help myself sometimes.

Lots of quoting old dead philosophers…. Which isn’t much of an existential reply if you think about it.

I meant that defining things is nomenclature. It’s a tautology. Including existentialism of course. A polite joke.

It’s just fodder for thought…. Existentialism is notoriously hard to define, at least the definitions and explanations always seem strained even from those brilliant long dead philosophers.

All the old references are Interesting of course but maybe - just maybe - existentialism fits better as a state of mind than anything else. — Metaphyzik

I think there's something to be said for this. Contrary to my impulse to define everything by its history it's not like that history is gone or somehow stopped with the authors I listed. One could be an existentialist and in this sense I think you're right to say it's a state of mind, or a mood, or a temperament -- the unity between existentialists or existentialisms is more along those lines.

Ingmar Bergman comes to mind as a non-philosopher existentialist in The Seventh Seal and Winter Light -- I'm sure he does elsewhere too these are just the ones that came to mind as good examples of existentialism that's not defined by concepts or dead philosophers (though it is a dead film maker :D )

I'm a little late but I hopped on.

I’ve always found the concept of existentialism to be an exercise in nomenclature. Let’s all decide to define something. Welcome to the forum ;). Or should I say to the machine? For all you pink Floyd fans. — Metaphyzik

Existentialism is an activity or state more than a concept, related to a stream of consciousness type of awareness / feeling somehow that is often fleeting - but can endure as a default… until you get too pedantic for even yourself. Forcing a modus operandi is almost always fatal to good humour ;).

When are you abstract and aware? And when are you lost in a pattern? Both are useful pursuits.

Everyone is an existentialist. Sometimes. Else you are only counting half (or so) — Metaphyzik

Given what I said before about N and K, I disagree -- existentialism can certainly be an activity or state, but it's also a concept -- and not less than an activity or a state.

Olive branch: "Everyone is an existentialist sometimes" -- I certainly think activity is important, but it seems to me you're saying "existentialism" is nothing but nomenclature. I'd disagree with that.

Seems to me this is the most existential answer -- you were inspired and made a decision and don't even care if the other interpretations are "more right".

Maybe you could claim to be an existentialist.

I went with "no" because the only existentialist philosopher I know of who could and has made that claim is Sartre, and I tend to think of "existentialism" more as a historical category than a thesis. I'd group Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Levinas in the historical category of "existentialism" through their themes, though I agree that there's a difference to be had between Sartre's existentialism and Camus' absurdism, and really between all of them, when we get into the details between them.

Historically I'd group these together in spite of most of them rejecting the label because they are all dealing with individual choice in a world without ethical answers. Each proposes a kind of meta-answer that's not a direct answer as much but a way of reflecting upon how we choose without objective value: Heidegger proposes authenticity, Sartre proposes good faith, Camus proposes heroic pursuit, and Levinas proposes the face-to-face encounter. (at least to put them each into a catch-phrase)

A world without answers: The background proto existentialists I think through are Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. The broadest theme that unites these writers is Nietzsche's notion of the death of God, interpreted as a loss of collective meaning and purpose, which seems very obvious to me that Kierkegaard is struggling with that same question but from a more theological side, with the additional interpretive difficulty of creating characters to speak different viewpoints.



But in spite of all that I'd say I'm influenced by these writers, and often try to think of how to put a softer form of existentialism out there because it often resonates with me, but feels too harsh.

I do not believe that I am directly aware of a distal object. I believe that I am directly aware only of my sensations. Therefore, my perception is not of a distal object and so therefore perception is not direct. — Michael

I'd say that this all well and good, but it's only because we have direct access to reality -- like a direct realist might hold -- that we can distinguish perception from distal object and say true things about them.

On the more continental side: you are not aware of an object beyond the object, an in-itself that holds a secret, but the plane of reality is just as real as the real. "Sensations" is a locution that is only meaningful within a web of some kind -- semantic, historical, phenomenological. The "real" which indirect realists posit cannot be meaningfully posited: it borrows a metaphor from the direct/indirect contrast (a distinction embedded within a world).

Science and metaphysics are different from one another, but they bleed over into one another all the time. The first time I heard of "emergent properties" was in a molecular biology class, not a philosophy lecture. Metaphysics and ontology tend to touch science on the theory side.

So, any book on quantum foundations is going to discuss metaphysical ideas. Any discussion of "what is a species and how do we define it," gets into the same sort of territory. "What is complexity?" and "what is information?" or "is there biological information?" are not uncommon questions for journal articles to focus on. Debates over methods, frequentism in particular, are another area of overlap. This isn't the bread and butter of 101 classes — although in Bio 101 we were asked to write an essay on "what life is?" and consider if viruses or prions were alive, a philosophical question — but it's also not absent from scientific considerations either.

The two seem related in that both inform one another. Physicists have informed opinions re the question of substance versus process based metaphysics for example, or mereological nihilism — i.e., "is the world a collection of things with properties or one thing/process?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think I'd say that these are questions within the philosophy of science -- it requires knowledge of both to reasonably perform philosophy of science.

By contrast I think your distinction between two positions is philosophy distinct from science:

we don't want a strange world of nothing but particles arranged x-wise or one undifferentiated process either. We'd like to say cats exist on mats (and just one at one time and place), that lemons are yellow, that rocks have mass and shape, etc. I am just unconvinced that these can be properly be dealt with fully on the nature side of the Nature/Geist distinction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The acceptance of the Nature/Geist distinction is what would be open to philosophical question which wouldn't require knowledge of science in the same way that your first questions which demonstrate where the two disciplines seem to get along or resemble one another.

Likewise, so goes the indirect/direct realist distinction. The direct and the indirect realist can accommodate their position to some accepted scientific body of knowledge; or, they could even make it falsifiable, but then it might just be science at that point.

What I think makes the task difficult in distinguishing these is that knowledge in both can help both, yet I'd still maintain their distinctness -- and that the series of questions you ask shows how the connection between metaphysics and science is at least difficult to trace :).

Cool. I'll join in 2 weeks then when I can.

The general structure I'm coming from is Marxist.

Marx's description of capital points out that there are owners of workplaces and people who work for the owners of workplaces.

I want to, by analogy at least, say this is similar to knowledge of the law.

You can know the law, you can know the previous decisions and know the likelihoods based upon the judge you're talking to. But you cannot know what the judge will say, even if you have a good idea.

I'm thinking from a general description of how economies work -- so of course I cannot say how a particular instance should cache out while being fair. Just like the law this is an understanding of what you can say, what people want, and knowing the likelihoods of being hired or, if you're on the other side, the likelihoods of who gets hired is more in direct control for you, like a judge.

This analogy is the strongest thing I can think of right now.

And, yeah, I was excited that you got a Zoom link! I understand overcommitting :D

I'm not sure I understand you. What is different, Nature versus Mind or science vs a Nature/Mind distinction? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I tend to think of science, at a minimum, as what science textbooks say.

The science textbooks I am familiar with never talk of properties in the abstract like philosophy talks of properties.

As a for instance: there are chemical properties of salt, but these are not the same as "properties of objects" -- it doesn't approach the universality that metaphysics requires because it's mostly a mixture of thorough bookkeeping with attention to detail, but (since it's just done by us) not universal, or even looking for universal relationships.

Metaphysics looks for universal relationships in reality, or at least discusses reality, and as such no matter what metaphysical belief you hold you have to accommodate the science to be credible, at least in our world. If your metaphysics contradicts understood science, it's a hard road to go to justify why anyone ought to believe it.

But if that's so: it seems science and metaphysics must be different from one another, even though I'm uncertain about the universal relationship that makes science differ from metaphysics.

But we don't want a strange world of nothing but particles arranged x-wise or one undifferentiated process either. We'd like to say cats exist on mats (and just one at one time and place), that lemons are yellow, that rocks have mass and shape, etc. I am just unconvinced that these can be properly be dealt with fully on the nature side of the Nature/Geist distinction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think @Banno and I share a suspicion of all metaphysics, though I welcome correction from him if I'm wrong.

I don't think science parses to Nature/Geist or most philosophies at all.

I think they are different, or if not, it's not easy to trace the connections.

This is the first time I've listened to it, so keep posting I say!

I enjoyed listening.

Cuz life is absurd and ought be better.

Tho for another in memory:

Sounds like heaven.

Do you not, then see that this is an aspect of many work environments which still requires the surrounding details to discuss it? — AmadeusD

I do. I think I just have a general structure to think through those specific problems. By analogy I'd say the law and its practice is another structure to think through the problems, though mine is obviously different.
 

I will do my best to engage back - but I expect this can't be done — AmadeusD

Cool. :)

Tonight.... naw. I said enough and have to think. I suspect, of course, that it can be done, but I'm tired now.

In that case I think the sometimes is enough.

As in, we're both weakening our claims ;)

I'm not claiming universality so much as generality. In the sense of "Generally speaking...", which includes, I believe, some amount of subjectivity. In a way it's like saying "In my experience...." to say, look, I understand my beliefs are informed by my experience and I understand that all of our experiences are wildly different.

But if they are the same?

Then it's pretty easy to talk in terms of working conditions, and the term refers to general things. Time-for-Money being a big one. Even the investor spends time looking at his stocks.

laid out some very good points that should generally hold for all workplaces.

More on the descriptive side: I think the social structure of property is what allows us to coherently speak this way.

Because we have individual property rights that are enforced by a state, and because human beings continue to be what they are, some of the general structures that emerge are: some people must sell their time to people who own things. It doesn't even have to be a bad thing -- I certainly believe that capitalism is better than feudalism, and I'd note an important part of Marx is his fascination with capital rather than his opposition.

So, yeh, that's the theoretical background I'm thinking from, but it seems coherent in practice too -- at least in my experiences. (we need not convince one another here). At a very general level people who own workplaces would like, based on self-interest, for people they pay to produce more value than they pay them for, and people who sell their labor because they have to would generally prefer to work less for more reward. That's just human nature.

heh me either I just felt compelled to add my bit while admitting it's not the old debate.

Cool. "Quantity" is the part that seems hard for me to put into logic, though you can always substitute the empirical ranges known for various properties. It might end up being a 5 or more part predicate, thinking about MSD sheets I've seen and how identity is established in practice.