And how is your "model of the world" different to what you hold to be true? — Banno

I’m not sure how to answer because I’m not sure what you mean by ‘hold to be true’. What exactly do you mean by that?

So isn't it the case that in order for you to be able to act, you must hold certain things to be the case? — Banno

Not at all, much of what I do is subconscious. Also, my dog never declares his beliefs to anyone and yet he seems to manage just fine.

I act according to my model of the world and the model is being continually updated. You seem to be suggesting that I need to have faith in this model. I don't see why faith is needed because I only have my model and no other.

What difference does it make?

Rather, I'm confident that I can put thoughts together, speak English, and type out a message that can be shared online. I also have reasons to think that my messages will be read and responded to. I understand that there are standards for posting on this forum. I can judge good and bad conduct.

I know about clay and stuff.

People commonly don't actually believe what they claim to believe, and in those cases, expressing belief can merely be a sign of solidarity with fellow "believers". This is why I endeavor to abandon the term. I don't hate it, and I don't hate "believers", it's just that I'm not a blind follower. I do not follow blindly, if I can help it.

I understand the folk psychology of “influence”. — NOS4A2

Actually, the work of Robert Cialdini is backed up by numerous empirical studies.

@NOS4A2 be ghost'n. :razz:

So there I was, nervously entering the floatation tank like a virgin bride on her wedding night. I know that simile doesn't make sense but bear with me. First, there was the gentle caress of the salient warm water. Did I say salient? I meant that it's salty, really salty. It's like almost burning your skin salty. Next, there was silence and darkness as the tank door closed. Finally, I was set adrift in a sea of sensory deprivation. After a while, my mind starved for sensory input, and not finding any it began to generate its own reality. I was sliding off of emptiness. Falling further and further into the depths of blackness. Then I heard a beeping sound. Was it God? No, it was the alarm set to notify me that my time was up.

They are crimes according to some species of legalism, but they wouldn’t be if people refused to do what they were ordered. So despite the legal theories the fact remains: whether people obey or disobey an order is not determined by the words. — NOS4A2

People will obey some words but not others, so obedience is certainly partly determined by the words.

According to Pew Research, about 3% identified themselves as atheist in 2014, so I imagine that antitheists (opposed to religion) must be less than 1%. Around half reported that religion was important to their lives. Unknown what portion of this demographic may be anti-atheists. That’s about all I can say offhand.

No examples?

What I’m saying is that the dynamic driving ongoing discussions about separation of church and state in the US is in trying to resolve this distinction - drawn up as anti-theism vs anti-atheism - in a way that differs from the UK and Aus. — Possibility

I don’t see what you’re saying. Can you give examples that illustrate this difference?

The US is not anti-theist or anti-atheist, though it contains citizens of both.

1988 Movie - "They Live" - where aliens come to earth and control everyone, which has been often commented as a metaphor for how similar it is to how the uber-rich/powerful and corporations already control everything. — dclements

The fight scene is a perfect metaphor for this topic, folks fighting with NOS to put the ideology critique glasses on his face.

As I have said several times, I encountered Watts decades ago and loved his roadshow of ideas. He considered himself an entertainer and many of us got our start in metaphysical religious thinking through him. Even today I'll listen to him on youtube - to actually hear his resonant voice is a buzz. The charisma leaps from my headphones. And he's often thought provoking. — Tom Storm

Pretty much the same story for me and I actually really like Watts. His ideas were ‘off-the-rack’ but he had charisma and was an excellent preacher man. His words gave me comfort and meaning in a difficult time, as I recall.

‘To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do, you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float’ ~ Alan Watts. — Wayfarer

Shame that he couldn’t loosen his grip on the bottle.

And yet the battle lines between secularism and religion are drawn, and the argument on both sides cites ‘separation of church and state’ as their basis. This is what I meant by ‘struggle’ - not an incapacity, but an unresolved and open debate. — Possibility

You seemed to be claiming that the US struggles to recognize the difference between ‘freedom of’ and ‘freedom from’ religion. The separation of church and state facilitates both.

Shouldn't any worldview or culture and state be separated.? — Hillary

No, simply because ideology is required to hold a state together.

I’m saying I feel like I’ve been indoctrinated into this idea of the separation of church and state being a “good” thing because I live in the US. And maybe it is. But it is hard to separate the "secular" from the "religious" in any case. — Paulm12

How is it hard? Can you give an example?

The separation of church and state is a good thing if you believe that citizens should have religious freedom, if for no better reasons.

if the alternative to religious philosophy is nihilism or materialism, then I'll always pick the former. — Wayfarer

It may be the only alternative for some people. It is certainly not the only alternative for everyone.

But I also wonder if I grew up in a theocracy if that would be the system of government I support. — Paulm12

Then you’re against religious freedom?

Separation of church and state doesn't mean we exclude religious values, it means we exclude religious institutions from government.
— T Clark

Sorry - I should point out that my personal experience of democracy is external to the US system. I wasn’t referring to the ‘separation of church and state’ as such, but to its common (mis)interpretation as the ideal of secularism: as Wayfarer pointed out, the difference between ‘freedom of’ and ‘freedom from’ religion.

I think where the US struggles is in recognising this distinction. So I agree with you here, and I think that secularism should not be presented as the ideology behind ‘the separation of church and state’ at all. They’re not supposed to mean the same thing. That was kind of my point. — Possibility

How does the US struggle to recognize the distinction? The US is not an anti-religious state. Neither the Bible nor books by Richard Dawkins are banned in the US.

Strangers asking for directions in the street and co-workers passing pens to each other across the room are examples of incorporating markets into wider circuits of social life?

And in contemporary societies?

Importantly, being free of market-dependency doesn't mean getting rid of markets tout court. I'm not sure that would be either possible nor desirable. But it would mean incorporating markets into wider circuits of social life in a way that does not make the latter depend on the former. — Streetlight

I was wondering if you or anyone else would give examples of incorporating markets into wider circuits of social life.

I posit that the communal resources can be managed sustainably because it is in their self-interest to do so. I believe it because I’ve seen it first hand in a local anarchist community. No rules, no management, no authority, no mechanism, just a community of people engaging in common enterprise on the land they loved. Their economy consisted of fishing and foraging, tourism, trading trinkets with other communities, and believe it or not, professional surfing. All of this occurred out of the prying eyes of state interference…or so they thought. As soon as the state caught wind of their dealings they were forced to leave and their dwellings were burned to the ground. — NOS4A2

I’m curious about this community. Some island, I assume, but where???

Btw, states have always had a tendency to take over.

NOS, advocating "separation of state and economy" – pure ideology (Žižek) – is no less delusional than the notion of "separation of structure and dynamics" in engineering (or no less incoherent than "separation of mind and body" in theology / metaphysics). — 180 Proof

Finished The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende today. The two Daughter of Fortune sequels before that.

Our words do not "lock on to our metal representations" because if this were granted, then there could be no such thing as our representations; there could only be your representations and my representations. There could be no agreement, no correction of those mental models because there would be nothing else but those models. — Banno

It works out because we belong to the same institution.

The game of chess has its own tiny reality, with driving goals, rules, a playing field, etc. The bishop and the rook both know the board and play according to the rules or the game will lose order and degenerate into chaos. Take a big mental step backwards. We have our own teeny-tiny reality with drives, rules, a playing field, etc. Like the bishop and the rook, we can’t say anything about what is beyond our teeny-tiny reality.

Brute facts can be shown and said. Here, hold this piece of lead in one hand, and this piece of wood in the other. See how they feel different? We call this difference weight, and further, the difference in weight of objects of the same size we call density. Things like this show how our words "lock onto" the world around us. — Banno

I think the trouble I’m having is that I don’t think that words lock onto the world around us (objective idealism?) but lock onto our mental representations or model of the world.

Status function:
Lead and wood count as matter in reality.

But is reality “the world around us” or is it only our model of reality?

what constitutes a correct aesthetic experience
— skyblack

I'm looking forward to finding out if I am doing it correctly. — T Clark

:rofl:

I do not think anyone here actually thinks words could, by some "spell", make lead less dense than wood. — Banno

It’s not magic but simply lack of experience or honesty. Mere words can flatten the earth. Maybe true brute facts are our own experiences.

We don’t need to identify something for it to exist. — Michael

I assume you mean because it has been previously identified and we can re-cognize it.

Quantum particles can't distinguish themselves? — Hillary

Good question. I'll do the math.



:chin: Think I forgot to carry the one somewhere.

Things don’t need to be distinguished from other things to exist. — Michael

I don't think we can identify something without distinguishing it from what it's not, and even then the same thing could be identified differently depending on the context of the thing. An O could be a letter in the alphabet or an O in tic tac toe, for example.

The concept of paper doesn't exist without people but paper exists without people. — Michael

Doesn’t but does exist… maybe you mean that something exists, like quantum particles for instance, but how are those particles distinguished from other particles without people?

There is no money if there are no people, but there will be paper. — Michael

The concept of paper exists without people?

But we still need to agree on brute facts. I may doubt my own experiences but in the absence of others there’s no one to agree or disagree with. Indeed in many occasions people may disregard brute facts in favor of “alternative facts”. Maybe the only true brute facts are our own experiences.

The more you think about it the more it seems that, besides our own experiences, all fact are social or institutional (patterns of organization) facts.

l want to group the meaning-free relativistic dizzying "post modernism" and modernism — Eskander

I want to group premodern with postmodern. That would be wild! :starstruck:

But Status Functions allow this. We collectively "declare" today Wednesday, and repeat this each week, resulting in the social fact of week days, which you and I can use to make plans, but which are unavailable to Fido. — Banno

Doesn’t everything have a status?

This piece counts as a bishop in chess.
This cord counts as a leash in walking.
A circle counts as a o in English.
A circle counts as a zero in math.
A circle counts as a o in tic tac toe.

if you go back far enough in time, art was thought of as just the direct impressing of the world upon the mind. — Joshs

There are of course modern concepts of perception and they continue to develop as we learn more about the world and ourselves.

It's unclear what you mean by "direct impressing of the world upon the mind". It seems to mean that ancient people could only record their perceptions and therefore their art could only be representational. If I'm not mistaken, some of the oldest art known is thought to be depictions of some kind of mother-earth spirit. Sculptures of a subject that they didn't actually perceive with their senses.

The technical has to do with the applied, and the applied is a reshuffling within an extant theoretical edifice. Steve Jobs introduced brilliant technical innovations but added nothing to the existing scientific theory underlying
it. Great art isn’t just application of extant theory, it is the creation of new theory, a new vision. — Joshs

Starting from impressionism the progression was basically > post-impressionism > cubism. If you're saying there's a "new theory" behind each of these stages, what are they?