How deep and transformative is the well documented fear of death? The fact that one’s life must end is understood to invoke in most people a kind of existential terror. While I am not keen to die immediately, I have never shared this terror. Should I die in the night, so be it. I’m ready. I’ve prepared my will and I've set up steps for when the time comes. — Tom Storm

I posted this graph from the web a month or so ago:



Here is the source it came from:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/959347/fear-of-death-in-the-us/

So, no, death does not appear to invoke existential terror in a large portion of the population.

What do others think about the role of death in their lives — Tom Storm

My attitude is similar to yours. I'm having a good time. I'd rather not go right now, but I don't want to live forever either. I'm trying to stay healthy, but I just ate a Milky Way bar.

I hope we are clear I am not here to learn English and if you can decipher the meanings, there is no need to pick up on these non-native speakers' grammatical errors. Unless, this forum is for only members who can speak English as their first language in which case I should be told so. — Raef Kandil

Good response to @180 Proof's snotty comment.

Thanks.

I'm not sure but, as a teen I had read Heisenberg's intellectual autobiography "Der Teil und das Ganze," — Pierre-Normand

The English translation is called "Physics and Beyond." I requested a copy from my library. Thanks for the reference.

Yes, that was quite enlightening. — Pierre-Normand

Isn't this fun.

I inquired with GPT4 regarding your interaction with (I presumed) GPT-3.5. Here is the result. — Pierre-Normand

Your conversation with Chat GPT about my conversation with it's less advanced alter-ego was really interesting. I think it's description of Heisenberg's explanation of uncertainty is correct. It is really a classical rather than a quantum mechanical explanation. I'm still left missing something. If Heisenberg proposed the wrong mechanism, why was his answer right and why is he credited with the discovery. I guess I could take this back to Chat GPT, but that seems pretty pointless.

The explanation of the real mechanism of the uncertainty principle you got is similar to ones I've gotten from other sources, e.g. Wikipedia. All the explanations I've gotten are pretty vague. I don't know if that's because you need to understand the math to get it or if people are just waving their arms.

You haven't tried GPT4 yet, have you? — Pierre-Normand

I asked the program what version it was and it said

I am a version of GPT called "GPT-3" (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), which is currently the largest and most advanced version of GPT developed by OpenAI. — Chat GPT

You have to work cooperatively to supply it with rich contextual information, which can include articles excerpts in which the scientific topic at issue is expounded rigorously, in order for the bot to harness to the fullest extend the expert knowledge and wisdom about it that is present in its vast knowledge base. — Pierre-Normand

I don't know if you saw my first post in this thread where I discussed a quote that might or might not be from Leon Trotsky. I had to ask additional questions and prompt it with my own understanding. It's on this page.

My major observations — Baden

I think my biggest criticism is how often it is wrong. I tried asking it some physics questions about issues I had been confused about. I found myself disagreeing with it's answers several times after only trying it out for about eight questions. An example - I've read Heisenberg's original paper about the uncertainty principle. From what I'd read previously, it seemed his explanation is different from the one generally given. When I asked Chat GPT about it, it acknowledged that Heisenberg's original reasoning was incomplete and claimed that the effect was related to entanglement. That seemed wrong to me, so the next day I asked what the connection between the uncertainty principle and entanglement is. In it's response it said there is no connection.

But, on the other hand, it does write poetry that's worse than mine.

I haven't been paying attention to this thread, so I apologize is this is a distraction. The following exchange represents something that has happened to me several times. I would ask question, ChatGPT would answer, then I would push back on the answer and ChatGPT would change it's mind.

T Clark - Who said "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

Chat GPT - The quote "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" is often attributed to Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He is believed to have used this phrase in a speech he delivered at a meeting of the Communist Party in 1925. The quote has since been widely used to suggest that individuals cannot simply ignore the reality of war, as its impact can be far-reaching and affect everyone, regardless of their personal interest or involvement in it.

T Clark - I had heard it is a quote made up by Alan Furst

Chat GPT - While Alan Furst, a popular historical spy novelist, did use a similar quote in his book "Night Soldiers," it is generally believed that the quote "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" was originally spoken by Leon Trotsky.

It is possible that Furst's use of the quote has helped to popularize it in modern times, but the origins of the quote can be traced back to Trotsky and his speeches in the early 20th century.

T Clark - Which speech are you referring to?

Chat GPT - I apologize for any confusion earlier. Upon further research, it appears that the quote "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" cannot be definitively traced back to any specific speech or writing by Leon Trotsky.

While Trotsky was known for his writings and speeches on the subject of war, there is no record of him using this specific quote. It's possible that the quote was popularized later on by writers and scholars who were inspired by Trotsky's ideas and writings on war.

The quote has since taken on a life of its own, becoming a popular expression that highlights the idea that war can have a profound impact on individuals, whether they choose to engage with it or not.

I have two conclusions 1) Alan Furst is a great writer and 2) Chat GPT is a weasel.

Emergence is not well understood in all its varieties.

In Wikipedia Mark A. Bedau observes:

Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities?

At its simplest level it is characterized as an automobile, which involves a pattern or arrangement of parts. Under downward causation in Wikipedia:

Downward causation does not occur by direct causal effects from higher to lower levels of system organisation. Instead, downward causation occurs indirectly because the mechanisms at higher levels of organisation fail to accomplish the tasks dictated by the lower levels of organisation. As a result, inputs from the environment signal to the mechanisms at lower levels of organisation that something is wrong and therefore, to act.

Downward causation might be a key to understanding consciousness, but mathematically it is not well understood. The explorations I have done in infinite compositions of functions might eventually play a minor role, especially inner compositions which relate mathematically to the convergence of continued fractions. Don't worry, I won't get started. :nerd: — jgill

This reminded me of a discussion that @apokrisis participated in. Here is his discussion about downward constraint. It's long:

That’s where the hierarchy of scale comes in. It represents an artificial division of the universe into manageable pieces.
— T Clark

Reductionists and holists mean different things when they talk about hierarchical order.

Reductionists think only in terms of upwards construction. You start with an ultimately simple and stable foundation, then build upwards towards increasing scales of complexity. As high as you like.

But a holist thinks dualistically in terms of upwards construction working in organic interaction with downwards constraint. So you have causality working both ways at once, synergistically, to produce the functioning whole.

The hierarchy thus becomes not a tower of ascending complexity (and arbitrariness or specificity) but it itself reduces to a "basic triadic relation" (as hierarchy theorist, Stan Salthe, dubs it). The holist account reduces all organisation to the interaction between an upward constructionist flow and a downward constraining history or context, plus then the third thing which is the relation that those two causal actions develop in a stable and persistent fashion.

So many key differences to reductionist metaphysics follow from this connected causality.

For example, it makes everything historically or developmentally emergent - the upward construction and the downward constraint. There is no fundamental atomistic grain - a collection of particles - that gets everything started. Instead, that grain is what gets produced by the top-down constraints. The higher order organisation stabilises its own ground of being in bootstrap fashion. It gives shape to the very stuff that composes it.

A simple analogy. If you want an army, you must produce soldiers. You must take average humans with many degrees of freedom (all the random and unstable variety of 18 year olds) and mould them in a boot camp environment which strictly limits those freedoms to the behaviours found to be useful for "an army". You must simplify and standardise a draft of individuals so that they can fit together in a collective and interchangeable fashion that then acts in concert to express the mind and identity of a "military force".

So in the holist view, there is no foundational stability to a functioning system. The stability of the parts comes from the top-down constraints that shape up the kind of parts that are historically best suited to the task of constituting the system as a whole. The parts are emergent and produced by a web of limitation.

When it comes to the metaphysics of science, this is why we see thermodynamics becoming the most general perspective. The broad constraint on all nature is that it must be able to self-organise its way into stable and persistent complexity. And thermodynamics or statistical mechanics offers the basic maths for dealing with systems that develop negentropic organisation by exporting entropy.

From particle physics to neuroscience, thermodynamics explains both simplicity and complexity.

Well, it does if you let it. — apokrisis

Fine. I never discussed reason, except as a proposed component of sorting information. I think I do use reason as part of the process whereby I arrive at conclusions and decisions, and I suspect you do too, but if you don't believe that, you don't. It's not a critical difference between faith, based in little or no evidence, and trust or belief based on empirical experience. — Vera Mont

I already discussed how I think reason is involved in knowledge and decision making. I never claimed it had no role. We've gotten a little off target anyway, the main issue between us is whether or not faith is a valid path to knowledge. I say it can be. You say no. I don't think we're going to get any better than that.

What is that internal model built from, if not experience and learning of real facts, things and events in the real world? At some points during that construction, reason must have been involved in assessing which bits to keep and discard, which bits go where in the model. — Vera Mont

I think "reason" has almost nothing to do with it. Most of it is non-verbal, unconscious. It happens while we're not trying to do anything. Children don't learn language using any kind of reason, certainly not before they start going to school, by which time they are already fluent. Maybe parents tell children to say "please" and not to fight with their siblings, but that's not where they really learn about the rules and skills of social interaction. The same is true of the physical world. We learn about gravity by falling. We learn it with out bodies. People pay attention to what's going on and take it into themselves to build their picture of the world. To me, that's the foundation of knowledge, intuition, and faith, which are all the same thing.

I came to recognize my initial understanding of a problem came from a mostly unconscious processing of the information I have studied, my understanding of my professional body of knowledge, and my general knowledge of life. In short, it was ultimately founded on an empirical but not rational basis.
— T Clark
I don't see this is as a contradiction to
Faith is a belief largely or wholly unsupported by empirical evidence.
— Vera Mont — Vera Mont

I think it is a contradiction. As I've tried to describe it, knowledge, intuition, faith is ultimately founded on direct experience of the world supplemented as we get older by intentional learning and contemplation.

My brother and I have really different tastes in music. Over the years that I've given him music as a gift, the only one he has really liked is Chris Smither. I'd pretty much given up on buying him more music until I started listening to Ray Wylie Hubbard. Now I just sent him a copy of one of his albums for his birthday. This song, "The Messenger" is on the album I got him, but this is a different version, one I like very much:

The individual is naked in the storm, a ruined king, like Lear. What is this 'final' form of heroism ? What is the 'last' that Macbeth tries ? — green flag

Maybe you're making too much out of someone saying "fuck this." It's a guy kind of thing. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Just fuck it. It's one of the good things and one of the bad things about men. No need to make it mythological.

what you are saying is that they need the support system to trust the world. — Raef Kandil

No, that's not what I'm saying.

This is why, when our intuition, guesstimate or hunch turns out to be wrong, we eat a little crow and keep trucking. When we lose our faith, our whole model of the world and confidence in ourself crumbles. — Vera Mont

You've ignored the substance of my comment and focused on a language disagreement.

An important point that is largely lost in Western cultural discourse is the principle of self-realization in the philosophical or spiritual sense. — Wayfarer

Good post and thanks for the link. I don't think anything you described contradicts what I wrote about in my previous post.

Faith is a belief largely or wholly unsupported by empirical evidence. — Vera Mont

I don't think that's true. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how we know things recently. I've gotten in several discussions here on the forum where we disagreed on the role of reason and intuition. My claim is that most of what we know and how we make decisions is not based on reason but on the totality of our experience and learning. I guess this is something like the correspondence theory of truth except we don't compare our beliefs with the world but with a model of the world we carry around with us. This is something I experience very directly.

My understanding of knowledge is based on my experience as an engineer for 30 years. In that role I had to pay attention to what I knew and how I knew it. I came to recognize my initial understanding of a problem came from a mostly unconscious processing of the information I have studied, my understanding of my professional body of knowledge, and my general knowledge of life. In short, it was ultimately founded on an empirical but not rational basis. For me, reason comes along afterward, when I have to verify, justify, communicate what I've learned and figure out what to do with and about it. In summary - reason can analyze, but it can't synthesize. Reason doesn't get good ideas, it evaluates ideas that come from somewhere else.

And yes, I think faith is just another name for intuition and religious faith is intuition for people who carry around a different model of the world than we do.

Religion is an act of fear. Faith is act of liberation. Prophets are not following dogmas. They are essentially defying all the society rules to favour their truthfulness to the experience they are having. — Raef Kandil

This is certainly not true. I know a lot of religious people who are not afraid. For many, belief in God in the company of others who feel the same is a way to focus their attention outside of themselves, to give themselves to their community, to surrender their will, and to trust in the world.

Faith is our interpretation of the life experience we are having and it is based on the mind and heart working together. — Raef Kandil

I do agree with this.

You misunderstood. I did not say that worldviews or metaphysics or epistemology are not substantial. I said that we were not having a debate over anything substantial, but merely exchanging worldviews. — Jamal

This looks like a good place to stop.

Well, I’m not sure how we ended up just exchanging worldviews rather than arguing about something substantial, — Jamal

For me, metaphysics, which is the study of worldviews, is, along with epistemology, the most substantial aspect of philosophy - the most central to the reasons I'm here.

Good points ! We are like wicked children, who question what they are told, because it feels good. But we are also anguished adults, truly troubled about whether X is right and whether Y could be true. — green flag

Well, I am neither wicked nor anguished. I guess I'm just opinionated and stubborn.

Welcome to the forum.

I agree that you can’t separate us from the world, because we’re part of it, but I don’t agree with what I take you to really mean, viz., that humans are in some way constitutive of reality. I’m a kind of materialist, despite Kantian sympathies. — Jamal

I don't know if you've read any of my posts on metaphysics, which are universally rarely acclaimed as brilliant. If you had, you would know that, as both R.G. Collingwood and I see it, both materialism and the understanding that humans create reality are metaphysical positions. As such, they aren't true or false, we just pick the one that works the best for us. Sometimes I'm a materialist, I think an engineer has to be. Now that I no longer have to do anything for a living, I'm more often whatever it is that I am. I guess that means I'm a pragmatist - I use what works. Pragmatism is also a metaphysical position.

Again, you seem to be saying two different things: that we are part of the world, and that the world is human. I agree with the first part, and only agree with the second part to the extent that we are reciprocally bound to the rest of the world such that we see it, conceptualize it, and act in it necessarily in our own ways, owing to our cognitive endowments and social behaviour. But it’s not like there were no dinosaurs before humans existed. That’s a Schopenhauerian antinomy that I think we can avoid. — Jamal

As I see it, we are both part of the world and the world is human. One of the first threads I started here on the forum discussed whether the idea of an objective reality makes sense. My answer is the same as the one I gave earlier in this post - when I'm doing science, it does; when I'm examining our human relationship to reality, for me at least, it doesn't.

Just as we don’t want to separate person and world, neither should we separate valuing from doing. — Jamal

I guess I just think that values come first. Values tell us what we need and want. Based on that, we go and do stuff.

To be clear, it is not my intention to take this discussion off on a tangent by making it about what metaphysics means and which metaphysics is correct. On the other hand, I couldn't explain my position without bringing it up.

This makes sense, because it costs to doubt. Smooth operation is paused. I have to stop and make sure, 'waste time' questioning this or that, when I could be steaming ahead. Then there's the cost of feeding a complex nervous system, of calculating a massive model when a cheap model might be the better deal, all things considered. — green flag

This would make sense if real people making real decisions argued about things like this, but it's only philosophers. Philosophers have lots of time to waste. Pausing smooth operation is what they, we, do.

But the point is that the existence of something “merely” as a social practice or as an intersubjective attribution does not entitle someone to say it’s just an illusion. — Jamal

Yes, I agree, but in my time here on the forum, a feeling has grown that it doesn't make sense to talk about reality, or the world, or meaning without understanding that all of these things are human. You can't separate us from the world or the world from us. Although I'm sympathetic to the idea that our concepts are not ultimate reality, illusions, that doesn't work in our daily lives unless we are sages. The Tao Te Ching is clear that the multiplicity of the world is human. It's ours. It's real. It's where we live and work.

And somewhat against your point, I don’t think this depends on its being rooted in something basic, unless we say that everything we do is rooted in something basic (which is a fair point but doesn’t say much). — Jamal

I'm not talking about what we do, I'm talking about what we value. And I do think that goes back to basic human nature, something built into us. Instinct I guess, as modified by personal and social experience and our mental capacities. For what it's worth, I've been reexamining these beliefs recently. @apokrisis and many others don't see it that way. They see our values and behavior more as a reflection of our generalized conceptual capabilities processing our experiences. (Forgive me if I mischaracterized your position Apokrisis)

There's no doubt I am walking a bit on thin ice. My understanding of cognitive science and psychology is not technically extensive. A lot of what I believe is based on introspection and observing people.

This can be extended to cover all needs and wants, whether basic or not. All of this valuing, whether based purely on need or additionally on conventional observance (“deciding”), is real. Things really are valuable, in our hands or in the market. — Jamal

I think all the values we think of on a daily basis - the value of money, status, expensive toys, etc. have their source in those basic values. The manifestations may represent themselves in the market or our fantasies, but that's not where their root is.

Trying to be nice, for ↪T Clark. — Banno

Thank you.

It could be that to the extent we value rightly, we're in tune with the Mind of God. — frank

I see values related to God as less basic, although I know a lot of people disagree with that. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God. — Verse 4, Tao Te Ching - S. Mitchell translation

all the little parts of your body act like they're in a community and they work all day long to make the community endure — frank

Sounds like comuhnism to me.

We don't decide to give value to food and shelter, so in this case value is rooted in basic needs and desires which we don't control. — frank

I think this is the heart of the matter. We can argue about why I like Chinese food or why I vote Democratic, but there are a set of foundational values I think are much more basic. Security, safety, maintaining what we need to live. Family. I'm tempted to say that all the less basic values can be traced back to those more basic ones, but I'll have to think about that.

And where do those basic values come from? Instinct? Learning? Experience? Physiological reaction? I guess all of those tossed together into the blender of our cognitive machinery.

The metaethical one has tends to greatly shape (I would argue) peoples’ normative ethical theories. — Bob Ross

Thanks for your response. I must admit I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but I don't think I believe in normative ethics, at least not as something driving our behavior. I see moral rules more as a reflection of personal and social judgements. If nothing else, your thread has helped me realize that.

I don't want to send the discussion off on a tangent, so I'll leave it there.

consensus was, leave it, as there have been responses already. I'm not suggesting deletion because of the subject matter, only on the grounds of quality, or absence thereof. — Wayfarer

You're right, given it was you, I shouldn't have played the anti-religion card.

The way this question is phrased amounts to meaningless internet blather. There may be a legitimate philosophical issue at stake, but the wording is poor and the reasoning specious. I'm flagging the thread for deletion. — Wayfarer

I don't think it's reasonable to delete this thread. It's true it was a bit unclear, but I thought it was interesting. [T Clark's usual spiel] There have been many atheist threads much less clear than this. Religious threads should be treated the same.[/T Clark's usual spiel]

So, lef us say it is all physical as you said. Only substance. — Raef Kandil

I didn't say that.

Is this a response to me? It's hard to tell. Here's a link to a page that will show you how to tag your responses to posts and specific quotes.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13892/forum-tips-and-tricks-how-to-quote/p1

Does God exist...If all the rest is created, the need for a supreme higher power is real and therefore whatever way to decide to refer to it, it is all the same. We are referring to the same real need. — Raef Kandil

Welcome to the forum. I enjoyed your post.

The forum is a fraught place to take up the existence of God. Most people here, or at least the loudest, are committed atheists. I don't think they will care much for your nuanced views. Many will see your position as irrelevant to the question of God's existence. My thoughts are in sympathy with yours, although I see things a bit differently.

For me, god is a metaphysical entity, by which I mean its existence isn't a matter of fact, but a way of looking at the world. For me, it represents the fact that many humans experience the world as a living thing. Although I am not a theist, I have no particular religious belief, I often find myself thinking that way. I feel grateful for the world and all the things it has given me. I think many religious believers feel that living connection much more strongly than I do.

I find the metaphysical basis of those feelings consistent with the way I see things. If, as you note, much of our reality is constructed by us, that means the idea of objective reality is misleading. The world as we see it is half human. That's not really all that radical a view. The writings of philosophers like Kant and Lao Tzu point in that direction. My understanding of my readings in psychology and cognitive science tell me that the structure of our minds and our thoughts is not just a function of the world outside, but also of our physical nature, our bodies, our nervous systems, our humanity.

In metaethics, it is exceedingly common to divide views into two subcamps: anti-realism (i.e., that there are no categorical imperatives) and realism (i.e., that there are categorical imperatives). Although I find this to be an intuitive distinction (as an approximation), I am finding the distinction blurring for me the more precise I analyze my metaethical commitments. — Bob Ross

Are there consequences depending on which approach you pick? I mean moral consequences, differences in what behavior you consider moral and, more importantly, how you behave.

broad agreement — Banno

No, I don't think so. For me, any definition or description that doesn't take into account how people use knowledge on a day to day basis is misleading. You call it pragmatism and I'm ok with that.

You married and started a family in the post WWII era of wide-spread prosperity and very good long-range economic prospects. A lot of people in China are not having more than 1 child because the cost of housing, medical care, and retirement is too high to make a commitment to 2, 3, or 4 children.

AT this point in time, upwardly mobile women understand that having a large family means interrupting or halting their careers, and upwardly mobile families want their children to be upwardly mobile too -- which amounts to a fairly expensive project. — BC

Whether or not people can afford to have children is not the question on the table as described in the OP. It is talking about the effect of fewer children on the retirement system. As for financial issues with child rearing, we did take those into account. My wife and I didn't have children until we were financially secure enough to raise them.

Preparation for Kazakhstan: — Jamal

Eat some apples, ride a horse. That's where they came from. In a world, or at least a country, full of geographical ignorance, I think Central Asia is the geography we're most ignorant of.

Sorry, can't help. But the subject seems interesting, so I'll pay attention.