I agree. Physics is indeterminate in regards to metaphysics.

But I think the same can be said about the metaphysical status of the brain and even of mind too. All these things can be looked at without any metaphysical commitment.

We've got science which isn't common sense, so we'd made progress.

How far we'll go, who knows?

So could that be an indication that our brain's "matter" also is much more than what we can perceive? — dimosthenis9

It depends on what you mean by "perceive", if by this word you mean our normal human perceptions without that aid of technology, then it's by now an established empirical fact.

If you include technology to perception, I think there are good reasons to suspect that there is more to the universe than what we can reveal about the world. We are human beings, not all-knowing creatures like God or something like that. So there must be a limit in what our senses and intellect tells us about the world.

So at the end is brain the only thing which gets involved in thinking? As NOS4A2 mentioned, at the end can brain "think" without heart, lungs etc?? For me seems kind of strange to separate mind (thinking etc) from all of the rest of the body. — dimosthenis9

It's hard to say. Obviously brains don't think in the sense that if you remove it out of the body, you'd still have these thoughts to examine. Which is why I say that it's people that think, not brains. So I'd agree with you.

It is difficult, it's almost impossible to get behind our ordinary intuitions which have been built-in to our mode of thinking for who knows how long.

Your approach is really different and interesting. — dimosthenis9

Thank you.

Excellent post. :clap:

Well, 13 pages later and still no consensus on what metaphysics is or what it should be.

But then you notice that debates of this kind has been going on for thousands of years.

Oh well...

Matter is much stranger than how it appears to common sense. Common sense tells us to think of matter in terms of solid, indestructible stuff. But this kind of matter is not the matter that exists in the world. In fact, "solid" stuff, is by far, much more rare than non-solid matter.

Our common sense misleads us. We know so little about thoughts and brain, from a scientific perspective, because the topic is incredibly complicated. Just look at physics, the most successful of the sciences. It deals with the simplest things in existence: particles, "waves" in space and other small level phenomena.

A good deal of physics is trying to figure out how a few particles colliding could create certain strange effects. But if you consider a brain, you are speaking of billions of particles and a more complicated science, like biology.

And when you speak of persons, you enter sociology and here there are too many interactions between complex creatures to have much by way of insightful data. That's why I think we know so little about thoughts.

A person is thinking. How the thought is created is quite obscure, it seems we are extremely far from finding an answer to this. The thought isn't realized in my pinky, nor in my stomach, nor in my hair. My brain must be involved somehow and I think it is the best candidate to say that thought takes place in my brain.

But from speaking to brains to speaking about persons, complexity sky rockets. Which isn't helpful as brain already are formidably complex.

I had in mind Wiles when he managed to give proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, he said that one part that wasn't making sense, but then he remembered something that gave him a solution, and he called it "elegant."

The novelist, who was also a capable mathematician, described some of the higher level stuff in math to be "elegant" too. I can't image it, because I lack that capability to be good at math, never mind these very high level equations.

Still, if they say so, I believe them. But it will be an elegance very few people appreciate and like you say, it would be hard to even explain in what this elegance consists of to people who don't know this kind of math.

Yes it can. I see the cow on the field and assume it's a cow as long as I'm sane and sober. — Shawn

You can be sane and sober and mistake a cow for another animal. Sane and sober people can hallucinate too and often do, such as seeing water down the road.

If you want to think about knowledge in terms of justified true belief, you can. But I don't see how it helps.

But knowledge isn't justified true belief, it can't be defined by a strict set of criteria.

A fact is deemed to be a fact, when it is recognized by the relevant people to be so: those involved in the affair, experts in a specific field, etc.

I don't have many problems with it.

I do think the phrase "scientific revolution" or specifically his "paradigm shift" (not mentioned in these quotes) to be way overused.

But aside from that, what he's saying looks fine to me.

I don't necessarily see problem. Very often, when a physicist or a mathematician finds a solution to a problem, they describe it as "elegant". And what seems art to someone, may not look like art to someone else, which is common.

Of course science and art are different human activities, but human activities shouldn't be forced into one descriptive scheme alone. One can say that a cook has that dish "down to a science". Doesn't mean cooking is physics, but the way the cook does the plate is extremely precise and unique.

Also, physics, which is the "deepest science" we have, is described in equations, which very few people understand. To an ordinary person, a physics equation may look like random scribbles on a page. Not so to those who understand it.

From here, I think each person may take whatever views they have about art and science and argue one way or the other. I don't see a necessary conflict - while admitting they are different activities.

I don't see why not. Certain experiments could be said to be an artform, such as using sophisticated devices to see detect the wave function collapse.

It's not as if there is something called "art" which only applies to certain works of arts, or specific artists.

I think it does, but we cannot prove it beyond doubt. This was actually Hume's position, which is sometimes interpreted as him saying that we don't know anything about causal powers. He said constant conjunction is the best we can grasp about causality, but we can't prove this. There may be more to causality that constant conjunction, but we are in ignorance as to what these extra steps involve.

I should add that Sellars can be quite useful here. He can be and often is rather obscure in exposition. But his distinction between manifest image and scientific image is quite accurate.

What to make of this distinction, depends on one's views of course.

Clearly.

I think this particular thread is doing fine. I was thinking that if you did begin another one on consciousness being an illusion, then I'd think one can already anticipate what disputes will arise and I doubt people would modify their positions.

I'm only saying that I think it doesn't make sense anymore to think of mind as separate from matter. So they must belong together.

That's fine. Supernaturalism is hard to even articulate, it seems to me. But there are all kinds of people in the world.

Good luck on that thread. It's going to be a tough semantic battle.

Maybe, it's possible. But I really don't see any reason to believe consciousness is an illusion at all. So although people may debate it, I don't see the point. If someone says it's an illusion, but it seems evident to most other people that it's not, then it's just a question of asserting one thing or the other. I doubt much people will be convinced.

I mean, there are people who think consciousness is a kind of illusion. But there's no evidence for this at all besides appealing to the fact that neuroscience will one day show that red is not red or that it only seems we see qualities but we really don't. But that is irrational.

Saying that the physical is more real than the mental is kind of like saying red apples are more real than yellow apples. Or that water vapor is more real than liquid water. It highlights some set of properties other than some other set of properties.

I think it should be obvious that those physical properties we call mental properties are the one's we are directly acquainted with. But this doesn't oppose physical with mental, as mental properties are, again, configurations of physical stuff. Nor is one more real than the other, unless someone can tell me what "real" means in this case.

And thinking about these questions will likely remain with us for a long time.

Florida Man does some crazy shit. :wink:

Sure. I mean Australia has a relatively rational government. As far as I know, I do remember that global warming denial was somewhat higher in Australia than in other comparative countries, due to industry interests in coal if I don't misremember.

But for the rest, your country has done remarkable well, all things considered.

Na man, I've never thought you were anti-science at all. I think you enjoy it, like anyone interested in philosophy should. Scientism is something I dislike too, it's an excuse for lazy thinking. I would maybe put different emphasis than you in some topics, but nothing massive.

It's a shame that bad ideas form the US get copied in other countries. But I suspect denialism will eventually whimper down, IF this doesn't continue for more than say, a year.

Absolutely. No doubt. It also mirrors a rightward shift in all developed countries since the 1980's, with the rise of neoliberal dogma.

So, as you've mentioned Australia also has pretty astonishing right wingers, not like Q perhaps, but you see it. And Europe has outright fascist parties in most democracies.

Then you see Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Modi and it isn't a pretty picture.

But absolutely. In the US, it's magnified, not helped by the religious extremist strain that runs in large parts of the population. But how it reaches to this level of saying that getting a vaccine infringes on your "freedom", when that very freedom permits you to kill another person, is difficult to believe.

Yeah. But a good deal of Floridians must not care. Maybe half. They've had a string of bat shit crazy mayors. It doesn't get much weirder than Florida so far as the US goes, most of the time anyway.

But the difficult question is precisely this, presenting a hypothetical: what the heck do you do if say, half the people - or maybe even a slight majority - don't want vaccines? Would it not be anti-democratic to make people take vaccines in such a situation?

I know, this isn't what's happening, but it's a tough question, I think. But even in an extreme case like this, people who have no good reasons not to take vaccines are potentially murdering people.

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.