Apokrisis, if understanding Forms required tying them to some kind of "energetic change," wouldn't that make them physical in some weird way? — Uber
Can "higher truths" be corroborated intersubjectively such that people can be clearly and definitively shown to be in error if they disbelieve them?
For example some people believe that Jesus is God, and that their faith is not merely a "higher truth", but the highest truth. Do you believe that? If not, are you thereby denying that it is a higher truth? — Janus
There is two other questions I would like you to answer honestly:
Do you actually claim to know for sure that there is a higher truth? — Janus
I'm not trying to be unkind; — Janus
I have noticed this is a common tactic with you: to assume that those who disagree with you simply don't understand. I think this is an intellectually dishonest move and actually does you no good service. — Janus
Do you want there to be a higher truth? — Janus
So theism becomes fine, even if it is "magical thinking" ... at least in the kind of minds it constructs within certain kinds of worlds. — apokrisis
:meh: — Wayfarer
But does that mean I think Christianity alone is 'the truth and the way'? No, it doesn't. Does it mean that I think Christianity is an archaic superstition? No, it doesn't. — Wayfarer
But there's something else that I think needs mention - the pre-modern world was 'religious' in a sense we can't easily imagine now - 'the past is a different country', as a saying has it. — Wayfarer
Do you want there to be a higher truth? — Janus
My conception of philosophy is that there must be a vertical dimension; there must be something to anchor qualitative judgements - as per the above. — Wayfarer
My [evolving and constantly subject-to-revision] understanding is that the Sky Father is indeed a cultural projection based on an amalgam of archetypes. — Wayfarer
So throw out these, but keep his understanding of time right? — Uber
When you say physics provides no means to look at time as something which is measured, you are basically implying that an absolute reference frame of time exists that ticks at the same rate for everything in the Universe. — Uber
Modern physics does allow us to measure time, but it warns us that our measurements do not represent an absolute state of time, merely a relative one. — Uber
It also warns us that time by itself does not make any sense separately from space, hence why we describe events and causes as unfolding in spacetime. — Uber
On this basis, I challenged the notion that Forms can somehow be active in time without being active in space as well. In other words, what does it mean for them to be active, if not in spacetime? — Uber
Furthermore, reason about what it means to exist cannot develop except through empirical experience. — Uber
Our "rational operations" in the brain, to quote Wayfarer, depend on the outside world, and then they develop concepts that go along with that dependence, such as existence, theories about the nature of that existence, etc. — Uber
Finally, there is absolutely no such thing as metaphysical reason separate from the physical structure of the brain. Let's not equivocate: it is the brain that reaches conclusions about the world. Thank you modern neuroscience. — Uber
Seeking a higher truth may be seeking an ideal, but not all ideals that are sought are higher truths; in fact most are not. People strive towards all kinds of ideals: ideal weight, ideal physique, become the best athlete, musician, artist, writer, businessman, academic and so on; the list is endless. — Janus
I would add that expecting others to share your beliefs and ideals is a form of imposition, even if it is not overtly acted upon, it will show up covertly in forms of passive/ aggressive behaviour. — Janus
And to take the next step, to reach a theory of quantum gravity that might account for time, the wheel looks likely to turn again towards a constraints-based view where the past is the actualised and the future is the potential. Having spatialised time for so long, we may have a QG theory based on reality's thermal history. — apokrisis
Is the non-physical simply the unexpressed-as-yet future then? MU will want to be more scholastic and place the forms clearly in the past - prior to that which actually exists. And they might be prior in the sense of being latencies. — apokrisis
you don't believe that Jesus is God, is that right? — Janus
A related question which you didn't answer, but implied you believed the affirmative: Is Gautama infallible? Do you see how these beliefs must be subjective, since the Christian will say 'Yes' to the first and 'No' to the second, while the Buddhist will say the opposite. Can you give me an example of a higher truth that no one could fail to believe? — Janus
There's a good reason, or perhaps many good reasons, why we cannot know anything about the nature of the afterlife; or even whether there is one. — Janus
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying in Savatthi, at the Eastern Gatehouse. There he addressed Ven. Sariputta: "Sariputta, do you take it on conviction that the faculty of conviction, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation? Do you take it on conviction that the faculty of persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation?"
"Lord, it's not that I take it on conviction in the Blessed One that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction....
What I wanted to know is whether you personally desire that there should be higher truths, whether that is important to you such that you would feel that life is devalued if there were no transcendent realm. — Janus
So we wind up with a scholastic hybrid that tries to preserve a super-animism while appealing to Ancient Greek metaphysical rigour, setting up its own later strong conflict with objective science in this regard. — apokrisis
The problem with Buddhism (in my view) is that - like PoMo - it avoids clear assertions about the issues. It enjoys and plays with the paradoxes rather than seeks to resolve them. And so it manages not to be found wrong by remaining strategically ambiguous. — apokrisis
But there's a sense of "prior" here which is difficult to grasp. — Metaphysician Undercover
If the unexpressed future is non-physical, and the past is physical, then the present is the act of expression, whereby the non-physical produces the physical (future gives way to become the past). So if at each moment, as time passes, the non-physical produces the physical, then if this is not instantaneous (which by the nature of "becoming" seems impossible), then we have to account for this expression, as a process. Hence the things which come out of the future first, those which are nearest to the purest of the non-physical, are "prior" in that sense. This order is understood in Neo-Platonism as procession, or emanation. — Metaphysician Undercover
there is absolutely no such thing as metaphysical reason separate from the physical structure of the brain — Uber
Of course most serious philosophers have come around to materialism by now, agreeing with the central conclusions of modern neuroscience: the mind is a physical product of the brain, the operations of the mind depend on brain states, and consciousness cannot actually exist apart from a physical brain. — Uber
Yes, definitely. You see that in many threads about anti-natalism, philosophical pessimism, nihilism, and so on. You also see it in many of the social malaises of current culture. I can't see how there can be much wrong with the belief that there is a higher truth, the pursuit of which requires discipline and the cultivation of virtue, even though many seem to regard the whole idea as a ridiculous superstition. — Wayfarer
No one can actually say what the meaning is, and people have conflicting ideas about it, as is evidenced by the different religions. So, whatever the meaning might be, it cannot be known because it is indeterminable, and there is therefore simply no alternative for any individual but to trust their feelings about it, and place their faith wherever their feelings lead them to. — Janus
But doesn't this come back to our usual sticking point? I say the problem with the Aristotelian telling is that is seems to put actuality before potentiality - in time. — apokrisis
The present is where the actualised past is exerting its historical weight of established being on the possibilities that may ensue to mark out its future. — apokrisis
So every moment has some limited set of choices. But the choices are free ones - either properly random, at the level of physical nature, or ones that reflect the kind of options that life and mind can construct for themselves in having their own memories, habits and intentions. — apokrisis
But I am talking about the choices actually happening, and thus establishing a further concrete fact about historical existence. — apokrisis
I have more productive things to do than waste time in a dualist cesspool. — Uber
Finally, it's worth noting for the record that this thread has still not reached an understanding of what is physical and what is not. All of the debates on this thread, including my posts, have relied on some hazy and contingent assumptions about what we mean by that term, but the debates reveal very clearly that we really have no clue. — Uber
Just quickly, the problem here is that you still treat meaning as something to be discovered. You simply place that discovery in the individual, rather than the collective, view.
But what if - pragmatically/semiotically - meaning is something to be constructed. And so the objective part of this is the correct understanding of that process of construction. — apokrisis
This is true, but completely useless nonetheless. :wink: To describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes is true. Winword.exe is just that. And yet the useful (and also true) way to define Word is as a word processor. It is still a collection of bytes, but the more abstract definition describes it usefully. I think that matters. — Pattern-chaser
My concept of the non-physical is phenomena that cannot be detected by our senses and the scientific extensions of our senses and which cannot be explained by existing scientific paradigms. The non-physical is associated with our current state of scientific knowledge. For example, prior to the work of Maxwell and Hertz, electromagnetic radiation was non-physical, but became physical as a result of the knowledge that they generated. At the present time, self-aware consciousness is non-physical. — johnpetrovic
This is true, but completely useless nonetheless. :wink: To describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes is true. Winword.exe is just that. And yet the useful (and also true) way to define Word is as a word processor. It is still a collection of bytes, but the more abstract definition describes it usefully. I think that matters. — Pattern-chaser
I'm not sure it's true to describe Microsoft Word as a collection of bytes. The source-code archive is as much Word, and with different computer architectures, the collection of bytes will be different. Whatever Word is, it is not just a collection of bytes. — tom
Any computer program can be correctly and accurately described as a collection of bytes, but it doesn't matter. — Pattern-chaser
There is a large abstract-level gap between a stream of bytes and a word processor. — Pattern-chaser
It's just too large a gap for us to bridge, when we try to think about the mind in terms of the brain. — Pattern-chaser
My argument with Wayfarer is that he dismisses biology's general goal of entropy dissipation. That kind of denial prevents progress on the problem. — apokrisis
So, I think, for me at least, the most intellectually honest thing to do is suspend judgement on the whole matter. — Janus
So, I think, for me at least, the most intellectually honest thing to do is suspend judgement on the whole matter. — Janus
Simply put, it states that if at any time, there was only potential, there would always be only potential, because if any actuality comes into existence it requires an actuality as its cause. — Metaphysician Undercover
The argument was intended by Aristotle, to demonstrate that anything eternal is necessarily actual, and it appears to produce an infinite regress of actuality. That's why Aristotle introduced the eternal circular motion. as the representation of this eternal actuality. — Metaphysician Undercover
In the theological representation, eternal means outside of time. — Metaphysician Undercover
It views the impetus of motion as "historical weight", inertia, — Metaphysician Undercover
But didn't you slip up in presuming that time always exists? My approach says it emerges. So when there is only the originating potential in "existence" (which of course, can't be existence as we normally mean it), then there is no actual time. At best, time is one of the possible emergent outcomes of a process of cosmological evolution, along with space and energy. — apokrisis
So there is a suppressed premise here - that time exists before the existence in which I say it emerges. — apokrisis
You are taking the view that motion could be completely eradicated and so absolute rest would be the natural baseline state of existence. But inertial motion could be used as proof of my constraints-based approach. The fact that spin and straight-line motion are energy conserving symmetries - symmetries that can't be broken - shows that your atomistic assumptions about absolute rest can't be right. Physics has concrete proof against your metaphysics. — apokrisis
MU, if it is accepted that there must be a uncaused cause for all things, what does that tell us about the nature of that uncaused cause, other than that it is not caused by anything within the Cosmos? Or, on the other hand, why can the Cosmos itself not be the uncaused cause of all things? — Janus
Right. And I reject the premise of eternality, and so I can stop looking for outs that don't work, like a cyclic cosmology. For me, infinite regress is solved by the starting points turning radically vague and indeterminate. Exactly as suggested by Big Bang quantum physics. — apokrisis
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