This is debated here?

Not even Descartes would have doubted to take the vaccine. :snicker:

Pretty much.

Yes it is. It's essentially Strawson's Real Materialism (minus the panpsychism), the view that everything that exists is physical. But this does not mean that everything is physicSal. It takes consciousness to be the most immediate fact of which we are acquainted with. Thing is, consciousness is a wholly physical phenomena.

It basically ends up saying that EVERYTHING is physical. Which might make the term meaningless. I just take it to mean that physical stuff is baffling.

I'm afraid I don't follow.

Why would matter (or physical stuff) count as more real than mind? Mind is a configuration of physical stuff. So far as we can tell, all there is, is physical stuff. It suggests than the physical is much, much richer than what we initially suppose.

Of course, my view is naturalistic which claims that everything is a natural processes. If you think there are supernatural phenomena, then we probably won't agree.

Now that our intuitive notion of body has collapsed, the rest remains terminological - which does not imply it is trivial, at least not to my eyes. "The physical" and "the material" are essentially the same thing in philosophical usage. As for what's "more real", that's a bit hard to navigate.

I think we can say what feels more intuitive or more immediate, such as our mental properties. But I wouldn't say (and I'm not implying that you do) that my mind is more real than my body. As far as we can tell, mind is the result of a certain configuration of matter. So it's not like we have the mental on the one hand and the physical on the other.

Neither really.

But I don't think you can have a large society without some degree of planning - how central it should be, is hard to say. We probably want less central planning than more of it, as a rule, but I think one can make a case for exceptions.

As for markets. Well what is a market? It's spoken of frequently, but it's not clear to me what they are. Nevertheless, I think they have a place in society. Preferably a much smaller one than what they currently have. But I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with having a market in a society.

It's a bit too abstract to say much that doesn't already involve presuppositions and ideological baggage, which we all have.

I'm a bit of a broken record, but I believe Chomsky has provided ample evidence for what I'm arguing. The mind-body problem was a metaphysical concern - about the nature of the world - back in Descartes time, so 17th century. The reason Descartes postulated a "res cogitans" is because he could not use his materialism to explain certain mental phenomena.

But it turns out Descartes' (and other scientists and philosophers of the time) materialism is false, Newton showed this, that the world is not a machine (not mechanical which was what materialism meant, the universe was conceived like a giant clock based on direct contact). There is action at a distance without physical contact. So what we have is a ghostly world, not a mechanical one. The whole "ghost in the machine" is a complete reversal of what actually happened if you look at the people involved in this affair.

With no conception of body anymore, one can't formulate a metaphysical distinction - a distinction in the world - between body and anything else. At least not on these terms. So, whatever else anyone may say about this, I think it's clear that the problem is epistemic and not metaphysical.

We just don't understand how the stuff of the world could be so minded. But it is. We just have to accept it as a fact of our cognitive makeup that we can't make sense of this.

It's not so communist. Just like the USA or Europe is not capitalist.

These things don't exist.

Anyone who claims to be wise, is not.

You don't look to find it, you stumble towards it.

Not much of use can be said on this topic, I don't think. Unless you get dragged down some New Age hole of which few people manage to escape. But that's my experience anyway.

Ideally, nobody. They should all be destroyed.

In reality? Law enforcement. But this should be overlooked by a democratic committee to prevent abuse of power.

1) For understanding how power works generally, I don't think it's possible to beat Understanding Power by Chomsky. Not much more to say here.

2) To understand the Middle East, Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilization is second to none. Connected with this would be the Israel topic, of which Avi Shalaim's The Iron Wall is very comprehensive. Lots of propaganda is generally involved in this topic, I think these cut through the bs.

3) For neoliberalism Slobodian's Globalists, Jessica Whyte's Morals of the Market and Mirowski's Never Let A Serious Crisis go to Waste are eye opening. An honorary mention should be given to Joel Balkan's The New Corporation as well as to Stewart Ewen's PR!: A Social History of Spin, both books don't deal directly with this topic, but are connected with it in fundamental ways.

4) For quantum mechanics, I think Art Hobson's Tales of the Quantum is quite lucid and confident. A close second would be Rovelli's Helgoland, which is quite philosophical too. These are the least confusing books on a confusing topic that I've been able to find.

5) For a general overview of science in general and problems with almost all fields of contemporary research, John Hands' Cosmosapiens is criminally underrated. A more popular approach, less ambitious but still fun would be Sean Carrol's The Big Picture.

6) To understand the European Union Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur and Ashoka Mody's Euro Tragedy is fantastic and exasperating. The EU can be very disorienting, but these can help you get a little less lost in the topic.

7) For a very important part of the history of philosophy, often not known or ignored, Chomsky (again) points out surprising facts in his What Kind of Creatures Are We? I can't praise this small book enough, specifically the first and last essays.

8) As far as neuroscience goes, a lot of it is pretty meh, but Adam Zeman's Consciousness: A Users Guide is quite solid and level headed, whereas Stanislas Dehaene's Consciousness and The Brain is convincing. Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel is also good.

9) In terms of philosophical literature, Jim Gauer's Novel Explosives is essentially an exhilarating though challenging romp through all topics in the field, with emphasis on identity and word use. A second one, much less philosophical but still wide ranging would be A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. I prefer contemporary stuff and these stand out to me, specifically NE.

10) For philosophy in general, it's hard to point to books without one's personal bias, but, I think that Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Russell's Analysis of Matter and his An Outline of Philosophy, C.I. Lewis' Mind and World Order and Raymond Tallis' The Knowing Animal are all quite important, I think.

Of course, there is much I can add to this list, on different topics too. But one has to choose and these came to mind at this moment in time. I'm confident that I left out a few which I'll have to edit in later.

It depends how you view a machine. — Prishon

Exactly.

But that's the point, how one views a machine. We project it into nature. It doesn't follow that our projections are correct. More often than not, they're incorrect, so far as the nature of the world (including the brain as part of the world) is concerned.

Machines are something we attribute to nature. They aren't found in nature.

Action at a distance disproved the world is machine because mechanistic materialism thought the world worked like giant clock, based on contact mechanics. The idea behind this being "if we can build it, we can understand it."

But it turns out the world does not work like a giant clock, there can be action with direct mechanistic contact.

But many people still stipulate that the brain is a machine, or aspects of the universe a machine. But they aren't. Machines happen to be a common way people think about things.

Chomsky and E.A. Burrt go over this history quite thoroughly. It can be found to some extent in Russell too. The brain aspect is covered quite well by Tallis.

There are no machines in nature. This point was proved decisively when Newton discovered action at a distance, which shows that there need not be physical contact between objects for there to be motion.

Prior to that, it was thought that the world was essentially a giant clock, working in essentially a mechanistic manner.

Now with the newer physics, the world is even less machine like than ever. I don't see what is particularly computer like about the brain. People can "compute" things, and do many other things as well.

I don't think so. We have anthropomorphized machines and have in turn mechanized people. Thus we swap parts with computers. But a brain is a biological system, not a mechanical one.

It's one thing that we tend to find it easy to think of things in a computational manner on/off, etc. It's another thing to say that what we are describing is actually computational in nature. People do computations, but they do many other things as well.

I think that this is the goal of philosophy, if not one important one, to try and unify things. The question is if we're actually doing this by evoking such terms or concepts.

It's hard to say.

After spending considerable time thinking and reading on the topic, it is almost as obscure now as it was before I focused on it.

Avoiding new age stuff, I believe the most accurate thing to say about metaphysics is that it focuses on the nature of the world and attempts to capture something in it that applies to all possible experience. It's always on the verge of attempting to say something very rudimentary of what lies beyond experience too. But this last point is like swimming in lava.

So, in short, I don't think it's easy to answer this.

It seems to me that many people already are ontological pluralists. Sure, you can get the odd person who thinks that everything ultimately reduces to particles and the laws of nature, but that tells you very little.

We can stress some aspects of ontology, say, we can argue that we should think of the world in terms of events instead of on things. Or we can stress the mind dependence or mind independence of certain aspects of the world. These types of arguments would apply to all levels.

But there isn't much that can be said that applies to everything in the world. So we tend to be ontological pluralists by default.

:up:

It seems we tend to agree on most things. I'm a genetic-pessimist, which is to say I cannot help it, it's in my constitution. I think it's a minority position as people generally have an active "can-do" attitude all over the world. Generally.

But the issues you mention and climate change, plus the rarely mentioned and worst-than-ever (which is a fact, Doomsday clock is now using seconds, not minutes) situation concerning nuclear war is not connected with personal disposition.

We may speculate that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe. Maybe. But evidence here seems to suggest intelligence is not a good mutation. Intelligent creatures are quite rare in nature.

We seem to be eager to prove this speculation correct.

It's a sound option.

I think the most pressing alternatives here are idealism/materialism/neutral monism vs. eliminitavism. That's substantive, but easy to decide on, I think.

The differences between idealism vs materialism vs anything else is mostly terminological.

Probably not. The ever increasing reality of climate change is simply too bad and so little is being done which is required to mitigate (not getting rid of) it, that I honestly don't see most us reaching the 22nd century.

Hope I'm proven wrong. The global response to the pandemic won't leave me holding my breath.

and not kick the can down the road by thinking ‘oh well, we will solve it one day’. — Wayfarer

Mysterianism would say we don't have the capacities to understand the answers to these questions. We just don't know. It's not that someday down the line we will know, it's that we can't know.

Similar to saying a Dog will never understand English or Japanese. Or that a blind person will understand color vision.

But Idealism is also a good option. ;)

What would perfect human "goodness" look like? We may have a skewed notion of perfection, compared to something like God.

As to things it can't do, paradoxes don't count like the example you mentioned.

I'll keep a note then. Hands' book is by far the best science book I've read, by far. But, as you say, too many books, too mucho info.

Call me romantic, but I think there’s a reason for it all. Not that one individual might ever know it, but we have a part to play. — Wayfarer

Hmm. Reason as in it happened because of X or Y, yes. Reason in some deeper sense is more problematic. We are the only creatures (so far) in the known universe to have reasons or knowledge. Quite baffling to have learned this much in the 20th century.

Man, the one shocking portrait of "God", one that is actually interesting, speculative, and predicted a big bang using reasonable speculation, is Mainländer's "God".

His translation is due next year, although very dark, it's going to be very interesting to read that, finally.

Cheers.

John Hand's, in his magisterial and quite contrarian book, Cosmosapiens, explains all candidates for the origins of the universe, which includes Penrose's. Hand's book is a for the serious layperson, not so much as say a book made by Tyson, which would be more for everybody.

Hands essentially points to issues with all models, including, what he calls, "the Hot Big Bang" model. I believe he mentions that the cyclical universe gets around the big bang issue, but it doesn't address why the universeS are built in this manner.

We won't find out, I don't think. But evidence now confirms only one universe.

Oh. My bad. Got carried away. :sweat:

Sure in classical theism it's assumed that he's all good. But then I'm a bit confused, why would it make sense to ask him/her why is he a cunt? Doesn't that assume that "bad stuff" is as normal as "good stuff".

I only ask because then we'd have to ask, why is he good? There's good in the world too.

Why wouldn't he be?

If we divorce the idea that God is all good, issues about him being an asshole don't arise.

Something like the conditions of the universe are such that, given a specific set of circumstances, phenomenon X happens.

For me, the only way to avoid an infinite regress into "why" questions as to causal beginnings is to think that the universe is eternal: we live in a universe of universes, which has always been and always will be, in some manner.

IF this is true, then we can't ask why anymore. If it's false, the question you raise stands. I've heard it said more than a few times that nature is essentially active, thus there is something about activity which is less taxing than nothingness.

Ah! Good to know! It's sometimes looked down upon, but I always thought it was an obvious position to take.

But, in philosophy, I guess nothing is obvious.

Ah, there's a fellow mysterian in here.

I'm unsure if other view, minus eliminitavism are explanations as opposed to ways of thinking about experience. But, the list is rather comprehensive.

:up:

Not a question per se, but give me the capacity to understand why the universe came to be and how is it possible to have innate knowledge. But in a intuitive manner, which may mean imparting on me a more sophisticated brain.

I think theMetaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E.A. Burtt says something about the topic. But it's been a while since I read that and I could be wrong.

Interesting article thanks for sharing.

I can't discern in that article any reference to Whewell having created the term 'scientist'. — Wayfarer

Maybe not in that article, but it is not a secret. To be fair, it's not quite common knowledge.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127037417

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27114

This is true. The term "science" was introduced because "philosophy" was too broad back then. If you consider that philosophy has been around since (at least) Ancient Greece, it would only be natural that given almost 2000 years, it's field of enquiry would become quite large.

But then you have your answer, science is an outgrowth of philosophy. To speak loosely, you can't do away with your genes no matter how hard you try.

So sure, they'll be the rustic person like Dawkins or Tyson who deny or think philosophy is useless for science. But that just means they're operating with an impoverished metaphysical framework, closely linked with positivism.

It's still part of philosophy.

Reality is a problematic word, as it is rather elastic and can (not must) be empty or honorific at best.

If you have in mind the world we know and love, it must need an observer with - at least - sentience. If you're talking about atoms and the stuff of physics, maybe not. Then again phrases like "all there is once we are gone is atoms and energy" and all that strange quantum stuff are hard to make sense of absent people.

I'd guess I'd also add that whatever it may be, will be discovered by reason alone. Our sense perceptions have finite capacity. Granted our reason must have some limit too, but it is clearly more powerful in these kinds of questions.

But as others have said, it may well be the case that these kinds of grounds are unsayable.

Rereading:

Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within by Colin McGinn

Not much philosophical literature on innateness, unless it's technical linguistic related matters. Great book.

Reading:

The Last House of Needless Street by Catriona Ward