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.

Do you think it is plausible that we could entertain reasons without that being correlated with neural processes? — Janus

. Affect the chemistry of the brain and you affect mental processes too. — flannel jesus

What I mean is, why aren’t anyone doing something when he breaks constitutional laws and regulations? — Christoffer

You can have a whole neural complex and establish relationships between each neuron up to a very complex level, and yet you do not know whether you have constructed the experience. You can't even decompose an experience into neural processes. — JuanZu

well if physicalism is true, then at what point does matter go from just matter to matter with experience?" — flannel jesus

Clearly, the objects of our fears and desires do not cause behavior in the same way that forces and energy cause behavior in the physical realm. When my desire for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow causes me to go on a search, the (nonexistent) pot of gold is not a causal property of the sort that is involved in natural laws. (Pylyshyn 1984, p. xii) — Excerpt

Where am I leaping? — Patterner

If so, then why don't people do anything about it? — Christoffer

Well you skip the question about spontaneous generation of sentience, and just ask, why is it that this hunk of smushy pink wet matter has an experience? — flannel jesus

At the micro level, matter has various physical properties. Mass, charge, spin, color, whatever else we're aware of. These properties determine how particles combine and interact, which determine the physical objects, energy fields, and everything else we see all around us, and their macro characteristics. — Patterner

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. — Thomas Nagel, Core of Mind and Cosmos

I'm not sure it's established that there's anything "spontaneous" about it. And once you realize that, the rest of your question is just... chemistry. Literal chemistry. Like, if you want to understand how life forms came about from non life, that's a question for science, and you can take classes on chemistry, bio chemistry, maybe even early life chemistry. — flannel jesus

More importantly, what do you make of it? — jorndoe

What "makes us conscious" is the (rare) arrangements of our constituent "particles" into generative cognitive systems. — “180 Proof"

I don't think that's the right question. — flannel jesus

What "makes us conscious" is the (rare) arrangements of our constituent "particles" into generative cognitive systems — 180 Proof

Those processes aren't in any individual particle at all. — flannel jesus

A huge question, but it boils down to whether there's anything at all that can properly be called "objective." — J

I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences.

Now, in one sense we can be very clear about our own experiences - we certainly know what an unpleasant or pleasant experience is, and we know that some experiences have specific attributes, across a vast range of experiences. But in all cases, we know those things experientially - we know about those attributes, because they are the constituents of our experience, in a way very different from how we know and predict the behaviour of objects according to physical laws.

We can see others having experiences, and infer what they're experiencing, but again, we only know experience by experiencing. Experience is never a 'that' to us. — Wayfarer

The difficulty is that the physical is contained within the mental, and only known or even conceivable within the mental. For "being" to mean anything at all (to have any content) if must be that which is given to thought. Hence, the Parmenidean adage "the same is for thinking as for being." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I get what Sachs is saying here, but I think it might be a bit misleading — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd urge anyone interested in supervenience and/or a reasonable version of physicalism to start with Kim. — J

I personally feel like certain technologies with screens that provide boatloads of stimulation cause the brain to develop in a certain way such that sitting down and quieting the mind to a stage of silence becomes neigh impossible for a child who develops a need for the dopamine dump from being over stimulated. — DifferentiatingEgg

But to be clear, Locke did believe in substances, but he just says he doesn't know what they are. They are obscure to our understanding. — Manuel

And if our best current physics is not "ghostly" ("spooky" as Einstein protested), then I don't know what is. — Manuel

Built in just over three years, it consists of 104 individually designed buildings, with manicured lawns, connected by a Disney-like monorail, housing labs for up to 35,000 scientists, engineers and other workers, offering 100 cafes, plus fitness centers and other perks designed to attract the best Chinese and foreign technologists.

The Lianqiu Lake R. & D. campus is basically Huawei’s response to the U.S. attempt to choke it to death beginning in 2019 by restricting the export of U.S. technology, including semiconductors, to Huawei amid national security concerns. The ban inflicted massive losses on Huawei, but with the Chinese government’s help, the company sought to innovate its way around us. As South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper reported last year, it’s been doing just that: “Huawei surprised the world by introducing the ‘Mate 60’ series, a smartphone equipped with advanced semiconductors, last year despite U.S. sanctions.” Huawei followed with the world’s first triple-folding smartphone and unveiled its own mobile operating system, Hongmeng (Harmony), to compete with Apple’s and Google’s.

Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all [US] factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation to be permanently liberated from Trump’s tariffs. — Thomas Friedman, NY Times