And in a few years when they've come further into their own and the US is further into decline they can call the shots. We aren't there yet. — frank

Only economically, which is why there is (or was) all this brouhaha with tic-toc and Huawei, Silicon Valley doesn't want competition.

But militarily, it's not even a competition. The US wins by stupendous margins.

Why childish?

I don't think the US would like to have China occupy Guantanamo and have their navy patrolling the seas between Cuba and Florida.

I don't like the Chinese government much and I think Taiwan should have autonomy. But what I like or don't like is irrelevant to the situation.

The Taiwan issue is extremely delicate. I fear some mistake could trigger a nuclear war, which is not at all some crazy imagining of mine.

High and tight.

To be fair, we proceeded to have a discussion and I think we reached a kind of agreement. Which I'm forgetting now. :sweat:

so the question — for me — was whether those ideas are the same, or related to each other, or what. For instance, some location words like “here” are flexible in their boundaries, and can encompass as little as my knee to as much as the whole universe. — Srap Tasmaner

These words - concepts really - have some overlap related to location, trivially. We have similar, though probably not exact, intuitions as to when here becomes a there. I have a rubber ball in my hand, it is here now as I am about to throw it, when does it become something which is no longer here?

Is it at the moment in which I no longer feel it in my hand? Or does it have to be on the floor for me to consider it over there? We decide, ultimately.

But why is it so tempting, and can we approach the idea of location in such a way that we are not tempted to think of the universe as there, somewhere? It’s one of those perfect nine-year-old philosophy questions that we are too sophisticated to understand. — Srap Tasmaner

I can only say that although I am a part of the universe, I can't be identical with it. If you want to use the word "universe" to refer to the Earth, and "here" specifically, you are free to do so and not wrong at that.

It may be that questions like these blur the borders between questions we can ask and questions which we can't ask, because we lack the capacity to articulate and understand them.

No, no, a club. The International Brotherhood of Amateur Philosophers. That’s a thing that’s not me, but we can’t define my location relative to it. Or relative to 7. Or relative to ‘conformity’. Or relative to July 3rd, 1807. — Srap Tasmaner

Not to the number 7 or conformity, we agree.

Hmmm. How far off is the International Brotherhood of philosophers from you? 1000 miles to the east, 200 kilometers to the west? There is a relation here.

As to July 3rd, 1807, you didn't exist, I assume. But go back far enough in (space)time, and we would find that date. I am closer to Tuesday than I am to Wednesday and quite far away from July 3rd, 1807.

But not just as a body, but as my body, and only so long as I am a going concern. Once I’m dead, what you’ll call ‘his body’ doesn’t tell you where I am. — Srap Tasmaner

Correct. So experience is crucial here and we don't know if experience could exist absent a body, which is spatio-temporally located somewhere.

My location, then, is to be defined relative to a thing that is not me. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I think so.

But not just any thing. If I am a member of a club, my location cannot be defined relative to the club. Why not? — Srap Tasmaner

I assume you're using the club as a metaphor for the universe. I'd ask, how do I know I'm a member of the club? Am I the club itself? Well, no. If I was the club itself, I couldn't ask questions about it, because I would be the club, presumably lacking consciousness and contextual awareness.

For me to be a part of the club, I have to be quite isolated from it, enough to form some kind of cognition that allows me to contemplate these things.

Not where my body is, but where I am; I am not my body, but a person, a living, thinking organism. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree that you are not your body.

Tell me this though: If I am in my room, intensely daydreaming about a novel, where am I? I am not present to the situation of my body, as when someone says "he's not here at the moment" or "he's in Neptune", meaning he's not here with us at this moment, paying attention.

But if you insist that this makes no sense, because I am were my body is, not where my thoughts are at any given moment, then the body becomes an essential component of the identity of here-ness we are trying to understand.

So the natural thing is to start with a location that has an extra feature, as my location does, by being an instance of ‘here’. And that seems doubly right as an entry point because here is always where we are and the universe is always where we are. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmm. We have a location here on Earth, as I understand it, the Universe doesn't really have a location, you can't say it's to the right of nothing or behind something else. Unless there are other universes, welp, we don't know about that.

Similar to when we say, there's no up or down in space, this is what we can't help but bring to the world.

That’s not the way my here works, because I know what neither of those does, that I’m spatial and must have a location, and that location is always at least ‘here’, whatever it is in relation to other things. — Srap Tasmaner

It doesn't make sense to me to say that my jacket or phone knows its location. They just are.

So you're tying space to a location, here, namely where your body is. There is a sense my body is in my city, in my house, but I could be off in metaphysical space, thinking about "thing in themselves" or thinking about the novel I am currently reading. So where would I be, if I'm totally lost daydreaming?

at least by then we should have a little more to say about what that relation is and how it works. How much could we say about the relation we tried to start with? — Srap Tasmaner

Which is, the relation of my location... in the universe, on Earth? The relation is between me and something that is not me, in some very vague sense.

I'm not saying you don't have a legitimate puzzle here, these things happen. I'm not understanding the problem too well. That makes sense too, many of these puzzles are hard to even talk about. In my experience.

We don't know if such a thing is possible. There's no instances of consciousness absent body and dreams reflect stuff we got from the world, in terms of seeing other people and ordinary objects. We then do crazy stuff in dreams, but we cannot say that a person lacking actual experience could have such dreams.

We could be a brain in a vat, we cannot know. But we need senses to get data for our brains. The vat would stimulate the senses too, as senses all go back to some process in the brain. But if we lack all of them, we won't have a world at all. About the world, maybe, maybe not.

Our common sense intuitions do not reflect the nature of the world mind-independently. Then again, if no one is around to ask any questions and recognize things, what sense is there in talking about a world? It's tricky.

The second option, taking ourselves as independent and thinking of location relative to us, seems to have some promise. I was confused at first that you and Miller seemed almost immediately to start talking about solipsism, but it makes sense if that’s how you see starting from us.

I think I didn’t see solipsism here because I’m not allowing myself to assume that location is relational, or at least not relational in a way that I already understand. — Srap Tasmaner

Funny you mention that. I did not have solipsism in mind, but (paradoxically or non-sensically as this sounds) I think if we are to interpret the nature of a creature, you do treat that creature as if it were the only one in existence. That's why when they mapped out our DNA sequence, they only used the DNA of one person (I believe, please correct me if I'm wrong).

We then generalize from single organism to others, under the (rational) assumption that they are like the initial creature studied.

The last sentence in this quote, is unclear to me.

In essence I’ve been arguing that the title of the thread, “Where are we?”, is exactly the way into answering “Where is the universe?” by turning it into “Where is here?” first of all, and thinking about location (what is ‘here’?) this way first, but knowing that we’ll need to end up with a sense of location that also works for ‘there’ and ‘that stuff’ too. (Does it need to be the same sense? Unclear.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think so. But look at your own examples, you relate "Where is here" to thinking about location. But in order to make sense of here, you also have to account for "there" and that "stuff". I guess I'm not getting what's the puzzle you have with the relational aspect of this.

I mean, if you can, tell me something that isn't relational and then maybe we can proceed. I can't think of a single example. Or maybe you have some different concept of relation than what I'm using.

Quite a bit of good stuff to go into, I'll pick out the relevant stuff.

(1) Where is everything?
(1a*) Where is everywhere? — Srap Tasmaner

Some things can be put in the forms of questions: "why is there nothing?", "what isn't a thing"?, but these don't have answers. So we say something trivial like, (1) everywhere, (1a) all around us. That leaves us with blank stares. We have to produce a question that could be given some kind of answer.

The universe, too, is wherever it is, and since we’re in it, that’s where we are. Or, maybe better, the universe is wherever we are. — Srap Tasmaner

Both are fine.

‘being somewhere’ is only ‘being somewhere (relative to something else)’? That is not clear to me at all — Srap Tasmaner

Well, what then? I can say "I am here", that doesn't tell you much. It's true that relations themselves don't explain the question, but if we don't include them, then we can't speak of where we are in any sense I can think of.

I know that I must be somewhere because I am spatial, and insofar as I am at all, I am located. What is that sense of being located, that’s what I want to get it, and what I think “Where is the universe?” can force you to confront. I don’t think you get to say that I know I must be located only in the sense of being located relative to other things, because we cannot claim already to understand what it means for those things to be located somewhere. — Srap Tasmaner

That sense of being located is what you feel, when you ask yourself where you are. You specify what comes to mind as you think of this question. If you don't include a relational aspect, then I can't make any sense of how to even begin.

I don't think that covers everything at all. But I also don't know how to proceed. This seems to me intimately related to the issue of self-consciousness.

And obviously we can’t say where the universe is in relation to anything else, but we can still say that it’s right here, or that it’s ‘all around us’. — Srap Tasmaner

The concept "universe" is relative to me, the creature asking the question.

I may be part of the universe, but I can scrutinize it in a way that it seems unable to do, absent someone asking a question.

And maybe the conversational emphasis is the right one. What does it mean to be the sort of thing that has a physical location? That’s a defining characteristic of us, but what does it mean to have a location? Can my having a location only be described in terms of the location of other things or beings that have a location? That still doesn’t say what it is for anything — those things, me, us — to have a location. The simplest way to block even thinking you can answer my location question by talking about the location of other things, is to ask “Where is everything?”

And that’s a very good question. Not ‘where am I in relation to (something else)’, but what is ‘being somewhere’? — Srap Tasmaner

Raymond Tallis writes about this in some detail, I'm forgetting the book now, or books.

I don't think that's possible to answer without postulating a self-referential entity and this itself is highly puzzling. In some sense, I have to be different from myself in order to refer to me and my location. For if I am completely in myself, I don't see how I could recognize other things at all. I would just be a passive creature, taking in whatever sense data the world happens to throw at me.

It depends on the relation you want to clarify. If you ask such a general question like "where are we?", you have the choice of narrowing the topic down. So, in one instance, we are on a planet in the universe. Speaking more narrowly, we are in a galaxy in the universe, the Milky Way. To be more specific, we are in a solar system containing eight planets and we are the third planet close to the sun.

We don't have evidence to say that we are in a multiverse, that is only speculation based on a mathematical supposition, which may or may not be true. From here you could specify an arbitrary line on a map and call that "your country", furthermore you can state if you belong in a town or city, all the way down to your address. That's where you are in a sense.

We now enter tricky territory because you'll say "I am here" as opposed to over there. Where is here exactly? Do you want to give an exact longitude or latitude? Are you next to a chair or a table? Are you the same person all the time, otherwise looking for you will have a temporal characteristic. And so on. In absence of a relation to something else, you can't say to be anywhere.

it's no wonder it eventually devolves into scientism and capitalism. — Xtrix

I mean, this approach has its merits. Him stressing the present at hand and our day to day absorbed dealing in the world and points out (as I read him, nowhere near yours or Joshs or Janus' level) that it's only on occasion that we stop and deal with items as objects.

Nevertheless, while we did get capitalism which shows a kind of detachment from nature in many instances, we also got science, modern philosophy, art and much else of good value. The scientism, I don't think has much to do with this, that is taking into account time.

It's the way science works, it advances through a specific mode of investigation. And a good one for what it aims to do: provide theoretical explanations of the world.

I think scientism has more to do with us being stuck in physics for a long time and not properly incorporating QM, as Russell and Whitehead did, as they later described the world in terms of events and not objects. Events "temporalize" everything we deal with. But many others still speak of objects and speak of "mind" and "matter", as if those are metaphysical distinctions, they're not.

So we have to take this into consideration, apart from our ordinary experience of the world. I believe the "manifest image" as described by Sellars, is something that needs to be fleshed out. Raymond Tallis (somewhat a Heideggerian to some degree) has done good work here.

Sorry if I was out of topic, but I had to comment.

Enjoy, I'll be joining you guys soon! :victory:

It all depends on how you set about in thinking about God. As you point out, we have the usual all powerful all knowing arguments, which don't make any sense, that is if we apply that idea of God to the world we live in. So there's no reason for belief.

I know there are others here who really know Mainländer really well, they can read the original text in German.

I tend to like his idea, of a metaphorical God a "being" that created the universe. I like the idea of a "simple substance", the most elemental thing we could think, which proceeded to expand into the universe we now know. How can we think of a "simple substance" or "simple being" or the simplest possible state of existence? Perhaps the singularity is what it could be, or something even more simple.

Then we can use the metaphoric name God, to whatever it is that "caused", "began" or whatever word one wants to use, the universe. But it wouldn't have any moral properties.

So, absent religious people talking about God, I don't see how to proceed here.

Well, in that case it makes sense I suppose. It's not as if there's some hard criteria that forbids people from being pragmatists, though Rorty does distort the term a bit, to my eyes.

I like to think I’m intense with everything I care about. :strong: — Xtrix

Oh no, you most certainly are. :sweat:

Just that there's more room in politics to get really upset at some people. It's a bit harder (though not impossible) to get pissed of at someone for not agreeing on a word, or if tree exists or not. I fall more into the latter category, especially with some rather niche topics.

In any case, thanks for the conversation. Great threads, as usual. :ok:

I'm not convinced of that, though I do agree that this has to do a lot with nomenclature, but I'll drop it. I guess we're not connecting here. Just like you get intense in political stuff, I get involved in these type of arguments. :cool:

That a colour is not a "thing" does not mean a colour is nothing. A colour is a quality.

Again, do people say "I saw a red" or "I'm seeing a yellow"? No, because they colours aren't recognized as things.

I've resisted reading Heidegger although quite a bit has filtered through in these debates and from various readings I've done — Wayfarer

Why resist?

Interesting. I never knew what you though of Heidegger. He has useful things to say, I think that is not too controversial if you just read B&T with just a little sympathy.

But I agree with you, there is something in his use of being that can be potentially misleading.

I think I get that. But eternity is a bit much. The "saving grace" for people in this world, is that there is no hell that exists which they must endure forever, for at least they can count that eventually they will be at peace from troubles.

But, one can still recognize futility and try to do something, just for the sake of doing it.



That's a bit like my thinking about it. I mean, say the gods told me, you're going to push that boulder up that mountain forever. I'd be like, really? I can stay still, try to go to sleep. Eventually I guess I'd realize that pushing the boulder is the one thing I can do, along with what you're pointing to.

The forever part of the myth makes it less relevant, in my eyes. I don't think that pushing the boulder till' you die of old age is the same as pushing it forever.

Don't tempt Trump. — James Riley

He tempts himself.

Of course they are both bitches compared to Putin. — James Riley

You should add Erdogan and Netanyahu to that list. Though this latter one is gone for now.

They're all disgusting. Putin may be worse, but beyond a point, it's just degeneracy.

That asshole, Bolsonaro, is a monster. When he cast his vote against the illegal coup ousting Dilma Rousseff (the previous president) he said he did so in honor of her rapist during the Brazilian military dictatorship.

And much, much more. He's considerably worse than Trump as a person.

Schopenhauer who took it a step further and asserted positively that the thing in itself, that which is beyond human perception and concepts, is an undifferentiated unity — jamalrob

:love:

I mean, it's one thing if they condemn you (or anyone) for 1000 years to push a damn boulder up the mountain. Then I can sort of understand being happy once you get the boulder to the top, because you defied the gods for that day.

But if the punishment is eternal, I cannot imagine a situation in which someone could be happy, even if Camus supposes this to be the case.

Is it no-thing? I would say it's something. It "is." — Xtrix

It's not a thing, it's a quality. It "is not", if predicated about the world, not about our way of interpreting it.

Reason is telling you one thing, that there is "the one", the senses are telling you there are many. When these are in conflict with each other, trust reason, no matter how absurd the consequences may be.

Today, we know that colours aren't in objects and that deep down, things aren't made of small impenetrable participles, but of probabilities and strange quantum vacuums. Our senses tell us this can't be right, just look at the world, but reason tells us to trust the evidence.

There's a lot more to say about this part, but that's the rough idea, as I understand it.

The only problem here is if you get stuck on the wrong idea, Einstein refused to believe QM was probabilistic, he had the wrong idea, though it's sensible, it's not correct.

"Red" isn't a thing? Of course it is. A thing is a being. Red, concepts, numbers, music, feelings, dirt, justice, words, Proust, and Boston are all beings. — Xtrix

Is red a thing? I think we can say there are red things, or I can say look at the red object or red landscape, but I'm unclear if red is a thing, if by "thing" we have in mind something in the world. Red is a quality. Is quality a thing? A quality is a quality. You can say a quality is a thing...

But, I don't recall someone saying "I saw a red" or "I saw a yellow", they add "thing" to it usually. Meaning that red, yellow, blue, etc. aren't thought of as things.

I remember that passage of Heidegger's. I think he makes interesting observations in his unique language.

I don't think it's necessarily "wrong" to separate the property "red" from the apple, but then we're off into secondary and primary qualities. Locke wasn't an idiot -- there's plenty of merit to this view. All I'm saying is that the term "being" certainly applies to all of this. — Xtrix

Yeah sure, Locke was no idiot. So essentially everything name-able is a being?

Yes indeed. How could it be otherwise? Unless, of course, we're taking "being" to mean something more restricted, like "empirically verified" or "physical" or something to that effect. But that's not how I'm using it. Any particular being has being. — Xtrix

It's too broad. I'm far from being a prescriptivist with language use, but if the word is used that amply, its meaning can lead to mistakes.

I think it can obscure the distinction between red as I perceive it in my own experience and the red attributed to the object. The object (so far as we know) has no colour. But it doesn't make much sense to me to say that the object has red being and that in addition to that or separate from that I have red being experience. The apple has no red being, we add that on to the apple.

You could say that what I'm doing is forcing the subject-object distinction on what we should take for granted, the world. But if we are, in addition to analyzing the world, also speak about word use, then this distinction is going to have to rise. Unless you can say why it's a wrong way to think about colour experience.

[thinking]...it defines the human being (rational animal, animal with reason/language) as a subject that thinks and the world (nature) as its object. — Xtrix

We have certain capacities to do something with the world. One kind of "thinking", whatever this may be, is to try and find what's the nature of the world, mind independently. The best approach we have for that are theories as postulated by the sciences, as (I believe remembering) you say.

But thinking goes way beyond the sciences. You only need to consider the arts and everything in it, which is an awful lot, and you can see all kinds of approaches.

As it currently stands we need a world for the subject. But not as a matter of principle. If we had enough intelligence to create a vat, we could stimulate the world exactly as we perceive it. That's important, I think.

Tables and rivers are beings. In that respect, they do indeed share a commonality: being. — Xtrix

Do ghosts have being? Does Winston Smith have being? What about that red colour I caught off the able, does that have being?

I'll use exist, for clarity. Tables and rivers exist, we interpret them as such. They do not have the commonality of existing absent people. And them existing, do not show what's common to "existing", for in a sense rivers were here before people, but not tables.

To associate Quine with pragmatism and oppose this to Heidegger somehow seems awfully strange to me. Heidegger is far more "pragmatic" than Quine in any sense of the word. — Xtrix

I'd agree actually. Sometimes Quine is lumped in with the pragmatists, I'm not sure why.

Not bad at all, more narrow, no implication on quality.

Yeah, she's right about Rorty.

I don't know Quine well either, but his focus seem to me to be more narrow than the traditional figures. Might be wrong about that though.

That's fair. And I also agree that B&T (and some of his lectures) is quite better than his Contributions and latter work, which I don't even get the point of.



You mean the Wittgenstein of the Investigations? Sure, pragmatism can be used for him too, and in some respects he could be one. Then again, that's stretching pragmatism a bit much.

They called Rorty a Pragmatist as well as Quine. I don't think Peirce or Dewey would've agreed with that. Not sure about James in this case.

As I interpret the topic, it's to try to give an account of lived "reality", in such a manner that what is taken for granted can be seen as a stupendous achievement of human beings capacity to order and structure this world.

What we take to be a simple rock depends on many factors, including language, social convention, perception, categorization, recurrence of experience on the same object and so on. We can, for instance, isolate as aspect of the rock, say it's grey colour (qualia) and somehow conclude that the colour is not fundamental to the existence of a rock.

Likewise, we predict this never before seen object, a rock, based on previous examples found in similar situations in which, based on our experience with such objects, we are able to conclude that this other object is a rock too. What's included? A certain texture, a consistency of the object, its location in our environment (it would be strange, but not impossible, to find a rock on top of a flower, for instance) as well as our use of it.

Do we use rocks as decorations, weapons and so on. If we have no conceivable use for an object, we probably could not categorize it as anything.

This can be thought of in the framework of "disclosure of being", or analyzing what's in "the given of experience" or consider that it is a construction of several categories, such as Peirce thinks it is. And so on, depending on which author you tend to think is on the right track.

That's the rough idea.

The classical ones. Probably more Peirce and Dewey than James.

I have in mind C.I. Lewis and am currently re-reading his Mind and the World Order. Instead of being, he speaks of the "given". It's a lot to say now and am currently working my way through it.

The point being that yes, he often complicates things without needing to do so.

Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World is quite good. He is pretty clear.

Another thing is if you find the whole account convincing. I used to be a huge fan, but less so now. Like Banno said, a lot of it is complicating simple things.

However, in fairness, I do think that on certain occasions his way of speaking about things is unique and special, in a sense that I can't explain if pressed.

In general the pragmatists do a better job, I think, though Joshs will very much disagree.