:up: Clearly explained!

Jolly good. Now apply that to the bible. And then acknowledge that your case for thinking that 'day' in Genesis refers to something other than what everyone else means by the term is really incredibly stupid. — Bartricks

"Day" in Genesis is only taken by fundamental creationists to be literally a twenty four hour day. Most Christians today accept an evolutionary account of God's creation. In any case, what could a twenty four hour day even mean prior to the existence of human time measurement and the revolutions of the Earth they are based upon? What could such a paltry "day" mean to a God busy creating the heavens and the Earth?

If you don't make the very implausible assumption that God spoke literal cultural and context-independent meanings to humanity through the prophets and scribes who wrote the books of the Bible, then the question as to the relation of God's days to our days, and God's created heaven and Earth to our Heaven and Earth, and consequently your whole argument is moot; the Book of Genesis just represents a cosmological speculation made by those who were entirely innocent of our current scientific understanding of the universe.

It's a good lesson in economics for sure. Economy is merely mass psychology in disguise. — Benj96

I agree with the rest of what you said there, Ben, but I think this view of economics as mass psychology is too limited. Psychology is a significant part of it to be sure, but there are real ecological constraints at work that are equally, if not more important.

An example is inflation. The traditional wisdom was that if a government prints money and injects it into the economy, that will cause inflation because there are is a certain quantity of available goods and services, and now, with more money available, more demand, which will push the prices up. But this is true only if there is not enough supply to meet demand, because if there is enough supply then there will be no incentive for people to pay more.

Yes, as I see it, this is poignantly true. So then, how do I establish a reasonable idea that can make Sidney a person, apart from me, over there, and so on, NOT reducible to any of the above, given that the above are all true? I am concerned that Sydney got lost in the rigorous analysis and no one noticed. So, I am noticing.
This is, in my thoughts, the second most important philosophical question there is. — Constance

I'd say all of those ideas of Sidney: as neural activity, as electronic or chemical activity, as meat, bone and muscle, as a relative, a citizen, or experiences of Sidney as just a human presence, someone you love, or don't love, someone you feel comfortable with, or not, and so on cannot, do not and should not have equal weight in your relationship with him.

The ideas of what Sidney is, based on objectifying analysis, are parasitic upon your, upon our, lived experience, and your experience might be explainable, to some degree and in some connections, by those observations and analyses, but is not reducible to them. It is lived experience which is primary, and which makes the secondary analyses possible.

I wonder what is, for you, the most important philosophical question?

I suppose you could call it "simply re-patterning", but I think that trivializes and fails to capture the quality of what is a significant struggle to, as Nietzsche puts it. "become who you are".

And it is like going home, but this is revealed as within subjectivity, as if, as the Buddhists' say, one already is the Buddha, and it is a matter of discovering this. — Constance

Yes, I think there is something to be said for the idea of anamnesis; the process seems to consist more in unlearning that it does in learning. The drive to knowledge can become more acquisitive than inquisitive. I don't think of anamnesis as knowledge remembered that was previously known in another realm of the soul, but as reconnecting with the forgotten inherent wisdom of the body.

I don't know for sure, but it seems most likely that by 'day' you mean a period between successive midnights (or it could be dawns or noons or any time of day) or in other words 24 hours.

Would someone please tell my why, when I greet my uncle Sidney, I am not "greeting" exclusively (!) systems of neuronal activity? — Constance

It's just one story among a multitude of other imaginable stories. At another level Uncle Sidney is just electrons, protons and neutrons, doing what they habitually do. Or multitudes of twelve kinds of quarks. Or a perturbation in a quantum field. Or chemical elements interacting, combining and separating. Or tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves and a brain that controls. Or a person; a member of a society who shares the same basic conditioning and set of presuppositions about human life that you and I do. Or he's your beloved (or not so beloved) uncle. And so on...

Why are brains and uncles different regarding this epistemic connection? — Constance

Uncles seem to have brains; barn doors do not. Your uncle takes himself to be something, you take him to be something more than merely neurons, barn doors do not take themselves to be anything. We don't know ourselves as neurons at all, other than at "second-hand"; i.e. because the scientists tell us it is so. Neurons mean nothing to us in our everyday lives (unless we are neuroscientists, I guess).

But how does anyone know anything? — Bartricks

It depends. Some things are known logically; they just seem self-evident, and any attempted questioning of them presupposes them. Other things are known by observation. Encyclopedias are full of "facts" which are conventional formulations of what is taken to be the store of human knowledge.There is obviously a distinction between belief and knowledge, but then on examination there are many things humans count as knowledge which would better be characterized as belief.

Your criticism of me only works if I am correct. — Bartricks

Not at all. You are unjustified and arguably incorrect in assuming that 'day' refers to a time period equivalent to one rotation of our planet or the period between one sunrise and the next. We have far less reason to make such a stupid assumption than we do to think that 'Earth' in the Genesis creation myth refers to our Earth. In fact given that the genesis of our existence, cosmically speaking, has always been something that invites philosophical and religious speculation, we have every reason to think the author of Genesis had precisely our world in mind.

How do we really know anything? — Bartricks

You don't.

I've already figured out why you can't answer the question; a fact which renders the discussion moot. You're a serial terminator of your own conceptual pregnancies, Abortrix.

What am I arguing, Hugh? — Bartricks

I don't know, Abortricks, what you've been saying seems incoherent to me. What makes it even worse is that you can't (or won't) answer a simple question that threatens your absurd conclusions.

I know what you mean — praxis

That's always an auspicious start for discussion.

I don't care for the phrasing — praxis

What is it about the phrasing that troubles you? How would you express it differently?

Just today I drove a half-hour to a client's office only to realize upon arrival that I forgot my briefcase, so lost in thought was I. — praxis

I've done such things myself, so I can relate. Whenever such things happened I told my partner it wasn't the "early onset Alzheimer's" she imputed, but a case of 'professorial absent;mindedness'.

In any case it wasn't really absent-mindedness I has in mind when I spoke of becoming blind to lived experience, it was more being stuck in certain conventional patterns of dealing with 'the world'.

That's a dishonest way of avoiding having to admit you have no cogent retort, Abortricks. According to you the heavens and earth described in the bible is not our heaven and earth, so why should the 6 days described in the bible as being the time it took to create the heavens and earth be the same as our days? According to your own definitions, God is understood to be infinitely greater than us, so why should his "days" also not be infinitely greater?

Now, once more: do you think 6 days and 4.54 billion years are the same? — Bartricks

What makes you think God's days are the same as ours?

One thing that doesn't make sense in this is how Constance refers to knowledge suppositions as both cultural artifacts and fundamental attachments. If they're fundamental then they're not cultural. — praxis

The tendency to become attached is fundamental, the actual attachments are culturally mediated. You can't become attached to something that doesn't exist in your culture.

Do you thinks it's possible that, in being enamored with one's discursive knowledge of the world, one might become blind to lived experience?

There is this tendency to think that language interferes with "liberation", but it is also true that language makes liberation possible. — Constance

As Jim Morrison says (in a different context) " words got me the wound and will get me well if you believe it". Animals have no language and no need of liberation, so it seems that language creates both the need, and the means, for liberation. Language provides the technics, makes the technics communicable, but the act of liberation is a going beyond the limitations of language, a stepping outside of it.

When the world stops becoming something to complain about… — schopenhauer1

It was never something to complain about in the first place.

These I don’t get. — schopenhauer1

Nor do I; some people have strange ideas about sport.

Can somebody sum up just why anti-natalism is such a popular topic? — ssu

It's so boring and vacuous that, by becoming obsessed with it, it reinforces the adherents beloved notion that life is.tout court, boring and empty. Because it's a kind of constant complaint it delights those who love to constantly complain, and attracts others who love to call the complainers out for being whimps and whingers.

OK, I'm still not sure what you're looking for, but fair enough.

I recall James' "blooming and buzzing" infant: this is what it would be like to without language. — Constance

Do you think it is like this for animals?

Forgive my lack of nuance but all experience is lived experience and we're continually intuiting or perceiving and predicting subconsciously according to our conditioning. — praxis

I haven't said all experience is not lived experience; so I wonder do you understand that you are disagreeing with something? As to the fact that we, in our ordinary state of mind, commonly anticipate the future, I'm not seeing what significance you apparently think that has to the discussion.

:cool:

A tough cookie in that one: what is "knowledge of the world"? And what is "lived experience"? — Constance

I meant discursive knowledge; the point is that such knowledge is always in the form of subjects knowing objects, or knowers knowing what is known, or objects analyzed in terms of their predicates, Lived experience is prior to that and not given or apprehended in such terms.

I'm being very specific in saying that you seem to be in love with generalizing, that is I am referring only to you. Are there generalizations I've made, that you'd have me reconsider?

But if we are to have imaginary gardens, we probably had best keep our capacity to claim that gardens are at least sometimes in the class of places were plants are grown. — Banno

True, though just as material gardens are places where material plants are grown, imaginary gardens are places where imaginary plants are grown.

You seem to be in love with generalizing.

The most fundamental attachment is knowledge of the world. — Constance

This is a very important point, and it should also be emphasized that knowledge of the world is not lived experience.

To understand the idea of 'real' you need to understand context. I can imagine a Hobbit called Bonehead, but there is no such fictional hobbit, and hence this hobbit enjoys no fictional reality, but this character could be a real imaginary character just for me and anyone else I care to tell his story to. When you understand that all shared realities are established by convention, then you'll get it.

It seems that if one supposes that to be 'real' is to be a 'member of a non-empty class' then Frodo, being a member of the class "Hobbit", is real. — Banno

That's not a real problem. Hobbits are fictional characters, and in that sense, and only in that sense, they are real. Same with unicorns

I've been using "language" and "linguistic" to convey "intentional communication capable."

If "language," by definition, means verbal expression (and it does), then, by current vocabulary standards, I've been wrong to claim all of the animal kingdom possesses language. — ucarr

Right, but although I'd say 'linguistic' is commonly used to refer only to spoken and written symbolic language, 'language' itself, although it shares the same etymology, is more widely used: "body language", "computer language", "sign language" and so on. Also the visual arts and music are often referred to as languages.

So, I have no problem with saying that animals have their own kinds of languages; languages of sign, though, not of symbol.All symbols are signs, but not all signs are symbols.

This is a way of saying being alive and conscious is synonymous with being linguistic. — ucarr

I pretty much agree with everything you wrote there except the quoted sentence; "linguistic" means "of the tongue", and I would reserve its use for the symbolic languages which are unique to humans. This defines the traditional area of study of linguistics.

The study of the other animal forms of communication involves different domains of investigation, for example ethology and animal cognition, as I see it.

That's animal communication not language. Conveying information is not a high enough bar for language.
— Baden

What is language for if not conveying information ? — RussellA


Exactly. No conscious individual in possession of information needful of communication exits without simultaneous possession of language. — ucarr

Even if all language is communication of information, it doesn't follow that all communication of information is language. It depends on what you mean by "conscious", but there are many kinds of animal that communicate information without language (language, that is, in the linguistic, symbolic sense).

a la Andy Rooney. — Mww

I'd completely forgotten about him; takes me back to childhood when he was on TV here in Horstraya. :cool:

a throne dwelling elder, with a flowing grey beard. — Tom Storm

It's white not grey...dammit!

LOL, funny and well said! It looks as if the "adults" have run away to their sandboxes.

it's not hard to see how some people might regard the world through shit colored glasses. — Tom Storm

My sunglasses are brown-coloured and the world looks pretty warm and good through them. Maybe "shit-stained glasses" through which the world would look spotty and leprous would be more apt? :joke:

The existence of God is controversial also — praxis

:up: Especially among Buddhists.

Buddhists do not consider liberation a temporary mental state. — praxis

That's a strong generalization. I think if you perform an internet search "Is nirvana a permanent state" you'll find that it is not uncontroversial. Secular Buddhists in particular might not agree that it is. Studying the brain chemistry involved in states of consciousness might lead to thinking it would be impossible for it to be so.

So it is not wrong to say that the Sun orbits the Earth. It just leads to much more complicated equations that give you no good intuition for the behavior of gravity. — Banno

This supports what I have been saying and my question about which, the Sun or the Earth, is the better candidate for being considered to be the center of gravity of the Solar System? The Sun of course, it being the more massive, in fact constituting most of the total mass of the solar system.

We’ve been having some fun recently with Sun-centered and Earth-centered coordinate systems, as related to a provocative claim by certain serious scientists, most recently Berkeley professor Richard Muller. They claim that in general relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravity, the same fantastic mathematical invention which predicted black holes and gravitational waves and gravitational lensing) the statement that “The Sun Orbits the Earth” is just as true as the statement that “The Earth Orbits the Sun”… or that perhaps both statements are equally meaningless.

But, uh… sorry. All this fun with coordinates was beside the point. The truth, falsehood, or meaninglessness of “the Earth orbits the Sun” will not be answered with a choice of coordinates. Coordinates are labels. In this context, they are simply ways of labeling points in space and time. Changing how you label a system changes only how you describe that system; it does not change anything physically meaningful about that system. So rather than focusing on coordinates and how they can make things appear, we should spend some time thinking about which things do not depend on our choice of coordinates.

And so our question really needs to be this: does the statement “The Earth Orbits the Sun (and not the other way round)” have coordinate-independent meaning, and if so, is it true?

From here.

Read on further and educate yourself.

And:
Technically, what is going on is that the Earth, Sun and all the planets are orbiting around the center of mass of the solar system. This is actually how planets orbiting other stars are often detected, by searching for the motion of the stars they orbit that is caused by the fact that the star is orbiting the center of mass of the system, causing it to wobble on the sky.

The center of mass of our solar system very close to the Sun itself, but not exactly at the Sun's center (it is actually a little bit outside the radius of the Sun). However, since almost all of the mass within the solar system is contained in the Sun, its motion is only a slight wobble in comparison to the motion of the planets. Therefore, assuming that the Sun is stationary and the planets revolve around its center is a good enough approximation for most purposes.

From here

Here, seeing as how you are incapable of doing your own research...

How General Relativity Complicates What We Know About Earth's Orbit

So it is not wrong to say that the Sun orbits the Earth. It just leads to much more complicated equations that give you no good intuition for the behavior of gravity.


Sometimes this forum is like dealing with toddlers.. — Banno

:roll:

You're the toddler Banno, when it comes to reading and responding to what your discussants have actually said. I didn't say it was wrong, simpliciter, to say the Earth orbits the Sun; I already acknowledged that is right from the point of view of Earth.

From a point of view outside the Solar system, looking at it as a whole, would you say it is more correct to say the Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun or that the Sun orbits the Earth? Does the Sun or the Earth form the centre of gravity of the Solar System?

I'm asking you to explain what it is you think you are arguing for. Not an unreasonable request, surely? — Banno

The question is which is the more objective, the more informed, view in relation to the question as to whether the Earth is stationary relative to the Solar System; the view from the Earth or the view from nowhere in particular, i.e.the view from anywhere not confined to the particular. limited view(s) from Earth? — Janus

In any case all I was looking for was a counter-argument to the argument that the more objective view is the less limited, more comprehensively informed view. — Janus