If you disagree with statement 1: i have a mind - then who would you be communicating with right now? It would also be hurtful to my own feelings saying I have no mind of my own. It would not be ethical — Benj96

Well, philosophers have criticised Descartes on this idea. The Cogito isn't necessarily correct as 'I think therefore I am', it might be, 'there is thinking.' An "I" is being presupposed.

Use of "I"
In Descartes, The Project of Pure Enquiry, Bernard Williams provides a history and full evaluation of this issue.[54] The first to raise the "I" problem was Pierre Gassendi, who in his Disquisitio Metaphysica,[55] as noted by Saul Fisher "points out that recognition that one has a set of thoughts does not imply that one is a particular thinker or another. …[T]he only claim that is indubitable here is the agent-independent claim that there is cognitive activity present."[56]

The objection, as presented by Georg Lichtenberg, is that rather than supposing an entity that is thinking, Descartes should have said: "thinking is occurring." That is, whatever the force of the cogito, Descartes draws too much from it; the existence of a thinking thing, the reference of the "I," is more than the cogito can justify. Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the phrase in that it presupposes that there is an "I", that there is such an activity as "thinking", and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks" wherein the "it" could be an impersonal subject as in the sentence "It is raining."[5]

- Cogito, ergo sum
From Wikipedia

I can imagine a scenario wherein my thoughts are not mine. I've certainly met many people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who claim that the thoughts in their head belong to others. But I imagine we could go broader with mere skepticism.

Always found it interesting that the creator of the most ruthlessly rational figure in fiction was himself a flake. :razz:

I'll listen to any version of this and other pieces as I like multiple interpretations - even 'wrong' ones :wink: I'm talking about the earlier one.

I remember listening to the first movement of Barbirolli's slow Mahler 6th from 1967 and thinking this is way too slow - I love it!

Ah, empirical evidence! I'm now convinced.

instead, we should insist always on specifying with what 'real' is being contrasted - not what I shall have to show it is, in order to show it is 'real': and then usually we shall find some specific, less fatal, word, appropriate to the particular case, to substitute for 'real' — Austin

Almost seems a deflationary version of 'the real'. I like it.

My position - I don’t think the idea of “real” has any meaning except in relation to the everyday world at human scale. — T Clark

I am sympathetic to this. I don't find myself needing or using the world real much in the 'real world'.

3. Monsieur Sherlock Holmes is not real
4. Fairies are not real — Agent Smith

Curiously Sherlock Holmes creator, AC Doyle, did believe in fairies in a rather notorious episode of credulity. The Cottingley Fairies hoax of 1917.

:up:

Cool and thanks. I've enjoyed this too.

They just claim that either God's plan is incomprehensible or that he has special reasons for suspending justice (the guilty will be judged in the afterlife, the existence of original sin, etc.). — ToothyMaw

I hear you, but I have some sympathy for this argument. Not the 'special' 'afterlife', 'sin' part of it, but the frame of reference part. See below as I respond to this earlier point of yours.

Why does God potentially being totally incomprehensible mean that he isn't responsible for the injustices we suffer? I'm saying that relative to any human idea of justness God is not just. How is that wrong? — ToothyMaw

It's potentially wrong because what we see as injustices, god might see (from the perspective of omniscience) as something else entirely. This is not to suggest a cold indifference to our plight, but a radically different interpretive framework. Our perspective obviously is, 'we suffer, do something, God!' I get that. But god does not necessarily share our world or human experiences/values.

Then we should stop drawing any sort of positive wisdom or assurance from any personal ideas of what God is too — ToothyMaw

Indeed. God can also be understood as a mystery - unfathomable and ineffable. People often see this as a cop out and an evasion and it can be that. But maybe not. Hence the apophatic tradition in theology.

Are you even trying to understand what I am saying? — ToothyMaw

Is this an insult? We are exploring an argument, not trying to slight each other, right?

We disagree (partly) in a discussion forum - nothing wrong with that, right?

I'll concede one thing here - you're right to say God may not be just by a human understanding of what is just. My problem is not this part of the argument, rather the implication that god is in some way a moral monster or 'choosing not to intervene'. From the perspective of omniscience what humans understand as injustice might look to be something utterly different. God may not consider intervention to be appropriate.

I offer this as a tentative response to your syllogism and version of god, not as a defense of theism. I am an atheist. Have we taken up too much time on this?

No. I haven't. God could be that unfathomably complex machine yet still be a being that cares not for enacting justice at all. — ToothyMaw

Just in saying that demonstrates to me you don't understand the argument.

Do you want to keep going in circles or have we reached the end for now?

It's on YouTube - was part of the Bach anniversary. Just pop that in and you'll get it. Rondeau is an extraordinary player. The older I get, the more I appreciate and 'feel' Bach. Perhaps that's how it is meant to work.

If God cared, you don't think they would do something? Would God pussyfoot around so that we can have arguments like these? I think not. — ToothyMaw

You've probably missed the argument about the nature of god then. You're approaching this in human terms and thinking of god as a kind of very special human, with the same frame of reference. But we are simply not in a position to know what a god thinks or can do or can see. And we have yet to demonstrate what god's relationship to the material world is apart from, presumably, a role in creation. But it's far from clear. The only god you can pin immoral behavior or negligence on is the version I named earlier. And this is the standard atheist trope. And believe me, I've used it myself in the past even if it has a limited range.

We have plenty of evidence, however, that God does not give a flying fuck about people getting what they deserve, at least as we understand it. — ToothyMaw

Mainly just for the kinds of anthropomorphic, cartoon gods of evangelicals.

I'm not sure how you have determined god's state of mind to conclude it doesn't give a fuck. :smile:

You need to address my definition, because, according to that, we can indeed declare him to be unjust. — ToothyMaw

I get that, but I think this narrows the scope and nature of both god and evil. That's all I am saying. The world may be much vaster than this small fence around matters moral and metaphysical would suggest.

And please note on the basis of literalist interpretations I have frequently called Yahweh a cunt. But this is kind of a separate matter. :wink:

I'm not certain about that. I keep coming back to this -

I guess I would ask, what exactly is the correlation between our world and the reality (or not) of a deity? — Tom Storm

I would say a more apropos syllogism might look more like this.

a) It is unwise to reach conclusions in the absence of good evidence.
b) We have no good evidence about the nature of any god/s.
c) Therefore we can make no claims about god/s as being just or unjust.

Or

If God exists he may be omniscient and therefore almost incomprehensible to human understanding.
Therefore we cannot ascribe to god/s human standards and expectations around morality.

The problem for me is that these kinds of formulations only really work if God is a person - some old guy in the sky, with a personality and an almost human approach and is subject to a literalist/fundamentalist interpretation.

:up:

It took Christianity to foster the view that not only is there one true God and one true doctrine but that everyone in the world must believe in that God and that doctrine, on pain of persecution and death. — Ciceronianus

You can see how totalitarian systems were influenced by Christianity. Stalin studied to be a priest... go figure.

I don't intend to be rude, but this sounds like a creative writing essay topic rather than philosophy. To answer your question - who knows? How would you determine 1) what impactful looks like and 2) how would you measure one set of impacts against the other?

Not sure why this below is included, seems a bit unclear what you are saying and possibly superfluous to your question -

As for now this discovery would be purely observational, i.e. we have no way of communicating with- or prove our own existence to them. However, that does not exclude the possibility of anyone, e.g. a person or government, to claim something entirely different. — CornwallCletus

What's this last bit below doing here?

You would not personally encounter them, but only be aware of their existence. (If you believe to have encountered either of them already the frequency of these encounters would not change) — CornwallCletus

Why 'only be aware'? What does this omission of personal experience add to your scenario?

I think you also need to clarify your dot point on 'paranormal presence'. Are ghosts in your account spirits of dead people or some other phenomenon? If this is 'not observable' as you put it, then potential impacts would likely be significantly less than if it could be established there is an afterlife.

As per this moment, I don't have good reason to believe either scenario. :wink:

That is, the will of the majority of the people can be advanced by the enslavement and even murder of a minority. That is not a hypothetical construct. It is the very history of the US. — Hanover

Yep. And that's the scary part.

JS Bach: Goldberg Variations - Jean Rondeau (harpsichord)
A Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht

Perhaps. Just asking.

a kind of developmental barrier to the ability — Universal Student

Is there hierarchical thinking predicated in this construction? You've stated that you privileged self-awareness/journeys of personal transformation, so it would follow that someone who does not is developmentally challenged, right? What if they are not? What if they simply do not share your perspective. Does this suggest a lesser being?

I'll grant you that one of the most fascinating things about people are the intricate pathways they take to getting in their own way.

I think that it is arrogant to be unwilling to do so. — Universal Student

There could also be people who may be unable to do so. How would we know which is in operation?

a. If God exists, they are at least unjust, and have the potential to effect just outcomes if such just outcomes exist.
b. Just outcomes exist.
c. God must always effect just outcomes to be perfectly just.
d. God does not always effect just outcomes.
e. Therefore, God is merely unjust. — ToothyMaw

a - If god exists we seem to have no demonstrable way of knowing what their nature is, or if god is even present in the physical world.

I guess I would ask, what exactly is the correlation between our world and the reality (or not) of a deity?

If you don't think that these sorts of questions matter very much, why are you allowing this discussion to take up space within your mind? — Universal Student

I think it's pretty important to explore and talk about the things you don't believe in, don't you? I get a lot from hearing what others believe and why. :wink:

What if we re-framed this instead as someone suspecting that they are experiencing greater degrees of awareness and consciousness and as a result, they experience this mental initiation into the new and unfamiliar territory. Does this change anything for you? — Universal Student

No. 'Mental initiation' is not a term or process I recognize. But if you are just saying people see and try new things and orientate themselves in the process, I would argue that it is a rare person who doesn't do this intuitively throughout their life, unless they belong to a very conservative or insular community.

Also, what harm can come of asking these kinds of questions? If a conversation doesn't attract us, we can easily access our freedom to move on to another which speaks to us more deeply. — Universal Student

I never said there was harm. But now you raise it, there are plenty of people I've known across the decades who have disappeared up their own rectums through a process J Krishnamurti describes as 'analysis paralysis'. Self-reflection can become compulsive and end up in ceaseless inaction and solemn festering. There is also a lot of explicit and implicit status seeking bound up in the self-reflection movement as people jostle to prove their innate sensitivities and higher awareness to others and themselves.

For some reason, none of your tags of my name show up in my "Mentions" page. If I don't respond to a comment of yours, that may be why. — T Clark

Same here.

I'm also keen on paying attention.

Interesting. How would we expunge statism from human behavior? Is it possible?

How does one demonstrate that having no government doesn't automatically generate some other form of tyranny or overarching organizational process?

Thanks. :up: Yep. This notion of 'underlying concepts' needs to be made coherent.

I wish we were able to hear more about @ThinkOfOnes notion of ‘underlying concepts’. I think he is sincere and he really can’t believe that others don’t see his point. Which seems to mean they must be dumb or bad people. An opportunity to clarify has been refused or avoided. I’d like to try and steel man his argument. What did you make of the thought experiment and the underlying concept argument?

Yes, that is interesting. Keep up those flimsy contributions, Cobber! :wink:

You seem to think we can rely on the words of Jesus, despite not knowing what they are.

Address that. — Banno

There's no real way out of that one other than playing a speculative game about the text holding underlying concepts, which hasn't gone so well.

You're really something. — ThinkOfOne

Interesting that you choose again to attack and belittle rather than to clarify. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that perhaps you are challenged by this kind of discussion. Take care.

If you kept track of what I've written, understood thought experiments and kept track of the context of my thought experiment, perhaps you'd understand that your response is irrelevant to the point of the thought experiment. — ThinkOfOne

Thought experiments are only useful if they provide insight on the matter you are trying to illustrate. We disagree about whether you were successful in this attempt. I'm not 'hellbent' on anything, just bemused at your imputations.

I did address your response with the following:
Well, perhaps you don't understand thought experiments. Or you've lost track of the context of this thought experiment. Perhaps it's once again due to the fact that you "read this stuff quickly during breaks at work."
— ThinkOfOne — ThinkOfOne

I see this as avoiding the argument by claiming it doesn't count.

Maybe you could explain why you think your thought experiment/scenario is of use here.

Oh, and are you able to address my response? Particularly this which you can't avoid with a scenario which doesn't remotely match the situation we are discussing.

Where is the equivalent of a journal with actual words in it as source material for the gospels which are copies of translations of copies of translations, written decades after the events? Your thought experiment is predicated on a real and ordinary person who has left direct first hand source material via a written record of actual words said. And only one person involved in the process which took those words and recast them in fiction. Can you demonstrate that Yeshua kept a diary? Can you demonstrate that any notes were ever taken of Yeshua's itinerant preaching? Can you demonstrate that there is any connection at all between any words as they appear in the gospels and any words said by any actual person? — Tom Storm

If you are unhappy with a comment or an approach, just say so plainly. This is a dialogue. No need to embroider your comments with imputations of a person's motives or intentions. That isn't good manners, doesn't demonstrate good faith and muddies an otherwise interesting conversation.

For the rest of readers the connection between social disorganization in Catcher and criminality in The Stranger would link psychiatry in the first case and nihilism in the second. These are not likely the intended, but the latent functions of the work that cause a potentially intensification of institutionalization. — introbert

Why psychiatry? I'm not sure what you mean here?

Sorry, I didn't read it carefully enough.

you once again intentionally omitted text — ThinkOfOne

You need to watch this sort of claim. You don't know what was omitted by intention or otherwise. I usually read this stuff quickly during breaks at work.

So, in your hypothetical, the person is not a god or a miracle worker and not the founder of a religion. That's the first critical difference. Because if they were then there's a different kind of scrutiny involved. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. They are not equivalent examples. Also, even an obscure and almost totally hidden 20th century scientist can be identified fairly readily using records and research.

That said - if the journal has actual science documented in it that can be tested empirically and validated, then we can accept that part of the information. The testable part. The other information we would be unable to confirm. It might not matter if Einstein was fictional as the methods described could be confirmed.

But now you have another problem. Trying to fit your hypothetical into the Yeshua/Jesus story.

Where is the equivalent of a journal with actual words in it as source material for the gospels which are copies of translations of copies of translations, written decades after the events? Your thought experiment is predicated on a real and ordinary person who has left direct first hand source material via a written record of actual words said. And only one person involved in the process which took those words and recast them in fiction. Can you demonstrate that Yeshua kept a diary? Can you demonstrate that any notes were ever taken of Yeshua's itinerant preaching? Can you demonstrate that there is any connection at all between any words as they appear in the gospels and any words said by any actual person?

In and of themselves, off what value are the underlying concepts conveyed by the journal entries in the novel? — ThinkOfOne

The key difference is we can readily demonstrate that Einstein actually lived, was a real person and we can demonstrate what he did. And we can readily compare the real person to any novel he may have inspired. So it's a very different situation. Also it is not claimed that Einstein is a god and had supernatural power. But I get what you are trying to say.

Maybe it's more like that 2012 movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter wherein Lincoln is depicted as a killer of vampires who works secretly for the US government. Clearly based on a real person, place and time, but almost nothing said or done in the story actually happened.

Still looking and reading... — introbert

Fair enough.

So my argument from earlier has been -

Perhaps we won't find common ground then since I have already proposed that nihilism has various expressions and does not necessarily lead to anti-social behaviour. Can you demonstrate that nihilism invariably leads to anti-social (sociopathic) behaviour? — Tom Storm

I don't think anyone here has demonstrated that nihilism invariably leads to anti-social behaviour. But I'm going to accept part of your argument having thought about it more, that nihilism is often used as a synonym for evil and that it is associated in many people's mind with anti-social activities. Nihilism is a kind of epithet and has totemic power.

But for me, problematically, we can equally point to significant anti-social behaviour and atrocities committed by Islam and Christianity, surely not nihilistic in their intent and typical meaning making systems.

In Nihil Unbound: Naturalism and Anti-Phenomenological Realism philosopher Ray Brassier highlights his understanding of nihilism as a positive and necessary pathway back to truth-

"Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution — his attempted overcoming of nihilism — consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such — all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. It's an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time's. The principal contention of my book, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from Nietzsche, is that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but rather the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative.”

I'm not a Brassier acolyte - just noting this take:

“Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity."

I think that's what I meant when I wrote -

there is nothing by way of foundation. Whatever meaning we find is ours to create. — Tom Storm

I liked what you wrote and it rings true. Thanks.

Maybe that's why I like Taoism so much - it's a lazy man's philosophy. I doubt many would agree with that. — T Clark

There's an imaginative poetic subtlety involved in Taoism that can't be readily described - hence the The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao I think that's what you've been getting at.

But how do I know other people are also not just an illusion simulated by my mind? For me experientially, it is only my consciousness that has a privileged position. — PhilosophyRunner

How do you know today isn't the first day of your life and all your memories are implants? The potential disruptive questioning one can pose regarding any version of reality is endless.

I am trying to get the idealist position right so I can fully understand (as much as I can be arsed) what it proports to tell us. Sure you can fire questions at it but you can do this to any metaphysical position.

My experience of computers, Tom Storm and boulders are indistinguishable in that they are all part of this physical dashboard I experience. It makes no sense for me to privilege Tom Storm as a conscious entity over the rest. They are all just inputs in the dashboard I experience.

However It does make sense for me to privilege my own consciousness, as that is the consciousness that I inhabit and experience directly (a la the Descartes quote). Hence the resultant solipsism. — PhilosophyRunner

Well stated. And you're right. I am giving idealists the benefit of the doubt in trying to steel man their account of the materialist illusion. Donald Hoffman, for instance, would be the first to agree that jumping off a 30 story building will probably kill you - except that death and what actually happened isn't what we think it is.

Most people will of course consider this to be tosh. I'm not so crazy about the idea myself. :wink:

Telling that you intentionally omitted the following from my previous post:
Interesting. Seems reasonable to place import on the quality of the underlying concepts conveyed. Evidently you place import on the quantity of records kept instead. — ThinkOfOne

Interesting and odd way of looking at it from my perspective. You say 'intentionally omitted' as though I made a sinister choice. Is that what you intended?

Yes, for me the first principles are: what was, or was not actually said. Who was or was not actually a person/god.

Everything else comes after.

If we have no record of any such figure saying any such things, or doing any of the things described, then what you have is functionally no different to finding value in Harry Potter saying things. And there may well be value in the words and deeds of a fictional figure. I value the ethical world of George Elliot's novels.

Seems reasonable to place import on the quality of the underlying concepts conveyed. — ThinkOfOne

As what? What are you getting at - as truths found in myths, or is it something more?

What mechanism do you use to determine 'quality' and how do you identify 'underlying concepts'?