4 years to come up with, "what was I saying?" seems very slow thinking indeed . How many of us will still be alive for the next pearl?

Is there only one Trump supporter on this whole forum? — RogueAI

It's an ancient tradition, that kings, even philosopher kings, allow one motley fool to entertain and deflate, lest they cease to question their own wisdom, and become as the emperor with no clothes.

I very much think that a mathematician or physicist or biologist can do genuine 'ontological' work themselves. — plaque flag

Form and substance - the first dualism. I sometimes call them 'stuff and arrangements'. I would say that mathematicians explore the possible arrangements of anything- pattern, chaos, order, disorder, symmetry, asymmetry. whereas physicists and biologists look to explore the actual arrangement of stuff. Some mathematicians seem to think that there can be, or are arrangements of nothing. It makes no sense to me. Just as you cannot have stuff without it being arranged or disarranged in some form, so you cannot arrange or disarrange nothing. Form is the general, and substance the particular, and they are two aspects on one world.
Or we could talk about energy and information as the temporal unfolding of energy difference into informational complexity.

Whatever reality is, reality necessarily excludes – negates – unreality (i.e. ontological impossibles — 180 Proof

Ontological impossibles are contradictions, limits on sensible talk. but if reality happens to be that particles are wavy and waves are a bit particular, talk has to conform itself to reality, because talk does not constrain reality at all (unless it's God's talk of course - 'Let there be light.' :wink: ).

Oh, sorry.

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that. — Bill Shankly

Philosophy is football with the universe as the ball, and everyman the referee.

The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

The Goal.

Philosophers are the thought police; roping off the dead ends and directing the traffic, but going nowhere themselvesselves. Dutiful, taking pains, loving, hoping not to get run down today by a man in a hurry.

Isn't it true that thoughtfulness is an indication of love, even if love does not actually require thoughtfulness for its existence? I don't see how thoughtlessness could be consistent with "love". — Metaphysician Undercover

When I say thought, I mean linguistic thought. Love begins in caring and nurture, you know nests, sitting on eggs, wagging your tail when the human looks at you.

Yup. there seem to be multiple threads approaching the same thing from different angles. The Lifeworld is telling us we done gone wrong somewhere, and that is an inescapably moral judgement, in the sense that if you eat all the pies today, there'll be nothing for breakfast tomorrow. We have nature beat, so now we have to live in a desert. Oops! Some religious comment about karma, or living by the sword seems appropriate - old signposts we philosophers have encouraged folk to ignore.

Is it not a re-run of looking into the void, and the void looking into you. Is she not saying, "Don't imagine all the obseverish specialness is on the one side. 'Plaque flag, meet cave fish. Cave fish, meet plaque flag."

Discursive practice is made of the fundamental particles of the universe which is the intra-action. She talks about discursive practice rather than the atomic 'speech act'. Our discussion and her book are defining each other in a mutual process, a thread is an experiment that might work or not.

We are, each of us, incomplete. So I think, not because I am, but because I want to be. — Metaphysician Undercover

Psychologically, this rings true. The world pours into the emptiness of awareness, never filling it. Being unfolds in time. But thought is unimportant, in the sense that it does nothing to complete us and fill the void, only love can do that. But for the rest, it looks to me that you have simply swapped interior and exterior and repeated the Cartesian dualism. So you end up as an idealist trying to think happy thoughts instead of a pleasure-seeking materialist.

Cool! you guys rock!

It would be great if governments incentivised the changes through taxation and subsidy. And even maybe directly building some generating infrastructure, but there seems to be a shortage of very stable genii in most governments. For buildings, for example a limit on rental charges permitted depending on the certified energy efficiency. Not very 'unregulated free market', but still... making stuff worth while doing is a good way to get folk to do stuff.

Replacing 1 billion internal combustion engines with 1 billion batteries, and the building generating capacity to keep them all charged, will not be easy. — BC

You don't have to do it alone, there are the billion car owners to help. Each has to replace just one.

Have you looked at the link in this thread? I'm currently struggling with it, but it may have something like a decent answer, if |I can get my head around it.

https://smartnightreadingroom.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

...the pragmatic sophist. — plaque flag

:rofl: "I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;…"

Fundamental ontology is a holism that doesn't cut corners or rip out a mere aspect or piece of reality and try to put it under the rest. — plaque flag

So the project is to find a way to explore that aspect that science has neglected by design, that we are calling subjectivity for the moment, and that cannot be the scientific method, but might be, I don't know, poetic, confessional, artistic, moral, sentimental, meditative, spiritual? Perhaps the method of no method?

I suggest that ideas do indeed exist at something like the 'more subjective' or 'less material' end of the spectrum. How they exist is something we can clarify endlessly. Where we seem to agree is that the individual subject is very much embodied. So is the 'cultural subject,' but more strangely. — plaque flag

Yeah, I'm more trying to encapsulate the difficulties of physicalism than present the creed for adoption. It's dead, but it continues as a zombie to consume life.

Science seems to begin in a Cartesian dualism of mind and body that at first limits itself to bodies as it's proper subject, but ends up having to deal with mind and subjectivity that it has explicitly ruled out of its domain. Philosophers of science and neuroscientists and scientific psychologists have somehow to give an objective account of subjectivity, which contradiction necessarily results in a mixture of fiction, nonsense and vacuity.

So given that an objective account of subjectivity is impossible, I return to Descartes' characterisation of subjectivity in terms of 'thinking'. Philosophers valorise thinking, and make an identification with it. I think - I cannot doubt that I think because to doubt is to think, therefore I am certain of my existence as thought.

*Silent pause ...*

In those pauses, when there is no thought, yet there is subjectivity. I conclude that thought is a mechanical physical process such as a computer or a neural network performs, that a subject can be aware of in their own brain, not subjectivity itself, and what thought cannot doubt is not thereby confirmed to be the case, because one can be aware of the silence of thought.

There is however, a sense in which ideas come to my mind from somewhere other than my mind. Since they cannot penetrate through my fortress, and enter from the external, and "ghostly phenomena" is silly talk, I conclude that they enter my mind through "inner space". And since the ideas which enter my mind through inner space seem to be very similar to the ideas which enter your mind through inner space, I can conclude that we are very well connected through inner space. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds a bit like the internet. But I think you are continuing the Cartesian split and trying to account subjectively for objectivity which must result in the same kind of contradiction - here we are sharing ideas through physical means, are we not? Interior requires an inexplicable exterior and neither can account for the other that it rejects. Can we not reject the split, except as a methodological tool for understanding one aspect of a single world? And then characterise that aspect that our scientific method brackets off, not as another world, and not as ideas, but as the meaning and the caring of the world.

External bodies become known to us only in the manner in which they penetrate our bodies, through the eye, the ear, the mouth, the nose, or the skin. Talk of being penetrated is a little unmanly, and that might explain why philosophers prefer to think that it is no worldly thing, but ghostly phenomena that enters "the mind".

Scare quotes for "the mind" because it seems to imply a universal generalised 'realm of ideas' in which your mind and my mind float ethereally in a universe of ideas, supping on the nourishing philosophies that abide there and remaining essentially disembodied.

"A mind" might better be imagined as the emergent will of the population of cells that constitute a body in interpenetrative relation to an environment. Where 'will' can be understood as the action of the organism, in terms of a discriminating response. Air is taken in, oxygen is preferentially absorbed and CO2 is preferentially released in exhalation, and that discrimination continues until the organism dies. These cells always knew the difference that science has lately named.

Science is then an aspect of the emergent (constructed) will of a social species, emerging from a 'method' or practice of interaction with the distinguished social and physical environments. The method in turn being distinguished from more varied (chaotic) practices that did not make the hard distinction between the social and the physical as religions and polities.

Thus a crude physicalism in outline.

They continued to count votes after election day, — NOS4A2

That's like counting chickens after they've hatched! Outrageous!

I agree 100% with the last paragraph. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Me too. And we use the word in that way "Footprints mean feet have passed by'; 'clouds sometimes mean rain'; 'Rainbows mean god promises to spare us from flood'; 'Umberto means... when he says...' This is why it becomes confusing when one asks what 'mean' means. And even more confusing when one writes a whole book about it but does not deign to stray outside the writings of academic philosophers, as if there is no meaning outside the ivory tower. (I'm looking at you, Ogden and Richards.)

What should happen to Biden if he did all that shit? — flannel jesus

Give him a Very Stable Genius award?

Do you mean the climate scientists who go on all expenses paid holidays each year (COP) to the worlds top tourist spots to discuss how everyone else should stop flying, etc. Of course the climate scientists fly to get to COP. Haven't they heard of Zoom meetings? — Agree to Disagree

I have not only heard of Zoom meetings, I've participated. They do not seem to work very well in establishing a practical consensus and strategy between parties with divergent interests.

But if your unspoken suggestion is that because scientists in their private lives conform to the society as it exists and functions, rather than the one they think we should be working towards, and that this is a hypocrisy that invalidates climate change, then it is either a foolish error, or a deliberate misleading. I wonder which?

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this. — Srap Tasmaner

Signposts are just like forum posts except their author is not pseudonamed. We don't need to talk about the behaviour of forum posts or sign posts, just the intentions of posters. There is an unconfirmed by me story, that during WW2, when invasion of the UK was expected, sign posts were turned around to 'confuse the enemy'. Checks can be fraudulent and so can sign posts.

:cool: Ah, I remember the good old days of Silent Spring and acid rain and the ozone hole, back in the days when the world seemed worth worrying about. The runner beans are doing well this year though, that's private practice for you.

Thanks, Sam. I just want to say that your answers make sense to me, not personally having had any NDE or other spiritual experiences as such. It reminds me of Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos books.

And comparison with Doris Lessing is a great compliment in my little world.

Yes. I would suggest that achieving social (or racial) justice will mean black's access to better education ----> better jobs ----> better housing ----> in better neighborhoods. Skip the "anti-racist training programs", skip black English, forget about micro aggressions, etc. etc. etc. DELIVER first rate education and training programs. Make sure there are no artificial barriers to equal access to good jobs; enforce equal access to housing in any neighborhood. In other words, make it possible for blacks to work and live as well as whites. — BC

I don't want to totally disagree with this, but there is some devilry in the details.

How is this crucial access to be achieved in the face of micro-aggressions that always extend the benefit of the doubt in one direction and never in the other. How can a first rate education be delivered to blacks whose very title lies on the negative side of every cliche of virtue, quality, and moral worth, of the language in which that education is delivered. There is no need to blacken the name, and de-nigrate, when the whole language makes negation the identity. Chris Searle's The forsaken Lover goes into this in detail, in the context of education in the Caribbean. I don't have any answer to these problems, but I don't see either that to forget about them is going to help.

When we reach a complete mutual understanding, we are of one mind. Nobody wants that, do they?

70's for me. I was a member of the whole food cooperative that became wholesalers as Suma in 1977. Amazingly, they have managed to survive without me all this time since.

I think your umbrellas are too small; you need more vagueness, not less. "Term" for instance is wide and fuzzy enough to cover some ground. Or "commonplace", or "I", or "is".

Example: some folks think that I is all there is. A thought so commonplace it has a name - solipsism. At the level of maximum universality as this is, the universe id taken to be all that is and one, undivided. There is no ambiguity, because nothing is left out. But as soo as one descends from the peak of total universality, where all is one forevermore, there are boundaries and borders, which are always fractal, vague, and usually involve a disputed 'no man's land'. Warlike philosophers are always trying to reduce the no man's land by claiming it or rejecting it - everyone must be either a Christian soldier or a servant of the devil. Whereas peace-loving philosophers prefer a large undefined space where they can play without falling into the trenches of the analytics.

So I am joining your war against vagueness on the opposition side, and staking a claim for no -mans land on my side. Vagueness for ever! Go, someone-or-other! Indefiniteness rules! Maybe, a bit, sometimes.

The way to change demand and behaviour is with incentives and disincentives. A tax on meat, a subsidy on public transport. The way to change production is by regulation with a Ban of CFC s for example, or a ban on the sale of gas boilers, or change the building regulations. The world can be reconfigured quite easily, we have been doing it for centuries.

Yes. Deflation is the best account of truth; every statement asserts itself, and assert's its own truth, or as I put it above, "language presumes truth". Evidence and reason and openness to new experience and revision of beliefs and what ought to be convincing to us are important to discuss, in order that we can have as much truth as possible in our talk, as is honesty.

We don't have the option of only speaking the truth; if we had some way of just knowing how things really stand, it wouldn't take so much work to find out. But we do have the option of only saying what we do in fact believe, and what we believe aligns with the available evidence, and what we believe we can give good reasons for that others should find convincing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes indeed, and I am not asking for more. But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. As we are seeing, a medium that is filled with too much dishonest communication, like the boy who cried wolf, ceases to communicate at all - and this has implications for freedom of speech - that the freedom to speak honestly the truth as best one can, should absolutely be defended, but the freedom to lie, deceive and mislead should be curtailed as strongly as possible while allowing for our fallibility and stupidity.

Of course I must remember that there are other things we do with language too - naming, constructing, playing, patterning, and so on where truth or honesty are not issues.

I like the relationship between poet and philosopher -- subversive to put the poet as the maker of what the philosopher needs to do his craft! — Moliere

Its only a simplified summary of Wittgenstein.

Meaning is use. Philosophy is 'engine idling' - Philosophers are not saying anything, as the engine is not doing any work, going anywhere, producing new knowledge. They are tuning the language to make it run more smoothly. Thus philosophers do nothing useful with the language in the sense of saying anything meaningful. They disentangle the threads so that poets can weave new meanings and identities for us to wear and use.

Excellent summary there.

Why wretched? I thought it a good read. — Pantagruel

I'm not entirely serious, but having read it more than once, I don't feel much further forward. It tells how the word is used, but that's like telling me that a frying pan is used by heating it from below. Good useful stuff no doubt, but what's for dinner?

the meaning of words derives from their function in sentence-level constructs (or larger). — Pantagruel

So meaning is emergent in language rather than resident in word atoms. To take the exemplary example, the meaning of the word 'meaning' was analysed and emerged, or as I would maintain, actually drowned forever, in the seminal book The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden & Richards. (I hereby condemn @Moliere to skim reading the entire wretched book as punishment for starting the topic. The word should no longer be spoken in polite society.)

Meaning,n. That which is consumed as fuel by philosophy, and produced by poetry.

Uh huh. I'm willing to discuss my anger with someone prepared to admit to their own.

Fucksake, not this shite again. Must every challenge be 'dishonest' these days, every disagreement 'disinformation', every ideological difference 'bigotry'.... — Isaac

No, not every challenge, it's entirely personal: your engagement with me. you see you make a big thing about my admitted anger, but here is yours for all to see. I quite like some of your posts directed at others, and am tempted to engage with them, but i mainly do not, for just the reason that you play this silly game of universalising the opposition in an attempt to humiliate and silence. Thus: If I say your challenge is dishonest I "must" mean that every challenge is dishonest.

I don't see how. If I say something to you like "the pub is at the end of the road", you'll be able to do anything with that exactly and only to the extent that you trust me. It seems trust, not truth here is doing the work. You're not expecting me to be 100% right, you're expecting that I'm not deliberately trying to get you to the end of the road for nefarious purposes. It my intentions that matter, not my unfailing accuracy. — Isaac

Who said anything about unfailing accuracy, not I? I trust the stranger I ask directions of because I trust that most people most of the time are honestly helpful. Just as i trust that most sign posts have not got twisted around. I trust you will say "I don't know" if you don't know where the pub is. I trust that you intend to tell the truth as you know it. If half the people on the street have nefarious purposes, I will not be asking anyone anything.

Must everyone only speak when guaranteed to pass all accuracy tests in perpetuity? — Isaac

No. Why would you imagine my thinking that? I trust your directions to be true, and my trust is based on my experience that people usually tell the truth about such matters. I wouldn't ask Boris Johnson because his words mean nothing to me, based on my experience that he does not try to tell the truth.

But Now i see that you are making up what I say and are not honestly engaging, so I will stop responding. Our conversation has no meaning.

Language presumes truth, because if it is not presumably true it has no presumable meaning, I like to communicate, and therefore I like truth. When I have to deal with liars, as politicians and advertisers tend to be sometimes, I become angry and cynical because their deceit undermines the very fabric of society. Signposts are useful if they are nearly all true, but if half of them point the wrong way, then none of them are any use. They become signs that do not signify and are best ignored.

It does; that phrase is redundant. However, '...it is false that...' would not be redundant. Language presumes truth.

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell. — Srap Tasmaner

"Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. "

If a belief is true, there can be no evidence that it's false, so you'll never need to revise your belief. If such evidence does turn up, in addition to revising your belief, you also remove the "true" sticker from it. So what? What was the sticker doing anyway? — Srap Tasmaner

The sticker was misapplied, so it is removed. what would you rather say?

Now when we accuse someone of holding a belief because it's convenient for them, I think often we're talking about something they're not aware they're doing. What we perceive is that holding such a belief serves some need of theirs, again probably something they're not aware of. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. anything one thinks is true ,one is reluctant to change ones' mind about; because it is inconvenient to change one's mind and change one's habits and rethink everything. One needs to think one believes things that are true most of the time, or thought itself would be useless. Fortunately, up to now the world has proved fairly stable; the key I put in my pocket remains there until I take it out to open my front door which it still unlocks and which is also just where I left it. Losing or finding a few chromosomes for 30 years is far less important. But if one comes home one day, and the house has vanished and there is just a pile of bricks, it is traumatic and one's whole life is changed.

I think we all know what true and false mean, as applied to statements or extended to friends. A false friend is one who pretends to have your interests at heart, in pursuit of his own interests - a deceiver.

I think when you say, "Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. ", you are deceiving yourself, and saying something that is not true. I believe it is true that my key will open the front door, and if it should turn out not to be true because the lock is broken, or my wife has changed the lock or someone has blown the bloody door off, or the god of locks is angry with me, then I will have to admit I was wrong.

for more than 30 years every biologist and every doctor believed it was a fact that humans have 48 chromosomes. Of course, we now believe they were all wrong, but it ought to give one pause. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure why you are telling me this. Certainly it is a problem that we get things wrong and believe things to be true that are not true. But it is not a problem for the meaning of 'true'. Something was thought to be true and turned out later not to be true. I think we need to keep stable and agree about what 'true' means and that it means the same when everyone thought wrongly then, as it means now that we have corrected ourselves. and if it turns out next week that there are another 17 chromosomes that have been hidden all this time because they are extra small or transparent or something, then we will revise again what we know. And at no time has what is true changed, but only what we believe to be true. Although it could also happen that the number of chromosomes might change.

By all means let us be open to revision and reversal of what we believe according to what we later learn to be true, but not according to what we later find to be convenient - that is the path to 'very stable genius' and never being wrong, conveniently.

The problem with the valuable house is that you can't sell it and still live in it. But on a balance sheet, property and cash can make one "a millionaire". — BC

Cliche inflation makes poor homeless fools of us all. https://www.foxtons.co.uk/discover/2018/10/what-does-A1m-buy-you-in-london

I remember when a $64,000 question was a seriously hard question that you had to go in a sound-proof booth to answer. and there were 3 dollars to the pound in those days.

I agree with Sushi on the importance of thrift and saving, — BC

I also agree with that. I just disagree that it will make anyone rich.