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Consciousness questionWhatever floats your boat, Ben. The brain is a wholly classical physical object in which the smallest neuronal structures are three orders of magnitude greater than planck scale and too hot for quantum actions to cohere, so no "quantum consciousness", etc. Anti-Pseudo-science 101. Basic physics and neuroscience literacy – and critical thinking – is required, not "expertise".
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Consciousness questionHave you ever taken a single university physics course? or read any substantial work on quantum theory by a (popularizing) working physicist? Expertise is not required to refute 'quantum pseudo science' as I point out in the links above. I stand confidently by my "nope". :wink:
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Why Metaphysics Is Legitimate
It's all Aristotlean "metaphysics" (in the background) through the 18th century.I’m not comparing Descartes, Newton and Leibnitz on the basis of their contributions to mathematics, but to metaphysics. — Joshs -
Consciousness question
Nope.Yes I agree I think science will make much headway in explaining consciousness. I think it will likely come from quantum physics tbh. — Benj96
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/638903 -
Why Metaphysics Is LegitimateI don't find conflating Cartesian algebraic geometry with Newtonian (or Leibnizian) calculus insightful or relevant. Besides, scientists build on the work of their predecessors in the sciences independent of any philosophical considerations. As CS Peirce or Paul Feyerabend show, scientific practices are largely opportunistic "anything goes" endeavors which largely are n o t deductions from first principles. Philosophy from time to time may provide an impetus for "paradigm shifts" but it does not inform building and testing hypothetical models. As Witty exhaustively points out, philosophy does not explain facts of the matter, that is, it's n o t theoretical in the way of empirical or formal sciences.
wtf :roll: What's a Shakespearean tragedy other than a grammatical structure? Quite reductivist for a p0m0 (i.e. social constructionist) like you, Joshs.What is a scientific theory other than a grammatical
structure? — Joshs
Nice canard. Only you have mentioned "philosophical vocabulary" – whatever that is. -
Consciousness question:up:
I agree, but I'd moved past the eliminativists nearly two decades ago when I'd come across a masterwork on the neuroscience of 'consciousness' titled Being No One by Thomas Metzinger (here's a good summary in this old video lecture). By the way, I very much recommend his more accessible, less technical synopsis The Ego Tunnel. Studying Metzinger's highly counter-intuitive empirical work on 'mind' had reoriented me from an underdetermiined conception of 'consciousness' with his robust phenomenal self model which had then lead me further to read more broadly other 'materialist neurophilosophets' such as, to mention a few,I'm a fan of Paul and Patricia Churchland, who are in fact "eliminative materialists" which involves an even more extreme view - that we should reject all folk psychology terminology. I don't personally see the need for that, but I do believe consciousness will be explained scientifically. — GLEN willows
• Stanislas Dehaene
• Max Velmans
• Peter Robin Hiesinger
• Sebastian Seung
• R.S. Bakker (online blog "Three Pound Brain")
whom most 'anti-materialists' and those without any background in either neuroscience, cognitive science or cognitive psychology (the latter two I did graduate work in during the early 90s) are wholly ignorant of. I still keep up with Patricia Churchland's and Daniel Dennett's work but not as intensely as I once had decades ago. The so-called 'philosophy of mind' lags significantly behind scientific developments in 'consciousness studies' but these are still early days I think. -
Consciousness questionThere are folks who claim that a 'materialist paradigm' does not rationally account for everything – they are correct – so they dismiss and replace it with an 'immaterialist paradigm' focused on what the 'materialist paradigm' leaves out. The problem folk like me have with their 'immaterialist paradigm' is that it does not rationally account for anythng including what's left out of the 'materialist paradigm' – they just fiat 'immaterial stuff' (e.g. spirit, mind, ideas, energy, information, etc) and tell just-so stories about 'material stuff' (e.g. bodies, things, events, facts, atoms-in-void, entropy, etc) really being illusions, mirages or hallucinations (e.g. maya). Yeah yeah, but how do they know that? :roll: Well anyway, some folks prefer a paradigm which rationally accounts for something rather than a paradigm which rationally accounts for nothing, and those folks are often disparaged as (dogmatic / dirty) "materialists" by the usual suspects: TPF's own Quantum-Woo Crew. :eyes: :sparkle:
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Why Metaphysics Is LegitimateA philosophy is to a grammar as a science is to a library. IMO as complementaries, while the latter without the former is unintelligible (or less intelligible than formulating its problems requires), the former without the latter is ineffable (or less effable than clearly expressiing it requires).
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Currently ReadingI'm curious how you find Hudis' read of Marx's corpus. Have you read After Capitalism by David Schweickart? If not, I can't recommend it more highly, comrade.
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Consciousness questionYeah. Often dismissed, never refuted. How would a p0m0ist / antirealist / idealist or platonist (or New Ager) even begin to address philosophical / methodological materialism (rather than play paddy cake with a caricature or parody)?
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Consciousness questionHere's a link to a TPF debate (and another link therein to a discussion of that debate) concerning the relative strengths and weaknesses of "substance dualism" (i.e. mind-body duality) and "property dualism" (i.e. dissolution of the mind-body problem).
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11335/substance-dualism-versus-property-dualism-debate/p1
More links are embedded along the way to other resources IIRC.
NB: An aside on "panpsychism" that might interest you (noy just my post but the thread as well).
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/584575 -
Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)Ah, "the polls" ... https://www.thedailybeast.com/pollsters-have-no-fcking-idea-whats-going-to-happen-during-2022-midterm-elections ... my own "poll" from abiut a year ago:
Fuck the polls! :lol: :point:The rightwing SCOTUS will overturn Roe vs Wade in 2Q 2022 which will set-off a center-left firestorm through the summer and fall that will help the Dems (barely) hold on to control of BOTH houses of the US Congress in next year's midterm elections. — 180 Proof
This jam dropped 30 years ago (last Thursday), and the funk's still fresh! :fire:
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What exists that is not of the physical world yet not supernatural
Is "Narnia" the negation of Earth? Are "dancing angels" the negation of pinheads? Or hallucinations the negations of facts?The answer to the OP would depend on how one defines "physical" and "supernatural". Is one the negation of the other? — Agent Smith
In the OP's poll, I selected the third oprion because, in part ...
So, in Western philosophy, does metaphysics concern (the) "super-natural"? No – not 'nature beyond nature' (infinite regress, etc) but instead something like 'the common denominator of every constituent of nature as a whole' or 'what within nature makes nature whole' (re: ).Physical is synonymous with natural (and nonphysical with formal (e.g. mathematics, logic, etc.))
Supernatural" a term used to indicate woo-of-the-gaps – "beyond" – in what we (think we) know about nature, however, amounts to babytalk? mystogogy? non-explanations? ... synonymous with superstitious.
Anyway, I recommend Spinoza over Aristotle (and, whenever possible, avoid Meta-Physics For Dummies :sweat:). -
Why Metaphysics Is Legitimate
I don't see how such a statement can be true. Aristotle's The Physics preceded Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by nearly two millennia without anticipating any of the latter's significant breakthroughs or findings.Philosophy has always taken the lead in sketching out the basis of new developments in the sciences, offer a century ahead of time. — Joshs -
Pantheism
As I discern these concepts ...1. Deism
2. Pandeism
3. Panendeism
4. Panentheism
5. Pantheism — Agent Smith
1. Belief that a deity created the world but does not intervene providenrially in its processes or human affairs.
2. Belief that a deity became the world and therefore no longer exists as a deity (maybe until the world ends becoming a deity again).
NB: This one troubles me the least.
3. Belief that the world is not ontologically independent of the deity that created it (no. 1).
4. Belief that the world is not ontologically independent – exists only in the belly or mind – of a deity that created it and intervenes providentially in human affairs.
5. Belief in the divinity of the world which constitutes its active, providential structure (e.g. dao, logos, "arc of the moral universe" ..., etc) -
Why Metaphysics Is LegitimateWhereas the sciences concern possible models for experimentally explaining transformations among 'aspects of nature', metaphysics, to my mind, concerns the concept – rational speculation – of 'nature as a whole' that necessarily encompasses the most rigorous findings of the sciences as well as all other human practices and non-human events/processes. Statements in metaphysics are paradigmatic and presuppositional, not theoretical or propositional; (ontological) interpretations of the latter are only symptomatic – insightful though still speculative – of the former (e.g. MWI, taxonomy, mediocrity principle, etc).
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Why do Christians believe that God created the world?You never cease to embarrass yourself, Bratshitz. :lol:
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Why do Christians believe that God created the world?Been there, done that. Read my previous post.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/754305 -
Why do Christians believe that God created the world?:smirk:
Ooops, I gave you too much credit again ... just more fatuous gibberish. You ought to try reading your bible, kid ...I am talking about the God of Abraham and pointing out that nothing in the bible commits one to supposing he created the world — Bartricks
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. — KJV, Genesis 1:1I have made the earth, and created man upon it ... — KJV, Isaiah 45:12
Etcetera.Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. — KJV, Job 38:4
And just for holy shits-n-giggles, this good ol' oldie derived from said "bible":
I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible [ ... ] — Nicene Creed (Theodore of Mopsuestia, 325 CE) -
Why do Christians believe that God created the world?Apparently, @Bartricks' triple-Omni deity is not the scriptural "God of Abraham" but instead, as Pascal points out, a "god of philosophy" based on reason (rather than on will or faith). Leibniz, as you're perhaps aware, tries to square this circle, but only recreates a 'Scholastic' mess ... You're right, of course, trying to shoehorn the triple-O into the idea of a "person" is conceptually incoherent, which is problematic, I suppose, only for a "god of philosophy" rather than "the God of Abrahsm". The OP is just Bartrick's apologetic wank for an idea of "God" credible only to him/her.
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The Book that Broke the World: Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”We're "here" engaging in dialectics due only to applications of modern logic – the practical difference it seems between semantic play (i.e. "rhetoric") and syntactical transformation (e.g. constructing algorithms), respectively.
Read (skim) both Hegel's System of Logic and Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic for a comparison. -
What is the point of chess?
I suppose we have one too many tone deaf, swing-free "wish-I-was-never-borns" ...Jazz is strong supporting evidence against living for some antinatalists. — Nils Loc
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What exists that is not of the physical world yet not supernatural
:lol:... Pure Energy ... — Gnomon -
Questioning Rationality
No. There are uninformed or fallaciously-derived "strategies".If thinking is strategic, is it therefore also rational? — Pantagruel
Yes. It is often not irrational to break rules norms or conventions.Is it possible to be a criminal, and also rational, in the strictest sense of the word?
I can't tell what you mean – how do you distinguish between "thinking" "rational" and "reasonable"?What about reasonable?
My short shorthand for these terms ...
And being discursive in nature, these terms connote primarily social, not subjective, practices (Peirce-Dewey, Witty)thinking: reflective inquiry / practices (i.e. meta-rational, meta-reasonable ... e.g. conjecture-making/testing, reflective equilibrium, philosophical hermeneutics, conceptual analysis, etc)
rational: inferential rule-following (e.g. means adequate to ends (goals) which, however, do not undermine / invalidate ends (goals))
reasonable: context-specific rule/exception-making and goals-setting which may be inferential or not
Not always.Is ethics rational? — Pantagruel
It's reasonable, I think; but, of course, that depends on what you mean by "ethical".Or is it just rational to be ethical? -
Philosophy and Critical Thinking course
Pierre Hadot wrote a masterwork Philosophy as A Way of Life reminding us to focus on the Hellenistic schools in contrast to modern academization of philosophy. Pragmatism, Exisstentialism and Absurdism are modernist attempts to reimagine the Hellenestic emphasis on eudaimonia / ataraxia over above 'theoria'. If all you're getting from philosophy is "abstract academic theories", then, IMHO, you're readings may be a mile wide but certainly an inch deep.I enjoy philosophy for what it is ... — Jack Cummins
From Spinoza's Ethics, Part IV "Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions", which is a fine novel itself that I feel is even more insightful from having read Spinoza too. As you may or may not know, Jack, for all of the "abstract academic theory" – rationalist demonstration – in the preceding three parts, Spinoza's examination of how emotions both enable and constrain reasoning 'brings philosophy down to earth' (à la the Epicureans-Stoics), which is further elaborated on in the context of neuroscience by Antonio Damasio in his superb Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.Somerset Maughan's ' Of Human Bondage' ... -
Troubled sleep:up: :up:
Reminds me of a girl I dated for a few months decades ago who'd grewn up on a farm and who couldn't eat any meats, poultry or fish that still in anyway resembled the animals they once were. Including eggs! :smirk:I had a colleague who used to work as a mortuary technician - preparing bodies for autopsy. It got to be that he was unable to look at people or experience them in ways that was stable and orientated to the present. He could only 'see' what was underneath - organs, tissue, bones, blood... it made intimacy and connection very difficult. So he quit his job in the morgue and took up gardening. — Tom Storm -
What is the point of chess?The best Go player on the planet, Lee Sedol, was beaten by the AlphaGo system 4-1 in a 5 game match in 2016. The following year, the AlphaGoZero system, which taught itself to play Go in three days, beat the AlphaGo system 100-0 in a 100 game match. Lee Sedol, the Go grandmaster beat by AlphaGo, like other Go grandmasters who have studied the AlphaGoZero matches, does not understand many of the games or strategies executed by the self-taught system.
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Philosophy and Critical Thinking courseSo you find philosophy is "applicable" "simply to abstract academic theories"?
180 Proof
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