• Emergence
    Awareness is an attribute of life (living organisms). — Alkis Piskas
    Only life can be aware? How do you know this?
  • Spinoza’s Philosophy
    ↪javi2541997
    Copelston's summary of Spinoza, like most other summaries in his A History of Philosophy, is both outdated and shoe-horned into a permissible, Jesuitical (Thomist) format. Besides, I haven't read Fr. Copelston since high school in the late 1970s so my guess at what @Ali Hosein's quotation means and how to answer his question are as good as yours.
  • What is needed to think philosophically?
    ↪TiredThinker
    :smirk:
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    As I've mentioned, C.S. Peirce's objective idealism comes to mind. — javra
    "Naive realism", however, isn't philosophical realism, which is what I read into the OP poll's "non-skeptical realism". Nonetheless, javra, I take your point.
  • Deep Songs
    "How can you explain ..."

    "Shadows in the Rain" (5:04)
    Zenyatta Mondatta, 1980
    The Police
  • What is needed to think philosophically?
    ↪TiredThinker
    No
    e.g. Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche et al.
  • Dilbert sez: Stay Away from Blacks
    The only way to banish it is to quit using it. — NOS4A2
    Like Covid-19, "just stop testing" to get rid of it. :mask:
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ... again, the dichotomy between realism and idealism can we'll be viewed as false. — javra
    Isn't antirealism a form of idealism? Are there other forms of idealism which are not antirealist?
  • Dilbert sez: Stay Away from Blacks
    Rather, claiming to not believe in racial taxonomies attempts (badly) to rationalize the status quo. — praxis
    :up:

    ↪BC
    :clap: :100:

    Yep, "white flight" is as baseball & apple pie as "In God We Trust" on Caesar's filthy lucre – old-time "heartland" stuff. I suspect Scott Adams would, for whatever reason, rather be "canceled" abruptly by mashing PC-zeitgeist buttons than just "fuck this job!" quit. Whatever. Never a "Dilbert" reader, like you, BC, I won't miss him, though I did enjoy (and still have a copy of) his first pandeism novel God's Debris.

    As members of the ruling majority (and historical oppressers of blacks), it's incumbent on whites to fix the relationship. Whites have [almost all] the goodies in this society. — RogueAI
    As long as scapegoating nonwhite communities is less costly psychically and economically for white commmunities than "fixing the relationship" in America, except – often temporarily – tweaked at the margins, the racism-tolerant status quo will prevail.
  • Descartes' 'Ghost in the Machine' : To What Extent is it a 'Category Mistake' (Gilbert Ryle)?
    ↪Jack Cummins
    Cartesian dualism is more compatible with Christian theology (even Catholic trinitarianism) than Spinozist acosmism which is why Descartes' confusions are still so commonplace. (NB: It's always been fashionable to equate Spinozism with "pantheism" or "neutral monism" but, paying critical attention to the text of the Ethics, clearly neither follows; rather 'ontological holism + property dualism' is a much more consistent description, IMO.)
  • Emergence
    ↪universeness
    :cool:
  • The Philosopher will not find God
    ↪universeness
    :100: :up:
  • Emergence
    YOU connected YOUR enformer with deism which means YOU labelled it a deity. All you have done since then, is try to struggle out of those manacles you placed on yourself by trying to redefine deism. Why you choose to cosplay as a theist/deist, whilst denying your dalliances with it [ ... ] Is your 'enformationism' a hot topic of debate within the scientific community? Will it become so, anytime soon? — universeness
    If only @Gnomon & co could (i.e. would make the effort to) understand and appreciate the soundly speculative implications of contemporary sciences such as ...

    ... maybe he (they) would reformulate and convey his (their) woo-of-the-gaps instead as a cogent philosophical system or treatise. :smirk:

    @Jack Cummins @Wayfarer @bert1
  • Descartes' 'Ghost in the Machine' : To What Extent is it a 'Category Mistake' (Gilbert Ryle)?
    I will look out for the one on Descartes, especially as Descartes' shaped so much of current thinking of the mind body/relationship. — Jack Cummins
    Descartes proposes substance dualism and Spinoza a few of decades later countered with, for all intents and purposes, property dualism. Remember: Spinozism was almost completely suppressed for over two centuries after Spinoza's death while Cartesianism (via Kantianism) has been all but celebrated since the mid-17th c. I guess most contemporary neuroscientists like Damasio find experimental agreement with property dualism and reject substance dualism (which has become a Cartesian-folk philosophy that thinkers from Witty, Dewey, Ryle, Dennett, Churchland & Churchland ... to the Buddhist neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger refute).
  • Psychology of Philosophers
    ↪Mikie
    Thanks for the reference to T.Z. Lavine
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelma_Z._Lavine – this wiki is fascinating, I'd never heard of her –
    but the author of the text I had used in 1980-81 (publ. 1966), with the same title as Lavine's (publ. 1984), was Samuel Enoch Stumpf. (I've never heard of him either and there isn't even a wiki.)

    ↪Mikie
    :up:
  • What are you listening to right now?
    https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lq26YClxHOBogwoV-LRHDntDFzeeWOiSk

    Your Mother Should Know (48:38), 2023
    Brad Mehldau
  • What is needed to think philosophically?
    ↪TiredThinker
    Patience. Persistence. Creativity. Courage. (And not necessarily in that order.) :chin:
  • Have you ever feel that the universe conspires against you?
    That's why I watch horror movies. — L'éléphant
    :cool:

    Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. — G.K. Chesterton
  • Bernard Gert’s answer to the question “But what makes it moral?”
    ↪Banno
    Bernard Gert's moral theory seems quite consiliant, or convergent, with my own musings though our respective approaches (emphases) couldn't be more different. I'm looking forward to meeting those devils in his theoretical details.
  • Why being an existential animal matters
    Why would nature ever allow for a level of conscious awareness, of complexity, to undermine its sole drive like that? — Benj96
    Just a guess – it might have something to do with 'Gödel's proof of incompleteness from self-referential complexity' (Seth Lloyd, Douglas Hofstadter). It's reasonable to assume that the vast majority of h. sapiens have not deviated significantly from our 'evolved biological drives' but it is always possible, no matter how improbable, to do so because those drives (which seem computable (i.e. algorithmic)) are either 'incomplete' or, more likely, not always / inexorably 'consistent'. :chin:
  • Bernard Gert’s answer to the question “But what makes it moral?”
    ... It shouldn't happen here. — Banno
    Guilty as charged. I usually barely skim posts with quotes attributed to or artcles about men or women I've never heard of such as Prof. Gert. The video of his lecture did pique my interest (and I reserved his book Common Morality – surprise, surprise – at a local public library) so thanks again, Banno, for pulling my coat.
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪Banno
    :up:
  • Dilbert sez: Stay Away from Blacks
    I suppose "Dilbert" is now bad for business. 'Bottom-line cancel culture' in full effect is on display. Predictable. Like 'suicide by mod' here on TPF. Apparently, saying the quiet part out loud in America is still considered "trashy" (à la MTG) by most of the CEO Class. Maybe this is "Dilbert's" way of kicking off a MAGA campaign for office?
  • The Philosopher will not find God
    ↪universeness
    Thanks. :up:
  • Why being an existential animal matters
    ↪schopenhauer1
    :up: Just like breathing ...
  • Why being an existential animal matters
    ↪schopenhauer1
    Yeah, P.W. Zapffe is one of my favorites listed on my TPF profile. :death: :flower:
  • Bernard Gert’s answer to the question “But what makes it moral?”
    ↪Banno
    Thanks. I'll check it out.
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics ... and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed. ... Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed to run loose. — Charles Sanders Peirce
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪Janus
    :clap: :up:

    Some metaphysical views must be supported, otherwise transcendental philosophy as a doctrine grounded in synthetic a priori principles, is invalid. And even if the validity is subjected to dispute, it can only be from different initial conditions, which are themselves metaphysical views. — Mww
    :100:

    ↪aletheist
    :fire: Excellent.
  • Why being an existential animal matters
    @schopenhauer1
    Humans are an existential animal.
    — schopenhauer1

    If by "existential" you mean reality-denying, I agree with you     — 180 Proof
    No doubt we're counterfactual (talking) animals.
  • The Philosopher will not find God
    I'm pretty well-informed about pseudo-science. — Gnomon
    No doubt you are, Gnomon, a verifiably expert pseudo-scientist. :lol:

    I stopped responding to ↪180 Proof
    [ ... ] because he seemed to insist that philosophical questions must be settled by empirical methods.
    If you would be so kind, @universeness, check these questions (which Gnomon is too disingenuous to address substantively) for any insistence on my part that they be "settled by empirical methods" where Gnomon's statements lack empirical assumptions:
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/709894

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/718369

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/742056     — 180 Proof
    Gnomon doesn't address them because, in fact, he cannot and is afraid trying to do so will lay bare the very pseudo-science at the heart of his pseudo-philosophizing "personal worldview" and which will confirms my (our) suspicions. :smirk:

    My thesis is definitely not a "what is" assertion,
    Why then, if not an "assertion", Gnomon, do you refer to "Enformationism", etc as "my personal worldview" (and "a non-physical belief system")?

    but a "what if question.
    In other words, "what if" Enformer-of-the-gaps? with which I've taken issue because, like "Intelligent Design", your "what if" doesn't explain anything about how the world is or came to be as you purport to do (which, btw, is empirical – otherwise you wouldn't rely so heavily on "cutting edge" physics for your anachronistic 'Deistic-First Cause' speculations).
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪schopenhauer1
    I've no idea what you're talking about.
  • Emergence
    Ok, so the monolith IS post-human. — universeness
    Post-posthuman (i.e. post-sentient).

    ... what do you think of 2010 ...
    I didn't think much of either book or film. IMO, the latter is quite dated and superficially derivative.

    So do you think 'quantum fluctuations' are deterministic?
    They certainly aren't deterministic to a classical observer.
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    It's not 'hard' to grasp. It's just an option. Unargued for, no evidence, no reasoning... Just a choice. — Isaac
    :up:

    The idea that I've been contemplating is that through rational sentient creatures such as ourselves, the universe comes into being - which is why we're designated 'beings'. — Wayfarer
    This statement is quite incoherent, because the phrase "rational sentient creatures" presupposes – makes sense IFF there is – the universe that brings them "into being" so that they can conceive of "the universe". Mind – "comes into being" because of nonmind (processes) – is embodied. Thus, your disembodied (i.e. transcendental) speculation, Wayfarer, doesn't fit (or explain away) the facts.
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪Janus
    :fire: :100:

    ↪Tom Storm
    :up: :up:
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪Wayfarer
    :roll: What "hypothesis"? Metaphysical naturalism consists of categorica, not hypthetical, statements. Clearly, you still don't understand metaphysics (or naturalism), Wayf.
  • Have you ever feel that the universe conspires against you?
    Have you ever feel that the universe conspires against you? — niki wonoto
    Yeah, but the fucker hasn't beat me down yet. :wink:
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    Personally, I'm not convinced by any metaphysical speculations; I see them as being just imaginative possibilities — Janus
    Same here, except I see metaphysical speculations as criteria for eliminating – filtering-out – impossible objects / worlds (i.e. necessary fictions) from reasoning.

    ... metaphysical naturalism [ ... ] taken to prove, or disprove, any ultimate facts about the world. — Wayfarer
    I don't know about "ultimate facts" but naturalism, as I understand the concept, certainly entails negation of unconditional (i.e. supernatural, non-immanent, non-contingent) facts.
  • Why being an existential animal matters
    ↪Wayfarer
    Every animal is more than just an "animal". Don't be speciesist :smirk:
  • Shouldn't we want to die?
    ↪MojaveMan
    :death: :flower:
    Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. — Mike Tyson
    I fear death and use that fear to live the best life I can every day so that nightly I can fall asleep at ease without needing any assurance that I will wake again. Like sleep and love, there's no need to seek, or hurry, death because it'll come when it comes. This life is a song, I feel, and its meaning is in singing, not ending, it.
Home » 180 Proof