No, I never crossed paths with Sagan or Clairvision.

Fin de siècle aside, I'm not especially keen on 1999's flicks. I don't have a favourite year, but my favourite decade is the 1970's. Most of those films I didn't see until the 1990's, when every film I saw from the 70's shat on the things being made then (and now). Or something like that.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000019899/

In Melbourne? I had a short foray in the area (intellectual area) and Melbourne was a hot bed at the time (circa 2010-2015). I still quite like the Thesophical Society Bookstore — AmadeusD

Yep, Melbourne. They used to be in a really coool 1920's building which was sadly demolished a couple of years ago. Now they're around the corner in Flinders Lane. In the 1980's I used to almost live in that bookshop.

However, I think I have found a semi-objective basis for morality. — Brendan Golledge

Lots of people attempt this move. As you probably know, Sam Harris wrote a book on secular morality based around the principle of wellbeing (The Moral Landscape 2010) . As you've already suggested, if you can get people to agree upon a presupposition (or some foundational values) you can build a moral system from there. But the challenge is getting people to share those presuppositions. I'll leave this kind of task to the system builders. :wink:

Consciously thinking about what things we ought to consider good and bad is the point of this discussion. Because of the arbitrariness of value-assertion, using an external guide as a rule (such as a religious tradition) can be very helpful. — Brendan Golledge

Are you particularly concerned by what we use as an external guide? Isn't this itself arbitrary too? We can pick secular humanism, a political ideology or fundamentalist Islam. How do we know which oughts and ought nots within a system are useful or 'correct'. Seems we have to step outside of the external guide to make an assessment.

Where we obtain our oughts from is itself a curious thing - it appears to be contingent and may have nothing to do with right or wrong (in a more transcendent sense), just perceptions of right or wrong. Isn't it the case that oughts and ought nots are located in the contingent system of values we gain through culture and experience? Some of these might coalesce into a system of sorts. Isn't morality essentially an intersubjective agreement, with many outliers and willing transgressors?

I am sorry for your bad experiences. — boundless

The people were 'bad' but I regret nothing.

even if the bad practicioners, teachers etc were the majority, this doesn't a priori negate the validity of a particular tradition. — boundless

Of course - and if I argued that I'd be making a fallacy. I make no claim about higher consciousness as an idea, I was referring to who the subject seems to attract and the innate difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of persuing it a useful way. But I'll leave this to others who are more interested.

(and here I mean the unsophisticated kind which is IMO the true naive realism, not more 'refined' ones that are actually not naive realism), then one accepts automatically some kind of notion of 'two truths'. Naive realism errs in interpreting pragmatic 'truths' as ontological ones. — boundless

I think phenomenology may do away with the need to pars the world into realism or indirect realism or idealism models, but I am not sufficiently versed in the thinking to articulate an argument.

Naive realism errs in interpreting pragmatic 'truths' as ontological ones. — boundless

That's fair. I'm skeptical that we can access ontological truths, or that we should we be overly concerned to identify them. I'm content with tentative models of the world, which is all science can provide. But even an idealist becomes a naive realist when he leaves the house to go to work. That's paraphrasing Simon Blackburn. Which comes back to my take on all this. None of it much matters since the world we inhabit can't be denied in practice and for the most part it makes no difference to how we live if we believe that all is an illusion.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
— Franz Kafka
— T Clark

I'd never heard that quote before. Maybe I should read Franz Kafka. — Brendan Golledge

There's a kind of companion quote which I prefer and it comes from Pascal - “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Re Kafka - I suspect that if you don't discover him in your 20's, he may be less affecting. I like The Metamorphosis and The Trial best.

:up: Glad Viz is remembered.

Thanks for the considered reply and interesting comments. I was connected the New Age movement and the Theosophical Society through the 1980's and into the 1990's, so I am moderately familiar with the thinking. Most of the folk I knew in those days were as anxious, status seeking, consumer obsessed and money oriented as any contemporary yuppie. But I guess the serious thinkers are always in the minority. I have never arrived at a reason to take this kind of metaphysics seriously. True or not, it makes no practical difference to how I conduct my life. I suspect a lot of this comes down to person's disposition. Some of us are unhappy in particular ways that seem to be ameliorated by philosophy and thoughts of higher consciousness. And perhaps some of us ruminate less and are more distractible. :wink:

I’ll just say this:

….Kant’s thought is the thing-in-itself was required for the things that appear;
….the thing of the thing-in-itself just is the thing that appears;
….phenomena are not that which appears, but represent things that appear.

….noumena are never even in the conversation, they do nothing, are nothing, and cannot ever be anything, to us. They were never meant to be the same, never meant to be understood as similar or identical, as the thing-in-itself, but were only ever to be treated in the same way, re: as some complete, whole yet entirely unknowable something, by the cognitive system from which they both arise.

…..Kant says things-in-themselves are real existent objects (Bxx), but never once says noumena are anything more than “…a thing which must be cogitated not as an object of sense, but solely through the pure understanding….” (B310). — Mww

Cool Kant mini-primer... :wink:

Anyway, while I believe that in Buddhist schools the formulation is more clear (after all, in their view it also had a salvific importance), the distinction is also present even in pre-socratic greek philosophers. Parmenides, for instance, developed a version of the 'two truths' doctrine similar to Advaita Vedanta. — boundless

While I find this quite interesting, I wonder to what extent we should care about the second truth or the reality beyond our own. There may well be a Paramarthika Satya or ultimate realm beyond the empirical, but what of it? Can a good case be made that we should care about this and to what end? Asking for a friend...

No doubt the quest for enlightenment or spiritual relaxation seems attractive to some but how likely is it you will arrive there? I often think that this quest is just a spiritual equivalent of consumer culture and status seeking. Thoughts?

Yes, I read Pagels back in the 1980's when Gnosticism was briefly trendy.

Understanding the history of the concept gave me context and helped me detach myself from that indoctrination. — Noble Dust

Thank you.

That’s so interesting. Are you able to say something about how her work helped?

So I think it's plainly misleading to say that belief is reality. — Wayfarer

I would have to agree. People can certainly live in a 'reality' of false beliefs and often do so and these can come crashing down.

It seems to me that the most generalized way of avoiding belief in falsehoods that feel good is to disbelieve in the statement, "Feeling good is intrinsically good." This would mean belief in an objective morality. That means that there is a distinction between what is actually good and what feels good. There is no concept of "truth" in the absence of an objective morality, because then there would be no value to tell you not to believe whatever makes you feel good. For a hedonist (which is what most people are), there is no difference between what is true and what makes them feel good. But a genuinely truthful person has to be willing to feel pain in order to know what is true. — Brendan Golledge

Sounds like a fairly conservative take on good. I am uncertain what 'good' means and how it can be identified. The only thing I can say is that to cause suffering deliberately would appear to be bad. Does it follow that to prevent suffering is good?

Aren't all human choices motivated by wanting to feel satisfied in some way, regardless of whether it involves pleasure or pain? Isn't that why we have the idea of psychological egoism? Even when people act in ways that appear to be self-sacrificing or aimed at benefiting others, they are actually motivated by the pursuit of personal satisfaction, whether it be through direct pleasure, the avoidance of guilt, or the fulfilment of a sense of duty.

Doing good to satisfy a philosophy or please a god would ultimately seem to be a pursuit of personal pleasure. Do you think one can transcend self-interest?

For a hedonist (which is what most people are), there is no difference between what is true and what makes them feel good. — Brendan Golledge

I'm not sure in what sense you mean this. Most people are not overly concerned by what is true. I would say a lot of hedonists I know feel some guilt about having pleasure while a relative or some other people are suffering. But they will justify or work to overlook this.

I read a book a long time ago called, "The History of God". — Brendan Golledge

I think you mean Karen Armstrong's, A History fo God. Armstrong is a former nun.

She is also one of the world's most popular writers on comparative religion. Amongst her works are a biography of Mohammad and a history of Islam.

I wouldn't say that myself, but you might be right. I find the left to be mostly a conga-line of hectoring fuck-sticks. And we certainly stole some of the progressive identity politics nonsense. But the right wing identity politics, as espoused by Abbot, Dutton, Morrison, et al, has often been very Republican and even Trump-like. Hence Fox News/Sky News consistent advocacy of our Liberal (right wing) Party in language that might make sense to Republicans, but not old school Australian Liberal Party voters. As a rule I don't follow politics. I detest it.

A solution inbetween trains and buses: — Lionino

Indeed. We call them trams and they run all over my city. There are 10 routes within 50 meters of my home. In my city, there are around 1,700 tram stops across 24 routes with 250 kilometres of urban tracks and a patronage of well over 200 million individual journeys a year. I do most of my reading going to and from places in trams.

Thanks for clarifying. I’m certainly familiar with the art movement.

What does it mean to say ideas are surreal? I haven't really been able to work out what you are asking exactly. Maybe I've missed something.

The term 'surreal' in my updated title is a way of seeing ideas and symbols as being a potential shift from metaphysics as absolutes, to the scope of a tentative notion of the metaphysical imagination. — Jack Cummins

I'm not sure what this means. Aren't all ideas humans hold tentative, even scientific ideas? Science is like a history of discarded ideas.

For something to be surreal, it needs to be bizarre and in conflict with ordinary reality (like a hallucination or dream). Are ideas like this?

:up: I hear you, Brother.

:up:

There seems to be an aspect of control in this no? You want to control and direct a cohort and see the drama play out for your amusement. — schopenhauer1

I think this is often the case.

Fuck it dude. You can mine the fuck out of the minutia and it still won't get you out of the MALIGNENTLY USELESS dilemma. — schopenhauer1

I certainly see this argument. And many people don't even get the distraction of the minutia, the quips, the empty achievements.

As daoists, epicureans, pyrrhonists, spinozists, absurdists et al know first-hand: humor & creativity, friendship & compassion also provide "relief" during the often tedious intervals between "sleep and death". — 180 Proof

Yes. Do you think this requires a type of courage?

The Culture Wars are alive and well but that was an identifiable milestone. — Wayfarer

Which is why I prefer not to throw more wood on the fire... :wink:

Was going to say something similar. Do we really need to rehash CP Snow all these years later?

Isn't this a bit loose?
— Tom Storm

We can firm it up. There are true statements about unobserved things. "The cup is in the dishwasher" is true, even though we can't see the cup.

So if asked where the cup is, I'll say "It's in the dishwasher" rather then "I last saw it when I closed the door on the dishwasher, but I've no idea where it is now, or even if it still exists. You might try looking inside the dishwasher to see if it reappears". — Banno

I can see how this is one obvious answer to the question, but philosophy certainly allows for different solutions. I know where you sit on this, but I don't know whether realism or anti-realism or idealism or constructivism are tenable. I'm not sure how many people on the forum have the capacity to arrive at an informed assessment.

but the ones that write books I own just say there are objects, the rest is either given through inference, or superfluous. — Mww

Agree. I'll take that.

EY issue? I don’t think the nature of the world is key; it is the nature of particular things, that is, insofar as they are the constituency of our empirical knowledge. And I should hope no one thinks he knows the world, it being just some general concept used to denote the containment of all things, the nature of which, other than the schemata subsumed under it, is irrelevant to us. — Mww

I agree. My language is probably sloppy - when I said nature of the world I meant the nature of things in it.

So do you think I am contradictong myself when I say that the world exists objectively (mind-independently / when no one is looking) yet we cannot have knowledge of its intrinsic nature? — Apustimelogist

I'm not sure. Then again, we can't really disprove hard solipsism either. The real quesion is what does it matter either way?

That the world exists in an objective way just means it exists when nobody is looking. — Apustimelogist

Isn't this a bit loose? What exactly does an 'objective way' entail? Even Hoffman and most idealists would say there is an objective world. Isn't the key issue what is the nature of the world we have access to and think we know?

It's easy to declare a passionate adherence to something that makes very few demands. — Vera Mont

I suspect our nations would make many demands upon us if only we listened.

Love is one of those words, isn't it? I can 'love' Siamese cats, pizza and (god forbid) the novels of Dan Brown. But what does this really say? It expresses a preference, a fondness for these things?

In Australia we often regarded strident American patriotism as amusing - the hand on heart stuff is something alien to the Australian sensibility of my youth. But since the late 1990's, we've begun to resemble the US in as much as we borrow their identity politics and right wing tropes. Perhaps it's because we share a Rupert Murdoch? How is the UK faring?

I assume at the heart of most countries with similar forms of government they can't be too terribly different? — TiredThinker

Countries can very different- customs, values, geography, religions - there's no end to the potential diversity. A lot depends, I suspect, upon how much we are capable of noticing and participating in that difference.

I am fond of my country of the United States, but I can't say I love it. — TiredThinker

To love one's country is just a romantic, idiomatic expression for patriotism. Since many people seem incapable of loving other people, one wonders how they fair with the nation state.

Meanwhile, with each news report of the daily death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. — FrankGSterleJr

Isn't it conventional wisdom that this is the case and that culture has increasingly desensitised us to the suffering of others? And not just via armed conflict, but also the war on poverty in our own cities wrought by neoliberal economic policies which hollow out community life and redefine citizenship in terms of the market and how well you are doing economically.

But what of it? What does it mean and what are the proposed solutions?

There are plenty of first world casualties being overlooked right here where we live, thanks to multifarious barbarisms on Main Street.

My first reaction on seeing the term motonormativity was probably to roll my eyes, since it's a fashion-conscious coinage in line with heteronormativity and neuronormativity. But on second thoughts, I think it's good. Sometimes you need to put a name on something to make it real, or rather, to allow people to think about it clearly in familar contemporary terms. — Jamal

Thanks. I've often thought this was the case, didn't know there was even a word for it. When all you have is a car, everything looks like a road...

I have never liked cars or driving. Owned many cars over decades, but never much enjoyed them. So I finally spat the dummy and bought a loft in the middle of the city and got rid of the car. There's nothing I can't get to within 10-15 minutes of walking, or 30 minutes of (excellent) public transport. Good thing is, while we may be a city of 5 million, there's not much crime, so I can walk around safely.

And my city has just banned motorized scooters, so that pleases me too.

Hoffman's interface theory is ultimately guilty of the same old Cartesian/representationalist error that haunts a good deal of contemporary philosophy. Saying "we don't know the world, we just know our experiences of it," is a bit like claiming no one can drive a car because "they can only push pedals and turn a steering wheel," or that writing is impossible because "we can only move muscles in our fingers." What is "being" supposed to mean if it's not what is thought, experienced, known or talked about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

That made me laugh. I appreciate the analogies.

I think both sides of the discussion think their position is self-evident and dismiss the other argument. — T Clark

Philosophy in a nutshell. :wink:

If it has been collectively decided to aim for happiness on an collective level, then what meaning could individual happiness mean to anyone? — Shawn

Regardless of the plans of a ruling class, regardless of any strictures imposed by authoritarian governments, people always find work arounds and recontextualize happiness in the spaces they can find. Ditto capitalism and its own multifarious deficits.

Your response here is one of the more arresting things I have read here for a while.

But the ‘I’ , and with it the world it makes sense of, changes its meaning completely , but subtly, every moment. You are not the same you from moment to moment , so blaming whoever came before ‘you’ makes about as much sense as blaming the you of yesterday for your current woes. You have a chance to start over again with each tick of the clock, because it s a subtly different you and a subtly different world — Joshs

And yet people feel they can't start again because they are on a loop. Habits seem to become compulsion. How do we work with this? (Perhaps the last quote from you below is what you are suggesting?)

I happen to think that the concept of non-being is a metaphysical chimera, a notion of death as pure nothingness that we invented and used as either a source of threat or comfort. But it is a human-invented illusion which only exists when we summon it as a thought. And when we summon it, it is fraught with suffering because built into the concept is a reminder that we currently fail to achieve what it promises. Imagine killing yourself , only to pick up right where you left off, with all your sufferings, questions, imperfects, but without the memory of your past history — Joshs

I am assuming this holds if you believe that we are on some kind of eternal cycle. And/or that death is not the end. But if there is a loop we pick up again, doesn't this suggest being is ongoing and consistent in some way? A ceaseless cycle of boredom and suffering. Are you hinting at a Nietzschean solution to recurrence?

Transcendence of suffering is an active, dynamic achievement that must be continually repeated. It’s about discovering the unities, patterns, relations in the flow. — Joshs

That's an exciting notion. Can you say more about this but locate your answer around a tentative example or two?

Sorry. Yes, I think what you outline holds water pretty well.

b) Communities of catharsis. It would be easier to vent, complain, as a community. Instead of pretending that the next mountain hike, or the puttering in the garden, or House of God Worship session, or Netflix show is the answer, we understand what is going on here with each dissatisfied response and inherent lack.

I find this particularly interesting. How this might work.

I've often thought that a key reason people contrive families is to be distracted by an interactive domestic soap opera.

If you could wave a wand an never be born, would you wave that wand?

We disagree on this.