(I'm also intrigued that Kant appears to concede dualism in that passage.) — @Wayfarer

I don't read that as Kant conceding dualism, — Janus

No, Kant is part of the egocentric movement. So, yes, Wayfarer's comment makes sense.

I don't have a problem with causation as used in perception and other physical phenomena we observe. But one of the most famous rational/empirical skepticism came from Hume, or unfortunately, it came from Hume. And then it just cemented the idea that there's a problem with causation.

Logical empiricism tries to argue against the necessary connection we humans make, as ordinary observers, about things in the world. I say this is the wrong way to argue against the validity of causation. Ordinary observation never claims a necessary connection, only ordinary hypothesis. It's not like the sunrise or sunset is a type of probabilistic event. lol. Ten things must come unhinge first before the sunrise and the sunset is no longer the case.

Whitehead was my personal preference, because I happen to think process philosophy is a powerful concept. — Pantagruel

:up: I can't argue against that.

I am simply pointing to the many problems with causation. — Banno

Then what are they?

Interesting to note nobody chose "metaphysics", which can't be right on a forum of this size. I think the example of Whitehead might be too polarizing, — Manuel

Yes I noticed. I chose it -- philosophy must have it, along with epistemology. Whitehead can be an example, but should not be the only example.

Must a philosophical mind remove the ego? — TiredThinker

Yes. Except for Descartes who must prove the duality of existence. After that, yes.

Be logical? — TiredThinker

Absolutely.

Prone to splitting hairs? — TiredThinker

No. Philosophers are known to be contentious if there's a thick argument to be made against an idea.

What are the prerequisites? — TiredThinker

One must first be introduced to their first philosopher's works.

Sorry to go off-topic on this thread.

This happened to me last week when a casual remark made by a high school classmate seventy years ago popped into my thoughts. It's partly the evoked emotion caused by the incident that fixes it firmly in the subconscious, available for re-annoying. :sad: — jgill

It's my job to deal with people with a wide range of net worth so basically I'm trained to deal with why people say what they say. (Not to say I've mastered it, so once in a while I fall prey to it, too -- but a "professional" one like me :cool: rebounds back)

Time should have blurred that emotion in you caused by the classmate's remark. But know this, I bet that memory came back to you at the moment when you're not feeling well or your mind was pre-occupied with some disturbance not related to the past memory. You were just vulnerable at that moment, like an infection that you acquired.

Hahaha! :up:

I am of the view that the word 'ontology' refers to exploration the nature of being, as distinct from the study of phenomena or the analysis of what kinds of things there are, which I said is the domain of science proper. — Wayfarer

This is good. What was the problem?

Too much emphasis on causation for my taste. A better epitome of a metaphysical principle would be the conservation laws. The causal relations between billiard balls, or instance, are an expression of conservation of momentum. — Banno

Not sure how that limits causation.
There are alternatives to causation, the conservation laws being a case in point. — Banno

This argument is getting more convoluted. You seem to think that causation involves only conservation of energy. If this is not the case, then I stand corrected. But my impression of your post previously is that you think only the conservation law is the proper example of causation.

All conservation is conservation of mass? That doesn't seem right. — Banno

Yes it is right, or conservation of energy, if you will. But optics is not one of those because it involves light -- and light is massless. So optics does not belong in conservation of energy, yet it is used as example of causation. In other words, it's not just conservation law, but other processes, too, support causation. That's it. That is our point of contention.

I agree that there are other examples of causation. Are you attempting to show that some of them cannot be reduced to conservation principles? — Banno

Yes.

So I'm still at a loss as to what this post of yours was about:

Surely you must hate optics? — L'éléphant — Banno

I said that because in your previous post, you clearly limited causation with the conservation principles. And then followed it with causation is not uncontroversial. What does being controversial mean?

I don't understand, again. The conservation of energy requires that the total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant -whether it be in the form of mass or otherwise. — Banno

There is no otherwise in conservation principle -- it involves mass. If not, there's no conservation of something.

Conservation of energy is not a fungible principle.

Okay, I thought you were joking. Unfortunately, this is not what causation is in metaphysics. Maybe Ethics? The harm principle? Offense?

Are you saying that energy is not conserved when light induces an impulse in one's optic nerve? — Banno

There is energy, but light is massless. Conservation of energy involves mass. Look up phototransduction. I believe this is one reason why causation is not limited to the billiard balls example.

What if I write something that makes you so annoyed your hands begin to shake. What kind of causation would that be? — Wayfarer

I give up. What is it?

Sorry I can't educate you. That post is for Banno.

Grumph. Too much emphasis on causation for my taste. A better epitome of a metaphysical principle would be the conservation laws. The causal relations between billiard balls, or instance, are an expression of conservation of momentum. — Banno

I said previously you must hate optics, to which you responded "How so?".

So, here it is. Billiard balls is a favorite example of causation -- after all, it is easy to see the force of the balls bumping against each other and putting them in motion. But this is not the only example of causation. The optic nerves, responsible for transmitting electrical pulses to create an image is another. You know... light passes through the pupil, etc. In other words, there is energy there, too.

That's what I'm talking about! :100:

That, and his perfect, unscathed dental work. — Vera Mont

I don't know why I keep forgetting to include dental work in my horror analysis. :up:

A better epitome of a metaphysical principle would be the conservation laws. The causal relations between billiard balls, or instance, are an expression of conservation of momentum. — Banno

Surely you must hate optics?

Previously I put this down to contrariness. I now wonder if it might be vacillation or trepidation. Or simple failure to commit? — Banno

I might put it as not understanding what idealism and non-skeptical realism are. The PhilPapers voters overwhelmingly voted for non-skeptical realism in both epistemology and metaphysics (drop-down menu). I entered PhD, then all respondents. Similar results, over 80% leaning towards non-skeptical realism.

So, my guess with the results in this forum is that not enough voters who understand the philosophies in the poll, and not enough voters.

It's possible, I suppose, that you have worse than average luck. But the difference between hope and despair is not in the circumstances; it's in the attitude. — Vera Mont

That's why I watch horror movies. I get to relive the victory achieved when the kick-ass hero beats the evil after having been torn in different parts of his body, covered in blood, haven't eaten for days, one eye shut blind, the other half-operating. After all that -- he gets to take one shot that ends it all and kills the enemy. And it's not like he wins material riches with this victory. No. He gets to continue living, back to his normal average life. That's his prize.

But that's not the focus of my OP. It is the extra burden of this existential situation.

Every time I bring this idea up, it is like there is a bug in this forum where no member quite understands what I am getting at but wants to debate animal cognition, losing site of the focus, and throwing up red herrings or getting lost in non-essential tangents rather than productive dialogue on our existential situation. — schopenhauer1

I honestly still do not get your point, except this is leading to the idea that not being born is better. Am I right?
I can't have a rational discussion about the choice of existing and not existing because they're not in the same realm. Debating the comparison is not productive or it is useless.

I have not been reading this thread. I will comment once I read them.

I am specifically thinking of reasons as motivations, not just intention in general. An animal might desire food, and they might even plan to some extent. But there is still something altogether different regarding this and what a language-bearing being such as a human does. It is this implication of this unique ability that I want to explore. — schopenhauer1

I used to wonder about the meaning of "instinct" - as in when people say, or experts say, "animals act on instinct, humans on reason". I thought, humans have instincts too. Don't we act on instinct, too?

But a sociology professor once made a point about the use of the word. When an expert say instinct, they mean a trait or behavior exhibited prior to intelligence. Of course, what is intelligence? Intelligence as reasoning -- a deliberative weighing of alternative options or decisions. Animal instincts do not rely on options. When you throw food on the ground for the animals, they do their instinct and grab, or even fight over, the food. They're not going to stop and divide evenly and fairly the piece of meat so everyone can eat. They don't feel shame either for wanting to take the whole piece. There's no shame in fighting over food among animals.

On the other hand, there are “….claims (….) delivered as “what actually is”.…”, serving as premises for the logical method following from them….

“…. That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience….”

….and this, with respect to his theory of knowledge alone, is not idealism in its strictest sense, insofar as external material reality is tacitly granted as a necessary condition. — Mww

:up: Thanks.

But your selective quotation of the passage then omits the grounds of Schopenhauer's 'defense of Kant', as he puts it. You then go to a peremptory dismissal: 'Obviously Kant doesn't know either'. But I don't think the 'sage of Konisburg' can be dismissed so easily. — Wayfarer

I did not omit on purpose the part where Schopenhauer's name appeared. There's nothing in that paragraph that would make it any stronger. Here it is:

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

I'm not denying that time is a human construct -- at least I'm not arguing here against that notion. I don't care about that issue.

What I'm pointing out is that the claims of the idealists, such as Magee and Kant, are themselves delivered as "what actually is" about humans. So then my question is, why are Magee and Kant so privileged as to occupy a position wherein they could be both idealist and make claims like that. They're contradictory.

I think the point of the argument is the reference to Kant's view that time and space are fundamental intuitions of the mind - *not* things that exist in themselves. In other words, space and time are not purely objective in nature but are grounded in the observing mind. And this has also dawned upon at least some scientists. — Wayfarer

We've passed this. The point of our argument now is the fact that idealists can make claims as to the condition of our perception (we don't know the world out there, only the construct created by our mind), as to the anthropocentric nature of time and space, etc.

My question to you is, what do you make of the claims of the idealists? Are those knowledge? Are they truth? Why should we believe them when the realists could say, well, we may be only perceiving, but the causal relation of the world out there with our senses makes it clear that we know the world. There is this mechanism, that escapes our direct observation, but whose functioning makes it possible for us to see the sun and the stars in space. If this is not true knowledge, then what is? Why are we even talking about truth, knowledge, theories, the sage of Konisburg?

And oh, btw, gravity is not a mental construct.

In the spirit of tradition, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

I'll favour his account over yours in this case. — Wayfarer

As someone who has 16.9K posts, you can do better than this to respond to my response to Magee's claim.
But you are maybe consistent in your claim if you also subscribe to idealism -- you don't know.

I have repeated a passage in Bryan Magee's 'Schopenhauer's Philosophy' many times here: — Wayfarer

No disrespect but I'm going to argue against the source. Magee is absentmindedly stupid in some important ways.
That's my impression of the passage you provided.
Get this:

'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

The claim that it is impossible that we know that the earth has existed for a long time even before the perceiving subjects is itself a claim about thing-in-itself, about what actually is. But Kant cannot make this claim because he doesn't know what actually is.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time:

If Magee endorses Kant's argument, then Magee cannot make this claim that it is what actually is in the world. The whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding?. Okay. Fine. But Magee is making this statement under the assumption of idealism. So he doesn't know either.

Twenty four responses. That might be enough to make some observations. — Banno

No it isn't if you're making an important comparison with the PhilPapers results.

I appreciate the citations and your reflections on (transcendental) idealism. Still, there's that confusion, or conflation, of ontology with epistemology, which plagues even Kant-Schopenhauer-Magee, that yields conceptual incoherences such as (e.g.) — 180 Proof

:100:

Yet Kant is an idealist. The structure is in yo head. So there are "real" facts, but their origin is not the external world. So that's why I said the "epistemological" part doesn't necessarily make a difference. It is needs both the epistemological and metaphysical for a complete picture. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I think we can't separate those two if looking at the poll.

Kant would say that there are true empirical statements, but still claims those statements are true for the human observer. — schopenhauer1

If Kant had said this, then he was just repeating what's already in his premise -- empirical statements are made by humans.

The danger of this poll is that it feeds the layperson’s impression that the existence of the external world is the central issue in philosophy. — Jamal

This is a good point. It's easy to mistake the poll as a poll about existence, instead of epistemology or knowledge.

I voted non-skeptical realism because this is the most rational choice for me. Idealism just have too many important unanswered points that resemble a catch-22 situation. The rest of the choices are non-issue for me.

Speaking of the large number of votes that the non-skeptical realism received at PhilPapers, this is as close as we could get from philosophical consensus, an issue which, in another thread, @jgill had pointed out -- philosophy had not achieved a consensus on something.

I'm not surprised that the votes went this way.

that reading him made on me back when I read Darwin: he didn't endorse the notion of selfish individualism being a leading driver of evolution. — javra

In other contexts Darwin did emphasise the fundamental importance of co-operation and altruistic behaviour as being essential to human flourishing. I don’t think he saw the SOF as a model for social development and co-operation which is however how it was adapted by Herbert Spencer and others through the ideas of eugenics. — Wayfarer

Okay, thank you for the information. At least I know I'm in good company.

I made a correction in an earlier comment about that: it was Alfred Russel Wallace, not Spencer himself who talked to and persuaded Darwin about "survival of the fittest". — Alkis Piskas

Noted.

I believe one has to roll up his sleeves ans start searching the web regarding the subject to found out details about that! :smile: — Alkis Piskas

:sweat: Yes, I know. That's why I'm thanking @javra and @Wayfarer for providing the passages. I was visiting a friend yesterday and couldn't isolate a good amount of time for this forum.

Anyway, we can find elsewhere that Spencer talked about this concept to Darwin and convinced him to use it instead of "natural selection". But this is trivial to me. — Alkis Piskas

It was coined by Herbert Spencer but Darwin approved it and included it in later editions of OoS - as OP says. — Wayfarer

May I ask what was the response of Darwin when Spencer talked to him about using the phrase. And if Darwin did agree to it, what did Darwin think of "survival of the fittest"? Because as others have already pointed out in this thread, the meaning, not just connotation of the phrase is one of competition and mercilessness. "I am not going to slow down so you could catch up. I'm going full force and if you're not able to catch up, oh well."

I have always understood the theory of "survival of the fittest" on a military/conquering way. Some authors, for example, defended the power of Roman Empire among Europe because how they showed to be the "fittest". — javi2541997

This is an example of how Darwin's natural selection had been misused. It really is about the species of animals.

Survival of the fittest was incorrectly attributed to Darwin's theory of evolution. This is a form of misrepresentation of his theory. Darwin would not have agreed to it, in my opinion.

So, that said:

1) Is this concept or principle a "realistic" one, i.e. does it correspond and fit our common reality about life? — Alkis Piskas

No it doesn't. We already know that adaptation due to mutation has been successful as shown in species and within the cultural context (i.e. humans). But also adaptation to changing environment has also been successful. Strategy is a very effective method of coping with the environment given what you have.

Does anyone know what the "official" name of the informal fallacy is? False attribution, or a kind of sleight of hand, maybe? — Hallucinogen

Strawman fallacy.

He then ends up thinking he's proving my wrong by just showing that there are scientific measurements of randomness. — Hallucinogen

Because you allowed it. Revisit the example. Your second comment should be confusion -- "why are you mentioning bla bla when my position is this..."
You should have repeated your original argument, not entertain a strawman.

So ultimately I’m telling a story that calls attention to (but does not explain) the difference between animal agency and selfhood, but which emphasizes the importance of the environment for both.

I don’t think it’s “immaterial”, but I don’t think it’s all about the brain, though having a brain is no doubt helpful. — Jamal

That works.

It was philosophy, not psychology or medicine, that improved our idea of self. Psychology introduced us to the idea of fear and mental illness, and medicine taught us about mortality. But it was philosophy that paved the way for contemplation of the universe, cognition of the non-physical, and articulation of reality and existence itself.

What has happened to fractals is similar to what happens to interesting concepts in math: everyone takes off in all kinds of directions with it. — jgill

:sweat: I think you're right.

Instead of a single function perhaps there should be an infinite sequence of functions that are iterated, one after the other. — jgill

In fractal dimensionality, as posited in the chaos theory in biochemistry, there is indeed an underlying foundation (as in stable foundation) that supports the nonlinear complexity. Researchers use fractal analysis in, say, fractal surface to show that we don't have to go to another methodologies entirely to accommodate unpredictability . (What these methodologies are is a separate discussion).

What do you think @jgill?

Merci.