.

I think he aids the theist posit of associating 'good' with 'god,' and he ignores the many storytelling traditions which also assign such words as evil/jealous/vengeful/angry etc to god(s). — universeness

Good point ! Looking back on the era of the Young Hegelians and before, there's a definite purification of the God concept so that the obviously irrational and offensive stuff is removed. So you have a crude concept moving toward a rational concept toward finally a replacement of God by an awakened humanity who realizes that God was its dream of what it should/could be.

I certainly feel and almost 'know' the 'linkage,' between all of us that you infer. — universeness

Nice ! We using the ordinary 'magic' of language for that right now. Amazing ability we've evolved biologically, culturally, and technologically (given the help of the screens and wires.)

I agree, the term ghost has no significance for me as a 'physicalist, — universeness

My metaphor is misleading, I see. The 'ghost' just refers to the popular idea of a solitary consciousness. One philosopher (Ryle) called this 'the ghost in the machine.' The far out version would be : how do you know that you are a singular person? Why are you an 'I' and not a 'we' or a 'this' ? We inherit ways of talking and thinking, and we take them as if they are more than that.

For you, what is this 'something bigger,' is sounds like panpsychism to me. — universeness

It really as something as simple as science or literature or music or philosophy. To do these things are to interact with something bigger than the individual. For Feuerbach, there's nothing 'bigger' than the human species. God, for him, was just a projection of the best parts of ourselves (a giant nice daddy with infinite knowledge), and humanism is just us reeling that projection back in and building Heaven on earth.

Updated the post, added something I hope you'll like.

I often find a lot of your typing to be rather cryptic and you have to toil a little to follow your meaning but that's just down to my own preference for 'plain talk'. — universeness

I try to adjust my talk to the conversation, but sometimes I can't help having too much fun. There is a beauty to the simple style a person can find in Hemingway, for example. The Sun Also Rises is great. The Feuerbach stuff can be summed up by saying that 'God' is just the good stuff in us, our thoughts and feelings, and that that is enough. We participate in something bigger than us when we plug in to the rest of the species through thinking and music and art and so on. The great geniuses leave a stain in the 'tribal memory.' I also like the idea of a flame that leaps from melting candle to melting candle. Our bodies are the candles, and the flame ,which we think of as ourselves, is just as much made of all the people who came before. After all, who invented the very language we think in ? It was developed over time, with individuals leaving little 'stains' of their minds to become parts of the minds of those not yet born. To me this helps us feel less alone and less afraid to die. We're not really little ghosts trapped in a box. We are linked through language and feeling. The box is something like an illusion. To me there is nothing supernatural in all of this. It all boils down to thought and feeling. It doesn't big us the big answers. It doesn't save us from death. But it connects us in life.

I suppose I will just have to persevere, regardless of my perceived frustration with the language approach of others.
So, carry on my cryptic friend! Your good heart seems to shine through anyway. — universeness

Thanks ! Your good heart is also apparent, my friend.

Ah! A meeting to his signs! It gets nice and confusing now! The reign as a sign. Or the reign being a sign? Or reign just rain and a sign a sain? Language is magic! Seems words speak to you! — EugeneW

The 'spine' of that sleptogram is: He failed to give a meaning to his signs. My cheery theory is that we never know exactly what we are talking about. We say the magic word 'real' and hope it sticks to something. We do the same with 'meaning' and 'god' and 'truth.' Yet clearly the system as a whole is helping swarm the planet, so the semantic resolution is sufficient for practical work. I'm sure math helps, being the great exception (ignoring the umbilical court that runs from mathworld to realword).

It's 'worse worse worse' as the dork prints omelette sad, with a myth flu of missing chief. ('words, words, words' as the dark prince Hamlet said, with...) Or 'threw a gas tar glee.' As far as words speaking to me, I try to listen to them from all directions. I've loved poetry since I was a teenager.

How to climb back? Once in mathematical heaven, one should just leap in good faith? — EugeneW

I don't know. It's a beautiful metaphor, this ladder you just need once. If one were to judge just by this passage, one might imagine a proof of the impossibility of proof, a formalism annihilating the power formalism. With more context, the real target might be the fantasy that we can build a little machine, once and for all, that captures and dominates beauty and truth.

What a bible passage!

But suppose Baal was asleep? And God took his chance? — EugeneW

Right. And the people are just worshiping power, not virtue, in that piece of the story. They'd worship an air conditioner. If Baal was asleep, I guess it's 'you snooze you lose.'

I am a strong advocate of the golden rule as the prime directive, 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' — universeness

Pretty solid rule indeed.

An old description of 'spiritual' is merely to be 'animated' or to move about. Carl Sagan often used the term in this way to pour cold water in its association with 'supernatural' but I think most people today DO still associate the term with the supernatural. — universeness

Yes indeed. Time's change. I like reading old books. It frees my mind from being stuck in today's little vocabulary. I also notice that many (not all) problems that seem new are not new at all.

You have a strong imperative towards what I would consider 'humanism.'
You add to my hopes for a better future for all of us by such typings! — universeness

Thank you for your kind words!

Here's a hint:

The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method. — went gone slime

I guess you could say that he felt to give a meeting to his shines is self-referential.

Might as well throw in:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

I've never heard of Tucker Carlson. — Gregory A

No kidding? The dude is the loudest voice on the right, last I checked.

If Richard Dawkins were a non-believer in a god/s we would (mostly) not know who he is. — Gregory A

The Selfish Gene is an exciting/good book (you might like it, given your interest in chromesones), and I think he was already famous as a popularizer of evolutionary science and felt that rationality and science needed to be defended. Just as you may feel males need defending. If you read his book, you'll see why males and females automatically stay just about balanced. It's game-theoretical.

I see as the foundation for Left and Right, our 'X' and our 'Y' chromosomes. — Gregory A

There are plenty of men on the left, plenty of women on the right. A war of the sexes sounds like a fortunately unrealistic nightmare. Some of us are married and/or have great friendships with women (or at least hope to at some point.)

Don't let a comfortable existence lull you into a false sense of security, I'm a theist yet can still foresee terrible outcomes, you, a non-believer should have no excuses. — Gregory A

I'm genuinely concerned that you might be troubled in some way. From my perspective, you are worried about something that's as unlikely as aliens attacking the planet. Please seek help if you are having violent fantasies. Seriously. I know women, lots of 'em, and they aren't scheming against us ! They love us more than we love ourselves sometimes.

Also seems unfortunate that your theism isn't more of a comfort. Personally I've never been tempted to mess with beliefs that seem to be working for people. I'm only critical of others' beliefs on philosophy forums, since that's why we're here, or at least philosophy includes for many people.

The 'scientistic' approach is simply that objective knowledge is the only valid kind: that what is subjective is merely personal, your or my business, certainly not of interest to science, although of course only science is able to say what, precisely, it, or anything, is. — Wayfarer

And ? We've got 'scientism' and 'woo woo,' a couple of cartoons mostly. This seems like a digression, unless I fit into 'scientism' somehow (which'd surprise me, since I think 'matter' or 'the physical' often functions with the same unnoticed emptiness or ambiguity as 'mind.')

I'm not particularly interested in Wittgenstein — Wayfarer

Probably won't be able to sway you, but in my philosophical journey the semantic issue has bubbled up dialectically. What is the meaning of 'being'? 'real'? of 'meaning' itself ? I think what's hidden from us is the ineradicable ambiguity of our words, including of course our master words. An overstatement of my suspicion would be that we don't know what we are talking about and we don't know that we don't know. But we do know well enough to have kept up the game for thousands of years. Wittgenstein among others persuades me toward a this kind of semantic pragmatism, which is not something that I'd expect to be as popular as icecream.

While I always said: all those people I see, constantly on their phone... Now I do the same. On philosophy and physics sites, but still... it's just the same. — EugeneW

If you're actually talking with people and your feelings are engaged and you are actively using your faculties (which you clearly are), then I think it's a better way to use the phone than most.

I noticed too! Hodbless.Sounds funny! — EugeneW

I thought it was a good one, but the gentleman broke my heart and won't give me back my maidenhead.

Baal! Wittalottareign! — EugeneW

Bell ! What a lotta rain !

He felt to give a meeting to his shines.

This is why the self is unknowable - not because it's some mysterious metaphysical object. — Wayfarer

If the self is 'too familiar,' then we have a 'pre-ontological' grip on it already, and presumably we'd try to develop a knowledge of what functions as a master concept, sometimes as the source or root of existence.

So far no one seems to have explained the unity or the interiority of the 'interior monologue.' I do not question in this context the singularity of the brain. The issue is the conception of the subject singular that haunts or inhabits that brain. Why not 'we think, therefore we are' ? Why not 20 subjects who take turns ? Or no subject ? ('twenty gods or no gods') Why do 'we' (why does our inherited softwhere) distribute exactly one soul to one body, one toe tag per corpse? 'One is one around here, old chap.' 'Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. ' Do qualia all stream in through different pipes to splash against the same 'non-mysterious' entity? Is this an empirical question ? Does 'one' check one's 'intuition' ?

It seems even wily Kant took for this granted. Distinguishing between an empirical self-image and a 'pure witness' is not what I'm on about. The 'pure witness' itself is what I'm contesting as a superstition or at least an unsupported and yet ferociously habitual assumption.

'The soul is the prison of the body.' Now that's a horsefly of a thesis.

Monotheism then shoots itself in the foot (self-refuting) - it's atheistic as regards Thor, Zeus, Krishna, and the whole pantheon of other polytheistic traditions and, in the same breath, if espouses theism (monotheism). Something doesn't add up, oui? — Agent Smith

From what I've read, it emerged as the idea of the one true or living god in context of a bunch of gods that were declared phony. You make a nice point, that selective atheism is right there in monotheism, waiting to mutate and kill its host.

This exciting but crude story from the bible comes to mind. It's a fucking movie script.

And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.

Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the Lord; but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men.

Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under:

And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the Lord: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, It is well spoken.

And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under.

And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.

And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.

And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.

And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me. And all the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down.

And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto whom the word of the Lord came, saying, Israel shall be thy name:

And with the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord: and he made a trench about the altar, as great as would contain two measures of seed.

And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces, and laid him on the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the burnt sacrifice, and on the wood.

And he said, Do it the second time. And they did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third time. And they did it the third time.

And the water ran round about the altar; and he filled the trench also with water.

And it came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near, and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word.

Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the Lord God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again.

Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God.

Witta luttareign! — EugeneW

Chase us or bottoms wet !!!!! (My girl soak inky.)

I'm here defending a right to free-speech while trying to silence others? — Gregory A

Let me clarify. You've talked as if there's a threat of theists being silenced by some gang that includes Dawkins. I've said that you haven't made a case for what just sounds like paranoia to me. In general you remind me of Tucker Carlson, who I think is a cynical manipulator of his fans. He's just so shrill. He's a bow-tie white boy mega-Karen. Whether he's influenced you or not, you've both got the same 'worm in your brain' from my perspective, except he might just be faking it. As I've said in other words before, beware the all too ordinary madness of an unrealistic boogeyman. Your cholesterol level might be more of a threat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THUFzmmKMPs

Keepem cooooming, dooz frash wints! — EugeneW

Those fresh winds?

If one could make a film of the dream while the subject is sleeping, then that's the proof of dreams. And we can't do that. — L'éléphant

Is this an empirical statement or a statement about grammar ? Or is it hard to say?

Private languageish! Wittgenstein would approve/disapprove, can't tell for sure. — Agent Smith

Think of 'em as viruses waiting for a host, like 'private language' and 'language on holiday' were once waiting for hosts. Then think of skulls as bags of such viruses and the code part of 'form of life' as a loose collection of the viruses that 'everybody' has, that 'one' has. (Like one is exactly just one around here, friend, before all else, as one should always already know.)

it seems you are fascinated by Lady Mathematica. Her curvy lines are seductive indeed. Her power to break things up, pull things apart, and divide, is quite frightening though. Be warned, Agent... — EugeneW

Y'all know about the Cauchy sequence construction of the reel numbers? Ignoring needless technicality, every real number is an infinite stream or river of rational numbers that get closer and closer as the stream flows. So 0 = 1/1,1/2,1/3,1/4,... But 0 also = 1/2,1/4,1/8,1/16,... This is just like a more complex version of 1/2 = 2/4, there's a way to check for equality.

The charm is the (pretty successful ! ) attempt to capture an intuition of continuous flow within a crystalline system of symbols.

lll employs the same device, more or less that is. — Agent Smith

FWIW, most of my encryptions can be sounded out. I think of it as a kind of pixelation. Joyce messed with spelling and proper nouns in FW, but that makes his stuff hard to pronounce. I try to stick with basic words and snap them chew gather. Cubist/impressionist word paintings. Which sometimes creep into a spiel.

What about Incitatus? — Agent Smith

Ah yes! Him too. And Nero's 'wife' Sporus.

I don't think it's a figure of speech at all. It's just one of the usages allowed by the definition of the word "see." — T Clark

I think it's a deadaphor.

Perhaps Freddy, like old Socrates, is an ironic anti-sophistry sophist ... :smirk: — 180 Proof

I like it.

He also wasn't selling it. He was out their alone, trying to tell the truth about truth, also trying to find words for new ways of feeling and being, to forge a conscience for the humans to come...and he was hilarious when we wanted to be.

Plato calls them "sophists" — 180 Proof

I think we both love Nietzsche, yet it's hard to see how the dark prince himself avoids the categorization of sophist.

Perhaps a defense is that he's too rich & strange to jam into that drawer?

What is a philosopher? One who contributes something new and of publishable quality to the realm of philosophy. — jgill

Hiya ! 'Publishable quality' might mean something different in philosophy than in math. I'd bet dollars to donuts there's a journal out there that you or I or others on this thread wouldn't use for toilet paper (choose your preferred pejorative adjective, itself presumably a function of your politics and skillset, etc.)

n light of that, what do you think Wittgenstein would have said about 'eliminative materialism'? — Wayfarer

It seems influenced by his work, which IMO points in many directions, given its fragmented and exploratory form. There's a strong behaviorist streak in him, but he's too complex to wrap up in an 'ism,' which is probably why he endures. He loved spiritual/literary works, no doubt. Sometimes he seems to be trying to reveal the wonderful and strange in the ordinary.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
...
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? ...What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.
...
The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.
...
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.—And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. — W

The subject is not 'some mysterious entity', but just what the word says: the subject of experience. — Wayfarer

The meaning of our master words is no small issue. 'Just what the word says' seems to refer to something like the average intelligibility of a decontextualized phrase.

To me this passage ages well.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm

The problem here, again, is 'objectification'. There is no 'that' in the sense you're gesturing towards. — Wayfarer

You are telling me exactly what I've been saying, that the metaphysical subject is a fiction or a convention. I criticize the idealist for only doubting the 'external' world and taking an inherited Cartesian cliché as the one undoubtable starting point. Check about and read my direct challenge of the so-called 'interior' 'monologue' which takes its own unity of voice entirely for granted, nevermind the intelligibility of a language that strangely comes with apparently contingent phonemes. (Why does a worldless ghost use the soundmark cogito ergo sum and not some impossibly pure tongue of the angels or slabs of silent concept ? )

So the point is that meanings are evolved. They are ways to codify the practices that allow intelligent order to gain control over the forces of entropy.

But the proof of the pudding is the long run. The system of meanings that define some stage of human sociocultural development might not lead to long term thriving.

So the search for a meaning to life is really the search for the codified practices that could sustain life in some suitably long-run and flourishing way. — apokrisis

Nice!

Sorry Tom, I'm sticking different things in that hole when I don't have an answer... — EugeneW

Tell me more.

It might, for example, influence what observations you consider important, what experiments you decide to conduct, what you may or may not regard as valid questions for research. None of those influences may be amenable themselves to explication, and none of them obviously visible in the results that you obtain - becuase they're unconscious, or because they're suggested by some cultural affinity you have, or even some traumatic memory. — Wayfarer

I'll grant you that background assumptions and attitudes probably play a role in what is researched.

But hopefully you can see that there's a rational concern about the utility of 'qualia' in a scientific or rational context. That which is ineffably individual (if it makes sense to talk about such a thing) is 'by definition' invisible or non-existent for any unbiased or individual-independent inquiry. I say this with what I can only assume is a familiarity with the typical 'consciousness' of noises and smells. [Wittgenstein on toothaches and beetles is of course relevant.]

I was thinking of this.

...for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality...

I should emphasize that 'of course' I think our nervous system is necessary for 'consciousness.' But the 'physical' is not so easily thrown away. The dream-weaver is part of the dream. 'Consciousness' loses sense without its other. The world (whatever its ineffable essence or true and final nature ) was apparently here before we arrived (hopefully during our conception). We seem to have a möbius strip on our hands.

then he suffers from the very blind spot which he can never (by definition!) see. — Wayfarer

But that's just my (and probably basically his) criticism of qualia. Why is a square not a circle? That's the hurt problem of conch-is-this ! Riddle me this, scientism, how does this so-radically-elusive-and-private-stuff-that-we-can't-even-talk-about-it connect with your fancy scientific understanding of the world? Tell me, pretender to wisdom, what the meaning of my 'private experience' of C-sharp means in the grand scheme of things. Fit a model to data which is invisible by definition which I nevertheless believe in just the way green ideas sleep which is furiously.

an unreachable unique reality to be approximated by science and math only, is compatible with a monotheism positing a unique OOOO-god, non-imaginable, and maybe approximately reached by meditation or prayer. — EugeneW

Bingo ! In both cases the unity and systematically of the cosmotheology they reflect ? God is a paint at infinity ?

towards a monotheist conception of Hod — Shwah

I like the name of your deity. Hod brass harmonica !

Oops, soory! Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. — EugeneW

Sounds like what we'd like to be. Coincidence?

Must be because I'm married 10 years today! — EugeneW

Congrats!

Apparently very hard to understand, though. — Wayfarer

Too easy to understand, the identity of world and my fantasy of it, a baby's dream...regurgitated capitalist egoism perhaps (with the good stuff too, to be fair!) And yet I love Schopenhauer and love idealism as a dialectical stepping stone. The journey of self-consciousness ( self-consciousness ) seems to need a visit to the skull.

Even in translation he is such a charming and pellucid writer. — Tom Storm

He's first rate, still one of my faves.

for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain — Tom Storm

Ah, but my dear Schopenhauer, you tell me the brain is an illusion or representation...thrown up by the brain ? Note that space and time themselves are part of the dream, so it's not so naughty of me to think that he's got no reason to trust this image of his a body as 'his' or even as single-souled or as the focal point of 'conch this is.' Idealism proves parasitic on a common sense it pretends to transcend. Or, alternatively, it's a half-hearted conspiracy theory that forgets to doubt its fantasized singular subject and so-called 'interior' 'monologue.' How you know you a you, sir?

That is why D B Hart says that Dennett's conjectures are 'so preposterous as to verge on the deranged'. — Wayfarer

Folks are sensitive about 'conch is this' and very much attached to 'the heard problem,' perhaps as a last hiding place from the demystifying astonished-at-nothing fingers of an analysis that wants to get somewhere and not just fetishize the mystery (which is fun sometimes, no doubt.) Maybe Dennett indulges himself, downplays what he doesn't explain, but I found that pointing out the epistemological uselessness of qualia is generally met with the same man-in-the-street 'obviousness' of a congealed grammatical habit mistaken for sempiternal necessity.