What I don’t get is the hatred for sock puppets. — 0 thru 9

Why do people create sock puppets? What are they for?

I read once that most people will habituate to a bell that rings periodically, but that some Buddhist monks do not; their brain waves show they hear each ring, as would be expected from someone who is paying attention to the present. — Art48

That is interesting. I live two doors down from a church which has an hourly clock tower bell. I never hear it going off. Never. Perhaps if I were a Buddhist it would drive me crazy...:wink:

If everything I experience is eventually forgotten and everything I accomplish is eventually gone, then what is the point of my life? — Art48

Yes, I think that summarises my understanding of how many people feel about death. I have the reverse reaction - if life is evanescent and everything is eventually forgotten, then the moment matters more. But I have never held a view that there is any 'point' to life other than the experience you're having now.

It’s often argued that all the achievements and struggles of life mean nothing if it all ends in blackness. How so? Aren’t the moments themselves worthwhile? Is eternity the only criterion of value? — Tom Storm

:up:

Where? I’m talking about worldwide. — Mikie

No idea, but I wonder to what extent people are interested in participating in public discourse any more. Apart from the social media tosspots.

Where’s our truly original thinkers? — Mikie

Original thinkers perhaps go elsewhere?

Nagel is still alive, and Charles Taylor and John Searle and Dan Dennett — Mikie

Hmm... it's not really Mount Rushmore is it?

In my opinion the last one died in ‘76. — Mikie

Heidegger or Ryle?

Apprecaite the feedback.

My criticism is that there are no philosophers — Mikie

I hadn't even thought of this possibility. Can you say some more?

What, exactly, is matter? Excitations of a field? — RogueAI

I had an excitation in a field with a farmer's daughter years ago and it did matter.

:up: Yep. I'm happy to be a fool.

You're right; parsimony is good, but how parsimonious can we be while still being comprehensive? Can you think of ways to collapse these categories further? — Janus

Good question. When I am on here I often find myself thinking that there are only two categories - honest interlocuters and dishonest ones. Now 'dishonest' might be a bit harsh. Perhaps it's more the case that some member's monomania can get in the way of a genuine exploration of the subject at hand. Perhaps in the end we are all either fools or dilettantes...

Ha! Sure. I generally prefer category lists with no more that 4 items and I took my cue from Tony Benn's account of the three types of politicians - straight men, madmen and fixers... I was thinking not so much about the school of thought, but how they interact ( foolishly, thoughtfully or through a labyrinth of theory). I think a phenomenologist, for instance, could be a theorist in some instances and a fool in others - depending upon approach and competence. A religionist might be a fool or a monomaniac. That kind of thing.

How would living people on Earth see death and killing from this point on? — Captain Homicide

The problem with afterlife speculations is that we fill them with what we are like here on earth. How do we know what being in the afterlife for eternity is like? Will it be cafes and side walks and Sunday dinners with Grandma? Will we slip into an afterlife with all the sensibilities (boredom thresholds, jealousies and preferences) we had in life? Will there be sex in the afterlife, or shopping, or walks to the river? I suspect our imagination about this subject needs energizing. If the afterlife is just us, as we are now, living for forever, then it's bound to be stultifying.

I can only boil it down to one thing:"our love to arrive to wise statements fuels our intellectual endeavors". I find it really simple and precise. — Nickolasgaspar

I don't disagree (how can I, when I have no real view on the matter?) but I'd like to explore this with you some more if that's ok.

Is not a 'wise statement' always measured or understood against some form of value system or worldview? How do you account for the perspectival nature of such values? What is wise for some may seem like a banal nothing to others. What does philosophy tell us about identifying the wise from the faux wise?

:pray: :up:

Bunge’s ten criticisms of philosophy — Art48

I saw this a few years ago and found it fairly conventional - most of what is said here would apply to any number of subjects taught at university. There's a famous quote - a piece of hyperbole by Theodore Sturgeon from the 1950's which nevertheless holds a truism - '90% of everything is crap.'

Daniel Dennett updated the quote 50 years later with - "90% of everything is crap. That is true, whether you are talking about physics, chemistry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, medicine – you name it – rock music, country western. 90% of everything is crap."

In other words, things are done badly... but I think we already knew this, which is why most of us are on the lookout for the gems amidst the dross.

And the reason for that is that the why is not something found in the world, but consists in what we do in the world. Meaning isn't found, it is constructed by us. — Banno

:up:

Food for thought. A rose by any other name?

That said, I’m still not dismissing Hoffman out of hand. I’ll try and finish more of the book. — Wayfarer

There may well be useful nuances and details in his position which have been overlooked in our commentary. Would you mind highlighting these if you find them?

Sorry - https://philosophynow.org/issues/154/An_Encounter_with_Radical_Darwinitis — Banno

That's great - thanks.

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.