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Said in the same vain as what Jesus said to the rich young man who wanted to follow Him: "First, go and sell all you have." The young man went away sadly [because he couldn't give up his wealth].

"Your family business comes second to the Kingdom of God." or worse than second. It's a tough demand. — Bitter Crank

Or cut off your hand if it causes you to sin. Of course all of that can be interpreted in a non-literal sense, but it seems to be saying everything else is secondary to your calling. I'm not sure you can build a modern society on the back of Jesus's teachings.

Restorative justice could be applied to older offenders and more serious crimes, too, but with more state involvement and likely still involve jail and/or a fine. — Bitter Crank

To a point, but I wonder what sort of restorative justice a rapist would do, since you don't want to further traumatize their victim. Or what you would have a murderer do that wouldn't be a total affront to the victim's family and friends.

You mean the walking dead, or what? — Noble Dust

Luke 9:59-60:

He said to another man, "Follow me." But he replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."
Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."

Jesus made quite a few statements that would not be good for society as a whole.

The Golden Rule begin with the self because we can only know what guilt and punishment feel like for ourselves. — Bitter Crank

Part of retributive justice is being aware that if you decide that bashing your neighbor's head in and stealing their stuff is a tempting idea, there could be serious consequences for doing so.

That won't inhibit everyone, as some people aren't wired to worry too much about consequences. But my guess is your average person is somewhat inhibited from doing bad things on occasion because they know they could go to jail.

Another way to frame your Golden Rule question is to ask what would you want to happen if you're the victim? Or what would you want to happen to your neighbor who was victimized?

Jesus never went into detail about how the Golden Rule should or should not be applied in every situation. He's just recorded spouting off maxims and performing miracles.

But he never set down and wrote a treatise on how a society would be arranged around such maxims.

What if everyone let the dead bury themselves? Would that be a good maxim for society? Probably not.

So meaning that if you committed murder, you would want justice served to yourself, right? — Noble Dust

Hopefully, if I have any decency. But I'm also prone to being self-interested, like everyone else. That's why I won't get to try myself or pass my own sentence.

Same deal if a loved one committed murder. I might want to see them get off or serve a lighter sentence. But I don't get to decide. That would be biased.

What I want, when self-interest and bias is removed, is for everyone to be held accountable for such crimes. That's the kind of society I prefer to live in.

What's the superior alternative? Someone robs, rapes, commits murder, defrauds customers, steals identities and ruins credit. What should we do about such crimes?

The golden rule is just one maxim. I might endeavor to treat my neighbor as myself, but when he kills another neighbor, I want justice to be served.

Notice that I said another neighbor, not myself. This other neighbor could be somebody I never even talk to, and I still want my murderous neighbor arrested and tried, and if found guilty, sent away.

It's also that Chavaka espoused the problem of induction as part of it's epistemology. Hume is credited with that, and he probably stated it in more modern terms, but he wasn't the first.

I feel like almost all philosophy I've been exposed to is exclusively Western, and almost all credit is given to Westerners.

One of the questions that fascinated me was the relation of personal identity to the memories others have of you. — Mitchell

Soderbergh's movie also explored this angle. I've read the book the two movies are based on by Stanislaw Lem, and the focus was a bit different. Lem was interested in whether communication was possible with a truly alien being. The characters in the book struggled with the failure of science and all other attempts to communicate with the sentient ocean on Solaris. It was clearly intelligent in some manner, but it was so different from anything humans understood.

As a last resort, they had their brain scans beamed over the ocean, after which recreations of lost loved ones from memory started to appear. The guess was that the ocean was attempting to communicate in it's own way, but didn't understand humans anymore than we had understood it, thus resulting in the strange and painful reunions.

Most basically, so that it can accomplish goals. — praxis

The pragmatic answer. Do you think the mind can accomplish goals without somewhat faithfully representing objects?

When I see a cliff and feel vertigo, is my mind representing accurately the danger to my body? Or is that just an illusion?

Material or physical objects are represented in the mind. These representation are not the objects themselves. This doesn't address the nature of the objects. — praxis

This assumes the nature of the objects cannot be known via representations in the mind.

Here's a question. Why does the mind represent objects the way it does?

I don't know what a view from nowhere is other than no view at all. It makes more sense to say that an objective view is a view from everywhere, not nowhere. — Harry Hindu

It's considered "nowhere" because it has been stripped of all subjective qualities. The world portrayed by science doesn't look, sound, taste, smell or feel like anything. And It's not from a particular vantage point.

I would be astonished if such disputes did not arise. — andrewk

But when I go and read on SEP, or a layman's philosophy book, it doesn't get bogged down with semantics. Things are defined as needed to setup the argument or examine the different positions, and that's that.

What really brings the issue to mind was a discussion on here a while back concerning whether color irrealism was a threat to direct realism. That went about 31 pages until the discussion was completely derailed by arguments over what "direct" and "realism" meant.

Physicalists believe that all that exists is the fundamental entities disclosed by physics, whatever they turn out to be - it used to be ‘atoms’ but atoms themselves are now rather spooky kinds of things. — Wayfarer

That's not an entirely fair description. It's too reductionist, and commits physicalists to mereological nihilism. Chalmers defines physicalism as the fundamental entities plus whatever logically supervenes on those.

He just doesn't think that mind (qualia at least) logically supervenes, therefore he's a dualist.

There are several ways to think about the distinction.

I think Locke's primary/secondary qualities captures it nicely.

One can also think of it in terms of the difficulty in reducing qualia, intentionality and indexicality to physical terms, while at the same time finding the idealist explanation for space, time, particles, etc to be unbelievable.

Or one can just say that the physical is mathemitizeable, while the mental is not. Meillassoux's version of speculative realism might fall into this, although he talks in terms of transcending Kant's correlationism to get at the mathematical reality.

On a more meta level, there is Nagel's subjective/objective split, with science being the view from nowhere, which is objective, and subjectivity being a view from somewhere.

The large objects jumping and landing and the consequent shock-waves that would follow are some way or another conveyed in the illusion, and so the noise is perhaps tailored in the brains attempt at filling in the gaps. — Qurious

I suppose auditory illusion is the better categorization.

Do we experience any sounds coming from our ears? Our ears are a stereo system that help place sounds appropriately in space. So we hear sounds coming from the place they are likely being made. — apokrisis

I perceive sound external to my ears, and that sound can hurt my ears if it's loud or shrill enough. This is different. It's like an internal auditory hallucination.

My impression that the key differences of opinion were over what constitutes a 'definition', and what constitutes a 'proof'. — andrewk

No wonder philosophy discussions on forums never get anywhere. It always turns into a semantic dispute over terms people normally have no trouble understanding.

Maybe we can go all the way back to the theorized big bang. — ff0

I don't think we need to go all the way back to the big bang to explain the rain satisfactorily. In my OP, I admitted that at some point, we run out of the ability to explain, and then we're left with brute existence. But we don't need to do that with experience.

Anyway, even if the universe is brute, that still explains our experiences of it. We experience a world, because it's there to be experienced (or better yet, we're animals living inside that world whose survival is dependent on perceiving the world to a certain degree of fidelity).

I guess this depends on what you take for an explanation. If I can take some concepts and numbers and build a reliable prediction machine, that's great. Is this an explanation? Obviously we want reliable prediction. No complaint there. But why is this explanation? — ff0

Why does it rain? Because heat from the sun evaporates the water which eventually turns into rain clouds. Sounds like an explanation to me.

Science is both prediction and explanation. The explanation gives rise to prediction, which allows for the explanation to be tested.

Would a falling tree still make a noise if no one was around to hear it?
Yes. — Qurious

It would make sound waves, but if there are no ears around, then there would be no sound as a phenomena. This is where it gets tricky. Does the tree look brown and green? Well, it does given the sort of eyes we have. But what about when nobody's looking? Well then it's reflecting light with wavelengths that correspond to brown and green perceptions, in addition to any light humans can't see that would be reflected by a tree. There's also all the light that passes through objects like trees, such as radio waves.

It makes you wonder what the sky would look like if our eyes could take in the entire EM spectrum.

Is metaphysical realism equivalent to belief in objective reality, or is there something more to it? — T Clark

I would have said that, but then skeptical scenarios like the Matrix would qualify. I think Michael put it better:

Metaphysical realism also seems to require that the kinds and categories that the things in experience belong to are also the kinds and categories that those mind-independent things belong to, but I think there's a case to argue that this isn't the case. — Michael

How similar does reality need to be for metaphysical realism to be true? Does the fact that tables are mostly empty space mean that solid tables don't exist? Or can we just say that within the light we see, and given that our bodies and ordinary objects are held together molecular in a similar fashion, tables are solid?

Or what if we take Banno's approach to objects, and say that there are different ways to carve up the world? Can there be a multiplicity of conceptual schemas about the world, but the world is still real?

The philosophical error here is to mistake a question of grammar for a question of ontology. — Banno

So basically, we can carve up the world anyway that makes sense, but asking whether our carving exists is to mistake carving for ontology.

What counts as a simple is utterly dependent on what we are saying.

The rest of this thread is confusion. — Banno

Many things we consider to be objects are made up out of parts. The question is whether something made up out of parts can be singular. I think of myself as a single animal, a person, a mind, etc. But I'm made up of tons of cells. And those cells are made up of molecules, and so on.

Are people, rocks, stars actually objects or do we mistakenly think they are?

Since this is an ontological question, the concern is with what really is, not how we conceive of people, rocks, stars.

But we only ever experience our experience, ie the model. — Agustino

What does it mean to experience our experience? Isn't that how we get in these philosophical muddles in the first place? Do I experience the tree, or do I experience the experience of the tree?

Yet the abstract mind can see the ultimate futility of all plans. There is no future, or (apparently) no stable and ultimate future. So our best laid plans are haunted by absurdity. — ff0

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? — Ecclesiastes

I was on vacation, and I realized it would quickly pass and I would never get to do the vacation over again. That was a bit depressing.

Not everything has to be of practical importance to be worth doing. Humans watch and debate sports, movies, read comic books, they go to art galleries and concerts, etc.

Not all science has a practical effect on our lives. It really doesn't matter if there is massive black hole at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy. But it's interesting.

That's why I cringe whenever the argument comes up that science exists for technology's sake. No, science, like philosophy, exists first and foremost because we're a curious species. We like to ask questions. We want to understand. We're puzzled by the world and ourselves.

This narrow prejudice ignores the fact that as embodied we feel the forces involves in causal efficacy; we feel ourselves being pulled, pushed, impacted and generally acted upon by natural forces in phenomena such as sunlight, wind and water, and also we experience pulling, pushing, impacting and generally acting upon other things. The bodily feeling of these forces is the source of the concept of force which distinguishes causation from mere impotent correlation. — Janus

Good point. Perception in philosophy is so often focused on vision that I wonder if it doesn't sometimes lead philosophers astray. If we're the billiard balls feeling the strike as we move in response, does Hume still make the claim that we don't perceive causation?

To doubt, you need a reason to doubt, not just a contextless wondering whether things might be different than you think they are. — gurugeorge

Right, so for example you can imagine this is all a dream, but then we understand the distinction between dreaming and waking because we spend part of our time awake. But what does it mean if we were only dreaming the entire time?

Just like we can imagine taking a brain and putting it in a vat, but what would it actually mean for us to be brains in vats?

I understand what a simulation is because of the real things it's simulating, but what if everything was simulated? Then what does "simulated" mean?

See the Sime & Willow posts above my response. Also see other posts in this thread talking about habit or passion, including yours.

What Hume was puzzled by was how we came to have a concept of causality since it's neither empirical nor a logical deduction. I've been arguing that habit in response to constant conjunction is not enough to arrive at the concept of causality.

Beyond that, I think very few people actually have world views that you would consider "realist." In the US, something like 45% of adults do not believe in evolution. More than 80% believe in God. — T Clark

That doesn't make you non-realist. That just means you think reality is different than the naturalistic version. Metaphysical realist means a belief in a mind-independent world. I grew up Christian, and most of those folks believed God created a material world that may or may not be compatible with what scientists say. I don't recall anyone espousing Berkeley's idealism, other than reference to Christian Science or gnosticism, which was considered heretical.

The point is that we do have the concepts of necessity and causality, contrary to what the Humeans in this thread have been arguing.

It's not that we can't be wrong about what's actually necessary/causal, only that we can and do conceive of such things. Kant was right that causality is fundamental to our thinking.

Hence to say that "B necessarily follows A" is in some sense compatible with saying "B doesn't necessarily follow A". — sime

The laws of thermodynamics prohibit perpetual motion machines from being invented.

Nothing with mass can be accelerated to the speed of light.

It's impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle with 100% certainty.

You can't build a storage device consisting of a sphere of 6.7 cm or smaller containing more than 2.6 X 10^42 bits.

You can't build a computer that carries out more than 5 X 10^50 operations per second.

You can't transmit information faster than the speed of light.

You can't perform a measurement below the Plank scale.

You can't have a temperature below 0 degrees Kelvin.

All of the above and more is necessarily the case without exception.

Presumably not so much for someone who actually believes it. — Wayfarer

That would be called faith, not a fact, would it not? Or even imagination, if we moved God from heart to head, depending on the person in question.

Do you expect an answer? I don't know. I don't know what you mean. — T Clark

That's one problem with God being a fact.

That's definitely a metaphysical question. — T Clark

God exists in my heart. True or false?

Hume says we are creatures of passion primarily not rationality; don't expect him to derive shit, he's busy pointing out how underivable it is. — unenlightened

That still fails to explain how we came up with the concept of causality. Saying that it's a habit of mind is not explaining how the concept could form.

And since Hume was an empiricist, he has nowhere else to go.

There is a passion to find a pattern, a passion to predict. — unenlightened

A passion isn't a concept. We have a concept of causality. Hume wasn't able to provide a good explanation for how we arrived at such a concept.

As has been noted earlier in this thread (in correction to something I posted), correlation isn't causation. So you can't derive the concept of causation from constant conjunction.

But the way it is interpreted has considerable metaphysical implications. I have no doubt at all about the facts of the matter, but considerable doubts about what they are taken to mean. — Wayfarer

You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals?

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is not metaphysics. Evolution is a fact in the world. The theory that natural selection is the primary mechanism of evolution is well supported by factual evidence and is believed by a consensus of those with a strong understanding of human biology, geology, and paleontology. — T Clark

Right, but science has taken over for metaphysics in the past on questions that can be empirically investigated. At one point, the idea of evolution was metaphysical. That was before Darwin, of course. Same with atomism.