In other words, the world is created by the mind of beings. — Wayfarer

Intriguing. Can you say some more on this? In broad brush strokes, how is the world created by the mind of beings? And how is that contrasted with a sovereignty of self?

It seems wrong to say that alchemy, religion and folklore became chemistry and medicine. In keeping with the idea of significant paradigm shifts in human thought and investigation "were replaced by chemistry and medicine" seems more apt.

I agree that what might be classed as metaphysical speculation (abductive reasoning or extrapolating imaginable possibilities) certainly plays a role in science, but I can think of no examples of metaphysics becoming science. — Janus

That's a very interesting point. So often I've heard people say that chemistry evolved from alchemy and astronomy evolved from astrology. I'm interested in your use of the word 'replaced' as in, I imagine, 'superseded' by? What happens in this process of replacement? Are paradigm shifts still seen as an appropriate way to describe the evolution of human thought models? I wonder what the process was that led alchemy to be superseded by chemistry - was alchemy in any way foundational in this process?

Whereas the idea that the way things appear to humans, is the way they truly are, amounts to a kind of tacit assertion of omniscience. — Wayfarer

Or exceptional luck. :razz:

Is our civilization critically imbalanced? How could applying Yin-Yang concepts help? — 0 thru 9

Maybe there's some substance in what you say but I'm not convinced our woes are a matter of 'balance' as such. Balance ( a more even distribution) seems too symmetrical, too neat a category to resolve the global issues we face. We live in a culture with distorted values and concomitant behaviours in numerous domains. To ask for balance IMO may not really address the problems. You could equality posit that what we need is a commitment to political transformation or a 'return to nature' crusade.

Any one of us can posit that the real problem is how capitalism operates and the urgent need for people to care more for others. But would balance be a substantive solution, or is it more about changing who we are, what we believe and who is in charge? Is wanting less of some things and more of other things about balance (in the colloquial, conversationalist sense, perhaps)? Not sure if it is at a deeper level.

Morality mandates a perspective be taken as one member of a group, with an interest in the group's wellbeing, and any views that fall outside of this context are invalid. — Judaka

Does morality mandate anythign or does a dominant culture with an official morality do this? Which is a separate issue to morality.

Morality will generally be connected to a worldview and values (religious or secular) and it is from this source, not the morality itself, that you will encounter context, justifications and coercion.

No culture has one morality as such, there are multiple perspectives, multiple moralities, views, opinions and then there are laws. Morality is incoherent and people don't pay much attention to it. Even within one religion - Christianity say - there are multiple interpretations of morality which explains why there are Christians who 'damn fags' and others who fly the rainbow flag of diversity. There are Christians who refuse to fight in wars and others who are enthusiastic members of the armed focus. Some who support euthanasia and others who are against it.

I tend to think of morality as a series of codes of conduct. Bernado Kastrup has an interesting definition - 'Humans create morality to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order.'

Yes. People with no beliefs don’t care about trans, etc. What you seem to be saying is there are significant numbers of voters who hold such views through some religious values. And parties exploit these. Which is where I was heading.

:up:

Of course. I am assuming that this far right generally locates its core values in debased and bigoted expressions of religion.

My pet theory is that gender stereotypes have become more extreme due to tik-tokkable and instagrammable views of extreme feminity and masculinity, leading to increased rejection of people who do not fit the norm (such rejection can be real or perceived). In other words, societies have become less liberal and accepting of variation in gender expression with an increased risk of gender dysphoria as a result. — Benkei

Interesting. I'm sure social media plays a role. I think the other fact is that if you build awareness (and tolerance) then more people will feel comfortable to identify and explore their identity.

I think we can address them without condemning transsexuals or transgenders. — Benkei

I think this is the key. As humans we are constantly extending ourselves. We can do it. And sure, there may be challenges and dilemas along the way.

I loved Suttree. Knoxville in the 1950's: a glorious celebration of darkness, destitution, drinking, deviance, dancing and death.

Apologies for the length. — Manuel

No, this is good. Thanks.

Chomsky also makes the point that even though the mind may emerge from the physical matter of the brain, the nature of physical matter is still beyond our understanding.

56min - the problem is with the physical. When you talk about reducing Consciousness to physical you don't know what physical is. Physical is just whatever the Sciences say.
58min - whatever matter turns out to be — RussellA

Chomsky seems to repudiate idealism (in the recent Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal interview). He says something like he sides with 'normal science'.

If the physical is whatever science says it is, then I guess the physical is quantum waves (at this point in time) right?

I'm a little unclear on his privileging science (methodological naturalism and empiricism) and saying that we don't understand the physical. Is there some tension in this?

Do you believe that if the nature of physical matter is beyond our understating then idealism gets a boost as an alternative ontology?

The idea that the physical remains incoherent or inexplicable probably needs its own thread and a clear but brief articulation as to why someone might argue this. I'm not sure I fully get this from Chomsky. Maybe it's my comprehension but he seems to lead to his argument without exploring it more fully.

That's a great interview. Thanks.

My firm conviction is that h.sapiens transcends biology, and is able to realise horizons of being that are, as far as we know, unique to us. — Wayfarer

:up:

What sex or gender a person chooses to be, worries me a lot less, (in fact it pales into insignificance in comparison) compared to a person who chooses to be a trump supporter, a religious zealot, a capitalist, a billionaire, a plutocrat, a celebrity cult, a personality cult, a narcissist, an autocrat, an aristocrat, etc. — universeness

:fire: I hear you.

As they say in court - you find your experts, I'll find mine.

I've known personally and worked with a fair number of trans people. It has always been a marked quality of life improvement for each of them. I now know a number of teens who have identified as trans. Their lives have also improved immeasurably. The lived experience is the thing that matters. But I fail to see how a ceaseless back and forth on this is of any use. Trans is here to stay - the arguments are largely moot.

Mostly you seem unable to address the issue and are relying upon outliers and hasty generalization fallacies. Andrew, it is pretty clear this is a developing space and there are things we need to work through. But pointing to special examples the way you do is like pointing to abuse of boys by Catholic clergy and concluding homosexuality is child abuse.

But nobody can change sex or live as the opposite sex. A defleshed inverted penis is literally not a vagina and it is a misogynistic insult to call it so. Women's biology is how we all entered the world. — Andrew4Handel

That is such a literal minded, banal observation. It is pretty clear empirically that people do live well and happily as genders other than their birth gender. A reductive focus on sex organs and sex in general is beside the point.

People who believe peoples gender identity claims should also believe peoples religious claims. — Andrew4Handel

This is a fairly poor false equivalence. I'm sure you are a smart person but that sounds like the kind of limited thinking that would have someone provide rickety straw man arguments like - 'But what if someone identifies as a Lego brick, would you agree with that?' Yeah, right....

A religious claim involves something supernatural or ineffable which cannot be identified or even described (e.g., gods and goddesses). Gender identity is a human phenomenon we can identify and point to and have conversations about. For me gender is an open question, our understanding of it is developing all the time. What harm is there in allowing people to be who they need to be? And can this be answered without straw manning, catastrophizing or using the hasty generalization fallacy?

Sounds like trans issues really upset you.

I accept the gender and sex you tell me you are.
The rest is a matter of a case by case basis imo.
Who can go to which area and compete in which sport etc, is simply 'issues' yet to be fully ironed out.
In my youth and probably up to around my mid 30's, I was very 'anti,' towards all non-heterosexual people. — universeness

:up: Exactly. Humans can work the through issues. Gender is complex and if someone needs to be male or female on non-binary where the fuck is the problem? People think it's against god or against nature. They think it's a war on truth. I heard all the same shit about homosexuality back a few decades back and even now in some communities.

The arguments are almost irrelevant. It's here. It's happening. It's not going away. Deal with it respectfully and respect people's choices. We can prevent suicides and depression and miserable lives if we can just agree to accept people's need to be who they are.

We choose commercial objects provided by the useless overproduction of capitalism in hopes to use them as symbols of our intentions, but these objects are always doomed to fail - because they are not for expression, but for admiration like art. You can recognize their independent beauty, but you cannot use them as your own.

But we as humans, will always try to become part of something, a life that item is supposed to have but lacks. And the disappointment is too much struggle for comprehension so we reject it. Instead, we move on to the next promise of desire. When I buy a guitar, I want it to become a part of me, but it never can, but the only way I can truly have it is if I treat it as a separate fantasy that I can only observe. I can re-create it, but I’ll never want people who observe that beauty to attribute it to me - I am no part of it. I am its mere reflection. — Levon Nurijanyan

I'm not really sure what any of that means in real terms.

We are unable to express ourselves adequately and that’s the internal struggle; the anxiety of being understood — Levon Nurijanyan

And how would you go about demonstrating this? Is this true of all of us or just some? Do we know it? I don't know it... I don't feel this.

When I buy a guitar, I want it to become a part of me, but it never can, but the only way I can truly have it is if I treat it as a separate fantasy that I can only observe. — Levon Nurijanyan

I bought a guitar during Covid. It worked as expected and I went about learning chords and how to pluck strings. At no point did I want it to be a 'part of me' but that feeling can follow when people become good at something. You can't make it happen. I'm not sure I understand this point - what is a 'separate fantasy that only I observe'?

He has drawbacks: his scholarship is quite bad; he is prone to exaggeration and even makes things up(!) and he has a tendency to want to complicate or extend a certain type of "Hegelian logic" way beyond specific instances in which such a counter-intuitive way of thinking may be of use or of interest. — Manuel

:yikes:

So, it's a mixed bag, — Manuel

Thanks. The lectures are quite interesting to watch (I've probably seen a dozen or so) but I often find at the end of them I haven't been left with anything much.

Mummy called the repressed child 'Being good, and the spontaneous child She called Being naughty. So the evening and the morning were the first day of the moralising child. — unenlightened

Nicely done.

Fair enough. By derivative I simply meant derived directly from noumena and 'constructed' through our cognitive limitations.

I'm not sure. I guess I am unclear about how empiricism can be said to have a firm traction on reality if that reality is provisional or, shall we say, derivative? I guess Kant must be saying this is what we have access to. Our reality is derivative but consistent and subject to predictable regularities.

Firstly, thanks for taking the trouble.

This is an idea you have of yourself that you identify with, and claim as your self, in relation to some meaningful others. There must be many other relations, familial, professional, neighbourly, social, from which you derive all sorts of other characterisations — the joker of the family, the only one in the office who actually does anything, the fight defuser at the bar, the guy who always came top in metalwork at school. And the sum of these various ideas is your 'narrative identity'. and all your experiences are the experiences of that identity, and your response are the responses of that identity, which develops through time with experience. And this self is always comparative and thereby judgemental - I am smarter than a brick and faster than a snail, but not as beautiful as a sunset.

A non-linguistic animal cannot form a narrative identity; they learn things - not to eat the yellow snow, but they never form the identity "I don't like yellow snow", they just avoid it when they see it. So they do not live in time, psychologically. they are always just here and now, with whatever they know, which is nothing of themselves. — unenlightened

Yep. Good, all this is something I have considered for many years.

And the crux of all this as you have correctly identified, you crude thinker, you, is that I propose a state of enlightenment, where the self is 'transcended' and one again lives without time and without the comparing judgement that becomes morality, but retaining the glorious creative potential of language. This is the fulfilment of human potential, and the end of the narrative self that otherwise has to end in mere death. — unenlightened

I see. Yes some of this resonates fairly well and is not dissimilar to positions I hold (and were probably influenced by Narrative Therapy; my background is in community work). I was unable to glean this from your OP. The most difficult thing most of us carry around with us are our personal stories - generally understood as judgments about who we are and who we are not.

I am unclear how 'comparing judgment' becomes morality.

Do you have a view about how language maps onto reality or do you see it as 'glorious' metaphor?

I follow the argument and thanks but it is somehow unsatisfying. :wink:

It just seems like if your concept of UFOs requires you to work through various physics with space travel priblems and whatnot , then your creative writing isn't creative enough. — Hanover

:up:

I think most people would agree to these 5 things - you missed "e".

Problem comes with the interpretation, right? What counts as slavery? I would include wage slavery, but others might not. I can't seem many people agreeing on how "f" should look, even if they all agree with the sentiment. With "a", just how would we determine what counts as 'extreme thought and care'? Maybe 'rigorous' would be better than 'extreme'. But can you see this leading to 'only psychologically stable and wealthy people with means should have children', or any number of unpleasant permutations.

:up:

:up: Too complex for me, but I get the drift.

Modern philosophy with its psychologized idealism is not my cup of tea. — introbert

Interesting point. Are you thinking of forms of phenomenology here?

Kant says he is an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. I think for Kant sensory appearances are real. — Janus

So to break this down, Kant seems to be saying we have no choice but to accept empiricism even if it isn't a reflection of things as they are in themselves?

I'm not quite sure how sensory experiences are 'real' given his model - does this mean they are all that is available to us and produced by our interaction with noumena which are real? The reality of sense data seems to be a 'translation' or interpretation of the real.

The story so far is that we (humans) have fallen out of the present continuous of living, into a story that is always a moral story, always judgemental. We do not live in what is, but in what was, what might have been what could be and what ought to be and ought to have been.

There can be no return to the innocence of not knowing. But we live in the story of what ought to be, and it contradicts what is that we still also inhabit, willy-nilly — and the only way to resolve that conflict is to make the word flesh; which is to say to make the life we lead the same as the life we know we ought to lead. — unenlightened

Nicely worded. Is this the crux of your narrative?

You are lost in an endless forest of signposts all pointing in different directions. — unenlightened

Indeed. Always.

Interesting story. Unfortunately as someone who has not privileged philosophy and is a fairly crude thinker, I'm not sure what this story is about. Can you dumb it down? (I did read your comments above)

The interaction is the problem, basically. At least for now, to our present knowledge, the speed of light is a bit of an obstacle.

If we solve our "limitations in our understanding" and create the faster than light hyperdrives or teleportation, then there's a bit more to the subject of interaction with aliens. — ssu

Agree. I wonder if the laws of physics are more about human cognitive limitations than reality. Do we have a full description and understanding of reality? No. My sense is it is a mistake to construct any ideas about aliens using our own technology or our understanding of physics as first principles - tempting and difficult to avoid though it might be.

I heard Bernado Kastrup say (some YouTube interview) that Kant is not an idealist. What do you think?

No, I won't have to concede that, because I don't think reason without sense data produces knowledge. It is not a valid inference from the fact that sense data combined with reason produces knowledge to a claim that reason on its own can produce knowledge. — Janus

:fire:

I've been reading the Google preview of that book, and have just now ordered the hard copy. It is an account of Schopenhauer's reading of the Upaniṣads, of which he had a Latin copy, translated from a Persian edition. According to this book, published 2014, they along with Plato and Kant were the major formative influences on Schopenhauer's mature philosophy. — Wayfarer

How do you account for Schopenhauer's formulation of antinatalism, pessimism and negativity? Do you think his worldview (presumably acquired via his reading) was reasonable or extreme?

One’s political views are going to be dependent on one’s morals and amoral goals—no metaphysical view in-itself tells us what to do here, but it can end up being what formulates our morals (e.g., if we shouldn’t hurt what is a part of ourselves and we are of the same mind, then we shouldn’t hurt each other). — Bob Ross

I hope it's the latter and not just business as usual. Which I guess is a Christian view - love your neighbour as you do yourself. The reason being we are all the same being... :wink:

I personally can't identify reasons to change how I interact with the world, regardless of the metaphysics or ontology posited. So I am wondering how useful it is to even have views on ontology, other than a common sense account, which may not be true, but has the virtue of working well enough as a frame.

Any view can lead to nihilism, although some more than others, and anyone can be happy under any of them—nihilism is a reflection of one’s psychology and nothing more. — Bob Ross

I agree.

But the underlying philosophical point is mistaking the illusory for the real, although of course for that to be meaningful, there must be some kind of inkling of a higher reality, which is also pretty non-PC in today's culture. — Wayfarer

I understand the lineage of this this view, I'm just wondering how it helps to think this way.

Wouldn't be much of a leap to take the view that the world is malignant, that birth and children are a curse and take up a position wherein nuclear annihilation might be a useful way to demolish this metaphysical Bastille. Isn't climate change ultimately coming to liberate us from the cycle of death and rebrith? Why act to prevent it?

The world as prison... Not sure that quote helps.

A wise response, Janus.

For example, it seems to me that very often, if not always, the motivation for believing in idealism is the hope that the self does not perish with the body. — Janus

Of course, and like an idiot I didn't even consider this aspect.