• Two Types of Gods
    Impersonal gods are not worth talking to or (therefore) talking about. Stick to physics, no impersonal god will care.
  • Chinese Balloon and Assorted Incidents
    My imaginary friend told me that there is always a load of balloony junk floating about and generally nobody cares, and they turn down the radar sensitivity. Then thiis big high-level thing appears like an extra moon, and is obviously way too low and visible, and everyone puts their tin-foil hats on, and turns the sensitivity up to max, and discover some more junk.

    Therefore, China is bad, for filling the media with talk about their broken junk.

    But I suspect my imaginary friend is making it up, because the Chinese are cunning and sinister.
  • Can you prove solipsism true?
    Only I can prove solipsism true. By definition.
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    ...often reality is more accurate than fiction. — L'éléphant

    You heard it here first!
  • Blame across generations
    Did you invent science, religion, language, civil society, law, agriculture, technology, architecture, cloth-making, education, etc, etc, etc... or did you inherit them?
    And if you did inherit all these benefits and advantages, do you then refuse to accept the responsibility to repair the damages they have done as well as enjoy the benefits?

    As to how that responsibility should be exercised, we can have a long and possibly fruitful discussion, but if you take no responsibility, there is nothing I have to say to you.
  • Vogel's paradox of knowledge
    A posteriori, he does, but not as a necessary fact. — Wayfarer

    It is a curious consequence of JTB knowledge that one may be certain, but one never knows that one knows - one always knows absolutely of the hypothetical Al's and Betty's whether they know or not, because the truth is stipulated in the hypothesis, but one's own knowledge or another's in real life... Philosophers put themselves in the position of the conjuror revealing where the queen really is after taking the sap's money. It's probably over-compensating for their own gullibility. :wink:

    As Hume described, there is no reason to expect, never mind know, that the future will be like the past, except the desperation that one has nothing whatsoever else to go on.
  • Arche
    I'm puzzled by your preference for the Incredible String Band, when there were others who could sing...

    Fairport - Sandy Deny!     — Banno

    Sandy Deny, indeed! Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Albion Band! But this is a philosophy forum, therefore String Band or Bob Dylan. A words thing.
  • Vogel's paradox of knowledge
    Your point that Al has no justification for believing that his car has been stolen is a good one. Until she discovers that her car has been stolen, the same is true of Betty, of course. That’s a key problem, of course. Justification can be less than conclusive. — Ludwig V

    Of course it can. we are fallible. I always keep my keys in my right pocket so I always know where they are, unless I forgot to empty the pockets when I changed my trousers. In that case, I discover that I did not know where my keys were after all. Or unless there was a hole in my pocket, or someone has stolen them, or they have been dissolved by the alien key dissolving ray, or God has done a miracle, or I hallucinated having keys, or...

    But meanwhile, I know where my keys are. Knowledge is provisional and fallible - if the car isn't there when Betty gets back she cannot have known it was there, but she thought she did until she learned better. This is only problematic for the pope, who is supposed to be infallible. You're not the pope, are you?
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    so why the torment of cancer? — Gnomon

    That's a bit of a weasel question - I don't mind a bit of discomfort, but...

    Life is the dialectic. Bliss plus torment produces awareness. Again and again; more and more. Take the heroin and ease the pain at the cost of your life. Yeah, leprosy does not directly cause disfigurement, but numbness, that leads to damage to the extremities, infection, and loss. But this is more. The heaven that is the womb cannot be experienced, because there is no comparison, only the loss of paradise can be felt.

    This is rather a hijack of the thread though. Perhaps we should get back to discussing the language ...
  • Vogel's paradox of knowledge
    1. Yes.
    2. No.
    3. No.
    4. No.
    5. K = JTB.
    1. Al's memory Justifies his Belief as to the location of his car, and his belief is True.
    2. Al has no Justification for Believing his car to have been stolen, only for considering it possible.
    3. Betty has a Justified Belief, that turns out to be Not True.


    The situation would change if the crime rate was so high that it was reasonable to expect that one's car would be stolen, in which case one would presumably take extra precautions, or expect trouble.
  • Brexit
    so the idea of the UK taking the control of EU was a silly, idiotic idea. — ssu

    I agree with your analysis of the political thinking. But my explanation is of the failure of that calculation. Idiotic ideas are the rule for popular thinking; the mantra, "take back control", is still being recited. that is the same idiotic idea. Independence good - isolation bad: trade deal good - harmonisation bad: and so on. Membership makes good economic sense, but has been trumped by xenophobia. Idiotic for sure, but actively fostered and exploited by the Conservatives for decades.
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    I had a dream.

    Actually I had 2 recurring dreams as a child. At the age of around eight learning something of the facts of life, I realised that they were memories of birth trauma. They were wordless of course, but became describable to myself as I learned to speak. The first: I am in a field and a huge thing is coming down, crushing me. That is a contraction. The second was associated with the house I was living in as a child. I had to go from the warm sunny kitchen along a dark passage to light a fire in the cold gloomy living-room, but there was an unnameable monster in the passage. That was the memory of the birth-canal and actual birth.

    I think this is fairly rare, and one reason I think I had these memories available even as dreams is that I was my mother's 5th child and had a very easy birth. I think for most, birth trauma is too extreme and the memories have to be shut off completely.

    Anyway, in relation to @Gnomon's dialectic there is no memory of the life in the womb as such; there is no event, nothing much happens; "there's absolutely no strife, living the timeless life". Birth is the antithesis of life in the womb, the first event, and awareness is the first synthesis. Thus is the problem of evil easily answered: without the pain and terror, there would be no awareness, no subjectivity.
  • Arche
    Earth, water, fire, and air
    Met together in a garden fair
    Put in a basket bound with skin
    If you answer this riddle
    If you answer this riddle, you'll never begin

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s3KHT5JYdU
  • Brexit
    How is joining (and then exiting) the European Union the last gasp of Colonial sentimentality I don't understand. — ssu

    Joining was an attempt to create a new European Empire, and when the French and Germans refused to be subserviently grateful for our presence, they became an oppressive bureaucracy responsible for holding us back. It's the same thinking that considers our independence from Europe is a great boon and natural right, but Scotland's independence from England is insulting and unthinkable. It's all sentimentality, and that's why it has the consistency of porridge - thick, but easily stirred.
  • Ultimatum Game
    Our intuition is doing something more than just a straight forward self-interest. — Banno

    Game theory assumes a-sociality. But you don't get me I'm part of the union. I wrote an essay on that back in the day. The prisoner's dilemma is set up to isolate, and this game is stipulated as one-shot, for the same reason: to preserve the individual free of the taint of social influence. It was always the theory of a sociopath.
  • Ultimatum Game
    we intuitively reject the correct games-theoretical response, which is to accept any offer. — Banno

    Because tomorrow the offer will be even worse. I'm saying the theory is wrong if it claims it is only played once. One's wages are paid weekly.
  • Ultimatum Game
    The game is played exactly one time. — Banno

    No it isn't. It is being played over and over, all the time, everywhere. If it were not so it would be of no interest to anyone. You and I may only play once, but I will get better treatment from others if it becomes known that I speak softly, but carry a big stick. this is called 'investment'. As every criminal kno.
  • Brexit
    Perhaps we could take a more nuanced approach and talk about remote and proximate causes of Brexit. Let's meet at the halfway point, eh? — Agent Smith

    I suggest a single "Elizabethan age", subtitled "the age of Empire" to stretch from Liz 1. to Liz 2. Brexit is the thus the last gasp of Colonial sentimentality and the final end of British dominance in the world, orchestrated by the same buccaneering (rapaciously exploiting) spirit that built the Empire in the first place, turned full force on the populace and accumulated wealth of the mother country.
  • Argument for establishing the inner nature of appearances/representations
    the inexorable decrees of fate in Greek drama. — Wayfarer

    The thought police insist we speak of 'determinism', and pour scorn on 'fate'.
  • Argument for establishing the inner nature of appearances/representations
    He at the same time seems to want Will to be a double-aspect to reality, yet seems to also think it is prior in some sense. The Will, — schopenhauer1

    "Water seeks its own level", we used to hear. More generally, the will of matter is to clump together - I think that's called gravity, There being no lawgiver, the universe must follow its own will. It dances wildly to its own song, and the will of physicists is to learn the tune.

    (The will of toothbrushes is to fall into the toilet at the first opportunity, as every skoolboy kno.)
  • Argument for establishing the inner nature of appearances/representations
    ↪jancanc
    I'll put this here by way of waving a little flag at one of the experts, and linking to a related thread:
    To me, the absolutely crucial thing about Kant is his recognition that 'things conform to thoughts' rather than vice versa. I still think very few people really get the significance of that. If you understand it, it completely undercuts 'scientism'. — Wayfarer
  • Argument for establishing the inner nature of appearances/representations
    The experts will correct me if I am wrong, but this is a recapitulation of 'the beginning' of philosophy. It aligns with what we know of the prehistory of ideas, though it may seem odd to the modern ear. Perhaps you will understand easily enough that I see your post on a screen and naturally infer a person behind it expressing thoughts in the same way that I am expressing thoughts. And it is just as natural to me to see the cat creeping up on the bird and the bird looking around, and infer an internal life for each with intentions and understandings. And why not also for trees and rocks and thunderstorms and volcanos?

    The alternative is to think one is oh so special, to have an internal being. The modern depopulation of the world of all the myriad sprites and gods and other spirits and agencies, right up to the Great Sky God himself, is actually the bizarre and unnatural position that stands in need of explanation and justification.
  • Ends justifying the means. Good or bad.
    Well I gave a number of examples. John want to save one person - Mark. This is an end, do you agree?

    To do so he kills 100, this is the means to his end, do you agree? Each time he kills someone, he says "for Mark!"     — PhilosophyRunner

    I foresee hundreds of mass murderers rushing about with cries of "for Matthew", "for Luke", "for John", "for Adolf", on their lips, and very few survivors.

    ↪Agent Smith
    The difficulty is that ends and means are only separable in the limited mental intentionality of the individual. So what purports to be a pragmatic approach to morality falls at the first hurdle. For in reality saving and killing are interchangeable as ends and means. One might say that there are no ends, because the end one has in mind, if achieved, becomes the background means to some new end, just every effect becomes a cause of a new effect.

    The counterpoint to the cliche of @TiredThinker's title, "The end justifies the means", is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The two balance out exactly, with no residue of wisdom remaining, as it commonly the case with folk sayings.

    So if the end is to end all wars, that justifies the war to end all wars? This was the thinking that 'justified' the most pointless war of all time, WW1. This is the thinking that justifies state torture in America today. It is always a false claim because it is only ever invoked to justify immorality. One Does not need to justify kindness with the intention to better another's life, but one needs to justify cruelty in some such way. The good needs no justification, but only the bad.
  • Have we (modern culture) lost the art of speculation?
    It seems that we have become so preoccupied with practicalities that we have lost touch with the abstract and speculative — schopenhauer1

    Philosophers are the thought police of consumer society, and materialism declares all such talk useless and therefore meaningless. This is amply demonstrated by the impossibility of understanding the meaning of even the simple word 'modern' without a material definition giving the date of modernity's advent.

    Edit: In the sense that the op has used it, I would date 'modern' to be about the end of the Victorian period and to correspond to the abolition of death as a topic in polite society - replaced of course by sex. The awareness of one's mortality is a great stimulus to unpractical speculations.
  • Mind, Soul, Spirit and Self: To What Extent Are These Concepts Useful or Not Philosophically?
    Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. — George Orwell, 1984

    Meaning is use. These words are meaningless. Therefore you must not use them.
  • The Bodies
    Where once we had a person, now we have baptized them into a schizophrenic: trust the doctor's word over your own feelings. — Moliere

    What is interesting is that this is scientific magic. The psychiatrist actually believes his own magic. With marriage, at least civil marriage, we all understand the formal, contractual nature of the event But for the psychiatrist the name is the disease and the disease is real. The better comparison though would be excommunication.
  • The Bodies
    a word which turns a person from a critical observer to a person who needs a cure? — Moliere

    Sounds like a magic spell. The sort of delegitimising incantation a psychiatrist uses by way of dehumanising his clients into patients. Your thoughts are sick, and the cure can only begin with your acquiescence . And low, the prince is turned into a frog. Personally, I'm a sceptic, so I always kiss every frog I meet, just in case.
  • Greater Good Theodicy, Toy Worlds, Invincible Arguments
    Now, if you agree that I can change the physics of The Matrix, let's talk about physical suffering. Have you ever played a video game and used a "god mode" cheat code where, no matter how much damage you're supposed to take, you don't take any of the damage? Bullets hit you, but your health doesn't go down, for instance. Well, that is very crude, but isn't it conceivable that I could change this Matrix so that the people in it don't suffer damage from being hit by bullets in the same way? — Astro Cat

    Excellent analogy. A game you cannot lose is a dull game where winning is no achievement and has no value. Games have to have baddies so that they can be overcome. A life without danger and suffering is a life without meaning. Heaven is intolerably dull, and that is why we are all here in this miserable world, trying to imagine heaven, and realise it on Earth. When god makes everything right, it's game over. No point in cooking, everything tastes wonderful, no point climbing mountains, you can never fall off. No point in philosophy, all the answers are available to everyone already.
  • Philosophy Is Comedy
    ↪ucarr
    No reason to get excited, the thief, he kindly spoke
    There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
    But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
    So let us not talk falsely, the hour is getting late     — Bob somebody-or-other
  • The Bodies
    Step one is to identify the specific measurable problem you have, step two is to arrive at some theoretically reasonable method for resolving it, step three is to implement that method, and step four is to measure your results to determine if you've been able to resolve the problem identified in step one. — Hanover

    1. This is insane.
    2. There can be no objective method for dealing with subjects.
    3. The results of personal interactions are immeasurable.
    4. The uselessness of this approach is easily measurable by the vast increase in mental illness that so-called scientific psychology has produced by its attempt to objectify social relations between subjects.

    If you treat people as objects, you will only learn how to manipulate them; people subjected to manipulation will suffer damage.
  • Philosophy Is Comedy
    ...philosophy is life. — ucarr
    Philosophy Is Comedy. — ucarr

    Divine comedy therefore.
  • Finding Love in Friendship
    Hi there, Royal Bank of Scotland. Well this is what matters in this life isn't it? Not a dull topic at all. Can we call it sexual attraction?

    look at it from a different angel — RBS

    I'm not sure if Eros/Cupid is an angel or not, but we have a void in modern society where there used to be religion and propriety. We have to negotiate relationships that might include helpless infants on an ad hoc, individual basis. There is a thing called 'commitment'; you know that 'for better or worse' clause that used to be in a marriage. "I might kill my wife, but not divorce her."

    Romance is mostly fantasy, and that is dangerous. There is a delicate balance of friendship and hard work that goes in to a long term relationship, that ideally will keep the flame of passion alight in the long term. R_E_S_P_E_C_T goes along way, as the song has it.

    What will you put up with from a friend? Can you have a really irritating friend? How many good orgasms will make you put up with an arsehole?Who gets to keep the kids and the record collection? I'm not sure what your real question is...
  • What happened to the Weltanschauung thread?
    ↪Agent Smith
    I just don't see the sinister or aggression of an Agent - no insult intended.
  • What happened to the Weltanschauung thread?
    ↪Agent Smith
    Other than that, you're charitable and friendly in your interactions and we would like to be able to keep you here if we can. — Baden

    This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I'm feeling just great, guys, and I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me. — Heart of Gold computer
  • Brexit
    ↪Benkei
    Yeah, and look how well the NHS is doing on the extra £450M. per week!
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    Who said united we stand, divided we fall? What about Ben Franklin who said "we must hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately " — Agent Smith

    Yes, leaders always want to unite us. Yes, loyalty is a good thing if society is good. But Hitler was a leader who united people, and all too few of his people stood against the tide. Sometimes falling is what is needful for a society gone rogue. Sheep are social, men sometimes need to discriminate, and may sometimes need to stand alone. In a sense, that is what makes a leader - one who does not just follow.
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    the objective here seems to be to teach a lesson to wit that you won't last 5 minutes in the wild unless you have someone watching your six. Our ancestors were no fools, mon ami. — Agent Smith

    That was not my experience. What I learned from spending time alone is that my feeling experience comes from within; there are happy days and miserable days, calm days and agitated days, and this emotional weather, if I may put it that way, is nothing to do with other people or the environment. This gives one a different perspective on all the social relationships one has, and one's relationship to the vicissitudes of life. One understands better what one brings to a relationship or a situation, and how one is responsible for one's response to it. In this way, time alone teaches one how to be socially responsible, which means knowing when to cooperate, and when to stand alone and in opposition. This latter is terribly important if one is going to be something more than a sheep in one's social relations.
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    Humans are social creatures and there's an instinctive desire for company. I believe there are psychological studies that show those who live solitary lives have shorter lifespans and suffer more illnesses. As Jack Cummins alluded to, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is on target (social life is a sine qua non). — Agent Smith

    Yes. But whence the stress? If you don't know, that's fine, or if you don't care. I stress the word 'stress' there to emphasise the tension between what you said for yourself, and what you say above for humanity.

    Maslow's hierarchy of needs is on target (social life is a sine qua non). — Agent Smith

    It is a sine qua non for infants and children. However, there is a tradition in some tribes that the adolescent needs to go alone to the wilderness, or perhaps on a pilgrimage to 'find themselves' or to find their 'spirit animal', or their vocation, or God. Zarathustra goes up into the mountains, and then returns changed to give something to society instead of just taking from it.
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    Being alone is stressful, as I said. — Agent Smith

    Can you explain why, or how, the stress arises? In engineering, stress is produced when there are two or more forces working against each other. The left hand pushes against the bow as the right hand pulls back the bowstring.

    So on the face of it, I would expect that stress would be produced when two people are wanting different things - Smith wants companionship, but Cummins wants to be alone, maybe. But you say that Smith alone is more stressed?

    I'm wondering if other people function as a distraction rather than a relaxant, from a stress that is always there in the background?
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    If one were to change the language just a little...

    Why can human understanding not understand human understanding?

    ... it becomes rather easy to see that the mind is not big enough to encompass the mind, and if it were big enough, it would be too big to be encompassed by the mind.

    One cannot stand under oneself.
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