:clap:

Hopefully NATO and Russia avoid a nuclear war. It would be nice to see this before we vanish...

I'm not familiar, his division is into the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic? — hypericin

Yep. It's extremely dense though and its value is very questionable, but there are lectures and books written about it.

They are opposites. Mental objects which cast a shadow into the physical world, vs physical objects which cast a shadow into the mental world. — hypericin

What physical object wouldn't cast a shadow of the mental world?

Well, the Netherlands is, all in all, pretty advanced in terms of human rights, more so than most other developed countries, which does not mean there isn't still much to do everywhere.

Sure. And it's also the case that housework and caring for children is still very uneven.

Though if you look at professional philosophers today, there are more men writing than women. It might be related to the constant arguing and competition, as you point out.

Sure, the issues addressed by different groups of people will vary and having a different perspective will make you have a different way of viewing things, but I don't think this applies to reason proper, which includes judgement, inferences, deduction, etc.

Values are different. But it's an interesting topic.

You are saying that you don't surmise that "reason has a gender" is that correct? — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Yes, the faculty of reason is not related to gender.

I don't get the impression that reason has a gender.

On a serious not, though, it is true that even today (not even mentioning the Western tradition), women tend not to be too interested in these kinds of subjects. Not that most men are either, but proportionally it's still very skewed to males.

It's maybe not unlike the phenomena that women like to do work with children on a higher proportion that men.

Again - generalities - but, curious. I wish more women did like philosophy, not limited to ethics.

This sounds awfully close to Lacan's conception on the subject. You'd only be missing what he calls "the symbolic", the other two are as stated.

We could call money a useful fiction. Something which is considered valuable solely by our considering pieces of paper to be of worth.

I think that your distinction between real imaginary and imaginary real is not needed. You can use one term to encompass both ideas.

:up:

Thanks.

Yes, I think this essay is very important, it points to historical aspects in philosophy which are barely known.

Because of this, a lot of debate arises that are based on incoherent ideas.

If you have any questions, need clarification or want more sources or videos or anything like that, I'll be happy to help.

According to Google Ngram, the noun "race" appeared before 1700, and had little in common with our use of the term. "Race" could apply to the ancestors of a Scottish family, for example. The adjectives "racist", "racism", and "racial" did not appear in print until the middle of the 20th century. Our categories were not the categories of Hume's time. — Bitter Crank

I didn't know that. Thanks for informing me.

He thought some groups of people were superior to others in certain respects, thus speaks of the lack of creativity in black people and things of that nature.

On the other hand, had he been born in the middle of the 20th century, I doubt he would believe the same things. He'd likely have other questionable views as do we, if we are honest.

We can't know what biases we have which will be considered objectionable.

The founders of the Imperial College of London, Thomas Henry Huxley (Darwin's Bulldog) and Alfred Beit, a German Jew, who richly endowed the Imperial College, are being scrutinized for rejection because they fail the test of purity--the same test that most people prior to the 21st Century (if then) would fail--the test of having the proper progressive anti-racist views of the present moment — Bitter Crank

This is sad. It's an inaccurate portrayal of history, which not only should be remembered for its great moments and figures, which existed no doubt, but also to see how much we've progressed in some areas of social life, not others. Erasing the past for such things is Disneyfication.

In 2222, the participants of The Philosophy Forum may look back to our time and say, "The people of 2022 had appalling views about artificial intelligence and mechanized beings." (In their time, "humanist", "humane", and "humanism" -- never mind David Hume -- had come to mean something much different, much more negative and socially destructive, than those words mean to us.) Are the pricks of 2222 superior to the pricks of 2022? No. — Bitter Crank

Absolutely.

Or the way we treat many animals and plants. Still lots to improve with feminism, racism, classism and things we can't even see are wrong.

Like @Wayfarer said, this current trend of hyper PC-ism, while in some cases good in intent, is misunderstanding human nature.

We tend to have this tendency to want to look for Saints - people who are morally perfect - might as well look for a pet ghost while we're at it.

There are no saints here. I've read that perhaps Spinoza was an extremely ethical person, but surely he must have shared a few of his societies quite appalling views.

I think Hume should be mentioned in this conversation. It's quite clear that almost everybody who knew him, really liked him, he was optimistic, witty, sharp, honest, etc. Just reading him, one gets the sense that he was a unique personality and a good person.

Yet he was also a racist.

But, if we are going to have the standards we have today, apply to the important figures of the past, we won't read anything.

We can't. It's part of being the creatures we are. For Kant, roughly, the thing in itself is an object of thought. For Schopenhauer it was something which we are acquainted with by being creatures with experience and understanding.

It's a very difficult topic.

Well, it it's modern form, correct. However, Berkeley pointed it out in a forceful manner. As did Schopenhauer and Kant, to name a few. Without us, reality is extremely nebulous.

I'm not downplaying QM at all, though we should keep in mind the many layers of the world and how explanation in one domain need not translate into another.

The problem of observation remains intact on all domains, I think.

I think we should be skeptical of drawing too much massive conclusions about QM. It's true that the particle-wave phenomena is strange and utterly unintelligible to us - to the extent that some even postulate other universes to make sense of it.

But the manifest world we live in, that is, the world of everyday experience, does not appear to follow QM at the level of large objects, for that Newton and to a somewhat lesser extent, Einstein suffices.

We are still left with puzzles about a tree falling in the forest, and what ontological status it has if no one is around to hear it, but it's a stretch to tie this to QM.

It's obvious to state, but easy to forget, but QM focuses on extremely, extremely small stuff. There are experiments now with supposedly visible objects following this strange behavior, but it drops off eventually.

Both men are in a league of their own, and their influence on literally everything in the Western world (and, now, the entire world) is really beyond comprehension. — Xtrix

:up:



I don't know much about the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages, but I'm guessing that given the socio-economic dimensions, the church would want some way to expand theology in some manner, and it just so happened that Aristotle was around to be interpreted or abused however way the church authorities wanted.

Perhaps one could make a case that Aristotle actually dampened down some of the more irrational aspects of theological dogma, but someone with knowledge about this could say either way.

Not that Plato being chosen instead of Aristotle would've necessarily been better, he can be abused too.

But placed in proper context, these two figures are among the most important people in all human history, it's truly remarkable.

It get's quite tricky with him, because he does appear to imply that in having experience, we are acquainted with nature of the world itself, through our bodies. As I understand him when I read him, and my interpretation has been heavily influenced by Magee, it's analogous to the idea that, say, in moving my arm, or breathing, and noticing this, would be like to feel what nature as a whole feels as will.

To put it less obscurely, if I stone could feel, it would not be unlike the knowledge we have of ourselves when we move our arms or walk: it says little, but then at bottom, the will is a simple striving.

What makes it complicated is this, he says:

"Meanwhile it is to be carefully noted, and I have always kept it in mind, that even the inward observation we have of our own will still does not by any means furnish an exhaustive and adequate knowledge of the thing-in-itself… In the first place, such knowledge is tied to the form of the representation; it is perception or observation, and as such falls apart into subject and object… Hence even in inner knowledge there still occurs a difference between the being-in-itself of its object and the observation or perception of this object in the knowing subject."

WWR Vol.2 pp. 196-197


So we are are a step removed from the thing-in-itself, our experience of will is the closest we can get to the nature of the whole, but between our experience of the will and nature itself, there could be a difference larger than Schopenhauer assumes.

I think Philip Mainlander discusses this topic quite well. It might be that we have to speak of wills in the plural, and if this is the case, then the knowing subject and willing are whole only to themselves, and not to nature at large.

But as you say, there is no logical contradiction is what Schopenhauer is saying, that I can see.

Agreed.

:up:

I tried to attribute a metaphysics to him in my work. :groan:

That quote is practically a classic for me. The issue is that, his conclusions seem magical to many, who think innate ideas, physic continuity and other ideas, can't be explained by current science (maybe ever).

People who disagree with him tend to be externalists, which is contrary to what scientists actually do.

It's in the final part of this essay, but is only touched upon. You can continue here or start a new thread.

Both are fine with me.

I'm thinking a few of the chapters in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind as well as the first two chapters in Power and Prospects are really good on this topic.

Or whatever essay you have in mind. It's all good.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2254605

As far as I know, I don't believe they have a "ordinary camera" on it, by that meaning any type of camera which can give us images like we got images from Pluto.

It's going to have a device that allows it to see infrared, which will be used as a picture, I'm assuming computers do some extra work to make the images look good. Unclear on how this process works.

:clap: :clap:

Now we wait for the final cool down stage for several months, and hope we are around to get some data back!

percept is usually understood as the product of mind's interpretation of sensory stimuli, the awareness of an object or event, such as grass outside your window or a car zooming by. This is distinct from the stimulus or the raw sense data (if that's a thing). And it is again distinct from the "what-it-is-likeness" of experience, which is what Nagel, Searle, Chalmers, etc. put forward as the phenomenal experience, or qualia, the thing outside the reach of physical accounting (unless we wave our hands and invoke something like "panpsychism"). (If all this seems confusing, then I've made my point.) — SophistiCat

I think that those are perhaps too many distinctions, which makes the topic more difficult than it needs be. The first sentence you write makes sense to me, and is what I take Russell to be talking about.

"This is distinct from the stimulus or the raw sense data". Why isn't the sensory stimulus raw sense data?

The whole "what it's likeness" is a complication here. It's supposed to point out that "there is something it is like" for a person (you, me, anyone) to see the colour red, or read this sentence. I can see red and am writing and reading this sentence, is there "something it is like to do this"? Sure, I guess, I don't think it says much, but I don't doubt my experiences.

Yes, Chomsky says little about this, outside of mentioning this quote of Russell's or citing Strawson's essays and books, he doesn't see a big problem here.

As far as he is concerned, materialism has been dead since at least Newton, but not for any reasons having to do with the "hard problem." — SophistiCat

Because then it meant that it was an intuitive description of the world - and crucially excluded the mental.

Since that doesn't hold up any longer, then if we want to use the word "physical", we can adopt Strawson's use of the word and say, that the physical is everything that is, unless someone can say way something isn't physical. This includes experience, at the highest grade of certainty.

Or we can say that physicalism is what physics studies and that experience is an illusion or not real. This is incoherent to me, but, it's an option.

By then it becomes terminological, and not too substantive, I think.

To be clear, it's not that consciousness isn't a hard problem - it is - but so is gravity, electromagnetism, creativity, free will, and so on. There isn't the hard problem, but many.

Well, what the argument means to show is that phenomenal experience (which p-z's hypothetically lack) cannot be accounted for by materialism/physicalism as presently understood, and therefore materialism/physicalism is false/incomplete. (How it does that is what I don't quite understand.) — SophistiCat

That's correct. Not false, simply not all-encompassing.

Why don't they ask for a "physical explanation" of why music makes us feel good? Or a "physical explanation" of why we have dreams? And so on.

It's becomes a bit silly. Physics is the study of abstract properties of matter, and this phenomena are simple structures, nothing as complex as biology. It isn't reasonable to expect it to explain things way outside its purview.

I mean, it helps to read Russell, Locke, Hume, Cudworth in addition to all you mention, lectures, interviews and so on.

Not that he can't be understood without all the extra work, far from it, but as you read these people, you realize that what he cites and interprets, tends to be spot on. Which doesn't mean one can't disagree with him, of course you can.

It's just that there's a lot of misunderstanding about Newton, Descartes and Hume in academia, it's surprising when you read primary sources or detailed scholarship.

Thanks, appreciated. :cool:

He's speaking of naturalism a la scienticism, think Dennett or the Churchlands. On this view, then UG does seems at odds with "naturalism". But that naturalism is not the one that actually exists.

One label Chomsky uses consistently in philosophy is "methodological naturalism". However, he is not of the camp that "evolution explains everything" at all. He cites a very interesting article by Lewontin related to this.

(Chomsky doesn't say much about the subject in this essay, except perhaps where he brings up Mary's Room puzzle. But here, as elsewhere, he just writes down some notes and quotes, adds that he disagrees with some influential analyses of the problem, and leaves it at that. The relevance of this discussion to the rest of the essay is unclear.) — SophistiCat

You're right, because he also doesn't see what the big issue is with qualia. He agrees with Russell here:

Russell held that there are “three grades of certainty. The highest grade belongs to my own percepts; the second grade to the percepts of other people; the third to events which are not percepts of anybody," constructions of the mind established in the course of efforts to make sense of what we perceive.”

Then he goes on to say: "...we recognize their existence [of our own percepts] , at the highest grade of certainty in fact."

Both quotes on pp.181.

One could call a percept a "quale", but Chomsky doesn't. A percept means a moment of experience, such as you reading this sentence as you currently are. Or looking at the window and seeing green grass, or hearing a car zoom by, etc.

I'm unclear why this is confusing, outside of the terminology itself. It's been overwhelmingly taken for granted up until the 20th century, when it suddenly became a problem to a small group of people.

Panpsychism is just glorified magical thinking, in my opinion. It's not the exoticism of the concept that bothers me, but its explanatory nullity. — SophistiCat

I agree. I studied it for several years, but was not convinced, also on your grounds of it not explaining much.

I just don't understand the argument, i.e. what it is that conceivability actually implies and why we should care. — SophistiCat

I thought the whole argument was meant to show that experience isn't necessary for a human being to exist as they do. But I also do not see the force to this argument, nor understand the attention given to it.

People who sleepwalk are not examples of P-zombies, because they don't behave like conscious people in all outward respects. — SophistiCat

That's likely true.

Yep, that's correct.

He's very open minded and considers almost all approaches to consciousness.

Others who use this term are misled by it, as if experience were "not physical" or "spooky".

Newton was a materialist as pertaining to the physical world, the way the world works. In the essay, which I am now seeing many people not bother reading at all, which is strange for a reading group, you would see that Newton also believed in something called "spirit", which he thought permeated all of nature.

"In Newton’s own words, “spirit” may be the cause of all movement in nature, including the “power of moving our body by our thoughts” and “the same power in other living creatures, [though] how this is done and by what laws we do not know. We cannot say that all nature is not alive.”
pp. 168-169

Terms are only a part of it, it has to do with our innate faculties, the one's all human beings are born with. What's not being mentioned, in these discussions, which you pointed out - and thanks for that - is that "materialism" is part of the issue, the other was that these notions do not reach the domain of mind or soul (which includes more than mind).

But even putting aside the talk of Newton, Descartes, Locke and so on, it's that even today, we know almost nothing about the mental. Hence the misleading "hard problem" of consciousness.

Yes, his prose is meh, but again, in A Scanner Darkly, he steps it up, I remember this quote, which is fantastic, I think:

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”

Yeah, I don't know why. But, given enough time (though not necessarily forever), I can imagine how something can come from nothing.

I can't imagine something lasting or being forever and ever. I suppose being born into this life, is a kind of "something from nothing", in terms of our experience of it. Of course, we can say that that's not true there were chemicals and atoms and biology prior to us. But we don't experience this prior birth (nor, presumably, after death).

Yet, forever doesn't fit in somehow. Before I was born, I have no temporal intuition at all.

I didn't pay (much) attention to order, he has like 8 -10 classics and then everybody has a few personal favorites, usually not on the list.

I kid not, the most reading I've ever done, was reading 14 of his books in a row, in 3 weeks. In my peak I was averaging a book a day.

I would not recommend it, I don't remember Martian Time Slip too well, nor Dr. Bloodmoney.

Flow My Tears, Maze of Death, Palmer Eldricht, were also amazing.

The underrated charm from me would be The Game Players of Titan.

/End rant

From what I've seen, accounts vary. Sometimes they remember dreaming, other times, they don't. I'm guessing that it's the same as going to sleep every night, just that they move around and do stuff.

Some people say we actually dream every night, be we just don't remember. I'm skeptical, when I used to party, and went to sleep, I'm pretty confident I didn't dream anything.

WHAT? :scream: :scream:

That last sentence made me realize, I never came down from my high.

Dick is absolutely fantastic. But his prose is not amazing. Though I think that in A Scanner Darkly, he steps it up considerably.

Ah.

Sure. No problem. I don't agree with Strawson's panpsychism either, though he's pretty clear with the terms "experiential" and "non-experiential".

The zombie argument isn't particularly convincing, I don't think, I mean, we essentially have very similar examples in people who sleepwalk, or so it seems to me.

As for experiential truths, I can see why "truth", can be problematic. I suppose experiential events or manifest reality are, in some cases, less confusing.

Sure. If you want some more info on some later date on this topic, let me know.

Yes, Stoljar is interesting, but I've mainly focused on Strawson. So I can say less about him than others.

I couldn't make much of the brief note on language tucked in at the end, but that's because I have no familiarity with linguistics and Chomsky's work. — SophistiCat

Other animals, which have a communication system have a sound-to-object relation. So, for instance, if a monkey makes a particular sound, it means something "predator", "prey", "food", etc., the relation being one of a sound with an object in the external world (extra mental) world.

The case of human languages is different, the vast majority of times there is no relation between sound and object, for instance, now. The human case of language use is much more sophisticated than any animal, which includes things like recognizing that if I say "Boston is awesome", and you knew the context for which I'm using the word, you'd know I speaking of a band, not a city.

He uses this example inNew Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind:

"If I say that one of the things that concerns me is the average man and his foibles, or Joe Sixpack’s priorities, or the inner track that Raytheon has on the latest missile contract, does it follow that I believe that the actual world, or some mental model of mine, is constituted of such entities as the average man, foibles, Joe Sixpack, priorities and inner tracks?"

Etc.



What Chomsky would say is that there is something or a reason by which something emerges, such as experience, but we don't know what the reason is.

Strawson says that at bottom, whatever there is, must constitute or realize experience. In Strawson's case, then, it's not a huge puzzle as to how matter can be constituted to lead to consciousness in certain configurations, it was there all along.

It's subjective, "in here", but not it's a thing, it's more of a process. It's only an object in so far as other people see me as an object - here I'm reminded of Schopenhauer's philosophy, of us being subject and object in a a sense.

The thing is to say that it exists, and we are most acquainted with it than anything else, it's real. I want to say "objective" in the sense of reality, not in the sense of an object.

The self, the I, is a "fiction", in Hume's phrase. Don't shoot. I'm not an empiricist. By fiction, he means a construction of the mind by the imagination, but in this sense, a nation and even the individuation of objects are "fictitious".

:wink:

I think Xtrix will have a good time arguing with you.

I think you and I disagree on many, many things including most of philosophy and politics. Also in ways of expressing our opinions, I try to be a bit less intense. Not always. Doesn't make me better or worse, just a style.

That just makes the world go round.

I'm having a Dudeism vibe now, and I like it. By all means, fire away, I'll be having a metaphysical White Russian and chill.

Cheers.