It's what I do. Once a dialogue stops being a dialogue, it's no longer "productive".

If nothing survived our transitory being then there would be no progress. But there is progress, culture advances, knowledge grows. So in some way, we do participate in a collective enterprise that does endure. Which is meaningful.

he was unpleasant to nearly everyone — Jamal

Nice epitaph.

Within a Budding Grove (À la recherche du temps perdu #2)
by Marcel Proust

Yes, the Proust. It's really, really good. I guess I envisioned it would be a bit of a chore, but quite the opposite. It carries you right along.

We are the only ones capable of measuring the circumstances in time. — javi2541997

As it happens I'm just reading one of the longest novels in the world, whose main themes are the ways in which memories extrude themselves into life, and the ways in which things actually become memorable.

Granted. But even lower animals can learn, which is a form of temporal-awareness, I guess.

Isn't a quality of "realness" that it's immutably real, though. I would say so. — neonspectraltoast

What does "immutably real" mean? The essence of property (?) real is that it is itself a complete characterization. Things are not "more real" or "less real." Or "apparently real."

For that matter, this would also be saying that mutability is not real, which is clearly false.

So, I am not confident enough to say that the past is "real" — javi2541997

The past was real, now it is past, a real past. We are in contact with the past constantly, as every moment incessantly falls into it. If the now has come to have special significance for us, it is due to the fact that we appear to be able to exercise a real influence on the state of affairs in which we find ourselves. So the "temporally inflated" now of a conscious being reflects a state of potential doing. If a large rock falls off a cliff face and then gets poised on the edge of another cliff, just barely balanced, that is a "now," a metastable state on the brink of altering to something else through human intervention.

2022 Summary. My favourite fictions this year were The Glass Bead Game and Jude the Obscure. For non-fiction, I really enjoyed The Dawn of Everything.

• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
• Foundations Of Cognitive Science by Michael I. Posner
• The Forever War (The Forever War, #1) by Joe Haldeman
• The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku
• Conceptual Issues in Psychology by Elizabeth R. Valentine
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• The Sociology of Knowledge by Werner Stark
• The Mantle of Kendis-Dai (Starshield, #1) by Margaret Weis
• The Quintessence of Socialism (Classic Reprint) by Albert Schaffle
• Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber by Anthony Giddens
• Foundation (Foundation, #1) by Isaac Asimov
• Foundation and Empire (Foundation, #2) by Isaac Asimov
• Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov
• Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov
• Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
• The Immortal Mind by Ervin Laszlo
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
• Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos by Peter E. Gordon
• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle
• Political Liberalism by John Rawls
• Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy
• Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding
• Lectures on Ideology and Utopia by Paul Ricoeur
• Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf
• The Intelligence of the Cosmos: Why Are We Here? by Ervin Laszlo
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
• The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Classic Editions) by Ernst Cassirer
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot
• Critique of Instrumental Reason by Max Horkheimer
• Knowledge and Human Interests by Jurgen Habermas
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy 1796-99 by Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects by Michael D. Jackson
• Reconstruction in Philosophy by John Dewey
• Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective by Karl-Otto Apel
• Lord Foul's Bane (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #1) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The Illearth War (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #2) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The Power That Preserves (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #3) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The Wounded Land (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, #1) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• The One Tree (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, #2) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• White Gold Wielder (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, #3) by Stephen R. Donaldson
• Introduction to Systems Theory by Niklas Luhmann
• Oneself as Another by Paul Ricoeur
• Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

I've seen this book mentioned a few times on TPF. Looks really good.

But in the grand scheme of things, the harsh truth is nothing really matters — niki wonoto

Speak for yourself. Meaning and purpose are created through effort, not bestowed. Maybe you just need to try harder.

Yes, I have been wanting to tackle this for some time. I'm transitioning to semi-retirement in the new year so I can make the time to do it justice. First impression, it is pleasantly readable.

Swann's Way
(À la recherche du temps perdu #1)
by Marcel Proust

ISO...lost time. Thanks Amazon!
Boxed Set

What is the pursuit of understanding in your opinion? To me it sounds very vague. — Shawn

Broad, but not vague. For me, everyone on here shares a common love of thinking and expressing thought, albeit across a very broad spectrum of subjects. Hopefully there is enough diversity that everyone can find something to his taste. I'm leery to some extent of standards of quality, as Schopenhauer was, as they can easily lead to stultification. The mods seem to manage all that handily.

I really liked this book, especially the exploration of the wisdom and depths of the indigenous world-view.

Cartesian Meditations
by Edmund Husserl

There is a section in Neurocomputational Perspective where Paul Churchland speculates that, if we could develop a deep enough theoretical understanding of the mechanics of brain, we would be capable of having direct experiences of those processes, the sensation of neural events. The ultimate embedding of belief I guess you could say.

Do you think that the pursuit of understanding should be enjoyable or challenging?

There is something very odd about the demand to give a description of having an experience which captures the difference between experiencing something and describing it. — Ludwig V

Perhaps this relates to the extent that having a description of an experience can thereby alter that experience. In any field where technical competence can be enhanced through learning (i.e. art, music, etc.) that enhanced understanding definitely changes the nature of the lived experience (the experience of a symphony by an untrained listener versus a skilled musician, for example). Add to that the fact that descriptions inherently transcend the isolation of individual perspective towards an expanded, dialogic-interpersonal version of reality.

We are not computers. Contra Chomsky, we are not computational, representational rationalists. Seeing something as something is recognizing that thing. Recognition is a creative act , not a representational comparison. To recognize a thing is to see it as both familiar and novel in some freshly relevant way. Belief is thus fecund rather than calculative. It is also affective. Things matter to us in affectively valuative ways. — Joshs

I would go so far as to say "what we are" is very much at issue and up for grabs, in the sense that any interpretation of that oriented around basic facts can be ratified through agreement and understanding. And insofar as the generally accepted and historically transmitted consensus about "what we are" is realized, beliefs are constitutive of that thing (which is actualized in that way, which I see as a good general description of consciousness).

Definitely start with Theory of Justice. Political Liberalism expands upon Theory of Justice. Both are well worth reading.

Animals don't operate on beliefs. Animals don't have language. So I've never been very impressed with views that try to explain animal behavior in this way. Don't see the usefulness of it. — Mikie

Since we essentially evolved from animals, do you think that there is a jump somewhere from having no beliefs to having beliefs? I would imagine the capacity evolved by degrees.

Here is a little piece of experimental technology that may be useful in this project (which has merit I think).

The Fibonacci sequence exemplifies a pattern. It has a purely numeric representation, and it is widely instantiated in nature. Recently, researchers attempting to overcome quantum decoherence subjected qbits to laser pulses based on the Fibonacci sequence. In so doing, they created a new phase of matter with two time dimensions, which indeed enhances quantum coherence.

I find this utterly fascinating, because not only are patterns instantiated in nature, but nature is also receptive to patterns apparently.

New Phase of Matter and Fibonacci Sequence

As a though experiment, what would a world in which free will "violates the normal functioning" of the laws of physics look like? How would we detect such a violation? — Echarmion

Given that the normal functioning of the laws of physics encompasses both entropy and negentropy, the possibilities are pretty much endless already.....

Sam Harris argues that in the chain of causation the buck does not stop and our "free will" cannot interrupt the determinist chain. — Edmund

What determinist chain?

We are having a "discussion" about free will. A "discussion" is something which can only exist in the context of free will. So anyone who proposes there is no free will is not proposing anything, since there is no free will and no one to propose.

In the chapter "An Agentless Semantics of Action" (Oneself As Another) Ricouer differentiates between what happens and why it happens, and argues for the causal efficacy of motivations. From a strictly material-cognitivist perspective, organisms evolve an internal feature of hysteresis, which is a processing delay between an input signal and any resultant output. This occurs at the most primitive level, in the formation of a cell membrane for example; and at the more sophisticated level of encephalization, and the evolution and elongation of neuronal dendrites. The fact that a complex cognitive system can amass knowledge means that a system that "knows" can and will act differently from an otherwise identical system that does not know. So there is no determinist chain in the context of a thinking thing, at least, to the extent that thing can be motivated by knowledge or reason. Which coincides with the traditional belief that thinking beings are free when they act based upon reason, but are not free when they act out of ignorance.

I wouldn't go that far. I don't consider animals as having beliefs, tacit or otherwise. I think that's an anthropomorphic projection. — Mikie

Actually, there is quite a bit of research on animal beliefs. I don't think they have a lot of them or that they are overly complex, mostly related to what we would call practical reason. Lower order of beliefs, lower order of consciousness. Fits my hypothesis.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200617145957.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,and%20empirically%20investigate%20animal%20beliefs.

Is it useful to view human behavior this way? — Mikie

Not only human behaviour, I would go so far as to say this is what characterizes consciousness as such.

The question then becomes that of the accessibility of beliefs. Beliefs can be embedded to the point of being instincts. Or traditions. Or superstitions. Or habits. Or, rarely, reasoned and practiced efforts. We are our beliefs. To what extent are we shaping our own beliefs?

I believe that every behavior can be interpreted as ethical but we aren't bound to be ethical at all times. Unless, they're in the military or something. — Shawn

I guess my take is that people are always being ethical. Even when they fail to be ethical, they are manifesting an ethic, just not what we construe as a positive one. Realizing this can be a strong motivator to reflect and perhaps to begin to try to enact a more healthy ethic.

Human behaviour is by definition a manifestation of an ethic, which is a specific instantiation of ethics. In other words, all behaviour is ethical (or unethical) as the case may be; all behaviour is interpretable in ethical terms. Isn't it?

The philosopher's task — Metaphysician Undercover

Is it the philosopher's task or aspiration? It isn't like the relevant information hasn't been presented. The public at large is responsible for what it consumes. Perhaps philosophy should try to sensationalize itself?

Well, the concept of consciousness as primarily intentional is often a starting point in phenomenology (i.e Brentano). From consciousness being directed in the sense of intentionality it seems a short step to being directed in the sense of conation. It seems an essential feature to me.

I think that will is something that presents in degrees, just like consciousness. In fact, I'd say there is a relationship between the two.

The will seems related to the idea of self, to the idea of independence, to the idea of responsibility (you mentioned that) but then that amounts to overlooking an obvious truth about what will is; — Agent Smith

What truth is does that overlook?

compulsion is the absence of will. — Agent Smith

True enough. And compulsion also abrogates responsibility. The question is, can we ever really be compelled, or do we allow ourselves to be compelled?

I think that the real opposition is internal, and the force that counters will in us might best be understood as...temptation.

But I don’t see what the activity of the will consists of once it has started an action off. Are you saying that the will is like the driver of a train, who always monitors, but only acts when required, or that it is like the driver of a car, who has to control the car every second it is moving? — Ludwig V

I think of it more as an executive function that can assume control. Searle describes how intentional consciousness rises to the level of background abilities (which are like habits) like an expert skier who just picks a path down a slope versus a beginner who has to be aware of the mechanics of each turn. Similarly, will - assuming it has been itself been exercised, because willing itself can become a habit, or meta-habit, I suppose - I think can be alert to need.

Now this concerted effort which overrides the mechanistic causation of what could have happened, if the person did not exercise the will in this way, has to be looked at for a cause of it. If the mechanistic action has a mechanistic cause, then why wouldn't the concerted effort to prevent that action also have a mechanistic cause? Each can be said to be "the will". Either the will allows the describable mechanistic action to occur, or it disallows it, so the type of causation, as "the will", is the same in each of the two cases — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly so.

You are very trusting of people's rationality and your own if you are sure that people defending positions that you find absurd must be self-consciously acting in bad faith. — Ludwig V

I think that the role of belief is to believe accurately. So when people pour extravagant amounts of energy into defending the belief that the earth is flat, for example, they are mis-believing, or believing in bad-faith.

But it is not true that actions are necessarily environmentally triggered. That is what will power, and the capacity to break habits demonstrates to us. If we cannot in every instance of a willfull act, establish a necessary relation between an environmental trigger, and the act, we cannot make the conclusion that such acts have an environmental trigger. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you partially misunderstand me. I'm suggesting that a mechanistic causation is the case, but that we can override even that through concerted effort. I do think we are capable of spontaneous, 'random' behaviours. But in that case, we run the risk of being even more at the mercy of external laws.

So just as much, or more, will power is required to produce a habit, as is required to break a habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly so.

In the question as to the nature of the will, we need to position the will in relation to the habit. The habit is the propensity to actualize a potential in a specific way, and the habit is situated as a property of the potential to act, by Aquinas. A potential however, cannot actualize itself, so the habit being a property of the potential to act, cannot be the cause of the act which is specified by a description of the habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, and behaviourism steps in and says that this is environmentally triggered and there you are. I'd propose an interpretation that is a kind of soft-determinism in conjunction with a modified conception of what constitutes free-will.

Let's assume that when we act, we are operating mechanistically in that the conditions of the success for an action trigger that action which exists in us as a tendency. Then our 'natural' actions are like instincts. But suppose also that it is possible to alter these instincts or habits through concerted and prolonged effort (the phenomenon of hysteresis, prevalent in organic systems evolution). Then, by choosing to modify our habits, we choose the direction in which our willing proceeds. Choice which is free to be determined by reasoned effort. Reasonable choice. Maybe we do not have free-will; but maybe we are free to (reasonably choose) to have will.

Really, what we are talking about is the time-frame in which this "actually free consciousness" exists. It is the time frame required "to successfully create successful habits".

I suppose it depends on what motivates knowledge seeking and society building. Science can find out things but to what end we apparently cannot derive goals or teleology from science. People might resort away from science for personal meaning and morality. — Andrew4Handel

I think some of the newest forms of science tend by their very nature to guide humanity in an advantageous direction. Systems theory bolsters the awareness that humanity has to comprehend itself as one element in the governing ecosystem that is planet earth. Historically, man conceived himself the "master and possessor" of nature, a misconception that the emergence of science only reinforced. This sense that man is an ultimate authority lends itself to a multitude of conflicting worldviews. Recognizing that all of these worldviews can, must, and in reality do coexist within a unified system can only contribute to their reconciliation.