Nice answer. I appreciate it. Thanks for the reading list. :pray:

:up:

t's the only school of philosophy to which I ever felt attracted. Not a card-carrying member, mind you, but it sure sounds better than most of them. — Vera Mont

Me too.

Further Epicurus' theory gets at something fundamental about desire -- that our desires can be the reason we are unhappy, rather than us being unhappy because we're not satisfying those desires, and so the cure of unhappiness is to remove the desire rather than pursue it. Which is a very different kind of hedonism from our usual understanding of the word since it's centered around limiting desire such that they can always be satisfied and you don't have to worry about them rather than pursuing any and all of them. — Moliere

Indeed. Philosophy educator Alain de Botton wrote I nice essay on this in his early book The Consolations of Philosophy.

This passage struck me and rings true for the wealthy, ostentatious people I've met.

The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.

Feel pity for the guy driving the Maserati - he's just working hard to be noticed and loved. :wink:

I don't know what they all saw. I think the story, which has various parts, is a mosaic of bits remembered and bits imagined. I think it could have been a cigar shaped target tug being towed by a plane on a military exercise.

I've always used 'confidence' as one of several definitions of faith. I think that does fine.

I would say that "confidence" is often directed towards oneself, internally, as an attitude toward one's own actions, while "faith" is most often directed outward, as an attitude towards what is external to oneself. — Metaphysician Undercover

I generally have confidence in things outside myself - relationships, the sun coming up, catching a plane, my roof holding the rain back.

Economics is entirely faith based - but they call it "confidence" — unenlightened

And when it works, it's a 'confidence trick'.

It's basically an American phenomenon, because only Americans can both distrust their own government and yet think their government bureaucracies can be so capable at the same time to have these huge cover ups. — ssu

Maybe, but here in Australia we had a major UFO event in 1966 called the Westall Incident. I knew one of the teachers involved who saw the UFO flying over a school for an extended period, with dozens of children. Conspiracy (in the form of traditional government cover up and interference) has followed this one since 1966, since before X Files and before Roswell was revived and spun as a grand conspiracy theory in the 1970's.

I have made no defence of religion. I am appealing for an attempt at understanding the meaning of religious texts to people, which I believe is rather more than mere the commercial advertising bullshit of the marketplace. — unenlightened

Cheers, yes. I think this is also a good point.

Do economists really believe in the invisible hand? This is a fatuous ignorant insulting question, surely. — unenlightened

Hmm...I studied economics back in the 1990's and what I found was a largely faith based dogma.

This is very binary, and rather the problem with this thread - and that is my fault for framing things that way. — unenlightened

I think this forum is full of folk who want the best for our planet - they proffer answers based on their own experience, intuitions and judgements. It all seems so 'self-evident'. Then there's the issue of tribalism and dualistic thinking and it can get messy. Not your fault.

Rationalist politics is necessarily dehumanising, because the defining feature of life is emotion. to be alive is to care about something. Having a home, for example. Accordingly, a worldview that rejects everything that is not rational or factual, is inimical to life. — unenlightened

I think that's a good point, my list of things that cause frequent harm to humanity include, nationalism, scientism, marketing, capitalism, materialism. And, unlike you, I would add religion as one of humanity's many problematic ideas. Do I want to ban it? No. Do I hate religion? No. But I admit to often being bigoted about it. And bigoted about capitalism, marketing, materialism, etc. I feel similar shudders whether I am driving past a church, an advertising agency or a shopping mall.

Yes. I am a reluctant post-modernist.
— Tom Storm

That's a pity. You're missing out. The original guys enjoyed it. (The dialogue between Searle and Derrida is a good example.) It was having a sure-fire way of tweaking the lion's tail - where the lion was the orthodox academy. The sense of fun that I found in them was part of the appeal. (I also realized that it must have been part of Socrates' appeal when he revealed Socratic method to his friends. I suspect that it was one of the reasons he lost the trial.) — Ludwig V

I was just making a mild joke that many of us are postmodernists reluctantly through the influence the ideas have had on our culture. I tend towards anti-foundationalist skepticism myself. I've done some desultory reading, but I have never privileged any philosophy in my life as I've had other priorities. Which is why I am here; to get a taste of what I might have missed.

Lot of renewed interest in UFO's and some real characters shilling crazy tales on YouTube - Jeremy Corbell, Bob Lazar, Robert Bigelow, Luis Elizondo spring to mind.

I agree with you - the actual content is slender, with inferences as shaky as the video footage we get. No one doubts that people see and photograph things in the sky from time to time, it just doesn't seem to amount to much. Set the tales in the context of a government conspiracy and stories accrue an instant allure.

My experiences of writing philosophy include the slightly weird experience of finding an argument taking charge and leading me down a path I didn't intend to go down and don't want to go down. — Ludwig V

I can see that. Characters in fiction often do the same thing.

That's a situation that post-modernists particularly enjoy(ed). — Ludwig V

Yes. I am a reluctant post-modernist.

But sometimes people forget that many texts are read and are important to audiences far beyond their original context The question of interpreting them in those circumstances must go beyond their origins. Indeed the problem starts to arise as soon as the text is published. — Ludwig V

Yes. I've always held that any text is redolent with potential meanings so settling on a 'right' one suggests a paucity of imagination and joy.

Welcome. Nice pellucid writing, I have no useful opinion on any of it, but I appreciate your clarity and collegial approach.

:up: Creativity is undomesticated and capricious, the artist is not always in charge.

But are you really telling me you didn't know what you intended to write, that you just had some kind of vagae association, when you were writing it? — Vera Mont

I think you are missing the nuances. I probably can't explain it to you any clearer.

I once wrote a magazine story about the art of writing sitcoms - my intention was to describe how they were written and produced. What people got out of it was a different story - how the talent of a comic actor can make bad material come alive through interpretation. Sure it was in there, but I wasn't trying to write about that. It's what most people told me they took from the piece. My editor didn't even register what I thought the piece was about; he saw it as an amusing analysis of the role of performance. If you were to read that 20 year-old piece today, you'd probably talk about how it was about the days before streaming, when network TV called the shots and when they produced shows in house in powerful TV studios - a microcosm of that era. Sure that's there too, but I didn't intend to focus on that. By now my original intention for writing the piece has been eclipsed. It has new life as a historical document about how TV used to work, certainly not the art of sitcom writing. My experience as a writer and from knowing writers is that this is often how a work ends up being reinterpreted and shaped by time and individual readings.

I see ↪Tom Storm has made pretty much the same point. Perhaps it's different for different writers. Anyway, I'm happy to leave it there and agree to disagree, because neither of us is going to be able to prove their point. — Janus

Maybe it's one of those points you either see or don't. A bit like god... :razz:

The only thing I will not countenance is : "He didn't know what he meant." — Vera Mont

It's not that simple. I worked as a published writer for 20 years (side hustle) - mainly non-fiction but some fiction and drama. I have often encountered people who have commented upon what I wrote and come to me with interpretations of my work I did not consciously intend but, on reflection, where defiantly there. I might have gone in wanting to say X (and partly achieved that) but what the story really demonstrated is Y. I think writing often works that way and certainly the other writers I've known - and there's been a good dozen - mostly find the same. We tell richer or poorer stories than we intend to.

Is that not the story of Jesus, whose necessity arose from the eating of that impregnated apple?

But that's not a story I focus on, but I get it. We don't need any actual apples, serpents, or crucifixions for that to have meaning.

Importantly, that story has the attention of a culture, and so it matters. That is where we look for meaning, so that's where we find it. — Hanover

Thanks for this account. It doesn't personally resonate with me but I get it. Sort of. Much human behaviour and many beliefs make no real sense to me, including Free Masonry, libertarianism, sport, fishing, and progressive religious beliefs.

I've mentioned throughout that it's partly the fault of literalist theists who insist on the truth of the scriptures that this is a common line of attack. Many an atheist, and I include myself in this group, has been dissuaded byof theological convictions on the basis of literal interpretations of scripture being a central part of a particular community. — Moliere

Well, whoever's fault it is, the fact remains that many theists are literalists. In America and Saudi Arabia (Islam) that group is so huge that they determine social policy and governments. So for me, there is justification for secular humanist education and some forms of assertive atheism. I've met too many atheists who left fundamentalism after hearing better arguments during their time as apologists.

So to insist on the truth of talking snakes or the existence of Jesus is to miss out on what makes these stories compelling. — Moliere

Interesting. Talking snakes is one thing. But dismissing the existence of Jesus would undermine Christianity, surely? How many practicing Christians would there be who think Jesus never lived? If everything comes down to compelling stories rather than truth then Hamlet or David Copperfield may was well be worshiped (actually I think Harold Bloom did just that).

How exactly does an allegory work to provide sustenance to a believer, any suggestions?

:up:

What would this movie be without the music? — Mikie

Yes indeed - Star Wars one one of those films that brought back the Dimitri Tiomkin-style orchestral film score - even if it sounded more like Holst's The Planets.

Any idea why 55 year-old men have shrines of plastic figures four decades on?

Metaphysics is about giving the best general account of what reality is while increasing explanatory power and decreasing complexity. Every theory stops somewhere, and that stopping point is the metaphysically necessary stuff. — Bob Ross

I think that's mostly true, but I am not certain about the 'stopping point'. But we can leave it.

I'm not motivated to explore this speculative subject much further since I've made my comments already and I would just be repeating myself. I get that you disagree. That's no problem for either of us. :wink:

Thanks for the chat. I might dip in and out later based on interest levels.

I wasn't referring to your arguments. I was saying in general any argument for universal mind would be held by fallacious ideas

Those two statements contradict each other. — Bob Ross

I don't think so. You seemed to take my comment as personal, I was talking more generally about arguments that attempt to describe mind-at-large as axiomatic. It's an inference at best. And while it might be compelling if you share certain presuppositions, it is still an inference which can't be demonstrated. And before anyone says, 'but materialism relies on inferences...' remember that's an equivocation fallacy. I am not defending materialism.

But hey, I'm not a philosopher. This matter is really best left with people who have deep understanding the full range of metaphysical implications and arguments in this space (and I am not talking about a cultre war materialists versus idealists type thing). I am in fact more interested in idealists who do not favor a mind-at-large concept.

Maybe there needs to be a separate thread on idealism and universal mind or non-solipsistic accounts of idealism - since for idealism a way around solipsism and an explanation for object permeance often seems to require a mind-at-large.

Interesting. I largely agree.

Otherwise: Lucas was a master of merchandising on the moment! :D — Moliere

That's for sure.

I did not come to say there is a universal mind on faith nor is it grounded in fallacious argumentation. What fallacies do you think I have committed? — Bob Ross

I wasn't referring to your arguments. I was saying in general any argument for universal mind would be held by fallacious ideas - like the ones I already mentioned and probably others. Such as universal mind being metaphysically necessary - this is no different than a Christian presuppositional apologist making the same claim about God.

The Universal Mind that I am discussing is not Yahweh—not even close. — Bob Ross

I didn't say it was like Yahweh (in personality). I said like Yahweh it plays a similar role - I am very familiar with Kastrup's account of what he calls mind-at-large - instinctive, not metacognitive, etc.

This is a straw man: I never made this argument nor has any Analytic Idealist I have ever encountered. — Bob Ross

It's not a straw man (at least not intentionally) - it comes from Kastup interviews where he essentially says - for there to be object permanence, a universal mind is necessary. His line (I'm paraphrasing) ' It means that when I park my car in the garage it is still there after I go inside'. If I knew which interview, I would include a clip here but I don't have to time to go find it.

But you can help us all here by answering the question - does your understanding of mind-at-large provide object permanence?

Here's Kastrup August 19th 2015 from his blog:

-- You cannot explain how different people experience the same world unless you infer something transpersonal, which connects people at a fundamental level. The most parsimonious inference is to simply extend something we already know to exist -- i.e. mind -- beyond its face-value boundaries. This is analogous to inferring that the Earth extends beyond the horizon in order to explain the cycle of day and night, instead of postulating a flying spaghetti monster who pulls the sun out of the sky. It is impossible to offer a coherent ontology that (1) isn't solipsist AND (2) does not infer something beyond ordinary personal experience.

-- My formulation of idealism differs from Berkeley's subjective idealism in at least two points: (1) I propose a single subject, not many, explaining the apparent multiplicity of subjects as a top-down dissociative process. Berkeley never addressed this issue, implicitly assuming many subjects; and (2) I state that the cognition of mind-at-large ('God' in Berkeley's formulation) is not human-like, so that the way it experiences the world is incommensurable with human perception (see: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/09/on-how-world-is-felt.html). In Berkeley's formulation, God perceives the world as we do.

Essentially, as Kastrup himself admits, this metaphysics is arrived at through inference rather than evidence. It's clever and I'm not saying it is junk, but I don't see how this can be certain.

Thoughts on this are very welcome. The one bit of theory neutral-evidence I can think of is exactly related to consciousness, and that is the insight that I am conscious. — bert1

I generally suspect that all our ideas exist in a web of relationships alongside other ideas, so everything is what it is by virtue of its relation to everything else. You can't isolate anything in its 'purity' because it exists entirely in those relationships.

I am not as confident as you in variations of 'I think therefore I am'. Do I know it is me doing the thinking? I've worked with many people who have schizophrenia, who experience thought insertion and voices. They are often not sure whose consciousness they are aware of. What are my thoughts? If pressed, the best I can say is there is thinking. I hope it's me. :wink: Common sense - which may be more useful than philosophy - tells me I am conscious. But so what?

I call it reading while awake. In some cases, it may be necessary to do it twice, because the author is smarter, wittier, better-informed or more subtle than I am. I never assume he just didn't understand what he wrote. — Vera Mont

When I studied aesthetics briefly back in the 1980's the dominant thinker was Monroe Beardsley. It was commonly held in lectures that the writer/artist may not always know what matters in their work or what their work is really about, or what makes it great or s/he may be unaware of a range of subtexts, humour or biases present in the work.

The idea that there is one interpretation - the author's conscious intention - is not often a key navigational tool for texts. Also times change and the work is necessarily understood differently - a work which starts as history may end up as literature (with the history no longer being considered relevant). Gibbon springs to mind. Some classic works are fecund in possible meanings and interpretations - like Shakespeare - and can be (and are) understood or contextualised quite differently with each new generation.

What I object to is reducing the author of a literary work to the unconscious amoeba at the bottom of its evolutionary pond. — Vera Mont

I think the choice of wording here is needlessly negative. It might instead be put that a classic work may be so fecund in aesthetic possibilities that it allows us to generate interpretive prospects and evolves in meaning and nuance over generations, staying relevant in new ways as culture changes.

:lol:

:up:

Their problem, not his. Marx made his observations and wrote what he saw in his own world, in his time — Vera Mont

That's not the point. Author's intentions are transcended. The point is we have texts which are consistently reinterpreted and subjected to new understandings. That's how texts are generally situated across time. The idea that an important text only has one interpretation would be naïve. However the Bible stories began or were intended, they have have ended up something else, in fact many things over the generations. This is an unstoppable process.

What "universal mind"? There is not any publicly accessible evidence for such an entity. And if "everything is fundamentally mind-dependent" (including itself, which I find self-refuting), then "a universal mind" is only an idea, not a fact or "natural process". — 180 Proof

Yes, I figure universal mind is essentially a god surrogate - held in place by similar fallacious justifications and essentially by faith. Instead of (in the case of Yahweh) arguing there can't be something from nothing, therefore god - AI seems to be saying, there can't be consciousness from nothing, therefore universal mind. Universal mind still functions as 'god', as the foundational guarantor of all conscious experience.

Would you agree that there are such consistent , recognizable behavioral differences between the genders in dogs and cats? Would you then agree that there are also such robust inborn gender differences in behavior between male and female humans? — Joshs

Would you contend that perhaps a transwoman is someone who has inborn feminine gender behaviors and perceptual affective style and this may lead to identifying as female?

Sounds good.

How do you think these 8 points sit with identifying panpsychism?

I haven't heard them do so. And I don't see why they'd need to. — Vera Mont

Neo-Marxism is the name for this school - usually an attempt to provide a more modern, sophisticated account. But amongst the Marxists I've known getting 'the correct' interpretation/reading was often the topic du jour and a source of acrimonious debate.

Whom? — Vera Mont

The dogmatic dullard atheist cocksuckers, of course. :wink:

I became an atheist directly through the Jesus story. — Vera Mont

Was it Twain who said, 'The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible?' Anyway it's a common path. The Bible when read does convert a lot of folk to atheism - you encounter this is secular circles all the time. But of course the key is to find the right sophisticated interpretive framework to transmogrify the book from a lowbrow literal interpretation to efficacious exegetical insight - Marxists would say the same thing about Marx. You just need the right interpretative framework, Comrade.

I should have stuck to real life to avoid your criticism about contrivance. True crime would be better, and that's really what I meant. — bert1

:up:

Ture crime is fine, but as I said you are just asking what are the key indicators of consciousness. Not sure your enquiry requires much more elaboration than that.

I was going to write a different OP titled something like "Is there any theory-neutral evidence for consciousness?" — bert1

Can you give me an example of theory neutral evidence?

But with consciousness, what do we use to determine what to admit as evidence? Do we look in dictionaries for definitions? Well, I think we should. That will help. But people typically don't do that, and that's really weird. — bert1

I'm not sure what constitutes consciousness in human beings (except in a trivial sense) let alone inanimate objects.

To make that work, seems to me you have to either 1) show that rocks have mental processes or 2) show that consciousness in humans is not a mental process at all. If you can't do that, you should just come up with a different name for the process you're describing. — T Clark

Yes, that's kind of where I was going to go. Possibly stuck between Rupert Sheldrake and Daniel Dennett. :wink:

We're familiar with TV crime dramas. We have a suspect we think may have done a murder. Why do we think that? We have some evidence. And we are seeking more evidence in order to obtain more certainty on the matter. So what might we look for? In the case of this crime, we might look for:

- a dead body
- proximity of people to that body in time and space
- a report on the cause of death
- fingerprints on the crime scene
- alibis
- motive
- opportunity
- DNA

...etc. All the usual stuff. — bert1

Hmm. Is a TV crime drama a useful analogy? These are often written and directed to highlight certain things about the suspects and manipulate an audience - false leads, clues and behaviours specifically filmed and constructed to deceive and take you in a direction. This is not like ordinary evidence, it is contrived to elicit a response. Maybe true crime would be a better analogy? Or maybe crime is not useful at all. Perhaps what you are saying can be made more simple - what are the key indicators of consciousness? How do we determine if something has consciousness?

Would it be unnatural for example, for a human to try to live life as if they were an ant or a fish or a god? — universeness

No. It would be futile. Someone might have a very natural mental illness which makes them attempt this. But perhaps we are using the term natural in different ways.

One persons truth is another persons lie, is a fair definition of subjective truth, but I think if your epistemology is the scientific method or scientific empiricism, then I think increasing your credence level to a level of an (to you) acceptable truth, based on demonstration of a process with observable predicted outcomes, is valid. — universeness

I'm mostly there, but some subjects are not so neat and the 'evidence' is contested. Personally I don't think humans have access to reality or absolute truth, just provisional little truths which are useful for certain goals (or not). But this is for another thread.

Yeah, but does that make guns, atom bombs, gods and murder, natural, merely because they are products of the human mind and also, would it follow that the word unnatural has no existent. — universeness

How could they not be natural? If beaver's damns and bird's nests are natural, then guns and highways are too. The matter of human intervention on nature upsetting the natural balance may well be a fair point, but takes the discussion in a different direction. But I am willing to be corrected on this.

This is just the basis for the Kalam Cosmological argument, yes? Which has been fairly convincingly debunked, yes? — universeness

No. I am referring to a type of apologetics that is called presuppositional apologetics. Quite sophisticated and the best of them are provided by philosophy professors - like Alvin Plantinga. As a subsidiary argument, they also use the evolutionary argument against naturalism which is pretty cool too.

I always remember that whether an argument is debunked depends a lot on whether you are susceptible to or agree with the arguments made.

Do you think that it does not matter, either way? If so, why? — universeness

I don't care enough about theology to hairsplit the gradients of Nazarene identity and purpose.

The concept of natural can be so strongly related to 'moral' by nefarious individuals. — universeness

Indeed - some forget that arsenic, heroin and melanomas are perfectly natural.

3. The idea that some activities are "intrinsically worth while". This is a popular concept in philosophy of education. I learnt of it from R.S. Peters' work, but I don't know if he originated it. This amounts to declaring that some ends need no justification, though if you look at the examples (art, music, philosophy &c.), there is a widespread fondness for turning them into the means for other ends. Perhaps those are intrinsically worth while. I think the idea is that these are axioms, from which it is rational to deduce means. So this too amounts to incorporating means into a rational framework. — Ludwig V

Interesting. The challenge is how do we determine what is intrinsically worthwhile and what is not? This has to be based on a value system which is open to challenge. We all hold presuppositions as the building blocks for our views and actions. Some would say God is a necessary presupposition to explain why there's something rather than nothing, why there's intelligibility, morality and goodness. Christians and Muslims often argue this way. Kant and CS Lewis did.

4. Naturalization of values. By this I mean argument from what are posited as human needs or instincts, shaped by the natural and social context. — Ludwig V

Can you think of anything available to humans that is not natural? I don't know how far this gets us in practice. I tend to think that if we can do it or make it, it's natural... Whether it is 'good' or not is a separate matter.

But not the temporary death of god? — universeness

Whatever. :cool:

Winnie the Pooh taught me that people can be all different and all have different weaknesses and strengths, and yet be good friends to each other and live lovingly together even if they all make mistakes. — unenlightened

Lolita taught me that pedophilia is unacceptable, especially if you are an ironist with a baroque prose style.

The Star Wars stories are historical analogues of Beowulf repeated ad infinitum with Jane Austin thrown in for romantic interest. — Paine

:cool: