There is no solution within the framework of democracy — frank

So let’s get rid of it.

So this is about it for you, Frank?

No good trying to kick into the long grass of ruminations about democracy. It’s your breakfast they’re going to be eating. Besides, the leading statement is completely untrue: democracies can limit spending simply by agreeing to do so.

Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro also became the heads of state in Venezuela through democratic means. But once they got there, the democratic means that they used began to show their limits. — Arcane Sandwich

It is more than probable that DJT is preparing exactly the same methods for the U.S. I mean, he's already demonstrating it - many of his executive orders in the first two weeks of his Presidency might be unconstitutional and/or illegal - but how can they be challenged? He's gutting the Justice Department and purging the FBI of anyone deemed disloyal - classical authoritarian moves. Fox News was complaining that the Democrats are 'shredding the Constitution' by stalling the confirmation of Trump's dangerous Cabinet selections. Republican Congressmen have already started talking about how to remove the two-term limit for Trump. And so on. You're seeing the birth of an authoritarian political regime right in front of your eyes.

"33. OF REAL THINGS AND IDEAS OR CHIMERAS.--The ideas imprinted on the Senses by the Author of nature are called REAL THINGS; and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid, and constant, are more properly termed IDEAS, or IMAGES OF THINGS, which they copy and represent. But then our sensations, be they never so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless IDEAS, that is, they exist in the mind, or are perceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own framing. The ideas of Sense are allowed to have more reality in them, that is, to be more (1)STRONG, (2)ORDERLY, and (3)COHERENT than the creatures of the mind; but this is no argument that they exist without the mind. They are also (4)LESS DEPENDENT ON THE SPIRIT or thinking substance which perceives them, in that they are excited by the will of another and more powerful spirit; yet still they are IDEAS, and certainly no IDEA, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it. ~ Berkeley"

Not only does he distinguish between - let's call them - real appearances - and - "chimeras" - unreal appearances but he also allows the existence of something beyond or behind appearances. . — Ludwig V

Thanks for producing those particular paragraphs, as it toucheth on something ( ;-) ) which a neo-thomist such as Edward Feser would say is radical shortcoming in the Bishop's philosophy.

It is that Berkeley collapses the distinction between sensation, imagination, and intellectual abstraction (for example in this post by Feser). In Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, intellect plays a regulative role, actively grasping universal Forms rather than just passively receiving impressions. Without this distinction, Berkeley’s account of knowledge risks reducing all cognition to subjective perceptions, which an Aristotelian would find inadequate - his "ideas" seem to be more like what the Thomist would designate phantasms (mental images) rather than concepts grasped by intellect. As a result, his theory of knowledge risks reducing rational thought to subjective perception rather than a proper engagement with reality. So, a Thomist critic might say, 'Yes, reality depends on God, but not in the way Berkeley imagines. The world’s intelligibility does not arise because God perceives it—it arises because God has endowed it with form and finality, which reason can grasp independently of sensory perception.'

@Count Timothy von Icarus, @Leontiskos

I did post about that too, but I also heard that the Musk crew access was read-only, which means something. But still, it's an absolute outrage. People should be on the streets, although I guess that'd give Trump a chance to try out his new crowd-control methods.

Amor Fati is Nietzsche's equation that replicates the Glad Tidings of Jesus Christ. — DifferentiatingEgg

But without loaves and fishes, presumably.

This is getting really, really serious. Musk is completely out of control. When the idea of the government expenditure review was mooted, it was supposed Musk's committee would propose draconian cuts to Congress, and there'd be the usual argy bargy. But no! He's barged into the actual finance departments offices, and started looking at line item expenditures for things he wants to cut, after they've all been cleared by Congress. It's blatantly illegal. But Trump has already committed so many blatantly illegal actions in his first two weeks in office, that nobody knows how to respond. He's doing what Bannon says - flooding the zone with shit. But in this case, the shit involves literally trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of jobs, entire Government agencies. He and Musk are literally tearing apart Government in full public view, and they've hardly even gotten started yet.

And don't forget, SCOTUS has declared that the President has full immunity for official acts. So if anyone challenges Trump, he'll just shrug and say they're official acts, so sue me. And who's that lucky litigant going to be?

Pity those poor government employees - and there are literally tens of thousand of them - who's livelihoods are being threatened, and who's projects are being shelved or cut in front of their eyes. What is happening in the US right now is a massive atrocity.

Oh, and the reason USAID are being called 'radical lunatics' is simply because the staff tend to being - and for completely obvious reasons - Democratic-leaning. And that is a disqualifying attribute in the emerging One Party State of MAGA.

In Christianity (and Plato before that) what animates human beings is the (holy) spirit, that is the general and immaterial which breaths life into the lifeless body. — ChatteringMonkey

By the time Nietzsche arrives, the concept of 'the immaterial' has been largely misunderstood. Reconstructing it, the original term in Greek, (as I understand it, and as one not schooled in Ancient Greek) was psuchē (subject of Aristotle's 'On the Soul'), a term which is now generally translated as psyche, or mind. The Greek term however encompassed the totality of the being - which in modern terms would also include the sub- and unconscious aspects - and also qualities such as traits, dispositions and drives.

Aristotle held that the psuchē is the form or essence of any living thing rather than a distinct substance from the body (using the philosophical, not everyday, sense of 'substance'.) It is the possession of psuche (of a specific kind) that makes an organism an organism at all - the psuchē is the 'form of the body' as is often quoted, and nous the rational faculty (that faculty which is able to grasp rational principles.) It is the rational faculty (nous) within psuchē that grasps the essence of things, and this rational capacity is what makes it immaterial. Why? As Platonist scholar Lloyd Gerson put it,

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible ('the psuche contains all things'). Among other things, this means that you could not engage in thought if the mind were purely a function of a physical organ. Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Platonism vs Naturalism, Lloyd Gerson

Obviously a lot to be said about all of this, but the point is that, after having been incorporated into theology as 'the immortal spirit', the original Aristotelian understanding was largely lost sight of (although preserved in Thomas Aquinas and other works of philosophical theology.) But it comes across much more like an invisible entity, which no sensible person ought to believe in, when originally it was a more subtle concept.

Nietzsche (and later Heidegger) were right to critique how 'spirit' became reified into a static, unchanging entity. However, I wonder whether this critique fully accounts for the dynamic aspects of Christian Platonism, which in its more sophisticated forms retained a more fluid understanding of soul and intellect. I suspect much of Nietzsche’s critique is aimed at a simplified, institutionalized understanding of 'spirit'—one that had been drilled into generations of students through rote learning and dogmatic instruction, often devoid of its original philosophical depth.

Another egregious and disastrous set of decisions are completely undermining US Agency for International Development, the main vehicle by means of which billions of dollars of US aid is disbursed globally across all manner of charity and aid organisations. It has >10,000 employees and disburses more than $50 billion annually. The entire organisation has been thrown into chaos, with the main website taken offline and all spending frozen, with rumours that it is to become absorbed by the State Department and its activities and funding slashed.

Again, the Musk oligarchy has been central to this, barging into secure offices and demanding access to confidential files and systems. Musk is acting like an overlord, with greater authority than any Federal official or deparmental secretary, and complete discretion in deciding what does or doesn't constitute proper spending of US dollars.

The placement of the security officials (of US AID) — John Voorhees and his deputy — on administrative leave is the latest effort by the Trump administration and Musk to wrest control of the world’s largest provider of food assistance, which they have denigrated without offering evidence as left-wing and corrupt amid objections from Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

Amid the turmoil at the agency, Matt Hopson, the USAID chief of staff and a political appointee, resigned, according to a current and former USAID official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Hopson did not respond to requests for comment.Voorhees was put on leave after he did not allow DOGE officials to access a sensitive compartmented information facility — commonly known as a “SCIF” — an ultra-secure room where officials and government contractors take extraordinary precautions to review highly classified information, according to three current and former USAID officials.

A group of about eight DOGE officials entered the USAID building Saturday and demanded access to every door and floor, despite only a few of them having security clearance, according to senior Senate Democratic staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the incident.

When USAID personnel attempted to block access to some areas, DOGE officials threatened to call federal marshals, one of the Democratic aides said. The DOGE officials were eventually given access to “secure spaces” including the security office. — USAID Security Officials on Leave after Refusing Musk Allies

Imagine the predicament of those staffers, many of whom have dedicated their lives to the welfare of their recipient states and nations, who's entire careers are now being ended under the MAGA jackboots.

A fool is “happy” when his cravings are satisfied. A warrior is happy without reason.

-Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior — Patterner

:up: I think this requires qualities of character. Notably, poise. And the appropriate orientation or attitude. The society we live in is such that it doesn't recognise those qualities, rather it relies on continual stimulation to incite cravings and consumption, hence we all become 'consumers'. Being 'happy without reason' entails throwing that off, which is not necessarily an easy thing to do.

My feeling is, Schopenhauer did not, himself, cultivate that kind of personal discipline - not wanting to be overly judgemental, as I'm no paragon. But I suspect that the kind of life he lead, didn't really lend itself to attaining any kind of real poise or equanimity, which is why he wrote so much about being disturbed by boredom and craving.

But those who overcome the impulses of lust and anger which arise in the body are made whole and live in joy. They find their joy, their rest, and their light completely within themselves. — Sri Krishna

The yamas (Sanskrit: यम, romanized: yama), and their complement, the niyamas, represent a series of "right living" or ethical rules within Yoga philosophy. The word yama means "reining in" or "control". They are restraints for proper conduct given in the Vedas and the Yoga Sutras as moral imperatives, commandments, rules or goals. The yamas are a "don't"s list of self-restraints, typically representing commitments that affect one's relations with others and self. The complementary niyamas represent the "do"s. Together yamas and niyamas are personal obligations to live well. — Wikipedia,Yamas

They always said you learn something every day. Especially on the Internet.

Actually one thought that came to me during that talk. Schopenhauer says life is a pendulum swinging between boredom and disappointment. When you do something pleasurable, it disappoints because it’s never as good as it promised, it doesn’t last and you start looking for new pleasures. But if you don’t get pleasure, then life is boring. Boo hoo!

I put it to those I was talking to, that this is simply a description of ‘egoic consciousness’ (something I’m well acquainted with), that is always seeking pleasure or satisfaction in the sensory domain. I remember a talk from a Tibetan Lama decades ago, where he made the same point, referring to Mick Jagger singing ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’. It’s the nature of pleasure, the ‘hedonic treadmill’.

Schopenhauer seems to think it can only be ameliorated by the sublimity of high art or a severe asceticism (which so far as we know he never practiced.) But life has its simple pleasures too, and - something Schopenhauer does acknowledge - there is also an enduring satisfaction in being empathetic to the suffering of others. As always, I’ll do more reading, but I do think Schopenhauer’s pessimism was lacking in that regard.

delightfully apophatic. :lol:

Apropos of which, I asked ChatGPT whether Wittgenstein was ever funny.



My favourite is the bricklayer one. :rofl:

You're welcome. I'm Sydney born and bred although now live about 90 minutes west in the picturesque Blue Mountains. Anyway, it was a salutary reminder of my probably rose-coloured attitude to Schop, he was an old curmudgeon in some ways. Still, a genius in my book, and worth the effort of reading.

I'm going to comment in this thread because the Trump thread has it's own dedicated MAGA troll.

So, two utterly and profoundly worrying developments.

The first is that Elon Musk and his troupe have now been granted access privileges to the Treasury system that disburses ALL US Government payments to every individual and organisation (NYT Gift Link).

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to five people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.

The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.

Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.

This is a guy who has never held an elected office. He's putting his lieutenants into Government buildings and scrutinising all the outgoing funds. (Incidentally there's also pretty strong evidence that it was Musk that was behind the bulk email offering severance payments to practically the entire Federal beauracracy.)

The second development is Trump's demands for a list of all the FBI agents that worked on the Jan 6th insurrection and stolen documents cases. It seems many hundreds or even thousands of individuals could be fired or demoted for doing their jobs, following the exoneration pardoning of hundreds of insurrectionist police-bashers.

//update// I now read that the DOGE stooges only have read-only access to the disbursements system, which is not quite as Dr Strangelove as the initial story. But still….//

3.4 Holding a True Thought I spent quite a bit of time on this section, partly because it seems so repetitive and I am becoming a bit exasperrated by the repetive nature of the arguments.

Rödl acknowledges that many resist the idea that we are conscious of our own judgments only through second-order judgments. However, he points out that rejecting second-order judgement while still maintaining the force-content distinction is incoherent. The two positions are intimately linked: if judgment is structured into force (assent) and content (the thought), then self-awareness of judgment must be a separate act— meaning it entails second-order judgement, and that, If we reject second-order, we must also reject the force-content distinction.

If we accept the force-content distinction, then self-awareness of judgment is always a second-order act, which means the first-order judgment itself lacks inherent validity. This renders judgment passive or “dead,” lacking logical traction—it is just an attitude toward a thought rather than an act of understanding. (It means we have 'no dog in the fight' as the saying has it.)

Rödl reconstructs how the force-content distinction conceptualizes judgment: judging means assigning the value true to a thought. This is separate from thinking that it is correct to judge it is true, which is treated as a distinct second-order judgment. However, Rödl notes that recognizing that "it is right to hold p true if and only if p is true" already blurs this distinction because the act of judging and the act of thinking its correctness are intertwined.

Someone who possesses the concept of judgment can expand a judgment by adding, "and so it is right to assent to p." However, Rödl argues that this is only a superficial return to judgment—it does not reintegrate the act of judging with its validity but merely layers a second thought on top of it. The structure remains bifurcated.

Rödl then presents a scenario where someone affirms both p and ¬p, while also knowing that one must be false. This awareness does not necessarily mean they recognize that they themselves are making a contradictory judgment. The logic of the situation is understood, but it is not integrated into self-conscious awareness of one’s own act of judgment.

Where someone holds contradictory judgments:
*She judges that p is true.
*She judges that ¬p (not-p) is true.
*She also holds the meta-level belief that "it is correct to hold a thought true if and only if it is true."

From this, she can logically infer that someone (which might include her!) must be making an error.

At first glance, this seems unproblematic—she recognizes that something must be wrong with holding both p and ¬p as true. However, Rödl points out that if we separate force (the act of judging) from content (the thought being judged), nothing necessitates that she is aware that she herself is the one making the contradictory judgments.

This is the key flaw: if judgment is treated merely as assigning truth values to thoughts, rather than as an inherently self-conscious act (e.g. she knows she is thinking p), then contradictions can be recognized in an abstract way but without self-awareness. She can see that someone is in error, but there’s no necessity that she realizes she herself is the one making the mistake.

In other words, if the force-content distinction were correct, then logical contradiction would not necessarily lead to self-awareness of error, because judgment would not be inherently self-conscious.

Now, Rödl shifts the focus to inference. Suppose someone judges:

*A is true.
*B is true.
*She knows that if A and B are true, then C must be true.

Based on this, she judges that C is true.

So far, everything seems fine: she makes a logical inference. However, Rödl points out a crucial gap: nothing in this description implies that she is aware of having inferred C from A and B:

We cannot say that she knows that she holds a given thought true because judging something is understanding oneself to judge it. For then assigning the value true to a thought would be thinking it valid to assign this value to that thought. The act of holding true a content would be inside that content and the distinction of force and content would collapse. — p47

The problem, again, stems from treating judgment as merely assigning truth values to thoughts. If judgment were just about saying “A is true” and “B is true,” and then mechanically following a rule to conclude “C is true,” then there is no necessary awareness that she has performed an inference. In other words, she might have judged correctly but without knowing why she holds C true.

At this point, I was reminded of John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ argument. As is well-known, this thought-experiment is meant to challenge the idea that syntactic processing (mere symbol manipulation) is sufficient for understanding. Rödl’s critique of the force-content distinction exposes a similar issue: if judgment is just assigning truth values (a kind of syntactic operation), then the person making the judgment could go through all the correct logical steps without actually understanding what they mean—just like Searle’s man in the Chinese Room follows rules for manipulating Chinese symbols without understanding Chinese.

In both cases, the key problem is lack of intrinsic self-consciousness:

* The man in the Chinese Room manipulates symbols but does not understand them.
* The thinker who assigns truth values to thoughts (under the force-content distinction) can make inferences or recognize contradictions but does not necessarily recognize themselves as making these judgments.

Rödl’s position could be seen as a deep challenge to the very idea that cognition (or at least judgment) could ever be modeled in purely mechanistic, syntactic terms. Just as Searle insists that syntax is not sufficient for semantics (understanding), Rödl insists that judgment is not just assigning truth values but is an act of self-conscious understanding.

That's all for now.

But unlike animals, we don't just respond to them when our immediate drives make them salient. We actively pick them up for purpose of practical or theoretical reasoning, which is possible thanks to our conceptual skills being rationally articulated. — Pierre-Normand

I recall you mentioned Eric Marcus, 'Rational Causation', who writes extensively on this theme. Could you perhaps say a little about him in this context?

So Rodl is just telling us "what anyone always already knows." — Leontiskos

Perhaps it's matter of recollection ;-)

On some metaphysical postulate about some blind drive the universe follows (as well as us), that's further steps more advanced than experiencing or "willing" (in the common usage of the term). — Manuel

That’s not something I postulate, and something that I question in Schopenhauer; I’m much more drawn to the ‘idea’ aspect of his philosophy, than the ‘world as will’ aspect, which I'm frankly sceptical of. (Actually, coming to think of it, I much prefer the Hegelian geist, but never mind.)

Incidentally I went to an open-air social gathering yesterday, a out-door ‘Philosophical Symposium’, the subject of which was 'The Suffering of the World: Schopenhauer's Christian Buddhism.' I hadn't attended before - it was held in a park near Sydney Harbour, convened by an informal group organised by the main speaker (picture below under the Peroni sign.)



I felt the actual lecture concentrated too much on the familiar 'Schopenhauer as pessimist' meme, and not at all on the idealist side of his philosophy, but never mind, it was enjoyable to sit around a table and talk about philosophy with actual people. :wink:

Says who?

Well, if we don't know what it is, how can we say that it is? — Manuel

On the same grounds as Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’: even if you suffered complete amnesia and forgot your identity, you would be aware of your own being. That’s the point about *any* being: on some level it is aware of its distinction from what is other to it. It knows that it is.

We can't step outside what we see to verify whatever it is we see. — Manuel

Buddhists would say that our grasp of reality is inversely proportional to our degree of attachment. But that belongs to another thread (or forum).

"But on this very account, this I is not intimate with itself through and through, does not shine through so to speak, but is opaque, and therefore remains a riddle to itself." ~ Schopenhauer — Manuel

Agree, but the awareness of will is not an appearance. We may not know what it is, but that it is, we can have no doubt.

But we do reach better approximations. And that's what we continue to do. — Manuel

But the uncertainty principle shows that there’s a limit to how exact we can be.

Crikey pointes out that Dutton now has two ministers responsible for reducing government waste... — Banno

that'd be right. Some other imaginary bogeyman for him to winge about. Everyone knows that whenever the Tories cut the public service, they then open the purse to thousands of overpaid consultants from the big end of town, who report to their shareholders, not to the electorate.

Yes, science is metaphysics - in large part, not entirely - because they try to tell us what that nature is. — Manuel

Not necessarily what it is but how it appears - and it's an important distinction.

Neils Bohr: “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world”.

Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

In any case, we do not - and cannot - go beyond appearance. — Manuel

I'd be careful there, it's a big statement!

:pray:

I’ve been thinking about a way to express Berkeley’s esse est percipi without the theological commitment to an all-seeing God or even the (Brahman-like) cosmic intelligence of Kastrup’s Mind at Large. A philosophically neutral alternative is simply to say that what is real, is real for a mind—or even just for 'the observer'. For those who are able to hold to a theistic interpretation, then the Divine Intellect will fulfill that role, but that isn’t strictly necessary for the paradigm to make sense.

If we then ask how to define this mind, the answer is that it cannot be defined in objective terms—because it is not an object. Mind does not appear to us as a phenomenon, but appears as the observer. It is the first-person to whom all experience occurs, meaning that it is never something we can stand outside of and conceptualize as we do with other objects (on any scale). As the old Hindu saying has it, to do so is like the hand trying to grasp itself, or the eye trying to see itself. This is why materialists like Dennett, recognizing that mind cannot be an objective entity, attempt to eliminate it altogether rather than acknowledge its unique status, which undermines their core tenet of the supremacy of objectivity.

This brings us back to Berkeley’s critique of materialism, the assumption that only observed phenomena—the measurable and quantifiable—is real. Because mind itself is never an observed phenomenon, the materialist concludes that mind must be either an illusion or an emergent property of physical processes. This, however, is an assumption, not a conclusion¹. If anything, the inverse is true: the very concept of an objective, external reality depends on the presence of an observer for whom reality appears in the first place.

This position doesn’t entail a theistic framework—it’s simply the recognition that experience always occurs for a mind, hence the indispensability of the subject. Whether one frames this in terms of Berkeley’s God, Kastrup’s ‘Mind at Large,’ or Husserl’s transcendental subject, or even contemporary enactivist approaches to cognition, the underlying point remains the same: the world appears only as structured within awareness or consciousness, within which which the subject of experience is an ineliminable pole.

----

1. 'The world is not conclusion/a species stands beyond/invisible as music/but positive as sound' ~ Emily Dickinson.

existence simpliciter — Count Timothy von Icarus

An oxymoron.

One of the outlinks in the Post story:

A Milwaukee TV weather forecaster has been dropped by her station one day after she criticized Elon Musk on social media for his straight-arm gesture that many have likened to a Nazi salute.

Staffers at WDJT-TV (Channel 58) were alerted by email on Wednesday that meteorologist Sam Kuffel had left the station. Her biography and picture had been removed from Channel 58 website by Wednesday afternoon.

"Meteorologist Sam Kuffel is no longer employed at CBS58," said the staff memo from news director Jessie Garcia that was obtained by the Journal Sentinel. "A search for a replacement is underway." — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Don’t forget the Supreme Court ruling giving Presidents absolute immunity for official acts. And that he’s had two major felony charges tossed by getting elected. That he thinks Justice is out to get him. You think that’s the profile of someone afraid of the law? (There's a venerable American colloquialism, 'scofflaw', which describes Trump perfectly.)

Meanwhile, must-read WaPo article on MAGA censorship of free expression under the banner of 'protecting free speech' (perfect Orwellian doublespeak).

On Day 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” This might have sounded like banal lip service, reaffirming commitment to the First Amendment. In reality, it was the start of an Orwellian effort to root out wrongthink from government ranks and the private sector.

The first kind of speech to be shushed was scientific speech.

Last week, the administration ordered a blackout on public communications from government health agencies — in the middle of flu season and a global zoonotic outbreak. For the first time since 1952, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld its weekly report on morbidity and mortality data updates.

The blocked issue was slated to contain two important new studies about bird flu transmission, KFF reports. The move echoed Trump’s data-suppression approach to covid-19. (“If we stopped testing right now,” he said in June 2020, “we’d have very few cases, if any.”)

Other federal departments, such as the Energy Department, were also ordered to cease public communications unless they had explicit approval of the acting secretary, according to memos shared with the Post. Some agencies have been blocked from sharing data even within the government. Others have canceled previously approved data access or other exchanges with outside researchers.

In one case, a University of North Carolina legal scholar was told his scheduled talk at a U.S. attorney’s office was canceled. The topic of the event: complicity of German lawyers in the creation of the Nazi state. You can’t make these things up. — A new era of government censorship has dawned

No need to make it up. You can watch it happening.

Don't scientists subscribe to a massive metaphysical commitment, that reality can be understood? — Tom Storm

The scientific method relies heavily on limiting the kinds of questions it tackles to those that can be meaningfully addressed within a defined scope. Consider for example the laws of motion and Galileo's definitions of physics in terms of the measurable attributes of bodies. Galileo made revolutionary discoveries in the understanding of motion, including the concept of inertia (that objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by a force).  Galileo emphasized observation and experimentation, laying the groundwork for the scientific method. Newton took these ideas further and formalized them into his three laws of motion, which are fundamental to classical mechanics, meticulously following Galileo's method in collecting data and formulating theories based on evidence. This is why they are considered two foundational figures in modern science. But note that this already relies on some fundamental assumptions and axioms, notably idealisation and abstraction. The practice of physics assume ideal forms, frictionless planes, dimensionless points, and bodies with precisely measurable attributes and behaviours. On the one hand, this proves incredibly powerful in control and prediction within its domain, which is universal in principle, but on the other, it is limited in practice by the fact that the real world does not actually comprise ideal forms and measurable forces, although this method also enables fantastically high levels of approximation. And of course there's no question of its power - you're literally looking at its results!

But notice that among what this excludes is - the subject! There is no conceptual space in all of this for the actual scientist. Which in some sense is what Bishop Berkeley is attempting to restore. He's saying something like, look, unless this is real for someone, then what kind of reality does it have? Phenomenology was to bring all of this out and make it explicit, but the germ of the idea is there in Berkeley (and Descartes for that matter, who is often credited as the forefather of phenomenology.)

The desire to know the answers to ultimate metaphysical questions like “Who am I?”, “What is reality?”, and “What is the mind?” has been haunting me throughout my life. To me, it surpasses other common aspects of a utility function. I cannot say much about the reason for that, as the curiosity seems natural and inherent to me, and precise attribution does not seem possible. I do feel bored and even disgusted by the fact that many human behaviors, including mine, are often driven by flawed/trivial motives, such as selfishness, the sense of superiority, and so on, from a very early age.

From my understanding, current philosophy and science cannot adequately explain these questions. — LaymanThinker

Might that be because of the materialist underpinnings of current philosophy and science? After all, according to its populist advocates, h.sapiens is simply another species, albeit a very clever one, but driven by the same basic instincts as everything else in the natural world, to survive and reproduce. The origin of life is a kind of biochemical fluke, maybe even a one-off, happening in a vast, indifferent universe which neither knows nor cares about humanity. Any conception of reason is a human invention and //apart from its instrumental value// a mere vanity.

If one’s life goal is to understand these ultimate questions and their solutions, should they first focus on longevity in order to wait for humanity to develop the necessary technology, philosophy, or language? — LaymanThinker

Like waiting for Godot. If we don't understand the question, then how what kind of answer can we expect? How can artificial intelligence be expected to answer a question which real intelligence can only dimly pose?

This also means that the most dire fears about Trump aren't realistic. — ssu

Hope you're right. But he could do a lot less than the most dire, and still be dire. Consider what is within his power, a misjudgement in an international economic or military crisis could be *extremely* dire.

I guess that is called self-loathing then. — ssu

He hates Government for many reasons, but one is definitely because of the prosecutions that were launched against him between his terms. He just sacked a whole bunch of prosecutors from DoJ because of their association with those cases, plus he's just offered redundancies to practically the entire Federal workforce. His loathing of the deep state is well-documented, but it turns out that the deep state turns out to be much of the federal beauracracy. He wants to turn the Government into a subsidiary of Trump Inc, and at the moment, he's not getting a lot of pushback. Congress is completely supine. They're terrified of crossing him.

:rofl: :up:

I think Schop was a major influence wasn’t he? (Although I generally shy away from discussion of Neitszche.)

Very interesting question!

Again I'm impressed with Schopenhauer's attitude (although recognizing the thread is about Berkeley).

Schopenhauer sees the body as the one phenomenon we know from both the first-person (inside) and third-person (external) perspectives. Unlike other objects, which are only known to us as representations, our body is directly felt as Will. Accordingly, bodily actions are not caused by will in a mechanistic sense; rather, they manifest the will. When I move my arm, it is not that my will causes the movement—it is the movement. In this respect the body provides an analogy for understanding the nature of a larger reality: things appear as representations, but in their essence, they are Will.

That is similar to how analytical idealist Bernardo Kastrup puts it:

If you are sad – very sad inside, to the point of despair – and you look at yourself in the mirror, you may be crying. So you will see tears flowing down your face and contorted muscles, but not for a moment would you think that those tears and contorted muscles are the whole story. You know that behind those tears, there is the thing in itself – the real thing – which is your sadness. So the tears and the muscles are the extrinsic appearance, the representation of an inner reality. — Mind over Matter

(A general point to note: within the premodern metaphysical vision, particularly in Neoplatonism and Christian theology, being was understood as a form of plenitude—what the ancients called the Pleroma, the 'fullness of being'. From this perspective, being is not a neutral or arbitrary descriptor, but an expression of fullness, goodness, and actuality, compared to which non-existence or non-being is a privation or deficiency. The ontological argument, then, is not simply about correct use of language but is grounded in this intuition of the inherent meaning of Being.

Also worth noting that for the medievals, arguments for God’s existence were devotional as much as polemical —they were edifying ideas intended to elevate the mind toward the Divine. The ontological argument, in this context, is not merely a logical proof but an intellectual prayer, grounded in the awareness of the fullness of being (Pleroma) as identical with the absolute Good.)

The first of the Trump Internment Camps for undesireables is on the drawing board.

President Trump said he is signing an executive order on Wednesday to prepare a massive facility at Guantánamo Bay to be used to house deported migrants. The order will direct the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantánamo Bay, a facility in Cuba that has been used to house military prisoners, including several involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Meanwhile, the 'funding freeze fiasco' is an example of the always spectacular Trumpian ham-fistedness. After practically paralyzing the entire Federal Government, Trump says, ooops, better not do that. But no doubt he'll keep trying. He hates Government, and he's in an ideal place to disable it.

I’m sorry, but “opening of the first eye” is absurd, if such is meant even remotely literal. To reconcile the absurdity, we are forced to admit the metaphor merely represents some arbitrary initial impact on a fully developed rational intelligence. — Mww

It is common knowledge that in the cosmic scheme, h.sapiens has only existed for the merest sliver of time, and mammals and higher animals generally relatively recent arrivals. That is a matter of temporal sequence, but again the observing mind provides the framework within which that is intelligible. And as I've brought Schopenhauer in, I'll double down:

Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions relating to the former (subject) no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the latter (object). In short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

So, while it is an empirical fact that universe pre-existed conscious beings, the way in which it exists outside of, or before, conscious beings is unknowable as a matter of principle, as the knowledge we have of it, which is considerable, is still held within that intellectual framework. That is why the great Kant could say that one could be both an empirical realist AND transcendental idealist and see no contradiction between them.

Isn't this where the colloquial "go kick rocks" comes from? — DifferentiatingEgg

No, it comes from the Samuel Johnson anecdote, which is described in the OP.

I believe the shift away from Aristotelianism, in the way that "matter" is conceived, is derived from the physicists. — Metaphysician Undercover

Plainly, the death knell for Aristotelianism was the advent of Galilean science and the collapse of the 'medieval synthesis.' And Descartes and all the early moderns took great pains to differentiate themselves from 'the schoolmen', on the not unreasonable grounds that it had become stultifyingly dogmatic. (Actually I still remember an anecdote from the very first lecture in philosophy I attended, by Alan Chalmers, author of What is this Thing called Science? He related the story of group of monks who fell into an argument about how many teeth horses had. They all scurried off to the library, but alas, when they reconvened, they reported that as this fact wasn't in Aristotle, then it couldn't be known. When one fellow suggested going and actually looking in a horses mouth, he was ridiculed.)

Announcing it publicly served no public interest, — Relativist

:rofl: Since when are Trump’s activities ever in response to ‘the public interest’? He’s driven wholly and solely by what Buddhists call ‘the three poisons’: hatred, greed and delusion.