That's all "salvation" can be. — Vera Mont

I agree, if by salvation you mean securing a place in heaven (or at least believing you have). Your list of social benefits is well thought out.

Have it your own way then; I'm not going to waste any more time.

Considering that some of the happiest countries on the planet are atheist and some of the worst aren't that's a good start. Buddhism is a religion but not to the extent others are, if anything even Buddhists themselves wouldn't call it that.

Sounds like you're just scared. — Darkneos

Again, that's a simplistic assessment, as though there are no other political and economic factors in play which could determine which are the happiest countries (a metric which is itself contentious, because hard to measure).

Many Buddhist traditions are just as religious as Christianity or Islam. It seems you don't want to educate yourself, but prefer to confine yourself to hasty, simple-minded judgments. As such you will remain part of the problem, not the solution.

It's laughably ironic that someone who has displayed so much resentment and self-righteous attitude, should resort to ad hominem and accuse me of being "scared"; all it shows is your apparent lack of ability to mount a cogent argument. Religion, it seems, is your own personal bogeyman. I suggest you take a good look at your motivations and try to be more measured in your assessments of both sociological phenomena and your interlocutors.

Yes, that is the terrible, childish, absurd, anti-life side of religion; which is not to say that that is all religion can be, but those kinds of attitudes human life can certainly do without.

:halo:

Except it is that simple, sorry you can't accept that. Religion overall has been a net negative for society, it's stagnated progress, and as we have seen recently it has reversed it in some ways. — Darkneos

Can you cite some sociological studies that show that religion has been a net negative for society? What leads you to think your unargued opinions are true? On what basis do you think you can speak for others as to what makes life worth living or bearable for them? And what makes you think Buddhism is not a religion? If you think that, you are woefully ignorant.

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. — Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, P11

Inasmuch as they thought that, then so much the worse for traditional theology and metaphysics. Such an attitude could never be beneficial for this life, this life which is all we really know, and hence all we should really care about.

:up:

Anyway, in the main, atheism is not a "theological position" any more than celibacy is a sexual position. — 180 Proof

:100:

Though IMO there are no existential truths, just opinions. — Darkneos

:up:

I would argue that religion isn't either. Religion is more about making their truths reality. — Darkneos

This is too simplistic. Organized religion is inevitably political, that is, concerned with control, like any collective ideology. I believe there are also countless people who are religious in various personal senses, and provided they don't attempt to foist their own beliefs on others I can see no harm in that.

Some people are simply not satisfied with this life; they just can't accept that this life is all there is. If it makes them happier and healthier, and hence more socially benevolent, to believe something for which there can be no evidence for or against, what's the problem?

Religious institutions should be judged, not on the basis of their doctrines, but on the basis of their actions. Are they more beneficial overall than otherwise or not, and do they stand in the way of socially progressive and inclusive values and environmental healing and sustainability or not: those are the salient questions.

:up:

Our “heads” which we experience phenomenally, in the sense of a physical head of our bodies within our conscious experience, are, under both physicalism and analytic idealism, representations. When you look in the mirror, your head is a representation that your brain (if you are a physicalist) or your mind (if you are an idealist) has of itself. Your brain (or mind) is trying to represent itself to itself when it views itself by producing perceptions of it (just like anything else). — Bob Ross

So, if our brains are representations like anything else, then how can consciousness be said to reside there? If the brain is a representation, then the consciousness that seems to reside there, and the self-model that comes with it must also be representations. The question then is what is doing the representing? Perhaps nothing? Or everything?

:clap:

Yes but that speaks to our thinking, not to what-is. We already know that thinking in terms of causes and thinking in terms of reasons cannot be made commensurable with one another at this stage of our understanding; I can't imagine anyone claiming that they are. So if that is acknowledged, as it should be since it seems unarguable, it will depend on what conclusions, if any, you draw from that fact.

Right, it seems that both sides of the argument, both positions, are promissory. People adopt them on account of what seems most plausible to them, but as I keep saying, that will depend on what one's own set of unargued premises or presuppositions are. That's why I don't take a position on it, although to be honest I lean towards physicalism, since I believe physics is the closest thing, we have to being a pertinent source of information regarding the ultimate constitution of what-is.

But the challenge is, how can any kind of 'either/or' thinking or logical argument, in general, be explained in terms of the kinds of physical causation that characterises brain states? — Wayfarer

Well, it can't if the nature of our thinking makes it impossible to explain. It does not follow that because we cannot explain it, it must be impossible.

In the cause of physical brains, the brain state will be the configuration required to instantiate non-physical mental content.
— Mark Nyquist

So, how to validate that statement is what is at issue. How do you think you could ascertain the empirical fact of that statement, on the basis of neuroscience. — Wayfarer

I don't think we can, with the present state of our knowledge and understanding, validate that statement either.

That neural states are causality-driven and/ or exclusively causality driven is an assumption which cannot be tested empirically, and that also does not involve a logical contradiction. Another point is that even though causality and propositionality (or causes and reasons) might seem incommensurable to us that can be, as Spinoza says, on account of looking at the one thing from two different incommensurable perspectives and may not reflect on the nature of physical processes, but rather on our naive understanding of them, or our dualistic "either/ or" kind of thinking.

If you point me to the argument, I'll be glad to address it, even though "might respond" does not sound very promising, and I dislike expending effort for nothing.

It has a bearing because things can actually be, counter intuitively, two things that seem incompatible. Do you think your intuitive preconceptions about how things must be are the last word on how things actually are?

What evidence would that be? We don't observe what we don't observe, so ...

As far as I can tell this is not something we believe on evidence at all, but an assumption. Hume describes it so. — Srap Tasmaner

I said "evidence", I didn't say 'proof'. For example, say I lost my well-worn copy of Crime and Punishment twenty years ago, just before my son was born and now I have an issue with my pipes leaking under the house, which my son, now a plumber, volunteers to look at. He goes under the house and comes out with a book; "look what I found under the house" he says, " an old beaten up and slightly chewed copy of Crime and Punishment. Say I had never told him about losing that book. Now I think right, the dog, now years dead, must have taken it under the house. You don't think that would count as evidence that makes it plausible to think the book had been there the whole time? Or do you think it more likely that the book popped back into existence when my son went under the house?

Of course this is not quite what you mean, but that we infer similar perceptions upon seeing similar behavior. Not saying that's a bad inference, but it's an inference, not an observation. — Srap Tasmaner

No, we can easily test whether we see the same details on common objects. Say you and I have an apple in front of us: a read apple with a very unusual yellow mark on it that looks like an image of Jesus. I ask you whether you see anything unusual about this apple and you say that it has a mark on it that looks like a bearded man with long hair. What would you consider to be the best explanation for that?

So if the couch has changed too little for me to notice or care since I last saw it an hour ago, I'm allowed to pretend it's the same and call it the same. Is that the metaphysics you had in mind? — Srap Tasmaner

I said perceptually invariant, not invariant tout court; if I can perceive any difference then it counts as perceptually invariant. And not, I'm not making any metaphysical claims about what it is that is responsible for presenting us with the world of objects of common perception.

The argument against it is that it somehow has to posit that these neuological states are at once physical and semantic, i.e. meaning-encoding. — Wayfarer

If microphysical entities can be both particle and wave why could not neurological states be both physical and semantic. Perhaps your unexamined preconceived notion of what it means to be physical is blinding you to the possibility.or perhaps it just doesn't suit you to believe suvh a thing is possible.

Representation are within our heads: they are perceptions; but, the world one is fundamentally representing is will (i.e., ideas in a universal mind) as opposed to something unknown (for Kant). — Bob Ross

If everything is a representation in our heads, are our heads also representations...in our heads?

Rather, we assume they do. If you read my posts more carefully, you would see that I am saying that both the posits of 'existing' or 'non-existing' are mental constructions or surmises. — Wayfarer

It is obvious that we don't know with absolute certainty that objects persist when unobserved, but all the evidence of human experience, including observation of animal behavior, suggests that they do persist. Really all we mean by "persist" is that they are perceptually invariant over varying degrees of time, depending on the object and also that they show perceptual commonality for almost all people and even some animals.

We are here discussing the perceived existence of invariance, so it is a cop-out to state the trivially true fact that 'existing' and 'non-existing' are mental constructs. If we want to do philosophy, then we have nothing else to work with than what are obviously our own concepts.

If you read my posts more closely you would know that I have acknowledged many times that our concepts may not be capable of capturing the nature of reality; how would we know whether they do or not? But they are all we have to work with.

you have said there are no immaterial minds - how would you even go about looking for such a mind (I hesitate to say 'phenomenon')? We have physical instruments that can detect electromagnetic and sub-atomic phenomena with exquisite accuracy, but how would you even go about investigating such a question? — Wayfarer

And here is a classic case in point: immaterial minds are something that language, by putting the words together, allows us to imagine. But there cannot, by your own admission, ever be any evidence for the existence of immaterial minds, so of what discursive or philosophical use is this "mental construction" or "surmise"?

If one does not want to work with substantive mental constructs and surmises, perhaps one should take a leave out of the pragmatic QM playbook and "shut up and live".

I think the stumbling block you're dealing with is the idea that unobserved ceases to exist, like what G E Moore said, when he asked if the train wheels ceased to exist when the passengers were boarded. That is not what Berkeley's idealism is claiming. — Wayfarer

You misunderstand. If you had read my posts more closely you would know that all I'm claiming is that unobserved objects persist, and that I'm making no metaphysical claims about how that is possible, whether it is that objects are simply physical existents, or are ideas in a universal mind or that it is on account of decoherence and entanglement or whatever. Berkeley's idealism is in accordance with the fact that objects persist, since in his philosophy they persist in the mind of God.

The point is that we know objects persist and we don't know, and it would seem, can never know, just what the explanation for that is, because none of the few imaginable candidates for explanation are empirically testable. The point of realizing this is just to clarify the position we find ourselves in; that is we are ignorant as to the fundamental nature of things.

This is a misrepresentation; Astrazeneca has been discontinued in Australia due to other vaccines being found to be more effective against new variants and also due to lack of ongoing demand.

Further to that, scientific method embodies a great many axioms, at least some of which are metaphysical, which, however, are not visible to science itself, as they’re not considered to be amongst the objects of scientific analysis. — Wayfarer

Can you name a few of those axioms you think are indispensable to modern science?

I think "science is founded on" pragmatic, or working, assumptions like that one. Such a "metaphysical position", however, may be a categorical generalization that has been subsequently deduced from scientific practices and findings. — 180 Proof

:up: I think the basic axiom of science is that nature is intelligible, and it could be argued that this is derived from the Christian idea that nature, being created by God, is a 'book' that is meant to be 'read' by his "crown of creation": us.

Beyond that being, possibly, along with the proto-scientific speculations of the Pre-Socratics, the explanation for why science developed in the West, and not for example in China, which in the 10th century was technologically well ahead of Europe, I agree with you what you seem to be suggesting: that science today only relies on the whole body of its previous knowledge and does not rely on any metaphysical assumptions. That is to say, you can be a practicing scientist and a Buddhist, Christian, atheist, nazi, or whatever, and your practice will not necessarily be hindered by your metaphysical beliefs.

No need to take offense — Gnomon

You're projecting again.

at the novel ideas of professional physicists, or both? — Gnomon

Firstly, citation is needed. And in any case, whether novel ideas in physics are cutting edge or not is something that gets worked out over time. If the experts cannot reach consensus, then citing experts as cutting-edge authorities to support your own pet theories is nothing more than indulging confirmation bias in my opinion.

There is a lot of documentation nowadays on the fundamental cosmological constraints that must be the case in order for a cosmos to form, and not simply dissipate into plasma or collapse into a mass of infinite density. These can't be explained in terms of consequences of the singularity as they must exist as causal constraints. I think they bear at least a suggestive similarity to a priori conditions of existence (see for example Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees.) — Wayfarer

Right, but that wasn't my point. If the constraints had been different a different cosmos may have formed or no cosmos at all. Or perhaps the constraints could not have been different. These are things which cannot be known, just as, if the Big Bang model is accepted, then the question of what "preceded" it makes no sense. Let us not underestimate human intellectual hubris.

The tree appears to you, and as such is part of the phenomenal realm. The tree - in and of itself - is the noumenal. — creativesoul

The phenomena we experience are views of things, not the things themselves; we never experience whole objects, rather we think them, which collectively generates the notion of a realm of discrete objects.

Is it a matter of opinion?

Hume agonizes over this; he can find no good reason to think objects persist, and yet he finds that he does believe so. It's a sort of prejudice; nature, he suggests, has taken the decision out of his hands, as a matter too important to leave to stumbling human reason. — Srap Tasmaner

As I say to CS above, we never experience whole objects, and yet the objects are always there to be viewed from various perspectives, to be touched, to be tapped or rubbed in order to see what sound manifests, to be measured, weighed, cleaned, smashed or destroyed.

So, it seems impossible to think that objects don't persist, and some more than others, obviously. So, I don't follow Hume in thinking that we have no reason to believe that objects persist. What makes the case even stronger is observing the behavior of the animals most familiar to us that shows that they also see the same things in the same locations as we do.

But the metaphysical explanation for the existence of these commonly perceived objects is another matter. We really have no idea what they are in themselves. You might argue that QM comes closest to informing us as to their actual nature, but QM too is still not showing us anything beyond human observation and judgement.

So, I would say that objects persist, whatever the metaphysical explanation for that might be; whether they are real material or energetic structures or ideas in a universal mind, I would still say that they persist, because we have no reason to think they do not and every reason to think they do. That is how I understand Kant's notion of noumena, as being whatever gives rise to our experience of persistent objects, something which intellectual honesty and modesty demands that we acknowledge is not known, or even knowable.

So your intention was to say that the existence of the rock is an attribute of it that is not dependent on being observed. — Srap Tasmaner

No. I'm not saying existence is an attribute, but something cannot have real attributes if it doesn't exist. I'm saying that the existence of a thing might not depend on it being observed, and that that is the common, you might even say default, attitude to things.

(Around here was where I mentioned Hume's suggestion that we seem only to think things as existing, which leaves open a question about whether existence is merely, as it were, an element of how we conceive things.) — Srap Tasmaner

I have no idea what the difference between thinking of things as existing and seeming to think of things as existing could be. I know I can think of things as existing, but I don't know if you can; you seem to doubt it, so maybe we have different conceptual capacities.

so it's one of the properties we can still safely attribute to unobserved objects. — Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't call existence a property but yes, I would safely say we can think of unobserved objects as existing, albeit not in any naive realist sense.

My point is still that you're trying to bracket the "observedness" of the object, while depending on it completely to say anything at all, which means you haven't really bracketed it at all. — Srap Tasmaner

Of course the observedness of objects is essential to being aware of them, but I disagree that I haven't bracketed that when I say that I think they exist despite being observed, because that is the very meaning of what is being said. If you don't interpret it that way, then fine, that's your prerogative, but I have to say it makes no sense to me. I still have no idea what point you are attempting to make. Do you not think things exist when not being observed?

This seems to be going nowhere so perhaps we should leave it there.

I didn't mean to say that I can imagine, as in visualize, an object as it is unobserved. My initial statements may have given that impression, but I clarified by saying that I can imagine that objects have attributes that cannot be observed, and that are not dependent on being observed.

I wouldn't say "we leave the spatial location of the something untouched, for instance, and it remains individuated just as it was when we observed it, and so on". The most I would say is that whatever that existence is, it reliably gives rise to the spatiotemporal in-common perception of individuated objects.

Cases of objects of commonly observed kinds that are not being observed at the moment, or that are never observed (because they are, fro example, in distant galaxies, I don't see as having different statuses. Objects impossible in principle to observe are not the kinds of objects I was addressing, so they would have a different status. But then if they are impossible to observe, then how could we ever know they exist at all?

I'm talking about the unobserved aspect of rocks, regardless of whether they are observed or not: it makes no difference. They appear to us, and we presume that does not exhaust their existence, but we also know that what appear to us as rocks do so reliably and do not appear as circus clowns or rabid dogs.

Of course I am "still just saying it's a rock", but I see a valid conceptual distinction between the rock as it is perceived and the rock as it is in itself; beyond that I have no idea what you are trying to get at, unfortunately.

it says something about reality, as the subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

It says something about reality as you judge it to be. Others may not judge reality to be as you do, and reality may not be as anyone judges it to be, if we are talking about anything other than what is observable.

Roughly, I'm not convinced you've made any progress toward removing us from your conceptions. — Srap Tasmaner

Some would argue that it is not at all possible to remove us from our conceptions. be that as it may, I see two justifications for using "rocks": First, when I see an x (any familiar object) in a particular location, and remark on it, I have never experienced anyone else saying "no, that's not an x, it's a y", so I think it's safe to conclude that whatever thing is there existing independently of us, it reliably gives rise to perceptions of an x. Second, the only thing in question now is whether there is anything there existing independently which gives rise to perceptions of a rock, and since the idea that there must be seems to be inescapable, I think the term 'rock in itself' to be distinguished from 'rock for us' is justified.

I'm not arguing a "first cause", I am arguing a cause of material existence. This is an actuality which is prior to material existence, as cause of material existence. Since it is prior to material existence it is immaterial. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why must there be a cause of material existence? Thinking of the universe as being of finite age and consisting in temporal successions of causes and effects constitutes the usual purported justification for thinking there must be a first cause. The point is why could the cause of material existence or the first cause not be physical?

The Big Bang model posits nothing physical or otherwise before the first physical event.

What we have here is a case of human reason not operating in accordance with reality. Reality, as we know it, is that all things have a cause (principle of sufficient reason). So when we allow ourselves to say that such and such a thing has no cause, we are really allowing our reasoning to be not in accordance with reality, by accepting this premise. — Metaphysician Undercover

"Reality as we know it" is reality according to human thinking, so it is circular to then say that the idea that something might have no cause is not in accordance with reality. What we should say is it would not be in accordance with reality as we know, that is reality according to human judgement, to say that an event could have no cause. But saying that tells us nothing other than about the nature of our own thinking. And that also assumes that there is just one version of human judgement on this issue of cause.

The idea that information is ontologically fundamental, not to mention non-physical, is very far from being a consensus view among contemporary physicists as far as I am aware, so your lame attempt to cast my questioning of the idea as coming from a mindset mired in classical physics is laughable.

I knew that the paradigmatic idea that information is fundamental is Wheeler's notion of "it from bit", so I searched on that and found this abstract from here:

Since special relativity and quantum mechanics, information has become a central concept in our description and understanding of physical reality. This statement may be construed in different ways, depending on the meaning we attach to the concept of information, and on our ontological commitments. One distinction is between mind-independent ‘Shannon information’ and a traditional conception of information, connected with meaning and knowledge. Another, orthogonal, distinction is between information considered as a fundamental physical entity (Wheeler’s ‘it from bit’), and an ontological agnosticism where physics is about our information of the world rather than about the world itself. Combinations of these lead to various possibilities. I argue that adopting mind-independent information as ontologically fundamental is a hitherto undefended position with important advantages. This position appears similar to Floridi’s informational structural realism, but is fundamentally different. Rather than ‘epistemically indistinguishable differences’, it requires a robust conception of information as consisting of readable and interpretable messages.

Note that according to the author Wheeler conceived of information, not as non-physical, but as "a fundamental physical entity"!

You also might want to read this to educate yourself as to the diversity of views on the matter of information.

This is nice apt summation:

According to Aristotle biological beings are a single physical entity. There are no separate forms and hyle floating around waiting to be combined. There is not one without the other, substantiated in living physical entities, that is, substances. — Fooloso4

You can and you can also pick up the table with cup on top of it or you can pick the table apart, say by breaking one of its legs. Or you can sit on the table and use it as a chair, say someone who has never seen a table, might use it that way. — Manuel

That's right, but from a human perspective a table is a table, and a cup is a cup. A table is a table even if there are no cups on it and a cup is a cup regardless of whether it's on a table. On the other hand, if you smash the cup it ceases to be a functioning cup and likewise with the table if you start removing its legs.

So why do you call this something-or-other you're conceiving "unobserved rocks"? — Srap Tasmaner

It refers to whatever it is, apart from the human, that gives rise to observed rocks. Exactly like this:

in fact it is more difficult to imagine that they cease to exist when not being perceived
— Janus

Something like this then: when I imagine a rock existing unobserved, I imagine a rock and then conceptually remove things like color and other perceptible attributes, until I can only say that right there, where we would observe rocks if we were observing, there is something about which we can say nothing, except that it's still there when we're not looking. — Srap Tasmaner

If there mist be a first cause, which is by no means established. I see no reason why it could not be a material cause. With the idea of an immaterial cause you have the problem of understanding how something immaterial or non-physical could effect the material or physical. Either way, there is no guarantee that reality must operate in accordance with human reasoning.

But I hold a rather low opinion of the human species in general, so, there is that. — Mww

I'd love to be able to disagree with you about that.

And yes, these objects don't have a natural separation point in which we can say this is a cup and this other thing is a table, on which the cup rests on, there's no reason why we can't take both things to be a single object. — Manuel

You can pick the cup up and take it away from the table, though. That said, nothing is ever completely separate from its environment.

Think it'll work for conceiving unobserved rocks? — Srap Tasmaner

I think everything you have said there is consistent with what I have said, in that I have acknowledged from the start that visualizing something is going to rely on perceptible attributes, and as you noted, which I hadn't, also viewpoint.

The further point was that although I obviously cannot visualize a rock as it is without any perceptible attributes or from no viewpoint, I can imagine that such things could exist under those conditions, in fact it is more difficult to imagine that they cease to exist when not being perceived.

But the caveat here is that the kind of existence they have is unimaginable to us, we can only imagine that they do not have the kind of existence they have as perceived phenomena, so it is an apophatic kind of imagining, or again, perhaps 'conceiving' might be the better term.

This kind of stiff is very hard to talk about coherently.

Yeah, but I'm not sure we can just switch from visualizing to something vague like "conceiving" and declare the problem solved. I think it was Hume who noted that to conceive of something is to conceive of it existing -- which cuts both ways: on the one hand, there's no "and existing" step, which either means existence is not a real predicate (which Hume says in almost so many words), or it means it's already baked in, i.e., it's at the very least part of how we think things. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree that to imagine something is to imagine it existing. Of course, it doesn't follow that the imagined thing necessarily actually exists. So, when Tolkien imagined the story Lord of the Rings he imagined every scene and event as existing, because it would make no sense whatever to say he imagined them and also simultaneously imagined them not existing.

It doesn't seem to me that when I imagine something where there are no persons, that I have to simultaneously imagine persons as being not present. When I imagine, for example, a planet in a far distant galaxy I just have an image of a planet. However, in this case I am visualizing a planet, which means I am relying on perceptible attributes in order to do that. And this is different to thinking that there could be a planet in a distant galaxy that has never been or ever will be seen by humans or any other percipient entities.

I think it's interesting that you introduce absence, because we can also imagine the non-existence of things, or to put it perhaps more coherently, we can imagine (or think) that something we know to exist might not exist. I'm not sure we can visualize absence, although I can visualize an empty room, for example, but that then would be imagining a phenomenal room, not a noumenal one.

There's something interesting here, don't rush past it. — Srap Tasmaner

You make a good point, and perhaps "imagining" is not the right word; certainly not if the term is equated with "visualizing". So, there's a difference between 'I can imagine (in the sense of 'visualize') a rock existing that I am not perceiving' and " I can imagine that a rock exists when no one is looking at it', because in the former case I could be thought to be relying on the visually perceptible attributes of a rock in order to imagine it existing unperceived, which one might say would constitute a performative contradiction.

So, perhaps a better way of saying it would be 'I can, without contradiction or inconsistency, think that rocks exist when no one is looking at them'.