Don't take my word for it. Anil Seth says:

Despite a revival in the scientific study of consciousness over recent decades, the only real consensus so far is that there is still no consensus. — Fooloso4

:up:

All I know about H is that for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time. How in essence does Heidegger understand being-in-the-world as a unitary mode? Is it held in the notion that I am my world?

Yes, I think the case is that we know discover the world through experience, I literally can't think of another way, it all leads back to experience and how we interpret data. — Manuel

Seems appropriate. But at some point experience becomes language and visa versa. Experience ends up being understood through language and I struggle to understand to what extent I 'process' through language.

But I wouldn't go as far as to say that an object, say, a planet, is literally made up of ideas. — Manuel

But hypothetically without preconceptions, ideas or language, what exactly is a planet? It seems to me to be an act of constructionism, not merely raw experience. There are understandings, if you like and then we seem to order, contextualize, name.

So what do you think? Is “define your terms!” always or often or ever a legitimate imperative? — Jamal

I will sometimes ask how a person is using a particular term as this is more useful than a 'correct' definition. People who get stuck on specific definitions are often irritating pedants and seem to miss the point.

Thank you. I enjoy these kinds of discussions, perhaps because I'm from outside philosophy. You are an engaging and informed interlocutor.

It's only that design in nature seems obvious to me, but obviously there are those who don't agree, and I can't think of a way to make the case. — Wayfarer

Agree. It is more of a faith based position it seems to me. BTW, I am not saying there is no design in nature, I merely say it can't be demonstrated.

I have no insight about Life but I am satisfied that human lives are random events, with no capital 'm' meaning, only more modest meanings we inherit though culture and/or make for ourselves.

Can you demonstrate that there is design in nature?
— Tom Storm

I myself don't think it needs to be demonstrated, but that if I need to demonstrate it, then probably nothing I could say would be effective. — Wayfarer

Ok. That's surely an outlier position, but let's get back to this later.

You seem to have argued essentially that you don't like Darwinism because it is unsatisfying to you aesthetically and is used to render meaning an arbitrary phenomenon. You are uncomfortable with that because there is an abundance of significant classical literature (and more modern work) which argues otherwise. This material and the perennialist tradition resonates with you. The application of Darwinism and scientism has robbed our contemporary understanding of reality of enchantment and transcendent purpose, along with the possibility of intelligibility and truth (the evolutionary argument against naturalism).

You then argue that representatives of Darwinism, like Dawkins or Dennett, are inadequate scholars and bungled representatives of a nihilistic era. They are stunted in their conception of being and ignorant of the important questions of philosophy.

But other than citing writers who deride forms of Darwinism or elevate models of higher consciousness and ultimate meaning, what can you demonstrate?

Evolution has the appearance of design. What reasons do you have for concluding that evolution has a goal or a designer, if this is what you are suggesting? I'm not aware of you making the argument and forgive me if you have earlier. Cut and paste if this helps.

Yes. Those on the Dawkins forum - the very first forum I joined - constantly used this defence against his many howlers, notwithstanding that his books are in the ‘Religion’ section of shops all over the world. — Wayfarer

So you are still not providing arguments, you're just trashing Dawkins and now it's his fault that some bookshops put his work in the 'Religion' section. Is that not a source of amusement rather than scorn?

If the apparent design in nature is only apparent, and not actual, that must be the implication, mustn’t it? — Wayfarer

I guess so. Can you demonstrate that there is design in nature and by extension a designer?

.

He did a great job as a science explainer, but he is not very good at philosophy. — Wayfarer

As we all know Dawkins is not a philosopher. But none of this answers whether we have evidence that evolution is directed by a designer, however we wish to formulate this notion.

Dawkins will often say that the processes he describes give rise to the 'appearance of being designed'. — Wayfarer

I'm no expert on Dawkins work but whenever I have read or heard him talk about the 'appearance of design' he is generally providing a rebuttal to some intelligent design proponent.

One of the key problems in dealing with Dawkins' work is separating the blunt polemical from the elaborately scientific. He's trying to be both a bar room brawler (albeit a tweedy, polite one) and a scientist. The two get mixed up and often deliberately so by people who dislike his work.

Does the word have any referent, outside the activities of h. sapiens? — Wayfarer

And animals (birds nests, beaver's dams, etc.) Probably not.

Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.

This just sounds like the rhetoric of resentment or an ad hominem based on impugning motives. It by no means provides us with any evidence that evolution is directed by 'supernatural' powers.

One of Dawkins books is called 'The Blind Watchmaker'. — Wayfarer

Yes, I've read it and used to own it. I already said it was a polemical title, but you'll note the book is full of descriptions of a highly complex interactive process as organisms interact with their environment and change over time. Is there a need to anthropomorphise this process? Do you have evidence that evolution is directed by higher consciousness? Or is this just an inference, a fallacy of incredulity wherein one can't imagine how it works without some kind of magic?

Overall, some of Chomsky's ideas are uncomfortably close to innatism for the liking of empiricist philosophers. There's something altogether too platonic about his 'innate grammar'. — Wayfarer

Perhaps. I just watched him defend human morality as constrained by innate structural limitations - or something of the sort - against arguments by that scoundrel and relativist Foucault.

dumb physical forces driven by the blind watchmaker - which I don't. — Wayfarer

This would be a slanted or polemical account of evolution, right?

Whatever Dawkins or Dennett say in polemical mode, I'm not sure words like 'dumb' or 'blind' help us with a full understanding. The evolutionary process is clearly complex and tailored and remarkable enough, without recourse to anthropomorphising nature.

I read him as saying you should not project transcendent meaning/purpose on evolution as the only correct way to understand it.

As you know as well as me, this is great material for working up a cult of personality. We humans love the ineffable, the paradoxical, the esoteric, the grandiose, the mysterious. Give us this day our wizards of the ephemeral and the diaphanous. — plaque flag

Yes; perhaps it's a distraction from the fact that we are going to die; a terror management system. :smile:

Comrade, you helped to remind me of this. :wink:

Do any philosophers here have more input on what makes a good life worth living for and worth dying for ? — invicta

I saw a t-shirt with a likeness of the Buddha on it. Underneath it said, 'Try not to be a cunt: The Buddha.' I think that's about as profound as I can get. I'm not a fan of system building or theory and I consider life to be without a fixed meaning, but since I know the experience of suffering and I seem hardwired (like most humans) for eusociality/empathy, I take a position that we ought to end or minimise suffering. Not being a cunt is a good first step.

The fact that religious institutions routinely violate their own principles is not an argument those principles. — Wayfarer

Not just religious institutions. People who believe in transcendent meaning do it. It's not a point we can overlook if we are willing to put atheists on notice as leading to murderous nihilism or rights violations.

What if I am the authority in a one-party state who doesn't recognise human rights? — Wayfarer

Just to clarify - humans rights are a construct and we can see them violated all over the West too. Try being an Aboriginal community member in this country. Believers violate others rights all the time, so this isn't a secular versus sacred matter.

The point is humans choose their values and also ignore them and a belief in god or transcendence has never safeguarded rights or preserved the sanctity of human life.

What if it doesn't matter to others? What if I am the authority in a one-party state who doesn't recognise human rights? Would that matter to you? — Wayfarer

Well, all that happens regardless of what we believe or what the truth might be, right? North Korea? Parts of Africa?

But the consequences of an idea say nothing much about whether it is true or not.

I can imagine that Dennett's ideas are shocking because they puncture the vested interests of so many groups. Talk about dangerous ideas in a world still in the thrall of romanticism.

I have no idea if Dennett is right or not, or if something similar to his ideas are right or not. But I have no reason to dismiss them on the basis that they might lead to the dissolution of some established values. The argument from disenchantment doesn't resonate with me.

Water was rushing down the slate, and I was shocked by the thereness of all that beauty, shocked to be alive, shocked that something (anything) was. I had other encounters with this shock / wonder, but they decreased with age. Perhaps it's just a feeling. — plaque flag

Nice. I wonder though why we would need to build a metaphysics on such a transitory experience of surprise. Why pull out this emotional reaction and not the one where we wanted to punch someone? Privileging this account of strangeness or surprise seems to be a post hoc rationalisation for the numinous.

:up:

Finding Dennett's account unappealing is an aesthetic response, surely? Personally, I've not discovered a reason to think humans are anything more than clever animals who use language to help manage their environment. I'm not confident that much of that language maps to anything outside of human perspectives and does not get us to a reality outside of us.

If Dennett is right, it actually appeals to my sense of humour - much ado about nothing - which I generally think summarises most human enterprises. Some of us are so proud of our metacognition and our supposed elevation from the other animals, but what is it? A more elaborate form of pissing against a tree to mark out our territory?

If we really are robots or blindly-propagating genetic machines, then the only reason to value humanity as such is convention or sentimentality, it has no real basis, because nothing important is at stake. — Wayfarer

It matters to us. What better reason do we need? I don't need to affix life to anything transcendent for it to matter. Just as I don't need Great Expectations to be true to be moved and thrilled by it.

No doubt you know this one. I'm amused by this becasue I have a dull, literalist mind. :wink:

This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Or it's a convoluted and playful way to say I'm a postFeuerbach humanist of some flavor. We humans are god. The divine predicates are human virtues. We 'eat' our old selves by criticizing what we've been as part of inventing what we will be. — plaque flag

This I understand.

Are we the ironic flowers of the heat death ? Are we coal's trick for getting itself burned ? Dissipative structures who didn't start but surely must maximize the fire ? Are we the gallows humor of the Universe in its hospital bed? — plaque flag

I think we are whatever we fancy ourselves to be. Or nothing in particular (which is my position).

It's intrinsically demeaning to declare that really, humans are confabulations of unconscious processes that only appear to be intelligent due to the requirements of survival. — Wayfarer

What if it is true? I don't hold to this view (or dismiss it) but I don't find it demeaning.

Wittgenstein and Heidegger both discussed something like the strangeness that the world (any world) is here. — plaque flag

I've never understood this. How is it strange?

I call myself an 'atheist' as a shorthand for not 'that' kind of theist. My God is a devouring fire. He eats atheists himself for breakfast. — plaque flag

Can you briefly explain this curious poetic sentence? Generally I find poetry as impenetrable as any foreign language (except, perhaps Dylan Thomas).

We can define sin as doing something against the will of God. — Art48

Yes, but how do we know whether or not god cares about what humans do? We have no source for sin except for the words of people regarding a particular version of god. So if we doubt that we can know what god wants for us - as you argued earlier - how can we know the idea of sin is even a thing for a god?

All we have is various preachers giving us contradictory stories about what God wants and doesn't want. — Art48

But do we know that sin exists? If all we have are humans telling stories about what god wants and doesn't want...

Nice examples. And of course there were the neocons who initiated the war on terror - many were former young leftists who embraced the path of apostasy. :wink:

Irving Kristol, often described as the father of neoconservatism, was once a Trotskyist. He said a neocon is 'a liberal who's been mugged by reality'. Humorist PJ O'Rourke said much the same about his move from the left to the right.

Often feels that way to me too.

It's about as gross a classist condescension as it gets. — Isaac

Yes, I think this is how some progressives seem to operate. Echos of Hilary's, "Basket of deplorables'.

It's all over the world. It's the politics of fear. — Vera Mont

To some extent, my family is in Holland, my point was the English language version.

You sound like a reasonable person.

But I've never changed my basic principles, converted to a punitive religion, supported miltarizing the police, rewriting history, denying the efficacy of vaccines or letting the mega-rich off paying taxes. — Vera Mont

I've known quite a few people who have changed principles and done just these things. The question I often wonder about is how serious were their radical ideas when young?

I do recall a time when Canadian conservative, liberal and soft socialist parties conducted civil public discourse regarding their agendas. — Vera Mont

Here in Australia too. I suspect the Murdoch influence and cultivation of the 'culture wars' has been inimical throughout the English speaking world

Not mom. 80 is about done with life. I'm 56 I would probably provide a spot for the 20 year-old. Depends how much I like them. It also depends on the nature of the disaster - I am not much interested in surviving in a post- apocalypse reality and I am not afraid of death. I don't subscribe to an ethical system, nor care to develop one, other than imprecise and common sense notions of fairness and that we ought to prevent suffering.

Like most such thought experiments made up by philosophers, this one is over-simplistic, unrealistic, and misleading. — T Clark

I agree that thought experiments are fairly dreadful.

They represented a departure from conservatism, and some conservatives doubt that they were conservative at all. Thatcher was a radical. She rocked the boat. The conservatives went along with it, because conservatism is adaptable and she was not threatening many of their interests, even though she was not really a friend of the aristocracy.

Conservatives created the first welfare state and were quite happy to go along with a mixed economy in the UK from the end of the Second World War until Thatcher.

Conservatism is not essentially pro-free-market, but this might be because it has little in the way of essence—it defends hierarchy and power, and that takes different forms. Traditionally, conservatives are pragmatic, not doctrinal.

Generally, what you are describing is the popular, very modern use of the term “conservatism”, but because it is also a political philosophy that’s a couple of centuries old, one which is still influential, it’s worth looking at that too. Vera’s questions pertain to the discrepancies between the two. — Jamal

Nice summary.

Would you perhaps say that 'conservatism' these days is one of the minor strands within the broader categories of (another imprecise term) 'right-wing' thought? And like 'socialism' the term is often used with magnificent imprecision.

The reason we don’t know much about conservatism is because intellectual conservatives are rare and academia and the press are mostly captured by the opposition. — NOS4A2

Probably. Scruton makes this point too. Conservatism is more of a disposition and not as prone to generating theory as the left seems to be. Edmund Burke was a key philosophical influence on Scruton.

It irks me when I keep hearing that old people tend to be more conservative — Vera Mont

I think this refers to the well-known phenomena of those radical in youth who often later become obedient members of the bourgeoisie. I know I have become more conservative in age. My choices and my political orientation is less radical today then it was 35 years ago. I'd say the same for my comrades who have moved from wanting revolution and blood on the streets, to sending their kids to good schools and worrying about risotto recipes and cooking with coriander.

I'm sure Nagel shouldn't be on it. — Wayfarer

I took his famous Bat essay as being suggestive of mysterian inclinations.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Without consciousness, the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness, it seems hopeless.

Has he ever qualified the word 'seems'?

All of reality is a prison. The question is, what is outside of that prison? — an-salad

Prison is preferable to reality. Discuss.

:up:

Best source is Scruton who writes about this at length and was the poster boy for conservatism for many years. He was not always a fan of the right even though the right would borrow from his work rather lackadaisically.

You’re pointing to the fact that political categories are blurred and inexact.

But I do expect people of conviction to be able to articulate, clearly and consistently, their own values: what they believe, what they consider important personally and as a society; what they think is a desirable state of affairs. — Vera Mont

I would expect that of few people, theorists maybe. In my experience, people with conviction often have convictions in place of knowledge.

That's not my version; that's the version I see under the political label that identifiable parties, their public spokespeople and their supporters wear. — Vera Mont

Yes - as you described them earlier. Not yours personally.

I suppose there must be, though the leftist groups I've been associated with were a lot more like a herd of cats than a phalanx. When that happens, though, are they still socialists and liberals? Or is there a leftward equivalent of 'neoliberal'? All labels can be abused and perverted. — Vera Mont

Fair point. Labels are twisted. I think most Western governments are neo-liberal. They do not rock the boat of the corporate interest groups - Obama bailing out Wall Street; Tony Blair's "New Labour" were about conserving the status quo. Here in Australia, Labor's Hawke/Keating deregulated the markets, floated the dollar and embraced neo-liberalism fulsomely. My socialist friends have always considered Democrat and Labor to be virtually equivalent to Republican and Tory. In this vein we get philosopher Cornel West's observation that Obama was "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats."