If it's not my consciousness that continues, what is the point? Other consciousnesses will continue after you are dead - is that the recompense? But we don't need reincarnation for that.

In Western culture there is no such belief, instead it is thought that living beings are aggregates of material elements which are born as a consequence of physical processes which cease when those comprising physical elements disperse at death... However from the ‘eastern’ viewpoint it is a nihilistic attitude. — Wayfarer

So is it nihilistic? I don't see that it is. That "aggregate of material elements" is the very source of value.

The concern about the quality of one's rebirth, given that in Buddhism at least, the reborn person is not you, seems completely incoherent. Why would I be more concerned about the quality of life my reborn person enjoys than I would be over the quality of life your reborn person enjoys, since neither of them have any conscious connection to me? — Janus

Nice. Yes, this is the issue with reincarnation. It is at best a very minor consideration.

A recent piece from Slavoj Žižek, Trump’s Oval Office clash with Zelensky killed diplomacy. A few philosophical ideas are drawn in to the analysis, which sets out the impossible position of Ukraine, and suggests, perhaps only half jokingly, an alliance between Europe andChina.

A nod back to .

Given that I was oblivious to much of what occurred last night, only finding out about it after I woke, I'm not too concerned about oblivion.

So I find the Wittgenstein's approach amiable, especially as it fits in with other ideas as to the nature of measurement - the official metre rule in Paris and so on. One's death is not a part of one.

When there is no mind to perceive, is eternal oblivion possible? — Corvus

This again is the problem of confounding what you believe with what is true. That you will not know that you are oblivious does not mean you are not oblivious... Rather the opposite.

...the idea of being out of the game will be disturbing... — Janus

Comforting, then, to think that some part of each of us returns in another. But what that part is, and how to formulate that return, remains obscure.

What is an object, for you?

Pegasus was the mount of Bellerophon. Therefor something was the mount of Bellerophon.

Whether that something was an object or not depends on how you use "object".

Yep.

Donald Trump doesn't want to control any markets — frank

Sure. The question being asked is, to what extent does the market control Trump?

All of them.

I will also note that there's a distinction between critical thinking and antagonism — Wayfarer

As Sir Bernard Woolley might say, I'm critical, you are antagonistic, he is a right bastard...

Yep. While all that is quite right, there are forces that the orange emperor will need to contend with that are distinct from the institutions of the failed US democracy - the market, for a start. How much of a reduction in the value of their shares will folk abide? How deeply unpopular can a President become, and still maintain power?

The truth is still there, regardless of the bullshit. The courts have ben captured, but he cannot capture the market.

That's what the article is pointing out, and where things will get interesting.

Yep. I was responding to that response. I do understand that you do not like what I have to say. You are of course not under any obligation to respond to my critique. But my critique of your response to the OP, is also, thereby, addressing the OP.

Wishful thinking?

What remains of the Wayfarer from previous lives? In what sense are you still them, and not just someone else who happens to have memories of the life of a different person? What is it that is continuous from one metempsychosis to another?

If there is a collective unconscious - whatever that might be - why do you have the memories of particular individuals, and not of some amalgam of all past consciousness?

Again, when one turns a critical eye on these ideas, it is difficult to see how they can be made coherent.

Here, I suspect, is the defining characteristic of the upcoming election:

A survey about how we see the future should worry politicians

Life wasn't better fifty years ago - I know, I was there. That folk believe it was is more about where they think - or perhaps know - things are going. The question facing votes is if the move away from the main parties will be progressive or regressive.

I would not much like what seems likely to come after — Janus

Once one is dead, one is no longer a player, as it were, and so inevitably things cannot go in one's favour. The particular interests that make you who you are will inevitably dissipate in your absence; the papers you wrote will no longer be cited, the events in the lives of your dozens or hundreds of descendants will not have relevance to you, and what belonged to you will belong to others or end up in landfill.

That's what it is to be a ghost.

An excellent analysis by Alan Kohler: To make America great, Donald Trump is undoing its greatness as global stock markets fall

In the name of making America great again, Trump is undoing the very things that made America great.

I quite agree.

This is a different topic to "eternal oblivion", which is not something to be feared. One might not be anxious about being dead, so much as about how one gets there.

And then there is the considerable discussion about whether being dead amounts to a bad thing, in that it deprives one of ongoing experiences. I'd like to know what happens next, although I expect I would not much like it.

Have a read of Confirmable and Influential Metaphysics by J. W. N. Watkins, or see the old thread.

Myths that are "haunted universe doctrines", are an inevitable influence on our lives, their logical structure preventing their being either confirmed or falsified. "although these doctrines cannot be proved or refuted they can be criticised and weighed".

Nice. Like Ross Ryan.

But he is not Pegasus. Pegasus is mythical, so any real creature claiming to be Pegasus is a con.

What you are describing appears to be a novice version of transcendental idealism.

is right to ask you how it can explain both the consistency of your perceptions, and how it is that we overwhelmingly agree as to how things are.

This realization is due to neural processes in the brain. — MoK

Not quite. That realisation is neural processes in the brain. It is not seperate from yet caused by those neural processes.

And a babe's brain is pre-wired to recognise faces and areola.

Part of the problem here is that it remains very unclear what "determinism" might mean. Indeed, the presumption that physics is deterministic is almost certainly mistaken.

Further, you do not know what you will do next.

A brute fact is a fact you can't explain with deeper more fundamental facts. — flannel jesus

It would be better to say that a brute fact does not have any further explanation.

it's not just that the explanation is not available to us, but that things just are that way.

Don't worry - there was more involved in banning Sandwich. You are safe.

As Wittgenstein pointed out, being dead is not something that will happen to you; when you are dead, there is no longer a "you". Death is no more a part of your life than the space two inches past a ruler is part of the ruler.

Do we in fact know that the dream precedes, or grounds, the kicking? Might it not be the case that my legs kick for some independent, strictly neurological reason, which then causes me to dream about kicking, in the same way that a full bladder causes me to dream about urination? — J

Daniel Dennett proposed that we don't dream, that we do not have an experience over a period of time while asleep, but that rather a memory of dreaming is confabulated on waking. Dreams are not lived but merely recalled as if they had been.

Not likely, given other empirical evidence, but curious.

One can still interpret that his/her country somehow appears in the Bible. — Zebeden

"Confabulate" would be a better term.

He communicated to me several papers, published in English and Spanish, mostly on quantification and individuation, which he was able to defend at length. He is a competent philosopher.

Unlike others hereabouts.

But his banning was perhaps inevitable. A shame.

"To be a bound variable in modal logic is to entail a choice of some necessary predicate(s)" — J

This seems to presume a fixed domain - that the very same things exist in every possible world. If that is not presumed, then there might be bound variables that belong to possible but not actual individuals. ∃x◊P(x) might be true in some possible world, yet not in others. In which case it's not true that the bound variable x is necessarily P. There are possible worlds in which nothing is P.

Water just is the stuff made out of H₂O. The two terms "pick out" the very same stuff. There's nothing ontologically or epistemologically puzzling in our using two words to refer to the same thing, is there?

And of course we might have done otherwise. We might have used the word "gold" for a group of different metals, but as it turns out we use it only for samples of that metal which has 79 protons in its nucleus. Did we discover, or did we stipulate, that it is "gold" that has an atomic number of 79? When scientific knowledge advances, are we changing the rules of our language, or are we uncovering facts that were already true? - but these are not mutually exclusive. We might arguably be doing both. In discovering that gold has 79 protons in its nucleus, we thereby changed the way we talk about gold.

What introduces necessity or possibility is the way the domain is interpreted as much as which properties are involved.

:wink:

More on the conflation of necessity and analyticity:

"Attributes, as remarked earlier, are individuated by this principle: two open sentences which determine the same class do not determine the same attribute unless they are analytically equivalent."

but this is wrong. It should be:

Attributes, as remarked earlier, are individuated by this principle: two open sentences which determine the same class do not determine the same attribute unless they are necessarily equivalent.

A field of study is not a mathematical or physical field, yes. Nor is it a field of wheat.
In so far as

...the whole of existence is reducible to the patterns of excitation of the one universal field of subjectivity. — Wayfarer

would pretend to a physical field, not an area of study or a paddock, it is muddled.

So this is a long argument setting out w "the only hope of sustaining quantified modal".

The page referred to just before your quote...

The Aristotelian notion of essence was the forerunner, no doubt, of the modern notion of intension or meaning. For Aristotle it was essential in men to be rational, accidental to be two-legged. But there is an important difference between this attitude and the doctrine of meaning. From the latter point of view it may indeed be conceded (if only for the sake of argument) that rationality is involved in the meaning of the word ‘man’ while two-leggedness is not; but two-leggedness may at the same time be viewed as involved in the meaning of ‘biped’ while rationality is not. Thus from the point of view of the doctrine of meaning it makes no sense to say of the actual individual, who is at once a man and a biped, that his rationality is essential and his two-leggedness accidental or vice versa. Things had essences. for Aristotle, but only linguistic forms lnave meanings. Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word. — p.22

Quine's view of Aristotelian essentialism, it seems. So what is the "reversion to Aristotelian essentialism"? That some of the properties of a man are necessary, and some contingent.

What Smullyanis proposes (back a few paragraphs) is very close to Kripke's rigid designation. Quine would reject this on the grounds that some description must be associated with any proper name in order to "fix" it's referent. This wasn't rejected until Donnellan and Kripke's discussion of the topic, a few years later.

Quine's text is not helped by the juxtaposition of necessary and contingent, and the association of analyticity with necessity.

So let's be a bit pedantic and oppose necessity with possibility, and define these in terms of possible worlds, while also and distinctly opposing the analytic and the synthetic, such that the analytic is understood by definition while the synthetic is understood by checking out how things are in the world.

And as for contingency, let's leave it aside until we have a better foundation.



How's that looking?

"must be seen..." — J

is, then, what musty happen if modal logic is to avoid the issues with quantification that Quine raises - in this Quine is more or less correct, and the strategy Kripke adopts is pretty much the one Quine sets out - there are properties of things that are true of them in every possible world.

Whether these properties are "essential" is another question.

Matter of fact, I've got one now. — Wayfarer

A hard-earned thirst?

Seems to me you are looking for a veneer of scientific credibility, which is odd. But in the end it's the bit where folk want, incoherently, to detail the ineffable, in this case the subjective.

...for the whole of existence is reducible to the patterns of excitation of the one universal field of subjectivity. — Wayfarer

That's not an analogy. Not a metaphor.

We could explore natural disasters, like the closing of King Island Dairy. — Banno

King Island Dairy to continue after Saputo finds new owner for assets

"Morphogenetic fields" cause me some amusement because it suffers much the same issues as "Subjective field". Morphogenetic fields could not specify a value at every point in the space. It commenced with Gurwitsch attempting a mathematical analysis that did involve a vector field, but this fell apart, replaced by a model of differentiation involving gene expression and differentiation by transcription and growth factors - specific proteins.

But at least Gurwitsch understood what a field is.

↪Banno I like the bead illustration as a guide to intension/extension. — J

I'm please.

I chose it also in order to draw comparisons to PI§42 regarding simples. What is the simple here? What are the individuals? We treated the beads as the individuals. I left out the string entirely; the domain might have been set to {beads, string}. I might equally validly have treated the colours as individuals - that the domain was {blue, red}. What counts as an individual in the domain is stipulated.

I might have missed a response somewhere — J

No, you didn't. I had intended to come back to this. It needs a longer post delving into the context. Next post, maybe.