Why pursue philosophy? If you have a choice, perhaps best not. — Banno

Do you mean to say that we shouldn't bother to pursue philosophy unless we want to? I would take that as read, because the alternative would be that we ought to pursue philosophy even if we don't want to which seems absurd.

That would be unprecedented, but interesting. — Vera Mont

Yes, it would...I'd love to see it happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

Voting has very little effect on the social and economic structure. It fractures due to design flaws, not user input. — Vera Mont

I agree, and I think the problem is the two-party system, with effectively little to choose between the two.

Whereas biology has had to begin to pay more and more attention to context, which appears in the form of ‘the environment’, as it’s become clear that organisms can’t be completely understood except for in that context. — Wayfarer

I agree with this, but this a case of realizing that no organism is isolated or can be properly understood without taking into account its interactions with other organism and also the inorganic environment.

The so-called observer problem in QM is the closest context I can think of to bringing the perceiving subject into the picture. But even there what constitutes an observer is controversial. For the doing of science considerations of the perceiving subject seem to generally be bracketed, but of course I agree it should be philosophically acknowledged that science deals with what appears to us, and not anything beyond that ambit.

Well, it's atomic structure is not something I'd call perceptible. Yet I am sure there are folk who know about such things. You want something more than that, I suppose, an acknowledgement not that we don't know everything, but that there are things we cannot know even in principle? Here you are bumping up against paradox: if there are things beyond knowledge, then what can you claim to know about them?

I'll admit the possibility and then choose silence. Many a philosopher will wax prosaically at length on this topic. That seems muddled. — Banno

Atomic structure is still no more than an appearance, and a mathematically based theory, albeit made possible by perception augmenting technologies. We cannot have more than that, so that leaves open the possibility that there may be real things, as opposed to imagined possibilities, which we cannot know even in principle; we don't even know if there are such things or not, so we really cannot claim anything at all about them. But we can exercise our imaginations, and I see that as a valuable creative exercise in itself, and that's why I say the distinction between 'for us' and 'in itself' is important for human life.

I agree with you that from the perspective of propositional knowledge such "waxing" is "muddled", but I don't think that matters, I don't think that negates its value.

The difference in parlance is a deeper issue.

Sure, there are things about the cup that are unperceived, and things about the cup that we don't know. But perhaps you want to say something more than that? — Banno

No, I would not want to say more than that except I might say "can't know" instead of "don't know", because I want to acknowledge that there could be things about the cup which are just not perceptible at all.

I mean as implausible as we might think it is, there is the metaphysical or logical possibility that the cup is, as Berkeley would have it, an idea in the mind of God or some collective entangled consciousness rather than just being a physical existent, but we can never know which is true or what the differences between such existences could be, because it is beyond the range of perceptibility.

Well, what is your source for reading up on rebirth?

The way I've learned it from Early Buddhist sources and Theravada is this: Kamma, therefore, rebirth. If one understands kamma, one will understand rebirth. For some of these schools of Buddhism, a person is a bunch of stuff held together by craving. — baker

Karma makes no more sense than rebirth to me, and I am very familiar with the theories in Buddhism and Vedanta. The point about dualism stands even without the idea of a soul, because there must be thought to be something (at the very least mental tendencies to attachments) over and above the body that carries on from one life to the purported next one, if sense is to be made of the idea of rebirth. But then this is just mind body dualism in another guise.

Notice how in all major religions, the religious doctrines are said to be given to mankind by God, or some other supreme being, or by an otherwise uniquely and supremely developed human?

Religious doctrines are always top-down, not bottom-up. — baker

That's true of course, but the followers must feel that what is being fed to them "rings true". There is always the possibility to question, and accept or reject, what is offered, which is not to say that everyone is capable in actuality of such questioning.

The elites only supply a demand
— Janus
and when social structure is in tatters, demand shifts to bread, shoes, antibiotics, and clean water. Mountains of fancy electronics and luxury cars rust away in containers on stranded ships in the Suez Canal. — Vera Mont

What if everyone collectively decided they did not want their money to be in the bank or in the financial and stock markets, and collectively decided to keep their energy consumption to an absolute minimum, grow their own food, only travel when absolutely necessary and so on?

I think the whole edifice would collapse if that happened. No doubt many people are seemingly inextricably entangled with the banks via mortgages, but they could just walk away from their houses. Of course, I don't believe anything like such mass coordination could actually happen. I think most people won't vote for anything that more than marginally affects their accustomed lifestyle. Most people do not seem willing even to forgo their big SUVs, air-conditioning and holiday travel whether in their countries or overseas.

Is the difference merely a difference of parlance, or is there a deeper issue? I don't think it makes sense to say there are two cups, but I am okay with saying that the cup can be considered as something perceived and as something that also exists unperceived, even if we don't know what kind of existence the latter is beyond saying that it exists as something to be perceived and that in its interactions with us it manifests its humanly perceptible qualities.

I can't see a ready answer to this either, but I'm not philosophically inclined to such views. Possibly Wayfarer would provide us with an account of how this might be of use. It's probably not so much that adding the personal experience is possible, but recognizing that our scientific views are a form, perhaps, of intersubjective agreement, which ultimately fall short of that elusive thing: reality. — Tom Storm

I'm with you on this, I think, though I don't think the problem of recognizing that science only deals with things as they appear to us should find too much opposition, at least among those who have thought at all about it at all; I mean I think it is pretty much tautologously true.

It's not as if one's ontology can be utterly seperate from one's epistemics. Each informs the other. Indeed, if what we know does not "coincide" with what we know there is, there is a big problem. — Banno

I agree, but what we know there is for our experience does not necessarily coincide with whatever there is absent us, and that is not at all a problem really, well at least not a practical problem, even if it might be a metaphysical problem for some folk; and if that is so, then that is really a psychological problem for them.

There is a need to go back to the question: how many cups are there? — Banno

There is only one cup for us; the one we all perceive. Do our perceptions of it exhaust what it is? Will there always remain something unknowable about the cup?

The elites only supply a demand; it is the populace that demands what they provide and if the populace acted as one in ceasing to purchase what the elites offer then the elites would become impotent.

That you have to make such sophisticated an argument, sundering ontology from epistemics, what is from what we know, does not bode well. — Banno

Is there not a coherent conceptual distinction between what is and what we know, or in other words between what we believe to be so and what is true or actual? Not to say that the two might not coincide, but there seems to be no guarantee that they must.

But it seems to me that in the unpacking of our experience, phenomenology may well show us that much of what take to be reality in the first place is a construction of culture, emotion and perception, with brains busily at work, sense making. Or something like that. — Tom Storm

I wonder whether the purely descriptive activity of phenomenology can tell us where our experience originates or what explains it: that seems to be more in the domain of epistemological and metaphysical conjecturing.

This is not to say that phenomenologists have not ventured beyond the bounds of description into the realms of speculation and hypothesizing.

Sure. I think most people would agree. But many might say this approach is a mistake. — Tom Storm

It's fine to say that the scientific methodology which leaves the subject out of the picture and just focuses on the phenomena as they present themselves is a mistake if you can explain how incorporating the subject into scientific investigations would make a difference to the results and also how it could even be done. For example, how would you incorporate the subject into chemistry, biology or geology? are there any sciences that would accommodate the incorporation of the subject? I just can't see any conceivable way of doing it. Am I missing something?

I guess this is fair but we can dissolve most metaphysical problems by simply pronouncing that we'll bracket them off. Is that fair? — Tom Storm

I don't say we shouldn't indulge in metaphysical speculation; I think it's a great creative exercise of the imagination; but I don't think metaphysical question are decidable and I can't see how they could be incorporated into scientific investigations. Findings in QM and biology, for example, may give rise to metaphysical questions for some folk, and be subject to metaphysical interpretations, but that wouldn't seem to change the findings themselves.

I find phenomenology - the littIe I understand of it - intriguing. I simply don't have time or the disposition to make a proper study of it. — Tom Storm

I don't understand phenomenology to be metaphysics except in the sense that metaphysical speculation shows us what we are capable of imagining. Husserl methodologically bracketed the metaphysical question as to the mind-independent existence of an external world.

Similarly, I think science has no need of metaphysical realism or materialism, and also can safely bracket the question of the role of the subject in constructing phenomena; it can simply take things as they appear and imagine explanatory hypotheses, unpack what such hypotheses should lead us to expect to observe and then proceed from there to further experiment and observation.

So, I remain unconvinced and unconcerned about purported "blind spots" in science; I just find that critique to be inappropriate.

They're building luxury bunkers in preparation for "the event". I don't think they have a whole lot of faith in their power to stave it off.
How much longer can this collapse be staved off?
Ten years? Unless the nukes get here first. — Vera Mont

I've heard that they are building such bunkers; I guess we should not be surprised. Your ten years seems a little pessimistic, but who knows?

:up: Far be it from me to pontificate as to what should seem intuitively plausible to others.

What I meant was whether the financial elites would allow control to be handed over to benign "strong AGI".

I would say the financial elites, whether psychopathic or not, are as in control, given the uncertainty of the future as it is possible to be, and I believe they will do everything in their power to stop the collapse of their "house of cards". How much longer can this collapse be staved off? Who knows?

I agree with you that the populace cannot unify itself or at least that it is very unlikely. I also agree with you that no one is really in control, and that the situation is progressing like a juggernaut. You could throw a million fat men in front of it and it won't slow it down.

Okay, what I should have said is

What I question or what I am skeptical about, is whether the financial elites would allow it of their own accord and/ or whether the populace could ever manage to unify itself sufficiently to defy them and their cronies (the politicians). — Janus

According to Buddhist theory, there is not anything that 'carries from life to life'. — Wayfarer

Holding that idea in mind disqualifies me utterly from making any sense at all of the idea of rebirth.

Perhaps it's better analogized in terms of a process that unfolds over lifetimes, rather than an entity that migrates from one body to another. — Wayfarer

Yes, but the idea seems to depend on a belief that there must be something independent and separable from the body that carries over from life to life, since the body obviously does not.

Fair enough. As the saying goes " you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink", but I also acknowledge that it might not be water at all, but a mirage.

I think we basically agree on that, except as I keep saying I think the fact that we can and do make such a distinction has had profound consequences for human life, but yeah beyond those historical, cultural consequences for religious, metaphysical, aesthetic and even ethical thinking, I think it is nowadays pretty useless, and becoming increasingly so in a world so polemically divided which faces so many much more pressing issues.

There are actually n cups my friend, where n = the number of people experiencing, and thus representing the cup. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Even if that is rejected on the basis that those are all experience of the cup, and not the cup itself; leaving experience aside altogether it remains trivially true that there are indeed many cups in the world. :smirk:

I really do not much care which account of Kant is the correct one - one world or two. Rather, my point is that, that this is such a bone of contention counts against the utility of the whole Kantian enterprise. — Banno

I think the 'dual aspect' as opposed to the 'dual world' interpretation of Kant is the only coherent one, but I do get where you are coming from.

Ergo: that 'dualistic' as opposed to 'pluralistic' phraseology stems not only from Descartes and Christianity, but also from common sense and intuition. — Leontiskos

:up:

The question I have is whether the financial elites would allow it and/ or whether the populace can ever manage to unify itself sufficiently to defy them and their cronies (the politicians).

:roll: :rofl:

And of course there is a relevant dualism in the linguistic sense, because I have power and sensation with regard to myself in a way that I do not with regard to things that are not myself. — Leontiskos

That's true and I don't deny that with the cell membrane comes primordial enclosedness and self-regulation, the apprehension of which leads in reflectively conscious beings to the notion of self and other. But this notion is really pluralism, not dualism. The idea that we are minds inhabiting bodies is the essence of the kind of dualism I have in mind, and I think this is reflected on our language. We don't say "I am a body" we say "I have a body" And of course the idea of body and soul, one mortal and the other immortal (at least potentially) long predated Descartes.

It's more than that - the legacy of Descartes is writ large in our culture in ways that affect it without us being aware of it. It's a large part of the intellectual background of modern culture. That sense of separateness between self-and-world, body and mind, spirit and matter, is very much the product of Cartesian dualism and the modern worldview (distinct from post-modernism).

It is what gives rise to what has been described (in The Embodied Mind) as 'the Cartesian anxiety': — Wayfarer

It surprises me that you don't think the notion of a mind or soul potentially separable from the body predates Descartes and that he was merely reflecting what was already written into the culture. I'm not going to argue for that, so all I'll say is that we disagree.

What I will say is that it seems to me that you do believe the mind is separate, or at least separable, from the brain and from the body, otherwise how could you account for rebirth?

Likewise, it seems at least some of the ancients in both the East and the West did think of the soul as separable from the body otherwise how would they make sense of, for example, the Pythagorean notion of transmigration or the vedic idea of atman?

Nope. I think it is just what Talbott says: a legacy of Cartesian dualism, with mind 'in here' and the 'physical world' out there. It's Whiteheads' bifurcation of nature. — Wayfarer

Yes, it is Cartesian dualism, but remember that when thinkers started to put aside the religious dogma that curtailed critical thinking and Descartes attempted to put everything in question, in order to discover the remainder which could not be doubted (that is what seemed intuitively self-evident) that it was precisely dualism that seemed most intuitively obvious to him. Our very language is inherently dualistic and has been all along, so it's no surprise that what seems most intuitively obvious reflects the dualistic nature of language.

"Do you have a body"? "Of course I have a body": that's dualism right there.

Well, that's a shame!

This is owing to a legacy of dualism that makes it almost impossible for people today to imagine idea, meaning, and thought as anything other than ghostly epiphenomena within human skulls.

That is probably the intuitive "folk psychology" way of imagining ideas, meanings, and thoughts, but now the science tells us they are living neuronal processes.

Science is impossible without Metaphysics. Causality, gravity, relativity, atoms, ... they are all metaphysical concepts. — Corvus

I'd say those are physical, not metaphysical, concepts. They are concepts which describe/ explain what is observed. Causality, gravity and relativity are not directly observable, but atoms are observable via electron beams just as microbes are observable via microscopes.

Because it's evident? Because there are processes and principles apparent in living organisms that are absent in minerals? I have been struck by the title of Aristotle's work on it, 'De Anima', from where, I think, the idea of animal and animated originates. — Wayfarer

I'd say different processes are evident. I don't see principles as being evident; just different kinds and scales of functioning. I agree with you about the probable etymologies: I've always thought 'animal' and 'animated' are from the same root. Self-directed movement seems to be the most basic attribute of animal being.

'The old must cease for the new to be' — Wayfarer

Yes, that seems to be true on every level.

Why do we need to think in terms of an "animating principle"? The organic processes associated with life can be understood as being merely different to inorganic processes in that the latter do not involve self-regulating cells, and all the organs they constitute. Cell senescence is necessary for the old to make way for the new.

I think it is unfair to Kant to claim that we would think there are two cups. He was an empirical realist, and I believe he would have said there is only one cup, and that we can think about it in different ways: namely as it appears to us, and as it is in itself. I see this as being perfectly compatible with realism, since the cup as it appears is just as real as the cup is as it is in itself. The curly bit comes with the realization that the cup as it is in itself cannot be real for us but is ideal (meaning it is merely an idea). The cup that appears and the cup that exists in itself unperceived are not two different things.

* Yes, that's a Kant/cant joke. — Banno

I heard that someone once said to Kant after he had introduced himself "Oh, I'm an automatic cunt".

Ah, sorry, I'm a wee bit slow this morning. Is the "transition from quantity to quality" intended to say that the reaction to living, as opposed to dead, things is not merely based on the perception of, or the idea of potential, movement (movement being quantifiable) but to a feeling (?) that there are entirely different qualities manifested in living compared to dead entities? I'm not too sure about that, so I'm just musing.

Musing a bit more: is the idea that there is an instinctive feeling that something has departed in the case of the dead? The naive idea then would be thinking that if something departs it must have gone somewhere? A quality of absence in a corpse that is not felt in the case of a stone?

You've read this stuff; what's going on? — Banno

Do you mean the past lives research? Maybe I'm missing something, I'm not sure what your question refers to...

The theme that comes to mind is that of process philosophy - of understanding a being as a dynamic process that maintains itself in existence, as distinct from a static entity. — Wayfarer

That process view (which I personally favour) seems to offer up a picture of all beings as transient temporal phenomena, The idea of a static entity, of static identity, seems more in accordance with the naive intuitive notion of an atemporal soul.

:cool:

Me neither. I think it clear we do not know what happens when we die. All the rest is story telling. — Fooloso4

Totally agree; there seems to be no conceivable way to rationally or empirically justify the idea that intellectual intuition can yield propositionally configured knowledge of such things.

You could add numbers for a long time, and not necessarily have the idea of infinity, because for all you know, numbers could come to an end. Infinity is an idea that goes "beyond" numbers alone, it's a different, though perhaps related concept. — Manuel

Right, for all we know number could come to an end, but that seems extremely implausible given there is no logical reason why we cannot, in prinicple, keep adding forever.

Likewise, with improving something. — Manuel

Yes, we can only improve accuracy to the degree allowed by our eyes, the materials we are working with and our measuring implements, so of course perfect accuracy, just as reaching infinity, is impossible in practice, but they both seem to be conceptually coherent.

if there is no light or if say, you point out that a dog and a bear experience the world differently from us, who has the "correct view" of the world? — Manuel

My view is that animals will probably see things differently because they are differently constituted and equipped. So, it would seem to follow that we and the other animals all see things as they naturally appear to the particular beings we are. Those appearances I would say are all "correct", all real functions of the "in-itself" nature of ourselves, other animals and the world.

I think the interesting philosophical question is that the most common reaction to Stevenson's research is that it couldn't be true, that there must be something wrong with him or his methodology, and that it can or should be ignored. — Wayfarer

I don't say it couldn't be true, but I find the anecdotal evidence in support of it unconvincing. the results could more easily, and I think more plausibly, be explained by some kind of collective memory.

My main objection, or more accurately indifference, to the ideas of rebirth or resurrection, is that they have no significance to this life, and I think this life is all that is important, given that anything beyond it can only remain nebulous.

Any fear of missing out I might feel (very little) is only relative to this life. Of course, the fear of missing out on resurrection, and especially the fear of not missing out on the alternative of eternal suffering, would be far more significant than anything rebirth has to offer in the way of fear, if only it were believable.

I'm a bit skeptical. I could imagine a case in which "good enough" would do the job, with no conception of perfection. I'm entertaining the idea that perfection is something transferred over from mathematics, but I admit I have to think about this in more depth. Outside of that, currently, I don't see why perfection must necessarily arise for us, though it does. — Manuel

You don't think the inevitable idea of degrees of accuracy logically terminates in the idea of perfect accuracy? To my way of thinking this would be similar to how the idea of infinity logically follows from there being no limit to counting, or the idea of degrees of darkness or cold terminates in the idea of absolute darkness or cold.

Yet many did think that the things we experienced were things in themselves, it follows naturally from common sense. It became a serious topic of enquiry in the 17th century. — Manuel

It seems reasonable to think we do experience things in themselves if that is taken to mean that how things are in themselves (including ourselves of course) is determinative of what we experience. But it is a different thing to say that we could experience things as they are in themselves; the very idea stipulates that we cannot because the distinction is based on saying that whatever we can experience of things is things as they appear to us and the in itself is the dialectical counterpart of that.

It's the most fascinating topic of all for me. I wish some of the classics (and contemporaries) talked about it much more.

But what we do have may suffice, given how hard the topic is, and how little we can say about it. — Manuel

:up: I find it fascinating too!