Adjourning a meeting was never involved in spiritual practices. — Jamal

That was hasty of me. Does this kill my point?

Not really. Adjourning a meeting was never the means by which the favour of benign spirits and the protection from malign ones was effected.

But:

Adjourning a meeting is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

This doesn’t work. Adjourning a meeting was never involved in spiritual practices.

Teach me; how else can naming a ship be distinguished from magic, other than by their being seperate instances of the same thing? — Banno

Very well, Socrates, I’ll play along. I’m not saying it has sharper boundaries than the notion of a game, so I’m not saying that Adorno’s definition of art requires a definition of magic, but I can say that magic, unlike naming a ship, involves the belief in supernatural entities such as spirits and demons that inhabit the things of nature, and that magic spells are often effected by means of symbolic objects made to resemble or represent these things or their spirits and demons.

But…

I suspect Adorno wants to grant a special status to art that I might deny. — Banno

I suspect this is true, even though his definition does not rule out the idea that naming a ship is a kind of magic.

Good point, but it’s a bit like referring to communism or militant atheism as religions. Naming a ship and declaring a meeting adjourned can be distinguished from magic incantations and rituals, and not only by the fact that they’re separate instances of the same thing.

I could say that meaning is pointing if that would help?

Like that, for a start. Setting out a definition in order to ground an argument is already taking a stance, which may itself be brought into question.

Moreover, we might think in terms of Searle's status functions and institutional facts. Language builds on itself, so that saying it is so makes it so, or counts as its being so. — Banno

I'm afraid I'm going to have to entirely agree. Sorry.

Maybe I'll even agree — T Clark

Woah, steady on! No need to go that far.

But aye, I did think my post would be in sympathy with your pragmatic conception of knowledge.

No worries, feel free to follow it wherever it goes. It’s actually quite relevant to my previous discussion called “Magical powers”, so it’s not that I don’t find it interesting.

I’m not opposed to your sagacious and fascinating thoughts, but I wasn’t really endorsing Teddy’s definition so much as interpreting it to demonstrate how the right kind of definition can work philosophically.

:chin:

In the sense that the same practice carried on without that lie.

Adorno means it almost literally though, whereas the ideas of commodity fetishism and social practice as magic are metaphorical.

Good points though.

These all happen because we take recursive stipulation seriously. — Banno

That’s quite interesting. Recursive how?

Almost nobody reads anybody's posts charitably and thoroughly as far as I have been able to tell judging by the bulk of replies. For what it's worth, I think you are one of the more charitable and thorough readers of others' posts, as well as being one of the more reasonable and thoughtful posters. I often find myself admiring and envying your patience. I'm far too prone to impatience. — Janus

Thank you :smile:

Thanks for reading and understanding my post by the way.

I think something like the latter, yes.

My point was that the consciousness of others is impossible to doubt, and yet you seemed to take me to be arguing that other people except for me might not be conscious.

Your comment does not stand, because it takes me to be saying something I’m not saying, something I did not say in the post you responded to. You projected a position onto me that I do not hold.

And I want to read yours Frank. You’ve got it in you, I can tell.

In what plausible universe would I be the only one who has this characteristic, even though everything physical about me and other humans is the same; even though my biology and neurology and that of other people is the same; even though my behavior and that of other humans is the same; even though what I report as my experience and what other humans report is the same. It's an argument looking for a issue to argue about when there's none there. What value is there in having this argument? What do we learn from it beyond the fact that humans will argue about anything. — T Clark

Try reading my post again you pillock.

Since I started posting philosophy on TPF again recently it’s become disturbingly apparent to me that almost nobody reads my posts, even those who reply to them. I don’t think this is a problem with my posts, but if it is then please let me know.

Really? Do you not find the argument from analogy completely compelling? I know some don't, but I struggle to understand why not. — bert1

Maybe you didn't read all of my post. My point was that what cannot be doubted cannot be known. I'm happy enough to drop the stipulation that using "know" here is wrong. It's certain, more than any argument could be.

OK, science geeks, how do we determine whether an AI is conscious? What do we do? What tests do we give it? — bert1

How do we know other people are conscious? What standards do we use? — T Clark

I suggest that we don’t know that other people are conscious, insofar as it is simply part of what it means to be a person. Maybe you could describe it as an animal certainty, but it seems a stretch to describe it as a knowing.

But then, how do we know people are persons? Again, what is significant here isn't knowing or judging that they are persons but relating, communicating, giving and asking for reasons, and so on.

It follows that we don’t use standards to make that judgement, because there is no judgement--unless the question comes up. And now that the question has come up, we find it difficult to judge. This I suppose is why it's also a difficult philosophical question.

My last reply to you covers it.

And so it could be that the experience is of an apple, and yet the experience is made of something like brain activity or sense data or rational inferences, none of which are features of the apple itself. — Michael

Well yeah, there’s an irreducible subject-object dualism for sure. I am not the apple.

Well, of course I’m showing that “extend beyond” is ambiguous here. You take it to be merely about physical substance, but if when we discuss consciousness and perception we mean experience, that is, phenomenology (loosely speaking), then intentionality extends to its objects. Intend literally means stretch towards and extend literally means stretch out. You can dismiss etymology, of course, but it is significantly suggestive.

consciousness, whatever it is, doesn't extend beyond the brain — Michael

Isn’t intentionality a fundamental part of consciousness? Isn’t that pretty much what consciousness is for?

You say that on the one hand you're not committed to perception as essentially linguistic but on the other hand you say that perception is linguistic. — RussellA

No, I was switching between provisionally explaining the argument that perception is linguistic as if it were true, and expressing doubts about it. This should be obvious.

Yes, I see. I'm flexible on this point, probably because I'm confused about it.

Yes, I think that's getting into the substantive debate, beyond the misunderstandings that I noted. I'll let @plaque flag respond if he wants to, because I'm not sure what to think about it.

I don't, and I'm not sure what that would mean. Closest I can come is to imagine how perception works when we're wrapped up in a physical activity, like running to catch a ball or playing an instrument (or hammering of course). These don't seem very linguistic to me, though I could well be wrong. I'm not committed to perception-as-essentially-linguistic, I'm just saying that to make this claim is not to say that one cannot see a tree without forming the sentence "that is a tree" or whatever. It's a deeper point than that, to do with the fact that in situations of perceiving we are always already linguistic, because of what we are.

I guess I should have clarified. It's about human perception. The idea is that in perceiving, a human cannot help but be linguistic. Both we and dogs perceive, but our perception is inextricably linked to our concepts and thereby to language.

I can see things without saying anything. — Michael

To perceive a dog as such is already linguistic. — plaque flag

I've noticed that people on TPF sometimes say things like "perception can't be linguistic because I can see things without saying anything," or "language cannot be social because if I were stranded on a desert island I'd still be able to talk and read." In these cases I wonder if they're making a solid point that I'm just not getting, or if they simply don't understand what we mean.

Here’s a definition:

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth — Adorno, Minima Moralia

I’ll do my best to interpret this gnomic utterance. Magic, the ancient practice involving the supernatural, attends to the particularity of things in terms of spirits and demons, believing or pretending that there really are such entities, which can be invoked or defended against with incantations. This is untrue. There are no spirits and demons.

Art was the means by which magic was performed, with fetishes, amulets, symbolic carvings and decorations, and also ritual music and dance. But art did not decline along with the decline of magic rituals and beliefs; and now, in invoking and manipulating the spirits of things in its works—in bringing out the meaning of things in their interconnectedness and in their irreducible particularity, in treating things as spiritual rather than as specimens for scientific study—art continues to perform magic but liberated from the need to claim that there are supernatural entities or that it has the power to influence nature and events.

Adorno quotes his own definition in his lecture course, An Introduction to Dialectics, to illustrate the difference between a “vulgar” definition and a good, philosophical one, his own being an example of the latter, of course. His point is that his definition is only meaningful to someone who is responsive to art and who is able to understand it. Thus he is explicating a concept, allowing it to unfold in a meaning-full context. In a sense, then, whether an explicative definition comes at the start or concludes a work or discussion is irrelevant. Similarly, we can make arguments by beginning with a statement of the conclusion—indeed I think this is the clearest and most common way of presenting arguments in philosophy.

Over the course of a few lectures he argues against the dependence on definitions in philosophy, and one of his arguments is pretty much the same as @Banno’s, about the circularity of definition and the primacy of use (in Adorno’s terms, the life of the concepts), although in Adorno’s case it’s wielded to show that Hegelian dialectics is the best philosophy for explicating the truth of concepts. The aim is something like allowing concepts to speak rather than imposing others on them.

Every concept is indeed internally dynamic, and the task is somehow to do justice to this dynamic character. And here it is often enough language itself that will have to furnish the canon for the appropriate use of concepts. — Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics

That is to say, it’s in the use of a term that we can understand the meaning of concepts, not primarily by definitions. I guess this is about what we should expect definitions to do: should they help us think new thoughts or should they keep our thoughts on the rails?

It's the kind of joke Nietzsche would make (which I hope you understand as a compliment.) — plaque flag

:up: :blush:

Not that it's important, but you mentioned that PlushForums responded --among other things-- with "Perhaps the next time a user reports such a case, send us the specifics (email address, approximate time, expected reason for the notification), we will comb through the email logs." — Alkis Piskas

He works for PlushForums, so he already has access to all the email addresses, because members of this forum signed up to a PlushForums forum. He nicely offered to do something extremely tedious to help solve this non-existent problem. Email addresses are not shared or used in any way outside of TPF/PlushForums.

RussellA perceives direct realists only indirectly: the direct realist in his head does not resemble the direct realist as it is in the external world.

So, based on the above two remarks, "bookmarks" do not seem to work or at least not consistently — Alkis Piskas

They do work. The issue is dealt with.

Is it an invasion of privacy to give out someone’s email address without asking permission first? — Alkis Piskas

Who said anything about giving out email addresses?

I’ll answer that question, because I have no intention of discussing it: nobody did.

An odd post Alkis, but I'll assume you've written it in good faith.

As my post made clear, the problem is dissolved, which means that we have discovered that there was no problem in the first place, except that we didn't know how the system works. Now we do. Read on while I explain it again...

Notifications about PMs are sent only...

• When a conversation is started [i.e., when a PM is first sent to you at the beginning of a private conversation]
• When a bookmarked conversation is updated [i.e, new messages are sent in the conversation], assuming it has been read, and the user has this option enabled

So if you haven't bookmarked a conversation, you won't receive notifications of new replies.

So, to receive notifications for all PMs including updates/replies, be sure to bookmark your conversations and check the checkbox labelled "Email when my bookmarks have new comments".

Does this mean that my mail server (receiver) is unreliable? Javi's too? — Alkis Piskas

No, ignore that. He only suggested that as a possible cause, but it's clear that the problem was just our expectation that updates/replies to a conversation trigger email notifications.

I don't think this is legal. It's a privacy violation. — Alkis Piskas

Not true, but it's irrelevant, because we won't be asking him to do that.

But I had not "bookmarked" anything when I received a notification about your PM, twice or more times — Alkis Piskas

That's because that PM was the initial PM of a conversation, rather than a reply/update to an existing one.

@Alkis Piskas @javi2541997

The response from PlushForums:

It would seem unlikely for some emails to be received and others not, unless the receiving mail server was unreliable or being throttled, which can happen.

Perhaps it's a misunderstanding of when notifications about PMs are sent. They're sent when a conversation is started, primarily. Users also have the option of being notified about updates to bookmarked conversations, assuming that conversation has been read and therefore the new message is "fresh".

Perhaps the next time a user reports such a case, send us the specifics (email address, approximate time, expected reason for the notification), we will comb through the email logs.

He later clarified that notifications about PMs are sent only...

• When a conversation is started
• When a bookmarked conversation is updated, assuming it has been read, and the user has this option enabled

So if you haven't bookmarked a conversation, you won't receive notifications of new replies. This dissolves the problem, I think (on the assumption that the messages you weren't notified about were updates to an existing conversation).

NOTE: To bookmark a conversation, toggle on the star icon at the bottom.

The point of the OP of that thread was a fairly simple one, that definitions do not, in a very important sense, give us meaning. — Banno

Yes, but I think many in this discussion would say that it doesn't follow from this, from the circularity of definition and the primacy of use, that one should avoid beginning their discussions with "let's first define our terms". This is because in defining terms they merely want to remove ambiguity, direct the discussion to what they're interested in, etc., rather than supplying exhaustive criteria or an ultimate ground.

Great! I'll pick it up next time I'm there.

Overall, the findings suggest that Common Mynas do not display more food-related aggression than other species in suburban habitats, suggesting that competitive aggression over food is not likely to be one of the behavioural traits leading to the success of Common Mynas in suburban habitats. — K. M. Haythorpe, D. Sulikowski & D. Burke (2012), Relative levels of food aggression displayed by Common Mynas when foraging with other bird species in suburbia

I just learned that both were recklessly introduced to Australia around the same time in the mid-19th century. Your evidence suggests that mynas have the edge over their European cousins. Why can't they all just get along? Families eh.