1. There's only so much that our brains can handle. — Agent Smith

Economics, I'd say. (I don't just money, but practical constraints and tradeoffs.)

The map can't be an exact replica of the territory. — Agent Smith

Because it'd be useless, right? It'd be just as easy to stare at the world. The point is oversimplification. Abstraction is subtractive, it seems to me. Ignore the right things, right?

Experimenting on myself, I attempted to conceive of a ball wholly red AND wholly not red (I chose black). It was a failure, it can't be done, by me at least. — Agent Smith

One problem with arguments from (in-)conceivability is that what are called 'private mental states' can have no significance for serious inquiry.

A more worldly approach would be to note that almost no one knows what to do with phrases like 'the ball that's red all over and also not red all over.' (It's thinkable that such a way of speaking could become useful, as in 'I love her and yet I don't.'

IMV, one the fundamental confusions in philosophy is taking a realm of shared logical intuitions and qualia for granted as foundational ur-stuff and trying to construct a world from it. In many ways it makes more sense to work in the other direction, and to think of the 'self' as a convenient fiction. It's a learned habit, the training of a single body to conform in terms of a central 'ghost' as target of praise and blame. So it must be (to jam it into the straitjacket of this myth) a morally responsible blob of freedom.

Atheism is a belief, a fairy tale, a myth. — EugeneW

Why is good knot a very tail? You argue that atheism is a belief. The standard reply is that it's a lack of belief (which is more strictly correct, IMN), but I do think atheism is often associated with a disenchanted worldview. This worldview (which is mine) strikes me as merely subtractive. The atheist (tends to) takes fewer entities seriously than a certain kind of theist (the theist meanwhile still expects toasters and teamsters to work.)

But, the unwarranted Cynicism makes the emergence of a new information-based Paradigm of secular Science difficult. — Gnomon

So skeptical cynics are the true enemies of scientific progress? One funeral at a time, right?

Note -- the mental image of a real thing has a similar structure, in the sense of analogy or metaphor, but is not identical with the neurons that evoke that mental pattern. — Gnomon

A 'mental image' is problematically private. The usual grammar suggests that anyone's only 'seen' their own. The absurdity of taking such 'images' and 'qualia' as foundational, when pointed out, is usually misunderstood as a denial of their existence as opposed to their suitability for the role foisted upon them (grounding meaning and/or functioning as a primordial Dreamgoo from which an 'intersubjective' world is constructed.)

In my view, it'd be easier to make your point by emphasizing the difference between sentences and neocortexes.

Have you ever considered the possibility that there is no such thing as "matter"? — Metaphysician Undercover

Good question. The next would be whether "mind" should be taken for granted.

On one side noumena or ur-stuff. On another side qualia or languageless thought. Problematic poles of an otherwise practical continuum.

Well, you know, it's just that I think nature by itself can't have spawned a creature like my wife. Somehow, some mad god must be involved. Luckily, I might add! — EugeneW

Nice.

Are you James Joyce? — Cuthbert

I'm reading him, and I took 'obsolute' from the buttockbefriending bard, as the brick fit perfectly wall in the whole I was building, abbreviating an up-so-late we-solute.

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. — L'éléphant

I don't believe that a purple man with seven arms rules the Omniverse on a throne made of cotton candy.

I think this is why careful, disciplined meta-cognition is indispensible for sound reasoning. — 180 Proof

Agreed. The worst cages are perhaps those with invisible bars.

I wouldn't be a Spinozist (immanentist) if I thought otherwise. This is why I allude to Sisyphus' 'endless task'... — 180 Proof

Thanks for the clarification. Endless indeed. And it seems that we must fight fire with fire, replacing obsolete metaphors with those which have not quite yet become so.

Now that's a great question in our beloved tradition. The sound already makes my head turn and ears direct! I wonder what's the answer. — EugeneW

My current position is no. Even the bone machine of math is a pile of analogies. It seems that we can only incorporate the new mostly in terms of the old.

Far from being a subset associated with problem solving—a tiny "Delaware on the map of cognition"—or a special variety of reasoning, analogy is the main event, Hofstadter asserted during an evening lecture Feb. 6 and during a discussion the following afternoon at the Humanities Center.

source

assigning way too much sex-appeal to white-coated representatives of the scientific church and their grey-suited, freshly-tied, programmed talking representatives in power positions — EugeneW

Feyerabendian fire, friend. I'm not so much to the left on this issue, but I can understand the concern. Specialization is troubling, and no one can see it whole, the vast machine we've built.

.

Yup, William of Occam (Novacula Occami: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate); :kiss: (keep it simple, stupid). Why complexify? Shouldn't we simplify? — Agent Smith

I agree: simplicity is good. But why? Seems that economy is involved. One might mention esthetics, but perhaps this boils down to economics. A practical animal needs tools that offer bang for the buck. Consider also the brain size of a tiger. It's probably tuned pretty well.

Also, I guess you might put me in as "one of them." As I see it, the mechanisms that produce mental phenomena are purely biological/neurological. — T Clark

That's my leaning. Of course I expect the science to keep advancing.

That's not the same as saying that mental processes are nothing but biological/neurological phenomena. There are metaphysical and scientific reasons to recognize that mental processes are different from biological processes. — T Clark

Precisely. Add also practical reasons.

Areed! Disagreement is like an ideal pencil sharpener. — EugeneW

Yes indeed, friend.

Talking about what one cannot talk about with sense exhibits the same lack of integrity as claiming that one knows to be the case what one cannot know to be the case. — 180 Proof

Well put.

Since Thales et al, 'Logos (ethos) striving like Sisyphus against his philosopher's stone to overcome Mythos (pathos)' is how I read the Greek tradition (pace Freddy). — 180 Proof

What do you make of the notion that cognition is largely analogical? Here you have Logos striving like Sisyphus against a Mythos which includes that very Sisyphus. Is the transcendence of metaflora and fairytails an impossible point at infinity? I think (?) you agree that even mathematics is embodied and metaphorical.

I hope I'll be able to read that book, if luck doesn't dump me like the last time she did! — Agent Smith

It's a good one. I'm sure there are others that are just as good, but I can vouch for that one. I like that two philosophers with very different styles are placed side-by-side so that they illuminate one another. (Hume is also brought in for a little playdate with the boys).

Does Democritus resonate with you at any level? — Agent Smith

Yeah, the laughing philosopher. Great dude.

Wittgenstein: I like where he intends to take us, but I'm skeptical of his ability to do so! Bear with me: me, tenderfoot! — Agent Smith

I do think W is great, but I also try to avoid the too-common off-putting my-big-hero-daddy thing that sometimes happens on forums. He is 'run among others' but ends up functioning as an abbreviation or avatar for the dissolution of metaphysics. I also like Derrida (who is tough to read and sometimes annoying) for similar reasons. Derrida will make grand statements, which can be charming or annoying depending on your mood. Wittgenstein is (perhaps you'll agree) sometimes even boring in his plodding understatedness. But then he'll pop a buddy in the month for forty none scents and 'give some good blow job' as @EugeneW might say.

Good luck, good person! — Agent Smith

Thank you, friend!

No clear-cut answer. — Agent Smith

That 'is' the answer perhaps, if it's understood as an insight into the limitations of the smoke machine of language. The 'and of history' is something like a state of infinite jest that no longer needs a Foundation and is satisfied with a plurality of models. There's a book clawed Crownless Clowns that tickles this aria. It is merrily run among others. James Joyce tries the same thing in literature, to sanctify or appreciate the so-called 'ordinary.' He thought the exceptional was muck for journalists.

Thanks for the kind words. My monikor is Whit Farder, and my pieces is mail.

I do try to encode actual substance within the playfulness. Above I suggested that our infinite jest is proof of the progress of philosophy. I can't speak for you (though your sense of humor suggests it), but I live (in my own eyes anyway) a much better life than I did when I was younger. Some individuals learn from philosophy, I say.

Of course the same old muddy ponds remain as stepping stones for new generations.
If you stare at a particular mud-aphysical pond and ignore the frogs, it looks like no progress. But take Wittgenstein, for instance. I think his later stuff is a break-through and even a kind of implicit apocalypse (one keeps going in 'his' direction beyond what he in his mortality could get around to, relaying 'his' brightening torch that he also got from others.) (So the torch is really a community possession, associated conveniently with prominently swift relay racers.)

Like I said, a most welcome light in dark philosophical times! For that already your comments are attractive to read! Regardless if I agree or not. — EugeneW

Thank a grin, my friend. I know we don't see high to high on Dawkins, but that doesn't need to mess up a fun conversation. It'd actually be less fun if we agreed on everything.

Could Zeno have intended to throw late on the smoke machine noun as lung-wrench? Maybe not the motion of legs but rather that of jaws was his target ? Alung whiff the senescent theophagy of grammar mistaken for the Obsolute ?

My question is, has philosophy made progress? It's a simple question. Dare I think it has a simple answer? — Agent Smith

Thou ought knot door such impiety, sewer ! For the gods are jealous of end-sores in the gobs of their sorry apes.

Yet progress, yes, I do incest on it.

Are infinite jest is poof!

If he loves the truth so much, he should have called them altruistic. These little wookers exist for our use only. They come in handy to conduct evofruction. — EugeneW

To me he makes a pretty good chase that, among odor thinks maybe, we are moist row boats or dank blow pots or draping what chew chew drains.

I like 'wookers.'

.

answering them comes later, much, much later, assuming it's even possible to do so. — Agent Smith

Unless we understand the movements of our limbs as answers. Life throws us hungry into a mess. We enact beliefs all the time. Philosophy can change the beliefs we enact, the way we live.

Perhaps you think of obtaining consensus when suggesting the answers are far away or impossible? But why should consensus be authoritative? Or perhaps you invoke an ineradicable logical possibility of being wrong. Fair enough. But we have to act, and we move more in faith than in an exceptional and troubling state like doubt.

He was the Zen master before Zen even existed, merrily blowing people's minds gratis, giving 'em much-prized Zen moments. — Agent Smith

He did some good blow jobs indeed. — EugeneW

That made me laugh. Thank you.

I can tell you this: no amount of arguing for the existence of the nonphysical is going to persuade science to change its mind on what can exist (only the physical - matter & energy). You're just begging the question I'm afraid. — Agent Smith

That still doesn't sound right. I do find it plausible that many working scientists consider their biological or sociological work to be in principle but not in fact reducible to the dance of 'mattergy,' but some scientists are religious and must therefore have a larger ontology, however articulated or not.

It's also not clear that a 'bottom layer' is necessary for a scientific worldview. I can imagine several being used alternately, each an imperfect map that may complement the others. I can imagine a first-rate sociologist who never bothers with a bottom layer and knows nothing of physics or chemistry. The Church-Turing thesis comes to mind. In some contexts, the 'grain' of the medium in or through which a pattern appears might just be a distraction best ignored. For instance, we rather seamlessly switch between written and spoken language. Linguistic studies that also don't distinguish seem quite plausible to me (and might also include sign language, and so and and so and.)

My thirty peaches of sliver are on there being no gods or afterlife, if that chunk of context helps.

I don't consider it kryptonite, rather a modern computer based tool — EugeneW

I'm thinking of the work of 'Lard-rag Rat-gum-slime' and his demolition of so much traditional confusion on the mind-matter issue in that indiscipline noun as mutterphysics. Repeating Nietzsche in his own way, he provides a battery of examples of us flossoffers bean misled by grammar, bewitched by habits in our sign slinging. In 'odor words,' 'lung reach is a broth dump flu of as it.'

Too, metaphysics isn't clear about what existence means, yet science claims only the physical exists. — Agent Smith

Hi. The bolded part doesn't seem quite right to me. Perhaps the 'physical' is too readily equated with that which we can be scientific or objective or unbiased about. Is the frequency of various words used on Twitter something physical ? Perhaps one can emphasize the mechanics of storage and transmission, but it's more intuitive and convenient to think of them as tokens that can be uncontroversially counted. It's also easy to make predictions that can be uncontroversially evaluated afterwords for their accuracy or lack thereof. When you say 'science claims...,' you seem to be making 'science' into a metaphysician.

Then why don't call them altruistic? — EugeneW

If memory serves, Dawkins almost used a title like that. The 'altruism' of the individual gene-carrying organism (the greenbeards) is the 'selfishness' of the gene (the one that encodes greenbeardedness). It's possible that 'selfish' was chosen as more titillating.

The evidence is high enough to bury a mountain. What does anyone have who believes we are somehow more than our brain and body? What? The silence of nothing is deafening. It is just our desire that we are more, nothing more; nothing less. — Philosophim

First, for context, I'm a moderate on this issue.

Language is a huge part of human reality. We live together in something like a historically and symbolically structured lifeworld. We bury or burn the corpses of the same loved ones we nurture when alive, so clearly the fine details or the structure of brains/bodies is important to us. The structure the sound waves we bark at one another is also crucial. I suppose it's plausible to stop at these patterns and say (speculatively or economically) that we are only such patterns. And perhaps you include all this implicitly in your 'we are only bodies and brains' position.

But your opening post doesn't emphasize what encourages the hopes for something more that you go on to criticize. I do agree that, naturally enough, people want to go to heaven, or a piece of the Absolute, etc. But there are also philosophical reasons to argue for 'something more' that do not include any such comforts and only seek a more comprehensive and consistent account.

What was it Nietzsche said - 'If you believe in grammar, you're a theist." The possibility of us making meaning and having reliable cognitive facilities may be just as 'miraculous' as the abstract, seemingly transcendental status of math. — Tom Storm

Indeed. Math is arguably a less impressive product of abstraction from a far richer linguistic ability, like bony driftwood next to a living tree. It's poetry just the same but stuffed in a alluring straitjacket .

When you zoom in too far it 'disappears'. When you zoom back out it's impossible to miss. These patterns are most aptly described via the language of information, just like the patterns that arise at the level of the compound are most aptly described by the language of chemistry. — Theorem

Well put.

The husked kernel-stuff is the latex glove? Are the latex gloves doing the yanking of the a-physical kernel stuff out of the shell it's contained in? — EugeneW

This is a just an analogy, but it'll help me make my point perhaps. Let's imagine 'mind' and 'matter' as $- \infty$ and $+ \infty$ respectively. Then our world is $( - \infty, + \infty )$ and doesn't actually include 'pure' mind or 'pure' matter. Some stuff in the world is especially 'mind-like' or 'mental' while other stuff is especially 'matter-like' or 'physical.' (This isn't delivered on stone tablets as a theory but rather as clog-loosening hypothetical alternative.)

The 'kernel stuff' is the (imagined or abstracted) 'purely mental' stuff. It's like a philosophical thought that is not yes dressed in a human language (or stripped of every garment it's ever owned.) The 'husk stuff' is the shadow of this kernel stuff, cast off as dead, secondary crap. But then resurrected by some philosophers as the obscure grime that's really really really real, whatever it really really is. This is the space junk that'll be left if all life in the omniverse is wiped out.

The abstracting or yanking out is a kind of methodical ignorance that ignores currently irrelevant context. The latex gloves symbolize the necessity of caution when handling the kryptonite of philosophers, the informaniacal Mental.

It's like the memes of Dawkins. He made them selfish and in control of human behavior because he has no better memes himself. — EugeneW

Perhaps you are being unfair to Dawkins. The selfishness of genes is just an anthropomorphic trope for self-replicating pieces of code that don't care if they persist or not.

The meme theory is foggy and speculative in comparison. 'Be fruitful and reproduce' seems like a successful meme. This idea might cause its 'hosts' to reproduce and teach the idea to their children. It's not clear how useful the meme theory could be.

There are many here who will defend the claim that ideas are merely neurological states. — T Clark

OK, perhaps. But will one of them speak up?

As he says, the mathematical symbols that express the laws of science are not themselves subject to physical laws. — Wayfarer

To me that's only plausible 'in the limit.' The costs are relatively 'infinitesimal' but nevertheless positive. Imagine two programs using the 'same' computer to steer some gargantuan machine. Tiny 'physical' modifications in one place lead to huge 'physical' modifications elsewhere. Still, it's not free to program the computer (arrange a little bit of 'Stuff' that 'controls' much more ).

We can also imagine a human reading a book and radically changing their life thereafter. A strong predictive model would have to have the equivalent of historical-semantic insight to make use of the book. A silicon version is vaguely plausible in some far flung future.

'In the limit' we can yank out a 'purified' or 'a-physical' content from what thereby become the instantiations or husks of this kernel-stuff, which I playfully call 'informagical' as a substitute for latex gloves.

You guys are making a mess of OLP. — Mww

Who was that fool officer who goddess chews dunk in the mud ? Or was it a bottle-bested beetle ?
Shall we tank away his budge? (We did muck a mash of thinks.)

If God is truly unfair this is a problem because an unfair deity is not worthy of worship. The deity that is unfair would not be worthy of worship because they created everything. — stressyandmessy

If an unfair god is unworthy of worship, and this fairness is our human concept, then it's our own human virtues we worship. We can cut out the muddle man. Thigh wheel be dim. All man.

But, now in my sunset years, I have gained more confidence in my own opinions; especially since I developed my own personal philosophical/scientific worldview. That mask of confidence might come across as aggressive or ego-centric. But, my Ukrainian defense is mostly a reflection of the aggressive attacks I get from those opposed to whatever-it-is they imagine I'm postulating. On a religious forum, I would expect a similar negative response. — Gnomon

You might come off as ego-centric, but what ambitiously creative philosopher is not? You might come off as accidentally aggressive by harping on the Scientism scarecrow. Just because a person uses a term like 'woo woo' (which is a symmetrically pejorative mirror-image of 'scientism') doesn't mean that they aren't another 'moderate' who nevertheless finds fault with your brew. It's as if you view the 'motherphysical' spectrum as a unidimensional continuum, with yourself at the proper origin, golden and harmonized, misunderstood on both sides for pitiably partial minds, irrationally allergic to either science or religion.

But what if this vision of the situation is itself a 'superstition' or self-flatteringly oversimplified map of the territory? Is it possible to be criticized not from the liquid left or rigid right but from another dimension entirely (for instance, along a semantic vector?)