I have no knowledge of Spinoza but my mother was 'into' him. I should have listened more closely to her...

In these arguments I general factor out (or bracket) the question of whether or not the ideas correspond to reality. Partly because I lack the expertise to discern if this is the case and partly out of wanting to steel man arguments I don't fully understand. You probably did the same thing when you were studying philosophy. As someone outside of philosophy, who is an atheist, I find these accounts of idealism fascinating.

What is the nature of your sympathy with these ideas?

one could probably trace a history as well, perhaps back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. — Banno

Indeed.

I brought up Kastrup as an example of evolution in idealsim - I know Hoffman agrees with (in his words) 90% of Kastrup's positon. But yes, strictly speaking I brought in a new guy. Sorry. :wink:

Thanks. It's complicated material and if you come at this with preconceptions you can miss the nuances. Which is something I've often done in the past. :wink:

Not that I have made the effort to study his argument here, but I believe Bernardo Kasturp incorporates evolution as being the gradual change of universal mind as it splinters off into various forms during its path towards metacognition - of which humans are the present example. He would no doubt argue (and my wording is clumsy, I know) that the 'physical evidence' of evolution is like all other things in our apparent physical reality; just consciousness when seen from the dissociated boundary.


A brief blog on random mutations;

https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2019/08/evolution-is-true-but-are-mutations.html

Interesting. There must be a thread on it.

Do you have a robust refutation to Wittgenstein's private language argument?

What idealists 'want to say' (but don't manage to say) is roughly correct. That's my claim. — green flag

Interesting. What's the nature of the gulf between these two?

Something like the mind of God seems to be necessary for the 'prestructuralist' theory of meaning. The assumption (not usually made explicit) is that there is a universal set of signifieds just waiting for this or that tribe to agree on handles or labels for them. — green flag

I've not heard this style of Platonic argument made before about this.

How do animals which evolved from germs co-generate language ? — green flag

Maybe I'm reading you wrong but is it your contention that evolution can't explain language and metacognition?

Platonistic theories of meaning are married to some version of creationism, it seems to me, without realizing it — green flag

Can you make that connection for me - simply, for a non-philosopher?

Lots of threads deal in some way with this topic.

Including -

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14165/fear-of-death/


I'm an atheist who enjoys life and has many types of meaning to engage with. I don't believe that humans have access to capital 'T' truth or 'ultimate reality' or that this is even a thing. For me meaning and values are human made. They don't come from outside us, encountered mysteriously, like some form of enlightenment. They come through history and culture and community and through kingship and friendship and experience.

I am not at the vanguard of theoretical physics, like most people, so the origin of the universe is not my subject - and nor do I much care. That said, I don't think anyone can demonstrate that there was ever 'nothing'. The need to invent a magic man as maker of all things seems to be one of our many meaning making stories. It helps some people to settle their generalised anxiety, even if it simultaneously fails to actually explain anything. Gods have no explanatory power. Goddidit is not an answer.

Experiences have their own powerful meanings - as sex, food, death, art, politics, conversation, relationships and work will soon demonstrate. But it's true that some people seem incapable of experiencing pleasure in life and some people's disadvantage is a huge barrier to experience. There's almost too much meaning and value out there to choose from, so for me the problem is the opposite of yours. It never occurred to me that we need eternity or gods to provide any significance.

But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. — green flag

Do you mean the possibility of transcendence built into the process?

From an old thread "Should We Fear Death?"[/quote]

Death as eternal return... I should have realized there'd be more threads on this.

I like what you said here:

What we do with fear – how we use fear is what matters, and not the mere affect. Ask any boxer who's about to step into the ring or fireman on his way to a five-alarm blaze or soldier as she's being deployed in an active combat zone. Fear is either your ally or the enemy, either you use it to drive you onward or you give it the chance to recoil and/or paralyze you. — 180 Proof

Fear, a double edged sword. Ditto for acting and public speaking.

Just a suggestion. Let's call whatever it is that is behind the appearance of the rock, a "rock". — Banno

:lol:

So, the idea that language could correspond to the noumenal world is neither correct nor incorrect, but is a "not even wrong" category error. — Janus

No real disagreement but how does this reflect on our capacity to talk meaningfully about ontology and metaphysics? Nevertheless it often does seem a metaphysical puzzle that we are able to understand each other at all. No wonder some religious folk consider God foundationally necessary for intelligibility.

It is correspondence between language and the noumenal world which is inscrutable, even impossible — Janus

Are you coming at this as a Kantian?

There's something the matter with how we see the world. I think it's a harsh truth, an inconvenient truth, and one that brings me no joy, but I feel compelled to acknowledge it. — Wayfarer

Well put series of ideas and nice summary and I'm not responding to disagree with this, just to clarify. Would it be more prudent to say 'there appears' to be something the matter with how we see the world.

Or is this for you, axiomatic?

I guess the issue for me this construction raises questions about whether right and wrong fit into any understanding of human perception. Could it not be that humans see the world just fine for what we need to do in it. Perhaps obsessing over the putative gaps and contradictions, while worthy of the term philosophy, is not going to take us any further or offer a path which transcends our perspectives.

And yes, I am aware of the promises in the various teachings of higher awareness and perennialist traditions. And I guess that's where you are heading if you think that this problem of human perception and perspective can be 'solved' or integrated in some way into an enhanced domain of the human experience of 'reality'.

It seems to me that the issue regarding how words refer and mean is troubled by a necessarily doomed search for a causal or mechanical explanation, for an actual empirically discoverable causal link between the sound or the visual symbol and the object it signifies. — Janus

Yes, that seems to be the hub of it to me - what correspondence is there between the world and language? It's a pretty tentative connection and interpretive and context dependent, but there's certainly an illusion of signifier and signified mating to produce meaning, even if the post-structuralists have demonstrated the limitations of this relationship.

One that can be filled however one wishes. — Fooloso4

Good point. As I wrote before it seems that there is nothing that can't be justified by an appeal to faith.

You must like Cormac too. Blood Meridian is something else, Deadwood's unfilmable cousin. — green flag

Love Deadwood. Best TV I ever saw. Not crazy about Blood Meridian but it is extraordinary. I prefer Cormac's Suttree... talk about the blues....

Deadwood: Calamity Jane teaching American history. 'Custer was a cunt. The end.'

Ties in rather neatly with the argument from reason. I'll continue to look for where he addresses this, though. — Wayfarer

As you know, Christian presuppositional apologists argue that atheism and naturalism is self-refuting and maintain that god grounds intelligibility, and is the guarantor for the logical absolutes and morality. Of course such an argument might potentially get you to deism, but not a particular Protestant god who hates fags... But you can't have everything.

Do you think it might be a possible that just as Kant argued that space and time were essentially part of the human cognitive apparatus which help us make sense of our world, that perhaps reason - e.g., identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle, might not have similar source? In which case, reason is not true as such - or located outside of the human domain - it is rather a condition of human experience and an unavoidable product of our perspective.

Hoffman is on record saying 'natural selection favours perception which hide truth and guide useful action.' It's not far from CS Lewis. Let us know when you find how he grounds his own truth seeking.

We know that things don't have to be true to allow us to make incredibly useful interventions in the world. For instance, star signs helped sailors successfully navigate all over the world centuries ago.

The body has a "time-passing-sense" (probably operating in the brain stem) and as we age, it slows down. A — BC

I that right? I always thought time appeared to speed up because as you age a year represents only a small percentage of time you have already experienced, compared to when you are young and one year represents a significant percentage and feels like an aeon.

Thank you, and thank you also for your nuanced, thoughtful reply.

As I read Heidegger his notion of death does not refer (predominately at least) to physical death, but to the closing off of many possibilities that comes with committing oneself to anything. — Janus

That's an interesting angle. And I have often felt this way myself as I have made my choices and a part of me dies...

Spinoza says ( paraphrased), "A free man never thinks of death" and this may seem, on the face of it, to be the antithesis of Heidegger's "being towards death". — Janus

All these associations between death and freedom are curious. I get it, but the formulation is striking.

I might be concerned that I have not realized my potential or that death might take me while I still have unfinished business. — Janus

I think this is often true for older people who want to see the future. When my mum was told she had two weeks to live she was angry, not scared or upset. Just plain furious. 'Now I'll never know what happens,' she practically spat at me. When there's a family narrative you have been delighting in, it must be hard to leave it all behind.

to learn how to die is to learn how to live. — Janus

Nice. It's like a philosophical ouroboros

I think it's folk materialism - the idea that the world is real? Whatever that means.

The question I would have for Donald Hoffman is why is his theory not a product of the same evolutionarily-conditioned process that our perception of everything else is? — Wayfarer

There's definitely a whiff of self-refutation here but no doubt there's an escape clause - he's a clever sausage.

If your roller coaster car as past the zero slope zone and you're headed downward, I don't know if aversion is still part of it. Maybe if a person has unfinished business? If they never learned to live? So they're still looking for a chance at authenticity (as if they would take it if you handed it to them.)

I see a lot of people die. Even old people are sometimes afraid if their minds are still there. I figure some people have so much love for life that they cling to it till the very end. That's kind of cool. — frank

Nice. Food for thought.

If one ceases to exist on death, then there is no "what it is like" to be dead. Hence fear of being dead is irrational. — Banno

Indeed. Irrational fears often have the biggest hold on us.

When I've worked with people dying and in palliative care, it used to surprise me how often it is religious folk who are most scared. It's said that faith provides comfort, but often it seems to provide discomfort along with apocalyptical, haunted visions.

Maybe. Most people are about 98% irrational. — frank

Most people are 98% dead....

Sorry, a cheap shot I couldn't resist.

Yes! Especially the Cohen (as he was dying himself).

Your post is helping me work this out. The earliest lecture/draft of Being and Time has everyday or inauthentic running like a rat in the wheel of a clock that tells everyone's and therefore nobody's time. If we look at how Heidegger and Derrida and Emerson lived, they had to mean something like the joy of courageous creativity. But I think it's more than fair to include joking with the wife over coffee about the pets. To obsess over fame or getting paid would, as I see it, put us back in that clock, insisting that we are machines for converting time into social capital. It may be the case that those who live carelessly 'accidentally' sometimes create such capital. But when I hear great music for instance, I experience it as a gift and not a request. If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. — green flag

That's a very nice formulation. I suspect the joy of courageous creativity helps people to bear some of life's greatest burdens. What's your take on the desire to make one's mark in the world - not necessarily to be recognized, but to leave a legacy, even if no one knows it was you?

I think this is my favorite song about death.... yes I know, Bill Shatner. I always laugh at this.

So when I say to myself "Death is nothing to us" I mean to remind myself that my fears are temporal. It's natural to fear death, and it is good to remember that this fear isn't a real thing you can defeat. For some of us that part is not so easy to accept. — Moliere

I think that's fair. I understand fear in the process (the messiness) of dying. But being dead seems like a doddle...

I recall a colleague telling me that her father had died aged 96. 'It was such a surprise,' she said. I thought the surprise was it took so long for him to go...

I just ate a Milky Way bar. — T Clark

Nice. Interesting survey.

Are people afraid of being dead or are they afraid of dying? — BC

The latter I would have thought.

Therefore, press on with diligence. — BC

Almost sounds Stoic.

This is possibly (?) the freedom or self-becoming Heidegger and Derrida had in mind. — green flag

I wondered about that when I read it back to myself.

If I stop desperately trying to identify with some lasting and indestructible -- conceived as the only way something can be 'truly' real -- then time becomes mine in a new way. — green flag

That's good.

I quite smoking decades ago; I drink very little; I never used recreational drugs beyond a few joints (total); I exercise within my diminished capacity. — BC

Me too. No booze or smoking for many years. I walk through city streets for exercise but stay away from the country - I am immune to landscapes.

the acceptance of death is precisely that liberation from dread? — green flag

Maybe. What I do find startling as I get older is the rush of time going by. I have ties older than some of the kids who work for me. It's remarkable how little and how much you can do in one life.

This should give you some sense why. — Fooloso4

Hmmm... I find the histrionic narcissism repellant. 'I... I... I... me... me... me... blood... courage... goblins...

reified romanticism. — schopenhauer1

I like that.

Thank you for taking the trouble to do this. Do you personally find the idea of eternal recurrence compelling? I think translator Walter Kauffman might have been on to something about Nietzsche's work being "easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.” I had a go at the new translation of On the Genealogy of Morality by Clark and Swensen but just find it turgid and dull, even with those flashes of mordant humour.

Dickens also used to laugh as he wrote, and he even did all the voices of his characters out loud as he penned their dialogue. I would give anything to hear that... I imagine Shakespeare doing similarly - smart actors make great writers.

I love how we can go from Heidegger's notions of chatter to putative supplies of bananas and peanutbutter in the same thread...

Sure. These stories do interest me. Speculating wildly now, but can we be certain, even if we accept a different account of metaphysics, that past lives is the only explanation? Could it not also be argued that random images from universal mind can be thrown out in small snatches or loops to which some people have access? For all we know there were 100 children who shared the same snatches of alternate life experiences. I mean, once we enlarge our metaphysical speculations, we can go in so many potential directions, why constrain it to preconceived past-life accounts?

Now don't spoil it Mr Flag... I was enjoying my achievements. And yes, it does mean I was also responsible for Pol Pot and Hitler and that sitcom, Friends... And you...

I put anecdotes and compilations of anecdotes under 'That's Interesting But...'

I'd be curious to see some independent investigation on this one. I spent my 20's with people who channeled past lives and saw ghosts, and some of the accounts were impressive but never amounted to a paradigm shift from me. I can't make any claims either way about such anecdotes, but if I get time I'll see what reputable skeptics have made of it all, if anything. I suspect that this subject and the kinds of claims made are very hard to investigate. And even if many accounts are accurate, there could be a range of mundane explanations for many of them. But who knows? They are interesting, but...

When they talk about the great green flag, they'll really being talking about themselves. — green flag

As long as you get the money and the girls, what will it matter? :cool:

That sounds tantalizing. I'll look forward to it.

I think it's about saying "yes" to all of life, both the good and bad, recognizing that the two are inextricable. Amor fati. — frank

That works. Thanks.

Thanks, yes, I kind of got this from the initial thought experiment. Not sure I'd do it all again. Let alone for ever. You?

Naïve question: in essence what is Nietzsche hoping his readers will gain from ER? What is the point of it? I can grasp its introductory use as a kind of thought experiment, but what else is there to this idea?