To ask a living organism to conceive of death is like ...
— TheMadFool
... stone aged human imagining herself on the Moon looking back at the Earth. Death is ur-counterfactual, the reflection on a mirror darkly from nowhere. An unwanted epiphany of utter oblivion by which every meta-cognitive entity ineluctably calls into question 'being a self'. :death: — 180 Proof

Yet, many times people have looked into the mirror and only seen a stranger eye back at them! Would you care what happens to strangers?

Ludwig Wittgenstein was of the opinion that meaning is use. :chin:
— TheMadFool
More precisely, meaning is use within a language game by players in a community (i.e. form of life). — 180 Proof

Indeed. However, I was wondering about the possibility of Wittgenstein's theory of meaning as use being an auxiliary to the more widely held belief of meaning as tied to the notion of an essence to words. I fail to see why this is an either...or... choice? Can't we have the best of both worlds? As it is Wittgenstein can't deny that a word has an essence within a language game, no?

My bad for the misunderstanding apparent. Religion, insofar as what I said earlier matters, stands for what seems to be missing in non-religious worldviews - that yearning to be part of something bigger as some like to put it. The closest such concepts free of religious baggage I can find are ecological movements and Niel deGrasse Tyson's Comsic Perspective.

Basically, I just picked religion out of convenience rather than anything else.

Could you explain it? Does the pen suppose to have mind to perceive anything? — Corvus

Not exactly, the pen can be used to draw its own end (broken). Take it one step further, take a pen, press its nib on a piece of blank paper and that's it!

We have no need to worry about our non-existence, because the personified process of dying and death takes care of everything for us. It's a free service, though various agencies try to collect as much as possible before The End, when we cease forever to produce revenue.

Granted, at times death seems to provide moderately interesting subject matter, but it's always a dead end, so to speak.

As Emily wrote

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –

Emily was sure that the horses pulling the carriage in which she and Death rode were headed for eternity. Paradise? Well, she didn't say that, and she could have if she had wanted to. However, Immortality was a third passenger. I don't expect immortality to be in my carriage ride with Death. You can think so if you want -- it won't make any difference, either way, Just my opinion. — Bitter Crank

That's another way of visualizing/imagining death - motionless inside a coffin in a hearse headed for the cemetery. The eastern version would be the body alight, blazing, on a funeral pyre. Yet these are still not what death is really like. One has to think about not thinking, death being defined as the cessation of all thought. To think about not thinking (death), one has to think (about not thinking) and not think (in order that not thinking can be thought about), impossible!

Interestingly, we can...not think about thinking i.e. switch off metacognition. In easier to understand words, we can stop thinking about thinking. Most people, 90% of the time, are not engaged in metacognitive cogitation i.e. self-awareness is, on most occasions, absent.

Our rather complicated and pathetic relationship with mortality is centered on self-awareness (metacognition) - we feel there's something, a self, an I, that perishes permanently, for all time to come, when we die - and yet self-awareness can be turned off, is missing for 90% of our thinking lives. Thus, in a sense, we can conceive of death, ego death I suppose, by deliberately refusing to undertake metacognitive tasks i.e. stop thinking about oneself. One less thing to worry about I suppose.

A striking resemblance, no?
— TheMadFool

Oh, indeed - has the penny dropped? — Banno

Not yet but I'm getting there. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer here.

If meaning is use, then the meaning of your life is what you do. — Banno

Yes, and I find it fascinating how Wittgenstein's theory of meaning (of words) as use fits like a glove with existential meaning (of life) as purpose. In both cases, meaning is about how we use things, in the former, a word, in the latter, a life.

The reason why all of us do different things in life, find meaning therein, is because there's no single purpose/meaning to life. Words lack in the same way - missing essences - and thus their meaning changes with how we use them. That's as far as I could get.

...religion provided one of the most satisfying answers to that existential query.
— TheMadFool

Well, I won't agree with that. Religion perhaps provides a cookie-cutter replacement for meaning. It's for folk who want a prefabricated answer, one that avoids having to be critical or think for oneself. that may be satisfactory for you, but not for me. — Banno

All I can say is religion, since it's essentially cosmic in proportion and scale, provides the greatest meaning a life could have. What better way to purpose one's life than by contributing to, in some way, the universe itself and God it's creator? It doesn't get bigger than that, right?

Just last night I was listening to an audio on Socrates' trial. True, the great luminary of western philosophy was charged with two counts of misconduct - impiety & corrupting the youth - and, as per the analysis presented, Socrates refused to accept Gods who were as flawed as humans, the Greek pantheon consisting of divine beings who "suffered" from human weaknesses like anger, jealousy, vengefulness, etc. This just didn't sit well with Socrates, the audio doesn't explain why?

Too, Socrates was no friend to democracy and preferred "alternatives" :wink: to what he probably saw as a group of ill-informed, poorly-trained, peasants trying to make decisions on matters they had not the slightest clue about, a not too flattering description of democracy and also the Greek gods with all their endless quarrels. The greek religion, it seems, was just too democratic for Socrates' tastes if you know what I mean.




:chin: Hmmmm Celestial North Korea! Socrates' dream state!

infinitesimals to be precise
— TheMadFool

I suppose physical space might. I'm not saying it does.

But infinitesimals are rarely used as such in math that is not non-standard analysis. However, just recently I employed a step to prove a theorem of sorts in which a second order term was ignored, similar to NSA. — jgill

I thought calculus was about infinitesimals - a controversial concept no doubt but if memory serves, two mathematicians defined it so that it ceased to be an issue.

terminate and exterminate — Prishon

Terminate one person. Exterminate an entire group.

Lee Harvey Oswald is to Adolf Hitler as terminate is to exterminate.

One might say that existential meaning is what we orient to while symbols are what we use to convey meaning. Symbols (or words) do not merely refer (i.e. point) - they can (and often) do something.

So yes, we can mean different things by the symbols we employ, but it isn’t equivocation to treat what meaning we convey with symbols as the same sort of thing that we mean by orienting (or living, if you prefer). — Ennui Elucidator

@Banno

I wasn't trying to say you were equivocating as such. A frisson of excitement passed through my body when I realized that the question, "what is the meaning of life?" is to find one's purpose which is to discover how one might best use what is a brief sojourn in the land of the living. Needless to say, religion provided one of the most satisfying answers to that existential query.

However, this was not meant to last - religion lost ground and nothing substantive took its place and in that vacuum, life became meaningless but that's another story.

Now, juxtapose that with Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of meaning (of words) as use. A striking resemblance, no?

It's as if "what is the meaning of life?" and "what is the meaning of words?" were two different ways of asking the same question, "what is meaning?" I'm sorry but I'm experiencing analysis paralysis. That's all I got for you. Hope it's helpful.

Was that a lie to quit the subject? — Prishon

The subject: quit lying

A latter day Archimedes, I shout, "eureka!" — Michael Zwingli

At full volume!

Linguistic meaning is about what words refer to. Existential meaning is about purpose (use), life's purpose to be precise. Two entirely different concepts.

However, the great Ludwig Wittgenstein was of the opinion that meaning is use. :chin:

@Banno. Heeellllllp!

"Lord, please situate a table between me and my enemies." — Valentinus

With food & wine on it if it's not too much to ask. :lol:

Here's the problem: If you accept white lies, you must either, at a minimum, condone or, at a maximum, embrace black truths (hurtful truths); they are, after all, mirror images of each other (flipped across two axes). Is everyone ok with this?

Planck-time (10exp-43(s)) — Prishon

Should have implications for Calculus, infinitesimals to be precise. What say you?

Explain the difference between hallucinations and patterns, pareidolia and non-pareidolia, and we have something to discuss.

Page 1 of this thread. — 180 Proof

So, I was close to nailing it but missed by a mile. :grin:

The relationship between the brain and the mind is a significant challenge both philosophically and scientifically. This is because of the difficulty in explaining how mental activities, such as thoughts and emotions, can be implemented by physical structures such as neurons and synapses, or by any other type of physical mechanism. This difficulty was expressed by Gottfried Leibniz in the analogy known as Leibniz's Mill" — Manuel

Argument From Incredulity

How does pattern recognition happen? — unenlightened

Perception & Memory

1. Perceive A, parts & whole. Record in memory

2. Perceive B, parts & whole. Cross-check perception of B with memory of A. Match! Pattern. No match! No pattern.

Ask Nagase — 180 Proof

Page redirect, huh?

Brazil's a covid hotspot. I hope Nagase's alive & well. He taught me a coupla things, one being, as I was just beginning my foray into logic, that what I was struggling with was only baby logic, his words. I instantly realized I had a long way to go, a long, long way to go. How deep is the rabbit hole? God knows, I'm still falling...

Either way, definition or claim, it's not an empirical statement. — 180 Proof

Can we formulate an empirical version of logical positivism's thesis statement? If no, why?

All I know is this: The Gynecologist dilemma for Taliban.

Either the Taliban must educate its women or the Taliban must allow men doctors to examine women patients.

The mullahs will never solve this dilemma. :rofl:

Its not that difficult to understand! Everyone says"oöhhh... Quantum field theory..." but actually its very easy.
now — Prishon

I'll pass...for now. Thanks.

We can never be sure that there's no pattern:

1. xxxxx...obvious pattern: x repeats
2. xy...no pattern but wait a bit and it might be xyxyxy
3. str...no pattern but it could be strstrstr
4. pktq...no pattern but possible that pktqpktqpktq
.
.
.
No matter how patternless something appears to be, it might actually possess one, you just have to wait. How long? I have no idea.

Beyond my ken I'm afraid. Good day.

inanimate matter -> animate matter -> animate, thinking matter (us) -> the attaining of the Absolute

That's why the ETs are observing us, to see if we can do it. Hence all the wild UFO sensor readings on US military aircraft — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're one of those guys!

To ask a living organism to conceive of death is like using a pen to draw a picture of itself, broken into pieces. Possible.

Okay - you’re going to have explain that. — Possibility

No, I won't. :grin:

Whence logical positivism? 'Verificationism' is not self-consistent enough to verify itself (i.e. "only empirical statements are meaningful" is not an empirical statement and, in its own terms, therefore is not "meaningful" – self-refuting). — 180 Proof

I think it's a definition rather than a claim. Help!

The purpose of wisdom is to improve one's life, and that includes improving one's socio-economic status. Agree? — baker

With that improved "...socioeconomic status..." to Batman...

Yeah, which is why gutters and prisons are full of enlightened people! — baker

You may have a point there but do consider "gutters" and prisons" metaphorically. :chin:

Only in the sense that any information we receive is incomplete. Not testing the world - testing our predictive representations of the world. It’s not about whether my predictions ‘come true’ or not, but about whether they are useful in determining future interaction. Incorrect predictions can be just as useful as correct ones. — Possibility

Jordan Peterson!

If logical positivism implies that one particular hypothesis is correct then it fails because more than one hypothesis may fit observation.

Since we can't zero in on one correct hypothesis, the next best option is to ensure that we're not incorrect (fallibilism).

The basic idea seems to be that since we can never know if we're right, at least make sure we aren't wrong.

I don’t think that’s what Tim IS saying, but I’ll let him clarify that one. Suffice to say, our minds determine predictions we make in relation to the world, and any relative regularities we perceive construct patterns in our predictions, which inform our actions.

How do you think we perceive relative regularities in a process? How do we even consolidate a process at all? By constructing an abstract representation from a series of periodic observations in the past. So are we really seeing the pattern ‘out there’, or are we perceiving it in our mind and then attributing it to our predictions about the world? — Possibility

I'm happy, happy enough if you agree that patterns can be used to make predictions because that means you're testing the world to see if the pattern you abstracted is correct or not, correct in the sense whether your predictions come true or not. In effect you're acknowledging the existence of an "out there" in this.

(con't) ... AIs engineer grey goo-like nanoviruses released into all of the major urban sprawls on the planet which target only influential people – "movers and shakers" at all strata (as per their online presences / reputations / networks with other influential people) – making them symbiotic hosts the AIs can use as avatars to gradually repurpose global civilization in order to execute AIs' more-than-human (yet unknown / unintelligible to humanity until it's too late to stop it :eyes:) Plan. — 180 Proof

Scary and also exciting! I feel dinosaurish!

No, seriously - where the hell did that association come from?

If you’re going to make comparisons like that, you’d better be prepared to back it up. — Possibility

Forget that I said anything at all.

Let's get down to business, shall we? Patterns are repetitions either of entities or processes:

1. Entity pattern: &, &, &,... [& is the entity being repeated]

2. Process pattern: 1, 2, 3,...[+1 is the proccess being repeated]


Now, @tim wood claims that patterns are mental (all in the head), we could even say it's projected onto the world (look up pareidolia) by our minds - I guess tim wood means to say we see what our minds want to see. However, that means there's no necessity for the world to behave in ways that correspond to the patterns we seem to discern in it unless tim wood wants to claim that our minds have some causal power over the world, able to make it do what we feel it should do (pattern), a preposterous claim, don't you think? I can, for example, imagine a pattern in the world, this pattern being (say) adding nitric acid to plants make it grow but me imagining that hypothetical pattern doesn't seem to make that pattern actual.

God: Omnibenevolent, Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omniindolent

least resistance principle, including both space and time — Prishon

Can both be had together? The intuitive understanding seems to be that the shorter (space) the faster (time) but Fermat's principle shows that a shorter time may actually require a longer distance.

We may have them now. How would we know? They'd be too smart to pass a Turing Test and "out" themselves. Watch the movie Ex Machina and take note of the ending. If the Singularity can happen, maybe it's already happened (c1990) and the Dark Web is AIs' "Fortress of Solitude", until ... :victory: :nerd: — 180 Proof

In a sense, we are the singularity: inanimate matter -> animate matter -> animate, thinking matter (us) -> ???

:lol:

I had to look up those words. First I thought you meant a slith or a woman doing it with all.

Both a sloth and glutton are deadly indeed! Considerer them mathematical anomalies... — Prishon

God the Father!