I've read the first two chapters of that Scarry book (out of four) and they - along with Alphonso Lingis's "Carrion Body, Carrion Utterance" - set me permanently against the use of torture. It's some of the most powerful phenomenology I've ever read.

It's not meant to explain anything; it's intended to make a conceptual space in the mind (ha ha) for 'the virtual' which is not where it seems to be, and not what it seems to be, yet is not something else or somewhere else, and again yet is perfectly intelligible and real. — unenlightened

So it's circumscription of conceptual space? Via negativa?

Hah, I like it. There's actually quite a long philosophical lineage of reflection (hah) on the 'being' of the image in the mirror, one that culminated in the scholastic idea of the 'species being' (cognate of 'specular', along with 'special'), which has the peculiar status of being neither a real thing 'out there' (ens reale) nor something merely in the head (ens rationis), but something in-between both. I've not considered thinking about this in terms of consciousness, but it's an interesting way to go about it.

I'm still a bit fuzzy on the specifics of what the mirror analogy is meant to explain though, with respect to consciousness. There's a novel vocabulary, to be sure: like the image, consciousness is virtual with respect to what is actual 'out there'; but is this just another way of speaking of consciousness as a so-called epiphenomenon, a surface effect according to which all the weight of reality takes place elsewhere? But is this an explanation, or it is closer to a phenomenology of consciousness? And if the latter - as it sounds like - what accounts for this phenomenology?

I suspect the OP simply meant 'as a discipline' rather than 'as a science'. Be nice yall.

Raymond Ruyer - Neofinalism
Elizabeth Grosz - The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

Turns out, holidays are not as great for reading time as I thought. Brought 4 books with me and only got through one. Too busy eating and playing in beaches. It's a hard life.

Damn. He discovered the thriving hive of postmodern lefty neo-Marxist socialist gender feminism that we are (might have left off a few adjectives there). With Thorongil as our leader of course. Off to the gulag he went.

I really enjoyed that review, lol. I've read very little of Pinker and nothing I've read about him convinces me that it's worth my time. Given that I think both Chomskian linguistics and evolutionary psychology are, without exaggeration, the two biggest intellectual black holes of the last few decades, I can't imagine having to take seriously anyone who champions both.

One thing to note about Bergson's concept of duration is that it is not, despite popular misreadings, limited to our/human psychology. For Bergson, our experience of duration attests to the fact that there are durations in the multiple, some of which we occupy, but many of which are, as he puts it "superior and inferior to us". Bergson's famous example, in Matter and Memory regarding having to wait for sugar to dissolve, attests to the fact that that are durations with which we do not coincide, that have 'their own time', a kind of temporal autonomy not indexed by us. Deleuze explains: "Bergson's famous formulation, 'I must wait until the sugar dissolves' has a still broader meaning than is given to it by its context. It signifies that my own duration, such as I live it in the impatience of waiting, for example, serves to reveal other durations that beat to other rhythms, that differ in kind from mine.... My duration essentially has the power to disclose other durations." (Deleuze, Bergsonism).

The audacity of Bergson is to have argued for the existence of durations that are as much a part of 'physical processes' as to our psychology - although he does not quite put it that way. One consequence of this is that there are for Bergson times in the multiple, not just one big block of impersonal time that everything belongs 'in', but temporalities that belong in some manner to each and every process of individuation.

What I am saying is that many people derive beliefs or ideas from evolutionary theory that are beyond the scope of the science. — Wayfarer

So correct the damn science and stop playing the 'science is bad for philosophy' card. It's a disservice to both science and philosophy, the antagonistic relation between which you've done more to foster than almost any other poster on this forum.

*Whenever it helps you pitch your spiritualism as a 'reasonable' alternative to the scientific caricatures with which you like to tar science with, even though - especially though - you know better. Nothing worse than a 'reasonable' extremist.

Ah yes, the most toxic poster on the forum, speaking in defense of tone, how quaint.

I quite liked the suggestion, made elsewhere, that the solution is to ban schools to protect guns. I think that would be reasonable. After all, only one of these things is protected by the constitution, and when push comes to shove...

You see that in many comments and posts on this Forum... So I'm perfectly aware of the 'myth of all traits being adaptive' — Wayfarer

Yet you have never once ceased to bring up the adaption myth when talking about evolution, almost always without acknowledging its mythic status, and instead of correcting the science, use it time and time again as a crutch with which to browbeat it. Whether or not you are 'perfectly aware', your consistent instinct to is wield the worst of scientific interpretations in order to characterize the field of science in its generality, making it the conveinent 'other' against which you can push your spiritualist agenda. Your rhetoric is consistently dishonest in this respect, and of all the apparent plethoa of posters who link evolution with the adaptationist myth, you are without doubt its number one practitioner. The irony seems to be that the more the science begins to align to your philosophical POV, the less likely you are to mention it, because it rids you of your ability to demonize it. A rejigged anxiety of influence, l think.

I didn't make much of the 'timeless space' paper, — fdrake

Just briefly on this, my interest was less in the science itself than in the rhetorical moves made within it: the illigitimate jump from spatializing the 'fourth dimension' to declaring a timeless universe. It's illustrative of the 'scientific' instinct to do away with time, even when - perhaps especially when - there lacks any warrant to do so. Will come back to the big post later hopefully.

The block universe is essentially conceiving of the vector space (x,y,z,t) as a space-time manifold - as if when all components were free to vary along their ranges, we have a continuous set of snapshots of all events. This isn't implied, what is implied is that for a given equation of relativistic motion there is a space-time 'block' corresponding to its trajectory over space through time. It would be odd to consider space time an invariant block when the things within it can distort all of its motions with their particular properties.

I thought you would've quite liked this, special relativity produces a multiplicity of blocks and the Lorentz transform renders the blocks reconcilable. Which is to say, with a more ontological framing, the unfolding of the universe is relative to the trajectories of its localising elements - the differentials of movements - but the category of relativistic motion nevertheless has a clearly demarcated set of potentials. — fdrake

I know I briefly addressed this exact passage in my post prior, but on further reflection, there's more to be said with respect to the question of time, which was what this discussion was motivated by. While I still do like this, I think this actually speaks quite nicely to Bergson's point here re: what I referred to as a desubstantialization of time: to the degree that every space-time block is relative to the trajectory of it's localising elements, what is missing or simply untheorized is precisely the passage from one trajectory to another. In other words what is missing, or rather, what is simply assumed is time itself. Time is 'given': given this space-time trajectory, that is the corresponding space-time block. But the passage of time itself is precisely what takes place 'before' (logically speaking) STR 'kicks in', as it were.

It's important to emphasise that this is not a 'fault' of STR. It speaks simply to its scope, and what kind of implications can be drawn from it. When I said that STR does not provide a substantial theory of time, this is what I was getting at. Time itself takes place 'behind it's back', as it were, and STR explores - in a totally legitimate way - what can be predicted given that fact of time's passage. But this passage itself does not fall within the scope of STR. One cannot draw a temporal ontology from it without losing the very thing it ought to account for: time.

--

The article linked by Rich above is actually quite fascinating to read in this regard (https://phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension.html): It begins quite well by noting that "it’s more correct to imagine spacetime as four dimensions of space", and that "Minkowski space is not 3D + T, it is 4D". But from there, instead of concluding that, as a result, STR is simply silent on the question of time (i.e. it says nothing about it either way - which is the whole point of their own reconceptualisation!!), it infers instead that "the universe is “timeless” (!!!). It's basically a classic case of looking for the lost key under the streetlamp and, not finding it there, concluding that there was never any key to begin with. But what it 'wrong' here is not the theory - which in fact, the scientists have exactly right (insofar as they correctly recognise, perhaps more acutely than any before, that it's four dimensions of space at play) - but the implications drawn from it. Excellent science, abysmal philosophy.

Thereby subjugating every human attribute to adaptive necessity. — Wayfarer

At some point in the next couple of weeks I will do a thread on this, but the idea that 'we are all evolved by a process of natural selection' = 'every human attribute is an adaptive necessity' is bogus science and that fact that you keep repeating this line is a testament less to the poverty of evolutionary thought than an ignorance regarding how evolution works. NS lays down limits, constraints on the possible, it does not imply that 'every human attribute is an adaptive necessity'. NS is a 'baggy' principle such that there is plenty of trait variation which NS is simply blind too. And as is usually the case, this line completely forgets that sexual selection is an entirely different selection mechanism whose influence on phylogenesis is both massive and overlooked. Please please please stop perpetuating this vicious lie.

Some basic reading on this:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13615-evolution-myths-everything-is-an-adaptation/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/education/2015/05/biggest-evolution-misconceptions-part-1/ [see 'Misconception #2']

I dunno, 'oh common man' has a lovely tinge of aristocratic scorn which I quite like.

:grin:

This isn't implied, what is implied is that for a given equation of relativistic motion there is a space-time 'block' corresponding to its trajectory over space through time. It would be odd to consider space time an invariant block when the things within it can distort all of its motions with their particular properties.

I thought you would've quite liked this, special relativity produces a multiplicity of blocks and the Lorentz transform renders the blocks reconcilable. Which is to say, with a more ontological framing, the unfolding of the universe is relative to the trajectories of its localising elements - the differentials of movements - but the category of relativistic motion nevertheless has a clearly demarcated set of potentials. — fdrake

I never thought about it this way, and you're right, I really do like this. My first thought was to Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, in which he aims to "make substance turn upon the modes", rather than the other way around in which it's usually taken. And this too, is a kind of 'making space-time turn upon differentials of (localized) movement', rather than the other way around. I think then that my general sympathy with the Bergsonian interpretation comes out of the general self-interpretation of scientists - including and perhaps especially by Einstein - who drop the 'for a given equation of relativistic motion' qualifier and take SR as an approach to time tout court. This latter was, in any case, how I've always been thought to understand the ontology of time implied by SR.

I will try to have a more interesting and in depth response later if I can, but I'm still on holiday/traveling right now and I'm off to Vietnam in two days which is going to be even worse for me posting-wise, so I'll hedge and say here that I really appreciate the response (it's also 3am where I am right now so... :/ )

They were all suffering from Blanchot worship, who actually did manage to almost never appear in any photos. Foucault expressed a similar desire ("I dreamt of being Blanchot", he once said).

Ah, yes I suppose I'll get around to it. I'm on holiday rite now actually so let me find some time to give it a deserving reponse.

Heh, ever since Heiddeger it's been a game of pin-the-metaphysics-on-the-philosopher as though a pejorative. There's something incredibly stifling and opressive about the one-upmanship involved in all of it, and with any luck, we're seeing the end of the 'end of metaphysics'.

In fact not that much is written on this distinction in current philosophy. — Wayfarer

But distinctions only matter to the degree that something is at stake in them: that they constitute a difference that makes a difference. Your particular favoured distinction is one with theological import: but absent that context, it is not clear that it has any significance whatsoever. But of course, everywhere you might care to look, distinctions of the kind are made: ontic and ontological (Heidegger), virtual, actual, possible (Bergson, Deleuze), real, symbolic, imaginary (Lacanian psychoanalysis), ens reale, ens rationis, esse objectivum (Deely, Bains), formal, numerical, real distinctions (Descartes, Alliez), and so on and so on. Each responds to a particular problem, aims to clarify and help think through a certain issue.

Your particular issue is how much you can desubstantialize and delegitimate this world in favour of the neverneverland of ideality and divinity, which is fine if you're into that kind of thing, but not everyone is. That said, I find the being/existence distinction useful to the extent that we can talk about the being of all sorts of things that don't exist just fine. Existence is a largely trivial affair anyway, which is something that Quine quite nicely pointed out all those years ago.

You really ought to read Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. If you can put aside your weird nouopormorphic take on Being, you might find much to agree with: "For the Greeks “Being” says constancy in a twofold sense: (1) standing-in-itself as arising and standing forth (phusis); (2) but, as such, “constantly,” that is, enduringly, abiding (ousia). Not-to-be accordingly means to step out of such constancy that has stood-forth in itself: existasthai—“existence,” “to exist” means, for the Greeks, precisely not-to-be. The thoughtlessness and vapidity with which one uses the words “existence” and “to exist” as designations for Being offer fresh evidence of our alienation from Being and from an originally powerful and definite interpretation of it." (Introduction, p. 70).

I am interested in references to philosophers that distinguish what is real from what exists. — Wayfarer

I would only be slightly callous if I said literally every philosopher from Heidegger onward (or at least, every philosopher familiar with, and conversant in, the Heideggerian philosophy), would make use of, or at least engage with, any such distinction. In fact even before him Husserl famously made all sorts of distinctions between the real, the irreal, and the unreal, all to be put to use to their own specific technical uses. Again, these distinctions are not categorical, and there's no reason they should be, unless motivated by a specific philosophical problematic.

Leaving aside your usual idiosyncratic and totally non-standard understanding of 'Being' as exclusively pertaining to the 'human' or to 'knowledge' or whatever anthropormorphic reading you and only you like to use, I would suggest that there is no serious philosophy that has ever not taken seriously the distinction between these terms. It is commonly acknowledged, for instance, there there might be a being of fiction no less than a being of the social or the material, and that for the most part questions of being are relatively unrealted to questions of existence.

To the degree that there is confusion around these terms, its generally down to both a lack of farmiliarity, and the fact that language is what we make of it, at the end of the day. Your motivation and agenda, as always, is theistic, but its useful to be irreverent to language every now and then as well.

If by 'read tons' you mean 'watched a few Youtube videos'.

A so-called Bergsonian who proclaims that there is no such thing as illusion. The only conclusion to draw is that he’s never read Bergson in his life insofar as both Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution continually make it their aim to… dispel illusions (MM: "But we find here once more, in a new form, the ever-recurrent illusion which, throughout this work, we have endeavored to dis­pel…” p. 141/ CE: “[instantaneous juxtaposition in space of time is] an illusion, no doubt, but an illusion that is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as the human mind!” p. 361). Almost everything Bergson wrote was set against the ‘illusions’ of spatialisation that he constantly wrote against.

As for everything in life being ‘exactly how it is being experienced’ - again, one wonders how any one calling themselves a Bergsonian could utter such crap. Matter and Memory famously extolls its reader to place themselves at the well known “turn of experience”, where we must disconnect experience from perception in order to install ourselves in duration, which requires us “to give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, [which is] is far from easy.” This just is the method of intuition, one which requires a critical and discerning effort at not taking experience for what it is, insofar as experience is bound up with precisely the many illusions that Bergson aims to draw our attention to.

Merleau-Ponty once famously wrote of the ‘two Bergsons’: "The truth is that there are two Bergsonisms. There is that audacious one, when Bergson’s philosophy fought and… fought well. And there is that other one after the victory, persuaded in advance about what Bergson took a long time to find, and already provided with concepts while Bergson himself created his own. When Bergsonian insights are identified with the vague cause of spiritualism or some other entity, they lose their bite; they are generalized and minimized. What is left is only a retrospective or external Bergsonism. . . . Established Bergsonism distorts Bergson. Bergson disturbed; it reassures. Bergson was a conquest; Bergsonism defends and justifies Bergson. Bergson was in contact with things; Bergsonism is a collection of accepted opinions.”

As someone who continually identifies Bergson with precisely the "vague causes of spiritualism”, it’s no secret which Bergson Rich subscribes to.

:D

Bergson on the poverty of what he calls finalism: "But radical finalism is quite as unacceptable, and for the same reason. The doctrine of teleology, in its extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz for example, implies that things and beings merely realize a program previously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus understood is only inverted mechanism." (CE, p. 45).

And on the poverty of vitalism: "There lies the stumbling-block of the vitalistic theories. We shall not reproach them, as is ordinarily done, with replying to the question by the question itself: the "vital principle" may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally while mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance" (CE, p. 48).

And again on how "It would be futile to try to assign to life an end, in the human sense of the word. To speak of an end is to think of a preexisting model which has only to be realized. It is to suppose, therefore, that all is given, and that the future can be read in the present. It is to believe that life, in its movement and in its entirety, goes to work like our intellect, which is only a motionless and fragmentary view of life, and which naturally takes its stand outside of time". (CE, p. 58).

On why Plato sucks: "Plato was the first to set up the theory that to know the real consists in finding its Idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame already at our disposal as if we implicitly possessed universal knowledge. But this belief is natural to the human intellect, always engaged as it is in determining under what former heading it shall catalogue any new object; and it may be said that, in a certain sense, we are all born Platonists. Nowhere is the inadequacy of this method so obvious as in theories of life." (CE, pps. 55-56).

The whole book is just so good.

But I love Bergson. And of course you haven't 'read such revision of Bergson as this'. You're entirely uneducated. But enough with you.

Bergson is a fantastic author and even better philosopher, but I wish he had better advocates than the likes of Rich, whose Bergsonism is a caricature, and whose posts are not worth discussing. With respect to teleology, it might be worth noting that the entire trajectory of Creative Evolution (the book) is governed by the need to avoid both what Bergson calls 'mechanism' and 'finalism' - i.e. teleology in any strict sense. It's whole effect was to chart something like a middle path between the two, and in many ways Bergson's understanding of evolution actually comes much closer to the modern understanding of it than most people might realise.

Bergson was entirely right, for instance, that more than sheer randomness was needed to account for phenomena like converent evolution - a major theme of Creative Evolution - but he, along with the science of his time, simply did not have the proper tools to explain it. The Elan vital does more to name the problem than to account for it, but that there was a problem, Bergson was entirely right about. Bergson would have been delighted, I think, with the discovery of evolvability, in which evolution enhances its own ability to generate adaptive traits, a kind of 'directed randomness' or accelerated search function which is entirely explicable on scientific grounds alone. So too would he have loved the advent of epigenetics and the deepening work on genetic assimilation, the principles of which are presciently intuited in so much of Creative Evolution.

Similarly with Einstein, Bergson definitively fucked up in the debate in terms of his own positive account of simultaneity, but he was also entirely right that Einstein's own account did indeed leave out time in any substantive sense.

At first, you said it has everything to do with the syllogism — Agustino

If you can read 'hand waving' as 'everything to do with', then I suggest you brush up on your comprehension skills.

For example, as if there was no connection between "the understanding of the cake" and "the cake". — Agustino

Irrelavant. What exists is the understanding of God, not 'God in the understanding', with is just an ungrammatical obfuscatory piece of sophistry.

Noooo, the flourish of color from the dress is what makes the portrait. That re-framing also messes with the rule of thirds.

I love, love, love both portaits. Think they both look absolutely stunning.

You think reputable philosophers like Alvin Plantinga would "purposefully" word an argument in a misleading way? — Agustino

That Alvin Plantinga is in any way reputable is an indictment on the intelligence of our species.

Regardless of that, I don't think the argument is misleading. That a cake exists in the understanding does not tell me whether or not it (being finite) also exists in reality — Agustino

I've given reasons why the formulation is grammatically suspect, reasons which you've not addressed. Brute insistence does not a discussion make.

No, we're not. This is something that is involved in understanding the concept of God, so that we can say that such a concept is present in the understanding. — Agustino

It also has nothing to do with the syllogism at hand, so has zero import on the argument. I will ignore any argument by you that invokes this pseudo-distinction.

God really exists in the understanding, that is the claim of premise — Agustino

Yeah, and the premise is nonsense, or at least worded in a purposely misleading way. That a cake 'exists in the understanding' means precisely that the cake doesn't exist, or rather, what exists is the 'understanding' of a cake. This is elementary school grammar, and it's insulting and embarrassing that this needs to be explained to anyone over the age of 10: the understanding of the cake, and not the cake, is the subject of the sentence. The wording of the premise is absolute sophistical bullshit. As ever, God is a grammar mistake. As for the hand waving distinction between 'finite and 'infinite beings', that's just what you're trying to prove, so to invoke that distinction in the argument's defence is just question begging claptrap. Next.

Yeah, Charlie I don't think you understand what's going on at all.

I'll have to get back to you later on - I'm heading overseas in a few hours and might be MIA for a while. In the meantime, here is why God is a lobster [pdf].

Luckily, existence is bivalent: either something exists, or it does not. The rest, like your post, is word-play.

The conclusion is in accordance with the assumption. — Agustino

Not in your formulation. Compare:

(1) God exists in the understanding, but not in reality [original]
(7) Hence, it is false that God would exist in the understanding, but not in reality. [Your forumlation]

If (1) is P, (7) is not ¬P. My formulation works because I've qualified the proposition. You've altogether changed it. This is just a failure of basic logical form, not to speak of content.

Even if this is granted, the "would" is coupled with the if of God existing in the understanding, not with the if of God existing in reality. — Agustino

You don't understand. The point of changing 'is' to 'would be' is to expose the fact that 'existence in the understanding' is hypothetical to begin with. To 'exist in the understanding' is precisely to not exist, or, if we want to be consistent and introduce some terminology, it is to have 'unactualized existence'. So the point is that the Being with 'existence in reality' is simply a 'better hypothetical', but a hypothetical nonetheless.

This is the whole conceit of the - in fact any - ontological proof: it grants existence to what, by definition, does not exist. It equivocates on the whole concept of existence, confusing, from the very beginning, ideality and actuality, as @fdrake rightly pointed out.

Then all the argument shows is that a being who is imagined to be real and have God's properties is greater than a being who is imagined to be imaginary and have God's properties. — Michael

Exactly right - and every single 'ontological argument' does this.

No, you haven't fixed it. You've made it into a non-sequitur. — Agustino

I didn't make it into a non-sequitur. It is a non-sequitur. As for this:

(7) Hence, it is false that God would exist in the understanding, but not in reality. — Alvin Plantinga

Leaving aside that you've changed the sentence structure so that it no longer reflects the proposition (1) that it needs to mirror so as to disprove (the entire point of the exercise), let's not forget that 'would' functions here as a conditional (grammatically, a 'second conditional'): every 'would' must be coupled with an 'if', or a least a condition under which it 'would be the case'. And that condition, in this case, is precisely... you guessed it, 'if God existed'. Hence the facile nature of all 'ontological arguments'.

Modal arguments have the distinction dissolved in the background, hidden in the accessibility relation. — fdrake

Yup. The modal crap is just another way of burying the petitio principii deeper and in a more technical and even less obvious way.