You know when Trump used the f word about Iran and Israel not knowing what the f*ck they’re doing, last week. When the Israel, Iran ceasefire was broken, by Israel before it had even begun. Israel had put out a statement that their planes were in the air to retaliate against the so called violation by Iran. Trump was very angry and said they’re turning the planes back, the ceasefire will hold. He must have told Netanyahu in no uncertain terms to call those planes back. And Israel must have obeyed his command, because the ceasefire did hold.

Rational belief is justified belief- i.e.having reasons to believe some proposition is true. "X is possible" is not a justification to believe X rather than ~X. Possibilities are endless.

I don’t work with beliefs, I don’t hold any other than those that are required to live a life. When it comes to questions of existence, I hold none. This also pertains to denying any beliefs, I don’t deny any either. This might sound radical, but it isn’t, it’s realistic. Because as I have already pointed out, we really have no idea, not a clue, what is out there. Gnomon seems to conclude that this is a barren denialism, or something. It isn’t, it’s is to be open minded.

So in a sense I am standing at the door of the unknown along with the Metaphysicians who have reached the extent of what they can deduced using logical inferences.

So what do we do now? How do we make progress?

Perhaps it is a pursuit like the pursuit of an artist, to make progress. An artist exercises intuition and a creative flair to improve their work. It is a journey, with events and experiences along the way. But crucially, the artist is moving forward without relying on rational thought alone. It is in the mix, but not controlling events, or progress. There is an interplay between thought, intuition, happenstance and the creation of artistic content. The artist may refer to pieces made previously, to find inspiration, a feedback loop. Also there may be means a bit like calculus, quadratic equations. Like shimmying up a chimney with one foot being intuition, the other foot, a way of life and the hands interaction with nature.

I apologize if I sound like I'm criticizing you or anyone else

No worries, My skin is like elephant hide.

This depends on the unjustified assumption that we actually have the capacity to see around those veils, and it places unwarranted trust in one's intuitions.

You seem to have smuggled in the word assumption there.
How can it be deemed unjustified if we don’t know if there are ways to go around, or unlock the veils, or not. Or what, or where the veils are? Surely there is justification to enquire, whilst under the realisation that we have reached the limit of empirical enquiry.

Likewise with your word unwarranted, I haven’t said anything about intuition, other than that it is used in some way. We use our intuition all the time, already, indeed it helps us sometimes when working with logic and likely plays an important role in understanding philosophy, for example.

All I’m describing is a different way of working things out than using reason alone. There is a system of calculating things about the world and the self from the use of intuition, interaction with nature and following an appropriate way of life. Where these three means are used together and in sequence to work things out. To arrive at an understanding without arriving there via rational thought. This and other means have been practiced for millennia from a time before there was much in the way of academic learning.

However, my impression of our Cosmos --- based in part on Modern Cosmology, Quantum Physics, and Information Theory --- is of a complex self-assembling system, that is motivated by a world-creating impulse (BB) of Cause & Laws. From such a simple yet powerful beginning, awesome complexity & beauty have evolved --- despite unfit mutations subject to de-selection. And that observation of gradual improvement implies, to more sanguine thinkers, some kind of long range Purpose, implemented in an ongoing Process, not in a six day Genesis fait accompli. I could post a list of my "company" of secular thinkers who reached a more positive & progressive understanding. But for brevity, I'll only mention the one I'm most familiar with : A.N. Whitehead*2.

What I have said doesn’t mean I don’t consider cosmogony’s like this. It’s a good philosophy as I said the last time we spoke.

However we are limited to what we can know in our world. This can also be extrapolated to some universal truths. But we can’t know the extent to which this knowledge applies to realities beyond our world. It could be a pale, or partial, representation of the reality beyond. As such we can do no more than speculate on what there is.
I am aware that there are ways, as you say, to work out what nature is up to and the direction it is going in. With the caveat that it may be only a partial picture and we don’t know what is missing from the picture. It could be something which entirely transforms it, or acts as a key to unlock realities hidden from us.

You’re aiming at the wrong target. It’s the human condition, not what thinkers have worked out, that is the problem here.

I will say one thing. Trump has kicked Netanyahu’s ass. This is progress. Now he needs to kick Putin’s ass. Then at least he might have a chance of getting that peace prize.

All we can do is to try and peek back layers of the onion, but sooner or later we'll get to a point beyond which there can be empirical verification, and this would limit our ability to explore even deeper. We may already be there, in some areas.

Mysticism got there a while back. They realised that mental enquiry alone is blind, there are natural veils in our and the world’s make up, which prevent progress in that direction. That if progress is to be made it requires other avenues of inquiry, to bypass, or see around those veils.

There are three avenues I have found, intuition, nature and way of life. Of course mind is present, but not in control.

But, IMHO, Calleman's unorthodox method came much closer to answering the "why?" questions. Any questions? :smile:

Questions of why and purpose are inaccessible to us because they involve the purposes of who, or what brought the world into being. It might only be possible to understand, or map those purposes from the perspective of that agency (this also applies if the agency is unconscious). We are mere specs of dust in comparison.

This is not speculation, it's inference that there is an ontological foundation to reality. The alternative is an unexplainable infinite series of causes and an infinite series of composition.

I would say that logical inferences about the unknown, or the fundamentally inaccessible are speculative. However it is preferable to the infinite series and composition, which throw up illogical inconsistencies. To this extent, I agree with you. I would add a third category here though. That the reality of the origin of what is, is beyond our capacity to understand. It may even be beyond the reach of logic.

Regarding intelligibility: I agree the actual ontological foundation may be unintelligible - but that has no bearing on the logic that concludes simply that there IS a foundation. (If we deny logic, this undercuts reason - making it self-defeating.)

But we must consider that logic may not be able represent the origin in a meaningful way. Or that we can’t rely on it. This is not to deny logic, but rather to accept it’s limitations. Likewise the limitations of humanity’s abilities to work things out, or to understand things.

There are other things to consider, apart from our limitations, that the reality might be counterintuitive, it may be totally orthogonal to what we know about the world. It might be inside out, or running backwards in time, or spanning time. It might be identical to what we know, or imminent, but that we are blind to it. Also there are transcendent issues, but I won’t go into them here.

Basically what I’m saying is that we really don’t know anything, this is not to say we are unable know it. It might be veiled from us.

Maybe. I believe there's a better reason to think the past is finite than infinite, but lots of smart people disagree with me.

I agree with you and really these smart people aren’t all that smart, because the infinite past thing is just a way of putting off the inevitable. We don’t know how something could have come from nothing, or how something endures for infinite time and space. So we are left with nothing to say.

But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation."

This is just speculation, all we know is that we don’t know and any speculation we do indulge in will be tainted by anthropomorphism. Where the anthropomorphism refers to the the human mind and its contents. Also that the answers we seek may be inconceivable to the human mind, or unintelligible.

I find the activity of thinking the most interesting and important concept in this conceptual space, which is why I assign the salient and important word consciousness to it.

Yes, but you don’t need to assign consciousness to it, just intelligence.

Or are you saying that consciousness is necessary for the degree of intelligence you observe in the LLM? Or in other words that it can’t perform those tasks if it is not conscious?

Going back to consciousness, we only know of it in biological organisms. Many of them don’t do any thinking, or very small amounts of it and the more primitive of them are only thinking unconsciously. So they as a being, are not aware that they’re thinking, or why. But they are clearly conscious of being alive and of their environment.

Also if intelligent activity is necessary for the emergence of consciousness, then computers with quite primitive intelligent abilities, on a level with these animals, would be conscious. But it is only in the highly intelligent computers, that people claim to observe consciousness.

Both these reasons suggest that consciousness is being attributed to intelligent LLM’s because they appear to be conscious. While ignoring the reality that they are like that because they are highly intelligent, rather than that it is because they are conscious.

Consciousness is not a result of mental activity. It’s a result of cellular life and in multi cellular organisms with a central nervous system. It becomes self conscious, or self aware. But it’s a category error to think that consciousness is emergent from mental activity, or intelligence.

I see. So, the NYTimes is drinking the Trump Koolaid. Is that what you're claiming?

Yes, they all are, every establishment is. There’s no credible opposition left, can’t you see that yet.

Yes, but now there's a UN agency, and the UN is no friend to Israel, backing up Israel's claim

Well they realised the U.S. and Israel couldn’t be trusted when Trump tore up the deal with Iran in 2016. This point became inevitable then. So much winning.

What Kool aid are you talking about?

The one where you don’t criticise what Trump is doing and treat him as a credible leader rather than a clown.

The NYTimes is solid, though.

The NYTimes has been on the cool aid since everyone kissed the ring last November.

Netanyahu claimed Iran was 2 weeks away from the bomb in 1992 and has continued to repeat if ever since.

What makes infinity woo-woo?

Well it does have a meaning in mathematics, as an endless sequence of numbers, or unbounded set. But this is not encompassing any endless, or infinite quantity, it is only a symbol representing an open ended sequence.
But that’s as far as it goes for rationality. When one tries to apply it to anything else, the logical conclusion becomes illogical. I could give examples, but I think we are all familiar with what that looks like.

Why consider any specific spiritual account? I can acknowledge it's possible, but the possibilities are endless, so what's the point?

So are the possibilities for the origin, ground of physical manifestation, the possibilities are endless.

It's like considering what other forms of life that may exist elsewhere in the the universe, choosing one specific, hypothetical form and then drawing conclusions about the nature of aliens. Indeed, it's possible that there exist Tralfamadorians, who communicate through tap-dancing and farts, but a bare possibility like this has no practical significance to me.

Yes and the Flying Spaghetti Monster might have spewed out atoms in the Big Bang. But that’s not my preference either.

IOW, something more than mere possibility is needed to make it worth giving any serious consideration to.

There are two parts to this;
Firstly, it’s unlikely that the human mind with its bias, I mentioned earlier and the limitations suggested by Wayfarer*, would be likely to come up with serious possibilities. We really are blind in this regard.

Secondly, philosophy has already addressed this in Idealism for example. So rational possibilities have been explored there.


Furthermore there are cosmogonies which have stood the test of time. These can be found at the heart of various religions. While their stories vary, parallels can be drawn between them. In these traditions the truth or reality about religion, or existence was shown to people in revelation. This is the only way to go beyond our inherent blindness (mentioned in italics above). This knowledge informs the philosophy of the school. Normally someone considering these alternatives spends years studying the philosophy of and experiencing the practice of one, or more of these schools. Until they develop a body and breadth of knowledge. So they become fluent in the milieu, rather like a philosopher becomes fluent in the milieu of philosophical thought.


* “He is arguing that evolutionary biology may account for how animals adapt and survive, but that this in itself does not provide grounds for us to believe that an argument is true, when, according to those criteria, it might simply be adaptive”.

As I said in my earlier post, I'm suspicious of using this explanatory gap as an excuse to believe in some sort of spiritualism.

If you remove the word believe from that sentence and replace it with the word consider the word excuse loses it’s relevance.

Infinity not woo woo!
Come on.

logic is computation and logical structures are software, by analogy. This is developed in living bodies that have a central nervous system. Living bodies that don’t have a central nervous system, have an encoded system of responses to stimuli.

The material world has an inherent logical structure due to cascading effects of forces between atoms and groups of atoms and sub atomic particles. This is an inherent result of the extension of spacetime. The aforementioned encoding is an inherent result of the development of living bodies and the aforementioned computation is the inherent result of the development of the central nervous system.

The question I have is what comes next in this progression from cascading effects(1), to encoded responses(2), to computation(3). What is, or would be, number (4) in this sequence?

I've spelled it out in depth and detail. To recap: physics is based on a useful abstraction, which has yielded enormous physical powers, but at the expense of excluding fundamental aspects of human existence.

Quite, a world of philosophical zombies could have played the role acted out by humanity. And yet a cockroach and a crocodile have more self awareness, or sentience, than a philosophical zombie.

I don’t have the answers to any of this, but I remain a kind of doubting Thomas. I find it difficult to see why meaning must be grounded in necessity or guaranteed by something absolute. Could it be that humans are unrealistically impressed by reason, treating it as the highest or even only valid form of understanding? But reason is just one tool among many, and has limited use. It struggles with emotions, ambiguity, and subjective experiences. It's clear that no logical argument can fully capture grief, happiness, aesthetic appreciation, or empathy. I wonder if we overestimate its power, forgetting that perhaps it evolved for survival, not for solving metaphysical puzzles or guaranteeing truth.

I enjoyed reading this post, it laid out some of my thinking in a clear way. I agree about the limitations of human thought. For me meaning, or guaranteed by something absolute etc are not important. Likewise my, or our ability to understand these different questions about our lives. Rather, I am concerned with way, of life, way of living and philosophy and mysticism enables this to be refined. Also that there is an opportunity that the mind can be opened to the complexities in nature and our historical heritage of philosophy and mysticism. Which can be brought into the present of life. So as to develop a wisdom in the present. Also an openness to any divine or teleological possibility, action, or grounding.

Is "existing at all times" consistent with your view? This would preclude a caused object from existing eternally.

No this not my view. My view is open ended, that we are trying to address things which can’t necessarily be understood by our brand of rationality, or that can be demonstrated, conceptually, or in principle from the limited knowledge pool of human knowledge. So when I say eternity, I mean beyond the horizon of our knowledge, or what we can say about it.

This statement was wrong: "There is no escape from infinite regression". I provided the escape- an epistemic reason a person might reject an infinite regress. You apparently aren't persuaded by this, and that's fine - because the "escape" is not a proof of impossibility.

I don’t know enough about foundationalism to reply. But I find the escape to be accepting an apparent paradox. That there is an uncaused, or ultimate ground. That uncaused is unexplainable, just like an infinite regression is unexplainable.

However, it seems to me that we can't justify believing in anything specific that is beyond that which is accessible - other than the fact you stated.

I don’t see a need to justify hypothetical scenarios, but I am interested in them. As much as a means of breaking free of the shackles of rational thought on the issue. Or as a means of contrasting, or shining a light on how our knowledge is blind to things about our existence. I don’t think belief is useful here because it’s an issue of hypotheticals, in the knowledge that none of it is verifiable (outside personal experience).

Google "Kalam Cosmological Argument" - a "first cause" argument for God. Yes, they universally believe God is eternal: existing at all times, past and future.

Yes, I’m familiar with the argument.
Putting the use of infinity to one side for a moment. A God which is eternal, existing at all times, past and future, is in no way infinite. As I said I am treating eternal as very big so to speak, but not infinite. But rather as beyond a horizon, beyond which it is indistinguishable from the infinite.

You're wrong. An infinite series of causes is avoided by assuming a first cause. An infinite series of layers of reality is avoided by assuming a bottom layer. These are what metaphysical foundationalism is all about.

Thanks for the link, I’ll have a deeper look.
Although, I would suggest that saying I’m wrong is a bit hasty. I am suggesting that infinity only exists as a concept, a concept in the mind of humans. Applying that to reality (external to that mind) is a bit tenuous.

That's a personal choice. But here's the issue: an infinite series exists without explanation: each individual cause is explained by a prior cause, but the series as a whole is unexplained.

Yes, I know, but I don’t see us explaining it using philosophy (logic), but rather that entertaining it is rather like looking at one of those Escher paintings of stairs going up and joining themselves lower down due to a trick of perspective. I know it may have uses in logic and maths, but when applied to existence it just throws up absurdities.

Our limited minds are the only minds we know exist, and we are utilizing these minds to speculate and judge the nature of existence. Is there more than this physical world? It's possible, but there's no way to know. So we speculate and apply reason. Different people accept different answers. No one can be proven right or wrong.

I agree that no one can be proven right or wrong. But as to the question of is there more than this physical world. I would think it highly unlikely that there isn’t. Simply because in the grand scheme of things, we are insignificant and our newly found powers of reason have only worked with what we have found in front of us when we each came to be in this world. It would be rather grandiose for us to conclude that this that we see before us is all there is.

Yet I have trouble envisioning the IDF taking and occupying Tehran. And this is the real problem here: attacking Iran is problematic, because a land war would be very, very difficult.

It would require the U.S. to take Tehran, this is what the hawks and the Israeli lobby are trying to convince Trump to do now. Hopefully there is someone with a level head in that room.

Wouldn't that form be a sort of "debunking argument?"

Reminds me of the heady days of the Jref forum.

[1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
[2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
[3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

King James Bible.

It looks like a ground of being to me.

it strikes me as a rather extreme assumption to think that such a being just happens to exist uncaused.

(from your post that I responded to)
I’m not aware of people claiming the “God” is uncaused. They say God is eternal.

By contrast, the gradual development of beings, somewhere in an old. vast universe, with the capacity for intentional behavior, but considerably more limited powers to act, seems considerably more plausible.

(From your post that I responded to)

But in such a vast universe the gradual development of eternal beings* who can create grounds of being may be just as likely.

Right. There's either an infinite regression of ever-smaller parts/of causes/ of explanations - or there is a foundation of all these - the ultimate ground.

(From your last reply to me)

There is no escape from infinite regression, this is a peculiarity of human thought, there is no plausible likelihood that infinity can be considered external to the human mind. So this whole preoccupation with infinity is a human preoccupation around this peculiarity. It’s turtles all the way down remember.

“ultimate ground” (isn’t this what the book of Genesis describes above) seems like wishful thinking aswell. It seems more plausible that there are no ultimate grounds out there, only relatively ultimate grounds. That this also recedes into eternity, seems much more plausible to me.

Also where you say plausible, presumably this is plausible to our limited minds which are designed to operate in this physical world we find ourselves in. So there is a kind of implicit bias there.

* by eternal, I am not suggesting any infinities, just a state or position outside or within, our observable reality, or something inconceivable to us.

Apologies, I missed your first post addressing this, the other day;

IMO, the philosophical accounts do not point to a God of religion. There may very well be a ground of being, but the big question is: does it exhibit intentionality? If not, then it points to a natural ground of being, not a god.

Is there a good reason to believe the ground of being acts intentionally? IMO, the only reason one might think so, is that teleology requires it - so the question becomes: is there good reason to believe teleology? I haven't seen one.

So this indicates to me that a ground of being is “ the very source and foundation of all existence.”(wiki)
Or the role played by a god (in an Abrahamic religion), ie created everything, creating the ground on which we walk. Not a metaphysical ground.

The post you linked to here seemed to be discussing things about infinite regression.

This is the opposite of what is meant by a metaphysical ground. See this. A complex object is grounded in its composition, not the reverse.

I’m only using ground in the terms you used it in the post I replied to.

Such a God would not be the ground of being.

Not necessarily. Let me explain it by describing a cosmogony in which the ground of being for an individual being is the body of a greater being and the body of that individual is the ground of being for a lesser being.

Just look at a human, it is a colony of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of cells. For each cell that human may be perceived as the ground of being. Likewise the being of the planet, or the biosphere, or Gaia, is the ground of being for the human. And by extension, for Gaia the galaxy is the ground of being. This has to be seen through the prism of an idealism where the Individual being on this scale, or hierarchy experiences a world commensurate with their position, or level of development in the hierarchy. That for a human the experience of the cell, or Gaia is inconceivable, because it is an entirely different set of circumstances, which are only intelligible to the being on that level in the hierarchy.

In this cosmogony the human world of physics and science is not everything that is, it is only a description of the experience on our level of the hierarchy. On the other levels, it would be inconceivable because they experience an entirely different set of circumstances.

By contrast, the gradual development of beings, somewhere in an old. vast universe, with the capacity for intentional behavior, but considerably more limited powers to act, seems considerably more plausible.

But God might be one of these beings, with powers which seem unlimited from our tiny perspective.

A process of subconsiously occuring deep learning.

Yes, I agree with that. Although what I was getting at is a growth, or development in the being, so there may be some kind of learning in a biological sense. But more of a flowering process, or metamorphosis. Something deeper than physical biology, perhaps, more on the level of a soul, or atman (baggage accepted).

So the being goes through the process as a result of this deeper transformation. The mind, (including the subconscious), or intellect is playing no more than a supportive role.

FWIW, what you describe here is quite consistent with deep learning occuring in the neural networks of our brains. So, based on neuroscience, there is good reason to think we are all unintentionally going through it. Of course, it might be beneficial to realize that deep learning is prone to "hallucinations".

Yes and yes. But what is “going through it” referring to?

However, over the years, a number of them have come to question those experiences - while not necessarily becoming atheists, they’ve grown increasingly skeptical about it all. I'm not claiming any definitive knowledge here, but I'm struck by how easily people seem to fall into and out of and sometimes back into beliefs.

Yes, I have seen this as well, (I was involved for a decade during the 1990’s). Traditionally (prior to the New Age movement) people would have a calling, which would mean that they became involved for a deeper seated reason than most churchgoers. The same with New Age, many people became drawn in to the movement who didn’t have a calling, or because friends and colleagues introduced them on a more social level.
Furthermore I am of the opinion that people only go beyond the initial impulse, or experience because they have an innate predisposition for that way of life. Myself being an example, I was seeking this out from a young age, by the time I was 12, I was studying two or three types of divination and reading anything I could lay my hands on that was philosophical, or theological.

Regarding the direction of a guru, the way I see it is that the guru is a conduit and is not necessarily conscious of what they are doing in terms of guiding the pupil. Rather, that it is as much something in the pupil drawing out from the teacher what they need to learn. I am coming to this from the perspective that people who are following this course are only partly aware and in charge of what is going on. That it is a more esoteric (putting the baggage of that phrase to one side) process and the pupil and teacher are developing on an underlying unconscious, or soul( baggage accepted) level and may be unaware of what is going on. Also that there are people living ordinary lives going through these processes entirely unaware of it and may have no interest at all in anything religious, or spiritual.

Yes, I realise that and the ability to view the world in this way requires a specific kind of training and understanding which can’t be sufficiently put across in writing. It requires direct experience and usually, although not exclusively direct contact and direction from the guru, or their equivalent.
Although I expect that with the rate of development in IT and AI, it will become possible to do this through technology, in the next generation, or two.

I should add, as we are in a Christian society that monastic life does enable monks to achieve this understanding, although, I have no experience of this personally.

And outside of my experince.

Part of the problem here is that we don’t have the conceptual language to imagine (visualise) such things. Once you do, it’s quite easy to do so. The various traditions teach this knowledge, each in their particular narrative. Although they all amount to pretty much the same thing, with different characters, means and purpose.
What they are teaching is an ability to conceptualise a divinity in the world, the world we inhabit. So that we can develop an ability to see it in action around us a develop deep love and reverence for it in our every day lives, as we perform our daily life activities. The idea being that over time we will exhibit some of the divinity in our lives and society. This role is played in Hinduism by the guru, for example.

Reduced to the conceptual, it has very limited usefulness. The realisation of such a ‘ground’ is ecstatic, outside the conceptual or discursive intellect.

100%

It makes me wonder how much this really is strategy to get rid of the fetters of international law.

International law has been a fragile thing held together by the international bodies. It wasn’t going to survive a breakdown in the coalition of the West. All the authoritarian rulers and oligarchs will be happy to see the end of it.
There may be a bigger picture here. Analysts will have been telling them that the climate crisis is going to hit big time over the next century. There is going to be mass emigration, starvation, food and water shortages. Large areas of the planet will become uninhabitable. Inevitably the rich and powerful will be scrabbling to shield themselves and their groups from the chaos. I see the rise in authoritarianism as a symptom of this. Also there will soon be fights over resources, this is already starting to play out.

My early reading was influenced by mystical traditions, figures like Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Which was tempered somewhat by the mystical pragmatist J Krishnamurti.

Interesting, I see an alignment here with the ideology of the Theosophical society and other attempts in the 19th century to bring Eastern philosophy to the West. Which then spurned the various new age movements, the interest in yoga, and Buddhism. And yet Western philosophy has struggled with these ideas and doesn’t seem able to adopt them, or integrate them.
It seems to be impenetrable to the Aristotlean way of thinking, which is centred around the perception and experience of the human brain. It’s like the human intellect is reified and everything else must be explained through the prism of this intellect, or dismissed in some way.