which Banno has also picked up on, namely whether the T in JTB is doing any useful work.
— J

Of course it is doing useful work. — Banno

The distinction between something's being true and our knowing it to be true is of necessary and useful―it is useful to know whether we do know something is true or not― it's better than thinking we know something is true if we don't.

A question remains though― what use is something's being true if we don't know it.

When do I ever know something is true apart from having the right justifications? How can we make truth independent of justification -- make J and T genuinely separate criteria? — J

We know analytic statements are true. Given competence we know that mathematical proofs are true. We know that true propositions about directly observable states of affairs are true (if we observe them).

The problem with relying on justifications is that we would need to know the justifications are true in order to be valid as justifications, which would seem to introduce an infinite regress.

The world "spiritual" is not in the original quote. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I thought it was implied, that you were not addressing empirical truth.

Or, because this is unconvincing, you get anti-realism and an ethics of sentiment that collapses any distinction between what is currently desired and what is truly desirable.

This is precisely what absolutizes individual preference and privatizes any deeper notions of teleology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's really very simple, and no need for a law-giving God. There will always be a tension between individual preferences and societal desiderata. It seems obvious that in any community harmony is more desirable than conflict. Right there is the pragmatic basis for ethics.

You say "deeper notions of teleology": but there is no need to "muddy the waters to make them appear deep".

A focus on wealth (or career success as a proxy for status) as a primary aim seems to be a paradigmatic example of "putting second things first," no? Sure, wealth is useful. There are plenty of miserable wealthy people though. Wealth is only useful in parting with it; it's a proximate aim at best. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to be doing that black and white thinking. I haven't said that exclusive or even primary focus on accumulating wealth would be a good thing. It wouldn't because it leads to egregious exploitation of other humans, animals and environments.

Exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. The "privatization" part of secularization makes it essentially impossible to have any public teaching of ethics per se. Of course, ethics is still taught, just not directly and reflectively. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I disagree. I see no reason to think that ethics could not be taught to children without incorporating the threat of divine punishment and promise of divine reward. I think humans become naturally empathetic and compassionate, once they are able to attain a balanced view of their kinship with others, an understanding that we are all in this together.

Of course there will always be some percentage of sociopaths―no society is ever going to be perfect. Teaching ethics would mean instilling an understanding of the balance between competition and cooperation. I think it is fair to say that competition is overemphasized in many modern societies.

But the point of speculative metaphysical theory in general only extends to whether the parts of the method reflect certainty with respect to each other. It’s like….if this then that necessarily (the point)…..but…..there’s no proof there even is a this or that to begin with (beside the point). — Mww

So, what you seem to be talking about is not certainty, but consistency.

Non-analytic judgements are synthetic, and it is true no synthetic judgement possesses apodeictic certainty. But synthetic and synthetic a priori while being the same in form are not the same in origin. — Mww

I think we agree on this. Do you mean that syntheses are hypotheses, whereas synthetic a priori propositions are phenomenologically derived by reflecting on experience in order to establish its general characteristics?

There can be no synthetic apriori certainty.
— Janus

Of course there can, provided the method by which they occur, which just is that difference in origin, is both logically possible and internally consistent. And is granted its proper philosophical standing. — Mww

Now you seem to be contradicting what you said above. I don't see how either logical possibility or internal consistency can yield certainty. And I have no idea what "proper philosophical standing" could be.

Case in point: mathematics. How many pairs of straight lines would you have to draw, to prove to yourself you’re never going to enclose a space with them? — Mww

It is logically self-evident that a pair of lines cannot enclose a space, so I'd call that analytic, not synthetic.

Have you heard about the observation of (the effects of) colliding black holes? Talk about paling in comparison, everything I just said….. — Mww

I hadn't, so I searched on it...very interesting, said to confirm predictions made by Einstein and Hawking. The interesting thing about scientific theories is that it seems they cannot be confirmed to be true, even on account of their predictions being confirmed by observation.

You say that we have knowledge and that it may be overturned by new evidence. You say what we believed we knew is overturned, in which case it wasn't knowledge at all but belief.

Whether a belief is thought to be justified or not is a matter of how rigorous or extreme are the criteria we want to stipulate for our use that determine what counts as justification.

We have knowledge of how to do things, but that kind of knowledge is not true belief, whether justified or not, but rather understanding what to do and how to do it, and that kind of knowledge cannot be overturned but can be improved upon.

You know the saying "seeing is beleiving" well I prefer to say that seeing is knowing. If I am looking at a tree, I know I am seeing a tree (radical skeptical scenarios like I might be dreaming or being deceived somehow aside).

And I don't think any knowledge is absolute, it is all contextual.

Returning to your 'raining' example, would you have said that you know it is raining?
— Janus

Not if I accept JTB as the standard of knowledge. I can't say I know it's raining unless it's true that it's raining; truth is the third leg of the tripod. — J

Right, but I wasn't asking whether you would now, when you know it was not raining, say that you knew it was raining, but whether when you thought it was raining you would have said you knew it was raining. This relates to what I said above to Sam about the paradox involved in saying that we have knowledge, but that it may be overturned by further evidence.

On the strength of this paradoxical situation I would say we can only justifiably claim to have knowledge when we are certain that we do. I think this obtains when we can directly observe something to be the case, and also with analytic truths as in mathematics. But I am not saying any knowledge is absolute, so any certainty is contextual.

I have to be able to be justified yet wrong. — J

I agree. but then why say we have knowledge, rather than merely belief, if we are not certain? (And I repeat that I am referring here specifically to propositional knowledge, not to know-how).

A good question. Again accepting JTB, the answer has to be no, unless you're wanting to tweak how we understand "possess." — J

I was thinking about it in the context of JTB. The idea was to question the idea of justification. I imagine a situation in which I believe something to be the case on grounds that would count as justifiable, but I am nonetheless not confident enough to think I know, and unbeknownst to me what I believe is actually true.

This is the same problem as above, I think. What counts as "justified" is slippery. Also, your phrasing is a little ambiguous: Do you mean "turn out to be wrong that what we believed was justified" or "turn out to be wrong that what we named as a justification was incorrect"?

EDIT: Sorry, the last phrase should be "turn out to be wrong that what we named as a justification was correct." — J

I meant the latter―that what we thought counted as a justification was not. The very idea of justification for a belief must rely upon other beliefs which we take to be knowledge, even certain knowledge, because if we took them to be mere beliefs it would then be belief all the way down, meaning no knowledge.

The so-called “Gettier problem” rests on a sleight of hand. It trades on the difference between thinking one is justified and actually being justified. — Sam26

This is a profound problem. Of course I acknowledge a logical distinction between feeling certain and being certain, and between feeling justified and being justified, and I have raised this very point many times before on these forums. The problem is that if we cannot be certain about being justified, if there is no observable state of affairs or logically self-evident criterion for justification then what we have is really a house of cards.

Then we can only be said to know something if we can be certain (as opposed to merely feeling certain
) that we are justified in counting it as knowledge. Whenever the truth is not obvious, then we cannot be certain that we know what it is.

I'm not sure, but you seem to think that if knowing isn't absolute, it isn't knowledge. This is a classic misunderstanding of what knowledge is. — Sam26

I come back to this because I'm not sure whether by 'absolute' you mean 'certain' or 'context-free'. No knowledge is context free because it is couched in language for a start, and language is obviously itself a context.

On the other hand, I say that within the appropriate contexts anything that counts as knowledge must be certain, because if it could be refuted then it could not count as knowledge. You might say that I'm showing "a classic misunderstandings of what knowledge is" but the reality is I would just be advocating a different understanding than yours, and I think mine makes more sense. You of course don't have to agree, but if you cannot see the possibility of different perspectives on this then you are playing the dogmatist.

:up:

You’re probably phrasing this a little bit more strongly that I would but I think this frame resonates with me too. — Tom Storm

I like to be less than diplomatic at times―only for the sake of emphasis, mind...:wink:

In the Western tradition ascetic/spiritual exercises were meant to re-order the soul toward truth, goodness, and the divine. In Buddhism, mindfulness is embedded in the Eightfold Path and oriented towards liberation. By contrast, modern adaptations tend to treat these disciplines as mere tools for the self-interested individual, e.g., a means of coping, maximizing productivity, reducing stress, or achieving “authenticity.” I have seen this particularly in some pieces on Stoicism I've read that seem to be largely aimed at the "tech-bro" crowd. A commitment to truth gets shoved aside for a view of philosophy as a sort of "life hack." — Count Timothy von Icarus

The above was what I had in mind. What could knowledge of "(spiritual) truth, goodness and the divine" be but "esoteric knowledge" if not merely a matter of understanding ordinary truth and goodness as commonly conceived?

What could seeking liberation be but an esoteric pursuit if it is thought to consist in more than merely being and feeling free to be yourself without fear of the opinions of others? As soon as it becomes concerned with purported transcendental knowledge of course it is esoteric. Many of the so-called 'wisdom schools" were quite explicit about the difference between esoteric and exoteric religion. Whether or not people are community-minded is a separate issue.

The point I was objecting to is that you are denigrating modern self-help practices for their superficiality compared to the purported profundity of the genuine traditional spiritual schools, and I think the comparison is underdetermined, most particularly because we were not there to see what they were really like and also because claims to transcendental knowledge and wisdom cannot but be pretentious, whereas practical wisdom is shown in one's actions.

Ok, so then it wasn't supposed to be relevant to what I wrote? I didn't write anything about "esoteric knowledge," nor any necessary preference for the older over the newer for that matter.

There is a sort of "managerial" outlook here, where praxis reduced to a sort of tool. In a similar vein, I have seen the critique that modern therapy/self-help largely focuses on helping us "get what we want," but not so much on "what we ought to do" or the question of if "what we want" is what will ultimately lead to flourishing and happiness. That is not seen as the purpose of therapy or self-help. That might be fair enough, but then it also not seen as the purpose of education either. So, what does fulfill that function? It seems to me that nothing does, except for perhaps wholly voluntary associations that one must "choose" (where such a choice is necessarily without much guidance). Aside from "self-development," this seems problematic for collective self-rule and social cohesion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Self-help teachings and practices, if they are effective, should help people to live better lives. Of course I realize some of them are all about how to achieve financial success, but is that really such a bad aim for someone if it doesn't degenerate into acquisitive greed, especially if they aspire to be a householder and parent?

"What we ought to do" is of course important too. In Australia, several years ago there was a move to teach ethics in school, but the kibosh was put on that idea when religious organizations objected that ethics could not be effectively taught without God. :roll:

Wellness retreats, access to outdoor education, etc. all skew towards the high end of the income distribution, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I haven't studied the demographics of such things. I used to attend the Sydney Gurdjieff Foundation meditation nights and weekend workshops, and the people there represented a fairly even distribution of professions, trades and jobs.

In any case I wasn't referring to literal classes, but to a kind of intellectual snobbishness and classism shown in thinking that the old ways and practices were more pure, more "real' when the reality is we know nothing about what those ancient cults were really like. It seems to be just unfounded "Golden Age" thinking, and I think it more likely that all the same kinds of abuses were practiced in the old days as they have been in the modern age and are today.

Anyway, that aside, the presumption is that there was genuine enlightenment to be found then which is not to be found in the modern settings, and I think this betrays unfounded assumptions about knowing what is the reality of transcendent knowledge and wisdom. It's that puritanism that I referred to as "a certain kind of snobbishness and classism". The idea is that esoteric understanding is not for the uneducated masses. And I am not saying there are not such "schools" alive today either.

I am saying that the whole idea of such esoteric knowledge is bogus. Real wisdom is always pragmatically centered on this life― like Aristotle's notion of phronesis or practical wisdom. The only wisdom that matters is the wisdom that enables one to live happily and harmoniously and usefully with others. Focusing on seeking personal salvation cannot but be a self-obsessed "cult of the individual". And I've been there and seen it in action, so I'm not merely theorizing.

They were highly ascetic: they renounced wealth, lived celibately, ate only the simplest foods, devoted themselves to study of the Torah and allegorical interpretation, and practiced prayer and meditation. — Wayfarer

Of course such renunciate organizations were probably always supported financially by their communities. These sad, life-denying fools were essentially parasites living only on account of the good will of those who had to work hard to survive.

:up: Yep, philosophy can easily become a fetish.

This makes sense to me. I don’t know much about Buddhism. The only Asian philosophy I have experience with is Taoism. That has always struck me as a reasonably practical and down home philosophy. As I understand it, there isn’t much talk about inevitable suffering, self renunciation, or esoteric practice. God has always struck me as an afterthought. I never felt any conflict between how I knew the world as an engineer versus how I knew it as a reader of Lao Tzu.

My attitude towards all philosophies, eastern or western is that their primary purpose is to encourage self-awareness. That’s certainly true of Taoism. — T Clark

I agree. I love the Dao De Ching myself (although I bet I haven't read as many different translations as you have). Speaking of Buddhism, I was intensely attracted to Zen from the age of about 17 until I was about mid-twenties, and I've had other reading forays throughout the intervening years. I read everything I could find about Zen: D T Suzuki, the other Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginners Mind) Alan Watts, Dogen and many many others that don't come to mind right now. Another text I got a lot out of is the Bhagavad Gita.

I never thought of any of it in terms of an afterlife, but rather in terms of living this live with clarity, equanimity and freedom, which of course also means, as you say, with self-awareness or perhaps more importantly, awareness of others. Anything that really helps people with that I would count as a good thing.

I quite like the old chestnut "the unexamined life is not worth living" and I also really resonate with the flipping of that: "the unlived life is not worth examining", and really I think the latter is the more important insight. There may be many people who live very good, yet largely unexamined, lives.

Properness is a requirement for consistency and coherency. Ambiguity produces equivocation. So if you really believed in consistency and coherency, you'd believe in grammar as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

You have it arse-about. We only know that something is a "proper" expression if it is consistent and coherent. The latter are the criteria for the former, not vice versa. If there are sveral consietnt and coherent usages of a term . then there would not be just one "proper" usage.

Yes, obviously it is all that important. If we don't use the words required to frame the conceptual distinctions, having the distinctions is pointless. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, but again there may be more than one way to frame the distinctions, and of course if they are not framed consistently and coherently then they are not really framed at all, and we could not be said to "have" the distinctions.

It's generally not productive to say that two words are synonymous. This dissolves the difference between them making the choice of using one or the other insignificant, despite the fact that there is at least nuanced differences between all words. — Metaphysician Undercover

The nuances of words vary with the different associations different people have of them, which is reflected in the different usages. You might not like a particular usage, but that would just be your personal preference and does not preclude the usage being perfectly consistent and coherent with common usage.

The most common difference between two words which might appear to be synonymous, is a difference of category. — Metaphysician Undercover

I disagree―I think that words can be synonymous within one context and not within another. In most general usage in English I think that to say that something is is to say that it exists, and to say that something exists is consistent with saying that it is be-ing (as a verb) or a being (as a noun).

But whatever you say, someone will disagree. For example I might say 'love is' meaning that there is love. Then if I say 'love exists', also meaning that there is love, someone will objects that love is not an existent object. I might then say, in accordance with a common usage "love is a thing"., and then the objection will be that love is not an object. And yet we say things (see what I did there) like "the thing is...".

You are never going to get away from the ambiguities of language, and playing though police or speech police is an unreasonable and unhelpful move. Wisdom is not to be found in teasing out some supposedly pure and perfect usage.

Since "being" is most often defined by existing, and "existing" is usually defined by something further, we ought to consider that "existing" is the broader term. This would imply that all beings are existing, but not all existents are beings, because "existent" could include things which are not beings. Subtle distinctions allow us to keep our categories clear, and categories are conducive to deductive reasoning. — Metaphysician Undercover

What about "the most important thing is love" and "love being the most important thing". Love is being practiced every day. Love exists in the world? You know perfectly well what I'm saying there even thought the words used might not be consistent with your preferences.

You are not going to get everyone to share your preferences, because as I said earlier language is elastic and we all encounter differences emphases on "correct" usage as we grow up and throughout our lives.

In philosophy, as I see it, it's more important to focus on the consistency, coherency and plausibility of arguments than pedantically worrying about "proper" usage of terms. Whatever is serviceable for getting the ideas across will do.

I don't believe there is any hidden knowledge, to be found in word usage, there is just the knowledge of different usages in different contexts to be found.

Modern self-help programs often seem to be excessively self-focused. But I would argue that the same is true of many traditional spiritual practices. What is it that motivates a search for "salvation" or "liberation" or "enlightenment" if not a concern for one's own well-being or life project?

People speak about great enlightened sages such as Gautama saying that such greats do not seem to be around these days, and yet all we know of Gautama's life is contained in writings produced fairly long and some very long, after his death. How do we know he was not a pedophile, or that he didn't exploit his position of power to have sex with some of his young nubile followers?

People who acknowledge that they do not think of themselves as enlightened (or are they merely being falsely modest?) nonetheless take it as read that enlightened ones did exist, and may exist even today (however rare that might be) but how can this be shown to be more than merely a personal belief?

I think there is a puritanical elitist element in the idea that modern self-help programs are merely watered down caricatures of the ancient "true" practices. I mean, if these programs really do help people to live better, more fulfilled and useful lives, then what is the problem? Is it because they don't really renounce this life in favour of gaining Karmic benefit or entrance to heaven? Is the most important thing we can do in this life to deny its value in favour of an afterlife, an afterlife which can never be known to be more than a conjecture at best, and a fantasy at worst? There seems to be a certain snobbishness, a certain classism, at play in these kinds of attitudes.

I guess I’m asking how we should characterize a “JB” -- a belief that is genuinely justified, according to your criteria, but whose truth is still undetermined. Does a person who asserts a JB assert that they know it? Only the “know of conviction,” perhaps. — J

Returning to your 'raining' example, would you have said that you know it is raining? Justification is a slippery concept. It might be said that it would be natural to conclude that it is still raining if I see water falling. But then if I know there are high trees in the yard and that after sufficient rain water continues to drip from them, could I be said to be justified in my belief?

If it had still been raining would I then be justified in my belief, even though I didn't take into account that it could have been water dripping from the trees instead? If there had been no trees in my yard and I saw falling water and concluded that it was raining, would that have been a justified conclusion on the basis that events so unlikely as that the neighbor was spraying water over my roof with his hose need not be taken into consideration?

Assuming that we can say that some beliefs are justified, which might yet turn out to be wrong, and given that the truth cannot always be discovered, would it not be the case that sometimes we possess knowledge, but cannot know that we do? And doesn't that seem a little weird, that we might know something to be the case, but not know that we know?

Sure, we can propose a division between living and not living. But, by what principle do you propose that both are properly called "beings"? I believe that is the issue. What does "being" mean to you, and is it proper to call the moon a being? — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not a believer in properness, but rather in consistency and coherency. We humans are so humancentric that we tend to think of human being as the paradigm. We don't use the term 'animal being' so much but simply 'animal'.

Of course 'being' gets extended to 'living being', and 'sentient being' and perhaps it has become more uncommon to speak of non-living or non-sentient beings. But since such entities are existents and to exist seems to be synonymous with 'to be' I see no inconsistency in referring to the moon as a being.

If we have all the appropriate conceptual distinctions is it really all that important what words we use to frame them?

It seems the nub of our disagreement is that I think of minding as being a real physical (that is embodied, neural) activity and for me 'to exist' and 'to be real' are the same (and I think this reflects the most common usages). Perhaps the difference lies merely in choice of terminology.

On further reflection though, I want to add that, for example, it might be said that Bilbo exists as a fictional character, but that since he is fictional, he is not real. This seems to introduce a wrinkle in the tidy fabric, and shows that these terms are more elastic than is often allowed.

The "good reason" to believe there is something nonphysical involved is simply that set of issues that is referred to as the "hard problem of consciousness": fully accounting for all aspects of our subjective experience of consciousness. For example: how do feelings of hunger and pain, arise from the firing of neurons, or accounting for the perceived quality of some specific color. — Relativist

Okay thanks for explaining. I have a different take than you on this it seems. I think that conceiving the character of conscious experience in terms of "quales" is wrong-headed and based on "folk psychology".

As I asked a poster in another thread 'is there a difference between consciousness and being conscious?'. How could perceptions, functions of evolved sensory organs and neural structures, that reveal environments and open up the possibility of responding to signs from those environments, be effective if they were not experienced and carried no qualitative significance?

I think the sense and idea of being conscious has been reified into 'consciousness as real and non-physical', and that this reification is a natural artefact of our dualistic symbolic language. Mind, instead of being understood verbally as "minding", as an activity or process of a sentient physical being, has been hypostatized as a noun, and even considered to be an entirely separate substance.

Since we, as linguistically mediated beings with a sense of freedom of action, consider our thoughts, feelings and behavior in terms of responding to reasons rather than being causally forced, and since this seems natural, we develop an intuition that this characteristic shows that we are not merely physical beings, and I think this intuition is misleading. Also since we are so complex, understanding our behavior in terms of physics, although not impossible, would be such a laborious and counter-intuitive task that it is practically unfeasible.

But I don't think this unfeasibility lends any support to the idea that there is anything substantive in us beyond our physical natures. Anti-physicalist proponents will argue that mind is not a substance but that it is real and different from the physical nonetheless. The problem is that then they cannot say anything at all about what it purportedly is if not a separated substance―that is just how it could be real other than as an activity or process of a physical nature.

Of course I could be wrong, so this is just my own take on it. The problem is that it is not a question the answer to which can be empirically or logically demonstrated, and all things considered, it doesn't seem to be very important either, even if it is kind of fun to consider.

Heidegger had quite a bit to say about 'the forgetfulness of being' in Being and Time. He traced it back to the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle in particular, and found fault with the way that the Western metaphysical tradition had 'objectified' being. So - how would it be possible to 'forget being'? If we've forgotten being, what has been forgotten? — Wayfarer

For me "forgetfulness of being" is not an intellectual oversight, but a failure to live to the fullest due to being distracted by various kinds of preoccupations. Consumerism is a big one―so I see materialism in that sense as the "enemy", but I don't see materialism as a metaphysical position as detrimental at all, unless it be considered that all such intellectual preoccupations distract us from living to the fullest.

And I don't think it is the case that such intellectual pursuits (provided they don't become unhealthy preoccupations) need detract from a life lived to the fullest.

The mere struggle to survive can be an all-consuming distraction. I wonder how the ancient peasants―those lacking any intellectual education―lived. Did they live fuller lives than we do today? And how many people today are preoccupied with working out the best metaphysics? Do all, or even most, or even many, people have a propensity to be driven by intellectual concerns? Are there more such people (as a percentage of the population) today than there were three thousand, two thousand, one thousand or five hundred years ago?

What could "forgetfulness of being" even mean to those who lack an intellectual interest?

Again, I have acknowleged that there are good reasons to believe there is something non-physical about mental activity. — Relativist

I asked you before, and you gave no answer, as to what good reasons there are to think there is something non-physical about mental activity? Presuming that you have in mind something other than the obvious notion that "abstractions, concepts, generalities and logic are not physical".

I believe the issue which Wayfarer is trying to bring to our attention, is that there is a specific type of characteristic of being, which is only provided by the first person perspective, I, or myself. Since this is a real characteristic of the being which I call "myself" we need to determine whether it is a characteristic of all beings before we can make any conclusive judgement about "the general characteristics of all beings". — Metaphysician Undercover

It seems obvious that all percipients have some kind of "first person perspective", so of course beings can be classed as living and non-living, sentient and non-sentient, and even sapient and non-sapient. None of that has been forgotten or is even controversial, though.

Animals arguably live with more presence than we do―our symbolic language has enabled us to become caught up in all kinds of "mind-distractions", and that is what i would say is "forgetfulness of being". And there are all kinds of other pursuits which can become unhealthy preoccupations. That is not to say I think an intellectual pursuit, or any other kind of pursuit, necessarily leads to forgetfulness of being.

I agree there is logic used in "cognitive methods" (given that I'm understanding correctly what you mean by that), but that logic is not deductive, so I would say its results cannot be apodeictic. Rather the logic there is inductive (expectation based on observed regularities) and abductive (speculative inferences to what seem to be most plausible explanations, i.e. explanations most consistent and coherent with what has been currently accepted as knowledge).

So, I disagree with Kant that non-analytic judgements can be apodeictic. There can be no synthetic apriori certainty. I think what Kant was doing in working out the forms of intuition and the categories was phenomenology―that is he was reflecting on the nature of perception in order to establish its general characteristics. So, in that sense it's more of an observation-based inquiry. We can be certain of observationally confirmed judgements, but only within the appropriate context―the are not deductively certain and their negations are not logically self-contradictory.

That said I cannot, for example, imagine a non-spatiotemporal visual perception―visual perceptions are strictly defined in terms of spatiotemporality, so anything that doesn't comply would not be defined as such, and it can therefore be said to be, in that sense, an analytic judgement that all visual perceptions must be spatiotemporal.

I agree with you that something not being logically necessary does not entail it being logically impossible. If all the events in this world are not logically necessary, they must nonetheless be logically possible, so I also agree that there is apodeictic certainty in establishing what is logically possible―it's basically anything which is a non-contradiction. But the downside of that certainty is that it doesn't really tell us much about anything.

I am not, therefore I don't think. — Jack Cummins

I've heard it said that I think, therefore I am not.

Okay, cheers, I won't say any more since I would be speaking from relative ignorance if I did.

But "x is y" is not an explicit assertion of being as such, but an assertion about some being's characteristics. That it exists is already implicitly given. On the other hand "x is" is explicitly an assertion of existence. "It is true that x" is not necessarily an ontological claim at all.

I agree 'being' is not the description of "what exists" it is a noun referring to an existent or a verb referring to the act or fact of existing.

Anyway, you acknowledge that what ontology is considered to consist in may have changed over time, but the point is that it is the contemporary understanding, or range of understandings, of what ontology is concerned with that is important.

Why look back to the ancients when they did not have the immense benefit of our prodigious scientific knowledge and understanding? Ontological enquiry should be about what it is reasonable to think about being today, not two thousand years ago.

Ontology, then, is not merely a massive catalogue of “what exists.” That is an ontic question, about beings and the nature and kinds of things that exist. — Wayfarer

Ontology is the general study of being, of what it means to be or to exist. Once the general characteristics shared by all beings are decided then what can be counted as a being can be
established.

With your etymological prescriptions you make it sound like it is a monolithic study in the sense that there could be only one way to think about it. However, you have an eccentric understanding of 'being' such that for you it applies only to living beings, whereas the most common meaning of 'to be' is simply 'to exist', and the most common meaning of 'to exist' is not 'to stand out for some percipient' but simply 'to be'.

And, contrary to what you claim, part of ontology does consist in deciding what all beings or existents have in common, and thus what kinds of things, and what particular things, can be said to exist. Yours is a tendentious and dogmatic, as opposed to an openminded, approach, unsurprisingly.

I've read that entanglement enables faster than light information―and I've wondered whether that is just hype, given that it seems that all that's being said is that knowing the spin of one particle we are close enough to observe will tell us what the spin of the entangled particle is no matter how far away it may be. So, it seems we would not be deriving the information from the far away particles but from the proximate one.

Connection is in essence uninteresting. It results in the hot and maximally featureless vacuum. But mix in disconnection as a contrast and now you can have a world made of definite things. The world that we really want to know in terms of how it got here. How it could have evolved and have such a robust classical structure. — apokrisis

Seems an interesting counterpoint to the usual predictable spiritualistic story where it is disconnection that is considered to be merely an illusion, where the classical picture is entirely a construction of the mind and where the promise is one of salvation or liberation from suffering brought about by the delusion of separation.

It's obvious that you have a different view of things than I do, but that does not constitute either an explanation or a justification for your views.

I haven't said that what people are conscious of is what consciousness is―I've asked you what the difference is between consciousness and being conscious. To give some analogies sleeplessness just is being sleepless, restlessness just is being restless and sexlessness just is being sexless. Or, closer to home, unconsciousness just is being unconscious.

You also say that you don't think being conscious means being aware, and yet you offer no explanation of what you think the difference is.

I don't understand why you talk about subjective experience of various functions of our brain, when I think it is obvious that we have no in vivo awareness of brain functions. Perhaps you meant to say that our subjective experience is a manifestation of certain brain functions.

I disagree with pretty much everything you said. I'm speaking from an entirely different angle. And I know nobody agrees with me, but I still think what I think. — Patterner

Okay, it's too bad that I can see no reason at all why you would think such things―are you just being contrarian or perverse?

At the same time, an objective answer to the question, for example: "Why do you live?" Does not exist. — Astorre

Why not? If you do have a reason to live, then surely having that reason is a fact about you? Your reason may of course also be said to be subjective, in that it will not necessarily apply to everyone.

There are logical facts, and facts determined by observation, and even facts which may not be determinable by us at all, such as whether a god or gods exist, or the facts about the actual genesis of the Universe (about which we can only theorize). There are also, presumably, countless facts of history which can never be determined, even in principle.

Of course indeterminable facts as such cannot be of much use to us, but noting that there are such facts may be useful in establishing plausible worldviews.

objectivity is simply empty and indifferent
— Astorre
This only a subjective statement ...

"Objectivity" as such is essentially a subjective idea ... it does not "lie" somewhere in nature.
— Astorre
Genetic fallacy.

It was invented by people.
... just like all logico-mathematical and empirical knowledge. — 180 Proof

:up: :up: :up:

Thanks there's a lot there, but I'll just address this at the moment:

When two particles are entangled, no one can really say which one is which. But when the particles are further constrained by the decoherence that is some further act of measurement, then each is fixed by that new context, that new point of view. — apokrisis

My question about entanglement (which I have only a superficial understanding of) was whether it might be plausible to conjecture that all particles in the Universe are already entangled. If that were so, then everything might be connected much more so than seems likely based on our macro-observations and their understandings.

Perhaps an example might help. It is not logically impossible that Mt Everest might detach form the Earth and float up into the sky. We might say it is physically impossible, given what we understand to be the laws of nature governing this Universe. We could say it is metaphysically possible since a Universe where the laws of nature or the lack of them allowed such a thing to happen is not a logical contradiction.

Is it possible that something could both be Mt Everest and not be Mt Everest in any imaginable world. It would not seem possible, since it is logically contradictory.

In any case, the point of my question was more concerned with understanding whether you think anything which is not logically necessary (or impossible) could be apodeictically certain.

To say that something is physical is already to draw upon a lot of theoretical abstraction and conceptualisation. ‘This means that’, or ‘this is equivalent to that’ is an intellectual judgement based on abstraction rather than anything physically measurable. You might argue that were we to understand the brain well enough, we could identify the structures which underpin meaning, but even that requires the kind of abstraction that we seek to explain. I can’t see how a vicious circularity can be avoided. — Wayfarer

In my book to say something is physical is to say it is either mind-independently existent and measurable, a property or activity of something mind-independently existent and measurable or a relation between mind-independently real and measurable existents.

Thus I would consider theoretical abstraction and conceptualization to be physical insofar as they are activities of (at least) humans, who are mind-independently real and measurable existents.

So, your objection is without teeth, and what you can't see is irrelevant, for me.

Indeed you have, and I have previously acknowledged that your criticisms provide a good basis to believe there is some non-physical aspect to mind. So I haven't rejected anything you've said on the sole basis that it's contrary to physicalism, as you alleged. — Relativist

I wonder what "some non-physical aspect to mind" could even mean. Of course we can say, based on a kind of "folk" intuition, that abstractions and concepts are not physical, but then if mental activity is always correlated with neuronal activity, any abstracting or conceptualizing will be at one level (at least) a physical activity. And just what could any purported "other level" consist in?

That leaves me wondering what could be the criteria for logical impossibility other than contradiction.

And then what would be the criteria determining whether something would count as a physical or metaphysical impossibilty?

Can anything we know except those things whose negation would be a logical contradiction be apodeictic?

Right, I'm not claiming that Kant necessarily believed he knew that space and time and the categories are purely subjective (subjective in the sense of being entirely due to the constitution of subjects) but that there are those who proffer dogma using Kant as purported support for their contentions.

I think Kant can be read as claiming that we cannot apply our sense of time and space to a mind-independent reality, not that reality in itself cannot be in any way spatiotemporal. As I've said many times it seems implausible that an undifferentiated in itself could produce our experienced world of unimaginable diversity.

Also the very idea of differentiation, diversity is incomprehensible without time and space. Of course we have no cognitive access (by definition) to the in itself, but we may infer its nature in accordance with what seems most plausible given the nature of our cognitive experience.

One helpful way of using the terms might be: an objective fact is one which others can verify, whereas "I'm having thought X at the moment" is a fact, but not objective. — J

It's like "I'm reading sentence X at the moment". I don't see the words 'objective' and 'subjective' as unambiguous. If I can only determine some fact on my own can I talk about it being objective? Looking out the window behind my laptop I saw a bird just now alighting for a moment in a tree near the creek and a leaf fall into the creek simultaneously. If you had been here you might have witnessed those two events, but they were so brief that chances are you would not have. Can we talk about those events as facts regardless, just on the basis that in principle it is possible you could have witnessed them?

The ambiguity here is the reason I prefer 'intersubjective' to 'objective'. The witnessing of the alighting bird and the falling leaf could in principle be shared. An experience of God, or the thought I am having right now cannot be, even in principle.

As above, the question is, Whose observation? I'm assuming you don't think we need objective confirmation of observations about what goes on in our minds (as a rule). — J

I don't count introspection as all that reliable. That said personally I tend to think in language...I can hear a 'silent' voice speaking my thoughts. so I am fairly confident that I know what I am thinking if I pay attention in the moment of thought.

Yeah, the more I think about Hick's idea, the less I like it. I suppose what he meant was, If you had an experience after death that checked all the boxes of what mystics claim God (and the afterlife) is like, and you in fact found yourself surviving death, as promised, you'd probably be convinced! But we're guessing about how reliable afterlife experiences are . . . — J

I agree and I think this points to the importance of faith in our lives. We all take many things on faith, and it pays to see ourselves doing that, and then from a critical mindset, deciding what to provisionally accept and what reject.

Many folk seem to be uncomfortable with uncertainty...but for me understanding uncertainty and the challenge of living with it is a major part of doing philosophy. So I don't have much time for the dogmatists who want to claim things like, for example, that we know, thanks to Kant, that space and time and all the categories are purely subjective or that intellectual intuition could be a reliable guide to the way things really are.

A holomorphic function is something else. It is a function that is "holistic" in the sense that it uses a number base that is more complex than the reals. Instead of counting points, you are counting something else like rotations. — apokrisis

Thanks for the interesting and allusive (not to mention elusive) explanation. 'Holographic' was either a typo or an outcome due to predictive text. And I'm afraid I don't at all understand imaginary numbers or the importance of counting rotations rather than points, beyond a vague feel.

Did you mean to use 'holographic' rather than 'holomorphic'? I understand the holographic idea to be that every part in some sense contains the whole. Do you think that could be related to quantum entanglement?

Anyway a good bit of it is somewhat over my head, and because of my mathematical shortcomings I have remained reluctant to enter into philosophical discussions involving QM and Relativity. At least I get the point about the liveness of relativistic spacetime, where space is not a mere container, but a real contributor to cosmic events.

I am drawn to the idea that science offers a pathway out of inveterate anthropomorphism, and that there is no better guide, even no other guide, to metaphysical speculation than science.

I wish I could offer a more adequate response.

Well, you've packed a lot into that question! To begin simply: "God exists" as a proposition is surely meant to state an objective fact, and that's really all I meant. (I'll say something below about why I think it may be inseparable from how we rate the plausibility of accounts of mystical experiences.) — J

This seems to be the central issue―what is a fact, and does the qualifier "objective" add anything? Obviously there are many facts in and about our everyday experiences. Facts are usually taken to be determinable by either observation or logic.

So, what is the role of "objective fact" in relation to the question of God's existence?

Your further qualifications seem extreme. "No possibility?" John Hick points out that, at the very least, claims about God may be "eschatologically verifiable" -- that is, we may find out when we die (or, of course, we'll cease to exist). — J

Say you die and you find you still exist―how will that confirm the existence of God? Say you have an after death experience that seems to you to be an experience of God―given that interpretations of experiences are not the same as the experiences, how will you know, any more than you would in this life, that an experience that you felt was of God is really a confirmation of said entity?

Surely in order to know that an experience is an experience of some particular entity, we need to know what the entity's characteristics are. Do we know what the characteristics of the hypothetical entity God are? Say we know that God possesses certain moral characteristics―perfect goodness and perfect love, say―how would we know that the experience we thought was of God showed us that he is perfectly good and loving? It doesn't seem analogous to being able to recognizing a physical entity on account of its physical characteristics.

As a pansemiotician, it is heartening that physics has arrived at this dichotomy of information-entropy. — apokrisis

As far as I understand in biosemiotics it is the membrane which is the basic interpretant. So, I wonder what serves as interpretant in the pansemiotic conception. Hoffmeyer seems to think of the evolution of the membrane as the origin of 'minding'.

I don't have any kind of grasp of holomorphic functions (my general understanding of mathematics leaves a lot to be desired). Is there any way you can make "Information is physical in being the global holographic horizon on the Cosmos" understandable to me despite my being math-challenged?

The idea of entropy as local material fluctuations or degrees of freedom is new to me. I think of entropy―the omnipresent tendency to dissipate― as the most universal global constraint.

The idea of information as substance has never made much sense to me―some like to think that information, since it can be manifested in different media, is independent of any substrate―but that seems to transform information into a ghost. Can we make sense of the notion of a ghost as substance―not the ghost in the machine, but the machine as ghost?

Are you familiar with any of the physicists who suggest that information is ontologically basic and that matter and energy emerge from it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea makes no sense to me since information, as far as I know, is always carried by a material substrate. Also science informs that for the majority of its existence the universe contained no interpretants, which would mean that although there was a physically existent universe, there was no exchange of information. That said, some semioticians advocate for pansemiosis, and it really depends on how attenuated you are prepared to allow the concept of 'interpretant' (not to mention 'mind') to become.

That something can be a sign for something else is a process which cannot be modeled entirely in physical terms, but it does not follow that the processes involved are anything other than physical, it just follows that they cannot be a matter of mere efficient causation.

As @apokrisis often reminds us, there is an interplay in the physical world between global conditions and local causation, or in Aristotelian terms, final (and/or formal?) causation and efficient causation.

Yet physically, an optical disk is very different from paper which is very different from a sound wave, which is very different from sound waves. The physical substrate does not seem to matter much. It is the information (form) that matters, and arguably this is "immaterial" in a number of senses. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That there is always some form of physical substrate is the point. There is no "immaterial " information.

Information is like currency...fungible... in that it has to be in some form of physical substrate or other, but is endlessly interchangeable.

Yes, it wasn't very well put. I only meant that, in addition to the possible explanations you named, it's also possible that the universality of mystical intuitions is explained by their actually being what they claim to be, namely experiences of God or some transcendent consciousness. — J

That's true it is logically possible―given that no self-contradiction is involved in the idea. The problem is we have no way of determining whether mystical intuitions actually come to us from God or some transcendent consciousness.

This situation opens up the way for faith, as Kant said of his own critical project. Faith should never be conflated with knowledge, though―as I never tire of saying that way lies dogma and fundamentalism.

Unfortunately, some cannot accept that limitation of the human condition and would rather fantasize about there being the possibility of direct knowing of the absolute nature of reality or some such nonsense which simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.

I haven't followed every post between you and Wayfarer today, so I'll just speak for myself. I don't think a statement like "I have had an experience of the Godhead" or "My third eye opened" or "I encountered Jesus and was born again" or any of the countless variants of this should be presumed to be "demonstrably true." Nor are they demonstrably false. It's not clear to me that they can be separated from 3rd-person/objective claims such as "God exists". — J

I'm puzzled by your last sentence here. How can "god exists" be an objective claim if there is no possibility of confirming it such that anyone unbiased would have to acquiesce, or even at the very least the possibility of assessing it against our overall experience in terms of plausibility?

All I can say is, we're left with possible explanations, possible ways of assigning probability values to the statements under discussion. And we'll rate these probabilities differently, based on our own knowledge and experience -- just as we would for any topic that's tough to know about for sure. I see plenty of daylight between "My account of my mystical experience is demonstrably true" and "Here's what I think probably accounts for my experience." The latter seems unexceptionable to me.

I agree of course that subjective elements come into our assessments of metaphysical claims, but I also think that some metaphysical claims are far more consistent and coherent with the human store of knowledge and understanding than others.

Of course it is still up to the individual to make their own assessments. It's like aesthetics in a way―it cannot be definitively demonstrated that Shakespeare's or Dostoevsky's works are finer works of literature than Mills and Boone, or that Jacksons Pollock's 'drip' paintings could not have been executed by a monkey, but...

:up:

Consciousness does not have physical properties. — Patterner

And yet being conscious does have physical properties. So, I'll ask again―what is the difference between consciousness and being conscious?

Do any of these things, or combinations of them, explain how the physical subjectively experiences, and, in at least our case, can be aware and self-aware? — Patterner

Being conscious means being aware. But being aware as in being able to respond to signs does not necessarily entail being conscious. Awareness happens at all levels of life. In simple forms of life, the presence of different molecules at the the cell membrane elicit different responses inside the cell. Those processes cannot be entirely understood in mechanistic terms, they are understood to carry information to the cell, but they are nonetheless physical processes.

Stated in biosemiotic terms there are interpretants as all levels (of life at least), but it does not follow that there is consciousness at all levels. It is probably symbolic language that enables reflective self-awareness.

It is not! Verificationism is not specific to philosophy of science. — Wayfarer

That's strictly true―I misspoke. What I had in mind was that it is a thesis in epistemology., and it is commonly, as applied to scientific theories, compared to and contrasted with Popper's falsificationism. the Wiki entry says:
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is a doctrine in philosophy which asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable (can be confirmed through the senses) or a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form). Verificationism rejects statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as meaningless in conveying truth value or factual content, though they may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behavior.[1]
Scientific statements (in the broadest sense as statements of what is observed) are along with tautologous statements are taken to be the only kinds of statements which can be definitively verified.

I am not a positivist in that I don't believe non-verifiable statements are meaningless. Apart from the observational aspect, the other aspect of science―the theoretical is not itself strictly verifiable.

Then you're still saying the only criterion of factuality is science, again. — Wayfarer

No, I'm saying the criterion of factuality is observability. How can be sure that a statement is factual if what it asserts is not observable? Following that reasoning a statement is factuality-apt, i.e. could be either a fact or not, if what is proposes is, at least in principle, checkable by observation.

You keep summoning the positivist bogey man, but this is an evasive tactic designed to discredit your interlocutor. I've asked you to cite one fact or piece of knowledge that is not based in observations of or about this world; that is not, in other words, based in human cognition of the world. Apparently you are both incapable of that, and incapable of admitting that you are incapable of that.

How to test a 'metaphysical theory'? Just now Kastrup was interviewed by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he suggests internal consistency, explanatory power, and parsimony would be good starting points. I would concur with that. — Wayfarer

Not "how to test", but "how to evaluate".

All true, if you mean "offer as possible explanations." But another way we can explain it is in the accuracy or correspondence-to-the-facts context -- that is, these intuitions are correct as to their source.

But . . . how do we determine which context, which putative explanation, is the right one? This is what you and Wayfarer are thrashing out. — J

Can you explain what you mean by "these intuitions are correct as to their source"? I'm trying to thrash out how we should categorize what is knowledge and what faith. Wayfarer is more just thrashing about, reacting emotionally to what he apparently sees as personal attacks, as attacks on his beliefs. I'm not attacking the beliefs, but the presumption that those beliefs are demonstrably true.