• 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?
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    On this forum, some basic familiarity with Quantum Reality ... why our contingent world exists — Gnomon
    :sweat: Oh please ...
    It is with sadness that every so often I spend a few hours on the internet, reading or listening to the mountain of stupidities dressed up with the word 'quantum'. Quantum medicine; holistic quantum theories of every kind, mental quantum spiritualism – and so on, and on, in an almost unbelievable parade of quantum nonsense. — Carlo Rovelli, Hegoland, pp. 159-60
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Does Quantum Physics contradict your Materialist worldview? — Gnomon
    Of course not. :roll:

    I am not a materialist. I find idealism intriguing — Tom Storm
    Like Spinoza, neither am I.

    There are no antirealists in foxholes.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Perhaps due to childhood religious "wounding" ... — Gnomon
    More pathetic projection. :roll:

    That the universe (i.e. timespece) "began" is no more certain or determined than "the edge" of the Earth. Again, bad physics –> pseudo-philosophy (–> woo) e.g. "creationism" disguised as programmer-of-the-gaps metafoolery. :sparkle:
  • Deleted User
    ↪T Clark
    :up: :up:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    - I don't[can't] reply to ↪180 Proof's saracastic, supercillious & science-based diatribes against the philosophical[superstitious] concept of Transcendence. — Gnomon
    Poor Gnomon, so scared of big bad Reason. :smirk:
  • Deleted User
    It is extreme, and inconsiderate to members who have engaged in good faith, as it makes a nonsense of threads when one side of a dialogue is removed. I am surprised it is allowed; I would suggest that in general it should not be allowed, as it somewhat undermines the value of the site as an archive record.

    Members need the ability to delete the odd post they might make in haste or anger, but to delete one's entire contribution is to destroy not just one's own work, but the full meaning of the contributions of one's interlocutors. And that is a deliberate destructive and malicious act.     — unenlightened
    I complete agree. :100:

    NB: Fwiw, I've been away from TPF involuntarily (due to a severe medical emergency) since early May, about 6 weeks, and as I recover I'll gradually resume participating as before. This is not the place so I will post more on my situation elsewhere as soon as I'm up to it. These last weeks the prospect of leaving behind years of discussions and interactions on these fora has reminded me that sooner or later this will be the case unless I self-delete my entire post history which is unimagineable to me at the moment.

    @Amity
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    , I realized that some kind of First Cause (pre-big-bang) or G*D was logically necessary to make sense of our contingent world, evolving toward some unknown Destination. — Gnomon
    Maybe, but certainly not physically necessary for modeling the universe (i.e. physus) and its development (re: cosmogeny).

    Also, how does "some unknown Destination" in any way "make sense" of a spacetime that, based on the best current scientific cosmology, is more likely to be unbounded – without beginning or ending like a sphere, torus, klein bottle, möbius loop, fractal series or any of countless nonlinear geometries – than not unbounded (given such scientific speculations as e.g. Penrose's Conformal Cyclical Cosmology or Hartle-Hawkin's No Boundary Proposal or Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics)? :chin:

    I agree the universe (seems) ontologically contingent but that in no way entails that it had a "beginning" or will "end", only that it is always possible for it to change – develop – including in unpredictable and incomprehensible ways.

    Likewise, my worldview is similar to Whitehead's open-ended "Process" toward some tantalizing ultimate unknown goal.
    Occult teleology (i.e woo-of-the-gaps).

    it's all information, all the way down
    And this tell us (explains) what exactly? :roll:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    The divine presents the possibility for actualization and satisfaction for each occasion of experience (actual occasion or event) but the divine acts through persuasion not coercion. [ ... ] Perhaps artists, musicians and writers [and scientists] are closer to the divine than priests and preachers [and politricksters]. — prothero
    A Tolkienesque 'theodicy' (re: mission of the Istari). :sparkle:

    The only form I can think of which might be more sophisticated is the thought of the mystics and their extreme forays into the abstruse and their stronger emphasis on the via negativa and apophatic theology ala the Divine Nothingness of Jon Scotus Eriugena — Bodhy
    For me, an even more "sophisticated" conception is the natura naturans of Spinoza's unmanifest substance (i.e. Deus, sive natura) that is consistent – imho has strong affinities – with both sub specie aeternitatis acosmism and sub specie durationis pandeism (à la Eriugena).
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    My own tentative view is that we do not access reality directly, nor can we claim any definitive knowledge of what reality ultimately is. What we encounter instead are multiple realities, each intelligible through particular conceptual frameworks or perspectives. The pursuit of a single, foundational, unifying reality strikes me as superfluous in that it overlooks the plural and interpretive nature of our engagement with the world.
    — Tom Storm

    You have summarized the fundamentals of my personal metaphysics.     — T Clark
    :100: :up:
  • RIP Alasdair MacIntyre
    After Virtue somehow lead me to Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness for which I'll always be grateful.
  • Our choices are never free from determinants, constraints and consequences
    If no free choices exist, what becomes of notions of free v. unfree choices? They're rendered nonsensical. — tim wood
    I didn't claim an "absolute ... "unfree choices". In effect, IME, our "notions" are enabled – instantiated – by our practices (e.g. "choices', habits, etc), and not the other way around as you suggest.

    ↪Janus
    :up: :up:
  • Our choices are never free from determinants, constraints and consequences
    Can our choices ever be free from determinants, constraints and consequences [spacetime+localiy]? — Truth Seeker
    No. One's "choices" can be – often are – "free from" one's awareness or volition (or awareness / volition of others). The more one is unaware of the causal / consequential path(s) of one's own "choice" the more one is unware that that "choice" is not, in fact, "free from determinants, constraints and consequences" (like e.g. flying in dreams).

    IMO, I've never seen the remotest evidence the QM/QT has anytying whatsoever do to with classical-scale (local) agency. Bad physics / science –> pseudo philosophy –> dumbs down too many TPF thread topics like this lately.
  • Reading group: Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima
    ↪javi2541997
    Why didn't Mishima volunteer as a Kamikazi pilot?

    I imagine Japan of the time of WW2 as culturally medieval [pre-modern] in character, the romantic culture of Arthurian legend that concerned itself only with the aristocracy. 'Might is right'; 'death before dishonour'; there are only masters and slaves and only masters have any value. It is a culture of trial by ordeal, where cruelty is not only functional but an aristocratic virtue. I can see how those of the land of Don Quixote, might find an affinity with such a culture, but WW1 I think largely destroyed the vestiges of it in British culture. It turned out that machine-guns have no romance and do not distinguish between gentlemen and peasants. — unenlightened
    :100:
  • Deep Songs
    Got to roll me
    Got to roll me
    Got to roll me
    Got to roll me
    (oh, yeah)
    Got to roll me ...
    Keep on rollin'
    Got to roll me
    Keep on rollin' ...

    "Tumbling Dice" (3:45)
    Exile on Main Street, 1972
    Jagger-Richards
    The Rolling Stones
  • PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
    I noticed the Sean Carroll quote: "there is no life after death". And I must agree, except [nonsense]. So, a particular form-pattern could in principle be reconstituted, just as computers can copy & paste data. I wouldn't organize my life around the expectation of a better life in the hereafter (bird in hand . . .). But it's a possibility that philosophers could argue endlessly about. — Gnomon
    This might be so for "philosophers" ignorant of Conservation Laws¹ (modern physics > Noether's theorem²). You're right, Gnomon, not hang your tinfoil hat on "form-pattern ... reconstituted" à la miraculously un-scrambling eggs, perpetual motion woo-woo, etc. Sean Carroll is right, of course, insofar as complete dissolution of a dynamic system – death – in effect, randomizes the system-pattern (i.e. information processes) as per maximum entropy.³

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_law [1] (re: information is not conserved)

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem [2]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) [3]
  • The Forms
    All of reality is merely reified abstractions. — T Clark
    ???
  • The Forms
    In your own view, what are The Forms, which Plato alluded to? — Shawn
    Like animist / mystical "true names", it seems to me that Platonic Forms – essences, universals – are merely reified abstractions (and therefore a mistaken theory of reference).
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