One might argue that the feeling of depth is a function of the richness , intricacy and anticipative continuity of the surface movement or flow of our experience of events
— Joshs

This is mainly in the realm of sensation? Depth as in truly tasting an apple instead of just chomping and swallowing? — frank

Both sensation and conception are structured i. terms of a temporal unfolding , so depth in time, not depth as a spatial concept. Conscious awareness is not a container but an interactive movement. ‘Truly’ experiencing anything is in the direction of a richer flow of change, not the accessing of a deeper inner dimension.

Realness is the sensation of some physical object(s). Those sensations are of a correlative. We understand this in neuroscience as neuro-correlates and in philosophy as correspondence. — Josh Alfred

I would argue that realness is not mere sensation. Such pure experience does not exist. Sensation itself
is a correlation and coordination between my body and the world, and among my various sense modalities. A sensation is a complex interpretation of my world that is built of a linkage between my prior expectations and and what appears. If I put on special glasses that turn my visual scene upside down, is this visual information no longer real? If I eat the glasses long enough the world rights itself for me automatically. How and why does it do this? Because the ‘realness’ of the perceived world is a function of how reliable , stable and predictable it is for me as I attempt to interact with it. The world is real to the extent that it is predictably useful. If I take lsd and the chair changes form and color , I may say that this is a hallucination, that it is not real. I say that because I believe that if I test out my belief that the chair is not actually changing shape I will be able to prove to myself that my perception was mistaken. But what if I take lsd all the time? Would this not be like wearing the special glasses? I may eventually be able to realign the seeming changes of the chair with my ability to touch and manipulate the chair as an object. So what began as hallucination becomes a different language of the real.

I am wondering if you think that schizophrenic auditory or visual hallucinations are not so much about the world becoming unreal as they are about a change in the language of reality.

The world you see is made up of your loves and hates. You are it's depth. — frank

And your loves and hates define the limits of your understanding. One might argue that the feeling of depth is a function of the richness , intricacy and anticipative continuity of the surface movement or flow of our experience of events. Depth would not be so much a vertical as a horizontal process, concerning how effectively we are able to transform ourselves rather than about the enlargement and deepening of a pre-existing way of feeling and understanding.

Still, all the great things in life, like painting, photography, dance, love, physics, etc. get a kind of load then in the sense that science can't explain them. — Hillary

It seems to me that the kind of science that offers an alternative to mechanism, panpsychism or animism in explaining the origin and nature of the physical world must spring from a philosophy that does the same. One would not expect to find such a philosophy in Kant or earlier thinkers, but Hegel would appear to have inaugurated a new era with his evolutionary dialectic. Marx’s dialectical materialism, Bergson’s creative evolution, elan vital and lived duration , the phenomenologists’ thing in itself , Heidegger’s Being in the world , Deleuze’s difference and Derrida’s differance all point to creative becoming as the basis of both living and inorganic processes. If one still wants to post gods as the source of this becoming , they would have to be much less interesting and powerful than the sort of gods that the Kantians and pre-kantian philosophers needed in order to explain the difference between the living and the inorganic. The radically relativist philosophers in particular not only remove the gap between life and non-life, they also remove the idea of purpose and reason as anything more than contingent values. This does t leave much for a god to do.

The above read like fast lanes to a nightmare of social instability, with frequent visits to thresholds of disintegration & collapse. — ucarr

There are regions of political stability and hegemony , just as there are paradigmatic communities in the sciences. Most of the time we live within these relatively stable communities, so it’s not as nightmarish as it sounds. In fact , it is just a description of how things already work. The disintegration and collapse is something we see on a regular basis. What we don’t see is an understanding of the basis of such breakdowns and how to avoid their violence and disruptive effect. Nietzsche’s philosophy doesnt produce this regular violence of instability and disintegration , it mitigates against the kind of political world we already live in.

Joshs Yeah, which is why I characterize reason as "in some respects is inadequate ..."; and yet reason is also indispensible, no? Not "perfect", but good enough – usually much better than non / un reasoning. — 180 Proof

When we think of reasoning we tend to gravitate toward formal systems like logic or mathematics. What doesn't immediately come to mind is the kind reasoning that psychotherapists see in their clients. To me this is the most important kind of reasoning , because our anxieties, confusions , fears, anger and guilt define the limits of our sense making powers. An emotional
outburst is a kind of reasoning, a coping
stance toward a world which has become difficult to assimilate. By this measure , reason in its broadest sense isn’t a capacity we sometimes use and sometimes
fail to use. Rather, reason is synonymous with sense making , which we are always doing as long as we are alive. Our motivational-affective system is wholly in service of anticipating and assimilating events. The optimally well-adjusted individual doesn’t need to know any formal logic or math. The kind of
reasoning that they employ entails the ability to partially unravel a crumbling scheme of understanding and experiment with and explore incipient new ways
of looking at a situation. As a result of
trial and error, a new workable anticipatory stance emerges, and can then be tightened up using math or logic
But if these are relied upon too heavily, they will hamper the ability to reconstrue when the next crisis of understanding arrives.

I don't think Nietzsche is a systematic thinker so it's not possible to present his ideas in a packaged form but will to power and other concepts do have a direct relation to his stance on slavery. Will to power in my interpretation, amounts to exercising influence and transforming the world by forcing your system of values/ideals. Eternal resurrection means you should live life in such a manner that you should wish/be glad to experience life as whole in repetition for for eternity. A high culture is the the manifestation of will to power, which can only be exercised by the elite in it's full meaning. So its neccessary to enslave the rest of people, so they don't become an obstacle in path of self realization of the ubermensch — Wittgenstein

In my reading, Nietzsche is very much a systematic thinker. The eternal return of the same does not refer to a repeating cycle in which the contents of one’s lived memories are lived again the very same way. On the contrary , eternal return of the same is the return of the same absolutely different. What repeats itself is absolute novelty , always in a new way. This is why Nietzsche does not believe that science progresses, that it represents, mirrors or corresponds to an external reality. The only reality is that of the incessantly changing relation of the drives to each other.

As Nietzsche says,

“ Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren’t
we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn’t enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean
comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of
reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect…”( Genealogy of Morals)

Will to power is not the desiring to possess power by a freely willing autonomous subject. The ‘subject’ is a fractured community of competing drives, and power flows through it rather than being possessed by it. Each of these drives within the psyche is its own will to power, and it is their tension that is the creative force of genius l.

“Everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn,
overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated." Geneology of Morality)

Will to power is in the service of the eternal return by being differential and multiple, transforming the arts, politics and the sciences through the constant clashes of the drives. The idea of a political class maintaining control is antithetical to the anarchic spirit of will to power.

I don't think we should bother with postmodern thinkers as they don't interpret Nietzsche, they reinterpret his ideas/work for their postmodern projects. I am more concerned with knowing what Nietzsche had to say, without adding my own content, which the postmodernist do. — Wittgenstein

You say postmodern thinkers reinterpret his ideas for their postmodern projects. This is precisely what every Nietzsche scholar or non-scholar does. There is no way to know what Nietzsche had to say without already interpreting him through one’s own perspective, which will likely line up with the perspective of one of a group of notated Nietzsche scholars. You don’t think Leiter filters Nietzsche through his own brand of modernist realism?

I am familiar with the work of Foucault but you can quote the "interpretation" of the philosophers you have listed and we'll see if it's really an interpretation. But make sure it's on the topic of slavery since we are not concerned about eternal resurrection, will to power etc as concepts in of themselves — Wittgenstein

You cannot spilt apart subtopics within his work and understand them in isolation from the whole. It is impossible to know what Nietzsche is saying about slavery without first understanding eternal recurrence and will to power. These are the means of decoding his views on all subjects.

Any student of history and culture knows that, each era brings forth new trends, values, ideas so it's stupid to fix greatness to a particular art,science,philosophy form. You should have understood why l didn't specify the content of high art form. My argument still stands, the system of elite artists/scientists/philosophers is capable of finding genius, just as Russell recognized the genius in Wittgenstein, who would go on to disagree with his mentor. — Wittgenstein

How do the new trends and values relate to those of the eras that precede them? With regard to the sciences in particular, does Einstein add cumulatively to the sum
of knowledge in physics, or is Relativity a qualitative transformation of previous physics that can’t be considered a linear progress? Is Einstein great because he brings science closer to understanding the way things really are , or because he simply ushers ina new perspective? For Nietzsche, the greatness of a scientist is not on how accurately they represent reality but in their ability to break free of the herd, as well as their eagerness to see their theories crushed.

↪Paulm12 Reason, while misusable and in some respects is inadequate for adapting to reality, works better – more reliably, more defeasibly – than all of the alternatives. — 180 Proof

Until it doesn’t. Reason is playing games within a value frame. All the while the frame itself is ever so subtlety being turned topsy turvey. Until lo and behold , one finds oneself in a new value frame , and has to create new games of reason. It’s transformation of value which drives cultural and scientific metamorphosis , and reason is impotent here.

What's the alternative to doing this for life? Going on intuition and emotion all the time?

That's not going to help you get very far, in fact, it's likely to get oneself killed. The "postmodernists" who argue otherwise are using reason to justify whatever they say, so.. — Manuel

The postmodernists are pointing out that Reason is a subset of value , and value is affective. Thus reason is organized and gets its sense on the basis of affective comportment, how the world matters and is relevant to us.

Contemporary "musicians" for the most part produce commercialized music. This explains the deplorable state of art. — Wittgenstein

You sound like an old fogey. Not a fan of classic Rock or Punk? The Velvet Underground were not very commercially successful, but there’s more of Nietzsche in that music than in any symphony.

A system should be put in place which allows the crème da le crème of society to blossom into maturity, this will come at the cost of a non-egalitarian society — Wittgenstein

Do you have the slightest idea what would constitute the ‘crème de la crème’ for Nietzsche in terms of specific values, beliefs, taste in music and art?
Do you think he would embrace any of the specific arts, sciences or political forms that you consider to be superior? Here’s a hint: No.
This is simply because Nietzsche does not advocate for any particular content when it comes to forms of cultural creativity. On the contrary, he advocates for the endless overturning of specific cultural values , which includes all particular creative content.

Do you think a college professor will keep his job in this age if he spouts the elitist nonsense in my OP ? A few scholars have nevertheless dared to read Nietzsche as he ought to be read and l can drop their names in this thread but you will dismiss their interpretation..... — Wittgenstein

That sounds like a silly argument. There are plenty of conservative Christian institutions in the U.S. where such readings of Nietzsche would probably be welcome. Of the authors you mentioned I’m familiar with Brian Leiter. He reads Nietzsche as a modernist, existentialist and realist. This interpretation is more accessible to most people than the postmodern reading, because it doesnt require them to understand postmodern thought.

I’m not bothered by what Leiter’s
reading says in particular about Nietzsche’s approach to slavery. Rather, I think it completely misses what is most exciting, daring and radical about his work. For me the larger question is whether you have any acquaintance with the Nietzsche depicted by Heidegger, Derrida , Foucault , Deleuze or other postmodernists. If you don’t know what they claim to be his main thesis (for instance , what is Will to Power , Eternal Return of the Same and their relation to each other) then you are not in a position to ‘prefer’ your reading to an alternative you have no familiarity with.

...and yet time and again it is read as encourage the aristocratic nonsense of the OP. Time and again this is how it is read. Your view looks like special pleading. — Banno

Special pleasing my ass. You really need to improve the quality of the Nietzsche interpreters you read. I have a shelf full of brilliant Nietzsche scholarship and none of it spouts the crap you’re referring to.

Who in his right mind would endorse hedonism?

Either you're manipulated or you're manipulating. — Agent Smith

Not as simple as you might think. Pleasure and pain are intricately bound up with sense-making oriented around personal goals and purposes. You cannot reliable produce rewards and punishments that motivate and shape the behavior of others without understanding their own interests , aims and ways of looking at the world. This insulates agains the idea of hedonism as effective behavioral control, because it only works in superficial and limited situations. Mind control is a Skinnerian myth.

truisms
— Joshs

So, they're true. Sorry if I'm a bit slow, nothing's obvious to me at all. — Agent Smith

They’re truisms because they come by their ‘truth’ by not saying anything new. Better, pleasure and desire mean the same thing and that is why it is ‘true’ to say that pleasure is better than pain. It is a truism just like ‘Better means better’ is a truism.

We know for certain (?) that pleasure is better than pain. What could be more desirable than pleasure in your opinion? My mind draws a blank. Is it the same for you? — Agent Smith

These seem to be truisms. ‘Better’ is synonymous with ‘pleasure’ , which is synonymous with what we desire or prefer. What could be more desirable that what we desire? What could be better than that which we prefer?
What’s needed here is an explanation of the basis of preference in terms of the organizational dynamics of perception and cognitionn. For instance, we could connect that which is desirable in terms of the goal-directedness of anticipatory sense-making.

That may be why humans have always imagined that there must be something better, something more, than this "vale of tears". Our advanced animal brains are not limited to the here & now, but can create alternative possible worlds, such as Plato's Ideal, and the Christian Heaven, or somewhat more mundane, a Garden of Eden, where grass-fed lions lay-down with their fellow vegetarian lambs — Gnomon

What is the ‘this’, the ‘here’, the ‘now ‘ , the ‘ it is’ which is being assumed as Reality. Heidegger began Being and Time telling us that we need to put into question the simple copula ‘is’. His conclusion? The ‘is’ supposedly points to a static state of affairs , ‘here and now’ that traps us, but in fact the ‘is’ points to transformation and temporalization.
The something better, more, different is already ‘in’ the state of affairs , the ‘here and now’ that we assume as confining and locking us in.

The law of gravity doesn't care whether you're a saint or a sinner or a stone. — Agent Smith

A variation of the popular conservative mantra:
‘science doesn't care about your feelings’.

Or at least, that’s the story a certain era of science tells itself. An era just coming into being knows that valuative frameworks are the very basis of science.

This thread topic is based on the discussion in 'Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment', by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein(2021). They argue that,
'Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points of view around the target.' — Jack Cummins

I think Kahneman’s approach is fundamentally limited due to his attempt to explain human behavior on the basis of an objectively normative model. Cognition is not the computational representation of information, it is the subjective constural of valuative relations. Words like ‘distortion’, ‘bias’, ‘error’,’off target’ rely on normative abstractions serving as the criterion of accuracy and correctness.

The authors argue that, 'measurement is in the human mind', and, 'Matters of judgment, including professional judgments, occupy a space between questions or facts or computations on the other hand, and matters of taste.' — Jack Cummins

Judgement is not a space between fact and value. Value is prior to fact , in that all facts are intrinsically valuative.
n

You know "the marshmallow experiment"? children are left alone with a marshmallow and instructed to not eat it (until some future point). If they wait 5 minutes, they will get two marshmallows." Some children can wait, some eat the single marshmallow forthwith,

The ability to wait 5 minutes supposedly predicts how well children will do in life, where delayed gratification is commonly practiced by successful (but chronically unsatisfied?) people. I don't know whether the marshmallow experiment proves anything or not, but it's the kind of easy to do, readily replicable experiment that comes to mind. — Bitter Crank

It’s also a deeply flawed experimental paradigm in my opinion. Experiments like this , the supposed Dunning- Krueger effect, cognitive dissonance and others that appear to find cognitivist ‘bias’ in decision-making presuppose an objective starting point for that variable which is allegedly vulnerable to bias. Attempts like this to translate moral reasoning situations into empirically measurable frameworks substitute simplistic normative biases for an understanding that takes account of the perspectival nature of value.


Which gets to the point I was making that you haven’t commented on, which is that objectively based research in social psychology is using the wrong notion of science, that derived from the natural sciences. The third-person perspective currently in vogue needs to be embedded within a first-person perspective , which should be treated as primary. I’m far from alone in pointing this out.

Eugene Gendlin writes:

“ We would not expect a first-person process science to contradict the genuine findings of reductionistic science, any more than ecology does. But it places those findings within a broader perspective that can be more useful for certain purposes. One of those purposes is to understand first-person processes in such a way that 'the person' does not drop out.”

Varela and Thompson reject the claim that scientific objectivity presupposes a belief in an observer independent reality. Evan Thompson(2001) writes:

“Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James' thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10).”

Matthew Ratcliffe(2002) says:

“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”

↪Joshs The social sciences--I'm including psychology--have a lamentably justified bad rep for half-baked research, sloppy methodology, unconfirmed results, and so — Bitter Crank

But why is this the case? Is it just a function of the obvious fact that the social sciences deal with phenomena that are much ‘messier’ than the natural sciences due to their complexity and instability? Or are the social sciences also capable of challenging the assumptions underlying what constitutes prosper science? For instance, Skinner never accepted cognitive psychology as a real science. And older versions of cognitive science are now making similar accusations concerning the scientific legitimacy of phenomenologicallly influenced newer approaches in psychology. So it’s important to separate sloppy science from approaches that define the methods and scope of science.

That he was being "scientific" is my projection of what he was doing--even if it wasn't great science. — Bitter Crank

I think when it comes to psychology, ‘great science’ is an oxymoron. The more psychologists and psychiatrists try to emulate the natural sciences the less useful their work becomes. Rather than the psychologists envying physicists, it is the physicists who should be taking cures from psychology.

Behaviorism - Walden Two - the grotesque result of an art aspiring to be a science. — ZzzoneiroCosm

The psychologist George Kelly wrote:

“I often tell my students that a psychopath is a stimulus- response psychologist who takes it seriously.”

Gracias! — Agent Smith

בבקשה

I read somewhere that the naysayers of philosophy accuse it of being nothing more than literature review. How would you respond? — Agent Smith

I’d respond that that is probably your view as well. It was also mine when I was in college. Took me awhile to realize that it was a product of my own ignorance rather than some fault of philosophy.

Suppose that belief or faith had the intrinsic property of manifesting into reality whatever is believed. For example if I believe a delicious cheesy, tomato and dough based circle exists then pizza becomes a thing. — Benj96

This is in fact how perception and imagination work. To say we believe something exists is , at the most basic experiential level, simply to have it appear before us either as imagined, remembered, hallucinated , dreamt or perceived. The difference between scientific fact, common sense fact, hallucination, memory, brief perceptual illusion, dream and changing perceptual reality is a matter of the pattern by which our ongoing ‘believing’ , which is to say, actual experience, unfolds. Does the experience of the pizza persist or disappear? If it persists, can I experience it with all my senses, can I touch it and eat it? Can I share it with others and have them experience it? Does everything I conjure by ‘belief’ function this way , and if so, can I control its appearance and disappearance at will? Why can Indo this? If I don’t understand why and how this happens, I can’t depend on it being reliable when I really need to count on it.

What I’m getting at here is that all we mean when we talk about reality is a certain dependable stability and predictability to what we believe. Science is based on intersubjective consensus of belief. No one ever observes
the exact same scientific phenomenon as anyone else , so we make our theoretical models general enough to compensate for this ambiguity. The precision of mathematical physics isn’t due to the mathematical exactness of physical reality, but to the models we choose to capture reality. Money as an intersubjectively created concept is different from physical particle in that our belief in money adjusts itself to what we know about its sensitively to economic conditions. We know that its value fluctuates in so many ways and this is part of its reality for us.

Intersubjective belief in god and belief in scientific evidence aren't as far apart as you might think. Both rely on their own variety of evindence. One believes and continues to believe in one’s god to the extent that that belief allows one to anticipate and make sense of deep aspects of human functioning. The evidence can change in such a way ( the death of one’s child) that one finds it necessary to abandon or revise that faith.

Free will has to be a determined will. — Hillary

If a free will is determined , does this mean that you reject the concept of evil? From a deterministic perspective , what are the causes of morally wrongful acts?

All processes are completely determined, no matter how complex — Hillary

Life isn't programmed. — Hillary

If life is based on processes that are completely determined then in a sense, yes, they are programmed. In order to understand living and human creativity without needing gods , you have to abandon physical causal determinism. Physics won’t collapse if you do. We can still use it the same old way we have been , but we can be more insightful about its limitations and the ways it will need to change in order to keep up with the social sciences and philosophy. There are more and more physicists today who are ready to abandon determinism.

As long as we can create the circumstances in which live evolves, we haven't created life. As life itself is part of the circumstances we can't create it, no matter how a programmed version in a computer looks like it. — Hillary

For me the issue isn’t ‘can we create life’, but why would we want to? Would you want to create the big bang, as opposed to understanding it or creating a computer
model of it ? Would that be useful to you? We don’t , and can’t , recreate the past because we take our past along with us. The past comes already pre-interpreted by our present. That is why our past is always ahead of us.

Nonsense. That what comes from our hands and minds is not to further evolution. Evolution of life, a freely developing process, is a different process than what we let freely develop in a lab or anything coming out of it. — Hillary

Is that because we have ‘free will’ , and that is somehow split off from, special and unique with respect to previous scales of evolution ? We dont choose to will , we find ourselves willing , and this birthing of the new happens this way with pre-organic matter. No element, particle , process , object remains self-identical from
moment to moment. A particle is a singularity, a differentiation. For the sake of convenience , physics has assumed the concept of law-governed deterministic objects with persisting properties and attributes , but this is just a useful abstraction

We can't create the circumstances to let a DNA molecule appear or a cell or a neuron, or a form of life. To create life you need life in the first place. — Hillary

And to create knowledge you need life , and to have life you first must have an inorganic word. Human creativity is not backward looking. We don’t recapitalw what already happened , and the levels of evolutionary complexity that preceded humans and human knowledge creation.
Everything we invent is forward-looking, designed to further the complexity we rest upon as living things and as cultural products. Understanding how life evolved
from pre-living matter would be a further evolution of culture.

I look from the scientific side. Not the philosophic side. — Hillary

Then you’re not reading the same scientists I am

Of course there is no magic involved, but the point is, we can't create life. Life can only evolve naturally — Hillary

Yes, life evolves naturally , and the human capacity for technological invention belongs to that natural
order of evolution. Our aims and goals further the evolution of the complexity of nature. The entire history of cosmology which leads to the creation of more and more complex inorganic forms, which led to the emergence of living things, which led to the emergence of human cultural evolution, is a process of the interaction of events taking place in more and more interesting ways, which means on a more and more accelerating
time scale. A the level of human culture we call that the progress of knowledge, but it is continuous with the levels of evolution that preceded it.

For humans to ‘create’ life , molecules or anything else is not to duplicate an earlier time scale of evolution. On the contrary, all our inventions move us forward to higher levels of complexity, over shorter and shorter time scales(‘knowledge’ that only accrues , and only can be utilized, over millions of years obviously doesn’t have the same usefulness as that same knowledge that is operable over a time scale of minutes. If creating life means a return to much slower and less
complex time scales , the. that would be akin to killing oneself so that one’s body could decay and the simpler arrangement of molecules that emerges from its decay
could then be allowed to re-assemble itself into a new living organism. I realize this example is different from creating life de novo, but my point is that we only think the concept of creating life represents some kind of achievement of knowledge because we are confusing the goals of human technology and knowledge with the ‘goals’ of earlier , slower and simpler scales
of pre-human and pre-living evolution. To create life simply means to wipe us out in order to regress to an older time scale. It is essentially returning to a past in which we didn’t exist yet.
It isnt life we are interested in creating , it is the further evolution of our own level of knowledge complexity we desire. What we already do every time we innovate is much more interesting therm the original creation of life , because it sits atop of that creative achievement and builds much further from there. We dont need to build from scratch ‘consciousness’ or the creative spark that the gods allegedly provided. Creativity is not the product of an entity , substance , being , organism. It flows through these but is an ontological and metaphysical a priori. Another name for it is time. The gods didn’t create time , time created the gods.

. Simple organic molecules can be made without detailed knowledge. But a virus, not even a DNA molecule, can't be created in a lab. — Hillary

All we do is place certain elements in proximity to others under certain conditions . We have discovered from trial and error that this leads to the formation of the molecules we desire. But the dynamics necessary to allow these molecules to stick together are akin to the guiding function of a dna strand in conjunction with the cellular environment. We don’t create these dynamics any more than we create dna. In both case , we combine and recombine what has already been created.

Language doesn't enact realities. It's merely a means of reinforcing and express them. To a minor extent It's involved in shaping realities. — Hillary

Then you and I support different philosophers and psychologists on this subject. Phenomenology , postmodern philosophies , enactivist cognitive approaches and Wittgenstein all argue my view.

even a single neuron can't be created in a lab. Let alone a hundred billion of them interconnected in erratic ways and living in a living body in a chaotic world. Only such a structure can produce consciousness and creativity. The game of Life (based on a few simple rules) gives very surprising non-predictable results, but I think the real game of life is a bit more complex. — Hillary

Let’s think about why we would want to create a single neuron. You said this would be needed to produce consciousness and creativity. But you also said that even non-living processes are creative in a certain sense. So the question may be why we should claim that our invented devices are entirely lacking in ‘creativity’. If , as we agreed , the computer isn’t a natural object ( which is a creatively evolving process) but an appendage, an interaction that we set up as a certain kind of useful structure, then what is it that we see when look at the historical development of our inventions? So they not aid our own creativity in increasingly effective and accelerating ways? Isn’t it the case that we cannot invent a living cell because we don’t understand enough about how a cell works? Our most advanced computers not only are less complex than a virus, they are less complex than the intricate structure of simple inorganic molecules, given that we don’t know enough about the physical world to invent such molecules.

If we are not ready to invent a living cell , why should we assume that we are missing anything by not having to us capacity? Would a primitive society benefit from having a computer placed in their midst, given their inability to invent such a device or appreciate its use? Don’t the devices we are capable of inventing reflect our readiness to benefit creatively from what we interact with? As we become smarter, our devices become smarter and our interaction with them becomes more and more creative?
So isn’t it irrelevant that we can’t ‘create a living cell’? We create only what we are ready to benefit from. The fact we can’t create life is just a reflection of the fact that we wouldn’t know what to do with such an ‘invention’. If an advanced species who could create life for their purposes were to give us some of their creations, it would be wasted on us.

I would argue that interacting with life is more valuable than ‘creating’ it , and we continue to understand living things , including ourselves, especially at the most complex level of conscious behavior, better and better over time. Our interactions with other animals also become richer and more useful due to this increase in understanding. We used to think animals couldnt cognize, emote, create tools , create and pass on a culture, have language. All that has changed. The evolution of our understanding of behavior is a kind of technology in itself, and is expressed in improvements in the devices we build that imitate behavior.

So I dont think there is anything magical about ‘creating’ life. What is important and relevant is the ever constant improvements in what we do invent.

Yes. And life is what these ever more complex processes accumulated into. From lifeless dead matter (with a non-explainable element called charge by physicists, of which they haven't the faintest idea what it actually is; it's a magical divine stuff the gods have charged matter with to make interaction and life possible) living processes, with feet, eyes, ears, bodies, internal simulation devices, etc. developed. I'm one of them and type to you with a laugh on my face, my brainy world constantly simulating the world while my body moves in it. Magic! And I can hear music at the same time, and hear the dog whine. From birth till death we walk through the world, which projects itself into the brain, where it comes alive and is actively shaped. We have no on/off button and to create a life means to create a new big bang and universe, which is the only way to let it develop freely and naturally. It's thus impossible to create live or program it. — Hillary

I’m not one who believes there is a profound qualitative gulf that separates the living from the non-living. With the help of autopoietic self-organizing theories and enactivism we now have a way to connect human cognition and affect with the simplest living systems. Rather than posting some special , unique status associated with human reason and feelings in contrast with the ear of the animal kingdom , we can now trace the basis of affecting and cognition i from single-called organisms. I think we will eventually be able to extend those dynamics to the inorganic realm of evolution as well, so the magic will have been shown to have begun with the simplest physical interactions in an ancient universe. ‘Lifeless and dead’ will no longer be appropriate ascriptions of this inorganic realm.

Our computers are appendages. We don’t build them for what they do in themselves but for how we can get them to usefully interact with us. We have used animals this way, and Skinner’s behaviorism face us a mechanistic model for interacting with animals as if they were machines. As our neural models change , we will no longer design our thinking appendages as calculating devices , but use wetware to device simple creatures
which we will interact with in more
creative ways, because these living systems will not be based on deterministic schematics.

Even the computerized devices
we now use never actually behaved deterministically. In their interaction with us they are always capable of surprising us. We call this bugs or errors , but they reflect the fact that even what is supposedly deterministic has no existence prior to its interaction with us interpreting beings, and thus was always in its own way a continually creative appendage.

But relevance does not always be practice-bounded. The truth of gods has whatsoever zero impact on scientific practice, but at the same time a very deep impact on practice, be it everyday life or experiments at CERN. — Hillary

It is your belief in the truth of gods I have in mind when I talk about pragmatic relevance. To me the idea of something true outside of its relevance as a meaning in your ( or anyone else’s ) life is incoherent. Your belief in gods informs all your actions, even the most trivial, and in that sense has significant impact on your way of thinking about science.

Computers are not naturally evolving processes. They are a product of these processes. Human products, that is. Naturally occurring processes can't be created. If you want to create creativity, you have to create a new universe with life evolving in it. — Hillary

You are arguing that only living organisms are capable of creativity, because of their self-organization? I think the inorganic evolves also. Hydrogen evolved from
something simpler , and the higher elements from the lower elements. Organic molecules evolved from
inorganic. The inorganic components of the computer in front of you are still changing , albeit very slowly.