So what would my body be made of? Ideas?

No but we can play with ideas, analyse them, communicate them. So we have ways to detect them.

But then you have the mind-body problem, which seems insolvable, at this point. — RogueAI

We'll solve it one day. In the meantime, I'd rather have a mind-body problem than have no mind or no body.

The existence of pheromones in humans is well attested, I think.

I think it was soup? I love an idea soup. — Kenosha Kid

You're describing TPF. I love it too.

I didn't think you were [an idealist], I was just annotating the edges of our conversation for clarity :)

Right. So there's one edge which is idealism, aka only forms exist; and another edge which is materialism, aka only matter exists. In between these two extremes lies the not-so-new idea that there's no matter without form and no form without matter.

That is why I say that the vertical axis, the dimension of real quality, has been lost in Western philosophy, which is a flatland of materialism and pragmatism. Ideas are simply the by-product of an hominid brain, shaped by and conditioned solely towards survival. There's no philosophy proper in that attitude. — Wayfarer

That's a powerful argument. I would argue that the vertical axis is still there and that we still climb it up and down daily, all of us, but it may be that some of us don't know it, are blind to it, or deny it.

In an emergentist view point (mine in any case), the vertical axis is being built patiently, as a tower would be, stone after stone, one emerging form pilled upon another, rather than being some preexisting ideal or transcendental axis. It's a work in progress (and regress), maybe a sisyphean task. Worthwhile still.

Another way to interpret the cave metaphor is to say that the shades seen from the cave are sense data, and the forms out the cave are the hypotheses we create or imagine, to explain the data. That would be a rationalist interpretation I suppose.

There is always a leap of faith to make to jump from data to explanatory hypothesis. That could be the ascent.

We're talking ideas in someone's [?], right? It doesn't permit redness to exist objectively as a perfect form outside of brains as an idealist might have it. But yes clearly my ideas exist in some way: I can convey that without any understanding of what they fundamentally are. — Kenosha Kid

There's a word missing up there after 'someone's'. Assuming it is the word 'brain', 'mind' or 'head', I agree. I'm not an idealist. More of a synthesis between materialism and idealism. So I draw from idealism what I see as the useful bit: the importance of forms, and from materialism the importance of matter.

No matter without form, no form without matter.

So a form cannot exist without being the form of some matter or another. Assuming ideas are forms, they must be the form of something material. Forms have material substrates, so to speak.

But the interesting thing with forms, is that they can be duplicated, copied, from one material support to another. And that may be why you and I can apparently share ideas.

Ha ha ha... See you around.

Why don't you inform me about materialism, then?

Well then, all is fine and there are no more logical contradictions that I can see.

I like Descartes as a theorician of the scientific method, but find his view of biology too mechanistic. On the issue of "animal souls" I prefer Gassendi, who said it was a matter of degree, that animals had a 'small soul'.

Remember also the Church's influence here. If man is made at God's image, monkeys aren't. This is still a powerfully pregnant idea, more than a century after Darwin.

Will try and find "Klara and the Sun".

we detect ideas with our senses to no less an extent that we detect objects. — Isaac

Okay, point well taken. Therefore ideas are empirical, and can be considered as physical. They are objects too.

Prove that materialism contradicts itself" ... if, of course, "you can". — 180 Proof

Of course I can. The only question is whether you can understand the proof.

Materialism, in it's most naïve form, stipulates that ideas don't really exist, at least not as fully as material stuff. But materialism is itself an idea. Therefore if materialism is true, materialism does not exist.

Okay so you don't know how it's done.

In my case, I hear my thoughts in my head.

So it makes no discernable difference from your standpoint...

How do you detect ideas?

If I have 'an idea', is not some part of my brain sensing that? — Isaac

Do you mean that ideas are empirical because we can hear them in our head?

The point is that common English defines 'physical' as 'apprehensible by the senses, measurable'.

That's not physical reality, that's solipsism. Physical reality is the causes of our perceptions. Or do you mean physical theory is what we make of what we perceive? — Kenosha Kid

It is our common reality: we know of the world through our senses.

We can ascertain that a given physical object exists by using our senses (and instruments).

In fact, the very definition of 'physical' in regular English is 'empirical, confirmed by the senses', as opposed to 'imagined, invented by the mind'.

Do you understand the point now? It is simply a matter of definition.

You of course define 'physical' in a different manner, which appears to include ideas. If ideas are considered physical, or material, then I have no problem with such a 'weak materialism'. It solves the obvious logical contradiction of 'strong materialism' (=the idea that ideas don't exist).

Alright then, what is the situation your end? Are you a BiV or a BiS?

Physics defines physical things as things having physical properties, and physical properties are the capacities to couple those things to other things. — Kenosha Kid

By this definition, thoughts are physical, since they can couple with other thoughts and have certain properties such as being logical or not, sensical or not, etc. — Olivier5

So in fine, either one considers ideas to be 'physical', or one must concede that there are things that exist, such as ideas, that aren't physical. The two options say more or less the same thing: ideas exist. They only differ by how they define 'physical'.

you're trying to make your case with the aid of an unreliable witness. — TheMadFool

No, I'm saying that it makes no difference from the stand point of the witness. And you are the witness, not the judge.

We philosophers leave such behaviors to MAGA capped trolls. You see, the quality of one's thought can be measured by the reputation of one's scapegoat. Blaming it on Descartes is what sophisticated thinkers do.

Or Aristotle of course. In fact if memory serves, Descartes blamed it on Aristotle.

It isn't hard to do because both men wrote quite a lot. In your case one could easily put together the argument that it was a sad relic of Cartesianism in you that made you treat monkeys as mere machines, not given a soul like humans have. You should have known better than believe Descartes...

You could blame it on Descartes. We all do it...

Hey, monkeys have feelings too!

You can measure the intensity of a magnetic field, though.

processed by different information-processing systems. — Kenosha Kid

In the end the two channels of information converge into the minds of the scientists. So there's no avoiding the subjective dimension of reality. Physical reality is what we (minds) make of what we perceive.

The above gives the impression that if you didn't sense it classically, it's non-physical. However if I can scan your brain and see a neurological correlate of your experience, I am sensing something about it in an indirect way (e.g. I could make predictions about it). This would keep it in the realm of the physical. — Kenosha Kid

Let me precise that, when writing "perceivable by the senses", I should have added a few caveats such as: "aided by any apparatus e.g. microscope, radio-telescope, brain scanners, etc." and "with several well qualified , sober people agreeing to what they perceive". The latter caveat is to take into account the possibility of human error or illusion (mirages, hallucinations, etc.). The former is to allow for more than just our bare eyes.

This precision being made, when you scan my brain you may be searching for neural correlates for my experience, but my experience is accessible to you only by my telling you about it. So you perceive, measure, empirically gauge a brain scan or rather a series of many scans; and then I tell you: I want an ice cream right now, preferably pistachio and melon, from the bald guy in the street behind the fountain. Or: I can't stop thinking about this documentary I saw yesterday night, about a baby called Sama born in Aleppo, and her father Hamza, filmed by their mother and wife Waad.

And then you'll tell me that you see some correlation between, say, the excitation of my post-hypophyse and my speaking of war, or ice-cream.

Then what? You think that will help you predict what I think next? Even if you could, would it make ice cream any less good subjectively? Would it make Assad's murder and torture of his own people any less disgusting?

This brutal irruption of reality in a thread about the philosophy of reality may be a bit unfair; likely you were not prepared for this. Let's go back to the safety of a lab. Scientists observing subjects in a highly controlled environment, not under bombs, and no one is getting gelato either. My options, while you scan my brain, are limited to wanting to press the red button or the green button in front of me, or something equally irrelevant to anything.

So I press sometime one sometime the other and you tell me: I can predict which one you will chose next.

Is this the argument?

Physics defines physical things as things having physical properties, and physical properties are the capacities to couple those things to other things. — Kenosha Kid

By this definition, thoughts are physical, since they can couple with other thoughts and have certain properties such as being logical or not, sensical or not, etc.

But we can "weigh and measure" what the idea of materialism (e.g. material, or matter) refers to? — 180 Proof

Why yes, that's the point. You can weight matter alright, but you cannot weight the idea that matter is all there is, because ideas are not physical as per the above definition of 'physical' = 'empirical'.

Although... you can prove that materialism contradicts itself, which in a sense is the sort of "measurement" ideas lend themselves to: logical evaluations of their worth.

But then you claim brain in a vat = brain in a skull — TheMadFool

No no no, I'm just saying there's no essential difference between the two situations.

If the sim that the BiV is fed looks exactly like some sort of reality that a BiS would possibly live in (it is coherent, rich in details, etc., as you agreed that it could be or even should be for the illusion to work), and if "they" don't wake you up from your sim, whence come the difference? You live in a sim which happens to be your reality. It is as real as any other reality will be.

If in addition there is in a BiS situation a structural, unavoidable epistemic gap between your mind's view of the world and the world itself; if you cannot really access the latter but only images of it (or any other senses' mental output/representation of it), then you DO actually live in a sim even in a BiS situation. Your mental world is a sim of the real world around you.

By that I mean you cannot weight, measure or see materialism. If "physical" means "perceivable by the senses", them materialism is non-physical. Therefore "just an idea".

I said that materialism is just an idea. Do you disagree?

He who lived well hid himself well.

Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, is indeed a verse by Ovid.

I don't know about yours, but my body is a little more than just an idea.

it is not simply about personal safety but to protect philosophy. — Fooloso4

Yes, there were other reasons than just the political risk of spilling too many beans. Those reasons are expressed by the Socrates figure himself in the dialogues: the written word is like a dead version of the spoken word, etc. Socrates never wrote anything, at least that we know of.

Are you sure your quote is by Ovid via Descartes? Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés is a well-known French proverb attributed by Wikipedia to Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian in his fable "Le Grillon".

Still not convinced. Your body is not, actually, the same thing as the way you perceive your body. We have this Kantian incapacity to reach reality as it is, we only see phenomena. In the world out there as theorized by physics, there are no color, only wavelengths. So what you see is NOT what there is, but a representation of it.

The images you see, they are in your head, and you know it.

This is precisely why it is so hard to get rid of the brain-in-a-vat idea: because it is basically true that we ARE brains in skulls watching algorithms, which is much the same thing as brains in vats.

I'm a fan of Aristotle, and he studied under Plato so I guess I should temper my critique of the latter.

Socrates' teaching was subversive.
— Olivier5

It was, but it was tolerated, — Fooloso4

For a long time it was. Democracy itself implies freedom of thought and expression, so democrats are bound to tolerate critiques of democracy. But this tolerance reached its limit at some point. I believe that the episode of the Thirty Tyrants was key: many democrats would have been concerned that something like this could happen again if Socrates and others were allowed to teach another generation.

There is also zero evidence that "the Platonic tradition" wasn't grossly distorted by the neo-platonists.

You seem to be wedged to their views, or to like them very much. That's fine, a bit passé in my opinion but fine. However, the neo-platonists were not the owner of the Plato copyright. They were just people who re-interpreted Plato in their own time, to suit their goals and answer their own questions.

We are all doing the same today. That's what reading old texts is all about: to try and reuse them today. Only fundamentalists care (or pretend to care) about what Plato really really meant in the secrecy of his soul. And even them only do so because of something important to them today.

In your case, you are trying to enlist the prestigious Socrates and Plato brigade in your fight against atheists and materialists, and to do so you must ignore the radical doubt introduced by Socrates, and make of him a BELIEVER. That's your bias, your take. It is a rather banal take, echoing and agreeing to the recuperation of Plato by the Church fathers. You are not trying to think by yourself; instead all your say is: "some old Christian scholars opined that Plato was all about nous and forms, so that's all there is to say about Plato; no need to enquire any further."

Fooloso4's take is more original: he understands Plato as a critique of naïve yet cocksure religion. He sees the Republic as an effort to imagine a city (be it literal or metaphoric) where religion would be replaced or transcended by philosophy.

I like his take best, I think it is far more likely to reflect certain actual ideas of Plato than yours. It also explains the death of Socrates quite well.

There are however differences between my take and Fooloso4's. I don't think very highly of Plato's metaphysics or of his political ideas, for one. I think he mistrialed democracy, failed to see its value. And here I agree with Popper, who sees Plato an an enemy of "open society". Another difference is that I see a lot of parallels between the trial of Socrates and that of Jesus; something which is probably closer to your take than to Fooloso4's.

When France got confined last year, the government made a distinction between essential services and non-essential ones. Musicians were considered non-essential, and musical performances were cancelled.

This lead this guy HK to write this song. Since then, it has become a protest song about culture being an essential part of life, whatever technocrats think. It's been translated and played all over. Here is a Portuguese version, which I chose because it has English subtitles.

To my knowledge there's no English version yet... A project for ?