Basic theistic bullshit — Banno

the supposed principle of sufficient reason is not a principle of logic. — Banno

Spinoza seems to argue that there is only one substance in the universe, and that is God. Everything else (you, me, trees, ideas) is a mode or expression of that substance — Tom Storm

The problem, as Spinoza goes on to diagnose, is that people normally desire “perishable things” which “can be reduced to these three headings: riches, honour, and sensual pleasure” (idem: para.3&9). As these things are “perishable”, they cannot afford lasting happiness; in fact, they worsen our existential situation, since their acquisition more often than not requires compromising behaviour and their consumptions makes us even more dependent on perishable goods. “But love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, unmixed with any sadness.” (Idem: para.10) Thus, in his mature masterpiece, the Ethics, Spinoza finds lasting happiness only in the “intellectual love of God”, which is the mystical, non-dual vision of the single “Substance” “Subject” underlying everything and everyone. The non-dual nature of this vision is clearly announced by Spinoza when he says that “[t]he mind’s intellectual love of God is the very love of God by which God loves himself” (Ethics, Part 5, Prop. 36). Since, for Spinoza, God is the Whole that includes everything, it also includes your love for God, and thus God can be said to love Itself through you.
— Some Blog

if I were offered a Rawlsian "original position" lottery, and asked to pick a time and place to be incarnated over the past 3,000 years, while not knowing my sex, ethnicity, amount of economic power, physical health, education, et al., the choice would be obvious to me: right here, right now — J

That longing for something to replace the religious consolations may be an important marker of those philosophers who aren't satisfied to be "modern" (using that word as I think you do), but it's not the whole story. — J

And if the properties we know of cannot explain subjective experiences, then there must be one or more properties that we don't know of. — Patterner

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them.

Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

But there must be a property there that can give rise to the "what it's like" of consciousness, because, if there isn't, then our subjective experience emerges for no reason. Emergent properties don't come about for no reason. The explanation for them is down there somewhere, starting with the particles that everything is made of — Patterner

…the background assumption behind all of it is still reductionist, in the sense that it is assumed that the fundamental constituents of beings exist on the micro level, and gradually combine to form greater levels of complexity. — Wayfarer

Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.

This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory - its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.

Therefore, he who thinks God is something to be known does not have life, because he has turned from true Being (tou ontōs ontos) to what he considers by sense perception to have being.

I use proto-consciousness to refer to the subjective experience of particles, — Patterner

We can't know for sure if the values are accurate. — Quk

. I think a mathematical description is just that: a description; — Quk

being a fallibilist, I doubt that inductive descriptions (theses) about empirical observations are necessarily true. — Quk

Although wetness does not exist in microphysical particles, their properties cause them to combine in certain ways under certain circumstances, which cause the emergence of wetness.

Although human consciousness does not exist in microphysical particles, their properties cause them to combine in certain ways under certain circumstances, which cause the emergence of human consciousness. — Patterner

It is often said that consciousness is analogous to liquidity or transparency: it appears only at a certain level of complexity in physical systems, though it is wholly constituted by simpler elements that lack it. This is a bad analogy. ...

Liquidity is just the behavior of molecules en masse, and transparency is a matter of molecular structure in relation to light. But what it is like to be a conscious organism is not reducible in this way to the behavior or structure of its parts, because it has a subjective character that is not captured by physical description. ...

It is not possible to derive the existence of consciousness from the physical structure of the brain in the way in which it is possible to derive the transparency of glass from the molecular structure of silicon dioxide. — Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions

I-ness is a term whose referent is difficult to demarcate, and can thus be demarcated in different ways. I find notions such as that generally adopted by Kant, Husserl, and William James to be of great benefit to this issue: To use James’s terminology: where “ego” equates to “I-ness”, there is a pure ego, which is the subject of the experienced self, and then there is the empirical ego, which is that full scope of I-ness or self experienced by the pure ego. — javra

It's time to lay out and lay bare what a reason is. Written down, it's an archive of an utterance, the utterance being an acceptable and presumably accepted account of some occurrence. As such, as accepted, there is nothing about it that says it's true. "True" not even well-defined in this context. What matters is only that it is accepted. — tim wood

It's time to lay out and lay bare what a reason is. — tim wood

A very large part of this disagreement is that the idea of justification is so ambiguous — Banno

No, I don't. That's the point. Justification ends wherever we want. If you need a stronger account of that, see the various discussions concerning hinge propositions, status functions, haunted universe doctrines and so on. These are very far from relativise ideas. — Banno

Such unpredictability is disastrous for the economy. — Joshs

The belief that there must be a reason for each thing is wishful thinking on your part. — Banno

You appear to want or need something both separate and that is absolute, and universally and necessarily so. — tim wood

We can give many uses to a scissors, why discriminate between one and another more than by an anthropomorphism? — JuanZu

Is it realy necessary to point out the difference between "There might be a reason" and "There must be a reason"? — Banno

People can see through his charade now, which is why the markets are not too worried. — Punshhh

Capitalism has no care about patriotism/nationalism. What matters are cheaper labor / lower wages, competitiveness, less environmental regulations, less health + safety protection, buy lower / sell higher, profitable resources, etc. — jorndoe

things happen for a reason’ might be comforting, but need not be accurate. — Banno

When a technological apparatus works, it does so to the extent that we have expectations, but the technological apparatus can always fail. The question is: Where is the intention and the final cause in the technological apparatus that works differently from our expectations? If everything has a reason it should also have a reason for failure too, and we would have to say that we also intended it to fail. — JuanZu

Assume and presuppose, and neglect the fact that the thing thereby created is your own invention — tim wood

So you're exempting the Fregean/Quinean/Wittgensteinian tradition from modernism? Along with most phenomenology and existentialism? And Cassirer and Popper and Langer and . . . So who's left, the logical positivists and Daniel Dennett? :smile: Oh and maybe the Churchlands too! Besides, if you can include Schopenhauer among those who challenge what you're calling modern, what does that make him, pre-modern? — J

So you're exempting the Fregean/Quinean/Wittgensteinian tradition from modernism? Along with most phenomenology and existentialism? And Cassirer and Popper and Langer and . . . So who's left, the logical positivists and Daniel Dennett? :smile: Oh and maybe the Churchlands too! Besides, if you can include Schopenhauer among those who challenge what you're calling modern, what does that make him, pre-modern? — J

This quote is very important and insightful. I think it expresses an intuition or a longing that motivates most if not all philosophy. So I don't think we should be so rigid about what is "pre-modern" and "modern," especially if modern is understood as "everything since Descartes." — J

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. — Terry Eagleton

I suppose this perhaps comes out of a certain sort of Protestant theology as well — Count Timothy von Icarus

So the challenge to those who think that a reason is a something: what exactly sort of something is it supposed to be? — tim wood

Most things in the world are explained by causal necessity because they obey the laws of nature. But what about the fundamental laws of nature themselves? They cannot obey more fundamental laws by definition of them being fundamental. Thus, they do not exist out of causal necessity (type 1). They also do not exist inherently (type 3) because they are not tautologies. E.g. Law of Inertia: "An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion" can be denied without resulting in a self-contradiction. Furthermore, if the fundamental laws of nature existed inherently, this would result in a modal collapse, which is usually frowned upon. — A Christian Philosophy

Natural laws are not logical laws. — Banno

Aided by the rise of scientific instruments, we now know about atoms and laws of nature. Thus, we explain the existence of most things in the world by causal necessity (type 1). With that, we no longer need four causes to describe the existence and behaviour of things but only two:
1. Efficient cause: what caused it.
2. Material cause: what it is made of. — A Christian Philosophy

6.371 At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

The Cartesian picture, by contrast, was a chimera, an ungainly and extrinsic alliance of antinomies. And reason abhors a dualism. Moreover, the sciences in their modern form aspire to universal explanation, ideally by way of the most comprehensive and parsimonious principles possible. So it was inevitable that what began as an imperfect method for studying concrete particulars would soon metastasize into a metaphysics of the whole of reality. The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order. — David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist

1) the world of space and time does not itself exist in space and time: it exists in Intellect (the Empyrean, pure conscious being);

2) matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something “material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from conscious being;

5) God, as the ultimate subject of all experience, cannot be an object of experience

2)as there is nothing thoughts are “made of,” so there is nothing the world is “made of”: being is not a “something” to make things out of

Note that the analogy in no way implies that the world is “unreal” or a “dream” (except in contrast to its ontological ground); rather, it expresses the radical non-self-subsistence of finite reality

Doesn't "knowing" and "knower" imply duality? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Senior leaders across the Department of Health and Human Services were put on leave and countless other employees lost their jobs Tuesday as the Trump administration began a sweeping purge of the agencies that oversee government health programs.

Top officials at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration were put on administrative leave or offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service. Other employees began receiving layoff notices or learned they had lost their jobs when their entry badges no longer worked Tuesday morning. ...

At the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, some employees who were laid off were told to contact Anita Pinder, former director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, with discrimination complaints. Pinder died last year. ...

At the National Institutes of Health, a nearly $48 billion biomedical research agency, at least five top leaders were put on leave. Among those offered reassignment were the infectious-disease institute director Jeanne Marrazzo, according to emails obtained by The Post and multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. ...

At the Centre for Disease Control, senior leaders who oversee global health, infectious diseases, chronic disease, HIV, sexually transmitted disease, tuberculosis, outbreak forecasting and information technology were among officials notified that they would be reassigned to the Indian Health Service, according to one leader who was reassigned and other current and former agency employees.

“CDC clobbered,” the official said. “The agency will not be able to function. Let’s be honest.” ...

Tuesday’s layoffs continue weeks of tumult at U.S. health agencies, where large numbers of federal grants have been cut and hundreds of research projects paused or slated for cancellation. ... — Washington Post

Two patients’ treatments using the experimental therapy had to be delayed because NIH’s capacity to make personalized cell therapies has been slowed by the firing of highly skilled staff and by purchasing slowdowns. Those occurred even before major layoffs took place Tuesday.