The problem is that less funny guys dated less good looking girls, and Borons (boring morons) dated ugly girls. They all had children, who survived to adulthood. — god must be atheist

Modern conditions are a mere blip, and irrelevant to our evolutionary history. This might be true today, where huge, concentrated populations, and monogamy, are the norms.

But we evolved as tiny, polygamous populations. There, fucking of the fittest reigns.

Don't think of wright and wrong. Think of how harmful it is. If one's moral view creates harm than good, then it is immoral. On a lesser intensity, it is offensive. — L'éléphant

This doesn't really help. One person's harm is another's good.

It is the attempt to use argument and reason alone to derive truth, in those shrinking domains where this is considered a legitimate undertaking. These domains just lack a better method.

Academically, the legitimacy of this activity is bolstered with vast amounts of canon.

Intelligence correlates poorly with creativity, well with humor:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20157303?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentswo

Here is one which both describes the link between humor and verbal/logical reasoning, and... completely supports my theory!!
https://www.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/attachments/95822/humor-predicts-mating-success.pdf

Correlation is not causation would have been a better way of putting it — I like sushi

Correlation is all that is required here

So, my concern would be that it is the creative element in better humour rather than some underlying ‘sense of humour’. — I like sushi

Except, they have studied both. Humor is more correlated

Plus if some people have a bad sense of humour they still find each other funny and mate just as much. — I like sushi

Unattractive people also mate, so what

Not to mention that ‘emotional/social intelligence’ is not actually ‘intelligence’ (as in the ‘g’ factor).
5h — I like sushi

Humor correlates with spatial, verbal, and logical intelligences

There is no evidence that humour correlates with humour. It does have some relation to creativity though, but how significant that is is probably still a matter of research and investigation. — I like sushi

You speak with authority, I guess you have conducted a comprehensive review of the relevant research. But a cursory search does not support your findings. Just an example, which cites multiple papers:

https://www.lifehack.org/378304/there-any-link-between-humor-and-intelligence

Humor is a proxy for intelligence, and a vehicle for sexual selection.

It's a cliche, the hot girl with the inexplicably ugly guy. Why is she with him? "He makes me laugh".

We are all the products of runaway sexual selection, which selected for intelligence, by means of humor. Humor is the origin of human intellect. This same process selected, secondarily, for taking pleasure in hurmor: after all, it was the females who enjoyed humor the most who selected the funniest guys. They bore both the funniest and smartest guys, and the smartest girls who loved their guys the funniest. These outcompeted their duller contemporaries, both due to the intelligence for which humor is a pretty reliable marker, and because of the growing population-wide preference for funny men, resulting from this same process.

Just my theory.

Do you know that, personally?

Are you able to have bodily feelings or emotions without also having some thoughts along with them? — baker

I do, being human. I think with a little reflection you will agree. For you to experience the itch of a mosquito bite, must you constantly think, I'm itching? If so, this must be the most distracting event possible, precluding all other thought and activity.

To feel fear, one must already have certain beliefs about the workings of the world and the meaning of life. — baker

Obviously false. Babies and animals feel fear.

How do you know?
Is it because he merely can't speak or write, due to the stroke, or is he truly mentally disabled? — baker

I stipulate that he has lost the ability to think: to self talk, and to visualize.

If one measures oneself the way a not particularly compassionate external observer might judge one, then the result is going to be truly meagre. — baker

This person has lost the ability to measure anything.

What one considers to be an acceptable reply to these questions depends on one's intention for asking them — baker

I am interested in the nature of self, and of sentience in general. Is the self fundamentally composed of all the sensations it feels, internal and external? Or is there something more?

Back to topic!

One thing I didn't consider: without thoughts, we still have bodily feelings, and emotions. These are both egoic in the sense that they mark a "me" as distinct from the sensory world. Unless I am dissociated, this pain is my pain, and I am frightened.

But then, suppose we subtract these. A hapless individual suffers a stroke. As the cerebral artery occludes, his train of thought fades away, his mind is utterly empty. He is terrified, but is unable to mentally formulate his situation in any way. He sees, he hears, he is afraid, he has a throbbing migraine. That is his experience. Can you empathize with this state?

Then, his migraine fades away, replaced by an all encompassing numbness. Yet even numbness is a feeling, what he feels is nothing. His terror is replaced by a corresponding emotional blankness. He sees bright lights passing above him. He hears the doctors comment on his condition, but can't seem to understand. He smells the antiseptic odor of hospital, and tastes copper in his mouth. That is all. No thoughts, no feelings, no sense of the body. Can you empathize? Is this being strictly speaking still sentient?

Sadly for our subject, the cerebral artery, a mighty river in more halcyon days, is now barely a stream. Sight is gone. Taste is gone. Smell is gone. Hearing is gone. What is left? Is it a unperturbed sea, as per ? I contend, there is nothing left at all. Our hero is now a vegetable.

So, in objective idealism, ideas are still ontologically basic, but there is no question about them not being real when you aren't thinking about them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So really I was conflating realism and materialism.

Berkeley dedicates much time to illusions and hallucinations because these are the obvious objections to his system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wonder how Berkeley would respond to this question: how do I know that the red I see is the red God sees? For all I know he sees blue when I see red, or he hears an electric guitar when I hear the violin. So I might be hallucinating my whole life, and yet the world appears entirely self-consistent. Must he dogmatically insist that God ordains that everyone perceives in the same way?

Similarly, how could he address animal perception? It is very unlikely that animals perceive the same way subjectively that we do. Must god simultaneously perceive in the manner of every sentient creature? Or must Berkeley insist that animals lack subjective experience?

It seems that Berkeley has replaced the dualism between material and perception with a more ad hoc dualism between mortal perception and God's perceptions.

You are conflating realism and idealism as the same things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Huh? I am?

When you take off the rose colored glasses in Berkeley, the world doesn't change, you just don't have tinted glasses on — Count Timothy von Icarus

I still don't see how this case is resolved for Berkeley. The world is real, and mental, and we access it via phenomenal perception. No reference may be made to a material reality which underwrites the perception. So, is reality rose tinted or no?

The forum is presently dominated by fools with little to no grasp of basic philosophical or logical notions and yet with thoroughgoing confidence in their opinions; by those who have failed to learn how to learn. — Banno

It must be a comfort to be in such good company!

Sure, the models change. But this is unproblematic for the realist. Because, the models, be they theoretic or phenomenal, are not reality. So the fact that they change is not particularly puzzling.

But for the idealist, there is no such remove between the phenomenal and reality. So, when the rose colored glasses are worn, the idealist is committed to say that reality itself changes. When such a result is arrived at, it is time to discard the theory.

he point about the rose colored glasses is particularly apt. That IS the argument against physicalism. Just reframe it: "if you assume you have an abstract thought model that explains reality, and you interpret all experience using that model, does that mean your model is actually a reflection of reality?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Except, your models of the world do not change when you put on and take off rose colored glasses. But your perceptions do. How do you consistently model a world where esse is percepi and rose colored glasses exist?

Models are reflections of reality. Perceptions are also models, and they also reflect reality. But they are perfectly pragmatic, without any commitment to accuracy beyond pragmatism. The physicalist models are the products of very hard work deducing what it is perceptions reflect. As direct contact between minds and reality is impossible, models are all we have. They are not reality. But they may model it more it less faithfully, and capture features more faithfully that what our built in models, perceptions, provide.

If you are a bat, or if you take a hallucinogen, is the world then radically altered? Obvious nonsense, not worth serious consideration.

The mind is essentially a function that maps sensory data to the virtual world of qualia. There is no other reasonable way to understand our place in the world.

If so and if, however, it doesn't make sense to say "perceiving is perceived", then "perceiving" cannot be; therefore "to be" has to be other (more) than "to be perceived". :eyes: — 180 Proof

"Being" and "perception" are categories, there is nothing wrong with claiming that these categories are in fact coincident.

There's a theory that Putin and Trump express obvious lies as a means of domination. The relentless bullshit creates a fog of abuse. — frank

I think this is why right wingers gravitate to obvious liars: it is a sign of strength and status, to be able to tell such lies. The stronger one is, the bolder the lies one is able to tell.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. — Joshs

It feels like you are reading way too much into the "precise" verbosity favored by professional philosophers. He is merely covering is bases. Would anything essential be lost rephrasing that quote as:

"Does a complete physical description and understanding of the brain imply consciousness? If it does not, consciousness must be aphysical."

There are no high metaphysical claims about realism here.

Would you similarly object to the statement:

"Does a complete physical description and understanding of biology imply life? If not, life must be aphysical."

I grant you that the with consciousness we are attempting to examining the very same process or entity by which we examine that process or entity. However, there are two sides of this equation, the third-person examination, and the first person phenomenon we are trying to explain. A third person scientific elucidation of the brain is no more problematic than any other subject. The problem is the bridge between the third person understanding and the first person phenomenon of consciousness.

If it were uncontroversial then how us it you are questioning how it happens? I'm with you on the questioning it, just not with you in saying it's uncontroversial. — Harry Hindu

It is uncontroversial that it happens from physical processes. Those who dispute that are properly marginalized.

The controversial part is how.

Consciousness is a word with Cartesian dualism baked into it. And that is why those who bang on about "consciousness" find that its usage leads to a feeling there is some unbridged explanatory gap. — apokrisis

Only by rejecting Cartesian dualism does the explanatory gap even arise. I also reject the Cartesian Theater, I believe we as conscious beings are the "images", and that the images arise from the physical brain. There is a dualism, between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. We are aware, by definition, only of the conscious parts, the parts which have representation as "images".

And yet, I cannot account for how these images arise from physical processes, despite knowing that they do. The explanatory gap results from the collapse of Cartesian dualism as a respectable philosophical position.. If Cartesian Dualism were allowed, there would be no gap, matter would be one kind of thing, mind another.

The fact that consciousness arises from brain processes is utterly uncontroversial. The philosophically interesting question that remains is how can it be that such a thing can arise from brain processes... A question to which science remains largely silent.

Eyes in the back of your head is it? — unenlightened

we are riding in the back of a pickup truck, trying to guess where we are going by looking behind.

[

Time does move backwards; or rather we move backwards through time. You can tell because we can see where we've been, but not where we're going. — unenlightened

Rather, from our perspective, we are moving forward while able only to look backward.

It is causality, not time, that has a direction. Time is the space in which causality evolves. If time "ran backwards", we wouldn't notice, because our memories would still be consequent of causally prior events.

we intellectually add in our minds more than is actually there? — TiredThinker

Of course we do. Our appraisal of something as beautiful is a property of our minds, not the thing. But we project this into the thing.

What about fractals? These are infinite spaces that you can explore on a computer. Their instantiation in a computer realizes what was an abstract infinity.

Even more cumbersome to classify become intersubjectively held fictions, like unicorns, which are not intersubjective realities in the same sense that moneys and cultures are - yet are still actual/real as culturally present fictions: unicorns then being a real, rather than an untrue, fictional notion within the cultures we partake of — javra

I would still classify unicorns as imaginary. It is just that they are intersubjectively imaginary. But they are not forces in the world, in the same sense that money nations and religions are. The latter is what interests me: things which are imaginary in their nature, but take on a kind of reality as quasi objective entities.

It will be a historical curiosity, and interesting, not because it is a piece of paper but because it was money. What significance would it have then, or would it have had in the past, as a piece of paper? Imagine the museum exhibit: "Piece of paper." — Ciceronianus

The point is, it was money, but no longer is, despite being physically identical at both times. The money is not the paper.

Right, but why not revise what we understand of the real, rather than create new categories because they do not fit tradition? — StreetlightX

is there something at stake is excluding money from the real? — StreetlightX

I am not excluding them from the real. I am refining the overbroad category of real: things that are ontologically real, vs. things that are ontologically imaginary but manifest as real. If categories are useful, it is because they pick apart relevant qualitative differences. If we lump these differences under the same term, these differences become obscured, and our thinking becomes muddled as a result, and you get money as simultaneously real and imaginary. In my opinion, there are few things that have muddled philosophy more than the real vs. imaginary divide.

Plato — bongo fury

This seems to be your favorite rhetorical gun, too bad you can't seem to hit anything with it.

it seems as if our existence occurs fundamentally in the encounter between the two. Everything else becomes objectification of that universal reality. — Melanie

Even if this were so, the components of this synthesis seem worthy of discussion.

If a ten dollar note (money) isn't a ten dollar note (money), what is it? Something else, which we merely treat as if it were a ten dollar note (money)? — Ciceronianus

The fact that a ten dollar note is money is not a property of the physical paper. In 5000 years whatever nation backs it will have long since collapsed, the piece of paper will only have the historical curiosity of once having been money. No matter how well preserved it is.

What do you think about this framework? — Hermeticus

Everyone is simultaneously mental and physical subject. Your personal identity is simultaneously mental subject and object, when you reflect on it. Money is simultaneously mental and physical object.


They don't seem to neatly cut across reality.

Hence the ontology of money requires one to step outside the ontological categories of real or imaginary or physical or mental, and to recognises that there is a wider social world that transcends these limited categories. — Banno

Yes, but this is my point. The categories of "real" and "imaginary" are inadequate to describe social realities. I am attempting to amend them by expanding upon them.

It seems funny to me that what is at stake in the OP is that money fails the expectation of what reality somehow ought to be — StreetlightX

No ought. I was starting from the commonplace dichotomy of real/imaginary, where what is real exists "in the world", and what is imaginary is "in the head" (note, both are part of reality). And showed that that money, for instance, is neither: while its origin and nature is in the head, it is a force in the world.

I'm simply saying that the idea that there are abstract reals is not a novel idea. — Wayfarer

Not abstract reals. Imaginary reals. Would numbers, qualities, logical principles, scientific laws, and so on, disappear if we collectively stopped believing in them, or if humanity was annihilated? Probably not. Would money, religions, institutions, ideologies, nations? Absolutely they would.

Is that a novel idea? Probably not. Is this way dividing the world into 4 categories the definitive way to conceptually cleave the world? Probably not, I don't think there is any such way. But it is probably useful.

Rather than seeing the world as 'things projected into our imaginations" our experiences can be seen as our imaginations projected into or onto things. — Melanie

Either way you see it, my point remains the same. Things live in the world, but cross over into the mental world in the form of sensations, and appraisals, as you point out. In the same way, a category of mental things, money among them, cross over into the physical world. .

So hate to dissappoint you, but it's not a new category, rather you've discovered or re-discovered the basic idea behind universals. — Wayfarer

Hate to disappoint you, but you can't give a meaningful reply after randomly half-reading a few sentences. Does money or any of the other examples I cited (and you quoted) sound anything like universals?

But if you consider the experience of the world to comprise sensations and ideas (as idealist philosophy claims) then the division is by no means neat. — Wayfarer

Again if you had bothered to read you would have seen this is exactly my point.

This sounds awfully close to Lacan's conception on the subject. You'd only be missing what he calls "the symbolic", the other two are as stated. — Manuel

I'm not familiar, his division is into the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic?

We could call money a useful fiction. Something which is considered valuable solely by our considering pieces of paper to be of worth. — Manuel

But since money is a collective fiction, it is resistant to our individual thoughts about them. It has properties of both mental and physical objects.

I think that your distinction between real imaginary and imaginary real is not needed. You can use one term to encompass both ideas. — Manuel

They are opposites. Mental objects which cast a shadow into the physical world, vs physical objects which cast a shadow into the mental world.

Odd here: You speak of innate moral intuitions, then deride ethical Realism with a capital R — Astrophel

For me this is as real as it gets. But capital R types usually want more, as you did in the previous post. You want to justify these intuitions, not realizing that any possible justification must take place within the framework of these intuitions.

In fact, the idea is so obvious than I cannot even imagine seriously dismissing — Astrophel

What follows is so far from obvious as to be incomprehensible.