As such, he is a problem, and as a problem, best approached clinically. The obvious question being how such a problem is solved, but that not-so-easy to answer. — tim wood

Yes. Some beliefs are more significant to people than others. This remark says nothing about the phenomenology of revealed truth. — fdrake

There is no meta-interpretation. — Joshs

As you may know, this question of how we retain previous moments as we listen, and project future moments, is integral to a composer's skill. — J

we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Aeon.co

A world transforming, singular, experience aligns the nature of the divine with the perceptual. What you see is what you now believe. In effect, the reinterpretation is a way of seeing the same world another way, like whether a Necker Cube goes into or out of a page. — fdrake

Are you suggesting no discussion about faith is meaningful without first adopting the definition that it is a revelation of something otherworldly? — ENOAH

I'm just as capable as he (Socrates) was as he was of critical thought It's a pity the same cannot be said of you. — Janus

I know what you mean, and I agree, faith which claims to have such revelation into some otherworldly superior reality is not supportable. — ENOAH

But in reality, faith is as contingent and fallible as any other belief we hold, shaped by history, culture, and personal experience — Tom Storm

But he cautioned against 'ontotheology' which I understand to consist in the absolutization of the human. — Janus

I'm attempting to do a similar thing here. — Janus

If all we want is "a plausible functional story," what would be wrong with organisms that just react to stimuli without experience? What we want to say about this, of course, is that it's impossible -- the idea of an organism "just reacting" without any form of subjectivity is offensive somehow. Or maybe we want to say that the very concept of "reacting" presupposes experience. But none of this is obvious; we can't just declare this picture it to be impossible. If it is, we need to know why -- back to the hard problem. — J

We usually imagine time as analogous with space. We imagine it, for example, laid out on a line (like a timeline of events) or a circle (like a sundial ring or a clock face). And when we think of time as the seconds on a clock, we spatialise it as an ordered series of discrete, homogeneous and identical units. This is clock time. But in our daily lives we don’t experience time as a succession of identical units. An hour in the dentist’s chair is very different from an hour over a glass of wine with friends. This is lived time. Lived time is flow and constant change. It is ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. When we treat time as a series of uniform, unchanging units, like points on a line or seconds on a clock, we lose the sense of change and growth that defines real life; we lose the irreversible flow of becoming, which Bergson called ‘duration’.

Think of a melody. Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if we’ve heard the song before) future notes may already seem to sound in the ones we’re hearing now. Music is not just a series of discrete notes. We experience it as something inherently durational.

Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.

In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Aeon.co

Trump won't lift a finger to anything that Putin does. — ssu

I don't think he's formulating it radically enough. Yes, this is part of the hard problem, but even more basic is the question, Why do we experience the world at all? Why aren't we robots, or philosophical zombies? If all we want is "a plausible functional story," what would be wrong with organisms that just react to stimuli without experience? — J

None of this standard phenomenological/Kantian picture can be said to obtain until a certain developmental point has been reached. James's "blooming buzzing confusion" has to give way to something like what Sokolowski is describing. — J

you don't really need to make up your mind about the underlying reality before drawing conclusions. — Dawnstorm

The reasons he talks out of thin air. — ssu

I find it puzzling how many still take Trump's word for much of anything. — jorndoe

Philosophy comprises discourses dedicated to the delineation of truth, its separation from falsity or illusion, and the forms of the subject’s access to truth: ‘We will call “philosophy” the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth’ (Foucault see below). Spirituality, on the other hand, comprises the discursively mediated acts, practices, and exercises through which certain individuals seek to transform themselves into the kind of subject or self that is capable of acceding to philosophical truth:

… I think we could call “spirituality” the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call ‘spirituality’ then the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth (Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject)

The decisive distinguishing feature of Western philosophical spirituality is that it does not regard the truth as something to which the subject has access by right, universally, simply by virtue of the kind of cognitive being that the human subject is. Rather, it views the truth as something to which the subject may accede only through some act of inner self-transformation, some act of attending to the self with a view to determining its present incapacity, thence to transform it into the kind of self that is spiritually qualified to accede to a truth that is by definition not open to the unqualified subject. — Spiritualilty and Philosophy in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Ian Hunter

Here are some of the projects that The New York Times has confirmed have been canceled:

A $131 million grant to UNICEF’s polio immunization program, which paid for planning, logistics and delivery of vaccines to millions of children.

A $90 million contract with the company Chemonics for bed nets, malaria tests and treatments that would have protected 53 million people.

A project run by FHI 360 that supported community health workers’ efforts to go door-to-door seeking malnourished children in Yemen. It recently found that one in five children was critically underweight because of the country’s civil war.

All of the operating costs and 10 percent of the drug budget of the Global Drug Facility, the World Health Organization’s main supply channel for tuberculosis medications, which last year provided tuberculosis treatment to nearly three million people, including 300,000 children.

H.I.V. care and treatment projects run by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation that were providing lifesaving medication to 350,000 people in Lesotho, Tanzania and Eswatini, including 10,000 children and 10,000 pregnant women who were receiving care so that they would not transmit the virus to their babies at birth.

A project in Uganda to trace contacts of people with Ebola, conduct surveillance and bury those who died from the virus.

A contract to manage and distribute $34 million worth of medical supplies in Kenya, including 2.5 million monthlong H.I.V. treatments, 750,000 H.I.V. tests, 500,000 malaria treatments, 6.5 million malaria tests and 315,000 antimalaria bed nets.

Eighty-seven shelters that took care of 33,000 women who were victims of rape and domestic violence in South Africa.

A project in the Democratic Republic of Congo that operates the only source of water for 250,000 people in camps for displaced people located in the center of the violent conflict in the east of the country.

Pre- and postnatal health services for 3.9 million children and 5.7 million women in Nepal.

A project run by Helen Keller Intl in six countries in West Africa that last year provided more than 35 million people with the medicine to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases, such as trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis and onchocerciasis.

A project in Nigeria providing 5.6 million children and 1.7 million women with treatment for severe and acute malnutrition. The termination means 77 health facilities have completely stopped treating children with severe acute malnutrition, putting 60,000 children under the age of 5 at immediate risk of death.

A project in Sudan that runs the only operational health clinics in one of the biggest areas of the Kordofan region, cutting off all health services.

A project serving more than 144,000 people in Bangladesh that provided food for malnourished pregnant women and vitamin A to children.

A program run by the aid agency PATH, called REACH Malaria, which protected more than 20 million people from the disease. It provided malaria drugs to children at the start of the rainy season in 10 countries in Africa.

A project run by Plan International that provided drugs and other medical supplies, health care, treatment of malnutrition programming, and water and sanitation for 115,000 displaced or affected by the conflict in northern Ethiopia.

More than $80 million for UNAIDS, the United Nations agency, which funded work to help countries improve H.I.V. treatment, including data collection and watchdog programs for service delivery.

The President’s Malaria Initiative program called Evolve, which did mosquito control in 21 countries by methods that include spraying insecticide inside homes (protecting 12.5 million people last year) and treating breeding sites to kill larvae.

A project providing H.I.V. and tuberculosis treatment to 46,000 people in Uganda, run by the Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, Uganda.

Smart4TB, the main research consortium working on prevention, diagnostics and treatment for tuberculosis.

The Demographic and Health Surveys, a data collection project in 90 countries that were crucial and sometimes the only sources of information on maternal and child health and mortality, nutrition, reproductive health and H.I.V. infections, among many other health indicators. The project was also the bedrock of budgets and planning. — NY TImes

If claims are not intersubjectively verifiable and yet not "articles of subjective belief" then what are they? You are not actually saying anything that I could either agree or disagree with. — Janus

I'm limiting valid knowledge claims to claims that can be rigorously tested. If someone says that rebirth is a fact, or Karma is real, or the existence of God is a fact, or the Buddha was enlightened...these are not valid knowledge claims, they are articles of personal belief. — Janus

The real point at issue for Wayfarer is the possibility of "direct knowledge" or intellectual intuition. Is it possible to have such knowledge of reality? Obviously, he believes it is possible, and that some humans have achieved such enlightenment. The problem is that if it is possible, you would have no way of knowing that unless you had achieved it yourself. — Janus

And even then, how could you rule out the possibility of self-delusion? — Janus

I'm not ruling out the possibility of a "much deeper understanding of reality", but I have no idea what it could look like, and if it were not based on empirical evidence or logic, then what else could it be based on? — Janus

People who think like Wayfarer believe that such an understanding existed more in the past than it does today, but they would not call it science, unless by 'science' is intended something like the original meaning of simply 'knowing'. — Janus

When we perceive an object, we run through a manifold of aspects and profiles: we see the thing first from this side and then from that; we concentrate on the color; we pay attention to the hardness or softness; we turn the thing around and see other sides and aspects, and so on. In this manifold of appearances, however, we continuously experience all the aspects and profiles, all the views, as being “of” one and the same object. The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.” The identity of the thing is implicitly presented in and through the manifold ~ Robert Sokolowski — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996, 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness') concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. ...Traditionally, the neural binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades (rapid movement of the eye between fixation points). But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. ...There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion....But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene... — The Neural Binding Problem, Jerome S. Feldman

We, therefore, in our experience and thoughtful activity, have moved from a perception to an articulated opinion or position; we have reached something that enters into logic and the space of reasons~ Sokolowski.

Perhaps the "bifurcation of nature" is due to the bicameral structure of the brain. — Gnomon

Apparently, most animals survive mainly with instinctive & intuitive thinking. But humans have developed a talent for processing abstracted concepts (ideas) that can be analyzed in more detail (logic). — Gnomon

If someone says that they have a special form of knowledge but there is no way for anyone else to confirm that they have a special form of knowledge, then they are probably flubbing. This applies to all knowledge, including procedural et al. — Leontiskos

I'm limiting valid knowledge claims to claims that can be rigorously tested. If someone says that rebirth is a fact, or Karma is real, or the existence of God is a fact, or the Buddha was enlightened...these are not valid knowledge claims, they are articles of personal belief. — Janus

It is an impossible conviction to argue for, though, or at least I've never seen an argument for it, from you or anyone else, that would convince the unbiased. — Janus

I'm not denying that there are those other kinds of knowledge—I've said so on these forums many times myself. It is only propositional knowledge which is intersubjectively decidable or testable in terms of truth. — Janus

Certainly you can find that in the Bible, but in general Christianity has tended to stop at "loving humans" and not considered what it might mean to actually love animals -- or the environment in general, as we are now seeing, to our dismay. — J

What leads you to assume that your intuitions are better than the equally intelligent people I have met who were convinced he was the real thing — Janus

I also very much value a further extension -- did the Greeks have a word for it? -- that would refer to love of Creation itself, and all the beings, not just humans. — J

I still don't understand by it what you interpret as an agapē that pays no regard to persons. — javra