Galen Strawson argues that the self is always different from one moment to the next, and there is nothing outside of the larger social norms to unify this subjectivity as an identity over time. — Joshs

In this view he is not far from this those say that self is nothing but a social construct, and that intersubjectivity is more fundamental than subjectivity , which is only a temporary position within a socially constituted field.
This may be what you mean by plurality of minds in a body. — Joshs

Marvin Minsky talked about a society of mind , and Francisco Varela described a groundlessness of being with no solid self. — Joshs

Mind is embodied in organism, organism is embedded in world , and all three interact reciprocally such that a dynamic autonomy of self-organization is evinced. — Joshs

"Who is that person behind the curtain?" - Dorothy — Valentinus

I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters—that dignified philosophic abstinence to which[Pg 196] a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the factum brutum, that fatalism in "petits faits" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of interpretation)—all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a modus of that repudiation.) But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives,—make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a metaphysical value, an intrinsic value of truth, of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject—he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"—has first got to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself—the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable[Pg 197] females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it—and here I quote my Joyful Wisdom, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, asserts thereby a different world from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, our world? The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief—even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine
....
[A]rt, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic corruption that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for[Pg 200] instinct, seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life).
...
Has, perchance, man grown less in need of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his... irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone—he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane—he rolls faster and faster away from the centre—whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"—Well! this would be the straight way—to the old ideal?—All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as unnatural—by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason—nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's contempt of himself, that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to counteract the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's victory over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?–– And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they now worship their very query as God? — Nietzsche

On the other hand, when I use the plural, where I am deemed to be an amalgamation of all the perceptions of all that perceives me, I must ask: What more can I be than what I show to all the world? If I am hiding something about myself, can I really say that what I am hiding is the real me? If I think that my thoughts somehow make me, secretly, some deeper being but I simply don't show that side of me to the world, then isn't that a form of denial? — James Riley

But as a temporal flow its contingency unfolds as a synthetic unity from moment to moment. Not a soul or self as something unchanging throughout the contextual transformations of sense but a self remade each moment as new variation of itself. Self as a pragmatic ‘in order to ‘ , an always implying, anticipating beyond itself. The world always matters to me, is significant to me , is relevant to me in a new and particular way, but is always recognizable in its mattering. — Joshs

If we substitute the ‘I’ or ‘self’ for mind , then I think the issue of a unity comes down to whether perspective, interpretation and ‘ for-me-ness’ are fundamental features of any experiencing of a world. — Joshs

I am of two minds about this. — Fooloso4

I have been arguing that this ‘solitude of the ‘I’ for Husserl is somewhat akin to the mineness of experience for Heidegger’s Dasein , not as a reified idealism but as a more intimate way to understand the perpsecrival nature of experience than through the Witt’s language discourse — Joshs

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's ideas could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign. — Blue Book

The man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where it leads to paradoxical results. Very often the way the discussion of such a puzzle runs is this: First the question is asked "What is time?" This question makes it appear that what we want is a definition. We mistakenly think that a definition is what will remove the trouble (as in certain states of indigestion we feel a kind of hunger which cannot be removed by eating); The question is then answered by a wrong definition; say: "Time is the motion of the celestial bodies". The next step is to see that this definition is unsatisfactory. But this only means that we don't use the word "time" synonymously with "motion of the celestial bodies". However in saying that the first definition is wrong, we are now tempted to think that we must replace it by a different one, the correct one.

Compare with this the case of the definition of number. Here the explanation that a number is the same thing as a numeral satisfies that first craving for a definition. And it is very difficult not to ask: "Well, if it isn't the numeral, what is it?"

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. — Blue Book

Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.

Now what makes us it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality.

This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions. There is --
(a) The tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term. -- We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term "game" to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likeness. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likeness overlap. The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.

(b) There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term "leaf", has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. He was shown different leaves when he learnt the meaning of the word "leaf"; and showing him the particular leaves was only a means to the end of producing 'in him' an idea which we imagine to be some kind of general image. We say that he sees what is in common to all these leaves; and this is true if we mean that he can on being asked tell us certain features or properties which they have in common. But we are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which only contains what is common to all leaves. (Galtonian composite photograph.) This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated to the word. (This roughly means, we are looking at words as though they all were proper names, and we then confuse the bearer of name with the meaning of the name.)

(c) Again, the idea we have of what happens when we get hold of the general idea 'leaf', 'plant', etc. etc., is connected with the confusion between a mental state, meaning a state of a hypothetical mental mechanism, and a mental state meaning a state of consciousness (toothache, etc.).

(d) Our craving for generality has another main source; our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive'. (Think of such questions as "Are there sense data?" and ask: What method is there of determining this? Introspection?)
— Blue Book

The word "I" does not mean the same as "L. W." even if I am L. W., nor does it mean the same as the expression "the person who is now speaking". But that doesn't mean: that "L. W." and "I" mean different things. All it means is that these words are different instruments in our language.
Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue. (Also, all that we say here can be understood only if one understands that a great variety of games is played with the sentences of our language: Giving and obeying orders; asking questions and answering them; describing an event; telling a fictitious story; telling a joke; describing an immediate experience; making conjectures about events in the physical world; making scientific hypotheses and theories; greeting someone, etc., etc.) The mouth which says "I" or the hand which is raised to indicate that it is I who wish to speak, or I who have toothache, does not thereby point to anything. If, on the other hand, I wish to indicate the place of my pain, I point. And here again remember the difference between pointing to the painful spot without being led by the eye and on the other hand pointing to a scar on my body after looking for it. ("That's where I was vaccinated".) -- The man who cries out with pain, or says that he has pain, doesn't choose the mouth which says it.
All this comes to saying that the person of whom we say "he has pain" is, by the rules of the game, the person who cries, contorts his face, etc. The place of the pain -- as we have said -- may be in another person's body. If, in saying "I", I point to my own body, I model the use of the word "I" on that of the demonstrative "this person" or "he". — Blue Book

Another such trouble, closely akin, is expressed in the sentence: "I can only know that I have personal experiences, not that anyone else has". -- Shall we then call it an unnecessary hypothesis that anyone else has personal experiences? -- But is it an hypothesis at all? For how can I even make the hypothesis if it transcends all possible experience? How could such a hypothesis be backed by meaning? (Is it not like paper money, not backed by gold?) -- It doesn't help if anyone tells us that, though we don't know whether the other person has pains, we certainly believe it when, for instance, we pity him. Certainly we shouldn't pity him if we didn't believe that he had pains; but is this a philosophical, a metaphysical belief? Does a realist pity me more than an idealist or a solipsist? -- In fact the solipsist asks: "How can we believe that the other has pain; what does it mean to believe this? How can the expression of such a supposition make sense?"

Now the answer of the common-sense philosopher -- and that, n.b., is not the common-sense man, who is as far from realism as from idealism -- the answer of the common-sense philosopher is that surely there is no difficulty in the idea of supposing, thinking, imagining that someone else has what I have. But the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don't succeed in solving them. The realist answer, for us, just brings out the difficulty; for who argues like this overlooks the difference between different usages of the words "to have", "to imagine". "A has a gold tooth" means that the tooth is in A's mouth. This may account for the fact that I am not able to see it. Now the case of his toothache, of which I say that I am not able to feel it because it is in his mouth, is not analogous to the case of the gold tooth. It is the apparent analogy, and again the lack of analogy, between these cases which causes our trouble. And it is this troublesome feature in our grammar which the realist does not notice. It is conceivable that I feel pain in a tooth in another man's mouth; and the man who says that he cannot feel the other's toothache is not denying this. The grammatical difficulty which we are in we shall only see clearly if we get familiar with the idea of feeling pain in another person's body. For otherwise, in puzzling about this problem, we shall be liable to confuse our metaphysical proposition "I can't feel his pain" with the experiential proposition, "We can't have (haven't as a rule) pains in another person's tooth". In this proposition the word "can't" is used in the same way as in the proposition "An iron nail can't scratch glass". (We could write this in the form "experience teaches that an iron nail doesn't scratch glass", thus doing away with the "can't".) In order to see that it is conceivable that one person should have pain in another person's body, one must examine what sort of facts we call criteria for a pain being in a certain place. It is easy to imagine the following case: When I see my hands I am not always aware of their connection with the rest of my body. That is to say, I often see my hand moving but don't see the arm which connects it to my torso. Nor do I necessarily, at the time, check up on the arm's existence in any other way. Therefore the hand may, for all I know, be connected to the body of a man standing beside me (or, of course, not to a human body at all). Suppose I feel a pain which on the evidence of the pain alone, e.g., with closed eyes, I should call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to touch the painful spot with my right hand. I do so and looking round perceive that I am touching my neighbour's hand (meaning the hand connected to my neighbour's torso). — Blue Book

Exactly. A non reductionist account, an account of the mind that gives justice to it rather than try to eliminate it, is not logically impossible, whereas a reductionist account of the mind would be self-contradictory — Olivier5

I'm in the non-pill camp, for what it's worth. I think both sides have good arguments. I think what the pro-pill argument misses is that, by excising any ultimate stake, life loses all its emotional shading and heft and becomes flat and sterile - but I think what the anti-pill argument potentially (but not always, actually) misses is that awareness-of-death doesn't automatically give meaning to life.


Not being afraid of when it when may end, even knowing it could end at anytime - that isn't something that is easily reached, right? We might agree that that's a good eudaimonic state to be in, but the getting-there is the hard part. There's a confrontation with fear, a full confrontation with fear, that is the entry-price of that state. And a full confrontation with fear (in all in its aspects: fear of pain, fear of the insufferability of injustice, fear of personal impotence, so forth) is probably a long, multi-stage process. I think something about voluntarily undergoing that process - freely accepting necessity, etc - is important. — csalisbury

I'm over my head here but some wag once said, if you are the smartest person in the room, find another room. — James Riley

In many of the threads I read on this forum, I disagree with about everyone, I have a bone to pick with most of the comments I read and it's not surprising. — Judaka

Many posters here, including yourself really, I am not a huge fan but I kind of understand, you're surrounded by viewpoints you despise and you're not necessarily wrong for believing what you believe. Well, I expect blood to be spilled, it is what it is, a philosophy forum will never be a pretty sight. — Judaka

The word "real" is honorific. So when we say "this is the real truth" or "this is the real deal", we are not saying that there are two kinds of truth or deals, we are only emphasizing our statements. In this sense the word "real" can often lead to confusion, though not always. — Manuel

And I, perhaps in a quasi-Christian "puritanical" way, want to reject that notion. Philosophy isn't something to be taken lightly. It's not simply for fun -- it's actually deadly serious, unlike any other human endeavor, in fact -- including its offspring, science. If it's truly happening, it's not really a "hobby" at all. — Xtrix

When someone says that they know something about which they have no direct knowledge, sceptic is justified in asking for a reason. — RussellA

Again, I don't know the math or science, so I can't appraise him on anything but the indirect - but this feels an awful lot to me like symptoms of something like a personality disorder - intense grandiosity + a kind of disavowed shadow self that almost perversely projects stuff onto the outside (fitting the grandiosity, he doesn't project onto others, but onto the world.) Again: He has the key to restoring phsyics and America; without the key, we have EGOS that made people fake growth and become pathological. It's so on the nose, that it's surreal. It's like he's got some kind of perverse subconscious imp. — csalisbury

Some famous hoaxes, like the Sokal hoax, have shown that peer review has it's failures, but I think the issue is more widespread. — ssu

If the entire system is intrinsically consistent, and valid, which it must be to be a "system", then no part of the system can be doubted without doubting the whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

208. I have a telephone conversation with New York. My friend tells me that his young trees have buds of such and such a kind. I am now convinced that his tree is... Am I also convinced that the earth exists?
209. The existence of the earth is rather part of the whole picture which forms the starting-point of belief for me.
210. Does my telephone call to New York strengthen my conviction that the earth exists?
Much seems to be fixed, and it is removed from the traffic. It is also so to speak shunted onto an unused siding.
211. Now it gives our way of looking at things, and our researches, their form. Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our thoughts.
(Every human being has parents.) — OC

ife would a lot easier if each meaning of the word "know" had its own individual sub-word. Though that would meaning a lot more words. — RussellA

One important aspect of the difference between Quine’s and Wittgenstein’s conceptions of philosophy, is their opposite attitudes towards linguistic diversity. According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise because we go astray in the ancient city of language. To find our way about, we have to remind ourselves of how the streets that we habitually walk every day actually look, and how they are connected to each other. Naturally, this will involve reminding ourselves of the more or less detailed differences between various buildings and blocks. Hiding or obliterating such differences only makes the necessary orientation more difficult, or even impossible. Indeed, it might have been precisely such obliteration which made us go astray in the first place. Being able to resist the inclination to impose uniformity on language is therefore, according to Wittgenstein, a central philosophical virtue.

Quine’s viewpoint is quite different. He wants philosophers to be like city-planners who replace old, irregular housing areas by new, uniform blocks. In a scientific spirit of systematicity and simplification, Quine thinks we should dispense with all “quirks of usage that we can straighten.” [Quine 1960:158] Allegedly, philosophers should not try to give a wholly faithful description of actual language use, but rather improve language by fitting it into an austere “canonical notation” that employs only the constructional resources of first-order predicate logic. [1960:226ff.] Only such “regimentation” - a process of “coax[ing]” and “trimming” that may even require “some torturing” - makes it possible to perform the supposedly necessary “clearing of ontological slums.” [1987:157; 1960:180, 275]
— link

At the risk of bringing this back to Nietzsche, I find myself drawn to this quote: — Tom Storm

The reading from the vantage of a distant star of the capital letters of our earthly life, would perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the especially ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting—presumably their one and only pleasure. ...For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without parallel, the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be master, not over some element in life, but over life itself, over life's deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does the green eye of jealousy turn even against physiological well-being, especially against the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy; while a sense of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment, in the exercising, flagellation, and sacrifice of the self. All this is in the highest degree paradoxical: we are here confronted with a rift that wills itself to be a rift, which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even becomes more and more certain of itself, more and more triumphant, in proportion as its own presupposition, physiological vitality, decreases....

Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness is induced to philosophise; on what will it vent its pet caprice? On that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true, to be real; it will look for error in those very places where the life instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy, reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical contrast of "Subject" and "Object"—errors, nothing but errors! To renounce the belief in one's own ego, to deny to one's self one's own "reality"—what a triumph! and here already we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but an infliction of violence and cruelty on reason; and this ecstasy culminates in the ascetic self-contempt, the ascetic scorn of one's own reason making this decree: there is a domain of truth and of life, but reason is specially excluded therefrom.. .. By the bye, even in the Kantian idea of "the intellegible character of things" there remains a trace of that schism, so dear to the heart of the ascetic, that schism which likes to turn reason against reason; in fact, "intelligible character" means in Kant a kind of quality in things of which the intellect comprehends this much, that for it, the intellect, it is absolutely incomprehensible. After all, let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity"—objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and non-sensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. — Nietzsche

Or take Aristotle as another example -- you are what you do, not what you think you are. I can't go around claiming I'm a carpenter if I don't have any skills of cutting and shaping wood. (I suppose I could, but I'd be a fraud.) — Xtrix

To me rationalization is where a belief-seeking agent selects the conceptual framework which best supports the information. Why pick the arduous and painful paradigm when there are in principle an infinite number of hypotheses that can support any given observation? — Zophie

When there's no danger of predators, the goat herder simply plonks himself down on the grass or a rock and starts daydreaming only to be jarred into action at signs of predators eyeing his goats. The brain is just like the goat herder - its job is to look after the whole body just as the goat herder's is to care for his flock. However, there are times when the brain is free, just as the goat herder is, and that's when all the "fun" begins. — TheMadFool

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
...
The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. — Bacon

We start with some basic axioms, and then to differing degrees of success, end up with intricate systems that we then apply to practical situations. But the axioms themselves are not susceptible to proof, it seems. — Philguy

I think when these Alexas and Siris can start passing the Turing Test and become companions to a lot of people there will be a sea change in what constitutes a "person". — RogueAI

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

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

No one worries about the problem of induction when they are parking their car in the supermarket lot. — Tom Storm

Suppose you show me a sample of a red paint chip. I agree that this is what I call red, but this does not get us any further. What I am seeing, what it looks like to me is not something I can show you. We have learned to call this sample 'red' but this is as far as we can get. — Fooloso4

Phenomenology starts in the wrong place and proceeds in the wrong direction. — Banno

The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. ...With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted. — Wiki

The term “lifeworld” thus denotes the way the members of one or more social groups (cultures, linguistic communities) use to structure the world into objects (Husserliana, vol. VI, pp. 126–138, 140–145). The respective lifeworld is claimed to “predelineate” a “world-horizon” of potential future experiences that are to be (more or less) expected for a given group member at a given time, under various conditions, where the resulting sequences of anticipated experiences can be looked upon as corresponding to different “possible worlds and environments” (Husserliana, vol. III/1, p. 100). These expectations follow typical patterns, as the lifeworld is fixed by a system of (first and foremost implicit) intersubjective standards, or conventions, that determine what counts as “normal” or “standard” observation under “normal” conditions (Husserliana, vol. XV, pp. 135 ff, 142) and thus as a source of epistemic justification. — SEP

In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning. — Husserl

In my naive self-consciousness as a human being knowing himself to be living in the world, for whom the world is the totality of what for him is valid and existing, I am blind to the immense transcendental dimension of problems … I am completely … bound by interests and tasks … [and] a certain habitual one-sidedness of self interest … I can, however, carry out the transcendental re-orientation in which … I now have, as a new horizon of interest … a new, infinite scientific realm—if I engage in the appropriate systematic work …

One kind of thinking … tries to bring ‘original intuition’ to the fore—that is, the pre- and extrascientific lifeworld … The proper return to the naïveté of life—but in a reflection that rises above this naiveté—is the only way to overcome this … naiveté …

In science we measure the lifeworld … for a well-fitting garb of ideas … It is … a method which is designed for progressively improving … through ‘scientific’ predictions, those rough predictions which are the only ones that are possible within the sphere of what is actually experienced and experienceable in the lifeworld …

Considering ourselves … as scientists … the manner of scientific thinking puts questions and answers them theoretically in relation to the world … Cofunctioning here are the other scientists who, united with us in a community of theory, acquire and have the same truths or … are united with us in a critical transaction aimed at critical agreement …

For the human being in his surrounding world there are many types of praxis, and among them is this peculiar … one, theoretical praxis. It has its own professional methods; it is the art of … discovering and securing truths with a certain new ideal sense which is foreign to [extra]scientific life, the sense of a certain ‘final validity’ …

Thus, a new way of experiencing, of thinking, of theorizing, is opened … here, situated above his own natural being and above the natural world, the scientist or philosopher loses nothing of their being and objective truths and likewise nothing at all of the spiritual acquisitions of his world-life or those of … historical communal life … Yet, as a scientist or philosopher, I stand above the world, which has now become for me, in a quite peculiar sense, a phenomenon’ … — Husserl

Grayling reads philosophy back into the anti-philosophy. — Banno

Just as shoes that are too tight make it difficult to walk, the language used by philosophers makes it difficult to think. — Fooloso4