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

The War on Terror unlike the War on Drugs is a war on the word "terror", liable to the fancies of powerful states. The latter war is a war with chemicals, and so far, the chemicals are winning - or at least not losing.

To fight a word though, is quite futile and leads to much misery and will continue to do so.

:up:



I think we might be creating more confusion than clarity by distinguishing "ultimate reality" from reality. It may cause people to think that subsequent layers of experience aren't real or fundamental, which leads to quite funny ways of talking about the world and our mental properties to boot.

If you have in mind something like the bottom constituents of reality, that is, what everything in the universe is made of, we don't quite know. Most of the universe is dark matter or dark energy and only 5% is the baryonic matter we know and love.

There's also the issue that, mental gymnastics aside, anything we encounter or disclose or relate to in the world is mediated through our mental processes. Once we are gone the (postulated) non-mental features of the world (atoms, quarks, etc.) are quite obscure.

If we want to go beyond that, or rather, underneath representations, the best guess I've seen is a modification of Schopenhauer's will, essentially a blind striving without rhyme or reason, which seeks to continue striving. We feel this in our own bodies as subject of experience.

Hmm. :chin: I think a phrase like "up needless heterodox for vagaries" is a meaningless sentence. There's nothing to take out of it. In your "red the is apple", the phrase is intended to convey that the apple is red, so I don't see why as a phrase it's meaningless.

Also remember Chomsky's example of "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." is semantically meaningless, but it has proper grammar. So the issue might go a bit deeper.

I think that argument can go on forever, since the other party will retort that nothing existing was far more likely since “nothing” was much simpler than the actual universe, in the same as a universe just like ours, but were a star didn't exist, was more likely to exist than the actual universe. — Amalac

Yes, that's correct. Perhaps you may want to ignore this as I'm doing what you point out. The thing is, we are here. And it doesn't make any sense in any way to believe that something came from nothing.

Nothing might not be simpler than potential, which is to say, nature wouldn't allow for nothing. There's always some quantum field or something even deeper we don't know about, that fills nature.

But point taken.

I was answering the question of the thread. Looking at the OP, I don't think saying "red the apple is" is unintelligible. It is poorly phrased, but it clearly has content.

As per your second question, I don't think we know enough about the universe to say this with absolute confidence. The best I've heard physicist says is something roughly like something is somehow easier or makes more sense that to say that nothing exists. Why exactly, I'm not sure.

Personally, in my own thinking, I'm inclined to the view that possibility is more likely to exist that nothing. Nothing is a lack of anything. It's not even a state, per se.

But why would nothing necessarily exist? Possibility or potential might be the most basic thing that could be said about anything, as it allows for options. Nothing doesn't, at least not the nothing we use in ordinary life.

Yes again. But, I could be wrong.

I'll let others contribute to what may be valuable information...

Seems to me that saying something exists is merely vague. Whereas nothing exists might just be empirically wrong, there isn't "nothing" in the universe, as we understand the term.

Yep.

But it's become a big industry in pop-science books, like Davies'The Demon in the Machine, Gleick's The Information or Loewenstein Physics in Mind and many others.

It seems to me to be very dubious, taking concepts from less well formed sciences and incorporating them into fundamental physics to then explain mental processes.

One could approach the question by saying, like Pauli did, that these things are "not even wrong."

They can't even be evaluated along a right/wrong axis.

I'm quite familiar with panpsychism. It's a natural alternative that may be intuitive depending on how it's articulated.

You don't even need information to articulate pansychism, all you need is experience.

But that's just the thing, do things like "code" and "data" accurately capture what is actually happening in the world? A person can crack a code, build a code or get lost in code. As for data, that might be less problematic as it seems more neutral to me.

Still you need to say for something to be data it needs to be data for someone.

I know. This road can lead people into saying things like "atoms" or "particles" don't exist because we named them this way, but I don't suscribe to linguistic idealism per se. I don't think the names we give to things in nature brings things into existence.

But approaches that are laden with extremely human centric concepts like "information", "code", "processing" are problematic in a way that "particles" or "DNA" are not.

At least that's my feel of the topic.

I'd be careful with this whole information-centric approach. It's often not clear what is meant as it is used in a technical manner in engineering then borrowed to biology and physics.

The problem is that it can lead one to think that the world is literally "informed". But to be informed and to have information is something people do, not objects. Unless you are of the persuasion that objects have some kind of mind that processes information.

And if objects literally process information, then we have a bunch of intelligence all around us.

I think a more neutral term would be helpful.

Yes. Matter turns out to be rather insubstantial and abstract even, so our ordinary intuitions lead us quite astray.

You can be a materialist like Strawson and then the "hard problem" can't be posed.

Alternatively, one can agree with Chomsky who provides extensive documentation, that the "hard problem" is very misleading.

Or like McGinn, one can say that there are many mysteries, consciousness being one of them.

Consciousness is hard not because of materialism, but because of the way we think about ordinary matter, which is fine for everyday living, but extremely inadequate when looked at in detail.

Sounds good. :up:

Ah.

You already believe something akin to BIV when you say "there is no moon... only hidden states which we model as being the moon...". We are liable to find more "hidden states" the more we discover about the brain.

So it makes sense why such a thought experiment would not be appealing to you. Others might have Sellars' distinction in mind in terms of thinking about the manifest image (the world as we experience it) and the scientific image (the the world as it is absent people).

I think the impact of the BIV depends on how you think about this distinction.

All of that seems to require an external world. The stimulus or sense data of type X must come from outside of the model. — Isaac

I haven't been as clear as I would've liked.

When I say there doesn't need to be a world, I mean the world we take for granted so you look outside the window and you see all that you see: cars, sidewalk, people, trees, etc.

A moth, granted, wouldn't see these things. A moth would see whatever it is that moths see: ultraviolet light and everything else they interact with.

But it could be, in principle at least, stimulated in a lab such that the world in this sense (described above) isn't necessary for the moth to experience (or react to) its "world". It would all be a stimulation in the moths brain.

Yes, the stimulation is external. But in this case the stimulation is not caused by something in the world (the moon), it would be caused by whatever electrical signals lead the moth to behave as if a moon existed.

A mistake in behaviour though, no? It ought not have flown into the lamp (to its death), the result of any modal of lamp/world should have had it remain alive at the very least. Soft behaviourism?

How could we understand such an error, in a functionalist sense, without an external world being one way such that some model of it can be another? — Isaac

Loosely speaking, in a model in which all sensations (stimulus, sense data, etc.) of the type X are interpreted as the moon, things that resemble X close enough, would lead the moth to act as if the X is the moon.

Of course, the moon could not be out that night due to cloudy weather or it could cease to exist. The moth would still interpret anything that causes X as the moon. Something like that.

So stimuli-response then...? — Isaac

That's fine.

If that were the case, there'd be no errors, the moth would have meant to fly into the lamp. Since talk of 'errors' and 'intentions' seems so useful, I can't see the utility of a system which would exclude them.

But to be fair, I've never fully understood externalism, — Isaac

There are several versions of it, linguistic, perceptual, etc. I don't know what's supposed to be revealed in most versions of it that I can recall.

I think that for phil. of mind, what matters is how the relevant creatures acts (behaves, responds, interprets) given sensory data.