:up: Interesting, BC. Thanks.

Cool. I wasn't sure what it was about either.

Just that I am wondering if anyone has any attachments to materialism these days, enough to speculate on these questions.

Are there any materialists these days? Isn't methodological naturalism the most commonly held theory these days amongst the 'non-woo' approaches.

Essentially my actions and life and all my accomplishments being reduced to nothing. — invicta

I often find it interesting that some people think this way. I don't see how death has anything to do with a negation of life and any accomplishments.

I don't enjoy a meal any less knowing it will be over in an hour or two. I don't enjoy my car any less knowing it will be a heap of rust in 20-30 years, I don't appreciate my friends any less knowing that in a few decades they will be dead. Things are for the moment and for the memories.

I just find it a massive tease to be granted existence and yet only experience it for a brief spell. — invicta

I think this is really just a matter of personal taste. I was talking to my partner about this. Neither of us is particularly worried by the thought of dying in the next 15-30 years (we are in our 50's). It's been a perfectly contented life, but I don't find the experience so compelling that I need to linger longer.

I forget what this thread is about. I think I was simply making the point that of the supernatural matters commonly posited - ghosts, gods, demons, spirits - I'm not inclined to belief in them even if there are lots of anecdotes in their support. I might have skipped the term anecdote and used 'personal experience' instead. Either way, it's getting late here, I have Covid and I may start speaking in tongues soon.

Sure - sloppy of me. I worked with a guy who says it is proof. That's his understanding of anecdotes in action. I'm all across tic tac reports.

Sorry I screwed up the formatting of my earlier post and deleted it.

Right but in a philosophy forum it is an immediate claim to dualism — Bylaw

I don't think it necessitates dualism. Idealism, a monist ontology might be an equal explanation. But even if it does imply dualism, what of it?

Hundreds of folk say they saw Elvis alive after 1977. Apparently he must have faked his death and lives amongst us. He even showed up as an extra in Home Alone. :razz:

You may be right. I was talking specifically if we should believe claims about the 'supernatural' based on anecdotes. Needless to say this is a discussion lacking in precision and clarity and where supernatural begins and ends or what counts as supernatural is still open. I don't consider claims about animal behaviour supernatural, but I am not a scientist, so I'll leave it to others to comment further on this. I am also not trying to set myself up as some kind of scientistic fiend.

We parent, vote, try to find romantic partners, succeed at work and in freetime activities, based on all sorts of anecdotal and other less than scientific research level rigor sources. — Bylaw

Indeed, but I don't know what this has to do with my position. I never claimed people make all decisions based on careful reasoning and evidence. I certainly don't - I go by intuition a lot. (This still contains experience and judgement.) I simply made comment on whether I would accept a belief in supernatural claims (let's say gods, ghosts, demons) based on anecdotes. Answer: no.

One person complaining to the city council about the new stoplight could be ignored, but 500 complaints means something got screwed up. The plural of anecdote clearly is data. — RogueAI

You're confusing categories - perhaps an equivocation fallacy. We are talking here about feedback regarding a tangible matter of council business, not an anecdote about the improbable or impossible. Try getting council to deal with the matter of 'invisible vampires' hovering near the local tip....

What would you believe after that conversation. — RogueAI

I would believe nothing in either direction, it's just an anecdote. Isn't this the point we have been addressing?

If I cared about ESP testing I might say - 'So you think you have a good candidate for someone who has an ability? Let's test it independently with stringent conditions.'

I think we are probably done. You think anecdotes count as good evidence, I don't consider them good evidence. I get it... :wink:

My point is that when enough anecdotal evidence piles up, it's OK to conclude something strange is going on. — RogueAI

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Do we have good reason to deny all these anecdotes? — RogueAI

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

That said, I think anecdotes can sometimes be interesting and they may well form a reason to investigate something further. But for the most part they are fairly useless in themselves.

I'll be a lot more interested the moment Southern Baptist's start seeing visions of Shiva and Hindus start seeing Mary Magdalene... :wink:

f a friend calls and says your house is on fire do you dismiss it because it's anecdotal information? — RogueAI

Nice try but unrelated to the matter at hand. I wouldn't compare a piece of information like that - about a mundane event, coming to me from someone I have a trusted relationship with, about something which can be tested empirically - to an anecdote about a supernatural event.

I don't generally accept anecdotes as conclusive evidence about a given matter. But the more important part of this is context: where the anecdote is about, for instance, laws of physics being contradicted, I am going to need more than a personal experience account, right? If someone tells me they bought a kitten on the weekend I am unlikely to be sceptical and need more. If they tell me they bought a unicorn, I'm going to need more.

Pretty sure we can find thousands of people today who have been 'abducted and probed by aliens'. Do we have good reason to accept all these anecdotes? I would say no. The stories may well be interesting and may well be evaluated separately, but that's just the beginning of a process where actual evidence must be considered before any conclusion can be reached.

he identification of gun ownership with appeals to Jesus is itself a particularly revolting aspect of American conservatism. Really signals a very deep and dangerous confusion as far as I can tell. It's diabolical. — Wayfarer

I hear you. I doubt that much of this is held in place by a deep reading of politics or scripture. It seems more emotional, a form of tribalism which has become embedded in cultural identity in some parts of the US. I wonder if it even properly counts as Christianity? It seems somehow too shallow and propagandistic.

I couldn't work out if he was mocking them or not.... But it gave me a laugh. — Banno

Funny you should say that... I can't tell if Chalmers is being serious in relation to most things...

:ok:

That's better. Can we think of any examples of this happening that are beyond myth or anecdote?

When you hear or read a statement, how do you decide whether to believe it? — Vera Mont

Depends on the statement. A lot of the time I have no special interest in knowing if something is true or not. I understand that most statements are subject to a particular perspective or worldview. Like most people I generally use intuition (experience) and sources I hold more credible than others - certain journalists, experts, etc.

Saw the video. Gert seems an amiable, practical kind of fellow. As you say, he ends up with 10 commandments (no doubt a cultural preference) although god is absent from it all. Significant pockets of American society will surely challenge any moral system that isn't grounded in a theistic perspective. Not sure how much cooperation we'd get from them.

Other than as a starting point for discussion, does any of this really help us determine the more pressing question of what we ought, or ought not do?

What can I say, he's a sick motherfucker!

The problem is that his use is often not in fact reasonable in context. I've demonstrated this in my posts. You might be interested in reading them.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger, and many others use the term to mean anything that is, i.e., anything that can be said to be. Nobody has to follow them in this usage, of course, but Wayfarer actually attempts to correct people who use the word in this traditional way, by saying that, actually, only sentient individuals are beings.

Can you see the problem? Can you see that if you say to Aristotle "hey, actually only sentient individuals are beings", you're not making a philosophical point, but just refusing to use Aristotle's terminology and expressing your refusal in a misleadingly substantive statement? — Jamal

Yes, I think this is worth pointing out clearly like this. It's confusing otherwise.

Yet isn't applying "aesthetic" (like epistemological) preferences to answering ontological questions a category mistake to begin with? — 180 Proof

Yes, I think so. Category mistakes are at the heart of so many fallacious beliefs.

But it's gotta suck to dislike the concept but believe it. — Dawnstorm

I spoke to an observant Jewish man once who told me he hated god and loved him in equal measures because life was so unfair and tragic. To me this just sounds like living with an abusive partner.

What we collectively need to do is recognize alcoholism as a disease — BC

I think you're insightful. As someone who works in the general area of addiction and mental ill health I would personally choose different wording. I agree 'moral failure' is a useless lens. The term alcoholic isn't commonly used any more. People have an alcohol misuse disorder and it comes in many variations and is definitely not the same for each person.

I'm not an additions academic, but I don't consider alcohol misuse to be a disease, it is an addiction, a behavioural or learned response. It's no different to an addiction to sex or shopping and probably often stems from a reaction to psychological trauma. This is certainly what I have found in the environments and life stories of the hundreds of folk I have worked with.

AA has dominated the language of alcohol use and the disease model is popular with many people from that cultish and sometimes useful organisation. This is a contentious subject because it touches on so many societal debates - personal responsibility, normalcy, recovery, meaning, hope.

I tend to find people may recover if they have meaningful alternatives to get involved in and can reimagine themselves as non-drinkers. This might require new friends and role models and a new job and deliberately acquiring alternative behaviours to the habitual patters they got stuck in. They need to recognise their behavioural triggers. Alcohol misuse is generally the result of a person's problematic relationship with their environment. It is learned behaviour and it can be unlearned, but the person requires a reason to change and personal feelings of hope.

People tend to have a 'career' in substance misuse and it can be a long road for some before change seems appealing. But I have seen people who drank methylated spirits (denatured ethanol) and aftershave come good with support and insight. People with histories of sexual abuse and trauma seem to be the hardest to support as they often have a screaming in their head that never goes way. (Social learning theory is one useful lens we can use to view addiction, but I have no desire to get into a debate about who has this subject mastered; I think we are still learning and have a long way to go.)

Yes, I think the idea of god/s is/are incoherent too. What do we do with these stories? The literalist accounts (myths) are easily junked, but the sophisticated theology of, say a Paul Tillich is harder to grapple with. Of course not understanding something does not give us carte blanche to deny its existence. There are plenty of things I don't understand which are useful and exist, from quantum mechanics to chemistry. But the god concept is a strange one. I find it hard to see what utility it has other than as a child like comfort in adversity, or as a fuzzy placeholder to explain things we don't fully understand, like abiogenesis or consciousness. I suspect where we land often boils down to people's aesthetic experience of the world. The idea of a transcendent being (magic man) seems right and beautiful to some folks, wrong and ugly to others.

:up:

Everything we do still means nothing at all, because we're all still just an insignificant speck of dust in the universe. It all means nothing. — niki wonoto

In many respects this is what makes me celebrate life even more. It's a brief flickering light in the infinite darkness, then it isn't. How marvelous it is that some of us are able to enjoy it and do things between the nothingness before we were born and the nothingness after we die.

You write 'insignificant spec' - but that is too emotive. Sounds like this has been influenced, perhaps unwittingly, by Christian thinking, where only transcendence can make a poor, earthly life meaningful. I call bullshit on that model.

Meaning? Humans are meaning making animals. There's more than enough variety of meaning out there to occupy a million lifetimes.

Wasn't there a bit of a flame war here about this definition of being last year?

I'm interested in what people think best exemplifies philosophical thought. Perhaps it cannot even be exemplified? — Pantagruel

I agree with this last part. I think of philosophy as a diversity of approaches for not taking anything for granted.

Well, they are good Christian soldiers in the war against humanism, which like Communism seeks world domination...

I quite like miniature dissertations. Thanks.

I can see that but I don’t really like that way of putting it. — Jamal

Fair enough, but I like my swords double edged...

At some level we might say this positon is also a kind of philosophical shoulder shrug.

I’m thinking that indirect realism, though popularly often expressed in modern scientific language, is a hangover from theology and speculative metaphysics. — Jamal

Nice Adorno quote. I've been looking for quotes expressing precisely this sentiment.

Ditch the ideal of the absolute, and experience is no longer a barrier, but just the way we interact with the rest of the world. — Jamal

In a somewhat cruder form, this kind of thinking informs my atheism. The idea of God, or some 'really real reality' which cannot be perceived has, for me, no clear application. It can in no way change my experience of what it is to be human in the world and can offer little but distraction and futility. Or some shit...

There may be things that are true universally, re: pure mathematical and logical propositions, in accordance with our intelligence, but I’m not sure about universal truth as such. What could be true under any possible condition, including whatever kind of possible intelligence, when the totality of possible conditions is itself inconceivable? — Mww

I think this is an important point. I'm assuming from this that you don't think there are moral or aesthetic truths?

Interestingly, Alvin Plantinga takes this idea to show how evolutionary ideas undermine naturalism. — Richard B

That's true. I think Plantinga was inspired by Kant's transcendental arguments.

Basically, what could reality be if not the stuff we know about via the swirling constructivist enterprise of perception and consciousness?

And if that's right, then of course we know about reality, and the notion of a reality about which we know nothing is just nonsense. Word games. — Banno

To be honest this has been my default, without the benefit of any philosophy. I'm curious these days to understand the idealist model better so I can say to myself I didn't dismiss things out of hand. I enjoy speculative, imaginative exercises - to a point.

So here's the thing: would Hoffman deny that the tree has three branches? — Banno

He seems to be an infotech Kant in some ways. From what I can tell, Hoffman would posit that humans have evolved a tailored and limited account of reality which assists us in survival. We do not apprehend reality. What we experience through our senses is like the icons on a computer desktop (phenomena?) but these icons are heuristic tools and are not to be confused with the reality they represent (noumena?) Unfortunately we can say nothing useful about the world beyond appearances so I wonder how helpful Hoffman is.

There's a minefield right there.

This is a fascinating discussion and not a new one for TPF. As a low-rent pragmatist, I dissolve the problem in a whole different way - by not giving a shit.

Which is a joke, of course, but has some semblance of truth. What I'm keen to discover here are the best arguments from both positions, in recognition that this debate is probably insoluble for now.

I do find myself coming back to a simple query about idealism which is, if all human knowledge is a swirling constructivist enterprise of perception and consciousness which can tell us nothing about reality as it really is, then how can we say idealism is at the heart of reality? Is idealism really just one way of expressing a problem in epistemology - that of the perspectival nature of knowledge, expressed through language, with all its dead ends and confusions?

Is purely fictional entertainment, is good story telling, enough to appease our innate desire for drama, battle, conflict, struggle, etc. — Benj96

Humans are meaning making animals. I would include philosophy and science in the story telling realm.

I don't think being the passive recipient of a dramatic story is ever going to be a substitute for an embodied experience of life. I'd say stories influence why people seek out adventures, wars and exploration. They are inspiration and may galvanize people into action. As far back as 1605, the satirical novel Don Quixote satirized the influence bad romance stories have on the crazy life choices of the hero.

Cool, I'll give it a look. Morality 'in the world'; was one of my initial reasons for joining this place.