Good info there, thanks.

A possibility I see coming is a population spread away from cities, even away from suburbs, to a more country/villagey lifestyle. The advent of the internet means it's possible to earn a living doing sophisticated intellectual work without having to do too much physical person-to-person networking, and I think given the increasingly dystopian nature of cities, that option is going to be more and more attractive, to all income brackets. Perhaps then we'll see a return to the kind of lifestyle that's most intrinsically satisfying to most people (not all, but most - bell curve again) - out in nature, knowing intimately a small group of people. That will be a good context for those older forms of self-help and mutual aid to make a return.

Cities in the future will probably be a mixture of poor urban areas (although probably much better off than today), robot factories, gated communities and city centers where young people hungry for success in professional fields where face-to-face networking is important will congregate. But the city as a human nexus is losing its raison d'etre (or perhaps better to say, its costs are starting to outweigh its benefits for most people).

Yeah, I thought Cathy Newman's question points to the terrible state of modern academia and our education systems, of which she is a product.

To take seriously even for a moment the proposition that people have a "right not to be offended" seems to me to be quite mad.

People certainly have something like a right to due consideration and politeness, etc., depending on context. But a "right not to be offended?" - the abyss opens up right there. It really is just a power play by a quasi-religious political cult that seems to have blindsided Western civilization and wormed its way to a frightening degree of cultural hegemony (particularly as exacerbated by social media).

Enough is enough, it's time we stopped indulging these lunatics.

In some ways, the social service welfare system is an employment program, NOT for the recipients of services but for the employees who deliver and administer it. — Bitter Crank

I think there's a bit of that, yes, and it's a huge cost.

Another major factor is the ideological factor - welfare systems are sometimes the result of socialist ideologues pushing socialistic demands as far as they can within the checks and balances of a democratic system. That being the case, there's this peculiar "stickiness" or mired quality, or sclerotic quality, to the systems - they're fought for to be maintained and expanded because they have a sacrosanct symbolic meaning for people. Meanwhile the real effect - whether they're really helping people, or whether the system could be designed to be more efficient and helpful without the ideological agenda - seems to be a secondary consideration.

Or sometimes they're attempts from the Right to defuse socialist agitation (as per Bismarck's original welfare state system) - and that's where you get the odd connection to morality, you know, the welfare system has have moralistic strings attached, or it's connected to ideas like "the deserving poor."

I think the road less travelled is what I mentioned: instead of State-run welfare, what we should really have is a thriving patchwork of spontaneous self-help solutions using pooled resources. People naturally came up with things like this during the 19th century - unions, friendly societies, co-operatives, etc. Education too was something that was done out of pooled resources.

You'd think that socialistically-minded people would be pleased to encourage and help along people's spontaneous efforts at self-help like that - and I think some did. But unfortunately socialism went in another direction, and such organizations were co-opted as the supposed vanguard of Marxist revolution, and their original home-grown functions fell by the wayside.

I really envision something like a parallel system that runs alongside capitalism, where instead of buying insurance like well-off people do, poor and disadvantaged people pool what resources they have and create their own organizations and social structures (even do things like invest, etc.) to see them through tough times and protect themselves against capitalist "bad weather." This would be much better for people's dignity and self-respect too - they're not getting "handouts", they're active in their own protection.

Even if you're talking about people with "mental illness," (I don't like that term, but what the hey) this would be a better solution. My friend works in music therapy, and I've helped him out with events. From observation, I think the mentally ill get better when they are able to direct their own lives as best they can, when they can feel a sense of agency instead of solely being objects of help and pity. There are so many people who are "broken" in some way whose lives would be helped much better by people helping them to help themselves, rather than them being swallowed up in bureaucratic machinery, State-run psychiatric systems. etc.

I wish socialists in the best sense (people who genuinely want to help) instead of agitating for stupid, unworkable economics and trying to take over the system top-down, would actually get their hands dirty and help people set up things like that. It would be more rewarding for them too.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree. — MindForged

I defer to your greater knowledge of the matter. If things are actually consistent at the micro level as well as at our familiar, evolved level, that's even better.

The quotes are intended to show that the properties of 'god' and 'gods' have changed over time, not with intellectual progress, but with culture. Meaning that people do not 'rationally' arrive at 'god', they just copy what everyone else is doing and saying. — Pseudonym

It's true that people are born into cultures and sets of ideas, etc,. but that doesn't mean they don't think rationally about the beliefs they've been given.

I think your position is uncharitable and you think too little of people - even if someone isn't particularly smart, that doesn't mean they haven't thought about things to whatever degree they're capable. To take a non-religious example, in my experience many philosophically untutored people I've spoken to about politics have come up with something like a social contract theory by themselves, they may not be able to articulate it crisply, but they have the general idea.

the first step is to make observations, based on those observations, you ask yourself questions. — MonfortS26

No, the first step is to posit a consistent nature or essence for a thing, then you deduce necessary conclusions for experience (or likely conclusions, if there are likely to be other, unknown factors involved) conditional on fiddling about with the object in some way - i.e. you deduce what would happen if the thing is the way you're positing it to be and if you were to fiddle about with it in some specified way, and then you fiddle about with it in the specified way (experiment).

Then you observe, to see if experience pans out as expected. If yes, you're done for now (until some anomaly crops up); if not, modify the essence or dream up another.

It's generate-and-test all the way up and down. That's how "blind" evolving nature works, that's how the brain works, how the immune system works, how epistemology works, how everything works (so far as we can tell).

As I see it, the "law" isn't a law, but rather an earnest (in the sense of "a token of something to come; a promise or assurance.").

IOW, like the apriori generally, it simply reflects our intent to use language consistently.

We posit consistent natures for things, proceed as if things have those natures (belief=trust, expectation), and then subsequent experience of them, or of things causally connected to them, either conforms to that posited nature - or not. If experience pans out as expected, well and good, we continue to use the term consistently; if experience answers in the negative, we think up another kind of nature or essence, or modify the original, and continue.

Now it so happens that the "middle-sized furniture of the world" amidst which we've evolved has things that do in fact have consistent natures or essences through time. But we've already seen how that breaks down at the micro-level and macro-level (although we can still draw conclusions that fit the logic-obeying middle-world we live in, in terms of scientific meter readings and dial readings on equipment that's causally connected to the bizarre goings-on).

I think the great advantage of UBI (from my own pro-capitalist point of view) is that entrepreneurial adventure is more likely to spontaneously develop.

If your basic income that keeps you alive and kicking comes without strings attached, then you can relax, and when you get bored with doing nothing, you are then free to gradually cobble together and tailor your own supplemental income as you fancy. You can save, you can incrementally take risks. And that's going to encourage people to fill in all sorts of economic micro-niches. It's really a much more suitable form of welfare for the modern age, precisely because it ditches the fiction of "lifetime employment" and encourages people to take responsibility for their lives; to stop thinking of work as being employed by someone else, and start thinking of self-employment as the norm.

It's also likely to re-awaken the development of more localized, intimate, resource-pooling solutions to welfare too (family, church, various new, at present unforeseeable kinds of small-scale socialistic and self-help types of social structures). This would have the added advantage of "de-atomizing" society to some extent.

IOW, from a pro-capitalist point of view, if you're going to have a welfare system at all, then negative income tax or a UBI is the way to do it. Milton Friedman said it ages ago: just give people some money with no strings attached, and ditch the vast, costly bureaucracy.

But as I say, it would be disastrous if it were just laid on top of the existing welfare system, and I fear, given the tendency of the State (and dependency on the State) to keep expanding, that's what's likely to happen.

"...gods are not always particularly good or moral, nor do they always take an interest in human affairs." — Pseudonym

Not sure why you think those quotes are particularly relevant to what we're talking about. My contention is simply that people aren't stupid and have usually come up with the idea of some kind of Absolute/Creator entity (even if they've had all sorts of gods, spirits, etc., some of which may indeed be mad, bad and dangerous to know). It's not rocket science, it's a rational response to the fact of there being anything at all (though of course that doesn't mean it's correct).

I think you're clutching at straws trying to make a set of extremely disparate religious beliefs fit a model which conveniently explains the widespread adoption of monotheism in rational terms. — Pseudonym

The point is that "Monotheism" is itself a rather dubious category and Henotheism (which always has the sense of an ultimate God above gods, which any god can "stand in" for) is the norm, throughout most cultures in the world, throughout history.

"Monotheism" is just a particularly pushy and exclusive form of tribal Henotheism, so it's not actually any sort of intellectual advance. In fact it's more of a tribalistic regression that's caused no end of trouble historically. It makes for a tighter "social glue" at the cost of causing tremendous problems for other cultures with other religions.

This means that when you mention of theist scientists that express their feelings about the supposed non-contradiction of science and religion, this mention is irrelevant, because science doesn't care about beliefs. — uncool

As I said, science doesn't care about beliefs related to final causes, the kinds of causes with which religion deals, and that's why scientists can keep their religious beliefs separate from their scientific beliefs. But science pretty obviously deals with beliefs - particularly if one thinks of knowledge as JTB, or of epistemology in Bayesian terms.

Again, we're going around in circles now, I don't think either of us is going to budge.

I'm honestly torn on this issue. I think it would make a great replacement for current welfare systems, especially going forward into the age of robotics; but I think practically speaking it would most likely be larded on top of current welfare systems, and that would be bad.

belief is defined to especially occur without proof or evidence. — uncool

Wiki says "with or without", Oxford 1.1 and 1.2 don't "especially" specify without.

You can quickly see that religious "evidence" is not actual evidence, because religious stuff contradicts scientific stuff. — uncool

And yet oddly, all the early scientists were believing Christians, and there are religious people all over the world today who don't think there's a contradiction between their religious belief and their science.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this.

There are plenty examples of tribal Henotheism (where you have one particular god standing for, or taking the office of, an ultimate creator god, but not excluding other gods, in a polytheistic system - i.e. one tribe prefers one stand-in, another another), e.g. pre-Islamic tribal religion, Native American religions ("Great Spirit"). "Paganism" is the same thing (Western or "Hindu"), and again, you have the idea of a singular "God" with the pre-Socratic (e.g. Heraclitus' "god", "the wise," "the one") and Greek philosophers, even when you have other "gods".

I think there's a bit of confusion about this because there's a hangover from older ways of thinking about this where "monotheism" is considered to be some sort of advanced stage that nobody came up with until the Jews relatively recently, but I don't think that reflects the anthropological reality.

There's not really much substantive difference between having a carousel of gods any of which can slide to the front and "stand for" the ultimate God, and the idea of a single God with a pantheon of angels taking on a bureaucratic workload - the only difference is that the former understanding is more tolerant, and the latter less tolerant, of other religions (it's a "hardening" of the tribal position - "our tribe's stand-in for the ultimate God is the right one.").

IOW, the absence of overt monotheism in a religion doesn't mean that there isn't a reasoned appeal to some variant of an ultimate Creator in some sense.

I think I covered what you're talking about in my post, but I'll go over it again.

There are two possible phases, one might call them, to religion:-

1) Is the stage that the religious person can share with some naturalistic thinkers (e.g. Aristotle, the Stoics, Daoists), whereby you can on the basis of argument and evidence get a reasonable answer to the question, "Why is there anything at all?" Further reflection can secure for this Creator/Absolute/God/Logos/Isvara/Dao-De, whatever, certain other qualities (e.g. omnipresence, omnipotence, all-good/perfect, all-knowing, with the meanings of these concepts not being quite the same as they would be in ordinary language, but analogous in some ways to ordinary language meanings). While this isn't as fleshed-out as most religions per se, it's not quite thin either, there is some substantive content.

2) On the basis of that kind of rationally supported belief (i.e. belief on the basis of reason and evidence, resulting in a basic theology and theodicy), religious people then have the option of various more detailed and elaborated religious beliefs that rest on faith - faith that their holy texts, or their personal revelations or whatever, come from or are sanctioned by this entity that they also believe in on rational grounds.

I agree with much of what you say, and as I pointed out, quite often religious people have jumped straight to faith as the primary factor, and in particular you often have the situation where people are simply born into a faith and take it for granted. But I think it's important to be fair to religion and lay out this two step process, because this has in fact been the main way that Christianity since Aquinas (both Catholic and many Protestant denominations) has viewed the matter (in terms of, say, convincing a notionally uncommitted non-believer), and I believe also certain schools of Islamic thought and Jewish thought too, as well as Vedanta and even Daoism to some extent (Buddhism is really more like some of the ancient Greek philosophies than like a religion, though it's absorbed or shared some features with deity-based religions as it has spread). And I think even if faith comes first for some people, they've bolstered their faith by reasoned arguments along the lines of 1).

Also: while it's true that religions have often clashed and felt themselves to be mutually exclusive, it's also true that religions have co-existed peacably too (e.g. the paganism of antiquity, the Indian form of paganism we call "Hinduism," the co-existence and mutual influence of many religions in the far East), and viewed their particular revelations in an "ecumenical" sort of sense, as more or less saying the same things in different ways, or of being revelations to particular people at particular times, for particular purposes. And it's also true that there is much in common between the core teachings of many religions of disparate origin (e.g. an emphasis on love, kindness, charity, social hierarchy, etc.) - of course for a rationalist this similarity would be expected on the hypothesis that religion is a kind of evolved "tribal glue" that's constrained by a) reproductive fitness and b) ethnic and group cohesion in an uncertain world. There's also a good deal of similarity between religions in their mystical teachings (though I wouldn't go so far as to say that forms any sort of easily-describable "perennial philosophy"), and from a naturalistic point of view that could easily be an artifact of neurological similarities between human beings generally.

At any rate, all I really want to flag is that while faith (which is what some here are calling "belief") is certainly a part of religion, belief based on reason and evidence-based argument has also always been a part of religion, although the emphasis has varied from time to time and place to place.

You are right, the argument is nonsense. The whole foofaraw about trans stuff is beneath contempt, it's just another attempt by the PC cult to silence ideas it doesn't like and gain institutional power. It's a mind-virus.

There's an old story somewhere (can't remember the source) about the difference between carpeting the world with leather to make it comfortable to walk on, and wearing shoes. There is no right not to be offended, there is no right to expect the world to bend to your preferences for how you'd like people to speak.

The notion that speech is violence is a metaphor gone haywire.

Religious beliefs are not based on evidence — uncool

Nonsense, you may not think it's good evidence, or you may think the arguments based on that evidence are wrong - and you may be right. But it's simply untrue to claim that religious beliefs aren't based on evidence.

Belief on the other hand, by definition says that people are mostly not even required to follow the evidence. — uncool

It sounds like you're conflating faith and belief. For religious people, faith in the particular tenets of their religion is based on their belief in the validity of divine revelation, but religious belief as such isn't based on revelation, it's based on something like philosophical demonstration (e.g. the arguments for God's existence - but of course everyone thinks it through to the level they're able to, and may or may not avail themselves of the more sophisticated arguments of theologians and philosophers).

Primarily, for most religious people, they have a sense of "why does anything exist at all?" and "God" (the usual monotheistic or henotheistic type of God that can be found in many religions) is one perfectly reasonable answer to that question. (And then there are proto-cosmological explanations based on "powers" or "emanations" of God, or "gods" or "spirits" or various kinds of hierarchies of sub-deities or whatever.) Many rationalists seem to be cloth-eared to that question for some reason.

It's true that religions have veered between thinking faith is enough and thinking that belief comes first and faith is like the icing on the cake, but the Christian tradition since Aquinas has generally settled on the idea that God's existence and attributes are rationally demonstrable on the basis of evidence (everyday, easily accessible evidence at that), while faith, having been secured by that rational belief, then takes a punt on divine revelation in particular texts as having come from the Being that they think reason demonstrates must exist.

Isn't it obvious then that our logic (its structure) must mirror the structure of reality itself? I don't think this is "just happenstance". — TheMadFool

What I'm saying is that even if the fit between our dreamed up logical puzzle games and reality is happenstance, if we find one that fits, then the fact that the puzzle structure came from our side doesn't in and of itself mean that nature doesn't actually have that structure. Indeed, if the structure fits reality, that's prima facie evidence that reality has that structure, that it objectively has it, that the structure is "out there" in the world.

You're getting closer to accepting that "linguistic meaning" is based in values, it appears. — praxis

Not unless you think reproductive fitness is one of "our values." It may be a value for some to pump out as many babies as they possibly can, but I don't think it's what most people would think of as "our values."

AGI will likely present the most serious teleological questions our species will ever know, because within a couple of decades our survival could depend on it. — praxis

But we can only ask teleological questions about AI because it's something we're creating, and the thing we're creating can have as much purpose as we give it. The question at issue was teleology in nature - that can't be found (except in the "as if" sense, as I said). And if you pursue the naturalistic view to its logical conclusion, it can't even be found in us (we literally are P-zombies and it's "as if" teleology all the way down).

Using my magic decoder ring translated this to: the substance of science was the methodical abandonment of teleological questions. — praxis

It's not usually considered a sign that you're winning an argument when you twit people for their manner of expression ;)

I never said "abandoned," I said "bracketed/shelved." The first scientists were believing Christians, they didn't abandon teleology (obviously, since they were Christians, they believed that the world has purpose, the purpose God imbues it with), they simply set aside questions of Aristotelian final cause and formal cause in order to concentrate on questions of material and efficient cause. Many modern-day scientists are also religious believers.

Later, modern philosophy started to play with the literal abandonment of teleology, and naturalism/materialism became a distinct philosophy. And that's where nihilism and the "death of God" come in. (To the extent that many naturalists/materalists think that teleology has been disproven - actually that never happened, it's just another bit of rationalist boosterism.)

I'd rather put it this way. One modern view of logic boils down to: logic is really just using symbols consistently in some symbol-shuffling game (or algorithm: recipe for symbol-shuffling). In this sense, logic is thought of as pure syntax, intrinsically detached from semantics (or the "interpretation" of those symbols, which makes the symbols stand for things in the world).

In that case, it's just happenstance that some dreamed-up algorithm happens to fit reality.

But then a lot of people go an illegitimate further step, and think that means logic isn't inherent in nature, isn't bundled into semantics.

But if a dreamed-up algorithm fits reality,it really fits. i.e. nature really, objectively hasthat particular pattern. So in fact, the syntax of logical statements that do happen to actually describe the world is derived from semantics (which is another way of saying what the later Wittgenstein was banging on about, the sort of thing Sime talks about above). Even though we can extend logic and play with patterns that are divorced from anything real, the starting point is the logic of the middle-sized furniture of the world that we commonly interact with from birth - just the standard logic. What logically follows from what depends on the nature of the things being symbolized.

The upshot is that you can't demonstrate the validity of logic in general (because logic is just dreamed-up consistent play patterns that may or may not fit some reality). But for any given logic that does fit the world as we find it, the world as we find it necessarily has that logic, that nature, that flow, that grain.

However, of course while that's obvious in principle, in practice, since the scope of our knowledge is limited, there may be any number of unknown factors that could make our deduction wrong, unbeknownst to us.

And this is really what makes the difference between induction and deduction. Induction isn't actually any different from deduction - rather, it's deduction that's aware of knowledge limitations, hence it's expressed in terms of probabilities. Induction is the punting of a specific nature or identity for experience, then the deducing of necessary conclusions (for experience) from that nature or identity. This is the process of science, in essence - we think up a possible character for things, and see if experience bears out the logical implications of the character we've posited for the things. But because of knowledge limitations, we have to hedge our bets ("all things being equal", "presuming no confounding factors", "it is probable/possible/likely that ..." etc.).

Just one final thought: it's unproblematic to think of logic as innate to some degree. It's pretty obvious that we bootstrap ourselves all the way from childhood into adult knowledge not from a pure blank slate position, but from an innate understanding of some basic logical primitives. However, that understanding has to be drawn out from us (in the Platonic sense of anamnesis), it's not in front of us reflectively from infancy, rather it's just innate in the way we act from infancy (e.g. reaching out expecting to touch something), and comes to conscious reflection as a result of interaction with the world. (Rather analogous to the way genes are expressed in the phenotype, in fact.)

Well something that allows people to mostly ignore evidence (namely belief), is actually counter to how humanity has progressed. — uncool

But belief is based on evidence, it's just that sometimes people make mistakes in the interpretation of evidence, or in the construction of beliefs based on evidence. To condemn belief as such on the grounds that beliefs are sometimes mistaken is ludicrous.

Religious beliefs too are based on evidence. "Gods" are first-pass explanations of natural phenomena, God in the classical sense is an attempt to explain the existence of anything at all, etc., etc.

You had said:-

"What you continue to not acknowledge is that aesthetics, "linguistic meaning," and capital M meaning is all based on our values."

I took this to mean that you think linguistic meaning is based either on our consciously held-values, or on values derived from the "base" (relations of production) in a Marxist sense, or on values derived from "power" relations in the modern-day pseudo-Marxist sense (e.g. "patriarchy", etc.). I disagree on all three counts: linguistic meaning is something that develops spontaneously over generations, and to the extent that any values are involved at all, they're unconscious and derived from things like differential reproductive fitness, status seeking, etc.

"Our values," as consciously held and expressed, or as products of social relations, sometimes align with those biologically-based values, sometimes not. Because the division of labour largely cushions us, as individuals and sub-groups, from the tribunal of nature, "our values" can freewheel away from those biological values to some extent (although ultimately they are a "tether" as I said above).

Of course it's metaphorical in biology. How could it not be? — praxis

Metaphorical teleology isn't teleology. All uses of teleological concepts in science are necessarily metaphorical, or shorthand, because science cannot possibly deal with teleology, only material or efficient causes and mechanistic explanations.

As I keep telling you, that's built in to the very idea of science as a way of looking at the world, as distinct from religious or mythological explanations (which are all about teleology). That's how science distinguished itself and split off from Scholastic natural philosophy in the period of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. That's how the great early scientists could still be believing Christians at the same time as they were scientists - because the very meat of science as a distinct enterprise WAS the bracketing, the methodological shelving, of teleological questions. (There's an often-used metaphor that's relevant here, of looking for the lost keys in the dark under the lamppost.)

But mind and consciousness can be studied separately, consciousness is a whole other subject. Unless your saying that the mind is just an expression of consciousness? — Fumani

I think they're rather just two ways of looking at something - one (consciousness) has a more passive connotation (it receives content), whereas the other (mind) has a more active connotation (it manipulates content).

Frankly, I'm skeptical if your 'clickety-clack, as if' explanation is worth deciphering. — praxis

Well, you'll never know until you try :)

There are things wrong with believing wrong things, but there's nothing essentially wrong with belief. Many of the beliefs you're pointing out there (like religious beliefs) are high-level or superficial beliefs that have very little effect on how people navigate the world on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis. (There's a lot of belief stuff, the bulk of the iceberg, so to speak, that's been "solved", that functions very well.)

The massaging of statistics to align all the bad things with religion is also quite tendentious - it's more or less rationalist boosterism, and quite unbecoming for rationalists - in fact (speaking as a rationalist) it's a bit embarrassing.

Interesting. I think I have a sense of it that's somewhat similar to your own. I don't think "hinge propositions" are quite the same as the pre-verbal mental "set" that the animal part of us has, but there's undoubtedly some relationship between them.

Schopenhauer (who the early Wittgenstein at least, admired) put it in a really neat way. There's understanding and reason. Understanding, which we share with animals, is the inbuilt expectations we have about how the world is that we bring to our experience as a result of us being evolved creatures. So that's roughly the general idea of the world as 3-dimensional, comprised of "middle sized furniture," and things like solidity, figure, texture, colour, etc. But it needn't be consciously represented (though it would probably have to be "represented" in some sense in the brain's machinery) - it's just how we proceed, it's pre-verbal, unconscious expectation taking-for-granted about how the world is. We proceed as if the world is a certain way.

And this pre-verbal expectation or mindset is usually correct because whatever may exist beyond these features, these features at least exist and are the kinds of features that our ancestors (going right back to primitive life forms) evolved to cope with.

Reason, on the other hand, is our own neat trick that other animals don't have (or have only to a much more primitive degree) - it's the ability to have either mental contents or items in the world symbolize other things. This probably evolved out of the capacity mammals (and some other social animals, like corvids, etc.) have, to represent inner states to their conspecifics (e.g. "I'm hurting"), which facilitates social co-ordination. As soon as the possibility of symbolizing inner states "honestly" arises, though, the possibility of lying about inner states for advantage also arises, and that opens up the possibility of counterfactuality, the possibility of imagining and symbolizing alternative possibilities, etc. And then we're off to the races, because we can then explain the known by means of the unknown (i.e. we can project possible causal explanations, that go beyond present experience, for what we presently experience).

I think "hinge propositions" and the like are elements (words, concepts, sentences, propositions) from reason that are tied closely to elements of understanding (pre-verbal expectations). The former express in symbolism what we take for granted at the level of pre-verbally just going about our business in the world.

There's nothing essentially wrong with belief. Neutrally, it's a kind of expectation, more positively It's a form of trust - you pays your money and you takes your choice.

When you believe something, you are proceeding as if the world is a certain way - usually it's a way you've taken on trust from others (e.g. something you got from a teacher or a book), sometimes it's something you're punting by yourself (e.g. a hypothesis you've come up with on your own).

Words, concepts, sentences, propositions, suggest or induce expectations. If I call something a "tree" or think of something as a tree, that carries with it logical implications for further experience if the thing really is a tree (i.e. if it really has the characteristics normally assigned the label "tree", then upon my further interaction with it, it will necessarily respond in certain ways and not in other ways - e.g. if I touch the trunk it will be solid and my hand won't pass through it). If you believe it's a tree, that means you just have those expectations.

"Mind" means several things. Sometimes it means mental imagery and thoughts, sometimes it means more of a process (the computing powers of the brain), or the particular individual's style of mental processes and expressions.

The most general meaning that sort of fits with all these (though not in any really tight, essentialist way) is probably that the mental is marked by intentionality ("aboutness") - i.e. out of all the contents of experience, some are about others, or refer to others, and those are the mental contents of experience.

Another way of saying this might be that the mind is like an engine for processing symbols, or just the processing of symbols, full stop. "Processing" here would mean: shuffling symbols around in ordered ways. The leanest distillation of this would be that the mind is an algorithm (recipe) for shuffling symbols around, and one's own mind differs from other minds in its particular style of symbol shuffling (while still sharing some methods of symbol shuffling - like the rules of maths or language - with others).

I think the question you're asking might be better put as "what is consciousness without its contents?" And that touches on questions of experiential mysticism and non-duality. And here we're at the limits of what can be talked about: one can say either that consciousness without contents isn't anything, or that there's something left over, that might be called "capacity" or "awake/knowing space" or something of that nature. Both ideas have their merits and problems.

Try it. See what happens. It's safe, I promise. — praxis

Non-responsive. I explained why teleology isn't and can't possibly be a thing in science, if you think my explanation is wrong, have at it.

What you continue to not acknowledge is that aesthetics, "linguistic meaning," and capital M meaning is all based on our values. Values are expressed in 'right or wrong' evaluations, aesthetics, and in religious traditions. There's no vast gulf between these modes. — praxis

Linguistic meaning isn't "based on values" it's a natural phenomenon that just grows. Although on another level I suppose you could say it's "based on values" in a particular sense - in the sense that language is a means of co-ordination, therefore of survival and flourishing, for us as social animals, which means it's ultimately subservient to the the value of reproductive fitness (the "tether" idea again) but I doubt that's the kind of "value" you mean - or is it? (I think you're probably alluding to a Marxist type of analysis of values in relation to social hierarchies? I would say there's probably some validity to that type of analysis when it comes to aesthetics and religion, but not to language as such, and not to science.)

We're free to ask teleological questions, form hypothesizes, test, and so on. — praxis

No, you can't ask teleological questions in science. The nearest thing would be the kind of reverse-engineering you get in evolutionary explanations, but of course that's just convenient shorthand for a bunch of complex mechanistic processes analyzed in other sciences. It's "as if" teleology.

For science, everything must necessarily be clickety-clack, from top to bottom, because that's all science looks for (material/efficient causes).

2nd Gymnopedie IIRC. It was the amuse bouche of a set of three pieces (the others were Beethoven and Chopin things, much more flashy and difficult, of course). *sigh* so long ago now :)

McCoy Tyner (L)

I did a Satie piece for my entrance exam to music college (many decades ago).

I was the keyboard player. Keyboard player tend to be the nerds, vocalists are the chick magnets :)

It's interesting, the process of songwriting: it happens in all sorts of ways, but I'd say 6 or 7 times out of 10, how it happens is that someone has a kernel idea, a sort of nugget that's a fusion of a snippet of lyric conjoined with a snippet of melody, rhythm and harmony, even a tone sometimes, and the song sort of "unfolds" from that nugget - you follow the internal logic of the thing wherever it leads from that initial nugget. Usually, with this method, the lyrics start off as open syllables and vowels that work well with the melody, but you're playing around with them with the background meaning of the song in mind, and with the "nugget" as the thing you're eventually going to "land on" (as it were), and precise words, and other sections of the song, gradually coalesce out of that. And you generally tend to have (for pop music at least) 2 or 3 "main" sections (verse and chorus, or verse, bridge and chorus) that get repeated a lot, and one extra section ("middle 8") that provides a break, and a little excursion away from the main themes for a while.

Damn, giving away the secrets here :)

What is meaningful has nothing to do with right and wrong? — praxis

No. You can have linguistic meaning in a material world, and science can be based on that, but you can't have meaning (with a capital 'M' as it were) in the sense of a kind of meaning that could counter nihilism - that is, the meaning of something's having a place in an over-arching narrative, or a telos, a purpose.

Science leave out all questions of telos by design - that was the whole point of the Baconian revolution, you bracket questions of meaning, telos, purpose, place in the universe, "what's it all about?", etc., etc., and you see what can be said about the world purely in terms of material and efficient causes, clickety-clack, one damn thing after another.

(I should note that there's another important sense of Meaning, which is more related to mysticism - a sort of aesthetic arrest, suspension in the moment, nonduality, silence, "peace that passeth understanding" - although it can occur even in the midst of stress and action - etc., and that's a very important "thing" in this world, but it's non-conceptual.)

Hehe, fun non-philosophical fact. The band I was in back in the 80s was rehearsing in the same studios as Motorhead, we befriended them in the cafe, they invited us back to their rehearsal room and we had the privilege of having our ears pinned back listening to Motorhead rehearse in a small enclosed space :)

Yes, beautiful and meaningful have nothing to do with right and wrong or true and false, I'm not sure why you seem to think you're still disagreeing with me. The world objectively either is or isn't the way science describes it; but with beauty and meaning there's no such binary possibility or question of objectivity (though there may be factual or statistical facts about what people find beautiful, that could be traced to things like shared psychological or cultural traits, etc.)

Prior to the enlightenment cultures like ancient Egypt were, by our standard, almost inconceivably stagnant. Of course it wasn't perceived as stagnant to them. Imagine visiting a modern art gallery, and then going back to the same gallery a century later and seeing the same style of art on the walls, and it is still considered a modern art gallery. Practically inconceivable to me. — praxis

Art is quite stagnant now, it's the been the same stuff on the walls now for 100 years or so, ever since Duchamp told us that art is something to piss on. ;)

Of course it is, something can be 'wrong' but beautiful (good). We can choose beauty, spontaneity, and meaningfulness, over efficiency, predictability, and fucking profit. — praxis

Yes, as I said, the aesthetic way of looking at the world isn't one in which right or wrong enter into the picture, it's not an alternative way of parsing right and wrong, true and false, etc.

Warning: idiosyncratic opinion bombastically expressed incoming. Really this is just the vigorously expressed opinion of an amateur, FWIW. :)

I wouldn't worry about it, Hume's problem of induction is way overblown and really falls out of the hoary old Empiricist stance on "impressions," or the "the Way of Ideas." If you believe that we are in immediate contact only with our "impressions," and only mediately in contact with things (or not), then and only then does Hume's problem (or any modern "sceptical" philosophical problem really) have any bite. Another way of putting the "Way of Ideas" would be that if we know only seemings-to-be, then we are blocked off from knowing actually-ises (or: we have a problem getting to is-es via seemings-to-be). But of course that's nonsense, because things can both seem to be and actually be as they seem to be; we're not permanently cut off from the way things really are by an opaque inner phenomenological screen of seemings-to-be ("impressions").

Induction works on the basis of things having definable identities, natures or essences and behaving consistently according to their nature. So if you peg a thing's nature - IOW: if either (if it's a new thing) you posit an identity for it that pegs the nature it actually has, or (if it's an already-known thing) you identify it correctly - then you can expect behaviour from it that's consistent with that nature under given circumstances. (In particular, you can expect certain consequences for experience if you poke and prod it, or "interrogate" it, scientifically. This is the same generate-and-test method as science generally, hence science is induction.)

That's really all induction is. If a thing has identity A, then (under given circumstances) it necessarily behaved in accordance with identity A yesterday, and it necessarily will behave in accordance with identity A today and tomorrow. Percentage certainties arise just because practically speaking there's always room for error in identification, IOW, you can't be fully certain that you've pegged anything's identity properly (this is really what was highlighted by Nelson Goodman's "new problem of induction" - the stuff about "grue" and "bleen" and all that). IOW, all other circumstances being equal, if the thing you're calling "sun" really is the sun (as we understand it now: the star at the center of our solar system, but earlier, more approximate identifications had the same implications for it rising and setting), then it will rise tomorrow with certainty. But it might be something else - an alien construct, a mischievous projection on everyone's retina by a mad scientist, etc., etc., etc. Or all things might not be equal (i.e. circumstances might have changed, unbeknownst to you - e.g. the law of gravity might have changed). But everything being equal, if it's truly the sun, then it cannot possibly not rise tomorrow.

Another way of saying this would be: logical necessity is a feature of things (or of semantics), not of how we talk about things (or of syntax). That was the classical understanding, which changed with "modern" philosophy, which made logical necessity a feature of talk about things (or of syntax); but that was a mistake.

Aristotle said "induction is easy" - again, all an induction is, is a deduction arising from the positing of an identity/nature/essence (which is then - the identification - confirmed/disconfirmed by experience), or from the correct identification of something whose identity has already been settled. The reason why induction has seemed to be problematic is because of a series of confusions arising during the Scholastic period, when some comments about induction in a particular logical context by Aristotle were taken out of context and misinterpreted (it's to do with something called "induction by enumeration", not sure I fully understand the confusion myself, it's quite complicated). The empiricist discussions culminating in Hume's problem only further muddied the waters.

Really, "modern" philosophy was a complete mess that we're only just now (after the later Wittgenstein and a few others) starting to recover from. The only modern philosopher worth a toss, ultimately, was Thomas Reid, and maybe (on a certain minority interpretation) Kant (but since, if that interpretation is correct, he's been largely misinterpreted, it hardly matters, in that the real Kant wasn't the famous Kant in philosophy books). That's not to say modern philosophy wasn't wonderful in the sense of being an intellectual adventure, or that its thinkers weren't great and profound and sometimes said important, true things; also a lot has been learned from it (mainly how not to go about doing philosophy). But ultimately it's been a giant detour that's led to no end of trouble in both philosophy and politics (particularly the megadeaths of Communism and Fascism) - and a lot of crappy 20th century art to boot.

In a rapidly changing world no one static source of meaning will last for long. — praxis

That depends on what you mean by "rapidly" human nature and the nature of the world change over time, sure, but rapidly? That's an attempt at persuasive redefinition. Rapidly relative to the timescale of stars and the formation of galaxies, glacially relative to the life of a human being, a family or the formation and dissolution of human cultures.

Aesthetic, to name one. — praxis

Is the aesthetic way of looking at the world a way of "examining" the world? And is it a "method"? It's a way of looking at the world, but it's not a way of looking at the world in which true and false enter into the discussion, it's not an alternative way of being right or wrong about things.

Memes require living hosts. — praxis

Right, and that's a form of limit, an example of the "tethering" I'm talking about, an example of biology limiting what's possible culturally. It wouldn't apply to invulnerable creature for example (because then "kill everyone you meet" would be logically impossible), or creatures that can regenerate from a few remaining cells (because then "kill everyone you meet" would be a trivial bump in the road for such creatures, therefore a possible social rule).

There is no one solution to figure out. — praxis

That's partly true. I'd rather say that there is a basket of closely related solutions (the "tether" idea again). IOW, I think you're opening up the space of possibility (possible social rules) to make it infinite, but that's arbitrary and doesn't conform with observable fact (the facts of biology, the fact that human cultures do in fact broadly share many norms, despite occasional outliers, etc.)

I don't think religion is the only possible solution - I've already given a possible non-religious solution! All I'm saying is that it's harder than rationalists/naturalists/materialists tend to think. A certain kind of cheesy, self-serving mythology has developed around naturalism over the past few hundred years; but the confidence is a) premature, and b) not as clever as it thinks it is, because it's suffering from cognitive dissonance (not usually following its own premises through to their logical - nihilistic - conclusion).

people regularly work through it. — praxis

No, they evade it. Much of modern philosophy is a grand evasion of the abyssal horror of a godless, mechanistic universe. For ordinary people, the business of everyday living and the juicy qualities of interpersonal relationships (family, friends, work) prevent them from thinking these things through, of course; but intellectuals tend to turn to shiny toys like idealism, relativism, social justice, social constructionism, analytic philosophy, postmodernism, etc., etc. - little fantasy worlds that have the dual purpose of distracting them from nihilism and serving as affordances for purity spiraling in social-status-seeking games.

There are other methods and perspectives. — praxis

Are you sure?

Assuming you're referring to cultural conditioning rather than intelligent design or something, I would hesitate to claim 'design' as that implies conscious intent. — praxis

The quotation marks signify the use of the concept of design as a metaphor. "Constructed by natural processes so as to ..." would be a slightly more neutral way of saying it. What I'm referring to is religion as a natural outgrowth of biology (as all culture is) - for example, traditional rules around gender roles, as enforced by a religion, might serve to ensure a certain reproductive rate for a group, relative to the environmental pressures on the group that would tend to diminish its numbers.

Of course there is, the ONLY difference is that we are free, or freer, to find/construct our own narratives because there is no longer a reliance on an external authority. — praxis

There's a certain amount of freedom yes, but it's analogous to a tether - the goat has a fair amount of room to move around, but there are limits. Similarly, the biological base forms a "tether" for the cultural superstructure; there's some leeway, but there's no untrammeled freedom to explore all possible cultural space (for example, at one type of extreme, the social rule "kill everyone you meet" would obviously be unworkable).

I should add that I don't know the answer to any of this, I'm just posing the problem in a stark form. Whether God exists or not, the "death" of God (as something believed in) and the concomitant vision of a mechanistic universe, resolves to a future in which the traditional social mores (which support reproduction) will gradually dwindle, resulting in a kind of drawn-out species suicide, and our replacement by artificial intelligence. Some possible forms of this future are cheerier than others (e.g. a few humans cherished and preserved as sort of the "parents" of our artificial children, i.e. humans as a "protected species"), but most possibilities seem pretty dire. The only possible ways to escape this fate, so far as I can see, are: 1) God exists and things sort themselves out in a way we can't foresee, or 2) God doesn't exist, but there is a way of discovering meaning in the universe that we just haven't been smart enough to figure out yet, that will eventually raise our spirits and give us a foundation for morality that enables us to sustain it through time, going forward.

Nihilism is just a phase of development, don't be so dramatic. — praxis

I don't understand how you can say it's a phase, there's no escape from it if the world is as science describes it.

It's rather analogous to various forms of Idealism being nothing more than ultimately inconsistent ad hoc stopping points, a staggered series of refusals to face the ineluctability of solipsism given the methodologically solipsistic starting point of Cartesianism.

We are (most of us) "designed" to believe in a religion - once any reason to believe is knocked away, there's no possible over-arching narrative that makes any sense of a material universe, all we can do is clutch at twigs as we swirl down the rushing torrent to oblivion (how's that for drama :) ).