• The passing of Vera Mont, dear friend.
    Very sad. Vera, I'll miss you. :broken: :flower:
  • On Matter, Meaning, and the Elusiveness of the Real
    ↪Banno
    :up:
  • What is MoK listening to right now?
    *a blues played in a "mock opera" style*

    Thunderbolt and lightning,
    very, very frightening
    me
    (Galileo)
    Galileo,
    (Galileo)
    Galileo,
    Galileo Figaro,
    magnifico ...

    "Bohemian Rhapsody" (5:55)
    A Night at the Opera, 1975
    writer Freddie Mercury
    performers Queen


    trivia – Freddie played this on the very same grand piano that Macca played "Hey Jude" on.
  • What Is Fiction and the Scope of the Literary Imagination: How May it be Understood Philosophically?
    ↪Jack Cummins
    Reformulate the question?

    ↪Jack Cummins
    I think we still think "in terms of story" – how could humans not? – such that philosophy produces reflective and suppositional stories about concepts (whereas modern science produces mathematical model-based stories about factual aspects of the world).
  • On Matter, Meaning, and the Elusiveness of the Real
    There is no such thing as truth. — Kurt
    Refutes itself.

    ↪T Clark
    Yes, because 'metaphysical statements' are themselves only, in effect, categorical interpretations of – conceptual proposals about – formal truth claoms or empirical truth claims.
  • What Is Fiction and the Scope of the Literary Imagination: How May it be Understood Philosophically?
    ↪Jack Cummins
    You seem to have missed this
    logos has been used to demythologize – but cannot fully eliminate – mythos — 180 Proof
    It's not a matter of 'narrativity' or the absence of it but to use logos to transform mythos into narratives which frame - interpret as – explanable models (i.e. 'predictive' fact-patterns). This, I think, is what Thales and other Pre-Socratics (6th-4th century BCE) were up to.
  • On Matter, Meaning, and the Elusiveness of the Real
    Idealists don't play in traffic? — RogueAI
    Won't find any in foxholes either. :smirk:

    One, in fact, can live by bread alone a hell of a lot longer than one can live on faith alone. Why? Because the latter denies reality.
  • On Matter, Meaning, and the Elusiveness of the Real
    what if what I am seeing is not what is really there, ...? — Kurt
    Idle question(s). 'Your context' does not provide any grounds to doubt "what is really there" and, in such a context, you're "seeing" is indubitable (pace Zhuangzi ... Descartes ... Kant ...) so that it makes most sense for (sober, awake, pragmatic) you to act accordingly.

    NB: AFAIK, the real is ineluctable and therefore inevitably hazardous to everyone who neglects or ignores it.
  • What Is Fiction and the Scope of the Literary Imagination: How May it be Understood Philosophically?
    What do you think about the juxtaposition between ]logos and myth in the scheme of philosophical understanding? — Jack Cummins
    Well, at least as far back as Thales, logos (re: "laws") has been used to demythologize – but cannot fully eliminate – mythos (re: "gods") in order to raise intelligible questions about 'reality or ourselves' which we do not know (yet) how to decisively answer. Suppositions and interpretations, not explanations, are the best, imho, (we) philosophers can do with nothing more than 'conceptual schema'.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    ↪Punshhh
    What makes infinity woo-woo?
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    I'm suspicious of using this explanatory gap as an excuse to believe in some sort of spiritualism. — Relativist
    :up: Same here. In my book this "excuse" amounts to appeal to ignorance (i.e. woo-of-the-gaps).

    If such a God is woo-woo nonsense, then so is Zero & Infinity. — Gnomon
    Well, not only doesn't that follow (category error), but all three concepts are mere abstractions; what makes any of them "woo woo nonsense" is attributing causal – physical – properties to any of them like "creator" "mover" ... "programmer". :eyes:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    I embrace physicalism because (AFAIK) it's the best general answer to the nature of reality. I don't have some undying faith in it, and I know it has its limitations. But I treat it as the premise when analyzing everything in the world. This seems the most pragmatic approach — Relativist
    I agree. Idealism, antirealism, immaterialism ... quantum woo-woo, etc are much poorer alternatives. :up:

    ↪goremand
    :smirk:
  • Consequences of Climate Change
    Behold, the enemy! — unenlightened
    The late, great Anthropocene. :monkey:
  • How May Empathy and Sympathy Be Differentiated? What is its Significance Conceptually and in Life??
    I am thinking that your issues may come down to diabetes, which is so prevalent. — Jack Cummins
    Yes.

    embodied beings
    needing compassion

    [W]e're not in a position to know whether people care about others or not. We can only judge by actions, not by sentiment or professed values. What do people actually do? — Tom Storm
    :100:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    I go with the theory that once upon a time, nothing existed. Then all of a sudden, something came into existence. — alleybear
    Nonsense. "Nothing" necessarily cannot "exist".

    [A]ll I know about this logical necessity ... — Gnomon
    ... except, sir, you don't seem to grasp that "logical necessity", as you say, does not scientifically have anything to do with dynamics in or the development of the physical world.

    ... how we, and our world, evolved from mathematical Big Bang Singularity
    The BBT is a model of physical processes; (the) "mathematical" is merely abstract and, therefore, cannot "evolve".

    ↪PoeticUniverse
    :up:
  • How May Empathy and Sympathy Be Differentiated? What is its Significance Conceptually and in Life??
    ↪Jack Cummins
    I appreciate your thoughtful response. Thanks, Jack.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    ↪Wayfarer
    It's an unsupported assertion, not an argument. Besides, I concede the point in order to make my objection to your other assertion about physics.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Are you familiar with D M Armstrong? — Wayfarer
    Yes, decades ago.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    [P]hysics is based on a useful abstraction, which has yielded enormous physical powers, but at the expense of excluding fundamental aspects of human existence. — Wayfarer
    Even if this 'claim' is true – of course there's no evidence for it – so what? Physics explains many fundamental aspects of the physical world and not (yet) others; "human existence" is tangentally something else entirely outside modern physics' remit. Why do you persist on blaming physics for not doing something that physicists don't use it for? Re: materialism – You're (still) shadowboxing with a burning strawman, Wayf.
  • How May Empathy and Sympathy Be Differentiated? What is its Significance Conceptually and in Life??
    ... thinking about the nature of compassion. — Jack Cummins
    I'm currently in a rehabilitation facility (for a couple of more months) with other post-op amputees and variously disabled elders where I'm confronted especially each night by sounds of acute pains (and prolonged indignities due to staffing shortage) which, even as a recovering patient/resident in this place, I'm not prepared to ignore or disregard. Is this "compassion" (now thwarted by own incapacity)?

    Does Empathy Always Lead to Sympathy?
    No. The latter is active and former passive.

    I see this question as particularly significant as so much is becoming 'robotic' and machine-based?
    And what about, for instance, the atrocities and abuses countless generations of folks long before this era have inflicted on one another as if they were "machine-like robots" completely devoid of "empathy" and "sympathy"? The modern world, global civilization, was not built or maintained by "compassion", mate – current technocapitalism, imo, doesn't make today's "compassion" problem any more acute and dire than it was back when the Upanishads were being written.

    Is it leading to moral indifference and based on the philosophy of the objective idea of the importance of 'emotional detachment as an ethical ideal?
    No, as pointed out above.

    What do you think about the ideas of sympathy, empathy and its relevance for life?.
    They are (like) moods; the relevant capability, or trait, is compassion – motivation stronger than sympathy to actually help alleviate another person's suffering – actually helping one another.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    Logic is not inherent in existence itself, whatever that means. To the extent it is a discovery, it is a discovery about the way our minds work, not about anything in the world outside ourselves. — T Clark
    Just as there is no ocean "outside of" ocean-waves, there is no "world outside ourselves" because we – our minds – are aspects of the world itself rather than a separate Cartesian substance. Maybe it's how you've expressed your point, T Clark, that doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, I'll go on: my point – maybe not quite the OP's – is not that "logic is inherent in existence" but, parsimoniously, that logic is existence (i.e. 'universes' themselves are logico-computable processes ~Spinoza ... Deutsch, Wolfram, Tegmark) about / from which we (can) derive abbreviated syntaxes & formulae (which are, in effect, maps yet often mistaken for terrain (e.g. Plato-Aristotle, Kant-Husserl, Russell-Carnap)). :chin:

    @jgill @Banno
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    So - magical? Well, I think not, but something even greater in some respects
    — Wayfarer
    This is what I see as an enormous problem in your position. It depends on uncritically accepting the existence of magic (or "something even greater"). I've seen no justification for this other than arguments from authority (the ancients had this view) and arguments from ignorance (physicalism's explanatory gap).     — Relativist
    :fire:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Could it be that humans are unrealistically impressed by reason, treating it as the highest or even only valid form of understanding? But reason is just one tool among many, and has limited use. It struggles with emotions, ambiguity, and subjective experiences. It's clear that no logical argument can fully capture grief, happiness, aesthetic appreciation, or empathy. I wonder if we overestimate its power, forgetting that perhaps it evolved for survival, not for solving metaphysical puzzles or guaranteeing truth. — Tom Storm
    :up: :up:

    Idealists tend to put the cart before the horse forgetting, as you say, or denying (E. Becker) that 'truth' presupposes (pre-cognitive pragmatics, or the enactive context, of) 'survival' ... to which reason at minimum is adapted (i.e. embodied = instantiated).
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Plantinga's argument is fatally flawed. In order to survive, every organism needs a functionally accurate perception of its environment to successfully interact with it. Primitive rationality is exhibited when animals adapt there hunting behavior when necessary, doing things that work instead of those that don't. The evolution of abstract reasoning would have been an evolutionary dead end leading to extinction, if it worsened our ability to interact with the environment. — Relativist
    :up: :up:
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    The moment anything exists - anything that has potential for differentiation - logical structure emerges naturally. Where there's being, there's logic. — tom111
    I'd go even further and claim, in a Spinozist sense, that logic IS being and that the law of non-contradiction (LNC) entails differentiations (i.e. multiplicities, or discontinua (à la 'atoms flowing in void')). Though 'systems of logic' are invented (i.e. derived), my guess is the applicability to being of such inventions is discovered as any given landscape of modalities (i.e. phase space) is explored.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    What I haven't seen is a justification for believing there is ontological teleology. It seems a guess, just like physicalism is a guess - but physicalism strays very little from the known. — Relativist
    :up: :up:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    ↪Wayfarer
    It seems to me "intentionality and purpose are left out" simply because there is no objective evidence that supports leaving them in any account of how the world has become what it "appears to us" to be. Like qualia, "telos" doesn't explain anything scientists endeavor to explain. Camus points out, I think reasonably, that the world might have a 'fundamental or universal purpose' but by virtue of scale we humans are almost certainly too small or ephemeral to recognize and grasp it. The Sisyphusean challenge is for each one of us to strive to live purposefully in spite of being ignorant or unsure of whether the world itself has any purpose. Or we can live in denial, fetishizing hand-me-down fairytales, myths, superstitions, theodicies, woo-of-the-gaps metaphysics or baroque mysticisms (re: e.g. Ernest Becker's 'terror management, immortality projects').
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Do you think reason is a useful means of evaluating conceptions of God? — Tom Storm
    Yes. I don't see why it wouldn't be useful.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    a religion of the people — Gnomon
    'Animism' (ancestralism ... or daoism) seems the oldest, and really the only, "religion of the people" that's ever worked for any people. It seems to me all of the cultic-variations (i.e. "fallen" bastards) which have followed, including the vast majority of explicitly 'philosophical belief-systems' (e.g. idealisms, transcendencisms), have been, in one way or another, servants of empire (aka "civilization": missionary, scarcities-consecrating, zerosum-dominance hierarchies).

    Non-literal, abstract, impersonal gods, like mystical / ecstatic practices, are just latter-day attempts at slipping out of the 'mind forg'd manacles' of the literal God of priests, preachers, imams, rabbis, gurus ... sovereigns (i.e. "Big Others") and returning – as Gnostics envision? – to an animist milieu or condition – 'the source' (however, only as (genuinely free) individuals, not as "the people").

    @Tom Storm @Wayfarer @prothero @Janus
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    ↪Banno
    :clap: Thanks for this. Even though I don't agree philosophical practice is strictly binary, I find the case you make quite strong and convincing. The plumbing matters.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Jordan Peterson (of whom I am not a fan :up: ) puts it like this: "Atheists don't understand the God they reject." I used to hear this from religious friends too. — Tom Storm
    Yeah, well, I keep encountering theists who don't understand the God they accept, that is, do not propose a cogent, self-consistent 'God-concept' they can talk about (i.e. defend) intelligibly without equivocating and special pleading. It's the theist's 'God-nonsense' – what she (or her tradition) says about God – I reject.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Baruch Spinoza, and his Pantheistic equation of God with Nature. — Gnomon
    Of course there's no such "equation" ... :roll:
    Spinoza's formula is Deus, sive natura and not 'natura deus est'. — 180 Proof
    S is an acosmist (Maimon, Hegel) and not a pantheist (or pan-en-theist or pan-en-deist) or philosophical materialist. Anyway, to wit:
    ... But some people think the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus rests on the assumption that God is one and the same as ‘Nature’ understood as a mass of corporeal matter. This is a complete mistake. — Spinoza, from letter (73) to Henry Oldenburg
    (Emphasis is mine.)

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/993976 :yawn:
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    ↪Hanover
    :up:
    ↪Hanover
    :up:

    No doubt, given most cogent, critical objections to "disembodied mind", "NDE", "OOBE", "reincarnation" – i.e. substance / body-mind dualism – raised in this thread (& others) remain unaddressed or unrefuted, I suspect @Sam26's upcoming book, in effect, will amount to special pleading that e.g. 'faces we see in clouds are actual faces which also can see us on the ground', etc :sparkle:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Scientists tend to not ask Why? questions. — Gnomon
    Scientists interrogate nature and nature is not an intentional agent that conceives or answers to why questions. Rather they ask more general how questions from which they infer causal explanations and not intentions or purposes. The premodern approach of putting 'why questions' to nature had produced alchemy, not chemistry; astrology, not astromony; geocentricity, not heliocentricity; humors & demonic possession, not germ-theory of disease; Aristotlean teleology of motion, not Galilean-Newtonian-Einsteinian equivalence principle; etc for millennia. Across all modern sciences substantive, methodological and technical progress has accelerated exponentially due in large part to scientists overcoming their innate magical thinking and not wasting time asking inanimate objects and systems "why" they do what they do.

    But philosophers have always wanted to know Why
    This is a function of reflecting – examining their own thinking – on personal sensations, perceptions, beliefs and what the philosopher assumes she knows. Philosophy begins (and ends) with the philosopher interrogating herself, so asking "why" is often appropriate, even inescapable; and in this way – pointed out above – philosophical speculation (i.e. "Why, self?" is categorically different from scientific theorizing (i.e "How, nature?")

    You're welcome, Gnomon. :smirk:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    [Is] an imagined telos merely an anthropomorphic, indeed anthropocentric, projection? — Janus
    I've always thought so: intentional agents make goals and the only intentional agents known to us are ourselves, mere humans. Am I missing something?

    @Gnomon
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Although my personal worldview has a role for a Transcendent First Cause or Tao, that is necessarily pre-natural — Gnomon
    Okay, but then you contradict your "Transcendent" claim with this Anti-Transcendent (i.e. pure immanence) claim:
    My G*D concept is basically Spinoza's deus sive natura ...
    Actually reading Spinoza's work itself rather than just skimming a wiki article might help you to stop repeating more nonsense like this, sir.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    ... reveals itself not by supernatural means but through the self organizing processes of nature ... The seeming striving against entropy, chaos, the void, the deep for novelty, organization, complexity, experience and creative advance. — prothero
    I.e. yinyang of the eternal Dao

    How could a self-organizing system emerge from a random Bang in the dark? — Gnomon
    Is that what really happened, sir? How do you (we) scientifically know this?
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    I understand that you might think a lot of religion is "magical thinking". I wondered if you felt the same about concepts like truth, justice, beauty, etc)? I hope not. — prothero
    Well, of course, that depends on the contexts in which, or how, (any) concepts are used.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    It is in such beliefs (or faith) that we find meaning? — prothero
    Just as toddlers "find meaning" in (naming, talking to) stuffed animals – magical thinking.

    I have to apologize for asking questions that upset you. — Gnomon
    Your questions don't "upset" anyone, sir, they are often just vacuous questions or even ludicrously uninformed, and yet condescending (i.e. defensive). You're just not a serious and conspicuously lack intellectual integrity. I challenge you (like this) when I'm bored, Gnomon, knowing you're too insecure to respond directly to challenge me in kind, and so I can keep attention on your woo-of-the-gaps clowning (e.g. hiding behing poor old Whitehead's skirts). You don't "upset" anyone here on TPF (get over yourself!), I suspect many of us on here are even mildly amused by your uninformed bloviating. :smirk:

    Historically, the "God" question has both pro & con  Metaphysical  arguments*4. Do you find any of them convincing?
    Fwiw (not that you'll intelligibly respond), I'm quite partial to both Epicurean and Spinozist "metaphysical arguments" FOR "God". I'm also "convinced" by arguments AGAINST "God" by such contemporary philosophers as Rebecca Goldstein, Victor Stenger, André Comte-Sponville, Theodore Drange, Michael Martin, Kai Nielsen & J.L. Schellenberg to name a few.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    If 'divinity' is real, why believe in it (e.g. mother, gravity & numbers are real)?

    Or if (we) believe in it, why also need 'divinity' to (seem) real?
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