evil behavior is the result of unmet needs coupled with ignorance of the self. — Tzeentch

Can you expand on this, especially ignorance of self?

Apologies for the length, I got motivated. :cool: — Manuel

:up:

Oh sure, plenty of silly mysticism surrounding this topic. Which is strange, because, as I think you would agree, consciousness is what we are most acquainted with out of everything there is. — Manuel

Yes, the thing we are most familiar with is also the thing which seems strangest. Reminds me of Montaigne, 'We laugh and cry at the same thing.'

Replace "God" with "nature", and you have the hard problem, stated over 300 years ago. — Manuel

Indeed. If humans are still a thing in 300 years, I wonder where culture will locate this problem. I suspect a breakthrough, even if I am a mysterian by nature.

We have to accept it as fact, as Locke recognized long before Chalmers. — Manuel

Indeed. It's interesting also to me that despite indirectly launching a million easy mystical solutions to the hard problem, Chalmers himself is without spiritual beliefs. He agrees with you.

Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist. I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views. And consciousness is just a fact of life. It's a natural fact of life.

For adherents of Scientism though, there is no single source of authority on The Truth of how & why the world works as it does. — Gnomon

Not sure this is right. Scientism says only physics can answer all questions and that the scientific method is a pathway to truth and understanding how the world works.

Science, on the other hand would say we can make reliable models of the world based on the best information we have available at a given time. But these models are tentative and change as we learn more. There is no scientific method as such, just reliable or unreliable methods of rational or evidential enquiry.

So are human beings good or bad (or evil) or is the leaning to either side just a misunderstanding of human nature or are there genuinely good reasons why evil takes place ? — invicta

Neither. I don't really accept the notion of 'evil'. We use this word 'emotionally' to describe detrimental impact, but the person undertaking this 'evil' is likely made this way by situational factors and flawed reasoning.

I think as a species we are inherently deluded – an organic alchemy of cognitive biases, maladaptive habits & akrasia – homo insapiens. 'Moral ramifications', I suppose, are a fallout from both our individual and collective struggles with – for and against – our delusions. — 180 Proof

Strong words but I think correct.

Comparing the animal kingdom in terms of human behaviour is to misunderstand the role of man as the apex of creation, knowledge and reason — invicta

I think humans are clever animals who use language to manage their environment. I see no reason to theologize humans or utilize categories like 'apex of creation...'

Very interesting theory and simply explained.

In this way, sentition evolves to be a virtual form of bodily expression – yet still an activity that can be read to provide a mental representation of the stimulation that elicits it.

But, as luck would have it, the privatisation has a remarkable result. It leads to the creation of feedback loops between motor and sensory regions of the brain. These loops have the potential to sustain recursive activity, going round and round, catching its own tail. And, I suggest, this development is game-changing. Crucially, it means the activity can be drawn out in time, so as to create the ‘thick moment’ of sensation (see Figure 2c above). But, more than that, the activity can be channelled and stabilised, so as to create a mathematically complex attractor state – a dynamic pattern of activity that recreates itself.

- Nicholas Humphrey

Nice.

What you say is largely correct. My point is better described by journalist Glenn Greenwald who in 2013 wrote:

...one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering.

What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.

Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).

There's a lot of journalism about Obama's ' business as ususal' neo-liberal presidency along these lines.

It seems that science is in need of religions’ values, ethics, and morals. Might science absorb values, ethics, and morals from religions? From purified religions, of course.

Or might science somehow evolve to address the concerns and questions traditionally addressed by religion? That seems to be on science’s trajectory. — Art48

Given the shrinking of religions (despite their popularity still amongst certain societies and subcultures) I suspect religions will disappear (unless they can escape literalism and evolve). Certainly for many millions of people and gods and goddesses are irrelevant. That number is not shrinking.

But we can't underestimate the fear people have of uncertainty, not to mention technology and science and how a retreat into creationism, tradition and superstition - call it what you will - may be highly appealing as a kind refuge from the perceived troubling present.

I don't think science is the replacement as it does different things to religion. But science has done a far better job in explaining most of the things religion used to explain. For some folk this is enough.

Morality will generally take care of itself - even most religious folk don't really follow religious morality and in Christian cultures most of theists can't even name more than 3 or 4 of the ten commandments.

As for Christianity, I think Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong (my favourite, now deceased, religious writer) is probably on the money:

“Unless Biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith.”
― Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel

I don’t think there’s much of a difference between US and non-US uses of the term. It has globalized itself successfully. — Jamal

True. And neo-liberalism has been a huge subject of debate here in Australia for decades. We originally called it economic rationalism in the first years of Thatcher and Reagan and here, where our pseudo-Labor government, privatised, deregulated and sold off as much as it dared. Later Britain's New Labour borrowed some of their moves.

Interestingly, I recall conservatives being against selling off assets and privatisation back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. We even had conservative intellectuals writing popular books against the phenomenon of 'rationalism' as it was then known. This is before old conservatism faded and remerged as a market-driven right-wing.

Obama's bailing out of the banks after the 2008 crisis was a conspicuous neo-liberal move. Cornel West described Obama as a 'black mascot of Wall Street.' The point, I guess, is that liberalism seems inescapable.

A later Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, an academic and intellectual, even wrote a high profile essay on the subject of neo-liberalism in 2009.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/february/1319602475/kevin-rudd/global-financial-crisis#mtr

Don't forget that God plays dice. — Wayfarer

No... he's a card shark.

:up:

But to me, in idealism, consciousness is fundamental, period. Indeed, I guess I wasn't very coherent. — Eugen

You were fine. I'm just positing models. I think some forms of idealism hold to an account that suggests individual consciousness like yours and mine - with qualia and what-it's-like-to-be-youness - are emergent and more recent developments in the journey of consciousness. But I'm not a customer for this particular narrative.

Yes, there is. I want to be as rigorous as I can. I don't want to miss something from the picture. — Eugen

So what difference does it make, however? I have often argued that idealism, such as I have described above, would make no difference to how I live. I still am in a reality where ice cream and employment, war and relationships and eating and finding a parking space cannot be overcome. :wink:

Maybe a reality where nothing is fundamental, or maybe a reality where something is both fundamental and emergent. — Eugen

Don't some forms of idealism work like this? Consciousness or will is fundamental (universal mind) and instantiations of conscious creatures, are dissociated, evolving alters, emerging from this instinctive, striving will? Hence we have the voyage towards metacognition, aeons in the making, as consciousness begins to know itself. At least that's the story I have heard (Bernardo Kastrup argues a version of this).

By reasoning, obtaining empirical evidence, etc. — Eugen

There's a Nobel Prize awaiting for anyone who can crack the puzzle - if it is one. I am not confident we'll get there. I certainly won't.

Is there any particular reason why the question matters to you personally?

How would we go about determining whether it is fundamental or emergent?

Nicely written piece of distilled information.

:fire: I love your notion of synthetic phenomenology.

The sentence "bachelors are unmarried men" doesn't specify which meaning of "bachelor" is being used, hence the need for the antecedent in the first sentence above. — Michael

Fair.

As a description "bachelors are unmarried men" is tautological, where "unmarried men" is a synonym for "bachelors". — RussellA

Yep. Thanks.

The issue is if a statement can be true in virtue of the meaning of the words alone. — Banno

Isn't this generally tautological? All unmarried men are bachelors is saying unmarried men are unmarried men.

I know a number of Catholic mystics and they would certainly agree with Plantigna ('not bad for a Protestant') on this.

You can add the Sufi tradition here too, I think - the notion Wahdat-ul-Wujood (the Unity of Being) all that that exists is held within god and all truth and the universe arises out of god (it's a kind of ground of being idea) but I am not an expert.

In my experience religions are not all that friendly towards metaphysics either.

But empirical observation doesn’t amount to metaphysical insight. That’s the crucial distinction. — Wayfarer

The hard part is working out what counts as metaphysical insight if we are locked in to a world of appearances and cognitive limitations.

However this was later addressed in Kant's famous 'answer to Hume'. Very briefly (and literally thousands of volumes have been written about it) according to Kant, causality is not an empirical concept at all - that is, it is not derived from experience - but a necessary condition of experience. It is one of the categories of the understanding by which we make sense of experience. In other words, we do not derive our knowledge of causality from experience; rather, we bring our concept of causality to experience, which allows us to understand and interpret experience. — Wayfarer

This is a tantalizing notion and you can't help wondering, if we add (as Kant does) space and time to our cognitive apparatus, what is it we are 'really' able to apprehend about the the world via empiricism? Are the regularities we seem to observe part of the universe or a part of us? How are we to understand the capacity to make predictions work in such a context?

My only point is that rejecting Krauss does not mean there must be a god. — Banno

Indeed. Many atheists (Massimo Pigliacci, Susan Haack, for two) bemoan Krauss' lack of philosophical knowledge and his crude reasoning.

The difference between science fiction and the reality of our intelligent machines is that our own agency and consciousness isnt the result of a device in the head, but is an ecological system that is inseparably brain, body and environment. Our AI inventions belong to our own ecological system as our appendages, just like a spider’s web or a bird’s nest. — Joshs

Nice. Can't help but find this a fascinating and useful insight. Do you think the day will come when we can produce an AI creation that is closer to being an ecological system?

Gore Vidal made the same point decades ago -

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

I don't think this is just an American issue. Those 'small adjustments' for disadvantaged people keep some voters interested and make some differences to lives on the ground.

I find that most but few atheistic mindsets often lean towards a nihilistic way of life. Nothing matters, morality itself being man made can even equal that of scripture in its basic tenets however the higher forms of expression are alien to the atheist such as the creation of art or meaningful literature. — invicta

The atheists I've encountered are often insufferable moralists, hectoring people about what is right and wrong, based on secular values, such as Sam Harris' 'wellness of conscious creatures' stick from The Moral Landscape. I have yet to meet an atheist who can commit to nihilism or will deny moral behaviour in practice. They are generally way too bound up in encultured values and beliefs. The only true nihilists I've known are dead. Suicide.

some of our questions cannot by answered by reason alone or even science which aims to probe the very fabric of reality itself, always falling short in its noble endeavour by the simple fact that our comprehension can never transcend it even for want of trying. — invicta

I think this is fair.

I read the OP as Make Philosophy Great Again ! — plaque flag

Definitely one possible reading, or Make Yesterday Today Again!

Yesterday being a kind of romantic Panglossian reconstruction. The notion of Golden Eras we have lost seems to haunt multiple subcultures these days, from mawkish Youtube comments on Elvis, to speculative historicisms by certain academics.

We've been lost in the pluralitistic rubble since the infallible popes ? — plaque flag

And of course, the contrapuntal argument is that in the Islamic world and (many other places) notions of transcendent certainty continue rule politics and culture like it's 1300 CE. Humans almost seem to have a certainty death wish.

:up: that's it I think. It's a veritable supermarket of isms and schisms.

I can see that. It's yin and yang... to purloin an Eastern term. :wink:

transcendence and Idealism rear their ugly heads
— Joshs

that says a lot. — Wayfarer

I suspect that Joshs was using terminology like this in quotations.

This suggests that the issue is also political. — plaque flag

Political and aesthetic.

Philosophy never made such promisses. — Wayfarer

I guess there is no Philosophy to make any such promises, only particular philosophies.

And how to arbitrate that, hmmm? Peer-reviewed double-blind lab studies? Questionnaires and surveys? — Wayfarer

Like many issues in philosophy, undecidable.

Read Bertrand Russell's 'A Free Man's Worship', one of his early philosophical polemics and still a canonical statement of that outlook. The reason Eastern or eastern-inspired philosophies have a following is because they put back into the world what the Enlightenment abstracted away from it. — Wayfarer

Could well be the case. But this doesn't address whether or not there actually is transcendent meaning or value. It might just tell us that people have a psychological need for and perhaps demand 'fairytales' and otherworldly narratives. Perhaps a way of managing the fear of life and death. What if Russell is right and what if the push back towards idealism, New Age and Eastern thought are just a reflection that people can't handle the truth? :wink:

Is your personal ambition the same quality as the kind of ambition present in the wording?

I think paragraphs would be helpful, this slab of text is hard to read.

Very often philosophy is thought of in the light of the question "what is the meaning of life?". I would rather ask "what is the purpose of life?". — Average

From my perspective those questions seem a bit ambitious, with a focus on utility. I don't think in terms of meaning or purpose but I can answer what I prefer to do with my life. How I prefer to spend my time.

I suspect meaning or purpose is more of a by product of the choices you make, but not something you seek in itself. And what is meaningful to me may not be meaningful to others - in this way meaning is an abstraction which has no intrinsic qualities.

:clap:


Professor Chomsky - have any recent findings and understandings in neuroscience enhanced or modified your understanding of the innate structures in human brains which allow us to acquire language?

That’s the whole question isn’t it? — Wayfarer

Well for adherents it is not a question, it's a faith. But I wonder how people who are not enlightened themselves can recognise revealed wisdom in old books?

General term - applies to the Bible, Koran, Bhaghavad Gita, for example — Wayfarer

How would we know if they were revealed truth?

In the same manner, we can have faith in God by reasoning well. — Epicero

What's an example of good reasoning which leads to theism? Are you thinking along the lines of Aquinas' five ways?

If logic aids us toward the truth, then we should use logic to pursue the truth. — Epicero

What's your definition of truth?

It seems mistaken that we would be unable to utilize this tool to come to the belief in God. I would argue that everyone reasons their way to faith, and It is merely a matter of difference in how well the reasoning is done. We cannot escape reasoning as we are rational creatures. — Epicero

It's not clear to me what you are arguing. Reasoning can get you anywhere you want to go, from Islam to scientism. The real trick is how we establish if the reasoning is sound.

Secular culture will generally begin by assuming that revealed truth and sacred lore are not to be believed as a matter of principle. — Wayfarer

Yes, I guess that's why they call it secular. I'm not unsympathetic to secular culture - I have no good reason to think that the idea of a revealed truth or sacred law are of any use to anyone except, perhaps, as some aesthetic (not ascetic) mode of living, or as historical curiosities. Can you identify an example of a revealed truth so I can understand what you are thinking of?

Secular culture like theistic culture can come in grotesque forms and distortions.

Ok. I thought you were asking a different question.