Differential equations will offer more interest and fun. You can solve them numerically, watch a virtual cup of coffee cool.

What does it have to be that way? How does the bridge know "that's the last straw, I'm collapsing"? — Agent Smith

Well, a really terrible but cheap model is to have the program say 'yes' for collapse if the input is greater than 2000 pounds and no otherwise. (It's terrible because the 2000 pounds was randomly picked.)

Do video game bridges collapse under extreme/excess weight like real bridges do? — Agent Smith

If you want them to, yes. It could be a very simple program without graphics that answers yes or no to the weight of a vehicle or it could be some rich, visual presentation, etc. I toyed around with the Unity game creator system briefly. It's got an impressive 'physics engine.'

Indeed! One has to be bat to answer the question "what is it like to be a bat?" Logic/reason is useless? — Agent Smith

With a bat, it seems hopeless. With geniuses, I think we slowly 'become' or assimilate part of them as we keep reading and thinking and writing. They fade in. But it's always a fusion.

In the simplest situation, the model will be fit to a set of measurements, which always refer to the past.

The data underdetermine the model. If a model does fit well, then we use it make predictions, and it's basically a video game simplification of reality. We 'pretend' that the data was actually generated by the model in the context of some random noise, and can then get new dependent values from any independent values we choose (though it's prudent to stay where we have lots of data, as this where our model tends to be robust.)

Assuming the uniformity of nature, the bridge would collapse because our 'video game version' of it was wrong (wrong enough), and we made a decision that trusted the model when we shouldn't have (too heavy of a truck, tardy replacement or maintenance.) (I'm mostly a stats/computer guy who knows the math better than the applications, so maybe others can say more and say better.)

many of those who recoil in horror from idealism really don't understand it. — Wayfarer

I expect this applies in all kinds of cases. As Hegel might stress, philosophies just cannot be summed up into aphorisms. Words in a conversation accumulate meaning historically. You have to put the time in.

That said, your recoiling doof is not entirely without merit, because philosophy's radical theses often just don't have much practical import. If the world don't disappear when the poor doof dies, then that idealism is of course less interesting, 'cause he's still got to pay that life insurance premium. It's like that philosopher's god who don't even give you an afterlife or help you win the lottery or cure mama's lymphoma. He might with some justification accuse us all of getting drunk on yawn-fiction.

When not go the whole nine yards and adopt atheism? As it is we're already down to one last man as it were. Let's finish him off too, oui? — Agent Smith

Maybe monotheism just modulates (has modulated) so that yesterday's holy ghost is today's blob of rationality. Perhaps monotheism was (is) so successful because it mirrored/mirrors the ego convention central to our capitalistic culture.

That Feuerbach, unlike Strauss, never accepted Hegel’s characterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clear from the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with his dissertation in 1828.[7] In this letter he identified the historical task remaining in the wake of Hegel’s philosophical achievement to be the establishment of the “sole sovereignty of reason” in a “kingdom of the Idea” that would inaugurate a new spiritual dispensation. Foreshadowing arguments put forward in his first book, Feuerbach went on in this letter to emphasize the need for "the I, the self in general, which especially since the beginning of the Christian era, has ruled the world and has thought of itself as the only spirit that exists at all [to be] cast down from its royal throne."

This, he proposed, would require prevailing ways of thinking about time, death, this world and the beyond, individuality, personhood and God to be radically transformed within and beyond the walls of academia.

Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

As I read Wittgenstein and others, the language of the tribe is always already a kind of not-so-holy ghost that exists like a film or web between the nodes of the bodies of the tribe's members. Add to that the ethic of being 'rational' and 'unbiased' and admitting as really really really real only what is determined by rational and unbiased claims, and you have a reality that is rational (all else is 'illusion' or 'superstition') and a rationality that grasps or articulates (only) the real.

Perhaps polytheism appeals to and reflects as less 'uptight' and psychologically organized way of being human (I of course exclude who take polytheism playfully or think all gods are really just one.). We then simultaneously model the 'outer' world as one unified 'machine' and the 'inner' world as one unified 'agent.' Mirroring this we have God the creator and his single creation, which itself is a system that mirrors God's benevolent and organized mind.

Perhaps it's just that we're stupider than we think we are and simply don't possess the processing power to suss this out. — Agent Smith

Could be. And perhaps we are too stupid to appreciate just how stupid we are. Is stupidity not relative? This touches on another metaphysical chestnut. In what way does or can the sage exist for the fool ? Except as a vague promise ? Can the fool understand the sage without becoming the sage? I don't think so. And yet the fool must trust in the sage to stick around long enough to become him. Or is it like music, where taste can run ahead of chops ? There's something tricky about talking about either genius or stupidity from the outside. It's like writing a check and the money ain't in the bank yet.

instead of racking our brains trying to figure out the real truth? — Agent Smith

I think this applies to some metaphysical issues, and I can't bring myself to fret anymore than Hume could. It's a glitch in the matrix. Still some of them are maybe good for target practice or as scratching posts.

shouldn't we just take the world as it appears to us — Agent Smith

You make that sound easy! We've evolved to worry ourselves, friend. The dead don't breed.

So I'm considering the idea that scientific law is where logical necessity and physical causation intersect, but I've never heard anyone else say that. — Wayfarer

I think the necessity is in the mathematical formalism. If you tell me $y = exp(bx)$, then 'necessarily' or 'logically' or 'grammatically' I know that $log(y) = bx$. Assign x to a quantity of somethings and y to the number of related somethingelses and you have a model with b as a single parameter. I don't see how the mathematical 'necessity' can escape into the world and bind whatever is counted by x and y. The parameter b (and of course the exponential model type) must be chosen according to what has been recorded so far. The model's relevance for the future is where Hume's problem comes in, seems to me.

I see the point, but I can't help but think there's something wrong with it. I mean, it seems to me science relies heavily on the application of logic to the analysis of causal relationships. — Wayfarer

Not my field, but I do understand that a mathematical model can be transformed into a mathematical equivalent that might nevertheless be more useful or intuitive to its user.

Along these lines, symbolic logic can be used as a detector/checker of non-obvious tautologies. The platonist might say that the tautology was 'always there' but not being looked at. Mainstream math is 'eternal,' while badboy intuitionism lets time in.

Indeed, causation is, as Hume discovered, not deductively necessary (re the problem of induction). The best we can do is describe patterns in nature, one such kind being causality where we tell ourselves that the cause brings about the effect provided the correlation is strong and consistent across spacetime.

If causation has no deductive basis, all bets are off: there's no way we could predict the future, today a ball may bounce off the ground and tomorrow it might stick to it. If so, what about the law of karma? Buddha did emphasize anicca (the problem of induction). The world is going to be full of surprises then, oui? Today you might hurl invectives at someone and get beaten black and blue for it and the next day, doing the same thing, you might end getting a marriage proposal. — Agent Smith

I think an argument can be made that some kind of uniformity of nature was in play during our evolution at least so that our 'irrational' (non-deductive) expectation of continuing uniformity makes evolutionary sense (it paid off to 'act as if' nature was a good girl.) I don't know of any good arguments (non-circular) against the logical possibility of everything going to pieces in the future. It might be that we can't even talk intelligibly about a causally unstructured reality (return of the ghost of the world as it is when we can't know anything about it).

Like this :

Unfortunately, without some kinda pattern (laws/rules/principles), the world becomes incomprehensible and that's what Zen koans must be designed to evoke in the practitioner: utter perplexity and confusion (can one hand clapping make a sound? It just might, panta rhei) — Agent Smith

And I think the constant problem in this discussion is the tendency to try and treat mind (or consciousness) as something objectively existent, because the emphasis in scientific objectivity is always on what is 'out there somewhere' - what is objectively existent. — Wayfarer

I agree that you can find some thinkers like that, but on the other side we have people who take folk psychology entirely for granted (not saying you, because we seem to agree that mind is social, which doesn't seem terribly normcore of us.) Anyway, I can relate to criticisms of the qualia concept which tend to be understood as denials, so I'm open to aspects of eliminativism. For instance:

Folk psychology is assumed to consist of both generalizations (or laws) and specific theoretical posits, denoted by our everyday psychological terms like ‘belief’ or ‘pain’. The generalizations are assumed to describe the various causal or counterfactual relations and regularities of the posits. For instance, a typical example of a folk psychological generalization would be:

"If someone has the desire for X and the belief that the best way to get X is by doing Y, then (barring certain conditions) that person will tend to do Y."

Advocates of the theory-theory claim that generalizations like these function in folk psychology much like the laws and generalizations of scientific theories.

According to theory-theorists, the posits of folk psychology are simply the mental states that figure in our everyday psychological explanations. Theory-theorists maintain the (controversial) position that, as theoretical posits, these states are not directly observed, though they are thought to account for observable effects like overt behavior.

The 'not directly observed' especially interests me, because it's pre-philosophically in the grammar-logic of such states that we can't be wrong about them. They are unspeakably proximate, luminous in their ineffable plenitude. Or the ghost in the machine just 'is' a bundle of this slippery stuff, dreaming (if that makes sense) its own unity. Perhaps this is where the pure-and-exact language-independent meanings of 'being' and 'real' and 'meaning' hide. But if 'mind' is delocalized and the individual qua individual can't be rational (isn't the speaker in this 'higher' sense), then the 'meaning' of these master words is also delocalized, liquidly implicit and ambiguous in the 'structure' of our social doings.

I think one way to approach this difficult question is to understand mind in a transpersonal sense - not as 'your mind' or 'my mind' or the mind of any particular individual. — Wayfarer

Well put. This is implicit in our appeals to 'logic' and 'rationality.' This is also implicit in (1) our strong desire to have our thoughts recognized by the tribe and (2) our radical dependence on an 'ingested' inheritance of tribal memory for being able to bring something to that tribe that deserves recognition in the first place. Feuerbach took something like this paraphrase from Hegel: 'Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual.' Of course in practical affairs it's helpful to say 'Joe thought the pipe was leaking.' Even in philosophy it's good to know whether Nietzsche or Plato is being quoted, since meaning depends on context. But ideally the 'rational' communal subject has the unity of a system of concepts or a language.

To others I am a part of their objective observable universe just as a chair or the sky is. I am outside of them. They cannot prove that I’m aware and alive like they feel themselves to be, I could be a hologram or robot for all they really know, we only adapt this trust based on our similarities and capacity to project feeling ie. empathise as well as the culture of classification that we built society on. — Benj96

I say let's drink the whole glass of acid. How they know that they are trapped in the box with windows that might just be dreamscreens? How do they know that their interior monologue is interior ? How do they know that 'they' are indeed a singular they ? How do they know that their interior monologue is a monologue ? It's as if all these boxed up unified voices still got the word somehow that methodological solipsism was the modest, careful, default position.

This is like an absurd radicalization of something healthy, namely that my perception could be wrong, my reasoning biased...but in wrong/biased in relation to a tribe I share the world with, so that the noisesmarks 'bias' and 'wrong' serve a purpose.

Scientific concepts, if they are "on the right track", attempts to show some aspects of mind-independent reality, but how to make sense of this, absent ordinary concepts and qualia, is impossible to understand. — Manuel

I suggest dropping that framework and thinking instead in terms of individual-indepedent reality. How is science applied? That's a clue, I think. We want technology that does not depend on its user. We want technology that does not depend on the faith of its user in its utility for that utility (so we aren't satisfied with a placebo effect. )

Note that this approach dodges all the metaphysical (or just grammatical) complexities that try to unthink the so-called subject altogether, expecting to find either the Real or the Void. Asking about the pure object or the pure subject might be like asking about the left without the right.

Now we know appearances can be deceiving, and we have plenty of good reasons to believe in physicalism, but this does pose a problem for physicalism in that it has to reduce what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive (subjective experience) and fit it satisfactorily into an abstraction that is itself necessarily a facet of subjective experience. Hence, we have the "Hard Problem," where it appears to be impossible to derive the experiences of the subject from the abstraction the subject experiences (the model of the physical world). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice setting up of the 'heard problem of conch is this' ! Lots of complexity in 'what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive.' One machete for this overgrowth might be thinking in terms of the individual navigating its relationship with tribe, as opposed to mentality as mediation of an otherwise unknowable physical substrate. Then 'reality' is (approximately) the best way for the tribe to talk, and 'seems like' is a kind of modesty or tentativeness in reports brought to that tribe (and its virtual surrogate in the self-doubting philosopher.)

the Hard Problem shouldn't be at all suprising, because it's essentially demanding that an abstraction somehow account for sensation despite the fact that thinking through an abstraction is itself a sensation — Count Timothy von Icarus

Something similar occurs to me. If you define some X as radically private, then 'obviously' it's excluded from rational explanation. It's even outside of language, an irrelevant beetle in an unopenable box.

The 'sensation' of thought you mention is what I take many to mean by 'pure meaning,' with which the metaphysical subject is supposed to be 'infinitely' intimate. Yet this 'subject' is itself a mere 'dream' or 'sensation' or 'thought' of this (no-longer-a-)subject. ('Watch me pull a hat out that same hat.')

Definitely. Back to the rough ground! — Luke

Joyce focused on the ordinary, leaving the exception to the journalists. His big message was something like 'the ordinary is fucking wild, ya'll.' I think that Wittgenstein 'rough ground' is also wild, and that maybe there's a 'immanent' or 'earthy' personality type that's more likely to want to grok what he's saying. W's journey is itself instructive, the evolution of his style. But this is a tangent, so...

lets the wonder return. — EugeneW

Ah, OK. So perhaps the vision of the universe as a vast, dead machine that disappoints you. If you don't cling to life after death and aren't that interested in divine commandments, then it seems to be the disenchantment of the world that you object to. I do think we've been tamed. Our imaginations are clubbed into submission. Today's sane man is modeling what Vico's early/divine men would have experienced as a straitjacket.

That's more or less what the short story is about. Gods being tired and bored of making love and hate eternally, longing to lay back in heavenly jungles to watch us play out the story they played so long themselves. — EugeneW

That's truly a beautiful plot.

Generally when someone calls themselves a practitioner, they have competence and expertise in the thing they practice. — Tom Storm

I think you're right, but it's big field, and one man's charlatan is another man's hero. Take Heidegger and Derrida. These dudes were paid professors of philosophy, not back porch belchers, yet some of their fellow paid professors were/are utterly dismissive. I can't think of anything comparable in mathematics, not unless one goes back to Cantor's day (and then at least no one could deny Cantor's early mainstream work from which set theory developed).

Perhaps this is because the history of philosophy is one identity crisis after another. 'Anti-philosophers' with any juice in them are assimilated. I agree with some of these later assimilated rebels that philosophy is (among other things) a genre of creative writing and a conversation with its own internally generated logic (its keywords accumulate meaning like a snowball rolling downhill.) The guy on the back porch who isn't 'read in' is likely to be stuck on some early part of a conversation, making him boring to those who've spent more time exposing themselves to the battle-tested crust of talk that came before.

They started a research program to create and develop love and hate particles situated in a very special unique space. The universe is that unique result. Now they just watch us. The virus god, the squirrel god, tree god and whale god. Human gods contributed too, but fucked up a bit. — EugeneW

That's a fun theology.

I don't think we are the heads of some universal hydrabeast, using us to masturbate in its attempt to spawn new universes as it can't find a female companion. Or us being part of a universe retroactively collapsing the wavefunction and bringing itself in existence. Mind you, this would be even more outrageous than gods or dead particles only. — EugeneW

Personally I don't feel attached to a myth, though the idea that we are stains on the diapers of drooling giants makes the most scents so far.

The meanings we assign are enough but not without that divine underlayer. — EugeneW

Curious. Is this more of an intellectual or an emotional dissatisfaction? Is it your mind that demands a metaphysics or your heart that demands divine empathy?

.
Beautiful quote.

Leaving out the third case: one must be both — a philosopher. — 180 Proof

Perfect!

Only an eternal universe, without eternal gods having created it, seems meaningless. Despite all meaning we can internally assign. — EugeneW

I take it that the meanings or meaning that humans assign isn't intense or decisive enough for you?Some thinkers have argued that a god-strength meaning would actually humiliate us. One might even argue that only a no-meaning-include universe allows us to play god. Others suggest that the universe evolves its own eyes with which to look at and understand itself, and that we are those eyes. What if our god-universe evolves like a fetus in the womb? And we 'are' that process as we debate this very issue? What if theology itself is the god it articulates? That'd be a self-creating god right there, a god that works from within the mortal meat of a divine dog, write in the broken hurt of his creator-creation.

Nice. I wonder why people think we have answers to the question, why is there a universe? — Tom Storm

To me that's a rich issue. What is an explanation? There are various theories, but in this context I think it boils down to some kind of animism or anthropomorphism. The explanation has to be a personality, a divine intelligence (maybe also with a benevolent will.)

Isn't inserting god/s into that hole what you do when you don't have an answer? It's using a mystery to explain a mystery? — Tom Storm

I totally agree. I think the special sauce of this kind of explanation is the linking of the strange to the familiar. If the gods are basically just humans without bodies, then that's comforting. Things happen for reasons that humans can understand, since the gods involved are (implicitly) essentially human. (Feuerbach writes of sublimated monotheisms ending up with the quality of human 'reason.' Thought has no limitations, no body, no location. It's the chew or true holy ghost. )

You must be a hearse whisperer... — Tom Storm

The young ladies I always end up accidentally dialing refer to me as a hoarse whisperer.

How can dead particles, conforming to physical laws, have brought themselves into existence? — EugeneW

My theory is that we'll always be left with some unexplained 'it' in our grand narratives. It seems to me that you are willing to take certain eternal gods for granted, untroubled by the issue of where they came from.

I don't see what can ever stop us from asking a 'why' that functions like a torch for unveiling contingency or brute fact. Some fellow somewhere said that we humans are a 'nothingness' because of this, a hole in the whole, incapable of plugging that very hole. Or we are like a mouth trying to swallow itself (the mortal of the sorry is oral, along with the moral of the starry). "Tell me tell me tell me the chew numb of got. " It's the and of the word as renew it.

I like a black hearse, myself — Tom Storm

Scientologists are beginning to insist on a transparent or a Clear hearse. I might ask for a rehearse.

Speaking of “inventive” ridicule, your “superscientific postreligious goo” is at least an improvement on 180prove-it's worn-out “woo”. — Gnomon

Note that you and I are simply rival distilleries. I don't claim to offer more than stuporscientific prosereligious glue myself, or at least not when I wander from the banality of trusting actual science in practical affairs. We are foils for one another. We'll both hopefully end up with sharper claws and thicker manes.

you'd find that the premise was inspired by leading-edge scientific theories, and not by any far-out philosopher or giggling guru. — Gnomon

I have long understood 'it' (your bowl of beep stew) to be inspired by popularizations of science. I see it as spiritualized science fiction or just a work of sculpture really, your latest architectonic erection.

I know people who read about the 'holographic universe' and find it stimulating and 'Spiritual' without knowing what a differential equation is. Of course 'Science' (as in 'the seance of muffle physics') tends to be more exciting than a dreary old science that won't plug up the god shaped hole or give us at least an amusing yarn. (I've suggested elsewhere that we are stains on the diapers of drooling giants.)

What about the reason that there exists a universe? — EugeneW

Please accept my playful challenge, friend.


A Dialogue
by Thomas Money, Sean Dough, and Brian Fog
========================

Q. Why is there a Universe?
A. God created one.
Q. Why is there a God ?
A. There just had to be one.
Q. Why can't someone say then that there just had to be a Universe?
A. Because the Universe is not like a person.
Q. Why does the big Explanation of things have to be like a person?
A. Because I'm more comfortable with that. Now brush your teeth and go to bed.
========================

The Left are out to censor all things that hurt their eyes and ears, theism with its patriarchs is one of those things. — Gregory A

Some of them are, yes ! And I don't like those mother flappers either ! For what it's worth, I like gun rights and free speech and distrust book burning chew believers of every polkadot and stripe.
Man-haters are as tedious as woman-haters. Our war is against cliché perhaps. Beware the cardboard windmill and the candycane lance. Check for the enemy behind you. Or, better stool, within you.

Most posters here are Internet trolls who Google their asses off to plagiarize and sound intelligent. — Joe Mello

Are you sure it's the boots and not your feet ?

When your thinking becomes evolved, one of the benefits is to spot a wannabe thinker immediately, which will save you from wasting time on them. — Joe Mello

Well said, friend! Well said!

But a cats like to play with mice, do they not?

Atheism's antipathy for theists is apparent whenever an atheist opens his or her mouth. — Gregory A

To be an atheist is usually to also be a relatively educated person with respect for science. The average theist who shoulders into an intellectual discussion comes off as 'pre-philosophical' in their apparent disregard of the norms of critical inquiry or just polite conversation. For instance, the contempt than this or that noisy atheist may have for your current beliefs is not censorship. It sounds to me like you'd like them silenced for hurting your feelings. Free speech cuts both ways, brother.

Regardless it does look like you're downplaying atheism's actual intentions which are to take away the rights of those who believe. — Gregory A

That's paranoid projection, brother, for which you have not made a case. I'm not sure that most people can walk without that crutch or something like it. If you take away Jesus, they'll get their fix from the child-eating lizardmen who live in tunnels or the Pleiadians come to save us from outer space. If the species makes it another few centuries, we'll probably have believers in the mutterings of a pontifical pulsar, with cryptographers interpreting its beeps and buzzes for a priesthood. I suspect that you're defending a monotheism (and not 'the Seven' or The Secret) simply because you were born among those who babbled of it and not some other fairy's tail. You've shown up late, too, for its glory days are past indeed, and the educated, if still Christian, are at least modest enough to take their theology negative (figurative or cultural at the least.)

You can check out The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to discover that Christianity was originally an offensive heresy that refused to tolerate the other religions already in place, like an only child who just would not share its toys.

we realize that we ourselves are not some free transcendental subject as Kant would have it, but that our self actualization takes place within a larger whole, later to be called horizon or maybe even 'episteme'. — Tobias

This 'episteme' reminds me of Braver's book on anti-realism, in which we have Kant => Hegel => Heidegger => Foucault. This is not to be understood as an ascension but to chart a movement of the big idea that the 'subject' is a kind of unstable liquid lens. Kant gives us the lens metaphor but wants it to be crystalline and eternal, so that we can have that kind of knowledge. Hegel liquifies it (makes it a function of an evolving community) but gives a journey toward eventual comprehensiveness. Then Heidegger and Foucault allow finally for unanchored drifting. The lens metaphor breaks down along the way, so we get some kind of form-of-life goo where entities are no more mound than mutter. Do please forgive any absurdities in this hasty sketch.

This part of the quote reminds me of Quine's web of belief. For example, that you can get around relativity and keep absolute time and space if you're willing to accept shrinking and growing measurement tools and objects as real facets of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly. Ontological holism emphasizes the systematicity or radical interdependence of concepts (hence 'the Concept' singular in Kojeve's Lectures on Hegel). (These lectures are dear to me as my entry into the aromatic Hegelian wetlands.)

The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method. — Kojeve

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm