The dictionary defines “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” — Banno

As in war...

"All warfare is based on deception." Sun Tzu (544 - 496 BC).
"In war, truth is the first casualty." Aeschylus (525 - 456 BC).

..to engineer our own feelings and emotions... — AXF

There is little to be happy about when the happiness is engineered. There is more to happiness than what constitutes the emotion.

Regarding Hume I think it would have been more apposite if you had written "limits within which there is nothing more to expect". — John

Well, to be clear, my post was actually not regarding Hume but andrewk's idea that Hume's identification of the limits of reason thereby opened the door to mysticism. Perhaps there is a different sense in which Hume opened a door to mysticism, but from identifying a limit it does not follow a border nor a door to something beyond reason, i.e. mysticism.

that while being essentially analytic in approach, he identifies limits of reason and thereby opens the door to mysticism — andrewk

Limits are not necessarily borders to something else, but simply limits beyond which there is nothing more to expect.

Since there is no acceptable definition of what makes something scientific, calling something "pseudoscientific" is meaningless. — darthbarracuda

Nosense. In disputed cases it might be dubious or meaningless to call them scientific or pseudoscientific before it has been settled. .

Pseudoscientific means to appear or claim to be scientific without satisfying the conditions for being scientific. For example, reproducable tests.

How is science challenged by the selective idea that it would be a term for marketing? Has anyone other than ideologues taken it seriously? (e.g. religious, new-age, or others whose claims and authority is threatened by knowledge).

Science is the name of possible knowledge, and when the knowledge is very selective or very general it tends to be useless or misleading, whereas relevant knowledge tends to be useful or right or necessary even.

Knowledge of metaphysics, say, Kant's categories, might be an example of knowledge about something so general that it becomes useless or misleading in case one would attempt to shoehorn all beliefs and statements as coherent parts of it. It occurs to me that a lot of philosophy becomes useless or misleading because of such or similar attempts to understand too much or too little.

a ''paradox''. On one hand ignorance and the accompanying stupidity is a sure source of happiness and on the other hand knowledge and wisdom are also sources of happiness. — TheMadFool

I think the first premise is false, ignorance is not a source but a lack of something, and you don't get something from nothing. The bliss in ignorance arises from a sense of continuity and peace, for instance, which hypothetically can be undermined by knowledge about threats or injustices.

The second premise is dubious, because not all knowledge is a source of happiness.

So, there is no paradox.

An ideology that is held to be above question can justify the most barbarous acts. — Srap Tasmaner

Are true ideas ideologies? Do we have visual experiences of ideologies or objects? I'd say some ideas are not based on other ideas but brute facts. For example, that there is something. Some ideas are plausibly held above question.

Boghossian takes on philosophically far more interesting relativists than the postmodernists. Nelson Goodman, for instance.

Frankfurt invertigates the nature of bullshit, and does not even mention the word postmodernism, but he brings up, I think, a very interesting phenomenon where the relativist, in the assumed absence of truth, considers him/herself more sincere than those who belive in truth. Here's a description of it written by a reviewer of his book:

when a person rejects the notion of being true to the facts and turns instead to an ideal of being true to their own substantial and determinate nature, then according to Frankfurt this sincerity is bullshit. — Petter Naessan

You might like Paul, that book is very well written. He also wrote an article about the original Sokal hoax in the 1990s which is available online here: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html

If you're interested in a detailed examination of relativist claims and examples of refutations, then I'd recommend Paul Boghossian's book: Fear of Knowledge; against relativism and constructivism (2006).

https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Knowledge-Against-Relativism-Constructivism/dp/0199230412


A perhaps more common kind of relativism is related to bullshit, which has been studied by Harry Frankfurt: On Bullshit (2005).

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946/ref=pd_sim_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0691122946&pd_rd_r=TC7F1S6JA9ZZHVWZ3M0K&pd_rd_w=UCu2R&pd_rd_wg=lYeSY&psc=1&refRID=TC7F1S6JA9ZZHVWZ3M0K

In science you must not talk before you know. In art you must not talk before you do. In literature you must not talk before you think. — John Ruskin, The Eagle's Nest, 1872.

One might add: "In philosophy you must not talk before you think about the nature of talking, or knowing, or doing, or thinking."

Case in point? — Galuchat

Science is the latin name for knowledge. What makes a belief possible as knowledge is whether it is justified (as in testable) and true. There can be no other kinds of possible knowledge than the justifiable and true kind.

But there are many ideologies that exploit current unknowns of the world, or attack scientific method for whatever insufficiencies it may have, as the means to market alternative unjustifiable beliefs.

— Wayfarer

..that reduces all possible knowledge to that of science.. — Wikipedia on the philosophy of Michel Henry

As if there would exist many kinds of possible knowledge... :-}

What is a dream? Is it a story we tell ourselves while we are asleep? — woodart

I think so. An event that you dream of has the disjoint syntax of memories or stories told in our language, it appears in parts or fragments, and unlike a veridical perception a dream is about something that is elsewhere in time and space.

Currently here in Sweden the chairman of Mensa (the society for people with high IQ) calls the members "damn idiots" after a party that went out of bounds. Allegedly the members got extremely drunk and began to intimidate the staff at the hotel who felt threatened and eventually had to call the police.

I'd say intelligence is a condition for any design (aleatoric design even).

..what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You’d have people going around saying: “Well, you’re part of that crowd who still believe in facts.” — Dennett

8-)

It should be intuitively obvious that consciousness includes a mental component and a corporeal component. Cases in point: wakefulness, sleep, coma, etc. — Galuchat

How is it obvious? What's an example of evidence for the idea that consciousness is a composition?

Consciousness seems to me to be some kind of information architecture. It is composed of all the various sensory impressions from our various sensory organs, and they all can appear at once. This seems to imply that the brain in a central nervous system is the central location where the information from the senses come together into a seemless model of the world, and it is this model that we reference in order to make any decision and perform any action. — Harry Hindu

Statements are compositions of words, and beliefs about the world are models of the world, but consciousness...? I don't think consciousness is a composition, nor a model, of anything but a capacity to identify and use objects and their compositions (including representations and models of them).

It occurs to me that the expressions 'being aware of' and 'being conscious of' are clearly synonymous, whereas the noun 'awareness' and assumed distinctions from 'consciousness' seem popular in talk of psychology.

Both have an intentionalistic sense: you are (fully or partially) aware/conscious of something (i.e. awareness/consciousness is about something). Derivatively you might be able to be aware/conscious of the fact that you are aware or conscious of something (but not the awareness/consciousness itself, because the reference relation separates the awareness/consciousness from what it is of/about, and puts them on two different logical levels.

In cases where the lives of two humans differ a lot in capacities, interests, and ways to interact with the world they have little to talk about. At some point they will no longer understand each other, and when their lives are so different that they no longer share a frame of reference it will no longer be possible to translate expressions from one to the other; they would be like two different kinds of animals.

I sometimes get to read that female architects demand to be identified as architects, not as female architects. The assumption seems to be that the word 'female' changes the meaning of the word 'architect' in some unwanted ways. Or that it would preserve unwanted conventions.

Granted that the profession used to be dominated by men, and that injustices still exist, e.g. in salaries or status, which is the case in many professional fields.

But would it really matter to drop the word 'female'? I don't think it would raise anyone's salary nor status.

We ought to interpret posts in ways that maximise communication. Nonsensical posts mean or do more than no posts.

The clergy used to be brutal beyond comprehension. — jkop


The problem is that people don't accept that meaning, often because of its historical baggage, which is a non-sequitur anyway. — Mariner — Mariner

Huh? What would different meanings of the word 'god' have to do with the fact that most of the great philosophers' works are based on argument, not blind reference to the authority of the divine or incomprehensible. That's why they're called philosophers, not preachers.

We apprehend that there are limits to the human intellect. Because of these limits, there are things which the human intellect cannot comprehend. We assume that a higher intellect can comprehend these things, and this is not at all arbitrary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Call it 'faculty' or 'higher intellect' or what you like. A possibility to comprehend the incomprehensible doesn't follow from there being limits to human knowledge, nor from things that we don't comprehend yet; obviously it is an arbitrary assumption.

A possibility to some day comprehend things that we don't comprehend yet, however, arises from research, and little prevents humans from doing research.

If you are implying that many of the great philosophers were closet agnostics or atheists — Mariner

The clergy used to be brutal beyond comprehension.

It's not an arbitrary assumption though, it's an identification. What is identified is that which is beyond human comprehension. — Metaphysician Undercover

Identification? Identification is the function of reference, and it is possible to refer to almost anything, such as fictious, alogical, or impossible things. But from reference it does not follow that the things we refer to would exist.

What remains arbitrary is the assumption of a faculty with which it would be possible to comprehend the incomprehensible. That's what's arbitrary and used ad-hoc by the religious and the mystics.




Sure, many of the great philosophers lived in societies in which they could be murdered if they would admit being agnostic or atheist. Most of their work, however, is philosophical, and does not rely on blind reference to divine authority.

What if it's not necessarily an "arbitrary assumption" at all, but a lived experience; and one that you cannot understand simply because you have never lived it? — John

To have or live the experience is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding it. Moreover, it is relatively easy to evoke the experience of the presence of something covert or incomprehensible, for example by will power, empathy, drugs, or indoctrination/psychological suggestion. Like the experience of nothing.

The religious or mystical faculty is what comprehends this aspect of reality — Noble Dust

What's ad-hoc and non-philosophical is the arbitrary assumption of a faculty for comprehending things beyond comprehension.

34% religious on a philosophy forum! :-O

Being religious and being philosophical have two different senses: unlike the philosophical the religious ultimately allow reference ad-hoc beyond human comprehension: e.g. "god did it!", which is philosophically unsatisfying.

This scene from "Interstellar" sums up well of the social critique in the film — ssu

Oh yeah, the new dark ages. :-( But the anti-intellectual life on Earth makes a great contrast to the depicted science and space travel. It reminds me of a quote of Bertrand Russell (from Why Men Fight):

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. — Bertrand Russell

Primer — Luke

That's a great film made with little means.

they are not "philosophical" in the sense of having some intellectual puzzle or dislocation at the center of their narrative; more like spiritual and even mystical. — SophistiCat

I tend to think that what sets a philosophical film apart from a poetic film is that the narrative arises from some intellectual puzzle or dislocation. For example, on the nature of the world, perception, or ethics.

Has anybody mentioned Ingmar Bergman's films? — ssu

The questions in Bergman's films seem more religious or psychological or poetic than philosophical (e.g. existential angst, dreams).

What do you expect when no question is asked in your OP :/

How could you put together shapes to compose "I'll stop at the store on the way home tonight and get milk."?

In the OP and elsewhere it is assumed that some animals understand or imagine only so much of the world whereas others, such as humans, have the capacity to understand or imagine different or more features of the world. It might, then, seem meaningful to ask whether a future human could have the capacity to understand or imagine features of our world that we don't. Or whether we are incapable to understand or imagine what future civilizations will be like.

But it is trivially true that discoveries have an effect on one's capacity to understand or imagine the world. Proto-human monkeys had no human language, nor a theory of evolution, with which they could understand or imagine what a future civilization is. Once we have language etc. it is easy to imagine future humans having discovered new features of the world that we don't understand yet.

We can't imagine the unimaginable, nor comprehend the incomprehensible, for the obvious reason that it has nothing to imagine nor to comprehend. We might, however, have the capacity at time t1 to understand what we will discover at t2, but obviously don't since it is yet to be discovered.

Passion changes with experience, or when the things that we're passionate about change. These days there is a lot of great music instantly available online, which in the long run can make our attitude to great music more blasé and non-passionate than ever. I'm not a mathematician but I understand that people can be passionate about the subject; there are websites and courses produced by passionate enthusiasts, quite different than the sedative books I had to endure in high-school.

Imagine if people felt the same passion for wanting to have an orgasm, for advancing technological innovation, knowledge, science and improving the world of humans in general? — rohan

People might feel the same passion, but seldom for the same things (e.g. not all people want to have orgasms, some find them unpleasant even, perhaps like a loss of control or something?).
For example, people who excel in the sciences can be replaced or set-up to look bad by people who excel in power games. Conversely, those who excel in power games can get a bad reputation when they are revealed by those who excel in investigating mismanagement, and so on.

Philosophy is the activity of thinking, reading, or writing about the nature of things, or unanswerable questions. Its methods are what it takes: for example clarity of expression, valid and sound argumentation, curiosoty, intellectual honesty, insight, regard for truth and so on.

I'd say the two are connected in the sense that without truth the human intellectual enterprise is re-directed from saying things about the world to performative utterances which are neither true nor false but do things, such as signal how advanced or superior the speaker is while pretending to say something about the world or the nature of truth. Unclarifiable unclarity does that, and it is impossible to refute.

Allegedly, higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought.