But here I’m trying to get an analysis specific to recent Western philosophy in particular. I never particularly warmed to Gilbert Ryle — Wayfarer

He was a prick. And it is the nature of a prick to misunderstand himself when right as supporting himself when wrong. He was right about category errors, and the notion is important for disentangling some of the muddles of philosophy. But in characterising mind as the 'ghost in the machine' he paved the way for a reductionist mechanistic thesis that still permeates much of the West.

Because nobody believes in ghosts, right? And philosophy runs on slogans more than arguments.
But we believe in 'measurements' like anything, don't we? And measurements are relations between the thing measured and the thing measuring. So the mind of man is the measure of all things, we might better say.

Perhaps a reconsideration of Ryle might even bear some fruit in the way of a rapprochement between the analytic and continental schools?

The idea is just unhinged... — Isaac

War is always unhinged. But talking of price, one sees a high price being paid for peace, or at least a ceasefire, being paid by the citizens of N. Korea for example. It seems that there are fates worse than death - Orwell's "a boot stamping on a human face forever". What price are you willing (for others, obviously) to pay for peace? And on what hinge do you hang it.

what Ryle said was the correct view of the matter — Wayfarer

Mind is not a thing but a relation, a pattern, an interaction, an event, a movement.

You only exist in relationship. — J.Krishnamurti

Not a brain state, but a(n embodied, active) brain's relation to the environment. The university is what the people do in the buildings. If people are not studying, the university has died, or is asleep at least.

The difficulty, as I see it, is that we tend to fall into, is that even starting with this clarity, that consciousness is the relationship between an embodied brain, and the environment, taken as two 'things', even as I lay out the categories of things and relations, I am establishing a new relation between consciousness and itself, the understanding of which tends to establish it as another thing. And I am back where I started with the wretched thinking thing. Hence meditation, to try and stop that circle of self-concern.

Anyway, all this is too "deep" for me as far as my knowledge, memory and interest about mythology are concerned. And I don't know if I should take a plunge in the deep waters of mythology. — Alkis Piskas

Sorry, I cannot resist just pointing, in case anyone missed it, to the relationship between mythology -"we're not much concerned with all that these days", and prejudice and inequality unfortunately persisting in the world, even - dare I say it? in philosophy departments. (Misogyny is the necessary tool of patrilineal descent, and thus of the vaunted nuclear family, etc etc etc.)

As for the "Triple Goddess" she has nothing to do with the main Greek goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. — Alkis Piskas

That's right. Or at least to an extent it is. but then the Triple Goddess has aspects of virgin, mother, and crone with the associated colours , white, red, and black. And I think Aphrodite for love, Hera for marriage and Athena for the wisdom of age fits quite neatly. It's a complicated topic, and I am not wanting to press it here.

As to the influences, we are talking about a widespread and very ancient religion that was likely varied and widespread and will have lasted longer in more isolated places. But Graves was very much the Classics scholar, and he detects the influence of the Goddess repressed, as it were in the Greek and Roman pantheons, and relegated to minor and largely negative roles. It gives a context to the later take-over by the ambitious mouse god of the Hebrews, that we now know as Jehovah, or Allah, or simply God,

Death is not taboo is simply uncomfortable to talk about and creates the sense of dread the terror comes first upon self awareness — MojaveMan

There are many people who have never seen a dead human. When you see the dead, they do not terrify, any more than a sleeping human terrifies. They are rather boring as they do not wake up.

Psychology is full of theories of this sort that are long on explanation and short on justification. Freud also had a theory about the importance of death in the unconscious, and he went so far out of fashion as to be almost unmentionable. That this is just another plausible but out of fashion hypothesis is well supported by this comment:

Psychologist Yoel Inbar summarized the popularity of the theory:

I can not explain to people who were not around during this time - which I would say was roughly 2004 to 2008 - how much everything at the time was about terror management theory. You would go to SPSP and it seemed like half of the posters were about terror management theory. It was just everywhere. There is just an explosion of terror management theory stuff. And then it sort of receded. And now you barely see it. Which is also kind of weird. We were obsessed with this for a period of 3-5 years, then we moved on to other things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory#Criticisms

It doesn't say much for psychology as a reputable science that this sort of thing goes on; I have argued elsewhere that there are particular features of the human sciences that make such errors almost the rule.

Religious authorities, with the support of state authotities, were always and still are persecuting non-believers! — Alkis Piskas

I'm not sure that was true, particularly of the many gods religions. It is true of the religions of the Book. All that 'begetting' is very much the record of patriarchal lineages, though I'm told there are vestiges of a matrilineal system somewhere in the Hebrew traditions. But between the Greek and Roman gods there was something between a translation and absorption :

Zeus= Jupiter
Poseidon= Neptune
Hades= Pluto
Hera= Juno ( No children)
Demeter= Ceres
Hestia= Vesta (No children)
Ares= Mars
Aphrodite= Venus
Athena= Minerva
Hephaestus= Vulcan
Hermes= Mercury
Dionysus= Bacchus
ETC.
This seems quite natural - "Oh you call the love goddess Venus, we know her as Aphrodite." As opposed to "My god is the only god, and all your gods are false, and your worship thereof sacrilege."

More equivalences here

Robert Graves had an interesting theory that "The Old Religion" worshiped the Triple Goddess. This was based on the more natural matrilineal society. The Greek myths retain the traces of this religion in the muses, the fates, and so on, and tells the story, in code, of how the patriarchal takeover happened. Patriarchy implies patrilineal inheritance, and that necessitates the control of women's sexuality, and hence their subjugation.
The White Goddess

He also has a retelling of the Gospel stories, King Jesus, which is also worth a look. A sadly neglected controversial scholar.

Ryle's purpose there was to illustrate what is meant by the phrase "category mistake". — Andrew M

My usual example is "three ducks in a row"

duck, duck, duck.

There are the ducks, and there is the row. When you have seen the ducks, you have seen the row. But there are not four things. Yet the row is no ghost.

For me the known too comes in a wide variety of flavors. Some knowns are quite pleasant while others are the converse. — javra

Yes, that is how I characterise the unknown - by reference to the known. Because there is no other character I could conceivably give it. And hence no particular response it can evoke, except by association with something known. So if one arrives at a fear of death, it can only be by associating it with something known and feared - a fear of abandonment perhaps. Which is the loss of relationship. Whenever one imagines one's death, one imagines being alive to it, and that is where fear can arise.

I'm saying that because the fear of death is what drives humans to do everything. (Terror Managment Theory) — MojaveMan

Right. Well that's a load of codswallop, and maybe explains why you have everything backwards.

Most psychologists consider TMT to be a sort of evolutionary trait. Humans naturally became aware of dangerous threats as a means of preserving their lives and continuing their gene pool. The deep existential anxiety that comes with that knowledge is an unfortunate byproduct of this evolutionary advantage. — PsychologyCodswallop

Elephants have some awareness of death, and show interest in the bones of their deceased. But fear of dangerous threats is not at all the same as fear, or even awareness of death. Even a fly will try and avoid being squished. Proper psychology talks about adrenalin levels and the fight or flight response to such threats - this is the physiological response to threat, which does not distinguish fear from aggression.

And that response is on a totally different level (it is instinctive and physiological in origin), from any possible conscious awareness of death. To the extent that there is a specific fear of death, it is is much more likely to be social in origin. In civilised society sex and death are taboo. By custom they are kept hidden, not talked about, not to be seen by children. It is the hiding that invests death with particular significance and creates anxiety and the excitement of the forbidden.

Most psychologists consider CMT (Codswallop Management Theory) to be a valuable therapeutic tool in the management of psychobabble, the disease spread by the regurgitation of sensationalist nonsense composed of unsubstantiated claims mixed with random scientific terms to lend it some credence, such as 'evolutionary' and 'gene-pool', and 'existential anxiety'.

I've always thought that fear of death - for those who are so afraid - largely consists of fear of the unknown — javra

Well that's something I don't understand - the unknown as far as I'm concerned covers all manner of wonderful, boring, delightful, agonising, unimaginable curiosities that I cannot respond to in any way at all because it is all - unknown. What I think one can more successfully fear is the loss of the known, which seems to be more or less in line with @Vera Mont

So is this the suggestion - because we fear death we should want to die?

Non comprendo.

That is, the university is something we can see by virtue of being creatures with minds. — Andrew M

I think Ryle, (and certainly I,) would prefer to say that the university is something that we do together; if the building is lost, and the library burns, we can meet under a tree for a tutorial on whatever we can remember of the course. The ghost is the transient interaction that takes place in the machine of the facilities, which are there to facilitate the educational and researching goings-on, that constitute the university.

It is not synonymous with the problem of squaring mental states with brain states and physicality with non physicality. — Andrew4Handel

I think Ryle would say that talk of mental states and brain states is also confused talk. A brain that is in a state is a dead brain; a living brain is a brain that is interacting with itself, its body and its environment, and it is these interactions that constitute the mind.

It is an unfortunate locution for his thesis that the solution to the problem of the ghost in the machine can be easily formulated as "machines are real and ghosts are not." This is clearly not the conclusion he wants us to reach. To discover the real university is to join the university, not to do a tour of the buildings.

I see the husband and the wife, but where is their marriage?

But could there be any moral code or principle that all rational people would put forward? — Mark S

It's an invitation to ad hom argue. Anyone who disagrees with me, given certain conditions, is irrational.
But furthermore, if the conditions were so weak as to allow the inclusion of all or most of the generally accepted canon of moral philosophers, then it would be clearly falsified as a matter of fact.

Hume's dictum is not really addressed:

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. — Hume

Hence antinatalism. This is also why politics does not consist of a competition for power between the Good Party and the Bad Party, but between parties that rationally disagree about what ought to be done.

Is there anything more to this than an appeal to like-minded, (rather than rational,) people to go with the current moral zeitgeist and stop arguing?

What's the Beef vegan myco-protein meat substitute? It seems to happen, as might well be expected, that social inequalities and prejudices are enshrined in the languages we inherit. We all, here, inherit the language of the British Empire, and its legacies of racist, sexist, classist, and otherwise offensive attitudes. Overcoming these is difficult and has not happened just because the inequalities in the written law may have largely been removed. Old habits die hard.

But if you are quite sure that you can use this distorting language without succumbing to the sexism or racism or gender stereotyping that is implied in the grammar, then there is no problem, is there? "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't."

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.” — Shelly

Consider the meaning of the sentence, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" The context shows both the original boasting intended meaning, and the ironic emptied out meaning turned back on Ozymandias.

I conclude that meaning is not limited to the intent of the speaker or the understanding of the listener, but permeates the whole of space and time and is affected by the desert wind and the traveller's tent, and has the power to inform even a modern philosopher.

Oh, and as it happens, it's a command, not a proposition.

The image of cheerful philosophers torturing lawyers is just too delicious; we'll just slowly pour the whiskey into the bottle until the flyster either flies or floats out.

Thanks for that. I have come across a few refugees from the Witnesses, and the rigidity of that society does seem to lead to a performed 'acceptable' interaction whose unreality can become unbearable, and yet so ingrained that one cannot any more find one's authentic being. As if inauthenticity were infectious. So the veil between you and the world becomes also a veil between you and yourself.

And from there, it is more understandable that @fdrake's implied denial of the existence of an authentic self would seem brutal. In old-fashioned psychological terms, one needs to establish an unproblematically robust ego first, before considering a philosophy that negates or transcends it.

maybe we don't understand one another at all. — frank

Have you said something about yourself and I missed it?

At some stage in this confessional thread one might start to see a pattern; so far the obvious pattern is that philosophers like to display their examined lives, and think it serious and worthwhile to do so. And who am I to disagree? Everybody's looking for something. Sweet dreams are made of these.

Family: youngest of 5, and only boy: an accident at the end of the family, father ex-Wee-Free, ex communist, mother ex-military. hence the contradictions of middle-class socialism backed by determinist authoritarian Colonial Victorian morality.

Me therefore, more like an only child of many mothers, both spoilt and neglected. Physically, slow to develop, poor coordination, rather poor memory, but some talent for pattern recognition. Therefore, good at mathematics, where writing is minimal and understanding is king.

At age 11, expelled from the womb of the ultra-feminine family, into the harsh world of an all male boarding school. Became psychologically homeless and politically revolutionary. Therefore rejected the natural path from Maths Physics and Chemistry A-levels to a science or engineering degree, and resorted to philosophy and psychology knowing nothing of their content. Found philosophy congenial.

TL:DR Contrarian falls into snake-pit of philosophy, cannot be bothered to climb out.

Alas, the hundred acre wood will be a quieter sadder place without Tigger. But there will be more strengthening medicine for the rest of us.

And yet in the mouth of (most?) believers these days, "God" is just a three-letter epithet (or crutch) for ego ("why"). — 180 Proof

Yes, I'm glad you appreciate the close connection. Ego is the zeitgeist of the age brought on by, I suppose a century of material 'progress'. Hedonism is ego as virtue, and as you are aware, often wins the popular vote in politics in these parlous times. Where religion is disconnected from politics, one might, even now, find a more significant expression.

Speaking of Stoicism, I noticed this book:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/604070/how-to-live-a-good-life-by-edited-and-with-an-introduction-by-massimo-pigliucci-skye-cleary-daniel-kaufman/

Which suggests in the introduction that a philosophy and a religion both necessarily have a metaphysics an an ethics, (and possibly a practice), and that the difference is vague. Not a new thought of course, but probably new to a certain modern incarnation of zealotry.

I have said before that everyone has something at the centre of their life that they live for, and that is their god, whether it is a football team, knowledge, ego, power, love, pleasure, rationality, sex, or whatever. "With my body, I thee worship."

this was "unenlightened's" whole argument...You need to believe in order to believe in god. — Nickolasgaspar

Not quite. My argument is that you need to stop believing in yourself in order to believe in God. And you have quite clearly exemplified this for me. What I have not done, that you have not seemingly noticed, is presented any argument for God, or professed any belief in God.

But you have seen in me the antagonist just like a good Christian seeing the devil in an atheist. You have displayed your irrationality and your blind faith in a cause, that of your own superior rationality. It's quite amusing.

do you feel hurt or threaten when someone exposes the irrational nature of a claim you subscribe to?? — Nickolasgaspar

Do you? Or do you not even allow yourself to become conscious of how you have exposed your own irrationality, so quick you are to project it onto me?

As it happens I answered your question 2 days before you asked it in another thread:

Say you call me an idiot; I tend to deny it, and then be afraid that everyone will think I'm an idiot and then blame you for being so rude, and call you an idiot back. All this is a resistance, I don't let the idea in, and so it remains there pricking at me.

But if I simply accept that I am an idiot, there is no problem - it is only the image I had of myself being smart that has taken a knock. — unenlightened

I am focusing or better observing and analyzing the irrationality in humans. — Nickolasgaspar

Oh, my apologies, I thought you were a human.

-Well in my opinion, the issue lies with the God claim . — Nickolasgaspar

Yes, you are in very good company focussing on the facticity or fictionality of "the God claim". That is exactly what I am pointing to myself. As long as your issue is that, you will never understand something like this:

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour's love for me,
Love to the loveless shown that they might Lovely be. — Samuel Crossman

This is why a philosopher cannot find god; he cannot make a commitment to anything, but must always be weighing and evaluating and reasoning. It's a very good recipe for thinking, but a very poor one for living. — unenlightened

The adequacy of human evaluation and human reasoning needs to come to be questioned before there can be any room for any other issue. This if you like is my counter question to philosophy - what evidence do you have that your merely evolved thinking and reasoning apparatus is in any way capable of understanding the universe that birthed it? What is reasonable about that faith in the face of all the evidence? Surely, of all the religions, faith in oneself is the least adequate?

It's an analogy, that you are taking literally in order to try and undermine.

So I'll try a different one. I am a fan of justice. This does not mean I think justice exists, it means I am committed to the cause; I strive for justice, i cheer for it. And you can explain that life is complicated and knowledge is never absolutely certain so on, so I am wrong to think there can be perfect justice, but you will be missing the point, as you have missed my previous point.

In order to choose the reasonable Default position we only need to evaluate the claims... — Nickolasgaspar

This is why a philosopher cannot find god; he cannot make a commitment to anything, but must always be weighing and evaluating and reasoning. It's a very good recipe for thinking, but a very poor one for living.

As Searle says in his conclusion, the core of the bad argument is to "...think that somehow or other, the experiences are themselves the object of the experiences". There is a sort of folding of the mind in on itself, so that the picture is of a homunculus attempting and failing to prove that there is a world "outside". — Banno

Indeed, one of the things one almost never sees, is the inverted image on the back of the eye. Not even if one peers into the mirror. It's just too dark in there, and there's nowhere to sit.

Understanding substance takes substantial understanding.

Substance is what is the basis of objects, and understanding is what is the basis of subjects. These are etymological definitions. Perhaps objects have no basis, perhaps subjects have none either. Perhaps this topic is entirely misconceived.

the law of conservation of energy proves that energy can’t be created. — Someone

Some radical circularity here. The "law" is discovered by the repeated failure to produce perpetual motion machines, etc. The law doesn't prove anything about the world but contrarywise, the world proves the law. And there is a built in contradiction; if energy cannot be created how come there is energy? Laws have a scope; and energy is conserved in the universe; how energy got to be in the universe is necessarily beyond the scope of the conservation law.

But apart from that, never argue with dogmatic scientism or dogmatic religion.

The self is the idea of the self that the self has; the circular track that thought runs around.



In therapy it turns out that ChatGPT is unable to form new memories, and thus unable to sustain a narrative self. There is a degenerative brain disease associated with binge drinking that has a similar effect on humans, extreme Korsakoff syndrome. One can talk to them well enough, but they are in effect frozen in time, and will respond to you five minutes later as if they have never met you before. Thirty years on, they are confused and distressed to see how old they look in the mirror, because time simply does not pass for them, and they think of themselves always as whatever age the were at the onset. You can explain to them, but they cannot remember it.

The narrative has ended, and yet persists, because it has never been transcended.

Can we just rename it "Election 2024" — Baden

Or "US Election 2024" in case another democracy comes into being in the solar system somewhere.

Are you saying it's better to be thin-skinned than thick-skinned? It passes through — Changeling

I'm saying that there is a tendency to resist pain, or to deny it, or to react to it with fear or anger; these prolong pain by turning it into suffering.

Say you call me an idiot; I tend to deny it, and then be afraid that everyone will think I'm an idiot and then blame you for being so rude, and call you an idiot back. All this is a resistance, I don't let the idea in, and so it remains there pricking at me.

But if I simply accept that I am an idiot, there is no problem - it is only the image I had of myself being smart that has taken a knock.

The same principle actually applies to physical pain, but it is more difficult to remain present with back pain or a sore thumb.

Let me outline a simple reason why a philosopher might not find God.
It is at the simplest a confusion of faith with belief.

If you ask a fan of Ipswich town FC. which is the greatest football club, they will tell you it is Ipswich Town FC. If you ask them about the next game, they will tell you that Ipswich will win. And if you point out that Ipswich almost invariably loses and often come bottom of the league, they will be hurt, but not dismayed. To be a fan is to be a loyal supporter and keep the faith in good times and bad times. To be an Ipswich fan is not wrong as a matter of fact, nor is it even a matter of fact that Ipswich will lose their next game.

It is not that the facts do not matter; the win is all important, and the loss is a heavy blow, but faith covers them both and amplifies them both. Faith is what makes these things matter at all. I am not a football fan, and I couldn't care less about Ipswich Town FC. I can therefore afford to be philosophical about their chances. But the only people who care about my analysis, are the Ipswich fans.

So if you are not a fan of god, you will always miss out on the excitement, and think yourself very wise.

[They] modified the algorithm that they use to determine whether something is of interest or not, and so things that have been there all along are now popping up for the first time. — Mick West

That's what my imaginary friend said!

What if we haven't been GIVEN anything? — universeness

Then we have made it all ourselves.

Or else it has all just fallen to us.

There is no evidence — universeness

Do you require evidence to be resentful? Do you require evidence to be grateful? Should I ask for your evidence that there is no evidence? You seem to be selling some snake oil here, and even giving commandments.

Convince me it is worth convincing you. — T Clark

It isn't.

Yeah, I struggled with the right way to say it. Conscious but impersonal? Not even that really. It's that reality can't be separated from human involvement, so the universe is half-human. — T Clark

Ah, the self made man who worships his maker?

You see, either you bite the bullet of a 'transcendent' person who give s a fuck, or you have a half assed personification of the generality of 'life' which obviously doesn't give a fuck. And why should we give a fuck for that which doesn't give one?

God created the world, and then left it in the garage, and went off to do something more important. "Praise the Lord!"

Or, God didn't exactly create the world, it's just his digestive system. "Praise the Lord!"

Convince me that it is worth even speculating about this.

The recognition that it is worthwhile to see the universe, reality, as something living is an important one. It changes how you see everything. It gives something to be grateful to for all we have been given — T Clark

Something living but impersonal?