Thank you for these passages. The Petrarch one is what I had in mind about renaissance. Your comments are on point.

@Bob Ross
I understand that you said "positively assert anything".
There is more than one way to skin a cat. It's all positive if you asked me.

What the fuck happened to thread? How did this become a troll enclave?

It is not a weaker position because it doesn't positively assert anything — Bob Ross

Incorrect. Atheists do assert something: God does not exist.

Zeus does exist. — EugeneW

In mythology no less, sir.

There is no "should or shouldn't" in math. Use "or".

Who said that? I was referring to the article you linked, which referenced 6 BCE, and then proceeded to describe the pygmies as non-spiritual, non-superstitious, non-religious, and no concept of a god or gods.

:halo:

I find that article suspect because pygmies would not have been able to make a statement, god does not exist. If they didn't have a concept of spirituality or deity, they would not have been able to make that statement -- which is essential to be an atheist, no?

I mean, they could not be called atheists. Maybe something else -- but not atheists.

reductive Reason — Gnomon

You mean bone-headed, dismissive reason.

Sex is like money: some people have a lot of it, most people have some but nothing to brag about, and some don't have any. — _db

Except that sex gets stale, money does not.

There is polytheistic. Belief in all gods.

I guess the thing is, the onus is on the atheists, not the theists.

Theists: God exists, we believe in god.

Atheists: God does not exist, we don't believe in the existence of god.

Note that the atheists deny the existence of god, not that they would not believe it if god exists. If god truly exists, the atheists would turn into theists.

To me atheism does not make sense. What it tells me is, atheists don't believe in something that never existed in the first place. It's a circular argument.

It seems like a poor use of phrasing many people use. — TiredThinker

It is not. At least not mathematically. "Times" is the inverse of division. Try, ten times weaker. Does that sound like the phrase "5 times fewer"?

A rebuttal to the naturalistic view of mind -- freedom in thinking is only an illusion - is this: how do the adherents of naturalism determined this "illusion"? Did they arrive at this conclusion through the brain processes? In that case, their conclusion is also an illusion.

They cannot assert that we do not have freedom in thinking because their conclusion is begging the question.

Okay. NATO represents the west.

You can't negotiate with bad faith. It's why the whole thing started anyway: a party that makes clear that they are only willing to deal in bad faith makes thereby clear that they understand only one thing: lethal force. — baker

I'm not following what's going on in the war. Who did bad faith?

True. Is that your propaganda?

Well, think fast.

:grin:
Are you gonna be nice now?

I hope some of your late grandma's wisdom rubbed off on you. — Agent Smith

And on you.

While I’m hesitant to accept this, I won’t reject it either, without some proper argument to judge it by. — Mww

If I've come across an explanation I will post it here.

Maybe you could start a thread on that. lol. How did we achieve self-awareness when there was none before. I'm guessing evolution and language development. But still, I'm not sure about that either.

You should allow little breaks.

.from which the deduction of the self must have already been established, insofar as there must already be that to which the understanding of “we” belongs. Hence the presupposed necessary singular subject. — Mww

While I haven't explained how we broke away from the collective awareness, the plurality, to self-consciousness, I'm telling you that there was no reasoning or deduction that went into it. Rational thinking of the "I" did not happen before when there was only the "we". When Descartes, for example, wrote the meditation, he wasn't starting from the beginning of self-awareness. Descartes, after all, was operating in the modern world, where our knowledge was already sophisticated and advance.

Can’t have an understanding without that which understands. That the self to which understanding belongs, represented as “I”, is only a speculative metaphysical determination of pure reason. — Mww

Yes, I admit we're both struggling and grappling with this idea that humans didn't begin thinking in the "I" tense. It's hard to understand that we didn't have this. What we did have in the primordial understanding of everything was the "we".

The only comparison I could think of is an animal which has every faculty of awareness -- the pack, the surrounding, where to get food, the hunt. Except, no self-awareness. If this animal sees its reflection, it would not think, "That's me". That animal could only think in terms of the pack, the many, its family.

:up:

Sadly, naturalism has some harsh words against freedom of thinking. To the followers of naturalism, freedom is only an illusion. Some of the reasons given are : it's only biological, it's a collection of nerves and cells, and it's physiological. Among them: Stephen Hawking and Alex Rosenberg.

But the placement (where freedom resides) of their contention is, to me, misplaced. To them, because of our biological constitution and the chemicals that come with it, we are only given the illusion that we have the freedom in thinking.

I think this is again the reductionist and mechanical views of metaphysics, which I disagree with.

.

:up:

Hah! Indeed. Thanks.

Here, I pasted a passage from the book:

The freedom which therefore cannot be encountered in the operari must lie in the esse. It has been a fundamental error of all ages, an unwarranted inversion (hysteron-proteron), to attribute necessity to the esse and freedom to the operari. The converse is true: freedom lies in the esse alone, but the operari follows necessarily from it and the motives.
From what we do we know what we are. On this, and not on the pre sumed liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, rests the conscious ness of responsibility and the moral tendency of life. Every thing depends on what one is; what he does will follow therefrom of itself, as a necessary corollary. The consciousness of self-determination and originality which undeniably ac companies all our acts, and by virtue of which they are our acts, is therefore not deceptive, in spite of their dependence on motives.

But its true content reaches further than the acts and begins higher up. In truth it includes our being and essence itself, from which all acts proceed necessarily when motives arise. In this sense that consciousness of self-determination and originality, as well as the consciousness of responsibility accompanying our actions, can be compared to a hand which points to an object more remote than the one nearer by to which it seems to be pointing. In a word: man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily.
…
Consequently, my exposition does not eliminate freedom. It merely moves it out, namely, out of the area of simple actions, where it demonstrably cannot be found, up to a region which lies higher, but is not so easily accessible to our knowledge. In other words, freedom is transcendental. And this is also the sense in which I should like to interpret the statement of Malebranche,3 la liberte est un mystere, under whose aegis the present dissertation has attempted to solve the problem set by the Royal Society.

esse = essence or nature
operari = action

Except understanding itself presupposes a necessary singular subject, which couldn’t be any other that an “I”. “We” only indicates a multiplicity of singular subjects, doesn’t it? — Mww

So then the one thing we could deduce from it is that there was no understanding of self prior, since there was no understanding of singular subject. It's a primordial phenomenon that there was no "I" consciousness. It's hard to wrap one's head around it but that's what philosophers have posited.

I'm not sure Descartes declared we had free will. — Philosophim

No, he didn't. Not in the sense you're thinking. But he demonstrated in cogito that our thinking can be.

What does freedom mean to you? — Philosophim

I am in the group that believes there is free will in thought. Like I said in my OP, we tend to focus on action -- that our actions are determined. But if these philosophers posit that thinking is the springboard to action, and that there's freewill in thinking, let's start there. Aristotle's insistence on deliberation as future-oriented thinking implies the freedom of the will. We think of possibilities, we think of different scenarios, and we think logically. For example, there are truths (principles) to discover. If we do not have that freedom in thought, we would never discover these principles. Apparently, he believed that we could.

What's crucial to understand that there is an agenda, and objective to be reached with the actions.

We have to understand that the act of propaganda is used by a multitude of actors. — ssu

"Propaganda" and "agenda" are words that aren't used by the government or nation or state -- only the critics used them. Because they are politically negative charged ideas.

This argument that freedom happens in the thinking (the act of thinking) is not just articulated by Descartes and Aristotle, but also by the likes of J. S. Mill. But Mill used the society or group as the location to bring out this proposed freedom by the individual.

Yes, that's a good one. I also remember reading about talking to plants make them thrive more. This is a scientific experiment conducted by qualified experts, so I will not argue against its validity.

Another findings -- babies in the womb benefit from music and mothers talking to them. Again, I don't know how valid this finding is .

Are you arguing our brains do not change as we age leading to greater wisdom with age? — Athena

I'm not sure I understand this point. Please clarify as to your reaction to what I said regarding the change in wisdom.
My point in my previous post was: the enlightenment happened. Now it's our task to examine what lasting effects did enlightenment provide? Because you seem to say we should bring back the enlightenment -- it isn't an organization or an institution that could be established again. And why do we need to bring it back? It doesn't look like it had a lasting effect if we're still unhappy with the state of affairs.

The renaissance -- you're thinking that the search for scholastic knowledge, rediscovering of the ancients writings, and other arts and politics ideas are sought or willingly craved by the greater population. No. It didn't work that way. The thinkers, the historians, the scholars were the ones. They were what they were before the renaissance and because of that, this renaissance thinking happened.

My practical question for this thread, is why do Anti-Metaphysics Trolls, waste their valuable on-line time, trying to defeat something that they assume to be already dead, and although perhaps a ghostly nuisance, cannot by their definition, make any difference in the Real world? — Gnomon

I'm thinking cause they're choleric -- easily irritated. So, your posts are doing their job just fine.

Theories of Preception :
The four main bottom-up theories of form and pattern perception are direct perception, template theories, feature theories, and recognition-by-components theory. Bottom-up theories describe approaches where perception starts with the stimuli whose appearance you take in through your eye.
https://philpapers.org/browse/the-causal-theory-of-perception — Gnomon

Yup! Interesting. Thanks for the link.

Emission theory (vision) :
Emission theory or extramission theory (variants: extromission) or extromissionism is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by eye beams ... — Gnomon

:grin:
Yeah, this is the superman theory of perception. Where we give off beams from our eyes and we see objects behind walls.

:shade:
This is exhausting. Why do I feel like I'm in the dating scene again? Cause this is the convo you get when you're in one. Just letting you know that.

Okay, what's the connection of this clip again?

I can't read minds. I'm not telephatic. If you want something from me, you need to tell me in words.

What doesn't compute? Spit it out!

What is it?

I continuously think about these things and I just want to know other people's perspectives. If there is a chance to be relatively happy and cause minimal suffering in the world through living like a monk why would we not do it? Is it because temporary/materialistic pleasures (new cars, fancy computers, good food, sex) ARE NEEDED for some people's happiness? Are things like music and movies/stories/art needed for your happiness? If these things were not available in the world and everyone meditated, socialised, volunteered and lived simply all day, there would be MUCH less non-human and potentially human suffering AND we could still possibly attain happiness? — Troyster

You probably need to draw the line between what you call ascetic (monk living) and living with just the basic necessities, which many ordinary people are able to do. I have already mentioned my own experience in another thread, but I will repeat it again here. I lived the bare minimum when I stayed away from the city and the grind -- I was still wired, meaning connected to internet and phone. It was great. That is, if you don't have to worry about bills. So it is realistic to think of living happily (no anxiety and worries).

:razz:
Good one.