He wanted to implode the institutional prejudices associated with reason with better reasoning rather than spiritualist or religious claptrap... — fdrake
I'm not sure if I am a wanker or a cunt. — bert1
I'm a cunt. — bert1
Nonetheless, the experiences qua experience (stripped of mysticalized descriptors) are latent in every mind and reflect, by their absence, a gap in self-knowledge. — ZzzoneiroCosm
reductionism = context-invariance of explanation (changed/changing conditions do not/can not alter how something works). — StreetlightX
I've gotten real fucking high a few times, and it has impacted how I think about things, but I would never believe that the intuitions and sensations produced in those states were insights into the true nature of reality. Altered states shatter, reasoning builds anew. — fdrake
"The Wisconsin study took electroencephalograms (EEGs) of 10 longtime Buddhist practitioners and of a control group of eight college students who had been lightly trained in meditation.....Zen Buddhist monks show an extraordinary synchronization of brain waves known as gamma synchrony—a pattern increasingly associated with robust brain function and the synthesis of activity that we call the mind." — ZzzoneiroCosm
Mysticism and reason should be dual (dueling) handmaidens not frittering in a myopic loggerheads we've come to see as natural and even inevitable. This synthesis will come. (In my opinion.) — ZzzoneiroCosm
Mysticism is a thinking style completely at odds with reasoning... — fdrake
So I'd be even more stringent than you about Wayfarer: it's not that his problem is with education and politics, and he's focusing on the science. He doesn't even get the science right, as far as I'm concerned. — StreetlightX
On the one hand you want to reserve an isolated realm for your philosophical speculation; rendering it out of the reach of science. On the other, you want to project the impact of your speculation back into the scientific domains! — fdrake
I've described mysticism as "a catalog of intense and unusual experiences." You've described mysticism as a "thinking style." — ZzzoneiroCosm
So long as the catalogue doesn't necessitate purchase of its items, we can see eye to eye. — fdrake
A scientist-ist (sic) would never call it mysticism — ZzzoneiroCosm
I just wonder why you'd reject that homo sapiens (and our minds) are descended from our homo ancestors (and their minds), when you're so happy to accept all the facts of evolution... one more is hardly a violence against your worldview, no? You're rejecting a framing of the facts, rather than the facts, right? — fdrake
They should be as surprising as human digestive tracts behaving in much the same way as chimp ones. Or humans and chimps consisting of complex cells with similar internal structures. — fdrake
The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to the existence in man of something which he has not derived from his animal progenitors--something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under favourable conditions. On the hypothesis of this spiritual nature, superadded to the animal nature of man, we are able to understand much that is otherwise mysterious or unintelligible in regard to him, especially the enormous influence of ideas, principles, and beliefs over his whole life and actions. Thus alone we can understand the constancy of the martyr, the unselfishness of the philanthropist, the devotion of the patriot, the enthusiasm of the artist, and the resolute and persevering search of the scientific worker after nature's secrets. Thus we may perceive that the love of truth, the delight in beauty, the passion for justice, and the thrill of exultation with which we hear of any act of courageous self-sacrifice, are the workings within us of a higher nature which has not been developed by means of the struggle for material existence.
The next stage is still more marvellous, still more completely beyond all possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and forces. It is the introduction of sensation or consciousness, constituting the fundamental distinction between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Here all idea of mere complication of structure producing the result is out of the question. We feel it to be altogether preposterous to assume that at a certain stage of complexity of atomic constitution, and as a necessary result of that complexity alone, an ego should start into existence, a thing that feels, that is conscious of its own existence.
better reasoning rather than spiritualist or religious claptrap; the better angels of our nature removed all further need for their namesake. — fdrake
Rationalism has always had a more religious flavor than empiricism. Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.
The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.
Another feature this highlights is that explanations need not tell the 'whole story', whereas reductive explanations, when right, must. — fdrake
I'm trying to understand what's behind it all, where that belief originates, because I'm sure it originates in something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand. — Wayfarer
Empiricism amounts to the elevation of the senses to the sole criteria for valid knowledge (along with predictive power and replicability — Wayfarer
It's the meaning. Your thinking has a ceiling on it, delimited by empiricism - exactly what a smart ape might think, pardon my impudence. — Wayfarer
When I said before that we only accept what can be weighed, measured, felt, sensed (including by instruments) this is what I mean. Empiricism amounts to the elevation of the senses to the sole criteria for valid knowledge (along with predictive power and replicability). — Wayfarer
But then he goes on to argue that natural selection can't account for mathematical skill or musical talent and many other capacities of mankind: — Wayfarer
The point about classical philosophy was that it also in some sense took you to the border of what can be empirically known and points to what is beyond it. — Wayfarer
Our culture no longer has a lexicon to describe that beyond, — Wayfarer
The next stage is still more marvellous, still more completely beyond all possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and forces.
Reductionism, at its best, acts as a very long leash to loosely tie models of more complex systems to those beneath them which work well and on which we have good reason to think they supervene — Isaac
It's just a rabbit hole devoid of any how questions (or generalisations from procedural descriptions), it's sitting there like it's waiting for something. — fdrake
I agree but I think it's far more of a problem invented by philosophers because it 'could be' the case than an actual problem in science that is the case. — Isaac
but I don't see anyone really doing that, it's a bit of a bogeyman. — Isaac
Maybe you've read papers I've not, it's quite possible, but in my field (psychology), — Isaac
I've read some stuff in clinical psychology that heavily criticises the naive application of the (diagnosis->treatment) paradigm in bodily health to mental health; since it promotes treatment methodology that just doesn't work. The individual level variability of mental health aetiology is so great, and the diagnoses interact so much (depression with anxiety as a comorbidity or anxiety with depression as a comorbidity anyone?), and the medication targets neurochemistry rather than psychological state (by necessity), "you're depressed? take prozac", "you're in chronic pain? try this exercise program!"; it's applying a billiard ball style reductive explanation (like germ theory) to interventions in crazy complicated complex systems, and as is predictable it doesn't work so well. And it's not necessary, since the patient is literally right there with self reports. — fdrake
We could talk about this elsewhere sometime if either of us can be bothered. — fdrake
If you want to make an argument that correspondence with the sensate world, along with predictive power and replicability, should not be the sole criteria for valid knowledge, then what other criteria do you suggest? — Isaac
Others who might, for now at least, be erring more towards the idea that what's behind a belief in God might just be a biological artifact, a cultural imposition, or any other physicalist explanation. Rather than engage with these people within the joint framework we share (the one prior to your subjective 'feeling' that it originates in something real, but something very difficult to realise and understand), you presume that framework and insist the fault is ours for not tackling the investigation from the same starting point as you. — Isaac
'm quite happy to be a smart ape. You don't seem to be. You want more. — fdrake
I thought you'd maybe noticed that I really like Heidegger and Spinoza; an arch-critic of instrumental rationality and naive empiricism and a full blown rationalist, both of them do metaphysics. — fdrake
With its strict division between selves and the world, subjects and objects, or mind and nature, this picture sets us against the world, in effect treating it as alien to us. And it is a bad picture, since in reality, Heidegger argues, we and the world cannot, even notionally, exist without one another: “self and world” are not “two beings”, but mutually dependent.
Science is never just about what can be empirically known, it's about what can be conceptually derived from or speculated about given what is known or suspected... — fdrake
What kind of idiot would expect mechanical laws of particle motion to explain the evolution of sensory mechanisms? — fdrake
Daniel Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:
"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe."
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