We are wayyy too far from understanding the brain to be able to say that we have an explanation for consciousness.

If the behavior of a particle is giving us serious trouble in physics, I don't think the human brain is likely to be "solved" any time soon.

Damn. That's a lot, significantly more than my family, and we live pretty comfortably.

I mean, Marx is simply just very well known, there's also the whole anarchist tradition in philosophy to consider such as Bakunin, Proudhon, etc.

It's interesting to note that, Descartes and Hume were relatively right wing figures, as was Schopenhauer. But we also have to consider cultural factors of the time, such as the Church and a different mind set too. Not that culture isn't a massive issue now.

As to your questions, well, you have a lot of freedom. You can donate to organizations and political movements and the like, find candidates that are actually good instead of typical politicians.

Nearly finished with Locke's Essay. This last bit is taxing, as he gets quite repetitive towards the end.

But, having said that, damn, what an impressive piece of work. Most of it holds up remarkably well 400 years later. Surely worth the time investment, I'm a huge fan now.

If my brain doesn't melt when I'm done, next up is:

Hume's Treatise.

Currently Reading:

Brunists Day of Wrath by Robert Coover.

We can't escape outside of our bodies to see what's out there. And even if we could, by some miracle, do so, it wouldn't change what we would consider to be valuable intrinsically.

Plainly we value things. Some things we value more than others, say we tend to value memorable experiences than staring at a wall and so on. The problem is trying to articulate a sound argument as to why X should be considered more valuable than Y.

I guess my issue is, what's the problem that's causing you to ask this question? Is it something along the lines of, "why don't people care more about politics than celebrity" or "why don't more people value art than gossip" or what?

Yeah, I remember reading about that, big woops.

Well, they're as prepared as can be. The die's been cast.

At least it'll be halfway to L2 in three days or so. It should be fully deployed a few days after that, but then calibration and getting the equipment in working condition will takes months.

Nothing compared to the wait for Pluto, but much more significant, or so we hope...

:up:

That's a lot.

But, given how much they've tested it, I doubt they'll have significant problems. So far, so good.

"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."

- David Hume

:ok:

"Our knowledge being so narrow, as I have shown, it will perhaps give us some light into the present state of our minds if we look a little into the dark side, and take a view of our ignorance, which being infinitely larger than our knowledge may serve much to the quieting of disputes, and improvement of useful knowledge...

He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not see long for instances of his ignorance...

The clearest and most enlarged understandings of thinking men find themselves puzzled and at a loss in every particle of matter... all the simple ideas we have are confined... to those we receive from corporeal objects by sensation...

But how much these few and narrow inlets are disproportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings, will not be hard to persuade those who are not so foolish as to think their span the measure of all things...

But to say and think there are no such, because we conceive nothing of them, is no better an argument than if a blind man should be positive in it, that there was no such thing as sight and colors, because he had no manner of idea of any such thing, nor could by any means frame to himself any notions about seeing.

The ignorance and the darkness that is in us no more hinders nor confines our knowledge that is in others, than the blindness of a mole is an argument against the quicksightedness of an eagle."

- John Locke

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.3.22

What's the technically most difficult part, is it this deployment or is it something upcoming?

Good to see the mission going as planned.

It's what we are most intimately acquainted with out of all phenomena, but is most difficult to say anything which is not trivial or obvious.

Being stuck to this, it seems to me that thinking is an activity of the brain, which accompanies self-reflection and is carried out almost constantly in waking life, and if you count dreams too, then it appears as if we think most of our lives.

When we say we had a thought, we imply we are taking out a slice of the activity of thinking and articulating it specifically, and so it "freezes" thinking in place.

As for "philosophy", this becomes terminological more than factual, and we tend to say that certain types of thoughts pertain to issues continuing to the beginning of humanity: what is a self, what is the will, what is an object, what is the right thing to do, what is experience, and so on.

It's interesting. I mean, if anyone take some gas or drug that makes them feel like they're having a deep experience, does that make it any less significant? Not attributing this to you, by the way,

Sure, you may write non-sense - it also happens when people have deep dreams, that is, writing something silly. But I wonder if someone having a "genuine" would not write something similar at the moment of the experience.

But even if it did happen like this, I think this points to a distinction between the moment of experience and the way we reflect on it when feeling "normal", two different "worlds" as it were.

The question would be, if these experiences actually tell you something deep about the world or something deep about the mind, which is a part of the world, sure, but not the world itself, in a way.

These issues of loss of ego, I think I can understand them, I've been close to having such experiences. They were quite powerful when I had them, but, I cannot imbue them with more significance than the moment I had them, in terms of me saying something like "the world is essentially spiritual" or "seeing the mind of God" or how fleeting everything is.

I think people can confuse the moment of the experience with some deep truth. But, I may be wrong here.

It can be a difficult topic. I don't have a problem with the notion of objectivity, namely giving reasons or looking for causes that can be found in nature. What causes something to heat up? The molecules speed up in the object, creating heat. That's an objective property of the world.

As for the idea of "the One", perhaps this can be illuminating in certain instances for the individual capable of having these experiences.

My intuition is not so much that we can't be objective, we can in many instances, but I tend to believe that there is a deeper cause for phenomena which cause things in nature, which we cannot conceptualize. I think this grounds the relations we see, but we don't know or understand the nature of this relation.

Which is why we always keep asking "why" questions.

Sure, it's not as if denying a personal experience or even a kind of bias in philosophical orientation, will help you see things more accurately. I mean, in some cases it might, many times though, one reaches ones point of view through personal experience.

I just don't see how we could even go about trying to find a perspective-less view to see things as they are in a natural state, not affected by any representations. But then are there "things" left at all?

It's very obscure territory.

I don't know. Maybe.

Then again, it might also be the case that in simply having a perspective, intelligent species cannot, as it were, get out of a perspective to view nature from a "view from nowhere", as Nagel puts it, to see how things are without an interpreting mind of some kind.

I'd guess that I could say that such a species could have more certainty than what we can achieve, but perhaps not perfect certainty. However, this is pure speculation.

In the empirical world, there are no guarantees in regard to final evidence, much less to "ultimate statements or judgments" about the nature of the world and the relationship we may have with it via our knowledge.

It's been established since Newton, explored by Locke, Hume and Priestley (among others), that our innate ability of understanding does not reach such high ambitions as understanding the world nor of being able to give an account for it that we can intuitively comprehend.

It's not impossible that another intelligent species somewhere else in the universe (of they exist), could have such a capacity of understanding which we lack. But we're stuck with what we have, which is plenty.

It's true, it seems defining free will causes some people to think one is going against the laws of nature. As if we knew that much about them to rule out that determinism must always follow, or that the idea of tyechism, or absolute chance, as Peirce said, is not something that could be considered as part of nature.

But why make it so difficult? Freedom is the ability to do so and so. It's situation-dependent and rarely as radical as someone ignoring all morality and killing people for fun.

Either we can do so and so in X circumstance, or we choose not to. We can be prevented from doing something by force or by moral reasoning.

Freedom is about being (as Descartes and Leibniz phrase it) "inclined and suggested" to act appropriately given a situation, but not forced to do so. I could speak about the colour of my shirt at length, but it's not relevant to the discussion. And so on.

Ethics would be kind of pointless if free will is not accepted (in some form).

Law would dish out punishment or reward, but the reasons given wouldn't make sense. Because even if you say you're doing it for societal purposes, one is assuming that people have a choice in obeying the law.

If they have no choice in obeying or rejecting the law, then it's as if the law did not exist.

I agree. And those who deny it assume we do have some form of it.

Otherwise, why argue to make a point? There's no reason to, there are only causes.

If they do argue, they assume I'm willing to change my views. But if I'm willing to change my views, I have to judge and choose each reason accordingly.

I think so too.

Why accept reasons though? There's no reason a person was killed, there's no reason to judge, it just happens.

If you remove free will for everyone, then there's not even a point in going to trial. Either get locked up immediately or not.

If there's no freedom, then it's kind of "involuntary manslaughter", there was no choice. And the judge and jury have no choice either. They do or do not put them in jail, for no reason.

I think such views make the law redundant.

I suspect that despite your comments to the contrary, the existence of free will, will (no pun) arise.

But, putting that aside, and assuming there isn't, there's no answer. For you could argue that, given no free will, I as judge, have no choice but to hold you accountable for your actions, given the risks involved in letting you go.

On the other hand, given that you are not responsible for what you did, then it makes no sense to me as a judge to punish you, because what happened could not be avoided, and locking you up wouldn't would be unnecessary punishment for an unavoidable outcome, so I'll be gracious and let you go.

But these options don't really make sense, so the assumption of no free will has to be modified or admitted.

Well, it kind of depends on what dualism one espouses. This article argues that some people are what are called substance dualists: there are two kinds of stuff in the world one which known and understood, the physical (and this is false) and one which is not understood the mental or spiritual.

I've said this too many times here to go into details again, but, first of all, this physical stuff which is claimed is known so well, isn't, we postulate 95% of the universe as being made of dark matter and dark energy, we don't know what they are, but if we don't postulate that, then the 5% we can describe, doesn't hold.

If you then actually examine what the evidence says, you discover that physical stuff is waaaay stranger than our intuitions of it being "solid, touchable stuff", in fact, it's almost completely insubstantial.

What's also insubstantial, that is, not touchable and strange? The mind, which we don't know much about, other than we have it and are acquainted with it better than anything else.

So out the window with substance dualism. Now we have the world, with many properties (the mental, the biological, the chemical, the sociological). So one can be a monist-pluralist and say there's many kinds of things which are at bottom made of the same stuff, or you can artificially say that the mental is not physical and somehow has to be fundamentally different from the rest of the world.

Nothing follows if there is another life after this one in terms of monism.

How is identifying as a Democrat equal to CNN being left? They always endorse the "centrist candidate", Obama, Clinton, Biden etc., which would be called "moderate Republicans" by the early 1990's standards.

They (CNN, MSNBC) loathe Sanders and AOC and other leftists, meaning economic leftist which is where power really belongs. If a person is pro-choice or for legalizing drugs, OK.

Democrats today would easily be to the right of most right wing parties in big European counties in economic policy.

Now, if you mention Democracy Now! or TYT or some other non corporate news, then I'd agree.

CNN leaning left is a bit like saying The Washington Post attacks Bezos frequently.

Yes that's true. Though as you suggest, we don't know if it's something specifically beautiful about the faces or some other factor. Babies might have more base reactions such as pleasant or unpleasant before they develop an idea as complex as beauty. Maybe.

Well, there are those arguments from symmetry, which seem common-sensical more than evolutionary, but I'm not sure that says much.

Neutral faces? I suppose these are cases of closer to neutral or further away. But I was replying to the idea that beauty being the lack of ugliness. It seems to me beauty is something positive.

Aesthetics is really hard. My initial idea is that the "beautiful", either a human face, a song or a painting is related more intimately with something positive than merely speaking about the absence of ugliness.

Absence of ugliness would lead me to think of neutrality, instead of beauty.

Of course, we add "more to what is actually there" in almost everything. What a human being considers a beautiful face may be (to some extent) subjective and obviously not shared by a squirrel or a cat. What is beautiful is something which excites that inner part of us that finds beauty in things.

I don't understand, why is it that we have to be able to see both sides of the limit, to know you're reaching (or have reached) a limit?

I don't think this follows, nor do I think it is the correct way of approaching this problem. A few examples should suffice: we cannot conceive, conceptualize, the size of the universe. Heck, we have serious trouble thinking about how far away Pluto is from Earth, not to mention the universe.

We run out of brain power if we think about how long it would take us to travel to Proxima Centauri. We can write down "4.26 light years", but it's way beyond our capacity to grasp, unlike say, I have three flowers or lemons in my hands.

The others are far easier to point out: we have no clue how the brain produces thought. Nor how willed action is possible.

So we already see things we can't proceed in our understanding of, but there are ways to work within these limits. Beyond that, we can't even ask nor even frame sensible questions, which might be sensible to another species.

Alternating between:

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

New Essays on Human Understanding by G.W. Leibniz

And, of course, fiction:

Sunflower by Tex Gresham

Very, very cool. Everything perfect so far. Good thing we don't have to wait too long to get some data, some 6 months or so, which is not bad in terms of astronomical time.

I suspect that we might have to revise some of the best theories we have after we see results from this one. If I had to guess, either the big bang did not occur quite as we think it did, or we may appreciate better what dark matter/energy may be - that is, if it exists.

It's going to be awesome to watch, no matter what.

I think smoking a lot of weed made me a Heideggerian for a while

Deeper experiences with shrooms and the like suggested to me that they could be used to justify or anchor any belief to anything you may want to believe is true.

Which can be misleading. But if it helps you deal with stuff, or gives you insight, then that's good.

Concentration of power, probably.

You should probably include the threat of nuclear war to that list.

but it’s more about selfhood in the sense one perceives oneself right? — Ignoredreddituser

Yes. It's how it feels like to be a subject of experience, which is the only real clue we have of this idea, which we then attribute to other people.

The objection from how I read it has to do more with an objective fluxing so it’s probably more in like with Strawson’s episodic view. — Ignoredreddituser

It's hard. If you press me, I might say that it's not objective, not an "ontological fact". I think it's epistemic, pertaining to how we view this phenomena, which doesn't make it "less real", just that "selves" are not mind independent facts of the world.

In any case, I don't see how we can attribute "causal connection", strictly speaking, to a person. For it could well happen that a person who does something, in another instant can become another person, say they get hit in the head, or have multiple personalities or acts very differently in front of different people.

Galen Strawson goes over this in his own philosophical thought, as well as proposing a good
(edit) interpretation (edit) to Locke's thought.

He distinguishes (essentially) between two types of "selves": diachronic and episodic. It seems these are the two poles in which people fit into and of course, some are in between.

Diachronic people take selves to be long lived periods of time, in which it would be intuitive for them to say "that was me 10 years ago on vacation".

Episodics, on the other hand, have no such notion of continuity in that, after doing any thing, they don't feel as if it was them who did what they did, or thought what they thought.

If this is the case for a good deal of people, there is no fact of the matter on these topics. What grounds personal identity includes many factors outside causality, including other people, culture, the type of person you are, etc.

Sure, but there is also a clear sense in which there is a difference between introspected "contents" and publicly available objects. In any case the point of this thread is to determine whether Dennett is correct in his characterization of phenomenology as consisting in mere introspection. — Janus

Ah, then I misread the OP, I thought you were asking if we thought that phenomenology was merely introspecting into one's mind, not to evaluate Dennett's critique.

I don't profit from him nor can I talk much about him without getting very annoyed, so, I'll take my bow.

Apologies for my clumsy reading.

Oh yeah, there's plenty of exciting new technology around the corner.

Well, it's kind of like saying eyes are required for vision, and vision requires eyes. How do we know that the eye isn't the puppet that keeps our sight going?

It's the simple observation, observed throughout all history, that a person whose brain is sliced in half, or pierced through with a bullet or arrow, or a head rolling from a guillotine, results in a bit of loss of awareness, and reports of experience cease coming from those (dead) persons.

There are many things we do not know about mind and how it relates to brain and the relationship between the world and the mind/brain, which is crucial, and is not well understood. And we can attempt to frame questions in terms of what types of experiences we can and cannot have, given that we are human beings, not gods.

We can also speak about "things in themselves" - negative noumena - which is as far deep as I think reason can go in terms of foundations for experience.

If you want "something more", then you can perfectly well adopt substance dualism and admit of the existence of the soul, in addition to body, adapted for modern times.

I think we have plenty to consider with what we have.

I'm sorry about your chronic pain, I hope it gets better.

A brain is necessary for experience, if you remove the brain, you can't have experience. People may claim that brain activity has ceased, but if people are reporting NDE, then clearly brain activity is still going on.

Unless they would be willing to say that experience does not depend on brain, but on something else, like blood circulation, or something like the soul of times gone by. But these ideas of soul don't hold up anymore, it was vitally united with the issue of God and all that context.

If they can report things other people in the room are doing, then a serious, medical/profesional account must be given, otherwise, to quote Hume:

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

More real than reality translates to more real than what there is. What's more real than what there is? You'd need a new approach to make this question intelligible.

You can say that there are different ways of experiencing the world, it is not inconceivable that an alien species could see aspects of the world we cannot experience.

Or you can ask what is it that grounds reality.

NDE's don't mean much if there's still activity in the brain, no different than a dream. What would be surprising is experiences once there is absolutely no brain activity left. But nobody's come back to say anything, so, don't hold your breathe.

And please, no gratuitous, unargued Dennett bashing. — Janus

:cry:



This is clearly one place in which @Joshs is at home and can teach us many things (agree with him or not) as he usually does.

My simple-minded take would be that speaking in terms of subjective and objective, while fine in our ordinary dealings with the world, can be problematic in this area of philosophy.

For there is a clear sense in which what we experience and try to analyze is subjective, it is "object knowledge", available to subjects.

There is another sense in which it is objective, you see these letters here and so does everyone else who may be reading them, likewise you can see your laptop (or phone or Ipad or whatever) and hence there is no rooms for reasonable disagreement.

I understand introspection as focusing on what my mind is doing, try to find "depth" in this "blooming buzzing confusion", but I think (some) phenomenology, at least, is carefully attending to and revealing what objects look like to us, much in a way an artist can do with her art.

Then we notice some aspects we took for granted. It's good in so far as people find this informative. I do. Others don't.