But this brings up a question closer to the topic of the thread. If, and when, someone flags a post, thereby reporting it to the moderating team, do we have access to that information, as to who makes the report. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can’t see who flagged a post.

I read some comments to the effect that heated conflict gets the creative juices flowing. I think this is only true in the case where there is an established underlying camaraderie, that won't be damaged by such conflict, an underlying respect and agreement. — Pantagruel

I agree with this. I also think that those comments in favour of heated conflict were based on a basic misunderstanding. Even if there are some people who enjoy that kind of thing, it doesn’t mean it always results in a productive debate, one that is worth anyone else’s while to join or to follow. In fact, abusiveness produces, at the very best, low quality debates that revolve around who misquoted whom, who took the other out of context, and so on.

So as I see it, it’s not just a matter of hurt feelings and thin skins, as those commentators seemed to imply. It’s about how enjoyable, productive, substantive, and welcoming a debate is.

Does this work for anyone? I don't see any way to check or uncheck a category on the Categories page. — SophistiCat

Yeah I think that one's outdated, so I'll remove it.

Instead, if you open a particular category page, at the bottom of the discussion list there is a faint eye icon. Clicking it will toggle the visibility of the category on the All Discussions feed. — SophistiCat

Yep, that's item 12 (soon to be 11).

What thread are you talking about? Is there a link to the examples of the alleged trolling? — Amity

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13850/why-is-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-so-hard

I don't think he specified which posts he considered to be trolling. His point was that anyone arguing that the hard problem of consciousness is not actually a problem is trolling and should stop posting. He was at risk of derailing the discussion and turning it into another flame-war, so I deleted the post. This led to him posting the same thing, only worded differently, whereupon I asked him to stop, whereupon he called me an idiot, and so on.

Banned @Olivier5 for persistently attempting to derail a thread with accusations of trolling and so on, refusing to stop when I asked, calling me an idiot and refusing to take it back, and then suggesting I ban him and saying he wouldn't care if I did.

He would disagree with parts of that, but those are my reasons.

Well, if a scientific paradigm has no place in discussions about consciousness, then will everyone please stop going on about neuroscience (the failings thereof) in relation to it. — Isaac

I’m in agreement with a lot of what you’ve said in this discussion, but I think it’s worth pointing out why people do this. I think it’s an understandable reaction to the claims in popular science to the effect that consciousness has been, or will soon be, explained away by neuroscience. That is, a scientism that thereby devalues our stories. Do you recognise that this is a thing?

:up:

will their be an insistence on niceties such as that when someone is mentioned they are linked, and that quotes have an attribution? — Banno

Insistence, no. The Help section is to make it easier for people to find out how to use the site.

Whether people want to use the @ mention functionality is up to them. It’s easy to use and Wayfarer might cover it in his how-to series, but we won’t insist on it in the guidelines.

when the person is Bartricks — Metaphysician Undercover

Normally I consider the celebration of a ban unseemly, but in this case I encourage it.

It appeared to me from looking at his posting history that he was unpleasant to nearly everyone, usually without provocation. Whatever caused this behaviour, it wasn’t you.

Incidentally, he had been warned about it twice, once around the time he joined, and again recently.

Banned @Bartricks for a consistently disruptive and insulting attitude. Long overdue really.

:up:

So the entry in Britannica under Noumenon is wrong? — Wayfarer

Yes and no. They’re certainly not synonymous, as Britannica implies, but things as they are in themselves and noumena are closely related. Both are only thinkable, though some metaphysicians have also claimed that they can be actually apprehended directly, that is, through reason alone.

There’s no substitute for reading the thing, but there are also some good secondary texts.

I'm still investigating what becomes of 'form and substance' in Kant — Wayfarer

As I recall, these would either both be elements of the understanding (judgements or categories) or else, in the case of form, either an imposition of the innate structure of the mind's faculty of intuition (space and time), or this as it is applied to the phenomenal and particular (according to the schemata?).

That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them — Wayfarer

The universal is listed in his table of judgements, so it's a pure concept of the understanding, seen as independent of the objects of experience and thus a priori. I'm not sure that addresses your questions about the problem of universals, and I'm not sure Kant comes down fully in either of the nominalist or realist camps.

By the way, I can't remember the last time there was a Kant exegesis thread, so thanks! :up:

I can't promise I'll contribute much more though, as I don't have my copy of the Critique any more, and it's quite a commitment. I hope @Mww joins in.

But if you want to include a priori mathematical concepts and categories of the understanding under the term noumena, appealing to the ancient use of the term, then I'm not against that in principle, and I don't know enough about its use in Greek philosophy to argue about it.

Kant wouldn't go along with this. He would use noumena to describe, say, Plato's forms or Leibniz's monads (as well as suggestive of "things as they are in themselves"), which are purported objects in the world that are nevertheless apprehended intellectually. The a priori concepts and structures of the understanding wouldn't be lumped in with these.

So if you're right, then there is indeed a difference between the ancient and the Kantian notions of noumena, but Schopenhauer's accusation remains mistaken.

As I explained in the other discussion, I think Schopenhauer is wrong about this, for the simple reason that Kant explicitly contradicts him on more than one occasion. He takes noumena to be the purported objects of intellectual intuition, as opposed to the phenomenal objects of sensible intuition. The notion of things as they are in themselves is the unavoidable result of taking this noumenal access to reality seriously as a legitimate human faculty.

Having said that, as always with Kant, it's complicated. He varies his emphasis and sometimes seems to come close to contradicting himself, so there is some support in the Critique for taking noumena and things-in-themselves as simple synonyms. But this is by no means the dominant thrust of the concept.

I wonder what Kant would make of the modern consciousness debate. I suspect he would think it's beside the point with both sides making a fundamental error of mistaking the phenomenal physical for the noumenal. There's no point in arguing whether there's a hard problem if it's all phenomenal anyway. — Marchesk

His idea of transcendental apperception could be the key. There is consciousness of oneself as a phenomenal object, and there is a consciousness of oneself as the subject of experience. Off the top of my head I can speculate that the what it’s like emerges here as a consequence (although this is hand-waving).

But I’d have to think about it, and you could be right.

Is Kant saying we reason that the real world responsible for our senses is beyond our perceptions and reason? There is a real world responsible for us reasoning and perceiving, but it's unknowable and we can't say anything meaningful about it, only the one of appearances our minds shape from our sensory manifold? — Marchesk

My own answer is no, not quite, but this is a big topic that doesn’t belong in this discussion. I poked my head in to challenge Wayfarer’s scurrilous accusation. When you’ve read Kant, doing so is irresistible.

Yeah I don’t want to take things off-topic too much, so I’ll just say the following, because you make a good point.

Remember that intuition for Kant means very roughly perception, the representation of things in the world. Mathematical concepts, in contrast, are pure a priori products of human faculties (reason) that don’t depend on experience.

Noumena are purported objects of a non-sensible grasping of the world, possible examples being Platonic forms. Thus noumena are the elements of the metaphysics that Kant is critiquing.

So mathematical concepts are objects of reason, but not objects of intuition, meaning perception. Under this scheme, which is not so far from the pre-Kantian, they’re not noumenal.

Schopenhauer accused Kant of appopriating the term for his purposes without proper regard to its prior meaning for Greek and Scholastic philosophy — Wayfarer

I and many Kant scholars think Schopenhauer was wrong about that. At the very least his reading is unfair and simplistic.

The original meaning of "noumenal" was derived from the root "nous" (intellect) - hence "the noumenal" was an "object of intellect" - something directly grasped by reason, as distinct from by sensory apprehension. — Wayfarer

This is also how Kant used the term. The noumenon for Kant is an object of intellectual intuition (non-sensible representation of reality).

The difference is that Kant argued that such intuition is a faculty we do not have.

:cool:

he seems to be an interesting user — javi2541997

Not only interesting, but also a thoroughly decent fellow.

It’s too early in the day for vaporwave!

@Mayor of Simpleton joined at the beginning of TPF, helped in bringing people over from the old site, and shows up here sometimes. He’s posted 661 times.

What was that guy's name who took over PF just to transform it into a cesspool? — Metaphysician Undercover

Porat.

And whatever happened to that site, is it completely gone now? — Metaphysician Undercover

Gone, yes.

I never posted in the Shoutbox on old PF, nor did I pay any attention to the short story competitions. At the time it was philosophical discussion or nothing for me. Times change.

If I’m to have any anointed or divine status, I see myself as a low-level demiurge, but a bit more benevolent than that of the Gnostics. Following the fall of Paul, allegiance was transferred to the supreme God Plush, who is entirely indifferent and non-interventionist with respect to TPF.

Let’s not forget those who did not make it here in the first place, high quality contributors such as To Mega Therion (fierce but fair Leninist physicist) and Sheps (wishy-washy socialist). A few others made it across but dropped out quickly, perhaps feeling that the death of PF was a good time to break the habit.

@Hanover was indeed instrumental in making a success of this place. His immediate enthusiasm for the move was unexpected, and the fact that he didn’t become a moderator until weeks or months later must have been, and must remain, a source of deep bitterness.

I really hope you enjoy it [Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon]. I stopped at pg. 910 - no joke. Yes, I am that stupid — Manuel

I’m at around page 750 and while I do love it and think I’ll probably read it again, it’s so overwhelmingly maximalist and sometimes repetitive (almost repetitive in its endless inventiveness if that makes sense) that I’m getting tempted to skip sentences. And I’m forgetting some of the characters or getting them mixed up, maybe because they haven’t been fully drawn.

But it’s far too early to assess it. When I finished Inherent Vice my thoughts were not entirely positive but I’ve come to see it as top class, so I think these things take a while to digest. Although I get the feeling that AtD is indigestible first time around.

I shall plough on.

That's enough videos thanks. This isn't a platform for your campaign; it's a discussion.

Monteverdi.

I'd have to say that Chick Corea/Return to Forever first got me into the jazz vicinity (i.e. fusion — busycuttingcrap

Oddly, for a long time the only fusion I really listened to was Weather Report. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to listen to Chick Corea/Return to Forever (which is even more weird because I went to see him in concert many years ago). I’ve been enjoying Romantic Warrior and The Leprechaun. The latter is total cheese but these days I can enjoy such things without shame.

That was the track that got me into jazz. To this day I never tire of it, which is more than I can say for some of the other stuff I was into at the time.

Awesome :blush:

:up: :cool:

I've been watching this and I've deleted a couple of posts by people who haven't addressed the article or who clearly haven't read it, but my skill in identifying them is limited to the obvious ones. Therefore, folks shouldn't hesitate to report off-topic posts.

A sign of divergent and creative thinking or exemplary of a ubiquitous superficial preoccupation? — Banno

A bit of both, maybe?

Most importantly, it has allowed this notice to remain in or around the top of the main page, allowing all the active members to see it.

You too, AS.

I'm beginning to see your point.

There's a problem: All languages fail in re the purpose languages are assigned (thinking, communicating, etc.) — Agent Smith

Sometimes, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep trying, Agent Smith.