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How to answer the "because evolution" response to hard problem?The electron contains charge (mind) and couples ti the virtual photon field, to reach out for other electrons or other charged particles. The interaction with other particles is an expression of charge, mind. The nature of charge isn't explained though. — Hillary
Is the charge pre-assigned to the electron as a property? Or is the charge created by the interaction? -
How to answer the "because evolution" response to hard problem?Maybe we could rephrase the question this way: "Why are there non-structured stuffs associated with structures of (causal) relations?" And then the answer might be: "Because the relations are between those stuffs." So, stuffs and relations between them are inseparable. Evolution creates causal structures of high organized complexity and these structures contain stuffs such as the qualia of our consciousness, for example (the feeling of) redness or sweet chocolate taste. — litewave
The distinction between stuffs and relations is the root of the problem , and is what is driving the Hard Problem.
In order to get past this dualistic thinking it is necessary to deconstruct the notions of identity, substance, qualia, inner feeling, intrinsicality and inherence grounding the idea of ‘stuffs’. -
How to answer the "because evolution" response to hard problem?Dawkins is the modern preacherman of the New Dogma — Hillary
Dawkins is the Old Dogma. Steven Rose is the New Dogma.
https://youtu.be/QceGqKZMqIM -
The Churchlandsthe Mysterians is a terrible name, and I think a Psychedelic rock band in the 60's already took it. — GLEN willows
I would put a question mark in front of that. -
The Churchlands↪Daemon I would like to know who thinks computation can cause consciousness. Is that a pan-psych argument? That a thermometer has a small level of consciousness. That’s definitely not my argument. — GLEN willows
Doesn’t Dennett believe that a thermometer has a bit of consciousness? That is , that consciousness only makes sense when we take the intentional stance , which is just a convenient fiction, and from within this stance , a thermometer does indeed have intentionality.
Personally , I suspect that eventually we will
abandon this fetishizing notion of ‘consciousness’ as some special capacity that a thing has or doesn’t have. I think all living systems , including plants, have consciousness in that what we are looking for when we play around with this seemingly mysterious notion is the general autopoietic self-organizing capacities of living systems. When we ask if a thing is conscious what we are really asking about is the level of organizational complexity of a living thing’s consciousness. If we could come anywhere near to understanding how a single-called organism works , we would be well on our way to understanding consciousness. The difference between an amoeba and a human mind is just icing on the cake. Contrary to the views of Dennett and Nick Bostrom , a computational , representational device will never come close to what even the r simplest living system can do. We need a very different kind of architectural
model. And when we begin utilizing such a model , we will likely dump the silicon chips in favor of genetically engineered wetware, and interact with these wetware systems in ways more like how we interact with animals than with machines. Once we forget about our superstitious ‘consciousness’ fetish, the question won’t be whether they are conscious but how conscious we can make them. That is , how complex can we make these wetware self-organizing systems. -
The ChurchlandsWe know enough about consciousness to know what can't cause it, and the observer-dependent nature of computation means that computation can't be the cause. — Daemon
I do t think consciousness is an ‘it’, some special facility that some living things happen to have produced. Instead , the basis of consciousness is present in even single-celled organisms, and I strongly believe that this is a continuum that can be even be traced from
the non-living to the living. The point is, in consciousness we’re dealing with a feature of the world that is not all or nothing but becomes more complex in tandem with the evolution of living systems. We will never produce something that is conscious in the same way as living creatures , just as we won’t produce flying machines that exactly duplicate what flying animals do.Our inventions build upon what has already been produced in nature rather than recapitulating it. But that means that , just as consciousness is a developing product of evolution , our thinking machines will evolve in their own way. We will produce
ever more complex devices that will achieve a kind of ‘consciousness’ that does not duplicate but mimics the consciousness of living forms. One could say that it will be parasitic on our own consciousness. -
Material Space & Complex TimeMatter depends on mind, mind on matter. — Hillary
Wouldnt it be more satisfying to be able to see mind and matter as each in its own right possessing attributes that were formerly only seen in the other? Your approach, in Kantian fashion , maintains the split but makes each dependent on the other. What is needed is a way to get beyond the split, by making creative differentiation and transformation intrinsic to matter, and by understanding subjective feeling as having a kind of causality or logic. -
How to answer the "because evolution" response to hard problem?But then you’d understand it.
— Joshs
So can you explain? — schopenhauer1
The hard problem is due to a seemingly irreparable split between dead matter and subjective consciousness, the ‘feeling of what it is like’ to experience dead matter. I think the root of this split , which can be blamed on Galileo , Descartes and other progenitors of modem science , is the difficulty philosophers have had with modeling movement and change. The way our language is structured inclines us toward giving preference to nouns over verbs, identity over difference. As a result , movement and change are explained by deriving them
from stasis and identity. This worked ok when modeling physical processes, which lend themselves (imperfectly) to description as self-identical entities with properties and attributes. But it was apparent that subjective awareness involved some kind of energetic dynamism that resisted this kind of description. Having no other way to depict identity and change, consciousness was typically treated as a special kind of object or substance, something mysterious and ineffable. Others tried to pretend that it simply didnt exist, and was just a kind of illusion that could be reduced to good old fashioned physical processes.
The first incarnations of evolutionary theory, while giving much greater importance to transformation than pre-Darwinian thought, also derived change from the rule-governed causal behavior of static objects, and so the hard problem remained.
But with approaches in philosophy such as poststructuralism and phenomenology , it became possible to understand the relation between identity and difference in a fresh way. In short, they reversed the priority of identity over difference, arguing that all
processes in nature generate identity as a derived product of differentiations. The static thinking of objects with assigned properties was now recognized to be the illusion.
The upshot here is that the mysteriously inner , ineffable quality we associate with consciousness is nothing inner. It is the experience of differentiation upon differentiation upon differentiation. Neural changes coordinate with bodily processes , which are inextricably embedded within environmental interactions. There is nothing but incessant change and transformation here. More importantly, this holistic dynamism is not confined to living processes, but characterizes what had formerly been thought as as the dead world of physical entities. Objects with properties are only probabilistic extrapolations from continuously differentiating multiplicities. So in a sense , we must trace back the ‘feeling’ dynamism of consciousness to the dynamism of pre-living processes. Subjectivity and perspective are necessary grounds of the physical. -
The ChurchlandsNo, it learns and is not just repetative. — Jackson
But has A.I. solved the frame problem yet? -
The Churchlands↪Joshs If you read my posts I said I don't agree with the concept of eliminating folk psychology. I do agree with educating people about what's really going on in their brains. — GLEN willows
As in ‘the really, really real’? Or as in ‘pragmatically useful ways of interacting with the world’? I side with those philosophies of science ( Kuhn , Feyerabend) who see the latter as the role of science, which is. it that different from the role of the arts, whereas writers like Dennett have not been able to peel themselves away from a certain realism that is not far enough removed from
correspondence notions of empirical truth. -
Material Space & Complex TimeIf a philosopher is not a Berkeley type idealist, s/he acknowledges the source of ideas being external, objective nature (holistically unified, or not), and thus probative investigation requires empirical journeys beyond the boundaries of the explorer's own mind.
— ucarrSounds like herein you place your faith in Kant's transcendental idealism, which has the mind's conceptualization limits & biases shaping our view of nature via a priori intuition.
Well, Kant's claims about space & time (the foci of this theory) being necessarily rendered to us by a priori intuition hinges upon discarded Newtonian physics. We now know, in the wake of Einstein, that space & time are out there, impacting our world quite beyond the boundaries of mind. — ucarr
Einstein’s work was fully compatible with Kantian Idealism, while Newton was following Descartes.
If you want to counter by arguing no explorer can get completely beyond one's mental boundaries, then we're venturing into Idealism's skeptical POV on the empirical. Is that where you're coming from? — ucarr
This is what I have in mind. It is indebted to Kant but it is not Kantian idealism. It is Pragmatism and phenomenology:
“ "I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental).
“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.
One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.
(Evan Thompson)
Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception?
Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120).
Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.”
(Dan Zahavi) -
How to answer the "because evolution" response to hard problem?You must explain these neologisms but without using other neologisms. — schopenhauer1
But then you’d understand it. -
How to answer the "because evolution" response to hard problem?
Evolutionary theory can be a step in the direction of dissolving the hard problem , but only if we go beyond classical darwinism and conceive of organic processes not in terms of causal concatenations and re-arrangements of elements under external pressure but in terms of a more radical notion of reciprocal differences of forces.
How does one actually get the point across why this is not an acceptable answer as far as the hard problem is concerned? Can this be seen as answering it, or is it just inadvertently answering an easier problem? If so, how to explain how it isn't quite getting at the hard problem? — schopenhauer1 -
Would a “science-based philosophy” be “better” than the contemporary philosophy?I've read things by Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Sean Carroll that were philosophical and insightful. But most of science is as interesting as reading an accounting textbook. — Jackson
I guess it was the implications of the sciences I was first exposed to that bowled me over. First came Einstein , which amazed me when I was 16, then Darwin. Darwin completely revolutionized the thinking of a generation of philosophers. American Pragmatism would have been impossible without him. Freud was less of an influence on me but Piaget’s approach tremendously impressed me, showing a way to connect the aspirations of religious thought with empiricism. Chomsky’s transformational grammar, and The Gestalt psychologists certainly stirred my imagination( and also the imagination of phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty).
More recently , the autopoietic model of Varela and Maturana was a significant advance in psychological as well as biological thinking. -
The Churchlandswill eventually be just empty descriptors. Like saying "he's got some balls" as a descriptor of a man's bravery, not the simple physical fact. — GLEN willows
folk descriptions have specific meanings for people just as the technical terms
used by eliminativists like the Churchlands . And their empirical jargon may be found pragmatically useful in ways that the folk speech they disparage is not, but to imply , as the term ‘folk’ usually does when used by cognitive scientists, that the neural concepts the eliminativists employ are more scientifically ‘correct’, is part of the problem I see with their brand of psychological
modeling. The Churchland’s concepts are just as contestable as the folk concepts they want to replace, and in my opinion have already been replaced by what I consider to be more satisfying accounts by enactivist cognitive theorists. It’s not just subjective mystical ‘woo’ the eliminativists eliminate, it’s the appreciation that reducing cognitive processes to internal computational bits misses the interactive web tying together mind, body and world. -
Would a “science-based philosophy” be “better” than the contemporary philosophy?Science only describes. It doesn't make one truly understand.
— Hillary
That seems right. — Jackson
That’s what Heidegger thought. But philosopher of science Joseph Rouse argues that science frequently does play the kind of role people tend to associate with philosophy. -
Would a “science-based philosophy” be “better” than the contemporary philosophy?Physics, e.g., is about "hows" rather than "whys". Philosophy can dabble in the later, but not the former. — jgill
Given that the ‘ hows’ get their orientation , sense and coherence from the ‘why’s’, I’m not sure how a philosophy could avoid a stance on the ‘hows’. In the same vein, every new ‘how’ generated within physics subtly challenges or adjusts an implicit ‘why’ framing their ‘hows’ , although this tends to go unnoticed by the physicist.
As philosopher of science Joseph Rouse puts it:
“ I am questioning any sharp or even significant boundaries between science and other meaningful comportments as practices that allow entities to show themselves intelligibly. My examples were chosen because they can neither be rightly described as scientific determinations of how things matter to us, nor as sociocultural determinations of scientific significance. Rather, they show how scientific understanding is integral to a larger historical disclosure of possibilities, within which scientific practices acquire and transform their issues and stakes.” -
Material Space & Complex TimeSpecial Relativity has nothing to teach the received opinion component of phenomenology, whereas phenomenology points to a conjectured future of physics. — ucarr
If you’re trying to distinguish between something you would want to call scientific method from your conception of the methods of inquiry typifying continental
philosophy, as that between experimental conjecture and received opinion, I would strongly suggest that no such distinction can be drawn. A philosophical account is no more or less tentative, and no more or less validated, than a scientific one.
idea & practical phenomenon are not always the same thing, which is the point of seeking experimental verification by literally countless observers. I don't know if The One god, being intangible, can ever be subjected to an authentically public scrutiny. — ucarr
One god, in its most general sense, is precisely what is subjected to an authentically public scrutiny through experimental verification by countless
observers, because the shard commitment to a certain understanding of concepts like ‘observation’ and ‘experimental verification’ already presupposes a certain. metaphysics. In a certain historical era of science, this made God and scientific truth synonymous.
“It is often said that what distinguishes science from other modes of knowledge is that it is not dogmatic, like theology, but rather is willfully fallible, that is, it will quickly alter its hypotheses and claims to ‘truth' based on new evidence. But there are perhaps two ways of understanding this fallibility. In the first, if truth is expressed in propositions that refer to or denote reality, then one could see science, in principle at least, marching toward a kind of complete or ‘absolute' truth, where the descriptions given in propositions will perfectly denote the corresponding reality — the map will become equivalent to the territory. Science, in this view, is an asymptotic progress toward an ideal, and that ideal is the ‘Form of the True,' even if in fact science may never reach this ideal. As Kant showed, it is the idea of God that expresses this ideal of absolute knowledge. Indeed, it has been argued that, in the seventeenth century, science was a secularized theology: the notion of one God as an eternal being with immutable attributes was transferred onto a single Nature governed by a set of unchanging laws (Deus sive natura). Monotheism was transformed into a mono-naturalism that still held on to an eternal form of the true.“(Dan Williams) -
Material Space & Complex TimeSpecial Relativity replaces universal time with time dependent on reference frame & spatial position. I think we've got to spend more time navigating the local neighborhoods of existence before presuming to have a valid & practical comprehension of The One. — ucarr
But it does not eliminate the idea of a single unified space-time totality within which relative reference and position are orientated. What it does is replace a causal grid with a gestalt . The One god remained important for Einstein.
Metaphysicians can makes claims for the independence of their discipline, except when contradicted by scientific observations of nature bolstered by experimental evidence. Premature attempts to distill philosophy from science amounts to foolish class warfare. The two disciplines need each other. — ucarr
Scientific observations of nature bolstered by experimental evidence are riddled through and. through with metaphysical presuppositions. For instance , what is the r relation between theory-driven interpretation, observation and evidence? Only a science whose metaphysical presuppositions are consistent with those of a philosophical stance can challenge that philosophy.
Special Relativity has nothing to teach phenomenology, whereas phenomenology points to a future of physics. -
Things and their interactionsSpace is just things, for Leibniz. — Jackson
Wish I read more Leibnitz. Deleuze relies on him
heavily ( and Bergson). -
Things and their interactionsIf two objects occupy a (shared?) space and are of finite extension, then every one of their interactions occupies a space and is of finite extension. — Daniel
Do objects occupy space or do they create it? Is extension a pre-assigned property of an object or is it a qualitative change? ( Courtesy of Gilles Deleuze) -
Material Space & Complex TimeOf course! You think I invented that 5D vacuum structure with virtual particles? Of course not! It were the gods! And they showed me in a dream. Im the humble messenger. — Hillary
I do have a question. You chose to appoint a plurality of gods to take the place of a mono-theism. The idea of god as single unified personality was quite an innovation in the history of theology. By conceiving of the divine as unified , we simultaneously saw the human psyche as a autonomous and internally unified. It also gave us a view of the cosmos as a perfect unity. What are you trying to say about us and the world by connecting us back to a plurality of deities rather than the One? -
Material Space & Complex TimeWhich wheel? I have invented a far better thing than a wheel. A structure on which the universe can inflate into existence repeatedly! The gods did a great job! They had selfish reasons but Ill settle for that! Proxies for philosophy? You feel threatened? How offers a physical model a proxie? It's just a part! — Hillary
But you haven’t invented , you have reinvented. I’m
not saying your account of the genesis of the physical world from gods is a mere duplication of an extant discourse, I’m saying that it fits very comfortably within a certain era and movement in philosophy. You would be able to enrich your articulation of your worldview by familiarizing yourself with the thinking of some of these authors. It would also make your thinking more accessible to others , by giving them more
routes of access to your ideas. This is the great strength of Continental modes of philosophy. -
Is science too rigorous and objective?The article seems
to back Chalmer’s panpsychism in that it talks about consciousness as a kind of substantive content to be studied alongside matter. This gives into a materialist thinking: subjective experience is just a different kind of objective phenomenon. What needed is an appreciation of subjectivity and consciousness not as an inner object, datum, substance to be measured alongside outer
objects, but consciousness as interaction. -
Material Space & Complex TimeBut at least you offer something new and interesting. That's how philosophy should be! — Hillary
I have a hard time thinking of theories by physicists as philosophy. I know it’s at least a form of applied philosophy. We use models from physics as proxies for philosophy when we don’t have enough background in actual philosophical discourse, and as result it always ends up being a reinvention of the wheel. -
Bootstrap Philosophy and Goeffrey Chew.The properties of any part follow from the properties of the other parts. This is the core of the bootstrap. Now while it's true that there is a mereology to be found in nature, but if you read what is stated you will see the circularity and impossibility to draw reality out of the swamp by it's own hair. But by leaving out the particles this can magically be done. Which we call: WOOWOO!
2h — Hillary
It’s also known as German Idealism. Physics tends to recapitulate early movements in philosophy( Capra, Kant and Schelling, Bohr and Hegel) -
Would an “independent” thinker be wiser than an academic/famous philosopher?An independent thinker would be someone who spends a lot of time thinking by themselves, writing, and actively exploring the world (in any way possible) to find more knowledge, not trying to follow any method created by others and not caring about the recognition of their work — Skalidris
To produce original ideas there has to be a starting point i. the form of a contrast with and critique of an existing philosophical stance. So typically an original thinking has read a great deal concerning the leading edge of thought in philosophy as well as many other domains, including the sciences.
In fact, it’s impossible to get credentials in academic philosophy if you don't base your work on other philosophers or philosophical concepts… — Skalidris
A credential implies the achievement of skills associated with a discipline. This requires engaging with the ideas of others, but can also include original work. A number of top philosophers introduced their original ideas through their doctoral thesis.
But what if it has scientific grounds? Doesn’t it get closer to wisdom? — Skalidris
Are scientific groups closer to wisdom than philosophic grounds? -
Depth↪Joshs I have been speaking about the content of the thought process, not its neural underpinnings — Janus
But doesn’t the content of the thought process itself unfold this way? Its not as if how we perceive our thinking phenomenologically has to run counter to the temporal nature of its organization at the neural level. Doesnt deep thought imply difficult thought , and doesn’t difficult thought imply a constructive process, a piecing together of something richer over time? -
DepthDepth is usually conceived not as consisting in "surface movement", or the superficial, but in subtlety, nuance, complexity of association and allusion and of what is at work underlying the production of surface movements.
So, it seems apt to think of depth as a "vertical process" insofar as it consists in going deeper than what immediately appears.The ocean or the human face seem to be good metaphors. — Janus
What produces complexity? If we think in terms of the neural connectivity underlying deep thinking, isn’t this a process unfolding over time? A superficial response to a question can be performed instantaneously, but a thoughtful answer requires effort , and this means a process that unfolds over time. All those neurons dont fire instantaneously, it is a process of spreading activation. Of course , intelligence and speed of processing are inseparable. A process isn’t intelligent if it takes forever. We are able to do more and more complex things , feel more and more complex feelings, over smaller and smaller increments of time. One could say that depth is a matter of temporal condensation. -
DepthOne might argue that the feeling of depth is a function of the richness , intricacy and anticipative continuity of the surface movement or flow of our experience of events
— Joshs
This is mainly in the realm of sensation? Depth as in truly tasting an apple instead of just chomping and swallowing? — frank
Both sensation and conception are structured i. terms of a temporal unfolding , so depth in time, not depth as a spatial concept. Conscious awareness is not a container but an interactive movement. ‘Truly’ experiencing anything is in the direction of a richer flow of change, not the accessing of a deeper inner dimension. -
Hallucination and Truth.
Realness is the sensation of some physical object(s). Those sensations are of a correlative. We understand this in neuroscience as neuro-correlates and in philosophy as correspondence. — Josh Alfred
I would argue that realness is not mere sensation. Such pure experience does not exist. Sensation itself
is a correlation and coordination between my body and the world, and among my various sense modalities. A sensation is a complex interpretation of my world that is built of a linkage between my prior expectations and and what appears. If I put on special glasses that turn my visual scene upside down, is this visual information no longer real? If I eat the glasses long enough the world rights itself for me automatically. How and why does it do this? Because the ‘realness’ of the perceived world is a function of how reliable , stable and predictable it is for me as I attempt to interact with it. The world is real to the extent that it is predictably useful. If I take lsd and the chair changes form and color , I may say that this is a hallucination, that it is not real. I say that because I believe that if I test out my belief that the chair is not actually changing shape I will be able to prove to myself that my perception was mistaken. But what if I take lsd all the time? Would this not be like wearing the special glasses? I may eventually be able to realign the seeming changes of the chair with my ability to touch and manipulate the chair as an object. So what began as hallucination becomes a different language of the real.
I am wondering if you think that schizophrenic auditory or visual hallucinations are not so much about the world becoming unreal as they are about a change in the language of reality. -
DepthThe world you see is made up of your loves and hates. You are it's depth. — frank
And your loves and hates define the limits of your understanding. One might argue that the feeling of depth is a function of the richness , intricacy and anticipative continuity of the surface movement or flow of our experience of events. Depth would not be so much a vertical as a horizontal process, concerning how effectively we are able to transform ourselves rather than about the enlargement and deepening of a pre-existing way of feeling and understanding. -
Metaphysics of Reason/LogicStill, all the great things in life, like painting, photography, dance, love, physics, etc. get a kind of load then in the sense that science can't explain them. — Hillary
It seems to me that the kind of science that offers an alternative to mechanism, panpsychism or animism in explaining the origin and nature of the physical world must spring from a philosophy that does the same. One would not expect to find such a philosophy in Kant or earlier thinkers, but Hegel would appear to have inaugurated a new era with his evolutionary dialectic. Marx’s dialectical materialism, Bergson’s creative evolution, elan vital and lived duration , the phenomenologists’ thing in itself , Heidegger’s Being in the world , Deleuze’s difference and Derrida’s differance all point to creative becoming as the basis of both living and inorganic processes. If one still wants to post gods as the source of this becoming , they would have to be much less interesting and powerful than the sort of gods that the Kantians and pre-kantian philosophers needed in order to explain the difference between the living and the inorganic. The radically relativist philosophers in particular not only remove the gap between life and non-life, they also remove the idea of purpose and reason as anything more than contingent values. This does t leave much for a god to do. -
Nietzschean argument in defense of slaveryThe above read like fast lanes to a nightmare of social instability, with frequent visits to thresholds of disintegration & collapse. — ucarr
There are regions of political stability and hegemony , just as there are paradigmatic communities in the sciences. Most of the time we live within these relatively stable communities, so it’s not as nightmarish as it sounds. In fact , it is just a description of how things already work. The disintegration and collapse is something we see on a regular basis. What we don’t see is an understanding of the basis of such breakdowns and how to avoid their violence and disruptive effect. Nietzsche’s philosophy doesnt produce this regular violence of instability and disintegration , it mitigates against the kind of political world we already live in. -
Metaphysics of Reason/LogicJoshs Yeah, which is why I characterize reason as "in some respects is inadequate ..."; and yet reason is also indispensible, no? Not "perfect", but good enough – usually much better than non / un reasoning. — 180 Proof
When we think of reasoning we tend to gravitate toward formal systems like logic or mathematics. What doesn't immediately come to mind is the kind reasoning that psychotherapists see in their clients. To me this is the most important kind of reasoning , because our anxieties, confusions , fears, anger and guilt define the limits of our sense making powers. An emotional
outburst is a kind of reasoning, a coping
stance toward a world which has become difficult to assimilate. By this measure , reason in its broadest sense isn’t a capacity we sometimes use and sometimes
fail to use. Rather, reason is synonymous with sense making , which we are always doing as long as we are alive. Our motivational-affective system is wholly in service of anticipating and assimilating events. The optimally well-adjusted individual doesn’t need to know any formal logic or math. The kind of
reasoning that they employ entails the ability to partially unravel a crumbling scheme of understanding and experiment with and explore incipient new ways
of looking at a situation. As a result of
trial and error, a new workable anticipatory stance emerges, and can then be tightened up using math or logic
But if these are relied upon too heavily, they will hamper the ability to reconstrue when the next crisis of understanding arrives. -
Nietzschean argument in defense of slaveryI don't think Nietzsche is a systematic thinker so it's not possible to present his ideas in a packaged form but will to power and other concepts do have a direct relation to his stance on slavery. Will to power in my interpretation, amounts to exercising influence and transforming the world by forcing your system of values/ideals. Eternal resurrection means you should live life in such a manner that you should wish/be glad to experience life as whole in repetition for for eternity. A high culture is the the manifestation of will to power, which can only be exercised by the elite in it's full meaning. So its neccessary to enslave the rest of people, so they don't become an obstacle in path of self realization of the ubermensch — Wittgenstein
In my reading, Nietzsche is very much a systematic thinker. The eternal return of the same does not refer to a repeating cycle in which the contents of one’s lived memories are lived again the very same way. On the contrary , eternal return of the same is the return of the same absolutely different. What repeats itself is absolute novelty , always in a new way. This is why Nietzsche does not believe that science progresses, that it represents, mirrors or corresponds to an external reality. The only reality is that of the incessantly changing relation of the drives to each other.
As Nietzsche says,
“ Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren’t
we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn’t enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean
comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of
reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect…”( Genealogy of Morals)
Will to power is not the desiring to possess power by a freely willing autonomous subject. The ‘subject’ is a fractured community of competing drives, and power flows through it rather than being possessed by it. Each of these drives within the psyche is its own will to power, and it is their tension that is the creative force of genius l.
“Everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn,
overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated." Geneology of Morality)
Will to power is in the service of the eternal return by being differential and multiple, transforming the arts, politics and the sciences through the constant clashes of the drives. The idea of a political class maintaining control is antithetical to the anarchic spirit of will to power. -
Nietzschean argument in defense of slaveryI don't think we should bother with postmodern thinkers as they don't interpret Nietzsche, they reinterpret his ideas/work for their postmodern projects. I am more concerned with knowing what Nietzsche had to say, without adding my own content, which the postmodernist do. — Wittgenstein
You say postmodern thinkers reinterpret his ideas for their postmodern projects. This is precisely what every Nietzsche scholar or non-scholar does. There is no way to know what Nietzsche had to say without already interpreting him through one’s own perspective, which will likely line up with the perspective of one of a group of notated Nietzsche scholars. You don’t think Leiter filters Nietzsche through his own brand of modernist realism?
I am familiar with the work of Foucault but you can quote the "interpretation" of the philosophers you have listed and we'll see if it's really an interpretation. But make sure it's on the topic of slavery since we are not concerned about eternal resurrection, will to power etc as concepts in of themselves — Wittgenstein
You cannot spilt apart subtopics within his work and understand them in isolation from the whole. It is impossible to know what Nietzsche is saying about slavery without first understanding eternal recurrence and will to power. These are the means of decoding his views on all subjects. -
Nietzschean argument in defense of slaveryAny student of history and culture knows that, each era brings forth new trends, values, ideas so it's stupid to fix greatness to a particular art,science,philosophy form. You should have understood why l didn't specify the content of high art form. My argument still stands, the system of elite artists/scientists/philosophers is capable of finding genius, just as Russell recognized the genius in Wittgenstein, who would go on to disagree with his mentor. — Wittgenstein
How do the new trends and values relate to those of the eras that precede them? With regard to the sciences in particular, does Einstein add cumulatively to the sum
of knowledge in physics, or is Relativity a qualitative transformation of previous physics that can’t be considered a linear progress? Is Einstein great because he brings science closer to understanding the way things really are , or because he simply ushers ina new perspective? For Nietzsche, the greatness of a scientist is not on how accurately they represent reality but in their ability to break free of the herd, as well as their eagerness to see their theories crushed. -
Metaphysics of Reason/Logic↪Paulm12 Reason, while misusable and in some respects is inadequate for adapting to reality, works better – more reliably, more defeasibly – than all of the alternatives. — 180 Proof
Until it doesn’t. Reason is playing games within a value frame. All the while the frame itself is ever so subtlety being turned topsy turvey. Until lo and behold , one finds oneself in a new value frame , and has to create new games of reason. It’s transformation of value which drives cultural and scientific metamorphosis , and reason is impotent here.
Joshs
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