I can see your point of view, but I am not sure that the three big philosophy questions can just be neatly swept away, after all the centuries of discussion. I also wonder to what extent it all comes down to word games. My understanding is that philosophy in the twentieth century began to just try to focus on analysis of language. However, I did not think that this meant that was because that was all that there was, as if all the underlying problems had been solved.

Of course, of course. It's just a thought which I hoped would stimulate further discussion. Looks like they're a dead ends.

It seems, on reflection, what I was attempting wasn't to provide a actual proofs for god, free will, and life after death. What I aimed to do though was suggest some avenues of inquiry and offer plausible reasons as to why some of us are of the view that god, free will, and life after death exist. My intention was not so much to come up with good arguments as it was to explore, examine the conspicuous absence of such in these domains of metaphysics.

G'day!

The immaterial soul, that which allegedly survives death, can't be proven from within a material setting. — TheMadFool

I don't believe in the immaterial soul, but I can imagine events that might convince me. If some Dr. Frankenstein could light up a corpse with dear grandma's departed soul, then I think it'd be reasonable to postulate some kind of 'non-physical' existence of this soul in between bodies.

My understanding is that philosophy in the twentieth century began to just try to focus on analysis of language. However, I did not think that this meant that was because that was all that there was, as if all the underlying problems had been solved. — Jack Cummins

Good :point:

I love the 'linguistic turn,' but I suspect it's because I've resolved your 'unsolved mysteries' to my personal satisfaction. Before that resolution, I spent more time with philosophers who obsessed over such issues.

The point of philosophy is the gaining of insight-wisdom. That is something that can only be grasped in the first person. You might attain great wisdom and find that others can’t understand you when you try and explain it. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have it.

It is said that many of Plato’s most important teachings were never written but only communicated verbally to his inner circle. And that also his writings contain hidden levels of meaning that are only intended for those suitably prepared to understand them.

In the Indian tradition the meaning of ‘Upaniṣad’ is ‘sitting up close’. Those teachings were likewise intended for verbal transmission from teacher to student. In those traditions the meaning of ‘lineage’ is very important, signifying the transmission of understanding from teacher to student down through generations.

So I don’t accept that philosophy ‘makes no progress’ or ends with unanswered questions, although I certainly accept that it might point to a wisdom beyond discursive understanding. Realising the limits of knowledge is a central task of philosophy. Unlike in science, where you have a prediction on the one side and a result or observation on the other, here the subject and object of knowledge are the same. Something which our object-oriented culture finds it impossible to understand.

I don't believe in the immaterial soul, but I can imagine events that might convince me. If some Dr. Frankenstein could light up a corpse with dear grandma's departed soul, then I think it'd be reasonable to postulate some kind of 'non-physical' existence of this soul in between bodies. — j0e

I suppose there's merit in your argument but I'm certain there's a hole in your argument and that too an own goal so to speak. Two words, Akashic records.

philosophical "mysteries" are mostly little word games on the edges of the world. They are annoying but for the most part irrelevant. — Banno

In the Twentieth Century, philosophy was like a confused and clumsy person who repeatedly tries to commit suicide, but keeps failing, though with the addition of debilitating damage at each attempt. The public face of philosophy was often, for many years, people like Bertrand Russell or Jean Paul Sartre, whose personal, moral, political, and philosophical follies were the kinds of things that will be no less than an embarrassment for posterity. In the classic sophistry of a dilemma of false alternatives, respected academic philosophy often seemed to have offered only two choices:

...the sterility and agnosticism of positivistic, scientistic, and merely analytic schools, characteristically, if not always originally, Anglo-American...have frequently denied the possibility of knowledge in metaphysical or ethical matters, and sometimes the possibility of constructive philosophical knowledge at all, with, according to Karl Popper, a "concentration upon minutiae (upon 'puzzles') and especially upon the meanings of words; in brief .... scholasticism." As Allan Bloom said, "Professors of these schools [i.e. positivism and ordinary language analysis] simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." Students and the intellectually curious looking for some concern, any concern, about the truths of being and value, the content of wisdom, or some humane purpose, found instead what has aptly been called a "valley of bones." Although continuing analytic philosophy sometimes appears as a small island of some sanity in a sea of increasing nonsense, as with John Searle, it retains almost all of its sterility, futility, and what could even be called a self-referential autism.

See https://www.friesian.com/ for info on the other choice.

I'm secure in my general unbelief, so for me the issue is whether any evidence could make me believe in gods, ghosts, or ghouls. I'd have to 'talk to grandma' or see some other 'miracle.' In the same way, I'd have to see aliens with my own eyes to believe they are here. Mere claims of others would not suffice.

I'm secure in my general unbelief — j0e

I didn't imply otherwise.

any evidence could make me believe in gods, ghosts, or ghouls — j0e

As much as it's a thorn in our side, it's an inescapable fact that given an observation, there are multiple hypotheses that fit it well. Then, whatever criterion one chooses, one of which is Ockham's razor, the usual thing to do is eliminate the impossible...whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. My suggestion is that we tread carefully in matters such as god, free will, and life after death if only because so little is known about such metaphysical issues that even blind guessing may offer a better chance of successful truth-finding missions than rigorous logical inferences.

I do agree with your earlier argument about 'conspicuous absences' in metaphysics. It does make one wonder how it all happened that certain ideas were often treated as more real than anything else? It almost seems like the history of philosophy can be seen as a great deflated balloon. And the problem is that we wish for answers and wish for grand meanings.

Some may wish to believe in God and others don't. Ultimately, we choose what to believe. Ultimately, we only have to find answers to these questions which satisfy us, but when the ideas are discussed it becomes more complicated, because there is lack of consensus.

I do agree that insight wisdom is the most essential aspect of philosophical exploration. This probably goes beyond the surface of philosophical discussions. Each person probably has to make the quest in a unique way, and draw upon the ideas of others where it seems fit. Perhaps the usefulness of the joined pursuit should not be about proving points, but about mutual sharing of ideas.

And the problem is that we wish for answers and wish for grand meanings — Jack Cummins

Paraphrasing:
Interviewer: We know only 4% of what can be known
Neil deGrasse Tyson: [laughing] Yes, and I'm happy with that.

Yes, I can be happy knowing so little too, and I do still enjoy sitting and reading philosophy books...

Yes, I can be happy knowing so little too, and I do still enjoy sitting reading philosophy books... — Jack Cummins

I can't quite place Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments in a specific kind of worldview except that his sentiments on the matter of how much we know, extending perhaps to how much we should know, seems to share similarities with the Biblical tale of Adam, Eve, The snake, and the tree of knowledge. God didn't want us to know certain things and thus his command to Adam and Eve to avoid the tree of knowledge. It's odd that this likeness between Neil deGrasse Tyson's views and the Adam and Eve story doesn't correlate all that well with Tyson's irreligion. Just saying, that's all for me. Have a good day.

I can see your point of view, but I am not sure that the three big philosophy questions can just be neatly swept away, — Jack Cummins

To be sure, I don't think that the first and last of your three questions are philosophical. There's a few associated conceptual issues, but they are straight forward.

Free will - the main issue there is as to what it is.

Perhaps the usefulness of the joined pursuit should not be about proving points, but about mutual sharing of ideas. — Jack Cummins

Let’s all join hands and sing Kum-by-a :-)

I think the challenge is to move past such notions. If the pursuit of knowledge is a wondrous thing, then the realization of ignorance brings even greater wonder. Similarly a lot of Jews are realizing that now the Israel prophecies are fulfilled, it's okay to let go of God. Perhaps Richard Dawkins is right and this is the dawning of the age of reason. Perhaps reason has been of all ages. Who knows? Is it relevant?

If free will is the central problem of philosophy it does depend what it means, and it may come down to how we perceive ourselves to be free or not. When we are act and make choices, these are bound up so many causal factors. We are making choices in an external world of causes, and our own consciousness is a result of biological and other factors, so even though we make choices it is hard to say to what extent they are truly free. Saying we have free will or not seems to be more a matter of perception and perspective.

I think that you are right to emphasise the importance of reason. We may not always be completely rational, but, at the same time, it does seem that we need to exercise reason to make sense of life. Otherwise, it would be like being stuck in an endless fog.

There are several mysteries which seem essential to the philosophical quest; the existence of God, free will and, life after death. — Jack Cummins

On these I guess there'll be loose affiliations of folk who take three main approaches. Some will say the questions have been answered already. Some will argue they are non-questions. And others will claim they will remain forever, like the Trinity itself, a mystery.

I have no reason to think there is a God or life after death. Free will? I don't know. I used to think I was a compatiblist, but I haven't read enough about the issue to get properly across it.

To be honest these questions have never really interested me passionately. I often used to joke that if there is a god it's none of my business.

I am more interested in aesthetics and morality and perhaps the nature of reality - eg, Platonism versus naturalism. Limitations are time, educational background and energy. I am pretty lazy and content enough in my ignorance.

I think these so-called philosophical mysteries represent directions of inquiry and effort. Each of which in itself has meaning and application within the total scope of human life. The question of the existence of God is not solely about determining an answer, but about establishing rapport, creating dialogue, and ultimately creating shared meanings which can then have actual influences in the lives of individuals and thereby an impact on our collective and shared existence (culture). Likewise for all of the other mysteries you cite.

So, in effect, to pursue these questions is to answer them.

Thank you. I think emotions can be reasonable too. Maybe it depends on the situation. I like the idea of personal truth. Formed by one's own experiences. And the fogginess....
well it kinda depends on what hour of the day it is. ;)

That's interesting, since I have the same academic background and slowly have been coming to the conclusion that neuroscience can currently tell us far less about conciousness than we'd like to know. I recall a bit of a splash at a conference years ago reaching me vicariously when someone pointed out in the midst of all the progress being lauded that we still have very little idea how anesthesia works, or even if it works at blocking pain, as opposed to immobilizing the patient and causing amnesia, because our knowledge of the "correlates of conciousness" is still so sparse.

I am willing to bet that modern psychiatric practices will one day seem as hapless as leeching. We don't map moods as they occur in the brain and treat patients with mood disorders through any sort of target approach. We identify drugs that will generally pass the BBB and effect activity at the synapse, attempt to give animals psychiatric conditions, load them up with said drugs, and run statical analyses on their behaviors.

Drugs aren't targeting "moods", they generally saturate the nervous system and are then declared effective or not based on survey and outcome data, without a true casual mechanism identified. Their use is so common that there are active levels of SSRIs in urban water supplies, enough to be a culprit in the developed world's plummeting testosterone levels, which in turn likely is a culprit in some incidence of mood disorders (granted, plastics, birth control pills, and obesity are the main culprits). However, causal links are elusive. I don't want to be misunderstood as anti-medication, I only want to underscore how little we know about how these drugs work as opposed to say, corticosteroids, and how much we use them despite that.

The newest improvement is the ability to correlate your DNA with the efficacy of drugs in similar patients, which is still a long way from a strong casual connection. Which isn't to say that psychiatric medicines can't be effective, but more that the science is clearly in its infancy and this is brutally demonstrated in the extremely harsh side effect profiles that are considered acceptable in anti-psychotics. It's hard to imagine the massive weight gain, disrupted endocrine system, malformed bone development in puberty, and general extreme sedation that these drugs cause being tolerated as side effects for diseases we actually understand well. I would hazard that they are viewed like the lobotomy when truly effective treatments are developed.

I guess I'm even less a behaviorist though, given the problems of replication in psychology. Priming has been torn down since I took social psychology. Implicit bias survives more due to political reasons than actual quality data trying it to useful real world predictions or effect sizes. Hell, the tests don't even meet common standards for predicting the same individuals' scores over several days.

Evolutionary psychology is worse. Here books full of hypotheses replace supported theories. Casual mechanism are a bridge too far.

I find neuroscience simultaneously fascinating and essential to any credible mind-body philosophy, and fairly useless, at least for now, in explaining higher order thought, moods, meaning (as in how semiotics can be understood through neural correlates), or the illnesses people around me suffer. Very much a science that is led by what it can measure, versus what it actually wants to ask.

The value in Jungian analysis, pastoral care, or depth analysis, is that it can speak to mental phenomenon and ideas in their own terms and help people develop their understanding of the meaning of their lives. You can throw philosophy into that boat too. The actual causal mechanisms for improved outcomes is even more murkey here, and will depend on the individual (you won't give an atheist pastoral care). However, in some ways what priests often do on a weekly basis is significantly more targeted than modern psychiatry, because it is interacting directly with pathological ideas and moods.

I understand you. The human brain is still very much terra incognita, which is all the more reason to study it in all its astronomical complexity than assuming it cannot ever be understood adequately enough for various psycho-therapeutic / pharmacological / gene-modifying purposes or to dispel any number of persistent philosophical puzzles. The implication of what you and many other philosophers (but almost no brain scientists) contend is that 'the human brain is too complex and yet not complex – intelligent – enough to bridge the various "explanatory gaps" manifest in (the current state of) brain science', and that's wholly unwarranted, thereby dogmatic mystification, akin to Lord Kelvin's dicta that in 1900 there was nothing more to learn in physics. :roll:

You "mysterians" may be right in the long run but, IMO, the long run is still very far off as far as studying the human mind-brain is concerned. Very early days yet, especially when you consider it's estimated that after of a few millennia of combined empirical observation, folk psychologizing and esoteric speculation we've learned more than 90% of what is scientifically known about the human brain-CNS in only the last couple of decades. I'm betting against you chicken-little "Lord Kelvins" and the woo-of-the-gaps du jure.

I don't disagree with most of your points. The issue is that:

A. I doubt that neuroscience will produce satisfactory answers to some of these mysteries (e.g. the Hard Problem) in my lifetime. In the grand scheme of things, the answers may be forthcoming soon enough, but on a practical level, they'll likely come too late.

B. People are in need of help now, which again gets to the issue of answers coming too late for pressing practical needs.

C. I believe it's possible that science may be unsuited at the ontological level for answering certain questions about meaning, or providing an answer to the Hard Problem that isn't merely describing neural correlates. That is, science will be unable to formulate an answer to the Hard Problem in the same way it can't provide us with a means of ranking aesthetic value. If Descartes had been correct, and the subjective world was linked to the material solely through the pineal gland, it still wouldn't answer the questions we're really interested in.

Jung's theories on dreams have no support in science and I believe they can be safely discarded when looking through that lens. The symbolic narratives he weaves with them however, have aesthetic value. Reading novels can measurably enhance measures of empathy, but their chief value doesn't lie in that sliver of result that can be measured.

I work in public policy and we're constantly inventing catagories for things, new ontologies for data, new conceptions of processes. These don't correspond to anything material, and indeed the same categories or chart of accounts used to describe the complex actions of one city might be fairly useless for generalizing to others. However, the use of the categorical organizations enables more effective political leadership and beaurocratic action. I have a similar view of psychology as respects individual action and decision-making.

Psychology is the "discourse of the soul," and it should perhaps begin to stick more to that. Neurology is the "discourse of the sinew," and shouldn't be expected to have all the answers.

I do agree that the mysteries which I have spoken about are not just abstract ones, but involve connections. The way we answer them is central to how we live. Without some need for such a pursuit, it may be tempting just to lie in bed all day. We need some underlying motivation and it is probably when we do not have it that life becomes hollow.

And when questions are definitively answered they cease to be instrumental and influential in our lives and become part of a pre-reflectively shared background. Also, while there may be some kind of ideal realm of abstract knowledge, this isn't it. We live in a world of contingencies, and all of our answers are just ever-improving approximations. 2+2 may be universally and forever 4, but that is only a "limiting case" within which a larger purposive knowledge can be applied. In itself, it says nothing, and it isn't clear that it even has meaning independent of a consciousness which apprehends it.

A. Most likely.

B. Unfortunately so. But think of the thousands of human generations in need of antibiotics before they had been discovered ...

C. Okay. But I see no grounds to agree with you on 'the ontological insufficiency or inadequacy of science' in principle.

As for neurology with respect to psychology, the latter presupposes substrate mechanisms like the former by which it is manifest. Yeah, a Tour de France cyclist cannot be reduced to the bikes he rides but without a well-tuned, thereby well-understood, machine underneath him at each stage of the race, he's not functioning as a world-class competitive cyclist.

I am definitely not in favour of 'an ideal realm of abstract knowledge.' That would seem to be drudgery and not helpful for living. Really, I am probably fascinated by mystery. If we had all the answers clearly laid out, philosophy would not be fun any longer. Also, what would be left for us to discuss on this site?

Of course, one of the more scientifically compelling answers to the mysteries is:

God: no
Free Will: no
Life after death: no

Conciousness is illusory, the subjective experience of a number of interrelated biological processes that actually occur with less interaction than we'd think intuitively. There is no central process, no "I" in "I think therefore I am." It's Hume's view of cognition, or even before him, the Buddhists. There is no Atman, there is just the illusion of an I. Sentience is an accident of evolution, and serves no real biological function either. More than that, it is illusory, an "after the fact" projection, the result of disperate systems trying to impose "meaning" on multiple streams of data.

This is supported by the fact that the experience of volition lags the start of movements. We begin to move, then experience the feeling of chosing to move shortly after. If you sever the main links between the hemispheres of the brain, and ask a person to write down their ideal job, each hand writes a different answer and the person is unaware of the discrepancy.

Living with someone with Alzheimer's, it's hard not to sometimes feel that the conciousness of even brilliant people isn't just an illusion projected by unrelated streams of data and feedback loops trying to impose order over behavior, including the internal behavior of thought and monologue.

If this is the case, I believe ethics really is trivial. You can meaningfully talk of ethics without God, but it's nonsense without free will, as is aesthetics. In that sense, the view just outlined does clear up some thorny philosophical issues, no?