Christoffer

Show us how in terms of the Lorenz contractor. — Banno

Do you mean attractor? I'm also not good at math, but thank bigbang I can try and apply conceptualizations with AI and produce a code for it. Are you looking for something like this? Put it into https://jsfiddle.net/ and run

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <style>
        body {
            margin: 0;
            overflow: hidden;
            background-color: #f0f0f0;
        }

        canvas {
            display: block;
        }
    </style>
    <script>
        const canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
        document.body.appendChild(canvas);

        const ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
        canvas.width = window.innerWidth;
        canvas.height = window.innerHeight;

        const lorenzSystem = (x, y, z, sigma, rho, beta, dt) => {
            const deviation = (Math.random() - 0.5) * 0.1; // 10% random deviation
            const dx = (sigma * (y - x) + deviation) * dt;
            const dy = (x * (rho - z) - y + deviation) * dt;
            const dz = (x * y - beta * z + deviation) * dt;

            return {
                x: x + dx,
                y: y + dy,
                z: z + dz
            };
        };

        const drawDot = (x, y, size, color) => {
            ctx.beginPath();
            ctx.arc(x, y, size, 0, Math.PI * 2);
            ctx.fillStyle = color;
            ctx.fill();
        };

        const animate = () => {
            const sigma = 10;
            const rho = 28;
            const beta = 8 / 3;
            const dt = 0.01;

            let x = 1;
            let y = 1;
            let z = 1;

            const emergentTerm = () => Math.sin(Date.now() * 0.001) * 0.5;

            const renderFrame = () => {
                const { x: newX, y: newY, z: newZ } = lorenzSystem(x, y, z, sigma, rho, beta, dt);

                const lorenzX = newX * 10 + canvas.width / 2;
                const lorenzY = newY * 10 + canvas.height / 2;

                // Check for random deviation and split the trajectory
                if (Math.random() < 0.1) {
                    const emergentX = lorenzX + Math.cos(emergentTerm()) * 50;
                    const emergentY = lorenzY + Math.sin(emergentTerm()) * 50;

                    drawDot(lorenzX, lorenzY, 1, '#3498db'); // Blue dot (Lorenz system)
                    drawDot(emergentX, emergentY, 2, '#e74c3c'); // Red dot (Emergent part)
                } else {
                    drawDot(lorenzX, lorenzY, 1, '#3498db'); // Blue dot (Lorenz system)
                }

                x = newX;
                y = newY;
                z = newZ;

                requestAnimationFrame(renderFrame);
            };

            renderFrame();
        };

        window.addEventListener('resize', () => {
            canvas.width = window.innerWidth;
            canvas.height = window.innerHeight;
        });

        animate();
    </script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

The gist of it is the Lorenz system having deviations that occur at a rate of 10% probability and when that happen a split produce another shape.

Basically, a simple guiding principle for deviations that follow the system but produce another level of complexity. If it produces a deviated shape at a certain probability, maybe that's what you're after?

But I'm not sure what you aim for with the Lorenz system in relation to emergence? So I'm just guessing.

But it's fun playing with the math :sweat:

Best Arguments for Physicalism
No, why would it? The only thing at stake would be whether the term 'emergence' would be used, which is not super rigorous. — hypericin

What I meant was, if we were finally able to compute or make predictable emergent systems ourselves, would that provide enough explanation? Meaning, if we were to accurately predict all parts of a system and their relation up to a corresponding area of the emergent system. Or, would it simply be enough for us to conclude something as a cause if we can produce emergence out of testing guiding principles for complex chaos until it produces the intendent emergence, even though the direct correlation between smaller entities and the corresponding area of the emergent system is not measurable?

And when it comes to consciousness, if we were to find evidence for consciousness being an emergent property out of the complex links between all subsystems of the brain (a possibility in the research), would that not be just as definable for consciousness as how we conclude ecosystems and other emergent systems in nature to be the result of its parts, but in which we also cannot draw predictable lines from its parts to the corresponding areas of emerging systems?

The support for emergence is found in its strong appearance all over nature and how they all function in similar manner and with similar difficulty to quantify between the parts and the emergent systems. But we're still able to conclude criticality in these systems, and that can't be ignored.

I've always been skeptical of that. People pass out from far lesser interruptions to cerebral blood flow than the total catastrophe of beheading. More likely it was some involuntary muscle contractions, fancifully interpreted. — hypericin

Sure, but my point was still that a separation from the body mainly remove the flow of nurture, oxygen, hormons and other chemicals to reach the brain. Those are the foundation of its biological mechanics. While there's no denying that the perception and senses affect the mind and the body's reaction to different stimuli affect the chemical flow to the brain, there's little to point out a fundamental dependence on the body for our consciousness. We can argue about if we can remove all those chemical systems and still retain personality, but that is different from the question of consciousness.

Consciousness doesn’t emerge as a property any more than unconsciousness does, or happiness, or sadness, or anger. I do not think that it’s possible to show someone acquires more properties, or different properties, should she shift her emotions from one to the other, or when he falls asleep. The properties required for any state of emotion, consciousness, feeling, or mind are already present. No such thing emerges. Rather, the body changes in ways that are observable. — NOS4A2

Consciousness is not personality or behavior, it's the entity that is aware and has agency. The things you mention are features of the emergent system, not the emerging systems. Or, we could argue that personality, identity, our sense of self are emerging out of the complexity of consciousness itself, but that consciousness is about what's forming through the interplay of parts of the brain under a state of criticality.

For me, “consciousness” appears as the last refuge for those who wish to rescue the doctrine of the soul. — NOS4A2

The "doctrine of a soul" has nothing to do with consciousness. Religious views and people's emotional need for supernatural explanations give rise to their personal justifications for conflating "soul" with "consciousness". However, in science its just the main term for the awareness of a living being, their ability for agency and their level of self-aware subjectivity. If we ever solve consciousness we might coin new terms that define its mechanics, since that would be a new paradigm in need of its own definitions. Until then, I don't see a problem with the term.

An alternative opts for two distinct descriptions, A and B, that use different terms to talk about the same thing. This is sometimes called dualism, sometimes supervenience. This is not unproblematic, but may be preferrable to the confusion of reduction and emergence.

Perhaps we could ask, how is emergence not simply reduction, backwards? — Banno

I would say that everything is reductionistic within a system that hasn't reached emergence. Seen as we could define each scale level from the smallest to the biggest scale as systems forming and generating new behaviors. Within each level it's all reductionistic, the previous emergent system is the smallest reductionist step we can measure until we need to define it as a fundamental emergent system of its own reductionistic composition. However, it's also possible that emergence happens out of the complex interplay between simpler systems that still are emergent. That was why I tried to coin something like "object" and "abstract". Water flows and has interactions with other systems like the variability of the matter in the river bed, the air molecules and their turbulence flows, the temperature fluctuations of the climate and all functions together to produce a remarkable path finding system that cannot be an emergent "object", but an "abstract" system that has an impact on the world, but isn't definable with a "location" or material. In the same way it is like the mind, our consciousness. We cannot conclude its existence as a "thing", but as an "abstract" system that still acts upon the world.

So, we would need reductionism to explain deterministic interactions between points of emergence at lower scales and larger scales, as well as "object" and "abstract" emergence, as well as simple and multisystem emergences based on either single system (consisting of one entity forming complexity) or multisystem (consisting of systems forming complexity).

But duality separate the physical and mental in a way that feels too religious for my taste, and it's very outdated by what we actually know scientifically about the body and mind.

Isn't emergence no more than Emperor Reduction in his new clothes? — Banno

It might be, or simply, emergence is the defining point, the critical point in which a complexity reach a form of singularity and introduce extreme differences to its state before. Check the video on criticality above.

We also have to include the guiding principles. A chaotic system require nudges in its forming complexity in order to reach higher states. Fundamentally, those might just be our laws of physics, but may also be part of larger systems and their interplays.

If consciousness emerges from brains, then consciousness would emerge from something functionally equivalent to a brain, correct? — RogueAI

Yes, but how would you put that together? It may be that the physical form of our body and brain is such a delicate evolved system that any flaw in an attempt to replicate it might lead to extreme differences between us and the functionally equivalent version of us.

There are plenty of horror stories with such themes.

Imagine a sphere in front of you (tennis ball size) at arms length. Now bisect it vertically and examine the two halves.

Can you do that? Easy right. The way your brain does it is nothing like a computer operates. — Mark Nyquist

While I don't argue for modern AIs to have consciousness, and this video is more marketing than a scientific test of the functionality, it's still clear that this type of actions are still reproducible in computing right now.

'They' being 'philosophers'. Seeking facts, would be the better description, 'truth' is too polyvalent a term. — Wayfarer

Sure, but my point is that I don't seek meaning in relation to scientific topics. I do, however, philosophize over what meaning we can form with the reality that we have. I have one foot in art and one in science and that balance is actually functioning very well since I believe to have acquired a good sense to spot where concepts border between fantasy and reality, fiction or fact.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
Yes, I understand that, but what is is about brains that makes them conscious? There must be something about brains that makes them necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. What makes brains so special? — RogueAI

Their composition of neurons and regions of complex systems that together make up our consciousness. That's why they are special, but they're not more special than other animal brains, only special to us and maybe because it's the highest advancement of consciousness that we've observed in nature.

But that's not really the question you ask, the "why" relates more to how did we got here. The reason the brain became what it became and evolved how it evolved is something I briefly wrote about earlier in this thread. A plausible line of causality for why it evolved in this direction:

the evolutionary necessity can simply be boiled down and explained through the human species starting with the evolutionary trait of adaptability, the need for it. Humans are highly adaptable in nature when speaking of only our basic body functions. Adaptability is an extremely powerful evolutionary trait, especially for animals that move over large distances and climates. It is not far fetched that the whole reason we developed our level of consciousness is due to this adaptability, a function that makes us able to plan and change behaviors according to the environment. This increase in complexity developed through evolution would then, just like other emergent systems of high complexities, produce new functions that weren't part of the intended simple function. That in order to be adaptable, we developed systems to recognize, memorize and formulate visualized scenarios in order to be able to plan our next moves. These systems together would be able to produce a new level of complexity which may be the reason why subjectivity occurs. — Christoffer

And the reason why it is so extremely complex as a system is probably because of iterative changes that have occurred over the entire evolutionary timeline. We can ask this about any complex natural phenomena among animals. How are birds able to sense the magnetic lines of the earth to guide them during seasons? Because of that need pushing evolution in that direction.

The most remarkable thing I think is how plants mimic insects to lure them towards them and spread pollination. These plants do not have eyes to spot how these insects look, but those who survived the best had flowers closer to the insect's form and color. Without being able to see, it still, over the course of thousands, if not millions of iterations of mutations arrived at almost an identical shape and color as the insects that exist in symbios with their existence.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
What is it about the brain that makes it the seat of consciousness? — RogueAI

If you mess with it, you mess with consciousness. If you were to separate the head from the body and do it in a way that kept giving oxygen to the head, it will eventually die, but still be conscious with the same feeling of paralyzation from the neck down.

So far we've only asked a few short lived heads:

In 1905, a French physician sought to find out. He attended an execution and stood close to the guillotine. He approached as soon as the severed head tumbled into the basket below and called out the man’s name.

He claimed the eyelids lifted and the man looked briefly at him before lowering his gaze. The physician called his name again and received a similar response. The man did not respond to a third prompt. The physician concluded based on his observations that a severed head could retain consciousness for 25 to 30 seconds.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
If a complex phenomenon manifests properties that are not present in its components, and could never have been predicted by studying the components, these properties can be described as emergent. But this doesn't explain anything at all. — hypericin

We do not yet know if it is impossible to predict or merely that the prediction is too complex for us to compute it. If it were, would that then be an explanation? It only becomes a description if we can conclude it fundamentally impossible to be predicted. But then we also have the guiding principles that govern how a complex system evolve into a new emergent entity. And the explanation should reside in the relation between the complexity of a system and what the guiding principles are.

In terms of consciousness, in neuroscience, finding these key guiding principles which directs the chaos is probably even more important than just witnessing chaos forming something new. Since it directs the outcome that emerges.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
Briefly, can you sketch out your reasoning for why consciousness emerges from brains and not, say, hearts? Or livers? And why are only some brain functions conscious? Do you think some information processing is required for consciousness to emerge? — RogueAI

I'm just using the brain itself for convenience in explanations. Researchers at the moment see the body as a pretty instrumental part of our identity as a conscious being, so there may be more parts that make up our consciousness, but they may only be partly responsible for things like emotional differences in behavior and not responsible for our experience as a conscious mind. The evidence for that is simply that someone who's paralyzed from the neck down still has hasn't changed their consciousness, even though emotional life might be changed.

I would say that consciousness itself probably resides in the brain, but our identity and personality and emotions rely on all the hormonal balances, chemistry and functions in the rest of the body.

Just like when we hold a hammer and researchers have noticed that our mind expands our understanding of our body to include the hammer as part of it, just by "attachment" to our body. We may speculate that if we are able to put a consciousness into a perfect simulation of their body, they would continue to function normally by just extending their conscious understanding of their body to the digital representation. But we won't know that until we could test such a concept out fully.

A further question would be: would we consider our personality and identity as emergent aspects out of the complexity of our consciousness in terms of memory and actions as well as the chemical interactions from our hormons in our body? Is the sense of identity or agency, personality and way of using our consciousness an emergent phenomena itself, abstraction out of abstraction?
Best Arguments for Physicalism
There are countless examples of emergence in nature. Why should we think that particular arrangements and complexities of matter/ energy cannot produce novel qualities? For a start, think about chemistry. How reliable do you believe your intuitions are on this? — Janus

:up:

What matters in the case of consciousness is the thing that is conscious, — NOS4A2

Why is that special? There are countless of systems that emerges in nature that are extremely complex and almost impossible to understand how they appeared. We only think consciousness to be this extremely special thing because we are arrogant about our existence. We attribute our consciousness an arbitrary value that in relation to anything else in nature does not really have that value outside of our emotional attachment to our own existence.

I value my hand over the paw of an animal, because its my hand, I like it and I feel its special because its part of me. But it's just one type of meat in an ocean of biological creatures.

Our consciousness might be the most complex emergent property in nature, when only looking at it in comparison to others, but we're also just a last point in a gradient of intelligence among animals. We can see their consciousness as emergent phenomena as well and the further down the gradient we go, the more simplistic consciousness get. At what point is that emergent mind phenomena in animals so rudimentary that you can accept it as just another emergent phenomena? Where is the line drawn? Between us and primates? Us and dolphins? Us and elephants? Between elephants and dolphins? A mouse and an ant?

More plausible is that, as I've described earlier in this thread, that multiple complex systems have between them formed a higher complexity and emergence that might not have fully occurred in other animals. When patients who died and get survived slowly wake up, if the part of the brain that gets oxygen first are responsible for memory generation, they are able to remember the process of waking the other parts up. The recollections these people give is that when all their conscious understanding of reality, their perception but more importantly their understanding of those perceptions click into gear, they go from them unable to make any sense of anything, experiencing the world drastically different than they do as a normally functioning human mind into finally functioning normally. If the area responsible for three-dimensional spatial understanding kicks into gear after the visual cortex, they don't understand and comprehend the visuals that the visual cortex process, they describe it as an almost abstract painting, like a cubist Picasso nonsense of inability to understand spatial relations.

What this shows is that our experience as conscious minds require these subsystems that are complex in themselves to act together, otherwise our consciousness breaks down. The sum of the parts produce consciousness, it... emerges as a system out them all.

It's not that the visual cortex is responsible for what we consider eyesight and what we see. It's that how we experience "seeing" requires other functions to form this understanding of seeing. It's an outcome of all parts and it's probably why we cannot boil consciousness down in reductionist terms.

Right now, this is part of the most likely explanation for what consciousness is, and it is truly remarkable. Yet, I don't treat consciousness as special in relation to the rest of the natural world, it is part of it and I think we need to be humble about its place in nature, rather than attribute it some magical status. We might not be that unique, even though we think so.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
I think on your very, very long post you went off the rails in your very first paragraph.

A physical object is always going to be primary and it's definition will be secondary. If there is any ambiguity about what the parameters of the physical object are they should be resolved by setting parameters on the physical object.

If the definition of the word you are using doesn't match the physical object.then you are using the wrong word. — Mark Nyquist

Not sure which paragraph you are referring to, but I think you can find in my argument that an "object" is not as easily defined as traditional understanding describes it.

If everything in nature is a set of smaller parts, formed by guiding principles (physical laws) into a complexity that generate an emergent holistic existence that we through our language categorize as an "object", then what exactly is "primary"? Reality as a whole is a rather messy ocean of emerging systems that behave and interact based on physical laws, an "object" is only relevant in language for us humans to communicate about reality easier. But an "object" is not clearly defined outside of our experience other than through borders between compounds. Therefore we need to treat and examine reality as a system beyond our perceptual limitations, as a whole system operating on levels of emerging functions rather than how we define objects traditionally.

This is part of the a fundamental difference between reductionist thoughts and emergentist thoughts. Reductionists generally view reality as being made up of objects in the traditional sense, while emergentists view it as a scale-based complexity gradient that has cutoff points where functions become defined.

But if you quote the paragraph and explain further it might clear up my confusion as to what you meant.

The idealists, when held to account, find that they are unable to give a simple account of error, or even of their not being alone. The physicalist uses words like "reduction" or "emergence", waving a hand in the air when asked what such things might actually be. — Banno

I think I've explained it many times in this thread. Emergence is rooted in how a chaotic system (for instance a bunch of elementary particles) operates by some guiding principles (physical laws, constants etc.) and at a certain point the complexity it generates produce an emergent property that we define as an "object" and/or as I described consciousness an "abstract".

Emergence is all over nature, from basic physics and chemistry, to large scale systems like consciousness, ecosystems, sociology, economics, solar systems, galaxies etc.

The problems with idealism is that it focus mind over matter, that the mind has center stage. My objection to that is that idealism really only point out our limitations of human perception and somehow believes that scientists and physicists only operate by those limitations when in fact they operate on the principles of calculating outside them. The abstract nature of what's beyond our human perception isn't closed off to us, especially when the language of this kind of research, like math, works in dimensions of understanding that goes beyond our perceptive limitations. We can in fact study abstract concepts and what we cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste; and for the well versed in such research, their minds operate on radically different levels of thinking formed out of using such "language". But that's only addressing the kind of soft idealism that people like Wayfarer seem to do. Then we have the idealists who treat mind over matter as a form of source for reality, that our consciousness is some form of special entity that is responsible for creating reality and this is the religious realm I'm objecting against.

The alternative to both is found most explicitly in that grandmother of philosophy, Mary Midgley, but can be seen in other Oxbridge philosophers from the middle of last century. It's simply that we use different types of explanation in different situations, that we need not, indeed ought not, commit to there being a single monolithic explanation of everything.

The world is far too interesting for that. — Banno

I'm not really a fan of this. The whole reason to try and figure our reality, with science and philosophy is to reach a form of truth. If the pursuit for the best method of doing so is met with some kind of "everyone is right in their own way", then everything breaks down into nonsense.

What I've mainly argued in here is that science generally should be preferable to researching reality and that things like our consciousness should be considered part of the natural world, and therefore also a point of study in science. Any argument against that requires an alternative method that is better than science to explain how reality functions as well as position consciousness as something extra special outside of reality. A claim that functions mainly in the realm of religion and spirituality and does not hold much water against what we do know already.

Using scientific knowledge as the foundation for theories and arguments should be an obvious thing to do. There's no other foundation for truth we can stand on without it becoming a realm of pure fiction.

Maybe Christoffer can articulate it in a way that I can't see how to at the moment, but I can point to examples. For instance, suppose I have designed a voltmeter. When an instance of such a voltmeter is powered, it has the emergent property of displaying a number corresponding to the voltage applied to the input terminals. That emergent property supervenes on the particular properties of components within that specific instance of the voltmeter design.

Another instance of the same voltmeter design might have a different emergent property due to having different specific components. For example, voltmeter A may be more accurate than voltmeter B. Because the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B supervenes on B's components, changing the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B would require a change in one or more of the specific components of B that the emergent property supervenes on. — wonderer1

In a sense that is an emergence, but I'm focusing on more fundamental aspects in nature.

Like, a good example as an analogy would be a photograph in a newspaper. The print dots themselves do not have any features other than shades of black and white, zoomed in they just look like white noise, grainy and nothing special. But the guiding principles that exist (the data of the photograph) makes these dots flow in and out of their shades in a pattern. When we zoom out we start to see an emergent form and when the complexity of those dots become many many thousands we don't see the dots anymore, we see a photograph, an emergent form out of that underlying chaos.

The emergence appears out of a chaotic system in which a set of principles or laws govern how the chaos generally behaves. In nature these are the physical laws of our reality. And each level of emergence forms new "objects" that in themselves -together with similar others form a new scale of complexity that can be further zoomed out from. Each system is part of of a larger system and so on. Fundamentally governed by natural laws of physics, and on larger scales they can take forms of complex systems acting together, forming new emerging systems that are even more complex, like our consciousness. There are some evidence of this in neuroscience that focus on more holistic measurements rather than reductionist methods just looking at the parts.

"emergence," being any sort of magic wand for difficulties in forming an ontology — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see it as a respect for a complexity of reality that traditional human hubris in understanding reality lacks.

It requires researching the guiding principles of a system rather than all of its parts. If you find those principles, laws or math, you could possibly be able to replicate an emerging property. It's basically what we do in chemistry, disregarding the individuality of atoms in matter and instead focus on the emergent properties and in what ways we can control their progression.

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

You look at the blueprint.

I use to come back to the concept of the commercial drone you can buy in a photography store. The design is made to be perfect for balance and air flow. But the designers didn't invent the design at all, they couldn't find the optimal design that included all aspects and it was too expensive to try and brute force it. Instead they set guiding principles that governed how the shape formed around the physical facts of its function as a flying drone. Then they let a computer run simulated trial and errors for millions of runs before it ended up with the most optimal design for the drone. No one designed it, it emerged out of the guiding principles and out of the chaos of randomness that flowed by those principles it formed an emergent shape and function.

What this is all about is an underlying chaos in all things and systems which forms new properties not by will, but by outcome of guided chaos. If we want to understand it we can't look at the chaos, we need to look at the guiding principles and how they direct how the chaos flows.

Even if you really really really believe it, it doesn't falsify physicalism. — wonderer1

Yes, this is my main problem with many counter arguments to physicalism. That some strong belief manage to somehow support truth? No, they're just beliefs. If I argue for physicalist emergentism I'm doing so out from the science and observations that already exists. It points towards a likely concept that explains many parts if not all parts of reality itself. The difference is that I know where the science ends and my speculations begin, but I always have my foundation rooted in what we already know and what scientists theorize about. I never pick a comforting belief I have and use that as my foundation and if there were proof tomorrow that emergentism is definitely false I would abandon the idea instantly, which is how knowledge should be treated. Too much I'm seeing people sticking to their preferred theory, regardless of evidence against it. I'm sticking to emergentlism because it is, today, the most holistically solid concept about how reality and consciousness functions, in respect to what hasn't yet been proven but logically speculated.

↪javra

The main problem with your argument there is that it introduces elements that does not follow out of the science. We do not have any evidence for any of these things you mention, and I don't understand how you mean that emergence as I've described it leads to such scenarios.

Emergence is chaos by guiding principles. In our reality those are our physical laws which has defined how chaos evolved from the start of entropy up until today. The physical laws that exist are the limitations that both guide and prevent events and there's no provable link to magic and supernatural elements, which means there can't emerge such properties as all levels of emergence still follow the laws of reality. Causation and causality still apply; a cause is required for an outcome. "Magic" has no cause and if so, what would that be?

Emergence doesn't mean "anything goes", we don't see a pool of bacteria spontaneously conduct magic because such emergent property "just happened", we still see it as a causal line of events, but engaging in extreme complexity. The emerging property is still dependent on the composition of the underlying systems and parts and limited by their physical composition. Such limitations may also play into the emergent properties.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
Be away for two days and the backlog of answers pool over :sweat:

It is long. And it provides no insight. Could be wrong, but that seems the case to me. — AmadeusD

But it sounds more like: being long, therefore it has no insight.

I tend towards dismissing your arguments in the same spirit that you trend to dismiss a vast range of philosophical spirituality as ‘religious fantasy’. You strike me as a highly intelligent and articulate atheist with cast-iron convictions. — Wayfarer

The "cast-iron" convictions might be because I root them in more rigid world-based reasoning, evolving them from what seems most likely out of what we scientifically know, without projecting my emotions onto the world as extensions of anxieties.

Whereas I see philosophy (and in some ways, religion) as being precisely the concern with what Victor Frankl called ‘man’s search for meaning’. But you dismiss it as an infantile search for comfort, as being like thumb-sucking. That’s how it comes across to me. — Wayfarer

If man's search for meaning leads to skewing truth about reality, then what meaning is actually extrapolated other than some fictional invented comfort? What depth and importance would such fabricated meaning really have compared to actually knowing truth and form meaning on more truthful grounds?

If we end up converging some kind of discovered universal meaning with the actual truth about what reality is, then I'm all for it, but I cannot believe such universal meaning exists before having proof that it does. And the burden of proof remains on those arguing for meaning to find and prove that meaning and not to argue for a meaning that there's no evidence for.

While they seek for meaning, I'll seek truth without the expectation of meaning.

And the reason I tend towards being dismissive is because I couldn’t say anything inside what you consider valid terms of reference which could hold any sway. What you’re asking for is a scientific explanation of what is outside the purview of scientific explanations. Whereas I feel you’re saying, if something is outside the purview of science, then how could it be worth considering? — Wayfarer

If something falls outside the current limitations of science, it requires a rational and levelheaded philosophical approach that still takes into account the science and facts that do exist. The problem is that many take advantage of the "unknown" to form the most outlandish philosophical theories rather than try to build out from what we do know and be careful of any wild and extreme leaps.

There are also those who form theories out of either a total misunderstanding of a certain science, a misunderstanding of the scientific methods that exist or who's only researched one single point of reference and not all parts of a certain field.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
Again, a very, very long post, which unfortunately shows no insight into the fundamental plight of existence, which is precisely the sense of separateness and the accompanying anxiety that this produces. But, of course, that is dismissed on account of it being 'religious'. — Wayfarer

Saying that a long post is a reason for "no insight", makes absolutely no sense. I've taken what you say into consideration in order to write out a detailed answer to what you brought up. This constant focus on the "length" of my writing is a rather dishonest point really. This topic is extremely complex and requires extremely detailed descriptions, in that perspective, my writing is rather short actually.

We're fundamentally talking about functions of our reality that I'm arguing extends beyond mere consciousness and therefor require further exploration. It's key to the understanding as a whole since a core part points out that our consciousness is as much a part of the natural world as anything else, and therefore functions according to how the rest of reality functions.

My point of religious reasoning mainly focus on when someone fail to acknowledge where evidence and actual observed phenomena exist. I've read your idealism argument and you do focus a lot on actual scientific research, but where I think it fails is to connect to any actual alternative and separate conclusion that answers beyond the scientific research and reasoning I'm building out of. It essentially produces a caricature of scientific perspectives and I don't know why.

That's why I continue to ask the question; where's the alternative? What's the alternative theory, position and perspective that's able to follow what's already been proven as well as what has been observed and being observed in scientific research today?

If you argue for idealism, what is it that you are arguing for? And are you just using the lack of final evidences as your foundation for your argument or do you have a foundation for idealism that is able to supersede what science and emergence theories provides?

I cannot dismiss your argument as "religious" until I know how you argue for it and counter-argue against what I've written. So far you're only focusing on dismissing everything, without real explanation for a different counter perspective.

I'm not sure how to interpret what you wrote there because it generally looks like you are after answers to reality in the form of comfort, something that reduces the anxiety of our existence. For me, that is an irrelevant point as it has nothing to do with what's true about reality. Those are two different aspects of existing as a human being. I am interested in answers to what reality is and how consciousness functions, but I don't really care in that sense about any meaning to it, because "meaning" is arbitrary, it is a trivial thing in this topic. "Meaning" is something I can create with what I have, it's something I can work on separately. We don't get meaning out of these theories and answers, we only get answers to the questions. Meaning is something we have to build out of the truth we find and if we believe there to be meaning elsewhere, that is the religious aspect I pointed out in my argument being inventions that ignores actual search for truth.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
If monism and evolution are true, emergence must be true. — creativesoul

Consciousness, in my view, is just part of the same coin as anything else. Maybe the best description would be that both mind and matter are part of the same thing, but an emergent property that functions as a fluid abstract system rather than a set object could be viewed as an abstract while a defined set object that emerge would be called an object. And these are bound to what scale they're defined under. A set of objects can emerge an abstract. Whether a set of abstracts can form an object however is probably closer to religion, but an abstract could form emergent properties of another abstract, as we can see in behavior science and sociology studying the psychology of masses of people, when speaking of primarily human consciousness. But one idea of an object formed out of a mass abstract complexity could be something like a Dyson sphere, a production of objects that becomes physical out of the abstract system of the masses.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
Okay so if I'm understanding you correctly, what I'm calling a physical process emerges from, is a result of, not the physical fundamentals, rather it is the result of the interaction of those fundamentals where that interaction results in properties that were otherwise not present. — NotAristotle

We need to define physical fundamentals first. We can argue that all existence is composed of smaller parts and that the sum complexity produce emergent properties that we then apply the definition of "an object". Calling something a physical object is just a terminology by us humans to define reality easier, it's part of the simplified language we use to function in day to day life. But "objects" are only accumulations of different other systems and the reason they accumulate and produce separation from other objects, like me as a human being not just vaporizing into an equilibrium of the space I'm in, is due to fundamental forces that bind and define these sets of things that make up me as a material entity. We could argue that these forces are either emergent properties themselves of other fundamentals, or they are part of the defining entities that mathematically steer sets to form certain types of higher complexities.

What I mean is that for a system to produce emergent properties; pure randomness cannot work on its own due to simple chaos theory. It's only when something has enough initial defining guiding principles that randomness start to form into a higher complexity that produce emergent properties. And it is in our math equations of reality that we can spot these guiding principles. If we zoom out and back to the beginning, before the big bang, going by the inflation theories of our universal bubble forming by randomness into a stable mathematical balance (like the fine structure constant) produces a stable rising complexity out of whatever we formed out of. In the theory it's proposed that there can form other inflationary universes that has its constants being different and therefor something like the fine structure constant are unable to balance the electromagnetic forces against other forces and the inflation of those universes fizzle out before being able to form any further higher complexities. It may be that we live in a universe in which these forces have found a mathematical equilibrium that stabilizes the progression of entropy and thereby enables enough of it to generate further higher complex outcomes, i.e emergent properties.

Whether or not these forces and the mathematical balance are emergent properties themselves or functions as the guiding principles are up for debate. But the fact that we have such probability chaos in quantum randomness and with virtual particles, yet still generate balanced bonds of matter and energy that doesn't immediately cancel itself out or break apart speaks to reality, as we experience it, to be a probability luck that occurred when our reality began. We wouldn't exist without all those forces ending up in a functioning relation to each other and we wouldn't exist if these forces didn't act as guiding principles for how higher complexities behave, leading to emerging outcomes and new levels of complexities.

In essence, everything is in relation and acting on each other, there are nothing defining the borders between anything other than the fundamental forces producing such borders by their fundamental interactions. Without their mathematical balance, nothing would be, at all.

As an analogy, H2O, the result of interaction between atoms, is a liquid at room temperature, while oxygen and hydrogen atoms, the constituents, do not have the property of being liquid at room temperature. — NotAristotle

Yes, in a sense this is how we can define it. A single water molecule, H2O, does not have itself the property of a specific state of matter. When you heat up a water molecule it becomes more kinetic and that energy soon overcomes any intermolecular forces. These forces bind together many atoms and only when they act in a larger amount do we see these kinetic behaviors act upon each other and the intermolecular forces binding low kinetic atoms. So only when atoms form molecules that then bonds with others do we see matter and only through different levels of energy do we see this matter behave in certain states.

Scaling up from that we find more complex interactions between different states of matter, different matter reacting on other types matter and their states interacting etc. and we're off to form even higher levels of complexities. Nothing of this is a straight line, but what we observe are cutoff points in which interactions pool into some new function that interacts as if the whole system could be defined as one single entity, this is the emergent property.

But, physicalism generally focus on topics like consciousness and in terms of that we focus on the brain/body, its physical processes, the neurological parts of the brain, and how they function and what I'm arguing for, consciousness appearing as an emergent property out of the complex bonds between singular biological functions. A form of hallucination that gets produced by a specific balance of these parts interactions with each other. Therefore we cannot simply draw a line from one part of the brain to a resulting behavior in our sum consciousness without understanding the guiding principles and how they steer the path of the complexity.

With respect to emergent properties - the emergent qualities of substances like glass or water as analogies do not really provide the basis of explanations for consciousness in terms of emergence. New properties can emerge from simpler constituents—glass from sand, liquidity from a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. These examples show that a whole can indeed have properties that its constituent parts do not possess individually, a central idea in emergence theory. — Wayfarer

And it's here that I ask, why would our entity as humans be separated from the rest of the universe? We see the emergent properties throughout our reality, acting on different scales and in different sets of interactions, with cutoff points in which we can observe the emergent properties appear and that we then simplify in language by defining them as "objects". But we aren't bound in language to only call simple bonds and interactions "an object", we also call sets of complexities as "objects". A solar system, an ecosystem etc. When speaking of an eco system as a whole it produces a behavior as a single entity when zoomed out and we can zoom out further and further and see more emergent properties arise from its parts.

"Consciousness" is as undefined as a physical object as an "ecosystem". And in similar fashion both systems produce problems for us to define their behavior by just studying its parts. Just like consciousness we have problems explaining the behavior of the whole of an ecosystem by trying to draw lines from its parts. It's like something "clicks into place", a cutoff point in which new behaviors emerge. It's this abstraction that produce a problem for scientists to just explain consciousness by the neurological parts alone. The interactions between all systems and individual neurons increase so quickly in mathematical complexity that we lose our computational capability to verify any meaningful causal links other than trivial ones that formed our knowledge of how different parts in the brain are linked to basic and trivial functions of our consciousness. But the holistic entity that is our consciousness shows functions that we don't understand by these trivial links we experiment with. And they disappear as through a cutoff point when we remove more and more interactions and interplays between functions in the brain, as I defined when writing about the near-death waking up-experiences.

However while these examples demonstrate physical and chemical emergence, they do not adequately address the unique challenges posed by consciousness. The emergence of physical properties like the transparency of glass or the liquidity of water can be (and have been) completely explained through physical and chemical processes. These are objective properties that can be observed and measured from an external perspective. — Wayfarer

Because they are simple for explaining the principle. Increasingly complex systems become harder to quantify in their emergent properties, yet we see them. Talking about matter is only there to make a simple example of the principle, but in relation to consciousness we reach a level of complexity and emergent properties that become harder to explain and test, and it's why we've yet to conclude it true. This is what much of modern sciences attempt to achieve. But as I explained with my example of the constants in physics having "infinite" decimals, it could be possible to explain these extreme complexities if we had the computational power to reach the end of such constant's string of decimals, seen as the geometrical resolution should predictably break down at some point, changing a constant to a variable as we reach the smallest functional resolution at the Planck scale and enter pure randomness. What I mean by that is that the complexities of higher emergent phenomena require such extreme level of computational precision that we may never be able to simply formulate a map of how consciousness appears. The numbers go through the roof if we brute force it.

It's basically similar to modern AI systems, even though they are extremely rudimentary in comparison; with the increasing complexity and amount of information, the guiding principles of the system forms emergent properties in the models behavior that was not directly programmed in, yet, they're there. Like how an LLM start to function in another language that was not programmed in as a function. And in similar fashion to other complex system producing emergent phenomenas, the computer scientists working on these models simply cannot explain how it happens, leading to the black box problem which echoes the problems we have in science to explain consciousness.

Consciousness, on the other hand, presents a different kind of problem. It's not just about the emergence of new properties but about the emergence of the capacity for subjective experience. This includes what it feels like to see, feel pain, or taste. This subjective quality is what is not observable or measurable in terms of objective properties of chemical substances. And that is by design, as by design, scientific observation excludes the subject. — Wayfarer

Why would billions of years of evolution not be able to form a certain emergent property based on necessity? We see highly complex systems all over in nature; that emerged through evolution. The only reason you apply consciousness some magical special treatment is because of our emotions as the conscious being thinking about it. It produces a feedback loop of experienced paradoxes that stirs up emotions and start to play into our cognitive biases. It quickly becomes supernatural and religious in nature, in which we protect our sanity by looking at consciousness as something uniquely special compared to the rest reality itself. That's what I call the human arrogance bias as we form theories not based on a universal logic, but instead by applying a higher value to ourselves skewing our ability to theorize correctly.

So, there exist no reason or evidence, other than religious needs and wants, to separate consciousness as a function from the rest of the natural world. The emergent property all of this is about is that specific subjectivity you mention. And the evolutionary necessity can simply be boiled down and explained through the human species starting with the evolutionary trait of adaptability, the need for it. Humans are highly adaptable in nature when speaking of only our basic body functions. Adaptability is an extremely powerful evolutionary trait, especially for animals that move over large distances and climates. It is not far fetched that the whole reason we developed our level of consciousness is due to this adaptability, a function that makes us able to plan and change behaviors according to the environment. This increase in complexity developed through evolution would then, just like other emergent systems of high complexities, produce new functions that weren't part of the intended simple function. That in order to be adaptable, we developed systems to recognize, memorize and formulate visualized scenarios in order to be able to plan our next moves. These systems together would be able to produce a new level of complexity which may be the reason why subjectivity occurs.

Our only problem is that we cannot quantify that complexity as the number of interactions between systems reach levels far beyond what's computationally possible by brute force.

Even if we fully understood the brain's physical and biological attributes - and we're a very long way from that - we might still lack an explanation for how these attributes give rise to subjective experience. There is an incommensurability involved which is not bridgeable in terms of more data. This gap in understanding leads us to question whether the concept of emergence, as understood in physical sciences, is sufficient to explain consciousness, or whether it is, at best, just another analogy or metaphor (or straw to grasp at). — Wayfarer

There's enough to assume it plays a part. But we don't know if we can produce a model that maps how it functions. And what I'm arguing for is that instead of looking at each part, each interaction and trying to brute force it, search for the underlying guiding principles. These are essential for emergent systems to produce properties that functions as their own entities, and finding these principles should be possible.

Basically, it becomes a trial and error research, setting up starting points (principles) that guide the generated complexity as we look for and analyze the emergent properties and if they show behaviors of subjective agency. It's basically what the AI research is doing, but without having that business as the main goal. Their approach is just higher functionality and all focus has been on the shenanigans that appears out of capitalist goal, but there's a reason why AI is considered instrumental as a tool for scientists researching consciousness. Because it enables testing complexity in a new way, and these tools in research is only just now being used.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
I'm sympathetic to the idea of something like "physicalism without reductionism," but as is discussed earlier in this thread, I'm not sure such a thing currently makes much sense with how physicalism is generally defined. Physicalism might have to become just a vague commitment to naturalism and metaphysical realism to deal with strong emergence (which, to be fair, I think that's how many people colloquially use the term). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Naturalism is just the broader idea that rejects the supernatural. In that sense, yes, I'm a naturalist as well. I do not think there are any supernatural elements to reality, I think that such things stems from human desperation, that our fears generate the need for supernatural elements to exist in order to cope with reality. Any notion of supernatural in my perspective would be things and beings that exist outside of the physical laws of reality, in essence, if there's a multiverse or higher universe outside of this and it is populated with such beings or existences, then that could be called supernatural. However, in the common terminology, supernatural refers to the fantastical that defies our reality and there is not a single fraction of evidence for any of it and all the witnesses expressing their fantastical anecdotal descriptions of them, when understanding human psychology, technology and physics, can easily be countered. People are generally prone to find patterns and make up imaginative explanations of what they don't understand, it's the foundation of how any religion starts out. Naturalism rejects all that and focus on what is, not what is believed.

Physicalism is part of naturalism, but focuses more on the metaphysical specifics. Especially when it comes to the mind and consciousness, or the nature of reality in terms of physics.

Emergentism generally focus on the scientific observations and theories of emergent properties of complex systems. Since it's found in so many areas of research, it forms an entire sub-category in physicalism. And it generally somewhat counter-argue against reductionism as it specifically points out the problem of direct links between the emergent properties and the less complex parts of the system. That it is problematic to try and quantify the math of that link as it may become too complex for any computational system to summarize it holistically. We may be able to in the future, but we also might not and need to simply conclude that we can't compute it, only understand that it happens.

I would say with high confidence that most scientists do not spend much time focused on the ontology of physicalism, problems related to supervenience, the causal closure principle, etc. Kim's argument against the possibility of strong emergence, given a substance metaphysics, seems very strong. Given that, strong emergence doesn't seem to be an option for physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Strong or weak emergence depends on what we can prove in the future. As I said, it may be that we can't provide an understandable link between the parts and the emergent property (strong emergence), but we can't rule it out and we may be able to compute and observe it some time in the future (weak emergence). As of now we cannot conclude either to be true, but we can conclude that there's observed phenomena that functions by the principles of emergence.

To be sure, I've seen theoreticians who do end up having to consider things like Kim's work suggest a move to a process metaphysics. But this move probably requires jettisoning a lot of what makes physicalism "physicalism."

It's an example of Hemple's Dilemma, I guess. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Physicalism only pinpoints that explanations boils down to physical systems. Emergence co-exist and functions within it through acknowledging such physical fundamentals; but expands them into emerging results that become "extra-physical", or "transcend" the classical definition of "objects".

In terms of Hemple's Dilemma, I'd say that emergence isn't an explanation but rather an observation of a type of behavior of reality. The nature of the behavior differs in each system based on what is producing the emergent properties and in what form it exists. Much like we don't treat a dimension in physics as some specific entity, but rather a general system that's part of defining reality. Emergence, as it seems, has some general attributes that can be found all over our reality and it may be part of how reality itself functions. Therefore I don't think the Hemple's Dilemma applies as it is both very specific in nature, and at the same time a general description of how reality functions. The problem lies in that the research into emergent systems is still pretty modern as a broad description, and still lacks enough empirical evidence to have common appearance in science media reports (some have), and it's just pretty much cutting edge right now that we're looking into it more seriously, coming out of previous purely and classical reductionist approaches. There's a lot of observations already concluded, so it's not as speculatory as many seem to believe, but it's not yet enough to find its way into fundamental parts of theories as frameworks.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
What I wanted to ask you is, can you say more about "emergent physicalism?" Is it roughly the same as "process physicalism" (my thesis here is that consciousness just is a physical process) ? — NotAristotle

It is physical but not in the way of the reductionist interpretation. Emergent properties functions as a result of increasing complexity. The gist of it is basically that you might start with basic systems, like particles, and they, as a collective form higher complexities that produce new properties that cannot simply be linked back and explained just by looking at the fundamental particles and their functions themselves. In such systems, the initial mathematical state and starting point, govern and directs how the complexity grows and will define the properties that emerges.

It's a bit more complicated than that, but in essence, when thinking about something like the mind; neurons can be measured to govern different systems of the brain. We can measure how they function and how they control different systems of the body, how memories form etc. but we've yet to explain the holistic nature of the entire mind. We have these separate systems that we can define, but we do not know how they relate to the entirety of our experience existing as a conscious being. But in the concept of an emergent system; all functions in the brain and body collectively increase the complexity and produce a holistic system that operate in new ways. The combination of all produces the result that is our mind.

These behaviors of systems can be found in other areas of research like withing an ecosystem that is extremely complex but cannot be defined by any individual specific animal, plant, insect or bacteria, and cannot be traced up through the ecosystem and be explained by simply those individual parts. We can see the result of the ecosystem functioning as a balanced system that moves and flows in a way that is highly complex and its own thing, but never define it as a thing in its own when viewing its parts. It simply "becomes" out of the complexity it generates.

As an example, people who experienced near death experiences have described that when they get revived and slowly return to consciousness; the ability of understanding the reality around them kicks in step by step, at different levels of understanding, connected to what specific brain system that receives oxygen through blood first. When they go through it, they experience different levels of conscious understanding of their surroundings. They can see and hear, but not understand what anything means, they can see clearly, but do not have a the ability to form those visuals into spatial three dimensional understanding of reality until such systems "turns on" again and all of a sudden; they can perceive reality just like everyone else. They can hear sounds, but make not sense of it, until more systems comes alive and they are able to hear in context again. The more all complex systems start to act in sync and increase in numbers, the more the half-functioning brain that produce only a rudimentary shell of a consciousness, becomes a normal human consciousness.

Of course, these concepts are yet to have full empirical evidence to back them up, even though the science and observations of it leans towards this understanding of consciousness. Many similar types of emergent systems appears all over in nature and they holistically converge many research fields into a general understanding of reality. Basically, there are so many systems in our reality that follows these behaviors that this holistic perspective hints at a fundamental corner stone of how reality functions.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
↪wonderer1

Main problems I feel are: Framing science as some kind of simple one-note group functioning under religious dogma, which is false. While there are bad actors who act like that both within and outside scientific research, it's not representative of science as a whole, especially not the methods used and the way conceptualization are actually performed by specialists in a specific field. A theoretical physicist does not look upon reality with a simplified reductionist perspective that only sees "objects" through the reference of how a human experience reality. There's a reason why the line "can you hear the music" is in the movie Oppenheimer. "Hearing the music" is closer to how the experience is, a kind of transcendent elevated conceptualization that does not feature forms by vision, sound by waves etc. but a form and shape that feels undefined by normal perception. This is because the practice of thinking through it is training the mind to conceptualize out of abstract concepts like math rather than relating it to perception based concepts. It's only when the conclusions gets published and reported on that we get these simplified visualizations of physics that are found in our school books and in science media. If that's all you use as the source of criticizing science through an argument of perception limitations, then it renders an argument simply not correct.

The main other problem is that I still haven't heard an actual argument for an alternative method in the pursuit of knowledge about reality. If someone criticizes science and calling it some dogmatic power over the world, then provide an alternative that function better. Because structuring the world based on anything other than modern scientific conclusions requires a level of result that I've yet to see any other method or system produce. Quite the opposite, it's within realms of using belief systems that just follow human biases where we find the most horrors. Notice that I'm saying modern science. Because I have heard again and again the same old arguments about how science in the past led to horrors of its own. But science has evolved with the conclusions; the rigor and practice has evolved and been sharpened to function past old non-functioning practices.

The ability to bypass human biases is better than ever and we are still bettering its ability to be the best method for knowledge. People who study the history of science usually gets lost in the malpractice of old sciences, and are unable to see how things function today, unable to see how good it has become and is still evolving. I dare anyone who think they can trick some bad conclusions into scientific consensus to try and do that today. Compared to spreading misinformation beliefs through the usual channels of human bias.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
I have no fear of science. Your posts are too long to deal with. — Wayfarer

No, you just don't seem to understand it. You seem to just understand a pop-science media caricature of what science is, and it has formed your entire defense of idealism. But neither does your argument succeed in countering what you aimed to criticize in science, since you ignore how scientists actually conceptualize their perspectives and just bluntly position them as having to frame everything through "Gestalts". You also lump together all science approaches into purely reductionism, which isn't a perspective that's very active in scientific communities. The fixation on objects becomes an irrelevant critique since emergentism doesn't view the mind as an object.

In the end you have a simplistic counter to physicalism that only functions against reductionism specifically, have a simplified insight into what the experience actually is for a scientist conducting research and you still don't provide an alternative that disprove my initial claim that science is the best method to explain reality, which was what you objected against. What's your alternative? That was what I asked and have yet to hear from you? If you can't produce an alternative method that functions better in the pursuit of knowledge about reality, then you can't say I'm wrong when I'm positioning science as the best method for it. That just comes off as desperate defense of some belief system because you don't like it. As if you've studied the history of science, seen some shit and then just lump together that shit with the methods and system of science. Like I wrote in the argument:

It's like the waiter blaming math for you not able to count your money correctly when failing to pay for dinner — Christoffer

Details in the post you ignore.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
But that is the very essence of 'scientism' (link to wikipedia.) Note the sinister overtones of 'deviating from knowledge'.

I think your arguments are influenced by what Thomas Nagel describes in his essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. (Nagel is not a religious apologist, and that essay is written from the perspective of analytical philosophy. I can provide a reference to it if need be.) — Wayfarer

No, it seems that you fear science more than I fear religion.

The reason I don't think religion has merits for factually describing anything is primarily due to what psychology tells us about biases and our pattern seeking functions. We are absolutely slaves to pattern interpretations in everything around us. Even our vision is mostly based on interpreting between slow input data rather than functioning as a camera. We form an interpretation of our sensory information and we generate not only perception through this, but also ideas. Without externalizing our methods of gathering factual information, a logical summery of data we collect and logical rationalization through math and secondary observations, we are absolute slaves to emotional interpretations and imagination that blurs our ability to form actual truth about the world around us.

This is what form religious explanations about reality; attempts to explain something without the tools to disconnect from our pattern interpretations and biases, and that generates absolute bias through our emotions, absolute skewing of our ability to rationally reason.

But that still doesn't make me fear religion because religion is part of our psychology. Humanity has just not matured out of mixing together factual statements with the psychological needs in religion. In my opinion, religion should focus on building rituals, traditions, meditation, emotional exploration etc. and get rid of any attempts to explain how reality functions because it has had no observed positive result of ability to do so throughout history. Whenever I observe someone trying to produce conclusions through a religious lens it is so absolutely crystal clear how that reasoning acts through their biases, through their emotional need for something to be a certain way and how all the logic is constructed around defending that belief rather than accepting reality for what it observably is. It is basic psychology that drives it and the lack of insight into these psychological processes seems to be responsible for making it impossible to explain anything outside of their realm of thinking due to them being fundamentally driven by those personal needs and perspectives.

In order to try and understand your viewpoint I read through your essay on philosophical idealism and it seems that your antagonism against any argument in favor of science is rooted in verifying this philosophical stance. It seems that you cannot accept what I say because that would negate your conviction about philosophical idealism. This is why you effectively strawman all I say about science into framing it as a dogmatic belief system rather than reading my actual points. And it seems you look at only a fraction of research, through a summery that all science is just reductionism.

But the process of science, the methods, the framework and praxis are not the same as only one field or philosophical position, and it is not defined by any bad actors throughout the history of science. Just as I explained about religious perspectives above, people in science can fail just as much because, as I mentioned, all people follows human psychology. And bad players in science will skew and produce similar religious dogmas around their perspectives as well. That does not equal the framework and method being the problem, that is culture, not science, and just summarize it as a "culture of science" and attaching a negative framing around it just forms a guilt by association; since some acts as zealots of science, science itself is the problem. That is the core problem in reasoning I spot when interpreting your counter argument to what I write.

It's like the waiter blaming math for you not able to count your money correctly when trying to pay for dinner, it makes very little sense.

But to adress the argument you've made for idealism in order to contextualize further:

In your argument you start off with a thought experiment about the inability to picture a landscape in all perspectives at once. But this is not anything that counters physicalist perspectives. We don't argue that what we observe with our senses is the all there is to describe reality. Observations simply means all that can be registered about reality. If we use measurements of microwave data from space, that is nothing we can ever perceive but it's still part of our perspective in understanding reality. Scientists do not require our human based perception to understand the abstract answers data gives us.

You can look at it as how we've discovered that when you use a hammer, our brain manifest an extension of our body to incorporate the hammer into our motor control; we essentially manifest extensions of our existence into whatever tool we handle. This extends to our thinking; if you understand the data, the tools to picture reality outside of our human perception, you do not think about reality in the same way as someone not learned in those mental tools. Why else do you think that theoretical physicists are able to come up with their concepts? All of the notable ones imagined and pictured reality far beyond the realm of human perceptions; they didn't start with math, they view the world in a different mindset which guides them towards how to formulate math to prove it. Simply focusing on our human perceptions of our surrounding reality, how we relate to reality, dismiss the ability of some to think in abstract ways about the reality that others aren't able to by their lack of similar "mental language". The fact that we have people who did just this and then verified the logic of their thinking with math after the fact, proves the ability of us to extend our perception beyond mere Gestalts.

But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective.

Yet it is. You argue only for human perception, observation through our senses and how that forms our instinctual mental projection of reality. A musician does not observe music in the same way as a non-musician. A painter does not view the world in the same way as a non-painter. The ability of abstract thinking beyond the bounds of a mind dependent on Gestalts, depends on the "mental language" tool that extends it. What we know about reality is not limited by our perception programing if we then acknowledge the limitations we have. Our perception programmed mind is not equal to an inability to picture reality for what it is, it is just a limitation of direct observation. So we can construct methods that extends our ability to understand reality beyond anything based on Gestalts.

This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.

This is false. Science does the exact opposite. Our biases and our basic human perception of reality is included within research as negative properties to exclude when forming objective conclusions. The inclusion of such human perspectives are there to pinpoint where are limitations are so as to not skew the objective conclusion that's made. It's one of the most important parts of research in any field.

But it's easy to form such an argument seen as how discoveries are shaped in the form of Gestalt-based concepts. But this is done to simplify initial introductions to scientific discoveries. It's how it's explained initially to other scientists in order to form a basic guide and reference before they head into the actual details. It's also there in all journalism reporting on scientific discoveries. It is, however, not in the trenches of actual research. When you act within research itself, there are no Gestalts because the aim is to reach objective truth, not the simplified interpretation aimed at communication of the ideas. Those are two distinct different things. But the public, non-scientists, misinterpret science as only being these wild simplified and expressive conclusions. Just like how the atom is drawn everywhere in this simple graphical drawing with defined object features (Gestalts), while the real thing features quantum properties that cannot be visualized outside their inherent abstractness, which is what scientists are actually doing in research.

But it is not until all of these disparate elements are synthesized into Gestalts that meaning emerges.

Meaning is irrelevant to explain reality. Meaning is applied out of desperation for it, it is not part of how I view reality when utilizing facts outside of my limited perception and mental projection out of such perceptions. The act against incorporating "Gestalts" is part of good scientific research and practice. The meaning you refer to is what I described above, about simplified communication found mostly outside of science, where people not versed in scientific thinking, not versed in the "mental language" of understanding abstractions rooted in data, are required to understand the abstract concepts being presented. This is not science, this is pop-science and how the public understands it, not science itself and not the methods themselves. You mix these two together thinking Gestalts are required for understanding reality. They're only required for people not versed in science.

As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.

Which is why I argue for physicalist emergentism and not reductionism. Your critique against neuroscience, using this quote from Pinter, only focus on a reductionist principle. The modern and increasingly used explanation for our mind forming out of our physical being is rather rooted in a emergentist perspective, as I've explained. In essence, you get nothing from brain scans, you cannot get data on emergent properties as they require a full map of the complexity, which may or, more likely, is impossible to map due to computational limitations.

The problem is that arguments that use the lack of answers in science through criticizing its reductionistic approach, ignores that science in itself extends beyond just reductionistic perspectives. Emergent properties cannot easily be reduced to root causes, instead a shift in approach is required for science to research through an emergentist lens.

our cognitive construction of the world is not itself amongst the objects of the natural sciences, and so is deprecated by physicalism, even though, in a fundamental sense, the physical sciences depend on it. This points towards the fundamental contradiction in the physicalist conception of the world.

Science does not depend on it. And in a physicalist emergentist perspective it's no more different from other observations of reality. How for instance biological ecosystems exist as complex entities in themselves, but cannot be considered a thing in of themselves as they lack properties of what we constitute as "a thing". The mind therefor acts accordingly, as an emergent property that we can define as existing because of its consequences onto reality, but yet not able to be defined as a thing. That failure does not mean physicalism fails when working from a emergentist approach, since it acknowledge the existence of a featureless category of something as a result rather than some object. The idealist counter argument depends on the physicalist stance to only accept "things" as objects, which the emergentist approach does not. Going further, we could argue that everything is an emergent property based on fundamental probability rooted in mathematical starting points; that all steps of relations between physical processes from the Planck scale and up just form different scale levels of complexities that in turn form different scale levels of emergent properties that in turn form new complexities. That the reason we don't find clear connections between small and large scale physics is because we are unable to calculate the result of an emergent property with the individual parts that forms its necessary root complexity. Yet, I need no Gestalts to form an understanding of this concept. There's nothing in my human perceptional-trained mind that functions to formulate an idea about reality by my human standards, yet I perceive it anyway because I understand the language of its abstract nature.

Basically, understanding reality does not require objects as we perceive them and the non-material nature of the mind does not conflict with this understanding of reality. It's merely a standard of perspective. Maybe some are more versed in it than others, but I believe it to be trainable, just like becoming versed in a musical instrument.

... the way in which our technology– and science–dominated culture accentuates the division between mind and world, self and other. Coming to understand the sense in which ‘mind creates world’ offers a radically new perspective and way of exploring this division.

Such divisions aren't necessary and not all science treats it as such. This reads more like a simplification of science and especially ignores the emergentist approach in which there's no such type of divisions present.

"mind creates the world" becomes more of a dismissal of just one type of theory in science, or philosophical approach, rather than a definitive perspective. It's merely pointing out how we are limited in our perceptive perspective and how it limits our instinctive ability to understand reality, but it dismiss all the examples of when we are able to extend our thinking beyond our limited sensory formed internal projections. While ignoring that there's further versions of physicalist approaches than just the reductionist one, only using a limited perspective on science to prove a point that isn't really a point that argues against science, only pop-science interpretation of it.

Essentially, you argue for idealism, but when I try to find answers in your argument as to what would replace our scientific methods and approaches, all I can find is a simplification of science to make a point about our limited human mind. Something that in real scientific work is included for the exact reason of not skewing our answers by our limitations.

So once again, what other approach are you proposing we use to find answers about what reality is? If I argue that the physicalist emergentist approach seems to point at the most valid framework to think and experiment about reality because of how it relates to so much in science and of observations between different fields. Then what is your alternative to that?

Because painting science as some dogmatic field that somehow abuse its moral power onto the world, while having an idealism argument in which I couldn't find support for such ideas about abuse either, and also not providing any alternative to what I proposed as being our best method in pursuit of answers, and instead just form an argument that primarily dismiss what I say as scientism linked to a form of abuse of moral power over others in the world... just doesn't work. It just sounds like a desperate attack on science lacking actual substance to it.

It only proves that there's an emotional desperation of alternatives to science, to the point of trying to paint it as a moral power system used by people like me to control the world. It's almost a conspiratorial reaction to a simple claim that science, by its own merits, proves itself to be the best method in pursuit of answers. Especially since its very focus is on dismissing human biases and our simplistic understanding of reality. Features you focus on in your idealism argument. And with a physicalist emergentist approach, much of those plot holes you point towards in science as reductionism goes away, replaced by a better holistic perspective that features an internal logic. Science isn't just about experiments viewed through the lens of Gestalts, it's also about forming abstract frameworks and theories that guides the experiments, verifying ideas about reality that demand projecting past our limitations. In essence, the verifications layer into new understanding, further and further forming an understanding far beyond the limitations you argue about. And none of it features any promises of "future answers", all of what I'm talking about focus on the value of the method in practice, the approach of seeing past the limited perception of reality that we have as humans. A solution to the problem you describe, not affected by those limitations.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
That would be something like Popper’s ‘promissory materialism’, would it not? Popper coined this term to critique a particular stance within the philosophy of mind. This stance holds that physicalist explanations for all mental phenomena will eventually be found, even if current scientific understanding falls short. Popper saw this as a kind of "promissory note" – a belief in future explanations based on physicalism, despite a lack of current evidence or understanding. It is difficult to disentangle from scientism, the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion or marginalization of any other perspective. Like promissory materialism, scientism assumes that science will eventually provide answers to all questions, including those traditionally addressed by philosophy, the humanities, or religions.

The cardinal difficulty with both views is that it neglects or ignores a fundamental starting axiom of scientific method, which is limiting the scope of enquiry to the realm of objective fact, and in so doing, also disregarding the role of the scientist in choosing which questions to pose and how they should be posed. And that can’t be dealt with by the idea of emergence, because in that paradigm, the very faculty which poses the questions is supposed to be the outcome or effect of some prior and presumably physical causal chain, by some unknown means - which we’ll work out in future, promise! — Wayfarer

I'm not arguing for science able to prove everything, just as it is impossible for you to say that it won't. Your argument kind of requires science to not be able to, which in itself is equally absolute in its claim. With how, through the history of science, breakthroughs often were preceded by claims that science would never prove a thing that then got proven, the probability of science answering something still lies in its favor based on its previous history compared to anything else.

But outside of that, as I said, I'm not arguing that it will prove everything, I'm saying that it is by far the best probability to work path for any kind of searching for answers about reality. If you were to choose a path to go in search of truth and answers, why would you choose something that relies on less than the rigor that science provides? It looks more like you try to force any argument in favor of science to fall under dogmatism in order to conclude it wrong.

It may be, as I wrote in my argument, that we may never be able to measure or find answers that directly links between low complexity and emergent properties. It may be that because how extreme the numbers get, there can never be anything more than a holistic conclusion of emergentism through the holistic observation of all systems in nature.

So I'm not saying that "the answers will come", I'm saying that the reason I position myself as a physicalist emergentist is because it finds most of its roots in verifiable science while acknowledging an observation about reality that can be found everywhere we look.

If we did find an answer, some equation that defines just how a growing complexity eventually form emergent properties, it may be part of a fundamental understanding that expands from answering how reality works, to consciousness, to complex mechanisms in biology and so on. But that's not the same as saying it will definitely happen.

But equally the evidence for emergent properties are not entirely unknown, they're observable everywhere. It's just that drawing a deterministic line between the parts and the properties haven't been done and might not be able to be done based on how complex it gets.

My central argument is simply to argue that science holds the most valid ground for finding answers to these questions. And I question how anyone can position other methods as better systems to reach those same answers. If you ask a question about reality, why would you use an alternative method? Why would you present a theory with less observable parts? Physicalist emergentism draws from what we actually observe everywhere, in almost every field of science there's observations of these phenomena.

Remember, physicalist emergentism is not really reductionism. Just so you understand that difference. And physicalist emergentism is closer to modern science than reductionism, which was closer to how science functioned in the past. More and more scientists today incorporate emergentism into their framework, rather than a reductionist one.

What would you suggest be a better position?

Notice the scope of that claim - not about those things which are objectively measurable and about which we may arrive at inter-subjective agreement, but anything. So here science is being presented not only as an authority, but as a moral authority.

Maybe (as I suspect) that's a claim that scientists themselves would not make, regardless it is true that science is looked to as the 'arbiter of reality'. — Wayfarer

Again, in order to find answers to questions about why reality is what it is, how consciousness functions and so on, what method would you go by? What would your strategy be? What position would you use as a framework of thought?

You argue in a way that feels more like an attack on science because it works too well for answering these kinds of questions. But it does not change the fact that if you attempt to answer them in any other way, you deviate from knowledge that functions as universal for all.

I can see that you don't like how well it works, but what would you replace it with? What's the alternative in your book?
Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
You ask "Who cares what the politicians say?" Well, we know the effects can be from what politicians say -- right there. Without Trump urging them on, those people would not have marched on the Capitol. — GRWelsh

Exactly, it makes no sense to imply that we shouldn't care about what politicians say. How many politicians in history can we argue are responsible and have guilt for leading their followers into destructive and murderous acts? It's absolutely irrational to assume that a leader and his followers acts does not connect. Such arguments are for apologists who disconnect the link for their favorites and connects them for their enemies. It's propaganda, it's rhetoric of the indoctrinators. It's marketing jargon. It's wartime speeches.

When it comes to Trump I think its very simple. Is he someone that is competent for the complexity of steering a large nation like the US? Through calm waters into storms and safely home? We can make the argument for any politician, but in here specifically about Trump, the answer is clearly and absolutely "no". If politicians like him, even after disasters like the Capitol invasion are still considered valid for election, then there's no actual protection of democracy in place.

Democracy shouldn't be "anything goes", it should have demands of competency, it should have a logic behind candidates as representatives of their voters. Otherwise it will be flooded with demagogues who do any manipulative attempt to shape a democratic outcome by their own will. And that is not democracy, that is just autocracy in disguise. Failure to see when such a system is in place is a direct failure of protecting democracy and people who trivializes that do not care about democracy or are incompetent to care for it.
Time travel to the past hypothetically possible?
Time travel backwards seem to be mostly impossible due to the fact that reality collapses into a single point at each moment in time. If you were to turn the arrow of time, there are no probabilities that can fraction out of events that happen, there's no causal links that make sense. In essence it would lead to a disruption of every point in reality. The only possible way is if the multiverse is true, if all probabilities has their own branch, but then there's no point in going back in time to do anything as you cannot change the future you came from. It would be closer to traveling to other universes rather than specifically traveling back in time. And any change would only just fraction into new branches into such complexity that there's no ability to "go back" to any meaningful timeline since there's no actual timelines that exist.

It's basically like seeing white noise on an old TV, that's the chaos of probabilities and then all those points in that white noise collapse into a single point. If you go back in time, which point is the correct point that you would define was the "true" past one? It's an absurd attempt as all points are true until it collapses into just the one.
Best Arguments for Physicalism
If you are a physicalist, what convinced you? Or is it just the grounding of your thinking? — frank

I would posit myself as a physicalist emergentist. What type is still up in the air since that's a realm depending on yet unproven scientific theories.

The reason is simply that it has the most verifiable evidence in science, which in turn is arguably the best way for humans to form conclusions about anything. If we have a gradient between pure abstract fantasy and hard rigorous facts, then it doesn't matter if someone tries to argue for something like "brain in a vat" since it only produce an "anything goes" scenario that renders philosophy and reality totally meaningless to even pursue. Even with such a possibility we are required to form a framework that functions for our thinking, something that we can both theoretically handle and practically apply. And that means turning down the side of the gradient that leans towards abstract fantasy and turn up the gradient closer to hard rigorous facts. In essence, in order to even begin to think about the world and try to explain anything, we require a framework for which we operate in. And since the most effective and functioning framework is science, then we might be required to operate in physicalist emergentism as its the the realm of thinking that is closest to the evidence found in science.

Other theories quickly falls back into abstract fantasies. Most often related to a sort of arrogance of our species, putting humanity on an arbitrary pedestal because of our ego and extrapolating metaphysical concepts out of it. This egocentric framework generates everything from detaching consciousness from reality and religious claims. But there's very little evidence for any of those frameworks other than the pure will of our ego to put ourselves in the center of the universe. Forming a rational and logical explanation of reality requires a detachment from ourselves and our ego, we must kill our ego before analyzing reality, otherwise we apply all sorts of emotional and arbitrary values to a subject before even attempting to theorize about it. And we are utterly irrational, emotional beings with so many instinctual tendencies that guide our biases that we absolutely, brutally, must kill our ego before trying to explain anything. Or else we doom ourselves to be just as irrational as the hunter/gatherer who dance around the fire ignited by a lightning storm.

Why physicalist emergentism? Because it seems to be the most holistic concept that resonates between almost all fields in science and our conceptual understanding of reality. Almost every field in modern science seem to point towards physical nature producing complexities that form separate higher emergent properties. And in this framework it becomes clear that most of the counter arguments pointing out the gaps in scientific theories mostly just point towards the gap between low complexity and the emergent properties that forms out of higher complexity. Forming a counter argument that uses the mismatch between them as the entire foundation for calling it wrong. I strongly believe that this is the main reason we don't have a theory of everything yet, because we desperately try to match up two sides of the same coin without accepting them being two separate sides. We try to combine the low complex state with the high complex state believing we would find an explanation for the emergent properties. It's why this inability to find a theory of everything so closely resembles our inability to explain consciousness, because it operates on the same principles; we observe consciousness and try to explain it with neurons or specific parts of the brain and body, yet unable to connect between them to fully explain. But if consciousness is an emergent property that appears out of an almost infinite complexity that is the result of an extreme amount of simpler parts interacting with each other, then it is impossible to just draw a simple line between the two. And in order to explain it we require a better holistic framework and therefor combining the physicalist perspective with emergentism.

This is found in everything, in theories of consciousness, physics, biology, math etc. Chemistry is entirely built upon working with these emergent properties by disregarding much of the details in physics and operating on primarily the emergent properties of matter, forming new emergent properties. In math it explains the infinity of decimals in constants, which might not even be infinite, only that the geometrical precision ends at the Planck scale leaving us with such an undefined point of last decimals that not only is the number too long for us to calculate, but also ending up being a variable if able to. That since the number of decimals is so long, the complexity is so vast that we require a computer as complex as reality itself to compute it. And fundamentally makes math a blunt tool to calculate reality for us and therefor we have problems connecting low complexity with emergent properties.

So if these phenomena and observations are so common everywhere, so ingrained in everything around us, why, in the name of Occam, would we argue for any other explanations; primarily operating out of our arrogance as humans, our ego and will to be special? We have no evidence for ourselves being that special, so why would we begin with such an unproven starting point which so many other theories operate from?

Why not instead operate through a framework that rhymes with what we actually can observe almost everywhere around us? It is at least the most viable framework that exist at the moment and we should always use the sharpest tool we have, regardless of how much it might hurt our ego.
Bannings
↪Wayfarer

This is something I’ve been saying many times. I get that threads on politics generate a lot of animosity, but this is a philosophy forum. That should mean that discussions about politics, society and conflicts at least follow an ability to formulate criticism and arguments by a certain standard of internal logic while maintaining a tone fit for proper philosophical discussion. When some just utter emotional outbursts and present arguments that would fail any other thread by the forum’s standards, I fail to see the point of such discussions. They usually just end up being the same people throwing the same shit repeatedly at each other for hundreds of pages while alienating anyone else who tries to enter the topic.

So, sure, a higher bar of tolerance may be needed, but it sometimes feels like that bar went through the roof and people trigger each other until someone snaps and goes too far or create a repeating cycle of bs posts that just goes on forever. Maybe lower the bar slightly and demand a bit more effort when participating in those types of discussions? In the case of the Israel-Palestine discussion it just feels like a perfect example of neither side listening to the other, both handling facts and knowledge like weapons to win an argument without regards to their validity or caring to accept the level of validity of the other side’s presented facts.

Philosophical discussion generally favors discussion to grow knowledge in all participating parties. It demands a bit of an open mind on the counter arguments to one’s own convictions. And I believe that having a slightly lower tolerance for these threads spiraling out of control and focus people towards holding a discussion rather than a brawl would be in everyone’s favor, especially important for those who want to learn and grow their understanding of certain topics related to on going conflicts and problems in the world.
Antinatalism Arguments
That strengthens Ciorans point in suicide. We are put in an impossible situation. The nostalgia for “unbirth” can never be attained. It doesn’t negate choosing not to impose the very dilemma on another. — schopenhauer1

But we do impose the dilemma on others by acknowledging that the suffering of existence exists, putting a spotlight on ideas that in themselves lead to the suffering. And we also need to interact with the ideas in order to process suffering and find a way past it. To interact with the ideas require interaction with others over these ideas.

I think that when adding our biological drives into the mix, people find social bonds meaningful, regardless of their meaninglessness intellectually. We have this vague feeling of meaning when with others. So in that sense, imposing the ideas that lead to suffering on others is impossible to avoid, but equally required for us in order to find meaning and a will to exist. So we can't be free from imposing these things on others because we need to interact with the ideas about our suffering to process it through our social bonds.
Would you live out your life in a simulation?
And yet people lose themselves to drug-induced euphoria, or role-playing video games. Not every life is purposeful and meaningful in reality. — Vera Mont

You missed my definition of meaning. I focused on the absolute core meaning that can be objectively argued for, the core universal purpose of entropy; how we are a part of how our reality fundamentally works:

It does not need to be noticeable or make you famous, rather it is about being part of this entropic universe. As I live in this reality I am in sync with the entropic forces of this universe, I am part of something and that has meaning, however minute that meaning is to us and how essentially meaningless that is within the context of what we consider having purpose. — Christoffer

You still do that when engaging with art/video games or taking drugs because you interact with actual reality and people. But you aren't doing that when living inside a simulation that only have p-zombies as its population and no real consequences to its reality.

If I'm facing death and this is a way for me to continue existing, then yes, if you fear death and don't want it, it may be preferable, as long as you have an off button for when that reality reaches its pointless conclusion.

If, however, you are speaking of a simulation with other people in which you can continue your existence and have meaningful interactions with others, then it would be a rather soothing continuation of your self when you face death in the real world.

I would not, however, in good health in actual reality, choose a simulation over reality when I still have life left to live. I see it only as a continuation for when my physical body can no longer function and provide me life.
Would you live out your life in a simulation?
Do you really want to live in a "heaven", populated by shadows, guaranteed to be (in reality) completely alone, for the rest of your life? Where every achievement will in fact be in vain, and go unnoticed, except in your mind? To live a life, in truth, that will be guaranteed to be meaningless? — hypericin

The meaning we create in reality is closely linked to making a mark on history. It does not need to be noticeable or make you famous, rather it is about being part of this entropic universe. As I live in this reality I am in sync with the entropic forces of this universe, I am part of something and that has meaning, however minute that meaning is to us and how essentially meaningless that is within the context of what we consider having purpose.

If my actions and existence lose that core and basic meaning as being a functional part of reality, then there is only an absolute meaninglessness left and I don't believe anyone could find joy in that other than for a brief moment.
Antinatalism Arguments
What we really want is to never have suffered in the first place. Annihilation after the fact doesn’t negate this. — schopenhauer1

Doesn't non-existence in the first place leave the equation absurd? To not have existed is to never have had a will to not suffer. The relief from suffering cannot exist for something that does not exist. We have to exist with suffering in order to want to be free from suffering. This paradox makes the will to never have existed an essentially meaningless yearning. Since it is with even less meaning in its fundamental emptiness than a meaningless existence that actually exist.
Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
That's why I wonder if they will consider the case before the resolution of the January 6th proceedings. It seems completely illogical that they could. After all, if he's found guilty (which seems likely considering the massive weight of evidence), then even without reference to the 14th Amendment, you will have a situation where an ostensible candidate will have been found guilty of trying to subvert the very process that he's supposedly participating in. — Wayfarer

Would a guilty or non-guilty charge become a reality before election gets going? It seems they actually need a proper sentence before they could conclude the decision proper or not, but if the sentencing is after any election machine gets going that might screw up their ability to decide in the matter.

Would be easier for them to actually just ditch him and get another candidate into action, but I'm not sure republicans would dare to lose the maga-fanatics voting base.
Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
↪Wayfarer

That would be hilarious.
On Fosse's Nobel lecture: 'A Silent Language'
Japan has usually set the highest standards for avoiding suicide, considering this act as an offense. — javi2541997

Making it illegal is fruitless for most people committing suicide. They give up on life, they give up on everything, making it illegal only put more pressure on them. They need guidance, help and better understanding from people around them. One thing to do is to instead stop making villains out of them, stop the sigma around the subject and make it a non-issue to talk openly about suicidal thoughts. having it so that it is shameful to be suicidal makes them hide everything, hide their depression, sorrow, their thoughts and all.

While therapy has done wonders in our modern era, one problem of it is akin to the problem of us not handling the care of our dead ones ourselves. We have outsourced these things. We let a hospital or funeral agency take care of our dead, we do not take care of their bodies and bury them or do rituals anymore than what is necessary... show up to the funeral, eat cake, go home.

So therapy is good as it can be a place away from people around us to deal with issues maybe related to them, but it has also become an outsourcing of all difficult topics that friends, family, loved ones should be part of helping with. The common reply from those who lost someone who took their own life is a cry about how they never opened up to them. But how could they when we treat mental issues as something outsourced to a therapist while shunning any difficult topics in day to day discussions. Even though the reaction might seem harsh, I almost laugh every time someone cries out that their friend who took their life never opened up about their issues, because the irony of it all has went over everyone's head so hard people should have gotten bald.

I thought this was a cultural phenomenon, but the government there expresses concern about the numbers. — javi2541997

Culture is more than the composition of state and people.

Some see ending life as suitable when it is not worth living, rather than continuing until death 'approaches us' due to age or sickness. — javi2541997

It's important however to differentiate between euthanasia and suicide. If one really do suffer in a way that cannot be fixed or helped without just prolonging the suffering, I see no reason for these people to have to suffer just because people cannot cope with the idea of their death. The campaigns against euthanasia just points out how immature and childish society behaves around the topic of death.

Is it a failure of society rather than the sloppiness of the state? While citizens who die from terrorism or gender violence are recognized as failures of the state, those who die by suicide are not given the same status. This surely happens because of the significant influence of religion in the state over centuries. A suicidal person tends to be considered as 'sick,' a mad person. Generally, the only backup is to provide pills to people with suicidal thoughts, creating an atmosphere of perpetual disorder with reality, instead of sitting down and listening to what is going on with this person. — javi2541997

It's both, society is the general culture of the people and their relation to the suicidal person. It's about how we culturally handle these topics, and how we talk and act around them. State has more to do with the result of culture, what laws will the society demand from the politicians to help mitigate the issue. It needs to start with the people in society growing up on the topic before the state starts to make changes that help people. As mentioned, making it illegal is a naive move against suicide rates. It may make people less prone to it if they know their family will suffer economically, but as mentioned, that only put more pressure on them and is just damaging society further, maybe even creating more people with suicidal thoughts as a result of criminalize the ones who need help the most.

We can call suicidal people sick, but I would call them a symptom of a sickness in society. As long as we tend to hold onto a culture that form depression and suicidal thoughts in some individuals, we are keeping the sickness alive.
On Fosse's Nobel lecture: 'A Silent Language'
Then, it is understandable how some authors incorporate suicide or suicidal characters. It is natural and even more realistic than some other fictional environments, plots, dialogues, etc. Stating this doesn't endorse actual suicide but provides another perspective in an artistic way. At least, a portrayal of suicide in a story can be more relatable than a plot where characters go to Mars and come back. — javi2541997

And writing fiction is also about metaphors and allegories, and in this we turn to archetypes and the exploration of the extreme ends of experience and perception of reality of the human condition. So suicidal characters in good writing transcends just being characters in the plot, they aren't just devices or causes for dramatic tensions or tragedy, but a communication of ideas that exist on the fringes of our experiences as people and individuals in and beyond society.

I remember debating about this a few years ago. Even ChatGPT argues that suicide is universally frowned upon and doesn't distinguish among cultures, something that I fully disagree with. — javi2541997

What suicide is culturally, directly or indirectly, seem to be regarded as an act of rebellion against everyone's existential struggles. When everyone else is suffering through the different major acts in life, suffering through the hard times, then someone taking their own life is considered an act against them, not the one committing the act. This is probably why it is frowned upon. And it also seems that people are utterly terrified that they would start to be seduced by the idea, that they would somehow get infected by the thought and do it to themselves.

It's probably why some religions, primarily the Catholic church view the act as something to be punished by blocking you from getting into heaven. You cannot cheat your way into heaven, you need to be tested in life. It would bypass a key part of the whole package; that your life is judged and the judgement decides where you end up in the afterlife. So if you kill yourself, you would essentially bypass a lot of years that would risk you not getting into heaven. This is a major problem for a church that wants to communicate that the afterlife is true and that their doctrine is valid truth.

But I think the main part is that suicide is primarily a failure of society and the people around the person committing suicide. And people cannot cope with the fact that they were partly responsible for failing to help that person. And they cannot cope with questioning society for pushing people to such thoughts. Instead, we frown upon it, we try to ignore the issue, we create religious doctrine around it and we blame the people doing it.

In my perspective, it's one of the clearest indications of how naive and mentally lazy the majority of society is. Turn away from the subject, ignore it, ban anything related to it, stop talking about it. In many people's eyes it's worse than murder, because there's no perpetrator in the same way as with murder. The murderer and the victim are one and the same and the victim's rationale behind the act can be empathized with and people are really bad at empathy when it comes to violent concepts and conflicts.

It's maybe a reminder of their own fragility, that it hints at a clarity of thought underneath all the noise that keeps them occupied in life. They are terrified of dipping their toes into such existential clarity because "what if" they come to the same conclusions as the one committing suicide?

And that's why things like this NEED to exist in fiction and discussions in society. In order to improve society's ability to find a place of comfort for people who fall into the idea of giving up. That means also questioning everything about life, how we live a good life in general, what meaning we create for ourselves. There's no wonder that suicide rates go up when we live in a neoliberal free market clusterfuck of a Baudrillardian nightmare. As long as people ignore dissecting and deconstructing this modern life, we will keep seeing people take their own lives.
On Fosse's Nobel lecture: 'A Silent Language'
The tyranny of black and white thought warps and twists the gradations of reality. — Vaskane

And in our modern times all of society is infected by binary structures of thinking and ideologies.
Evolution, creationism, etc?
'm an atheist but more sympathetic to religion than you. I don't quite know why. — mcdoodle

It may look like that, but if you have the energy to read through my posts in this thread I think you will see that I'm sympathetic to religion in a certain way. I value the practices of religion but deny religious belief. What I mean by that is that there are too much evidence that show the positive effects of religious practice on the individual. The acts of praying, in a sense, meditation, the act of surrendering to a larger context, the act of feeling meaning.

One purpose of my exploration in philosophy is about finding such practice within a context that excludes religious belief. The reason being that religious belief skew and distorts an honest perspective of reality, especially collective reality. And so by that distortion the individual will always have trouble navigating reality as it truly is and will always end up in either internal or external conflict with others in a collective society. In order to find harmony, religious belief needs to be excluded. But in doing so we lose the parts of religion that is of tremendous importance to our mental health and social bonding. The practices we have in rituals, mythological storytelling and exploration needs to somehow be reworked into a context of non-religious belief, which requires a new paradigm of how to live life. We can see hints of this in how meditation has become a science backed practice for some, but the baggage of religious belief still haunts it and keeps inserting itself into groups conducting and leading others in meditation, and in doing so start to install beliefs in the supernatural once again.

So, I criticize religious belief, but I'm not unsympathetic in the way I think you see me.

I've been studying philosophy academically in later life, and I confess, after lots more reading, that the notions of qualia and emergence feel dodgy. They come over like vague and sometimes slippery notions that are struggling to explain what happens beyond the limits of materially-based rational enquiry. — mcdoodle

I'm not sure what you mean by them feeling dodgy? Qualia is the experience, the point of view experience of you, the individual. The experience you have right now reading this text is not something I can experience even reading the same text. It's the hard line between knowing about something (like how consciousness works) and the internal experience within that function and process. It relates to the concept of philosophical zombies, Mary in the black and white room, the Chinese room etc. and how it is seemingly impossible to cross that hard line and know that this emergent phenomena is in fact experiencing something with a point of view and not merely functioning as a simulation.

We can add another example of this in face blindness. As a person with face blindness tries to recognize a friend, the face-blind person will have developed strategies to recognize his friends without being able to see their face. His friends might not even know he is face blind as they, as outsiders from his mind, can only recognize that he functions just like they do when they meet, so they think that this face-blind person is functioning and experiencing reality just as they do, while he in fact only "simulates" recognizing their faces.

It's the major problem of AI research as well. When we have an AGI superintelligence that seemingly mimic or surpass human intelligence and we interact with it, how do we know that it has qualia? Or isn't just a form of functions that never has any holistic experience as a result? The problem with qualia is that we might never be able to know this, it's part of the hard problem of consciousness.

When it comes to emergent properties, it's actually very supported in science. It's everywhere in nature. Rudimentary functions in extreme numbers can form patterns generating a higher complexity and emerging functions that has no relation to the functions themselves. Just a basic example of this is how neutrons and protons in of themselves cannot be "wood", and the basic composition of a carbon molecule has a higher complexity than just the neutron and protons, but still does not produce "wood". Only when you combine a number of different compositions of atoms into a molecular structure do you get "wood" as matter, but that doesn't create the structure of "wood", which requires bonds of those molecules. And these bonds in relation to the environment (other bonds and other molecules) can produce the structure of a "tree". But that structure cannot be simply explained reductionistic by looking at neutrons and protons. The "tree" is an emergent structure and form out of the extreme complexity of the whole of its parts. The function a tree has in relation to the rest of the universe is a function that emerges out of all of it.

To draw connections to consciousness, it's all there. En emergent function that cannot be explained by its parts. If it sounds abstract it's because it is, because it's not tangible in the same way as an object. We can view it in the same way as how we have trouble viewing light as both a particle and a wave. We know there's this thing called consciousness, but it's also no thing but a function/process that exists beyond what we can seemingly measure. But if we apply emergentism to this it makes sense, a function that can only exist as a byproduct of a certain complexity that rises out of a specific set condition of less complex functions.

Some people who have gone through near death experiences have explained their experience waking up from it. As parts of the brain and body starts working again, but not fully in sync as a whole, they have explained a deep sense of confusion, hearing words, but not able to understand them, seeing light and images without having spatial knowledge etc. If consciousness is an emergent phenomena, then at less than full complexity the experience they talk about would logically form a broken sense of reality, even if some parts of the brain function correctly. They explained that reality started "popping" into clarity, in my interpretation, almost like if watching a Picasso painting start to pop its cubist sharp forms into realistic shapes until it feels familiar and correct.

As I see it, the emergent explanation for consciousness holds most promise out of all research on the topic. It may sound abstract, but it has an elegant logic to it.
On Fosse's Nobel lecture: 'A Silent Language'
But I think that in every expression of culture, suicide pops up, even unintentionally. — javi2541997

Because it is part of the human experience. Death by sickness, death by old age, being murdered and committing suicide are constant outcomes in our human lives. It is impossible for us to ever rid ourselves of it, regardless of losing all knowledge in the world and starting over. Immortality is the only redeemer to these concepts, but even with that, and maybe even more so, suicide will still exist as a concept in need of exploration for the sake of sanity.

Otherwise it's like constantly telling children up into their adult life that Santa Claus is real because you cannot accept that they will grow past innocence and eventually die. Even if we become immortal beings incapable of dying and a culture forms out of that in which death has no meaning or existence, the end point of the universe, heat death and destruction of reality would surely still end us, thus making death a concept that still exist even in absolute immortality.
On Fosse's Nobel lecture: 'A Silent Language'
There are many suicides in my writing. More than I like to think about. I have been afraid that I, in this way, may have contributed to legitimising suicide. So what touched me more than anything were those who candidly wrote that my writing had quite simply saved their lives. — javi2541997

I find today's constant trigger warnings about suicide in fiction to be appalling. Made by uneducated people, probably over-protecting parents who knows nothing of mental issues believing suppression of exposure to complex issues would in any way help people and children from handling such things and then ignoring the very reasons why bad things happen. It's anti-intellectual and stupid.

What Fosse is writing there is exactly what happens with fiction in relation to reality. No serious author is promoting suicide, not even Camus did so as he positioned it as the negative relation to his solution for the absurd. People who experience suicidal thoughts need to find good exploration of the concept they experience, it gives perspective and in almost all cases exposure to such ideas in fiction lead to calming such thoughts rather than triggering them. I've seen stuff in fiction that makes fun of suicide to the point of almost being tasteless and it still seem to help suicidal individuals overcome their negative thoughts.

We need more writing like his than we need overprotective uneducated anti-intellectuals stumbling around thinking they are helping other people.
Evolution, creationism, etc?
As I said in the post you're responding to

I think a genuine religious path charts a way altogether beyond dread, not that that is necessarily an easy path to tread
— Wayfarer

But plainly we're not going to agree on that. — Wayfarer

It may be, in times when people lived inside such a bubble and never ventured outside. But how do you apply it in times like these, when the bombardment of alternative perspectives constantly question the validity of ones faith? Does treading that path soon not become impossible as any shred of doubt only creates its own type of dread, slowly intensifying and corrupting the ability to hold onto the specific faith. Would it not rather be better to explore a path that consist of better validation for its existence, finding a harmony that is more stable than the chaotic ocean of different religious beliefs clashing themselves to pieces and impossible to be convinced about in a socially complex society?

What I see today is this basically appearing in two types. Either a life of religious belief filled with doubt, keeping it hidden from others in order to try and keep it from being exposed to criticism, hidden crosses, hidden shrines, never talking to others about personal faith. Or turning to fundamentalism, shutting out all influences from the surroundings, extremify the bubble, silence anyone or socially excluding anyone who risk installing any kind of doubt, and double down on dogmatic dedication, isolating themselves from the rest of society or join societies in which this fundamentalism is the standard.

How can that hard path not become impossible when the world is constantly infusing doubt on a scale and movement that has never been experienced among religious groups before?

In another perspective, what is the goal for the believer with their belief? What are they striving for? Hoping for? If fundamentalism is the only path to successfully be convinced of where the path leads, what hope is there for non-fundamentalists to be free from this other type of dread setting in? The dread of possibly being wrong?

Wayfarer, I actually agree with you on your criticism of reductionism, not sure if you picked up on that. I'm a materialist, but there is a special case here. Mind can drive matter... no doubt. — Mark Nyquist

Can mind drive matter or are we simply another type of matter driving matter in perfect accordance with entropic processes? On a large enough scale, does not the complexity of the entire human race only just become another set of a system based on universal principles forming complex outcomes?

The problem with reductionism is that it focuses too much on trying to explain something complex by analyzing the details separately or trying to find a set pattern in a holistic overview of the sum of all parts. This is why I argue for emergentism since we see it all over in nature and in physics. For instance, you cannot explain consciousness with reductionism, it has been tried to death in scientific research. But emergentism instead acknowledge how the pieces of our brain and body cannot in of themselves form consciousness, rather it forms a new function not found in the parts out of the complexity that appears through the almost mathematically infinite sum of all parts, it emerges out of the complexity, it isn't directly the complexity itself. Which means it's not a tangible object that can be found somewhere, it is the result of all without clear and direct paths able to be seen between the result (consciousness) and its sources (parts).

This means that emergentism and materialism works better together than pure reductionism, and it solves much of the problems with how reductionism is unable to explain things like consciousness. I would however say that physicalism is a better modern term for how most materialists argue as materialism only traditionally focuses on matter, not physics as a whole.
Winners are good for society
As Trump is poised to once again become president of my country (unless someone manages to cap his butt) I feel challenged by my own theory that social "winners" are sort of naturally selected and serve the larger social life cycle, whether the people on the ground understand that or not.

I believe this about leftism: whatever its merits may be, it lost. The western world turned away from it. The opposing perspective didn't win by a blitzkrieg, but by giving the people what they wanted.

To arrive here, you have to stop being sanctimonious and see a social group as it is: a naturally evolving being, playing out it's own story. — frank

Isn't this ignoring the complexity of manipulation?

Not only do we have intentional manipulation by political powers utilizing the gullible nature of humans (all humans) and ride the fact that the ones who see through bullshit are a small enough group to not have actual democratic power in elections.

On top of that we have the unintentional or automatic manipulation. How the zeitgeist ebb and flow between the extreme ends of society. When one group had their perspective as a primary driver of society for a while, the other side feels removed from being participants in society and will strike back during times when the primary side has grown lazy in their power.

Right now we also have the algorithmic manipulation of social media. How the business of it push negativity as an interaction method for driving ads, and produce more intense groups of extremes being radicalized by a skewed world view built on misinformation. Algorithms manufacturing a reality that does not exist but affect the values that drive how people vote.

Because of this, most people aren't free in their votes because they are being shuffled around by different kinds of manipulations all the time. The proof of it can be seen in all kinds of marketing, how industries can influence fashion and cultural mentalities by marketing alone. And since democracy relies on 50% of the population's support in order to produce a win for one side, it requires more people than the amount who are able to see past the sum of manipulation.

All democracies are therefore slaves to whatever side manages to manipulate most efficiently and whether or not functions in society produce a balanced or skewed perception of reality (like with the algorithms of social media).

So to put absolute trust in such a fragile system to be good for people just because someone wins, is a rather problematic ideal. Democracy is only the best system so far, and our focus on why it is good is only in contrast to all current alternative systems that truly does not work. Right now, people are too occupied with just keeping democracy alive and going and not fall back into authoritarian regimes, otherwise we would focus on improving democracy past the problem of manipulation.

In the hands of smart people, democracy can function as an alternative to authoritarian power, in which the population are manipulated into believing they are free when in fact they are controlled just as much as in an authoritarian state.

The only question that is relevant: does the state and nation have enough safeguards against such manipulation? If not, how does the population know they are free or in an authoritarian democracy?
Evolution, creationism, etc?
That's the philosophical question, and a deep question. I think the intuition is that at bottom, everything in nature is transient and perishable. I think at bottom there's a deep intuition that there is a flaw or fault or imperfection in nature and in human nature, for which the remedy is not to be found on the same level at which it is perceived. That is expressed in different mythological and metaphorical clothing in different cultures. In Buddhism for example, it is the observation that existence is dukkha, one of those hard-to-translate terms that is usually given as 'distressing' or 'unsatisfactory'. The root of this dukkha runs very deep, and is ultimately related to the inherent tendency of beings to cling to sense-objects as sources of a satisfaction that they can never provide, as they are by nature transient and perishable. Hence the valuing of renunciation and giving up attachments. The ultimate aim of Nirvāṇa or Nibbana is realising the state of deathlessness.

In the Christian mythos, the unsatisfactoriness of existences is put down to the Fall, which is signified by the 'fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil'. I take that to be a symbolic representation of self-consciousness, the burden of our reflexive intelligence. Through faith in Christ, the believer overcomes the sense of separateness and anxiety and the fear of death, by the realisation of the individual union or oneness with the divine (although this is highly attenuated in popular religions many of which have become corrupted in my view). — Wayfarer

And it is this that I speak of. The existential dread, this "Dukkha". However, in Buddhism, it seems that "Samudaya" describes the cause of "Dukkha" and that the cause of suffering is our craving for "things" and pleasures. But what I'm saying is that the cravings for things, for the materialistic needs, pleasures etc. isn't the cause, it is the symptom due to our desperate need for comfort against the dread. The dread is the curse of knowledge and the irony is that while our knowledge has produced better living conditions, it also opened our eyes to the meaningless, producing this existential dread. The more we know, the more clearly we see our existence.

In such line of thinking I'm aligning somewhat with Buddhism in that I argue for finding a harmony with the natural world and universe, a balance, that does not rely on materialistic or delusional comfort. Materialistic, in this concept, is how many live their life today; buying new things, craving for the next pleasure, the addictive behavior that never reaches a content state and blinds by the noise of the sum of all material. Or the delusional, to surrender to a made up concept, giving up the ability to conduct critical thinking and wisdom in favor of an authority to form a fixed worldview that controls you. The delusional is religion, how an authority, another, or even the self, create a fantasy concept that is then transformed into a factual description of reality, often complete and with a promise that this life and its suffering will end and be transformed into something better as long as you hold onto that belief and defend it, like a manufactured and raging obsessive–compulsive disorder.

Both are desperate and rapid responses to the dread, in order to try and keep it at bay. But I also see a creeping and increasing horror of uncertainty within those who live by these two strategies. How the dread still creeps into these people's lives. How the materialistic individual can sense the dead existence within their owned stuff. How they sometimes wake up and look upon all their things and see a dead manufactured ocean that slowly drowns them. Or that the religious person holds onto their faith, try to keep it solid and unchanging, consistent and unbroken but keep feeling doubt due to the world around them, from other perspectives giving them other answers, other stories that they cannot prove are more or less true than their own convictions, and their confusion rising into anger, horror and depression.

As we hear people in their dying breaths voice their regrets and memories, they most often talk neither about their materialistic journey or their religious beliefs, but about the people around them. About life as it was, no more, no less.

So truth for what truly gives us comfort seems not to be found in the materialistic, or religious belief or even the absence of it. But rather in the life we live, truly live, honestly, with ourselves and with others. Why then not accept reality as it is, no more, no less? Accept all knowledge as it is, as it grows, explore it as a constant journey, live in it without demanding more.

Such balance acknowledge the pleasures by not pushing them into their extremes. We can have things, as long as they support, not being the source of it. If we find meaning in music, we may value a good record player. But we do not constantly buy new record players to fill some void. We already filled the void with music and the record player is only a tool for that purpose and meaningful experience. In this sense, we aren't materialistic anymore because we do not handle things other than as tools for a purpose. And we do not need religious belief if we find harmony with the natural world as it is and we do not need to accept the religious teachings as facts to value the stories being told as teachings for a good life. And we do not need to believe in illusionary concepts to value the experience of meditation.

The flaw as I see it, is in this core belief:

I think at bottom there's a deep intuition that there is a flaw or fault or imperfection in nature and in human nature — Wayfarer

I don't think there are any flaws because there isn't a template of perfection anywhere to hold reality up against. Reality is what it is and everything about the human condition is rooted in how we interpret this reality through our emotional experience, not our intellect. People are experts in blaming the external world for their own shortcomings and sense of despair. If they aren't happy or content, they essentially blame the universe for it, calling it flawed. This is what I call the human arrogance. We place ourselves onto pedestals and try to judge the universe by viewing ourselves as masters of it or capable of mastering it without realizing that we're not only slaves to the universe and its laws, we are also part of it, equal to everything around us.

This arrogance of trying to fix the imaginary flaws of this reality is the driving force for the delusion of any solutions to those imaginary flaws. Such solutions, in the form of religious beliefs or comforts in the ownership of material only function as temporary comfort towards a dread that ironically only arise out of the initial arrogance in the first place.

The solution is to not have that arrogance in the first place, to not view reality and our existence as flawed. We do not explore this reality or control it because it needs fixing, we do it because we're part of it and our existence is already in balance with it. The comfort lies in finding this harmony with reality, not in trying to fix some imaginary flaw in it. We exist because the universe and reality is as it is, without reality having its principles and laws as they are, we would not exist at all. We therefore fool ourselves if we seek out to fix a flaw because the flaw is imaginary and changing reality would essentially annihilate us, including any ideal we try to achieve.

Of course. Inside the Catholic Church, there was dissent over Galileo's censure. Whilst the conservatives were keen to see him condemned, there were progressives who believed the entire effort was misconceived. The Church is concerned with 'how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go', was their mantra. They lost the argument (much to the discredit of the Church.) Likewise after the publication of the Origin of Species, whilst some conservatives were quick to anathematize it, there were many within the Church who saw no inherent conflict between evolution and divine creation. It wasn't until the American fundementalists came along that it really blew up. But for those who never believed the literal truth of creation myth, the fact that they are *not* literally true is not the devasting blow against religion that Richard Dawkins seems to think. Origen and Augustine used to ridicule the literal reading of Scripture in the 1st and 4th centuries AD respectively. — Wayfarer

All I see are shifting goal posts back and forth through history to fit a narrative that best suits the storyteller. And I question the need for any of these religious narratives and beliefs as they do not fix anything other than being good stories as inspiring fiction. There's a desperation boiling underneath it all as they seem to sense some core truth hidden under all that fiction but desperately hold on to their narrative in order to stay sane. It's why I call it "comfort" against the dread. Because removing the narrative and stare right into existence is downright terrifying, but necessary as a step before finding harmony and balance with reality as it is, without imaginary flaws to be fixed.

so we're now looking to science for moral guidance, which is a mistake, as science is only quantitative and objective. — Wayfarer

This isn't true however, it is a simplification of the experience of us who value science over beliefs. We do not seek moral guidance by it in the way you summarize it, and we do not ignore the human experience. We acknowledge the importance of human experiences, but we do not attribute magic to it because we don't have to, we accept our experiences for what they are. I think the core difference is that we do not view reality as "flawed", as you described it, and thus formulate any need to fix anything. We accept all things in nature and reality as they are, without attributing "good" or "bad" to them. Letting reality inform us how things are rather than us interpreting reality through human values and emotions.

As I see it, we are arrogant to believe ourselves to stand above reality, to believe that we have to fix some flaws of it because we cannot cope with reality as it is for us. Nothing about that means that science as a process is used to find meaning instead, only that it informs us not to be arrogant to value ourselves as more important in this reality.

Such a conclusion leads to something else than you frame us as, it leads to a balance with reality that I find much more in sync with reality than any religious belief can ever produce. A clear and direct indication of what we need to do in order to find true peace with our existence. And it shows that we cannot find it in the materialistic addiction, religious fantasy, the rejection of all or total control of our emotions, but instead in the acceptance of reality as it is and living in harmony with that realization as a state of mind.

Finding that state of mind and harmony defeats the existential dread without being dishonest with the truth of existence. It does not require lies, delusions, illusions or fantasy to produce a shield and spear to control the dread, rather, it lay down arms and let the dread flow past you through the acceptance of reality for what it is.
Evolution, creationism, etc?
Not you, in particular, but our culture in general. Lloyd Gerson, who is a Platonist scholar, has a book Platonism and Naturalism: the Possibility of Philosophy. It's a pretty specialist text, but his argument is that Philosophy just is platonism, and that if you deny Platonism, there is no conceptual space for philosophy proper. And, he says, Platonism is irreconciliable with naturalism, which is the mainstream view by default.

I think naturalists tend to turn the kinds of dialectical skills that philosophy has inculcated into our culture against philosophy proper. Daniel Dennett is an example. His more radical books, like Darwin's Dangerous Idea, say that evolutionary theory is like a 'universal acid' that dissolves the container that tries to hold it - that 'container' being Western culture, and one of the things being dissolved, philosophy as philosophers have always understood it. — Wayfarer

I think that's taking it too far. Contemporary philosophy, at least how it appears today, exists right at the edge of science. The difference today is that science has forced philosophy to focus even more on a composition of logic and rational reasoning. I.e there's less room for the purely speculative and the things that are speculative still requires a rational component.

While I do think that its problematic for philosophy to drive wild concepts in metaphysics due to how much more effective science is in that area, we still have areas of thought that need philosophy. Ethics is still very much alive and I think the main area for philosophy today has to do with our place in the universe, meaning, how we live in an ever growing explained universe.

With just how much philosophy has changed the last two hundred years, it may just be that philosophy goes through the same tidal shifts as the rest of the world, changing faster and faster. But there's a difference to concluding something dead and concluding something changing or shifting.

We generally define facts scientifically, but existential issues are not necessarily tractable to scientific analysis — Wayfarer

Our personal experience may not, but we can explain more and more of the roots of our emotions and components of our mind and body generating experiences. And some of those factors are root causes of some existential experiences. As an example, that the existential dread we feel may be something we can never overcome and that comfort against it (as I described it) is vitally required for us to function as a human consciousness. If that is the case, how do we deal with that without hiding truths from people or fall into addictive replacements like materialistic life-styles?

How I see it, there's a lot more than people seem to realize, that can be explained utilizing a combination of different scientific areas for a holistic explanation of a phenomena. It's easy to look at a specific and isolated field in science and conclude it fully unable to explain something, but when combining many fields together there are logical conclusions that start to emerge. As I see it, this should be the role of contemporary philosophy. Scientists to be specialists, philosophers to be generalists.

Not true. It is not about 'ideas' at all. It is about a hard-won transformative insight. — Wayfarer

I meant in the context of the discussion. The reason for its existence still emerge out of those questions. The rise of any religion starts by the unknown trying to be known by man. But it extends beyond religion, it's a core driving force of our consciousness. The unexplained scares us and we comfort ourselves by trying to explain it. But even the act of finding harmony with not explaining it is still part of the same process of dealing with it. What I meant here boils down to a simple rhetorical question of, how did Buddhism begin, or rather "why" did it begin?

So how can you deny the accusation of 'scientism' on the back of statements like this? — Wayfarer

Because scientism have problems with handling holistic speculation, even if those speculations are rooted in rational logic. I.e scientism has problems coexisting even with contemporary philosophy. It's too rigid. It also does not function well with emergentist conclusions, even if emergentism is a large part of many fields of science. Because scientism is largely functioning on reductionism and a specialist approach, not holistic reasoning.

What I meant by that statement is that if I say that we should handle society and our collective space based on scientific conclusions, I mean that we should not let religious claims define our world. For instance, laws in society. As soon as we use religious beliefs as a foundation for how we shape our principles of a shared world, we open the door to conflicts over different made up concepts. It ends up being as ludicrous as if people start a knife fight over which console, Xbox or Playstation is the best. Emotional attachments to the concept that comforts.

To follow science more is about collectively agreeing that, what can be proven for all, we agree by. Not arbitrary or unsupported claims that can never coexist between people of different cultures and beliefs. A shared world, shared existence requires a shared primary world view. If that can be combined with individual religious beliefs, sure, but so far I've yet to be convinced that the people of this world are able to co-exist with such powerful forces of psychology pulling their very experience of reality in such different ways compared to others.

What 'comforting results' are you referring to? If the illusions of religion are put aside, then what constitutes a real solution to the predicaments of human existence, other than comfort and standard of living? — Wayfarer

"Comfort", as I've explained in this discussion is primarily about ways and strategies to handle the dread and terror of meaningless existence. And what constitutes a real solution beyond religion and the materialistic? That's the solution I try to explore and formulate. One thing that I've found hints at such solution is the question; why cannot nature and the universe, as it is, be enough? Why does there have to be some divine purpose and meaning for us, in order for us to feel comfortable in existence? While Camus gives as an answer on how to live in the absurd, I'm asking, why not the opposite? To be curious about nature and the universe as it is and embrace it for what it is. Many Native American traditions follow a simple idea of harmony with nature around them. Removing the spiritual and religious claims in their traditions still leaves a practice that embrace our bond to reality and nature for what it is. A dedication to the ebb and flow of the ecological bond we have to the environment around us.

I see no major attempts to formulate a way of living outside religious beliefs in such a sense, I only see desperation and quick fixes. People won't explore, they want answers fast. That's why the materialistic has easily replaced religion for many people today, and why some double down into their religion as we can see in radicalized movements, or why many accumulate into extreme groups like Maga followers and cults like Qanon. Even the "Xbox vs Playstation" brawls follow the same path and psychological pattern.

In a sense, you hit on an important distinction with Buddhism. The problem I have is that there are still many religious components in Buddhism that muddy the clarity of its practical use. But it is further away from the religious and dogmatic claims that religions with a God component has. Which is why I say that religious practices in themselves has importance for our lives, I just think that we can accept existence for what it is, no more fantastical than we can rationally speculate, no less profound than what it already is. And live with practices that produce a meaningful experience without any fantasy components included.

Which is reductionist, 'explaining away'. I have studied religion through anthropological, sociological and psychological perspectives in comparative religion, but it's not reducible to those categories, even if they provide very useful perspectives. — Wayfarer

But they paint a pretty rational explanation for the emergence of different religious beliefs and claims, and that makes it hard to view such emergence of religion in history as having divine intervention. People are too susceptible to self-manipulation into fast explanations of the unexplained and too prone to solidify such inventions into larger patterns of meaning, in forms like mythology. The less proven facts that exist to explain anything, the easier people invent myths that grow into accepted facts.

Point being that the emergence of religion, especially sharing traits between cultures, has so many explanations in psychology and human behavior that it's hard to ignore all that and instead conclude the emergence of religion to be something more magical than it seems to be. We can also see the emergence every time we find a cult that has formed today. The same driving forces, the same inventions out of desperation for answers, but before the long term formation of myths becoming religious "facts".

All due respect, I don't believe you have 'knowledge that counters it'. What you have is a firm conviction. — Wayfarer

In this I refer to when such knowledge exists. Like for instance, we have proven evolution to be true, we have proven general relativity. If someone makes a religious or other claim that acts in opposition to it, I won't act like there's some grey area to it, in those cases they are wrong, provable wrong. If there's a psychological explanation for a certain behavior, I cannot ignore that component when analyzing a concept. What my point was, is that religious claims considered "facts" by believers, but that has more rational explanations is not something I can ignore and just play along. When people start out their claims with a demand to accept something that has more provable or rational explanations than they provide, their entire argument falls apart and this is why I argue for a clear line drawn between religious belief, its fantasy/illusions, and the practices in religion that has clear provable value for our experience. To formulate a living beyond religious beliefs but retaining aspects that comfort against the dread.
Evolution, creationism, etc?
↪Wayfarer

I thank you for a well put argument. I see your perspective, yet the core issue I have is that since we can only rely on some kind of evidence for a collective understanding, I can only formulate my world view on what we can actually prove or at least speculate as logical based on facts as we define facts. That doesn't render meaningful experience as dismissable, only that I cannot accept ideas and theories when I have knowledge that counters it. If I'm presented with a concept that I can clearly see a solution in psychology explaining it better, then the most likely explanation of said phenomena is the psychological one. And the more I learn, the more perspectives I learn, the less I can summarize anything in any other way than through a holistic perspective that incorporates all of them. What I find problematic in religious perspectives is the random claims of, in their view, factual concepts that only works within its own framework and often affect the ability to have an open mind, to the extent of sometimes radicalize people into harmful acts. Within it, all makes sense, but requires ignorance and denial of a large part of what we know about the world, universe and life. I cannot dismiss that baggage and I cannot dismiss evidence of psychological processes connected to religious experiences that show how they form and develop.

but I don't know if you yourself realise how embedded you are in the materialist mindset. — Wayfarer

It depends. I'm not a reductionist but more in line with emergentism. Emergent behaviors of complex systems. These cannot be explained by simple reductionism and somewhat transcend pure materialism.

But yes, I do not accept supernatural explanations since I have yet to be presented any evidence that supports it. And the more I learn the more inputs I have to explain a phenomena by other means than the supernatural. And the process proves itself over and over. The more we prove of natural phenomenas the less supernatural things get.

You push these ideas that I'm not doing philosophy, but yet, I am. To hold a firm stance within philosophy is nothing strange. I have this stance and I argue for it and if you tell me an argument that can logically undermine my conclusions, then I'm open to discuss adjustments. But I cannot dismiss the philosophical position I have on the mere fact that you disagree with me and it does not make me less of a philosopher when I require much better support in evidence for counter claims to my conclusions. In the end it becomes almost like you point out that there is experiences unexplained and therefor I am wrong, which isn't how this works. You cannot use the unexplained as evidence for my framework being broken. The experience is simply an experience that exist, yet to be explained. It does not require religion.

you take for granted a way of seeing the world which I think is inimical to philosophy per se — Wayfarer

You frame it as such, maybe because you feel it is a threat to your own position in philosophy, that doesn't render it objectively harmful, which I feel is a bit over the top in regards to what I've written. That feels more like expressing a need to downplay my position and paint it as dangerous in order to remove the perspective all-together. I don't understand this at all since I find this much more hostile than how you frame my writing. If you find it hostile, as I said, might it just be so because it is in such direct contrast to the position you hold close to heart? But isn't philosophy actually about clashing such positions together in discourse without hostility? This way of framing my writing seems more like a knee-jerk reaction to what I write rather than engaging philosophically? However, you also present a thought through counter argument so I'm not really sure how to interpret what you mean by all of that?

in your analysis, it is simply assumed that religion only ever *is* an opiate, a pain-killing illusion. I have devoted considerable time to Buddhist studies, and there is no way you could mistake Buddhist praxis as 'seeking comfort' or 'comforting illusions'. — Wayfarer

Not an opiate, for some it is, but that's not what I mean by comfort. Comfort is simply what holds back the sheer terror of the experience of a meaningless existence. I require such comfort as well, so does all people. Without it we would fall into utter despair. What I underscore is that most people experience panic and swan dives right into whatever comfort there is as fast as they can, not even having time knowing that they do so. Most people just accept anything that turns their mind away from this dread and fear boiling underneath their experience.

What I'm advocating for is to align everything towards an experience that rejects illusions and fantasy but can still reach such comforting results. Because there's too much baggage that comes with most of religion.

What Buddhism is about is still such a process. It starts with the painful questions about our existence and evolves into an exploration of ideas to comfort against that sense of darkness and lack of meaning. The reason to begin the journey is always the same, for all. That is not an opiate, that is a strategy against the experience of meaninglessness. A journey for meaning can be painful and hard, but against the utter despair of meaninglessness it is still a comfort.

And my position in this is that there's a gradient of the ability to handle this, from person to person. Some, most people, jump straight into it as an opiate against the dread, while some explore other means of experiences and exploration. If the opiate is on one end I just happen to be on the opposite end, rejecting anything that doesn't logically follow the universe as it is and presents itself to us. What is a good and bad strategy has nothing to do with it really. However, I personally believe that we need to follow science more than illusions and fantasy as the defining foundation for mankind as a collective, because the part that is fantasy is often prone to cause unseen consequences that most often does not have mankind's best intention in mind. That does not remove the need for experiences with fantasy and illusions, only that our experiences with such can remain in fiction and still have just as important and mythological impact on our experience.

the principle involved is obtaining insight into the causes of suffering and cutting it at the root, which (it is said) opens up horizons of being that remain unknown to the regular run of mankind. — Wayfarer

How is that different from experiences featuring LSD or Psilocybin? From the research going on into therapy with such substances, it is becoming known that they cut off the negative emotions, the suffering durring a session, letting the patient explore the roots of their suffering in a much more exploratory way. An intense form of induced meditation. And as many seem to point out, there are patterns similar to deep meditation. Why would one then need Buddhism as a religion when the praxis of meditation can be detached from it? My point is that there seem to exist an inability to look at many practices in isolation from many different religions. Key point being that the explorations in Buddhist practices do not require the whole religious package of Buddhism. Just as a prayer in Christianity could be explored without the religious whole.

I think it's within this that makes it problematic to frame me as a pure materialist. I need evidence and logic in explaining the universe and life, but the experiences we have as humans still is an emergent process that has extreme complexity and function only based on the rules, both known and yet unknown, of our psychology. In the end we may require a spiritual kind of experience in order to actually function as a species, and it is my conviction that we can develop such things without the baggage of religion.

But we've yet to enter such a phase in history as the current state of humanity is about replacing religion with materialistic ideologies and ways of life. It's when humanity realizes the futility of doing so that we may enter a phase in which we seek experience beyond the materialistic and religious.

Regarding scientism and nihilism I don't see how you can avoid it with the stance you take. The scientific mindset revolves around reduction to mathematical simples — Wayfarer

That is a simplification. I don't see the need for illusions and fantasy to be actual and real in order to experience wonder. Storytelling, art, music, experiencing nature as it is, experiencing love and other people. While there is no objective meaning, we build meaning for ourselves. Living as a nihilist has problems functioning together with the ability to produce meaning and experiencing such meaning actually makes it an objective part of reality for us as humans, the experience is a provable process. The difference, however, is that this meaning is created by our hands, by our ideas, not framed as meaning through illusions and fantasies viewed upon as facts that negatively influence our ability to understand reality for what it is or most likely is.

Living as a nihilist is for those who've yet to land in a functioning comfort framework of existence outside of religious beliefs. Those stuck in nihilism have no guidance, because, there really is no common one in existence. Today, we either have religion and if not that we have cults, addiction or materialistic life-styles. There's very little guidance and philosophies out there about this next step from nihilism toward a sense of meaning and that's what I'm interested in exploring and formulating. I would say that Camus may be the closest to it, but I still think it lacks inclusion of all human complexity.

I truly don't have any beliefs in gods or the supernatural. Yet I feel no nihilism in my bones. I don't act out such nihilism and I instead appreciate and love life. Am I not then a walking contradiction to your point? If I can't avoid it, how can I then not be acting as a nihilist and at the same time reject religious beliefs? I think you ignore other dimensions to this.

But as Nagel eloquently points out in many of his other works, this is at the cost of excluding from consideration the nature of lived experience. — Wayfarer

And I would say that it is possible to include the nature of lived experience without requiring religious beliefs. A rejection of religious baggage is to acknowledge the practices in religion separated from the fantasies. To follow science, facts and evidence does not equal a rejection of human meaningful experiences. Only a rejection of the act of concluding unsupported claims as something factual and specific based solely on religious concepts and inventions. We can still have profound experiences without that.

So it produces a kind of one-dimensional existence — Wayfarer

In my perspective, as would be considered to exist in that kind of existence, I don't experience it one-dimensional. I'd argue that people stuck in religious belief are unable to grasp the experience of a non-believer who still live life full of meaning and profound experience of living. The reason they're unable isn't because they're stupid or anything like that, but that the perspective of a believer is so far away from the non-believer that it reshapes how they experience reality. I would say it's easier for a non-believer to imagine themselves in the shoes of a believer than the other way around. Because if you are fully convinced you have the answers to why things are as they are, you are unable to imagine an experience not having those answers, but a person who accept only what we already know and accept that there are answers we've yet to find, they aren't bound to such biases. In essence, It's easier to imagine having a bias than to be a slave to one imagining being without.

I've never bought Nietszche's 'death of God'. Time Magazine published a cover story on it which I read aged about 11 or 12. — Wayfarer

Is that the extent of your knowledge of that concept? A Time Magazine story?

The death of god is about how modernity removes much of the need for religion and a belief in God. The concept's end point is to warn about nihilism as the world transitions more away from religion. But what gets lost is what he's actually warning about and it's about the desperate replacements for God. He couldn't have predicted how the world looks today, but he predicted how our modern culture basically replaced the church and God with the free market, materialistic life-style.

What if there really is a dimension to existence which is pointed to, however inadequately, in the various religious traditions of the world? — Wayfarer

That dimension of existence would not require the religions themselves. You don't need the entire forest to have a tree. You can study tree in itself. And then you've really just entered the science of researching the validity of such a dimension and the journey towards that enlightenment. Why is that similar journey less profound? This "What if" is not enough to argue for the need of religion itself since your goal seem to have nothing to do with religion, it has to do with purely a focus on our experiences. As I've mentioned with LSD, when I've heard people describing their experience and the experience of life after it, that sounds like a profound religious experience, without the need for religious beliefs and fantasies claimed as facts. Why would such induced experience be considered less profound or meaningful to these people? Because it's not within the framework of a religion? Or is it just that we've yet to actually looked into such experiences outside of the framework of religious beliefs?

Your conviction that it can only be empty words mirrors the certainty of religous dogma to the opposite effect. Religious philosophies are universal across culture and history, and show no sign of fading away, Nietszche's proclamation notwithstanding. — Wayfarer

Here I feel you strawman my position a bit by making a simplification of it.

And the fact that religion exist universally across culture and history can easily be explained by analyzing human behavior. What the psychology is for people trying to figure out the world around them in ancient times. How so many have sun gods because... well, it's the most profound thing to witness in a time when there are no answers to anything that happens. The similar experience that people have globally by living on the same planet with similar conditions, would of course produce similarities across the religions that forms.

And once again, it's not fading away because its being replaced by something else (which is closer to what Nietzsche meant). And we can see it in the modern world. The fact that it doesn't fade away only supports what I've been saying, that the desperation into meaning makes it close to impossible for most people to find any alternatives to what we already have, as the journey towards such alternatives demands more work.

I see the role of renunciate philosophies as being especially crucial in today's world, because consumption obviously has to be drastically curtailed. — Wayfarer

I agree, but that doesn't require the baggage of religious beliefs. Why cannot such life-styles and experiences be lived accordingly without having to accept a deity, God, pantheon or made up concepts of existence?

My position is that we can. And without the baggage we skip the risk of skewing people's perspective of our collective physical existence that can end up in, as has happened so many times in history, war and misery. The only reason for the world looking like it does today is because many people have replaced religion with the modern condition and materialistic ideologies. Going back to religion isn't the answer, that would just put us back where we left off and wouldn't really solve the core issue.

But what alternative does our culture provide? — Wayfarer

Maybe we're not there yet, maybe such guidance can't be easily found? Maybe that's what my philosophical position is all about when it comes to this topic? All I can see is that the tired old battle between religious believers and non-believers continue on a shallow level in which that's the only binary discourse that can be heard out loud in society. So when I try to talk about this topic I get shunned into the usual corner. If that happens to all of us trying to actually explore such alternatives, then of course those explorations won't be easily spotted in society.

Our internet algorithms have radicalized our brains to only function on binary assumptions about everything, so a non-believer becomes some kind of zealot of nihilism.

But my position is anything but that. I value exploring our experiences, I value the importance of practices that can be found in rituals, I value all things in religions but reject the claims religion makes about reality that is then acted upon as facts. I reject the need for religious belief when exploring meaning and purpose. Because the beliefs easily shifts into being facts these people believe in, which skews a collective understanding of reality and easily promotes ridiculous conflicts over such "facts", often with deadly outcomes.
Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
Your wish is granted, including that it is legal to make laws and enforce them. The fundamental problem with anarchy is that it fails to forbid government. — unenlightened

:up:

While I like the anarchistic ideals, I fail to see how any such form ever lasts long enough to be sustainable on a large scale. Not necessarily to fall into ruin, but rather how people in their dynamic shifts over the course of history wouldn't just end up gravitating away from anarchy if the zeitgeist of a particular time in their history produces enough people to support another form of society.

In the end it feels like anarchy instead functions better as a perspective used to criticize hierarchies and deconstruct rigid structures to put them into a perspectives that can prove them not being a natural order, but instead an invention that can be criticized.

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