I thought you said transcendence was a straw man? — Pfhorrest

Nope, supernaturalism was what I objected to. Dualism, at least my garden variety, is a natural, common sensical philosophy. It's not really about demons and fairies.

It has to be fabricated by someone and then set up by someone. Cameras don't crop up in the landscape haphazardly. They are artificial eyes that humans make and use.

There is also the actual stuff represented in the picture, e.g. the grand canyon.

There's no camera filming without some use for it, and therefore no camera without a user. Even the footage of a surveillance camera is watched by some human being once in a while.

include the user of the camera.
:roll: Homunculus fallacy. — 180 Proof

There is no such thing as a "homonculus fallacy" that I can see. There is an argument about it but it is poor and obviously false. We do in fact use cameras. Therefore there are camera users.

Don't you worry about it. My guess is that among the 50+ poster's who pumped you up, quite a few -- like myself -- did it just to show how easy to manipulate and hence meaningless that feature is...

I voted you up too. :love:

The numbers of likes the user's posts have, I think. — Amalac

So my fan base here is composed of three (3) people?

Why, I love you too, 3 people ! :-)

IQ — frank

That must be it! :-)

:-)

And so, emotions, inner thoughts, phenomenological states, and one's full inner life are not natural states but supernatural. — Fooloso4

That is very far from common sense, which considers emotions and thoughts as perfectly natural.

As it is being used by 180 I take it to mean that what it being divided in terms of two different substances is actually a distinction between properties of the same substance. — Fooloso4

Thanks. Not sure that works for me... My dualism starts from the duality of form and xyle, information and matter, and see this as more fundamental a divide than just 'properties'.

If the pages are made of gold, I don't see the problem...

Can you or anyone explain the meaning of "property dualism"?

I love my parents
I love my children
Boring, I know...
I don't like war or misery,
It's annoying...
You may find it
Too politically correct
But then, fuck you!

I am no racist
I am all for human rights
I don't wear fur
I don't regret the guillotine
I'm not a misogynist
I sort my rubbish
I am, I repeat
Politically correct
But then, fuck you!

I have nothing against mosques
I don't feel threatened by minarets
I don't believe gay people
Are abnormal
Or necessarily coquet
See? I'm a snowflake
Politically correct
But then, fuck you!

Victim of the consensus, I am,
I admit, secular, now that I think of it
I specify that I do not believe
That there are too many Jews
In the media or finance
At the risk of appearing
Politically correct
But then, fuck you!

It will sound like demagoguery to you
But I advise against drugs
Even for minors
I don't militate (hold on tight)
For the extinction of dolphins
I don't want them to die!
You may find it naïve and
Politically correct
But then, fuck you!

I don't treat the concierge
Nor to the cleaning lady
As if they were dogs
We must respect everyone
I teach it to my children
So that they too may become
One day, as I wish
Politically correct
And then, fuck you!

This is dedicated to @SophistiCat and @Kenosha Kid, posters who seem to know their way around a particle accelerator.


In 2015, three graduate students and a communications officer made a CERN-themed parody of Howie Day’s hit song “Collide”. Howie Day saw the parody on Twitter, and asked to visit CERN. We said yes, but only if he covered our parody of his song and let us make a music video with him during the visit. We were joking. He wasn’t.


The beam is starting
The power is on
This is our parting
Goodbye my baryon

We counter-rotate
I see you pass by
Till we make argon and lead tungstate
Light up again

Out of the depths of space and time
Even the bosons cannot hide
As the momentum starts to climb
I somehow find
You and I
Collide

The theories you know
We test their ground; I wonder
Is there another Higgs?
Can SUSY still be found?

Out of the depths of space and time
Even the gluons cannot hide
As the momentum starts to climb
I somehow find
You and I
Collide

Dark matter
2HDM
And gravitons, yeah

Out in the depths of space and time
Even the sea-quarks cannot hide
Out of the mess we leave behind
What will they find
When you and I
Collide
What will they find
When you and I
Collide

What will they find
When you and I
Collide

Banned 3017amen for disruption, trolling, and ignoring warnings. — Baden

Our loss, his gain.

it's not clear to me what your point 1 even means — Pfhorrest

It means knowledge about X is different from X. The map is not the territory.

I think most everyone (besides Berkeleyan subjective idealists) would agree with that; even eliminative materialists would agree with that (the act of observation is a thing the observer's brain is doing, which is not identical to the object being observed). — Pfhorrest

Indeed, idealist monists such as Berkeley disagree with my point 1, and so do materialist monists in fact (i.e. the eliminative ones), because for them there is no such thing as a symbolic map: everything is just gluons spinning in a flat ontology, without any room for transcendence.

Monists reject the fundamental difference between map and territory because they are monist. I accept it because I am a dualist.

Whatever.

It was not a concern, more an information. Honestly, I don't like your style. You are trying to be toxic and obnoxious, a behavior best left to unsecure teenagers.

You'll get banned if you continue like this.

Glad you liked it. This movie is a classic of the era, graced with one double entente joke per second (almost) and Marilyn's unapologetic sex appeal. Also a bit before my time but not that much.

It's a silly and sexy comedy, mindlessly enjoyable. Google "last scene" and the title.

Deus, sive natura. — 180 Proof

Yes, Spinoza but also the Catholic humanists.

Aside from me being black and American, we could be twins. — 180 Proof

My soulmate! :-)

Reminds me the final scene of Some Like It Hot.

I'm an environmentally concerned, pro-science, atheist social-democrat from France. To my defense, I'm also an old white heterosexual male. Nobody's perfect.

Welcome to TPF.

Are you some kind of MAGA-capped intellectual, by any chance?

My faith in science serves me well and helps me a lot, for the very simple reason that it is undistinguishable from my faith in my own reason and senses. Science is but a systematic way of doing basic human thinking that is natural to man. It is our specialty, in the animal kingdom. We are sapiens.

If God created man, He created reason, sapience, and gave it to man. If God created reason, then science is godly. It is the patient exploration of God's eternal laws. Eureka = Hallelujah.

Now, in practice all scientists may not serve God or even Truth (godly or not), conflicts of interest between Truth and Money exist, but they are manageable.

The question is why Socrates? If this is Plato's images of the truth then why not put them in the mouth of a stranger? — Fooloso4

What I gathered from my superficial reading on the subject is the conventional wisdom that Plato went through 'phases' or 'periods' like Picasso. At the begining he was following upon Socrates rather closely, but progressively he took some distance from his master, as he developed his own ideas. This would be reflected in his dialogues, where the figure of Socrates is prominent in dialogues classified as early, and in later dialogues he tended to be replaced by 'the stranger' (that is to say Plato himself, since he was a stranger in the strange land of Sicily at this point).

Socratic philosophy is oriented around the question of the good. It is what is sought for. This orientation is, however, necessarily a human orientation. That is, the question of the good is the question of the human good. — Fooloso4

The trick is that we know of Socrates through Plato and a few others but not directly. Like Jesus, Socrates could have written a book, but he chose not to, and so we know of his thoughts and deeds only through others.

This composite picture has some contradictions that you highlighted. It could be that the reports by Plato are inaccurate, or it could be that Socrates himself harboured some contradictions.

Yeah, I'm pro-science hence bad.

Yes,scientist are regular folks. But they work in an industry run by monied interests. — Protagoras

Who doesn't? You gotta serve somebody.

Well, I'll send as many as I can on to you so you can instruct them in 'The Way' and save them from their unenlightened chaos... — Isaac

Just tell them that science is about minds understanding matter, not vice versa.

The solution of this seeming contradiction could be as simple as Plato putting words in Socrates' mouth.

Another solution would be that Socrates, while doubting, had a sort of hunch that the good was beyond the gods and all that.

Scientists are no better nor worse than other folks. They are regular folks. Why is everyone treating them either as devils or angels in beyond me.

What if it was someone you trusted and you knew they were being genuine? — Protagoras

If I had personal memories of my previous lives, and if while chatting with others, I would realize that they all (or most of them) had similar memories, then I would accept the immortality of the human mind.

One witness is too few. She could be mistaken.

He could be a liar, though.

Second, substance dualism is not the basic way we understand things. — Fooloso4

Indeed, this idea of two different substances is not intuitive at all, it is something that came out of a certain culture. The intuitive idea (to me at least) is that our mind dies when our body dies; reason for which we are all naturally afraid of death.

If our mind was some special inalterable substance, it would be immortal and I think we would know it, we would remember our previous lives for instance. But we don't.

Yes, the power of doubt.

The question cognitive science is trying to answer is that of how the mind works (neuroscience is trying to answer the question of how the brain works). It is a question without a current answer, no-one is 'replacing' anything, we're filling in gaps. Are you claiming that you already know how your mind works, do you think your own guesswork is somehow privileged and should be sacrosanct?

Nothing is sacrosanct in my shop, not even my nor your guesswork.

I think there are answers to those two questions. Biology tells us a humongous lot about brains and how they work, and more generally about how the body manages its information needs. And psychologists have become pretty good at understanding or at least at predicting, manipulating, and sometimes curing minds. Transactional analysis for instance does work reasonably well. So we do have some answers. We are making sustained progress, the way I see it, and I have been looking at this fields for a good 30 years.

All this to say that I am not a prophet of doom for neuroscience. I think we will end up cracking the mystery of the human mind, ultimately. And when that happens, it will be a great triumph for the human mind. It will of course NOT be a replacement of the human mind by some biological theory, just an understanding of the mind and its powers in terms of its biological foundations.

If only there were thousands of highly trained individuals who had decades of time and experience to put to finding out via careful experimentation that they could then publish in a series of papers and books so that people like you could read them and find out... — Isaac

Yes, and if all of them gave some thought to what they are doing instead of running around like materialist chicken, they would make faster progress.

Socrates does not explicitly deny the existence of gods. Therefore, it cannot be asserted that he was an atheist.
— Apollodorus

He does not affirm the existence of gods either. — Fooloso4

It follows that Socrates was the prototypical agnostic. I agree with him here. We don't really know how many gods there are: 0, 1, 2, a million, or 3.1416...

Subsystem 1 is in state |1>
Subsystem 2 is in state |measured |1>>
Subsystem 3 is in state |measured |2>> = |measured |measured 1>> — Kenosha Kid

Why not:

Subsystem 1 is in state |1>, which includes a (imprecise, approximate) measurement of Subsystem 2
Subsystem 2 is in state |2>, which includes a (imprecise, approximate) measurement of Subsystem 1

We have two brains (left and right) and only one mind. It could be that our two brains work as mirrors to one another, thus creating a mise en abyme called consciousness. Just an idea.


An optical mise en abyme

They lead a double life! — Protagoras

Yes, they put themselves in what Bateson called a "double bind", i.e. a self-contradictory injunction, which is actually dangerous for one's mental health as it can lead to schizophrenia.