I'm glad you are enjoying it. When you finish shoot me an @, I'd love to get your impressions. There's a lot to it.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee is probably your best bet. He covers most of the great figures quite accurately in great, easy to grasp prose. I can't think of a better introduction.

His book on Schopenhauer is also very good and will help build more critical thinking skills.

Beyond that, there's a lot of stuff, it depends on what you like. Russell's History of Western Philosophy, though uneven, is a great reference.

Once you see a topic click, you can read intro books, lectures or just begin to read the classics. I think it's important to note that you never really finished with Plato or Descartes or Wittgenstein, it's a lifelong thing. So don't pressure yourself in mastery of the subject. It comes with time and changing perspectives.

Shout out to T Clark for mentioning The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern science by Burtt. Knowing a bit about the history of the time period helps A LOT. What may seem silly to us now, was perfectly reasonable for the time, given what they knew. That's also a good book for the early-modern period in philosophy, which contains the most important figures outside of Antient Greece. It's a great book too.

Dude that books is nutssss.

LLMs are still fancy autocomplete. — Simon Willison

:up:

That's pretty accurate so far as I can tell.

For this place? Absolutely. It degrades conversation, but as Jamal pointed out, that is already banned. Having a specific thread that uses LLM's is fine- it can contain the fire.

I can't give a sermon as to why using them is bad, as I use them - though never here or in any thread or conversation. But I get it and I think it's wise to point out the issues with such things.

One problem is that it is harder to avoid this stuff. It's even hard to use Google now, because the damn AI bot answers instead. As to how crazy this can get, we don't know. I suspect it won't be as bad as alarmists say - because these things are not intelligent, we are - or use to be.

So far, this website has managed to do quite decent work monitoring this stuff- but an outright ban is probably impossible by now.

I didn’t have my glasses on when I saw your post and I read that as “Naval Explosives.” I thought that was an interesting choice until I reread it, this time wearing them. — T Clark

That can happen!

All this is quite subjective, needless to say. Some may think it's just a bloated mess. I think it's the best book I've read. But that's the interesting thing about art- if we all liked the same things, it would be boring.

Though if you like philosophy, poetry, action, political injustice and ambition, I have a hard time imagining it would not be in appreciated in large part. But if difficult-ish prose is a no-go, then yeah, it's a skip.

I gave that to my daughter for Christmas one year. We share a love for it. Have you read “The French Lieutenant’s Woman?” — T Clark

Not yet, it was also recommended to me by @frank. Those are two recommendations so I will have to read it.

I have a massive reading library though so, I'll add it to read sometimes next year. Thanks for the heads up. Fowles was a fantastic novelist.

Sure, if you forgot then I'd say go for it.



Oh cool! I've heard about it, but have not read it yet, thanks for the recommendation.

Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is no.1, hands down. Should be a philosopher's dream. Criminally unknown, imo.

Then in no order: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino (This one is significantly narrower than the others, but its left a very strong impression.)

As for Brothers Karamazov being no.5, well, maybe it still is, its reputation is more than well earned. But I just finished The Magus by John Fowles yesterday and it's vying for the top 5 spot - it's astonishing, still reeling from that experience. I've had a good year with novels. :)

I know many of you here are well read in novels - probably much more so than me. But having just finished The Brothers Karamazov I must say, what an absolute miracle of book! Certainly, among my top 5 books of all time.

I have no more words to say, because they will be meaningless.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Any single on of us? Likely not too much. Maybe some people would be less happy - heck maybe they'd be happier, it's difficult to say.

I'd miss out on everything quite literally. But the universe does not care one way or another.

No. This is science fiction frankly. Way too many assumptions are being made that are highly questionable to say the very least.

Economically yes. Though they do have a looming population decline that is very very serious and that may change the outlook for them. But as of now yes, that is what is happening.

We are in dire need of good leaders in this "West". I see danger all over and escalating. Let's hope it doesn't spiral out of control.

I don't see why we should believe that discourse of the "West" (whatever that means) can no longer be given.

It seems to me that there are quite sensible accounts one can put together about what's happening in the world. It takes a decent amount of searching different people specialize in different domains (foreign policy, economy, domestic policy, international relations, tech, climate change, etc.), but one sees a picture emerging which is frankly very grim.

Now that's one thing, the other is to assume that one is capable of giving a single account of everything that is happening. I don't think any one person can do that, there are too many countries, too many complexities, to expect someone to be able to do this.

But I don't see why that is even necessary.

I like QBism too, but I have no way to verify if my intuitions are correct, because I can't do the physics. An interpretation may sound elegant to us, but this doesn't ensure its correctness.

We like Qbism, others may like the Bohmian theory, or Many Worlds and if you accept the view, then you're going to say it's correct. But we need evidence to establish that, which we are lacking.

Are you talking about the "association of ideas" thing? — J

That's a part of it. But he also talks about how certain ideas cause us to react in certain ways, a lot of it on his Passions and Ethics section of his Treatise.

But I think you want something contemporary, so it might not be what you're looking for.

We interpret things mechanistically, yes. That doesn't mean that the world is the way we interpret it to be. It isn't. That may be part of the reason we find QM so hard to understand, we don't have the type of intuitions that would help up make sense of the phenomena.

And signs are mechanical?

We must think of ourselves in terms of the device and not the other way around — JuanZu

Must? Why?

If you want to do science, sure you do experiments, have a theory, see how the numbers work.

If you want to describe a human being, well. I dunno if you can have a theory about a human being, that's complicated, to say the least.

The apparatus measures, but not with the intention of measuring. It is characteristic of idealism in quantum physics to introduce mental aspects into the apparatus. But these aspects are nowhere to be found. — JuanZu

There is nothing in physics which suggest mind. There is nothing is physics which suggest a lack of mind. We don't know enough about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff to say if it is like mind or unlike mind.

That's a good point. The reduction of mechanism to mathematics itself starts to look more idealist than mechanistic. I would argue that one might consider many forms of ontic structural realism popular among "physicalists" to be a sort of idealism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's exactly right. A lof of these so called "materialists", if you question what it is they believe, end up being very strange materialists, because they have to anchor belief in some extremely abstract mathematical formalisms. How that is related to matter being either dead and stupid or no-nonsense spooky stuff is hard for me to understand.

As if entanglement or non-locality are "no nonsense" or "not spooky". But people like to repeat what they hear.

It's not a ghost in the machine. It's ghosts all the way down.

Modern physics doesn't look machine-like, does it? It's extremely strange, abstract and insubstantial. That looks ghostly to me.

And consciousness? What about the experience of consciousness is "mechanical", colors, sounds, smells, thoughts seem to me to be extremely different from a "machine" in any meaningful way this word may be used.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Have you read Locke or Hume? Hume speaks about this quite a bit (not using modern terminology).

There are others too, but I suppose I'm not clear on what the issue is such that it constitutes a problem.

She was a student of Galen Strawson and he recommended her book, fyi.

Again, I don't think you've misinterpreted anything. I was just pointing out what I think is the more comprehensive account of Kant's epistemology.

It's a suggestion, nothing more.

I think you did fine. The bit I understand of what you put forth makes sense.

But Kantian scholarship isn't something I'm an expert in; I suggested Allais because she covers almost all of them.

So, no interpretative issue arises that I can see here.

I won't get into the technicalities here - they don't fascinate me, with some exceptions of course. But I think looking at Lucy Allais' Manifest Reality is very comprehensive for Kant. She also analyzes people like Allison and Peter Strawson, many others.

Perhaps we ought to distinguish between meaning or signification with existence and then the puzzle is weakened.

Unless one wants to throw away all the evidence we have of non-conscious activity prior to our existence, which helps explain (in part) why we are here at all.

I don't know if I've shared this before. Even if I did, it's worth sharing again. It's a wonderful line by Hume on free will:

"For first; is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body; by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? Were we empowered, by a secret wish, to remove mountains, or control the planets in their orbit; this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, nor more beyond our comprehension."

Man, there are just no words left. I don't even comment here and I just see headlines maybe twice a week. It's just... again no words.

Well, I can say that all those people who loved to say "If I were alive when the Holocaust happened, I would've done something" or words to that effect. Welp, something not entirely dissimilar is happening and you have people DEFENDING this. Granted, a small portion, but it's obscene, grotesque.

Personal identity consists in "continuity of consciousness", as Locke pointed out. As you say in the experiment, yes, there would be another person identical to you being "duplicated", but it's not you.

Your consciousness is not independent of its source in the brain. Ergo, as you seem to suggest, yes, doing the experiment would kill you.

There is extreme pressure to over-sexualize and look perfect and plastic surgeries and all that. That's for the most part pretty bad.

However there seems to be a standard of beauty that most people share, with slight variations based on culture. But with these new technologies and supplements and all that, we're just abusing nature for mere aesthetic appreciation.

Not sure how good that is.

The question is, why do you assume that absent the effects of sensation, there are "objects", plural. Division into distinct objects is a part of sense perception. — Metaphysician Undercover

Correct, individuation is something people do, hence why Schopenhauer speaks of the "thing-in-itsef", or Plotinus on the One.

It's tricky. Perhaps monism exists as a single substance, but its instantiation will be plural in some sense. This goes way back to the problem of the one and the many.

They're different formulations of the same issue. The way objects are (in themselves), absent the way they affect our sensation and intellectual capacities goes way beyond sensation, necessarily.

Now, you may think the premise does not follow the conclusion, but I don't see how I'm succumbing to the influence of sensation if things-in-themselves are intellectual posits.

As I've quoted a number of times already, "a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble." — Wayfarer

Yes, that's one interpretation of it, called the "deflationary" one by Allais. And sure, that could well be what Kant meant. That's not how I read it, but that's marginal.

The point is not Kant - it was formulated before him. More richly, in my opinion, by Plotinus, as "the One". And also, Neo-Platonists (Cudworth, More, Burthogge, etc.)

The question is if things - objects - have a nature independent of our (a way of being or existence). I think they do, but if they do, the way they exist must be completely incomprehensible to us.

I understand some will think this even if true is pointless, but it obsesses me.

That said. I do think the materialism/ idealism dichotomy is ultimately wrongheaded, but there is a deeply entrenched distinction between the ideas of things and the things the ideas are about. — Janus

Very much agree with the material/ideal distinction, I would even go so far as to say that the issue is merely terminological, not substantive, unless it is reframed.

Sure, ideas vs what these ideas are about (objects) is a problem.

And I wonder whether that isn't a "figment" generated by the dualistic nature of language―a reification or hypostatization. As I like to say "choose your poison" and it seems that people usually do, especially on philosophy forums. — Janus

The topic of things-in-themselves is just brutal. When I go down the rabbit hole, it's just total blindness.

But I think we can simplify a little, either things exist independently of us (in a manner we cannot at all conceive) or they can't.

If they cannot exist independently of us, then I can't make sense of reality. Granted both ideas are problematic, just that one is more coherent than the other to me.

That said, I have my own preference for thinking that they are actual, not ideal, existents―the 'god hypothesis' I don't find so compelling. — Janus

By "actual" do you merely mean they as a matter of fact exist?

aha. thanks man!