I don't see how that works, though. Augustine explains in De Trinitate, that the sum of the Son and the Father is not greater than the Holy Spirit. In other words, it's one thing with three faces. In semiotics, the sign, object, and interpretant are clearly distinct things. We aren't supposed to imagine them as one. So it's not really the same thing, is it?

What this means is that "is a philosopher" has changed from being an essence of Parmenides to being a description.

Being born in Elea, Magna Graecia is not a necessary truth of Parmenides but a contingent truth. Parmenides could have been born in Constantinople, he may not have written the poem dactylic hexameter and he may have been a statesman rather than a philosopher

In the expression, "Parmenides is a philosopher", the copula "is" is not establishing "philosopher" as a fixed and static essence of Parmenides, but rather describing a contingent rather than necessary truth. — RussellA

Philosopher isn't metaphysically necessary to Parmenides, but if I refer to Parmenides, the philosopher, it would appear that anyone who isn't a philosopher is not the person I'm talking about. So I can turn philosopher into an essential feature by way of my intention. Kripke introduced the idea of possible worlds as a tool for talking about that kind of essence.

It means to be inclined toward luxury

It's a good question. Freedom and power were traditionally understood in terms of actuality, potency itself being nothing, and so inherently most static in that it is wholly incapable of moving itself. There is often a reversal here though. Potency becomes least static, freedom becomes the potential to do or be anything. Yet this only makes sense if potency is in some way actual, if it can spontaneously actualize itself, e.g., explanations of our contingent reality as simply 'brute face,' or of reality as primarily, of fundamentally will, a sort of sheer willing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you think of life as having to do with freedom and power? I mean, algae don't really have either one, do they? I think life is more about an organism's purpose to reinforce itself in the face of entropy.

If we have a block universe, change is just about the way consciousness is configured.

If stasis precludes life? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Would it?

But once the choice is made, there is a truth. That's the point of the choice. — Ludwig V

Yep

That seems about right to me. But I would have to add that change and stasis are relative. Heraclitus' river has constantly changing water relative to the bed and banks. But the water itself, not to mention other factors, cause the bed and banks to change constantly relative to the landscape it flows through. — Ludwig V

Right. We could pick a point in the steam and build a frame of reference around it so that the surrounding landscape is in motion around the stream. There's no truth of the matter about which one is in motion. It's a matter of choice.

By the same token, it is not true that the whole universe is in motion, waiting for us to pick a frame of reference. Again, there is no truth regarding change and stasis until we orient ourselves.

I agree.

hat is a good summary of what we get from Einstein. Do you want to treat physics as the ground floor of your understanding of the world, — Joshs

I don't have a ground floor. I have a very principled lack of ground floor.

like me, see Einstein’s thinking as the expression of an era of philosophy which has since been surpassed — Joshs

It sounds like you're saying you understand Special Relativity, you just think it's been surpassed by something else. I think we could find common ground if you explained what you see as its flaw?

Einstein said all motion is relative to a chosen frame of reference. You declare a point to be unchanging at the same time you perceive change.

It's not that everything is changing before you declare a frame of reference. There simply is no change without stasis.

Can there be certainty without stasis? — Joshs

Can there be change without stasis? Aren't they two sides of the same coin?

This does not follow. Wittgensteinian linguistics is metaphysically agnostic because it refuses to speak of it. It does not hint one way or the other what lurks within. It talks about language and what can be expressed through language.

How could his theory possibly hold sway if it were defeated by simply pointing out we all have internal feelings? What he's getting at is the futility in discussing that which cannot be discussed. — Hanover

Imagine a realm of pure sensation. Think of it as a dark ocean and the mind is a flashlight, bringing this in view, focusing on that sound, or just relaxing without focus as colors bleed into each other, patterns appear, tones mix with undescribed feelings like the earth touching your feet.

Wittgenstein asks how language could be used to nail down some section of this ever turning ocean. If we picked a word, like red, how could we confidently say it properly attaches to this rather than that? What we can do is look to the way people behave. The word has no meaning that can endure over time until we see that it's attached to that rose, that berry, those lips, by the actions people take.

So Wittgenstein was not saying we don't have sensations. He's saying that words like pain don't gain their meaning by referring to a particular section of the ocean of sensations. There's no way to throw a dart of reference and hit something in that realm. The meaning comes from our primal connections with one another.

Do you agree with that?

Assume the feeling I have when I'm at the park I self refer to as "burj." I speak this word commonly to myself, often out loud, but no one ever hears it. What this means is that I cannot check for my consistency in use of the word and it cannot be verfied that today's feeling of burj is yesterday's. I engage in ten years of this self-talk of burj, and on year 10, it is discovered that the park had audio-taped my coversations unbeknownst to anyone.

On this day, a community listens to my recorded speech and it decides I have used burj consistently and subject to a rule. It is now a word retroactively. Before, not.

This makes the point again: The reason "burj" was not a word yesterday isn't because it was simply isolated in my head. What made it not a word was that no community had evaluated it. In this thought experiment, the community did not get into my head, but it was the usage of the word that fell into the previously silent world. Use arrived late, well after the word spoken, but its use made the non-word of yesterday the word of today once it was used.

The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it? — Hanover

I think the 10 years of talking to yourself made it a word, though as you say, of somewhat dubious meaning. The group who hears the recordings will debate amongst themselves what it means. If they come to a consensus, it's probably because of that one lady who talked really loudly while other people were trying to say something, so she got her way because they were like, fine, whatever.

I just assume your functional consciousness is accompanied by qualia. In other words, as your body navigates around the park, there is something it's like to see, hear, smell, and feel the world around you. I assume you're that way because I am. There may be a little bit of dubiousness to naming various aspects of the experience, but that's par for the course for language, most of the time.

The people who introduce doubt about qualia are usually aiming for eliminative materialism. They're basically saying we're like robots who claim to be more than robots, but we're wrong, we're just robots.

:up:

:up:

We had made all the arrangements to visit, then covid-19 happened. — RussellA

I read a biography of Catherine a long time ago. I'd love to go. Some other lifetime. :smile:

Maybe. I don't know.

It's a quote from a french movie called Pandemonium.

I don't know, but I betcha I know what color this building is painted: it's goluboy. This is Catherine's Palace in St. Petersburg.

I agree you can see them. Without the numbers, you would have a harder time picking one out reliably. Some people would be able to do it. Some couldn't.

BTW, this is a documentary on the color blue. It's more fascinating than I would have thought. :razz:

It would indeed be strange if we could only perceive those things in the world that we happen to have names for. It would mean that if we had no name for something, then we couldn't perceive it, and if we couldn't perceive it then we couldn't attach a name to it. — RussellA

I think it's more that naming helps fix the mind on something, and remember it. If your visual field is filled with color, you'll remember the aspects of it that you have associated with a name.

Humanity is evil by nature and must atone for its sins.

For the most part, the far right is not interested in reform. They believe the establishment has failed.
— frank

Seems so for the far-left also. This is to be expected, and I'm unsure why there are discussions about understanding absolutist and destructive ideology (on it's face, anyhow) from either side. Why not ignore hte idiots and move forward with reasonable people in the discussion. But that's a pipe dream, I know, and not necessarily 'right'. — AmadeusD

Exactly. The far right and left have become so similar that we might expect to start seeing them voting as a block against the establishment, represented by Democrats.

What do you mean by "move forward with reasonable people in the discussion?"

My main focus these days is futurism, like around the year 2100. I think climate will be one of the main drivers of events at that point, so I watch Trump's attempts to make the US independent from the rest of the world, his statements about annexing Canada and Greenland. I think it's super ironic that Trump will probably be thought of as visionary one day. Life is strange.

As for wokism, it's in things like a recent failed Disney movie called Snow White, in which the titular character was played by a fairly dark-skinned Latina, and according to this actress, we shouldn't think of this folktale as a love story, because Snow White doesn't need a man. :grin:

Is that what Nick Land’s accelerationism is about? — Joshs

Yeah. For the most part, the far right is not interested in reform. They believe the establishment has failed.

What are the ends the criticisms are a means to? — Joshs

Criticisms from Dark Enlightenment people aren't supposed to accomplish anything. The downside to wokism is viewed as self-correcting, so if anything, the admonition would be to accelerate wokism. Go faster. Accelerate capitalism. Stop dragging this out.

:up:

I think English speakers have the same thing with pink and red. It's hard to grasp that pink is light red because we never call it that. We have potent and distinct emotional associations with each, so it's almost a little magical that adding white to red makes pink.

I think habit has a lot to do with the way we describe things. Habit actually configures highways through the nervous system, so maybe language (not just the syntax, but the whole history and emotional anchoring) influences what a person is conscious of.

I’d rather audaciously stumble into the unknown. — Joshs

The human race needs that too. We temper one another.

:up:

I think it is the eventual fate of all our best ideas to appear from the vantage of hindsight as the ravings of idiots. — Joshs

If it's inevitable, we should value all the more the restraint our conservative nature gives us: first, do no harm.

Yes. Lobotomies were performed in the U.S. for 40 years, sanctioned by all the proper scientific authorities. What’s the point of calling them idiots? — Joshs

Fair enough. Wasn't your point that lobotomy lead to progress, and so is to some extent redeemed by that? And likewise, the mistakes made while transitioning pre-pubescents should be seen as worthwhile? Or did I misunderstand you?

Of course the difference between trans therapy and lobotomy was than the policies were rushed into place before the chance for any society-wide debate. Did this happen because of the decisions of idiots, or because this commonly happens when a new conception appears on the scene which blurs the lines between the medical, the psychological, the sociological and the religious and results in polarizing political debates which draw in the medical establishment when they are not prepared to navigate the political minefield. — Joshs

I didn't say the activists who ran the transitioning facilities were idiots. I said we were. The whole society took a vacation from reason. It's a drama that echoes the eugenics craze in the US. That also started with pseudo-science that was caught up in a campaign to engineer a better human. If there is a Spirit of Progress, this is its dark side.

Was lobotomy idiotic? — Joshs

Yes. Have you read much about the advent of transitioning pre-pubescent people?

Lobotomy was once a thing. But it led to progress. After all, we still use ECT. — Joshs

We aren't going to be making progress on transitioning youths. Both the US and the UK (the two countries that mysteriously became manic about it) have realized that it's a bad idea.

At this point progress means waking up to how idiotic we were.

Imagine that we decide to become woke about the issue of vaccines. There is controversy. It's being said that we've slept long enough, allowing these substances to be injected, even though we all knew big pharma was raking in the profits from it. We'll take that as a sign that we need to reassess this.

How would you want to start this reassessment?

I don’t have answers to your questions, but I would agree that cultural reassessment comes with costs, as does the time before it. — Antony Nickles

It comes with a cost if it's joined to aggressive social engineering. The cost is unnecessary pain and suffering as we learn from our mistakes and try to back up. I think the tide is turning against wokism because much of it was never tested for reasonableness before it was established as the bar we all need to be reaching for.

I’m not sure anyone imagined trans as anything but a preference adults had, and that it had something to do with wearing women’s clothes and padding a bra, so I’d say no, the interests and needs of young trans wasn’t in the cultural awareness. — Antony Nickles

I think the problem is that the interests and needs of young trans people was created by woke culture. We now know that gender dyphoria is not a sign that a child needs puberty blockers and surgery. That both the UK and the US tripped over themselves providing that kind of "therapy", without research, was a result of the power that wokism had for a minute. That minute has now passed, I think. This is not a backlash from the right. It's just a recognition that we screwed up.

The question is: was this catastrophe just the cost of progress? Or is it a sign of something gravely wrong under the hood of wokism?

. I think it is just a different kind of moral issue when our culture is overlooking something — Antony Nickles

Do you think of support for trans youths as something that was previously overlooked? Many (both right and progressive) now see it as a problem created by woke culture.

Folk here are almost desperate for qualia to make sense. — Banno

It makes sense to me.

It's just a way to refer to the part of consciousness that isn't covered by functionality.

So, what's your solution to this? — kirillov

Life is suffering because consciousness depends on a story arc in which pain and suffering is overcome. The end of the story is the resolution. Satisfaction is death. This is Schopenhauer's point.

Realizing that the world doesn't need to be saved, that it's exactly what it's supposed to be isn't armchair philosophy.