It accounts for everything known to exist in the universe, except possibly dark matter and dark energy. — Relativist
You are making an argument premised on the belief that there is actually something more than just pragmatism when it comes to living life. You name these higher facts as truth, goodness, and the divine. — apokrisis
Josiah Royce: ...the need for salvation, for those who feel it, is paramount among human needs. The need for salvation depends on two simpler ideas:
a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain.
b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good.
To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). I would put it like this. The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer ( :yikes: ) or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa (path of sorrows) through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition. Some people don't, and it cannot be helped. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them. — Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation
I think the sense and idea of being conscious has been reified into 'consciousness as real and non-physical', and that this reification is a natural artefact of our dualistic symbolic language. Mind, instead of being understood verbally as "minding", and activity or process of a sentient physical being, has been hypostatized as a noun, and even considered to be an entirely separate substance. — Janus
anti-physicalist proponents will argue that mind is not a substance but that it is real and different from the physical nonetheless — Janus
Non-reductive physicalism tries to close this gap with “emergence.” But that makes the view unfalsifiable, since any anomaly can simply be reclassified as “emergent.”
Agreed, but so is the notion that there is something nonphysical involved with mental activities. This is the problem with many theories in philosophy, and it's why I suggest that the only reasonable option is to strive for an inference to best explanation (albeit that this will necessarily entail subjectivity). — Relativist
Sure, physicalism implies philosophy is reducible to physics IN PRINCIPLE, but it seems to me that this would be computationally too complex - to the point of being physically impossible. — Relativist
In Buddhism, mindfulness is embedded in the Eightfold Path and oriented towards liberation. By contrast, modern adaptations tend to treat these disciplines as mere tools for the self-interested individual, e.g., a means of coping, maximizing productivity, reducing stress, or achieving “authenticity.” I have seen this particularly in some pieces on Stoicism I've read that seem to be largely aimed at the "tech-bro" crowd. A commitment to truth gets shoved aside for a view of philosophy as a sort of "life hack." — Count Timothy von Icarus
Classical Buddhism sees human existence as embedded in the condition called samsāra, understood literally as the beginningless chain of rebirths. From this standpoint, humans are just one class of living beings in a vast multidimensional cosmos. Through time without beginning all beings have been roaming from life to life in the five realms of existence, rising and falling in accordance with their karma, their volitional deeds. Life in all these realms, being impermanent and fraught with pain, is inherently unsatisfactory—dukkha. Thus the final goal, the end of dukkha, is release from the round of rebirths, the attainment of an unconditioned dimension of spiritual freedom called nibbāna. The practice of the path is intended to eradicate the bonds tying us to the round of rebirths and thereby bring liberation from repeated birth, aging and death.
Secular Buddhism, in contrast, starts from our immediate existential situation, understood without bringing in non-naturalistic assumptions. Secular Buddhism therefore does not endorse the idea of literal rebirth. Some Secular Buddhists regard rebirth as a symbol for changing states of mind, some as an analogy for biological evolution, some simply as part of the dispensable baggage that Buddhism drags along from Asia. But Secular Buddhists generally do not regard rebirth as the problem the Dharma is intended to resolve. Accordingly, they interpret the idea of samsāra as a metaphor depicting our ordinary condition of bewilderment and addictive pursuits. The secular program thus reenvisions the goal of Buddhist practice, rejecting the ideal of irreversible liberation from the cycle of rebirths in favor of a tentative, ever-fragile freedom from distress in this present life itself. — Facing the Great Divide
I believe the issue which Wayfarer is trying to bring to our attention, is that there is a specific type of characteristic of being, which is only provided by the first person perspective, I, or myself. — Metaphysician Undercover
With your etymological prescriptions you make it sound like it is a monolithic study in the sense that there could be only one way to think about it. — Janus
Most of mental life is better considered from completely different perspectives. My issue is specifically with ontology: what actually exists. I think ontology can be set aside for the issues you raised. If this is wrong, and there is such a dependency then there's a burden to make an epistemological case for that ontology. — Relativist
I doubt "consciousness studies" depends on a particular ontology of mind, because that would make it a house of cards. — Relativist
But it seems uncontroversial to acknowledge that we engage in a set of processes/behaviors that we identify as mental activity. Those activities occur, and it's worthwhile to understand their basis, as much as possible…. So what is it that you suggest we NOT do, other than objectifying/reifying "the mind"? — Relativist
if mental activity is always correlated with neuronal activity, any abstracting or conceptualizing will be at one level (at least) a physical activity. — Janus
OF COURSE, the mind as a whole is relevant - to self-reflection, to finding meaning and purpose in life, to finding and expressing love, perceiving beauty... Those aspects of mind are not subject to scientific investigation - and they wouldn't be even if the mind were entirely grounded in the physical. — Relativist
I have not argued that every aspect of the mind is purely mechanical. The question is: where should we draw the line? — Relativist
"Francis Crick and Christoph Koch (2005) have speculated that the claustrum…. — Relativist
Unconstrained speculation leads nowhere. It merely raises possibilities. — Relativist
. You've redefined 'memory' as "information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis". — noAxioms
Ability to recognize people from their faces (a baby knowing its mother say) is not information conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis. — noAxioms
you omitting the 3rd definition provided by google, which is:
"3.the part of a computer in which data or program instructions can be stored for retrieval." — noAxioms
And I agree that the term 'memory' is not often used in that context, hence its lack of appearance in the dictionary. — noAxioms
Computers operate with logic, so our ability to think logically is consistent with a mechanistic aspect of mind. — Relativist
ChatGPT: I am not a mind. I process inputs and generate outputs according to patterns in data, but I have no first-person awareness, no “what it is like” to experience. I can simulate dialogue about thoughts, but I do not have thoughts.
intending to understand the intention — unenlightened
Of course, this still doesn't account for the subjective nature of a conscious state. — Relativist
What I HAVE done is point out that this merely established a negative fact (the mind is not entirely physical). This may suggest that it is impossible to develop a complete understanding of the mind through scientific investigation. However, it doesn't point to any particular boundary—so it seems irrelevant to science. — Relativist
Then there's no reason to think mind (or a thought) is an ontological ground. Thinking (including formulating intent) requires something analogous to a physical brain. — Relativist
Do you acknowledge the fact that there are essential physical aspects to a functioning mind? There's clearly a dependency on a functioning brain: memory and personality can be impacted by disease and trauma. Birth defects that affect brain development have bearing on cognitive ability. Hormones affect our moods and our thinking. Each of our senses (our interface to the external world)are dependent on physical organs and on specialized area of the brain to interpret the input. I don't see any reason to think that mind can exist without a functioning brain, or something with analogous functionality. — Relativist
The book expands the campaign of militant modern atheism, the offensive launched against religion by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rosenberg’s broadsides attack a wider horizon. Since atheism is thought to be territory already secured, the targets now in view are the Big Questions, questions about morality, purpose and consciousness that puzzle softheaded people who muddle over them. Science brings good news. The answers are now all in. This conviction that science can resolve all questions is known as “scientism” — a label typically used pejoratively (as by Wieseltier), but one Rosenberg seizes as a badge of honor.
The evangelical scientism of “The Atheist’s Guide” rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is “the whole truth about reality”; we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable.” Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.
...Rosenberg’s cheerful Darwinizing is no more convincing than his imperialist physics, and his tales about the evolutionary origins of everything from our penchant for narratives to our supposed dispositions to be nice to one another are throwbacks to the sociobiology of an earlier era, unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned: much of Rosenberg’s book is evolutionary psychology on stilts.
So quantum and classical are not different except to the degree in which a confused everythingness has been boiled down to an exact somethingness. — apokrisis
it is not referring to a domain in the sense of a place.
— Wayfarer
Do some people think it is? A "place" without space and time? Hmm . . . — J
Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.
Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” — What is Math? Smithsonian Magazine
how it can be the case that there is a N-teenth prime even if no one knows what it is, or has ever had the thought of it. — J
I've been forthcoming with what I believe and why I believe it. This affords you the opportunity to identify a flaw in my reasoning, or undercut something I believe. — Relativist
In addition to pointing out the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' (which is the irreducibility of first-person experience) I've also argued along other lines, such as that information is not reducible to matter or energy (Norbert Wiener); that what exists and what is known to be real are not coterminous (C S Peirce); that the placebo effect and neuroplasticity as cases of top-down causation are inconsistent with neuro-physicalism; that constraints, forms, and intelligible structures (laws) play a real role, which physicalism as substance-ontology fails to recognise. — Wayfarer
How, for example, do you explain syllogistic logic, or for that matter general semantics, in terms of neural processing? Syllogistic logic and general semantics operate in a normative, rule-governed space ('the space of reasons'). To reduce that to neural processing is a category mistake. Neural firings may underlie thought, but they don’t explain validity, reference, or meaning. — Wayfarer
I do not insist the mind is necessarily 100% physical (I'm not dogmatic), but whatever else it might be seems unknowable - and therefore the possibilities I've seen discussed simply seem like speculative guesses. — Relativist
:100: There are many dangers.There are too many instances of people who've been visited by powerful realizations of one sort or another, and then draw mad conclusions about the meaning of it. — J
John Hick points out that, at the very least, claims about God may be "eschatologically verifiable" -- that is, we may find out when we die (or, of course, we'll cease to exist). — J
---The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we [i.e. Christians] refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions. — John Hick, Who or What is God?
we know, thanks to Kant, that space and time and all the categories are purely subjective or that intellectual intuition could be a reliable guide to the way things really are. — Janus
The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.
Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe.
So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271