We have very little innate modules and much of our way of surviving in the world is learned habits and deliberative reasoning based on heuristics that could be comprised of. beneficial or poor methods to obtain goals all of which are themselves constructed from preferences based on heiristics built over time. — schopenhauer1

This is a controversial issue that I've been reading and thinking about recently. I think your statement is wrong. I think our thinking is heavily influenced by innate modules. Not certain. Working on it. It's likely a combination of both. I know @apokrisis agrees with you.

At what point do you think that this general processing ability- whereby there is much plasticity in how we behave and thus plasticity in our ways of survival, makes this ability some thing that is a difference in kind not just a degree in evolutionary, biological, and psychological terms? — schopenhauer1

It's not that I don't think we have a powerful general processing ability, but I don't think you can ignore what is built in from the start. I don't think there's anything wrong with calling them instincts.

I'll answer this question with another question - Is it actually true that there is a discontinuity in cognitive ability between humans and other living things? I guess so, if you ignore all the extinct ancestors to our species. I was going to say more but I'm walking on thin intellectual ice now. I'll leave it at that.

Not using the built-in search unfortunately. But there is a way. — Jamal

Tried. Works. Yay! Thanks.

If I'm doing a search and I want to look for a complete phrase rather than a single word, I normally "put quotes around the phrase" before I do the search. When I do that, it seems to highlight any post that has all the words, even if their not in order.

Is there a way of looking for the whole phrase?

Can you see the problem? Can you see that if you say to Aristotle "hey, actually only sentient individuals are beings", you're not making a philosophical point, but just refusing to use Aristotle's terminology and expressing your refusal in a misleadingly substantive statement? — Jamal

I hadn't been following this discussion closely, but when things got lively, I went back and read the relevant posts, including yours. Words mean different things to different people in different places at different times in different contexts, especially important words like "to be" and related words. If you look at definitions of "being", a person or other living thing is one of them.

Both of you seem to be making reasonable arguments. Your usage is more in line with the way I normally see things in a philosophical context. What I'm not certain about is how Jung fits into all of this. He was included in the OP. I don't know much about his beliefs. He seems like something of a mystic. That made me think that what @Wayfarer was saying was consistent with how Jung saw things. I don't know enough to judge.

When I said you were being aggressive, I didn't mean you were being impolite. I tend to be pretty aggressive sometimes. I'm just not used to seeing that from you. You're supposed to be nicer than I am.

I was showing that when philosophers say that everything that can be said to be is a being (which should be obvious), they are not advancing a metaphysical view. — Jamal

This discussion has really gone off the deep end. Arguments about definitions are almost universal here on the forum. The definition of "being" that @Wayfarer is using can be perfectly reasonable in both everyday and philosophical discussions, depending on context. I admit he looks at things differently than I generally do, but I see things differently from many people here. I don't understand why you've being so aggressive.

your post doesn't even address how your idiosyncratic usage of "being", as Jamal has argued, is justified in public discourse. — 180 Proof

I say that beings are subjects of experience, which is a simple fact. As for the various meanings of the verb 'to be', it's a different matter, but it's not relevant to the question implied in the OP. — Wayfarer

I don't get it. Words can mean different things in different contexts. Using "being" in reference to a sentient or conscious entity, e.g. human being, is perfectly reasonable in philosophy or everyday speech. Whether or not that particular usage is relevant to this particular discussion is another matter.

I'm rereading "Tao - The Watercourse Way" by Alan Watts. I haven't read it in more than 30 years. It surprises me how sophisticated his argument against reductionism is. He brings up a lot of issues that I don't normally associate with Taoism, but he helps me see the connection.

In that case the Tao is being as a whole — existence. The individuated beings (things) that we differentiate in perception have as much existence an anything else, as beings. — Mikie

It wouldn’t exist as a linguistic entity— but animals interact with apples all the time. They seem to differentiate between them and what we call rocks just fine. — Mikie

I think the difference you and I are having is a metaphysical not a factual one. There's no need for us to get into a back and forth, but here are two quotes from the Tao Te Ching that lay out my understanding of how Taoists see this. Both are from Ellen Marie Chen's translation. The ten thousand things represent the multiplicity of things, i.e. distinctions. Being applies to them. Non-being represents the Tao, the undivided unity.

Verse 1:
Non-being, to name the origin of heaven and earth;
Being, to name the mother of ten thousand things.

Verse 40
Returning is the movement of Tao.
Weak is the functioning of Tao.
Ten thousand things under heaven are born of being.
Being is born of non-being.

As I said, we don't have to take this any further. I don't want to distract from your discussion.

The OP plainly doesn't want to go down this road so I'll leave it at that. — Wayfarer

Really? I thought we were right on target. Still, I think I said all I had to say anyway.

[Edit] I see @Mikie's later comment now.

I think making the distinction between beings and things is part of a different discussion
— T Clark

Customarily, the subject matter of ontology, which is suggested by the thread title. — Wayfarer

I think the being/thing equivalence I am discussing is ontological while the being/thing distinction you are discussing is ethical.

You'd have to read Wayfarer's post from which I quoted and responded to with my post. — 180 Proof

This is what Wayfarer wrote.

So - is not consciousness invariably associated with beings? Isn't consciousness a fundamental attribute of beings, generally? (as jgill suggests) A non-conscious being is not actually 'a being' but an object or a thing. So consciousness is intrinsic to being, isn't it? I'm tempted to say that to be, is to be conscious. — Wayfarer

I guess I don't see the difference between "beings" and "things." Maybe that's not right. Maybe I just don't think the distinction is useful here. As I see it, consciousness brings all the differentiated aspects of the world into being, existence. In that context, we are just as much things as apples and hand grenades.

I think making the distinction between beings and things is part of a different discussion which can't take place until all the things, including us, are brought into existence. In that different context, the distinction makes more sense. Mixing them together doesn't work.

“The physical world is not as the world as it is in itself. The physical world is a representation, an appearance, on the screen of perception, on the dashboard of dials. Physicality does not have standalone existence, a standalone reality, for exactly the same reason that the images on the screen do not have standalone reality.” — Art48

Keep in mind first of all that my grasp of quantum mechanics is at the level of an intelligent but relatively uneducated amateur. I understand the outlines of the theory and some of the consequences, but I'm not capable of judging in any detail or depth. In particular, I struggle with action at a distance as it is described in current science.

I watched the portion of the video you described. Kastrup uses the language of Kant; thing-in-itself, noumena. He also mixes in action at a distance associated with quantum mechanics. Kant's formulation is one that has parallels with other philosophers - Schopenhauer, Lao Tzu, and Merleau-Ponty I am aware of, but I'm sure there are others. These formulations are metaphysics. They're assumptions, what are called absolute presuppositions. They are not facts. They are habits of thought that form the foundation for science, but aren't science themselves. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is science - a set of theories established based on experimental and theoretical physics and then validated by further observations. These two ways of looking at things don't belong together.

Kastrup isn't stupid. I'm guessing I am misinterpreting his ideas. As I noted, my understanding of quantum mechanics is at a relatively unsophisticated level. But I don't know how to take this discussion any further.

I agree, and this is not the question I've asked. — 180 Proof

I also considered that the person we are discussing is still a person to others, even if the person is unconscious. I assume you don't mean that either. I guess I don't understand the question you were asking.

More to the point, CS Peirce differentiated existence and reality. He said that existence is a binary property that can be ascribed to any concept or entity, depending on whether or not it satisfies certain logical criteria. For example, we might say that unicorns do not exist, because they fail to meet certain logical criteria for existence, such as being observable or verifiable in some way.

On the other hand, Peirce argued that reality is a far more complex and multifaceted concept that encompasses both the logical properties of existence as well as the broader metaphysical properties of being. — Wayfarer

Would Lao Tzu say what he calls "existence" or "being" are the same things you and Peirce call "reality." That creation of the "complex and multifaceted concept that encompasses both the logical properties of existence as well as the broader metaphysical properties of being," is the process that brings things into existence.

I hope you awoke flush with happiness. — Wayfarer

I don't think anyone commented on this. Maybe I missed it. I wish I'd thought of it.

Lantana is a South American climbing vine that forms large patches sprawling over hundreds of square meters displacing native species and is extremely resistant to weedicides, nowadays endemic to large parts of Australia. — Wayfarer

In the southern US, there is a plant called kudzu which behaves in a similar fashion. It was brought in from Asia to help stop erosion. It works very well for that. If you drive along roads in Georgia or South Carolina, you'll see it completely covering trees and abandoned buildings. Once it gets started, it's hard to stop and overpowers native plants.

So while sleeping or comatose, a person is just a "thing", and not a "being", like a sofa or toilet? — 180 Proof

This person would not stop being a person to others. It is a commonplace that we live in a social reality. If you ask whether the person is still a person to themselves when they are not conscious, I don't think the question makes any sense. I don't think anything is anything to an unconscious person. Isn't that what unconsciousness means?

We may want to include the idea that existence and being point to the same concept, that of becoming as difference. — Joshs

I wonder if you mean the same thing I did when I said making a distinction is what separates the undivided oneness into the things we know in the world.

So we need to be clear as to whether we are talking of existence or being. — Banno

Any dictionary you look at will use being and existence as synonyms for each other. If you don't think they're the same, what is the difference?

Why “consciousness” is given such primacy is puzzling at times, especially when you take a serious look at how we live as human beings in our daily lives.

Opposed to all this, I’d argue that being is the precondition for consciousness — just as living is the precondition to being awake. We’re not always awake — and we’re not always conscious. — Mikie

I don't know what Jung meant when he wrote that consciousness comes before being, but I have some idea what Lao Tzu meant. The Tao, the primal oneness, comes before distinctions are made. Naming, which I take to mean consciousness, is what breaks the Tao up into what we see in our everyday world. Language is what people use to make distinctions. If there was no one around to call an apple an apple, it wouldn't exist as a separate object, only as part of the inseparable whole. Naming, consciousness, brings things into existence.

Of course, this is a metaphysical position, not a factual or scientific one. To me, it makes sense to say that anything that hasn't been observed by a conscious entity does not exist. Many people don't, or can't, see the sense in that.

Sorry about @Darkneos. You'll find that there is a lot of hostility to religion here on the forum.

Welcome to the forum. I'm sorry it couldn't have been with a more gracious poster.

.

This, or something like it, I know from experience. There are different methods - solitary contemplation works for me; for someone I know who suffers from depression, it's analyzing dreams, or it might be writing poetry or keeping a journal. Basically, the process boils down to: See it, name it, accept it, own it. Then it can't own you. — Vera Mont

Yes, although it's easier to say it than to do it, at least for me.

Alleged Buddhism expert — Darkneos

Yes, I was being ironic.

But that quote from the Tao Te is more about just letting things happen rather than fight them, which is supported by psychological research. Resisting a negative thought or idea, etc, ends up building a stronger association to it, rather than just letting it come and go. So actively trying to force something out of your mind does the opposite — Darkneos

Yes.

I'm reminded of a scene from They Live. — praxis

What a great flick! — Moliere

I believe Rowdy Roddy Piper won the Oscar for best performance by a professional wrestler that year.

What 'things' do you feel when meditating that are different from the things you feel when connected to the outside world? — Vera Mont

I'm not a formal meditator and I think my understanding is different from @praxis. I went looking for an Alan Watts quote I think is relevant, but I can't find it. To paraphrase though - Quiet contemplation can help us experience our negative emotions without resistance. If we allow ourselves to feel our grief, sadness, anger, shame, or guilt fully and without trying to avoid them, they lose their power over us. Trying to avoid suffering just makes it last longer and causes additional suffering.

This is a quote from the Tao Te Ching that has always meant a lot to me:

If you want to shrink something,
you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are. — Tao Te Ching, Verse 36 - Stephen Mitchell Translation

You spend enough time in meditation, you will realize that you never genuinely feel feelings in the first place it is all just cause and effect response

I understand this is not your position, only the one you are questioning. I think it was @Possibility here on the forum who recommended a book - "How Emotions are Made," by Lisa Feldman Barrett. If I understand the book correctly, Barrett believes that the physiological phenomena associated with emotion are not learned, but how those feelings are interpreted is. Children are taught what they mean, how to put them into words.

Looking at it a different way, I've seen animals behaving in a way that it would be ridiculous to call anything other than emotional. They show fear, happiness, anger, affection without the societal expectations your Buddhism expert describes.

Speaking more personally, my emotions are a big part of who I am and how I behave. A Buddhist might say that is a reflection of my illusionary self, but I'm not a Buddhist.

Can we agree on properties that give beauty or harmony in objects, humans, artworks and phenomena? — Eros1982

No.

If yes, why we see all kind of government/political intrusions into aesthetics: through educating kids, through promoting "artworks" and "artists" who are politically correct, through declaring poets people who are not poets, through staging "plays" that are anything but plays, through turning political agendas into "excellent scripts" for movies, etc.? — Eros1982

I don't see how government or politics, at least in the US, is making significant "intrusions into aesthetics." Do you really object to public education? On aesthetic grounds? What governmental or political institution has promoted artworks and artists who are politically correct in a significant way? Called people who are not poets poets? Staged plays that aren't plays? Turned political agendas into scripts?

Should philosophers and simple humans give up the idea that beauty and ugliness result from certain features and/or properties? — Eros1982

Yes... maybe.

These come to mind.

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come. — S. Shakepeare -

I'm not scared of dying
And I don't really care
If it's peace you find in dying
Well, then let the time be near

If it's peace you find in dying
And if dying time is near
Just bundle up my coffin cause
It's cold way down there
I hear that's it's cold way down there
Yeah, crazy cold way down there

And when I die and when I'm gone
There'll be one child born
In this world, carry on, to carry on — Blood, Sweat, and Tears - When I Die

I'd forgotten this was written by Laura Nero. B,S,&T was a great band.

The true men of old
Knew no lust for life,
No dread of death.
Their entrance was without gladness,
Their exit, yonder,
Without resistance.
Easy come, easy go.
They did not forget where from,
Nor ask where to,
Nor drive grimly forward
Fighting their way through life.
They took life as it came, gladly;
Took death as it came, without care;
And went away, yonder — Chuang Tzu

The Master gives himself up
to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die,
and her has nothing left to hold on to:
no illusions in his mind,
no resistances in his body.
He doesn't think about his actions;
they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life;
therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep
after a good day's work. — Lao Tzu - The Tao Te Ching, Verse 50 (S. Mitchell)

I shouldn't have made an umbrella statement, but have you met someone who is (perhaps you yourself) who is not afraid of death? Maybe it goes with age but as a 25 year old I think about it often. — MojaveMan

I'm 71. I'm not ready to die, I'm having a pretty good time, but I'm not afraid. I'm not the only person like that. Here are some statistics from the web. I didn't check the validity of the source.



Here's a link:

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

We should have a poll of forum members.

Also - I forgot to welcome you to the forum.

my own grandmother is close to passing and she is a devout Christian, and I can tell she is absolutely terrified of the end. I believe this is the case for all rational animals, — MojaveMan

This is not true. You're talking to the wrong people.

Humans are an existential animal. That is to say, why we start any endeavor or project (or choose to continue with it or end it) is shaped continually by a deliberative act to do so. — schopenhauer1

In my experience, both of myself and others, this is not true at all. I think this misunderstanding is a consequence of people not being aware of their own motivations and where they come from.

We generate things that might excite us. Or we generate things we feel we "must do" (even though there is never a must, only an anxiety of not doing based on various perceived fears). — schopenhauer1

We've had this conversation before. You and I have a different understanding and experience of what it is like to be a human. I don't think that everyone thinks, feels, and lives the same as I do. It seems as if you think they do.

Really hard to read. Needs more paragraph breaks.

While I do not agree with all of what he says, I agree with much of it. — Dfpolis

As I noted, I don't understand all of it, but there's something there. I've spent a lot of time thinking about reductionism, holism, emergence, and that constellation of ideas that includes them. I've got more work to do.

I invite comments pro and con. — Dfpolis

Before I start, I want to be clear. I have only an engineer's interested, amateur understanding of cognitive science or philosophy of mind. I also admit to just scanning the linked article. I am not well-read enough to make a line-by-line response to your detailed and careful argument.

To start, it's very well written. Clear and thorough. I don't think I've read a better one here on the forum. But then, I find it flawed and unconvincing. The article states:

I see two sources of difficulty: the post-Cartesian conceptual space, and the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science. — Dfpolis

This indicates the problems with the scientific study of consciousness are philosophical, logical, not scientific. That shows my primary problem with your argument - you have shuffled the decks of philosophy and science together to provide a muddled, makeshift argument. When you deal out a science card you often make blanket pronouncements without support. You make a quick arm-wave to current cognitive scientific study of consciousness without showing you have given them a fair hearing. You talk about a Standard Model of neurophysiology which, as far as I can tell, is a concept you came up with yourself. I can't find any reference to it with a quick web search.

I share your skepticism about a reductionist scientific understanding of consciousness. This is from a paper on Merleau-Ponty's theory of form which I think is relevant. Streetlight provided a link to the paper in a discussion about five years ago.

Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot understand how knowledge arises within nature unless we abandon the Cartesian view of nature as a machine composed of mutually external and indifferent parts.

If nature is a mechanism then it has no intrinsic meaning or unity. Thus nature could only be meaningful for a constituting consciousness that imposes a meaning on it by synthesizing its disconnected parts into an ideal whole. However, this amounts to denying that we can know nature at all. First, it means that nature can only be known from the outside, from a God’s-eye-view that could comprehend it as an object. But this is not our situation; we find ourselves born into a nature that is older than thought, and indeed gives rise to it—a nature that we can never encompass or transcend. “Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not entirely an object; it does not exactly stand before us. It is our soil, not that which faces us, but that which carries us.” It is precisely for this reason that we wish to naturalize epistemology—to understand how knowledge arises within nature. Second, if the only meaning we can find in nature is one that we ourselves put into it, then nature ceases to be an object of knowledge that transcends consciousness and becomes instead an idea within consciousness—a representation or mental construct. — Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking

There's a lot more going on in the paper, some of which I admit to not understanding, but the author does not conclude that the study of mind is not accessible to scientific study.

I think there is a valid argument to be made for your position. I do worry some about how our languages are being changed for what I consider trivial or unnecessary reasons. Even so, I don't think you've made your case very well. The two examples you've cited are not really convincing. I don't have strong feelings about "Latinx" but it's pretty early in the controversy. There were similar changes I think have turned out well, e.g. providing "Ms." as an alternative to "Mrs." and "Miss." I understand this example is more important to you since you are Spanish-speaking. As for the apostrophe issue, the etymology you suggest seems pretty far-fetched to me.

Some fiddling with language pisses me off, but some makes sense. An example - I remember reading a non-fiction psychology book I had heard good things about. In the preface, the author indicated he had alternated using "she," and "he;" and "him" and "her" in different sections of the text. I thought it was a stupid and distracting change to make. Then, as I read, I found it really made a difference in how I thought about what he was writing.

The problem: given the original scenario, such a person is now equivalent to the Jews in Nazi Germany - they are being persecuted. However, why aren't the people who sent this person into such a life now equivalent to the Nazis - as they are now doing the persecuting? Discuss... — jasonm

This is just another case of what I call "the Paradox Paradox." That's where people call uncertain or ironic circumstances or simple inconsistencies paradoxes.

Also, calling a religious belief paradoxical sort of misses the point.

I do agree with you, but it probably also remains an issue for the site in general, where many write such short posts, with one line remarks and emoticons. It isn't an academic site, but, sometimes, there seems to be so much which is shallow and lacking in philosophical depth in discussion. It is so complex on a site which is neither a chit chat one or one of formal academic philosophy, and Agent Smith's contributions may draw attention to this dilemma. — Jack Cummins

I agree with this, but I think the moderators have done a good job making a place where the rules are not so tight or enforced so strictly that they exclude non-standard approaches to philosophical subjects but not so loose as to allow low-quality writing to overwhelm the good stuff. I don't think it's an easy balance.

I don't mean to say that great questions are unimportant or should not be addressed, but I don't think philosophy is useful in addressing them, unless we mean by philosophy art, poetry, meditation and pursuits which evoke rather than seek to explain. Those are pursuits which are better left to those who aren't philosophers. — Ciceronianus

There is important truth in this.

And that may be a fool’s errand. I think that’s Neitzsche’s point anyway. I tend to agree. But you did say “to the extent possible,” so I take your point. — Mikie

The effort is the point. It's not where you get, it's how you got there. That's philosophy.

Thought people might be interested in this. It's a good AP story including an interview with the foreman of the Georgia special grand jury looking into election fraud. Has some really interesting things to say about the process the grand jury went through, although nothing about the actual testimony, deliberations, decisions, or report.

https://apnews.com/article/politics-new-york-city-only-on-ap-donald-trump-georgia-266e28c4e47e54731b233e0f770f6729