Sinking into disingenuousness and pretending you don't know in order to avoid admitting that you have no counter-argument is not going to help you. It's not a good look, Banno.

Too hard for me to explain it to you, yes. — Banno

If you understand it yourself you should be able to explain it. I don't believe you even know what it is you find too hard to explain. 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.

Is the Earth flat or spherical? In the past it was believed that the Earth was flat and stationary because that was how it looked to those who were not yet able to get clear of the Earth in order to view it 'from the 'outside'. This has nothing to do with relativity except that of course the Earth is not moving relative to us, since we are moving with it.

Right, too hard for you apparently. :roll:

Better to think of it as the view from anywhere. It's what is the case such that if I were in your position I would see the same thing. It says that if I were on your side of the table the knife would be on the right; it's the movement I would agree is occurring if I were in your frame of reference. — Banno

This doesn't address the question of the objectivity of views about whether the Earth moves or not at all. Of course the view from Earth is not going to be the "view from anywhere" except of course anywhere on Earth; it is not going to be the view from anywhere that is not on the Earth.

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 the view from nowhere in particular, i.e.the view from anywhere not confined to the particular. limited view(s) from Earth?

Well, I've never heard of a Buddhist heaven, high up in the clouds or whatever, so nirvana must be right here, neck deep in the midst of all the shit. Where else would it be? — praxis

So where is the adept who has reached nirvana when her body dies, and "all the shit" along with it?

If we're talking about Buddhist Nirvana, it must only be what they claim it is. If we're not talking about Buddhist Nirvana, then we are completely free to confer whatever grand and nuanced meanings we wish to our uncanny experiences. — praxis

The only consistent claim seems to be that it is liberation from suffering, perfect peace and happiness. Perhaps you are thinking of different associations of the word "uncanny", but for me that experience would be uncanny indeed.

If you want to say it is necessarily thought of as permanent, then how would you answer the question above about the whereabouts of the enlightened adept. The other thing to consider is how it would be if you found yourself permanently is such a state, and become used to it such that it is your native state, as opposed to being thrown into it from time to time, via hallucinogens or whatever. I tend to think it would seem more uncanny in the latter case.

Indeed. I'm not someone who has reason to believe in the existence of Nirvana/enlightenment (except perhaps as metaphor), but what can we meaningfully say about such a nebulous conceptual artifact if we are not actually there? I had read and heard that the experience of attaining (if that's the verb) enlightenment can arrive as a great shock. — Tom Storm

I'm with you; I don't believe in Nirvana as some eternal, in the sense of endless, or of infinitely great duration, existence; I see it as being eternal, in the sense of stepping out of the temporal round of "birth and death" (birth and death understood as being the mechanically automatic fluctuating states of the discursive self) and entering into a dimension of experience which is as Blake expresses it:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

A brain state, yes. A suppressed DMN, to be precise. I don't think that uncanny is a good descriptor though because it means something strange, particularly in an unsettling way. — praxis

You can think of it as a suppression of the default mode network, and what does that mean? It means the suppression, or better, suspension, of our usual "canny" ways of dealing with the world. This may happen with ingestion of hallucinogens, and can that experience not be uncanny? It may be deeply unsettling to the discursive mind.

Nirvana, on the other hand, means liberation from the cycle of life and death and perfect happiness. — praxis

That's one, perhaps simplistic, interpretation of the meaning of nirvana. Buddhists have also said that nirvana just is samsara. Do we know what that experience is for adepts? Must it be the same for all, in any case?

You believe that nirvana is merely an uncanny experience? Like seeing a ghost or something? — praxis

Not purporting to answer for @Constance but I'd say it's an altered state of consciousness, not a matter of seeing something uncanny (like a ghost) but seeing ordinary things uncannily.

Note the definitions of 'canny' given here:

Definition of canny

(Entry 1 of 2)
1 : clever, shrewd a canny lawyer also : prudent canny investments
2 chiefly Scotland a : careful, steady also : restrained
b : quiet, snug then canny, in some cozy place, they close the day— Robert Burns

See the context.

So objectively speaking, is the Earth moving or not? Can objectivity be relative? — sime


So what's your answer to Sime? — Banno

It depends on how you define "objective". The closest we can get to objectivity in my view is the
view from nowhere in particular, or the most generalized and informed view, according to which I would say the Earth is revolving around the Sun along with the rest of the planets and other bits and pieces.

You and I sit opposite each other at a table. On my right is a knife, on my left, a fork. The fork is on your right. Does that mean there is no objective truth as to the location of the fork? — Banno

This seems like a poor analogy given that for an observer anywhere other than on the Earth, the Earth orbits the Sun. The illusion of Earth being stationary in relation to the Solar System is only made possible by the insufficient degree of observation that is necessarily brought about by being confined within the Earth system; it is entirely an artifact of this limited perspective .

:up: I agree power-ful music is the voice of God;along with psychedelics (psilocybin),and practice, a powerful prescription for profundity. Profundity being the other face of mundanity; (they are so close).

When you wrote "journey back to life" it sounded like a metaphor for a revival/recovery/regeneration or reinvention - possibly even in a Nietzschean sense. — Tom Storm

I do have a lot of sympathy for the Nietzschean sense of "becoming who you are".

I am mildly obsessed with the ordinary which I insist of calling the quotidian.

:up: :lol: @Wayfarer used to call himself Quotidian.

Nicely put and intriguing. 'Journey back to life' is particularly juicy stuff.

Those metaphors, by the way, are not how I generally see the world. They were chosen for their brutalist effect (a la Weber to which you probably allude) in contrast to all this lofty talk about metaphysics.

Can you say more about the journey back to life? It sounds a little like a 'paradise lost' narrative. Does it relate to Buddhist metaphysics? Are you suggesting that Buddhism might be a kind of antidote to the present era of capitalism, scientism and managerialism? — Tom Storm

Right, I think those metaphors are apt though, in that it seems as if that is just how life is for many people; a great supermarket created for our consumptive pleasure. Now we have the consumption of the consumer. It is "brutalist" indeed, in it's most banal dimension. I see metaphysics as very ordinary, but of course it would appear "lofty" compared to that all-consuming banality.

So the "journey back to life" as I see it it is just the journey away from the deathly banal to the merely ordinary. The ordinary is no paradise, it has its rigours, which are seen all the more as our gaze becomes less hypnotically fixed on the banal "life" of consumption. But at least then we can say we are alive in more than merely the "technical" sense, right?

Heidegger and most others would disagree, simply because the being there of the cup and the coffee cannot be parted from the "cups and coffee". — Constance

I think its a problematically human-centric perspective. And it should not be forgotten that all we are talking about here are different perspectives, different seeings, not some absolute reality The problem is that cannot explain how the food and bowl, for example, is there for the dog; it is not there for her as "food" and "bowl", even if she learns to associate those sounds with the food and bowl, she cannot conceptualize them as items within a greater conceptual context. Absent language the cup and the coffee are not there as "cup" and "coffee" of course, and sometimes they may even be there for us absent language. (That said, they would not have existed in the first place absent language (culture), but that is a separate issue, it seems to me).

Have you ever tried hallucinogens or meditated?

I pretty much agree, except for one thing: Our acknowledgement of just this is itself a language event. This is hermeneutics. So the world has two faces, Janus: the one is the language existence we live in and, if you will, are "made of". The other is all that lies before one that is not language (and following Wittgenstein, language "is" not language, though this is nonsense to say, for the generative source of language is unrevealed. The world is shown, nothing more). Actuality is not a thesis. It is a non propositional "presence" which cannot be possessed by language, and since there is nothing that escapes being actual, it does follow that all things are metaphysical. Metaphysics is not some entirely impossible other of the world (though it is that, for sure). It is there, in the cup, in the coffee, in our affairs. Is our affairs. — Constance

Right, of course our acknowledgement, as expressed, is a language event. And I recognize the "two faces" of the world, but our lives are not our (propositional) "language existence", that is our deaths. "All that lies before us" and is known prior to language, and is what makes language itself possible is our lives. Propositional discourse is the "city of the dead" that, if participated in without the care that comes with awareness, robs us of our lives. That said, there is a dimension of language that is also life, and the enrichment of life. but it is not to be found in the anal preoccupations of the walking dead.

So, yes, actuality is a "non-propositional" presence; although I would say it is there when the cup and the coffee cease to be merely "cups" and 'coffee".

I get that. I was curious what you got out of it. What difference does it make to you? We spend a lot of time here talking about abstractions and the experiences of generic humans. — Tom Storm

I hope you do get it. My experience tells me that the difference lies in the nature of experience.

What do you mean here; are you referring to the gradual journey towards enlightenment/liberation, or something more prosaic?

The world is an unfathomably large supermarket of ideas and lifestyles. I am curious 1) why people go shopping and 2) why they put certain items in their shopping cart. — Tom Storm

I'm referring to the journey back to life, from out of the endarkenment of propositional discourse.The journey from analysis to poetry, from logic to metaphor.

People search for ideas that may bring them to life because they feel the cold grasp of the grave, and the absurd killing viciousness of greed, resentment and corruption that rules human 'life' beneath the veneer of 'civilization'. Your "supermarket" and "shopping" metaphors say it all; they speak to the intolerable banality of modern human "consumer" life. Of course (for the "lucky" ones) it is also warm, cosy, safe and secure, and it is just there that the problem lies.

As I have no doubt you know, Wittgenstein saw his project, saw philosophy properly conceived per his view, as being "a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language." This statement is somewhat ambiguous as it could be interpreted as meaning that either the bewitchment or the battle is by means of language, or both. Can we be liberated from the kind of reificatory thinking that comes with language, merely by means of language?

Buddhism is more radical and would say 'no' in the final analysis, I think, although of course language is necessary to teach the soteriological techniques of any spiritual practice. But the spiritual techniques are designed to take us beyond language and to effect transformation of consciousness. Now you may have no interest in such a thing, or you may believe it is impossible, a fantasy perhaps, but of course you could not know that unless you tried it yourself, and even then if you failed that would be no guarantee that no one has succeeded or could succeed.

So, the question as to what use such understandings could be depends on what one's interests are. If you have no interest then of course such understandings would be of no use to you.

As to the illusion of being a person, a self, this is, to me, very interesting. What is illusion? and what is a self? As a construct in the world, the self is a language entity. Thinking is where identity comes from. What is anything? you could ask, and the first thing that steps forward is language, of course, for the question itself is an expression of language and logic. — Constance

I'd go further and say that the idea of anything at all as a self, the tree itself, the chair itself and so on is entirely a linguistic phenomenon. No doubt things may stand out pre-linguistically as gestalts to be cognized and re-cognized, but the idea of them as stable entities or identities, I think it is plausible to think, comes only with symbolic language and the illusion of changelessness produced by concepts..

:up:

What dualistic character does language have? — Mww

I agree we think in images prior to thinking words. The dualistic thinking I referred to probably starts with words: yes/no, is/ is not, being and nothingness, the one and zero of comuter language and so on.

Now it follows that the folk who are certain of that statement hold it to be true.

But it does not follow that the statement is indeed true. — Banno

You cannot be absolutely certain of anything, you can only be certain of anything within contexts that rely on assumptions that are themselves not certain.

On the other hand you can feel certain of anything at all.

I've tried to point out this distinction to you before to no avail.

*

What substance can have both attributes? — Mww

On Spinoza's account Nature (God) has both attributes; extended nature and thinking nature, if you like.

I see less of a problem with thst than declaring those natures to be separate and yet somehow interacting substances or fundamentals. But then I'm no advocate of the notion of substance at all.

We know that humans have a tendency to think in dualistic terms, but I see no reason to think that says anything about anything beyond the nature of our thinking.

Does our language reflect the primordial nature of thinking itself or does our thinking reflect the dualistic character of language? Chicken or the egg?

I didn't know that Descartes was a non-dualist at any point. Spinoza would say that we do know God's/ Nature's attributes; well two of them anyway, extensa and cogitans. It's never been clear to me whether by "infinte attributes" Spinoza means infintely many or attributes that are infinite or both.
The problem of interaction he dissolved, not by invoking the infinite, but by treating extensa and cogitans attributes of the one substance which show up for us when considered from their different perspectives.

But then … the second law of thermodynamics. Pull back the curtain and once more we see who is boss. :smile: — apokrisis

Without humans the second law of thermodynamics may be said to be non-existent. Rovelli says as much IIRC. But again this comes down to how "existence" is defined. Of course I am not in any way wanting to claim that we are not constrained by nature. :grin:

The vagueness is anthropic reification of the indeterminacy of ignorance, of indecision. Out of that unbearable situation grows knowledge: the general and the particular and their logics, this and that and their relations, decision: yes or no, and the realization of complex contextualities and possibilities. It is all anthropogenic: as below, so above from one perspective or as above so below from another onto-theological perspective. As Heidegger says "Language is the house of being".

So the question as to whether metaphysics subsumes ethics or ethics subsumes metaphysics is just another example of the interchangeability of those dualist "above and below" perspectives, and the tension of the hierarchical problem of the aspirational "higher" that so bedevils and illuminates human life.

Substance is thought as that which 'stands under', as the basis of everything. Spinoza's notion of substance makes more sense:deus sative natura, 'God or Nature. Cogitans and extensa are just two of Nature's infinite attributes, as Spinoza thinks it.

Remember that for Aristotle every entity is a substance, but then each substance is thought as unique and different and more like essence.The idea of two fundamental substances seems fatally wrongheaded because of the problem of interaction, the problem which Spinoza dissolved.

How do you know today isn't the first day of your life and all your memories are implants? — Tom Storm

The thing is we don't know anything at all with absolute (i.e. decontextualized) certainty), but if I were to accept that the only reliable or plausible guide is what I think then since I think that what appears to me as the material world is real, then following that criterion, I should believe the material world is real. I also don't think that everything is just a product of my mind, therefore I should not accept solipsism, just because it, like any other stupid possibility I can imagine, cannot be dis-proven.

It could certainly be interpreted that way. :wink:

To be serious, I consider all approaches to be semiotic, either explicitly or implicitly or even despite themselves, just in virtue of the fact that they all work with signs and symbols. Each approach yields its own set of possible results, or in a dialectic key, its own set of theses, antitheses and syntheses. I don't tend to think in terms of one size fits all, but that said, for any given aim, it certainly seems some approaches will work better than others.

So i'm suggesting that a reliance on phenomenology leads to solipsism. — Banno

No, paying attention to your perceptual life and practicing phenomenology are just alternative approaches to knowledge; nothing to do with solipsism or dogma of any kind except perhaps in your feverish imagination.

It's a distinction which is self-evident. — Janus


Never a good place to start. — Banno

Not for you apparently. Do you consider yourself an authority to speak on behalf of others?

I'm not. I'm asking why the posited inner life could not be as much a social construction as the self. — Banno

Social construction is too strong. Just as the real (what would still be if there were no humans) is not entirely socially constructed (a point which you as a realist must surely agree with) so our perceptual and inner lives (what would be in the absence of other humans) are not entirely socially constructed. "Constructed" is an unhelpful and even misleading term: 'mediated' is better.

...as if this were a distinction that could be made firm. You yourself point out that it "only finds its relevance within that context".

Don't both you and Darkneos start at individual phenomena, and so never escape solipsism? It's not a representation that is collective, but the world; Perhaps there is no "inner" life, any more than there is an "uninterpreted" reality.

But at last now the tread has moved from physics to metaphysics. — Banno

It's a distinction which is self-evident. When I say it only finds its relevance within that context, I am speaking strictly of propositional discourse. I would not say that about the arts and the inner lives of individuals in general. Why you apparently would want to deny or eliminate the inner lives of individuals or deny their significance is beyond my understanding.

Yes, the so-called "external world" is a collective representation, but the internal world is not. I don't deny that our common culture may enrich, and certainly mediates, at least in "ordinary" states of consciousness, the inner lives of individuals, but it seems to me it goes both ways; the inner lives of individuals also enrich our common culture, in fact without those inner lives and imaginations there would be no common culture of any value to speak about.

To which we might add Davidson's point that if we never leave the representation — Banno

But we do "leave the representation" all the time, as I noted, in our perceptual lives. It is necessary to remember that, lest a sense of the importance of the inner lives of individuals be lost. Looks like the so-called "old ground" has not been sufficiently excavated and examined.

I don't lack subtlety but there is nothing in his quote to imply what you're suggesting. — Darkneos

Have a read of this by the same author and see what you think.

The suggestion that we live in a simulation is surely facile...? — Banno

I think it's arguable, I would even say obvious, that we do live in a collective representation that we have all been inducted into since birth via socialization. It doesn't follow that nothing real is going on, or that there is nothing "outside" of that collective representation, but it does follow that anything we can say, propositionally speaking, can only be in the terms of that collective representation and only finds its relevance within that context.

On the other hand. in terms of our perceptual lives, we all live outside of that representation (even if we never notice it); whatever we can say propositionally is always in terms of collectively generated abstractions which are hopelessly inadequate to the complexity and subtlety of living perception. Anyone who has ever practiced meditation, consumed psychedelics or seriously practices (for example) the discipline of writing poetry or painting notices that this is immediately evident.

Except he is imputing reality or existence to such things by suggesting them to be a useful fiction, your interpretation doesn't follow from his words. — Darkneos

OK, I disagree, but I can't be bothered arguing with you, since it seems obvious you lack subtlety, and like to opine on subjects you know little about (QM).

Yes. We are all in this story together. — T Clark

Exactly!

That's your interpretation and you're sticking to it it seems. I don't read it that way. To me he seems to be saying that the whole of what we call existence or reality is an 'empirical simulation". The notions *reality* and *existence* have their genesis, and derive their sense from within that "simulation", so it appears that he is trying to make the point that since that whole simulation is a "convenient fiction" we should not impute reality or existence in any imagined "absolute" sense to the entities that are therein encountered.

So you're OK with saying the self is a convenient fiction, and you don't take that to mean you are not real, but you're not OK with saying the other is a convenient fiction?

No not at all. It's just regarding other people as not real rubs me the wrong way. — Darkneos

To say that other people is a useful fiction is not to say others or the self (since we are all in that fictive sense other people) are not real, and is no different than saying the self or any identity is a useful fiction; so what's the problem?

:up:

Cheers, though I'm not clear what "trading intensions for extensions" means, but then it's probably to be expected since I'm pretty much a modal ignoramus. :smile:

What I don't get is how someone can refer to other people as a useful fiction? — Darkneos

Would you object if they said the self, or identity in general, is a useful fiction?