Comments

  • Metaphysics of Reason/Logic

    What's the alternative to doing this for life? Going on intuition and emotion all the time?

    That's not going to help you get very far, in fact, it's likely to get oneself killed. The "postmodernists" who argue otherwise are using reason to justify whatever they say, so..
    Manuel

    The postmodernists are pointing out that Reason is a subset of value , and value is affective. Thus reason is organized and gets its sense on the basis of affective comportment, how the world matters and is relevant to us.
  • Nietzschean argument in defense of slavery
    Contemporary "musicians" for the most part produce commercialized music. This explains the deplorable state of art.Wittgenstein

    You sound like an old fogey. Not a fan of classic Rock or Punk? The Velvet Underground were not very commercially successful, but there’s more of Nietzsche in that music than in any symphony.

    A system should be put in place which allows the crème da le crème of society to blossom into maturity, this will come at the cost of a non-egalitarian societyWittgenstein

    Do you have the slightest idea what would constitute the ‘crème de la crème’ for Nietzsche in terms of specific values, beliefs, taste in music and art?
    Do you think he would embrace any of the specific arts, sciences or political forms that you consider to be superior? Here’s a hint: No.
    This is simply because Nietzsche does not advocate for any particular content when it comes to forms of cultural creativity. On the contrary, he advocates for the endless overturning of specific cultural values , which includes all particular creative content.
  • Nietzschean argument in defense of slavery
    Do you think a college professor will keep his job in this age if he spouts the elitist nonsense in my OP ? A few scholars have nevertheless dared to read Nietzsche as he ought to be read and l can drop their names in this thread but you will dismiss their interpretation.....Wittgenstein

    That sounds like a silly argument. There are plenty of conservative Christian institutions in the U.S. where such readings of Nietzsche would probably be welcome. Of the authors you mentioned I’m familiar with Brian Leiter. He reads Nietzsche as a modernist, existentialist and realist. This interpretation is more accessible to most people than the postmodern reading, because it doesnt require them to understand postmodern thought.

    I’m not bothered by what Leiter’s
    reading says in particular about Nietzsche’s approach to slavery. Rather, I think it completely misses what is most exciting, daring and radical about his work. For me the larger question is whether you have any acquaintance with the Nietzsche depicted by Heidegger, Derrida , Foucault , Deleuze or other postmodernists. If you don’t know what they claim to be his main thesis (for instance , what is Will to Power , Eternal Return of the Same and their relation to each other) then you are not in a position to ‘prefer’ your reading to an alternative you have no familiarity with.
  • Nietzschean argument in defense of slavery


    ...and yet time and again it is read as encourage the aristocratic nonsense of the OP. Time and again this is how it is read. Your view looks like special pleading.Banno

    Special pleasing my ass. You really need to improve the quality of the Nietzsche interpreters you read. I have a shelf full of brilliant Nietzsche scholarship and none of it spouts the crap you’re referring to.
  • Letting Go of Hedonism
    Who in his right mind would endorse hedonism?

    Either you're manipulated or you're manipulating.
    Agent Smith

    Not as simple as you might think. Pleasure and pain are intricately bound up with sense-making oriented around personal goals and purposes. You cannot reliable produce rewards and punishments that motivate and shape the behavior of others without understanding their own interests , aims and ways of looking at the world. This insulates agains the idea of hedonism as effective behavioral control, because it only works in superficial and limited situations. Mind control is a Skinnerian myth.
  • Letting Go of Hedonism
    truisms
    — Joshs

    So, they're true. Sorry if I'm a bit slow, nothing's obvious to me at all.
    Agent Smith

    They’re truisms because they come by their ‘truth’ by not saying anything new. Better, pleasure and desire mean the same thing and that is why it is ‘true’ to say that pleasure is better than pain. It is a truism just like ‘Better means better’ is a truism.
  • Letting Go of Hedonism
    We know for certain (?) that pleasure is better than pain. What could be more desirable than pleasure in your opinion? My mind draws a blank. Is it the same for you?Agent Smith

    These seem to be truisms. ‘Better’ is synonymous with ‘pleasure’ , which is synonymous with what we desire or prefer. What could be more desirable that what we desire? What could be better than that which we prefer?
    What’s needed here is an explanation of the basis of preference in terms of the organizational dynamics of perception and cognitionn. For instance, we could connect that which is desirable in terms of the goal-directedness of anticipatory sense-making.
  • Nick Bostrom & Ludwig Wittgenstein
    That may be why humans have always imagined that there must be something better, something more, than this "vale of tears". Our advanced animal brains are not limited to the here & now, but can create alternative possible worlds, such as Plato's Ideal, and the Christian Heaven, or somewhat more mundane, a Garden of Eden, where grass-fed lions lay-down with their fellow vegetarian lambsGnomon

    What is the ‘this’, the ‘here’, the ‘now ‘ , the ‘ it is’ which is being assumed as Reality. Heidegger began Being and Time telling us that we need to put into question the simple copula ‘is’. His conclusion? The ‘is’ supposedly points to a static state of affairs , ‘here and now’ that traps us, but in fact the ‘is’ points to transformation and temporalization.
    The something better, more, different is already ‘in’ the state of affairs , the ‘here and now’ that we assume as confining and locking us in.
  • Psychology Evolved From Philosophy Apparently
    The law of gravity doesn't care whether you're a saint or a sinner or a stone.Agent Smith

    A variation of the popular conservative mantra:
    ‘science doesn't care about your feelings’.

    Or at least, that’s the story a certain era of science tells itself. An era just coming into being knows that valuative frameworks are the very basis of science.
  • To What Extent is Human Judgment Distorted and Flawed?


    This thread topic is based on the discussion in 'Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment', by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein(2021). They argue that,
    'Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points of view around the target.'
    Jack Cummins

    I think Kahneman’s approach is fundamentally limited due to his attempt to explain human behavior on the basis of an objectively normative model. Cognition is not the computational representation of information, it is the subjective constural of valuative relations. Words like ‘distortion’, ‘bias’, ‘error’,’off target’ rely on normative abstractions serving as the criterion of accuracy and correctness.

    The authors argue that, 'measurement is in the human mind', and, 'Matters of judgment, including professional judgments, occupy a space between questions or facts or computations on the other hand, and matters of taste.'Jack Cummins

    Judgement is not a space between fact and value. Value is prior to fact , in that all facts are intrinsically valuative.
    n
  • Psychology Evolved From Philosophy Apparently
    You know "the marshmallow experiment"? children are left alone with a marshmallow and instructed to not eat it (until some future point). If they wait 5 minutes, they will get two marshmallows." Some children can wait, some eat the single marshmallow forthwith,

    The ability to wait 5 minutes supposedly predicts how well children will do in life, where delayed gratification is commonly practiced by successful (but chronically unsatisfied?) people. I don't know whether the marshmallow experiment proves anything or not, but it's the kind of easy to do, readily replicable experiment that comes to mind.
    Bitter Crank

    It’s also a deeply flawed experimental paradigm in my opinion. Experiments like this , the supposed Dunning- Krueger effect, cognitive dissonance and others that appear to find cognitivist ‘bias’ in decision-making presuppose an objective starting point for that variable which is allegedly vulnerable to bias. Attempts like this to translate moral reasoning situations into empirically measurable frameworks substitute simplistic normative biases for an understanding that takes account of the perspectival nature of value.


    Which gets to the point I was making that you haven’t commented on, which is that objectively based research in social psychology is using the wrong notion of science, that derived from the natural sciences. The third-person perspective currently in vogue needs to be embedded within a first-person perspective , which should be treated as primary. I’m far from alone in pointing this out.

    Eugene Gendlin writes:

    “ We would not expect a first-person process science to contradict the genuine findings of reductionistic science, any more than ecology does. But it places those findings within a broader perspective that can be more useful for certain purposes. One of those purposes is to understand first-person processes in such a way that 'the person' does not drop out.”

    Varela and Thompson reject the claim that scientific objectivity presupposes a belief in an observer independent reality. Evan Thompson(2001) writes:

    “Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James' thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10).”

    Matthew Ratcliffe(2002) says:

    “The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”
  • Psychology Evolved From Philosophy Apparently
    ↪Joshs The social sciences--I'm including psychology--have a lamentably justified bad rep for half-baked research, sloppy methodology, unconfirmed results, and soBitter Crank

    But why is this the case? Is it just a function of the obvious fact that the social sciences deal with phenomena that are much ‘messier’ than the natural sciences due to their complexity and instability? Or are the social sciences also capable of challenging the assumptions underlying what constitutes prosper science? For instance, Skinner never accepted cognitive psychology as a real science. And older versions of cognitive science are now making similar accusations concerning the scientific legitimacy of phenomenologicallly influenced newer approaches in psychology. So it’s important to separate sloppy science from approaches that define the methods and scope of science.
  • Psychology Evolved From Philosophy Apparently

    That he was being "scientific" is my projection of what he was doing--even if it wasn't great science.Bitter Crank

    I think when it comes to psychology, ‘great science’ is an oxymoron. The more psychologists and psychiatrists try to emulate the natural sciences the less useful their work becomes. Rather than the psychologists envying physicists, it is the physicists who should be taking cures from psychology.
  • Psychology Evolved From Philosophy Apparently


    Behaviorism - Walden Two - the grotesque result of an art aspiring to be a science.ZzzoneiroCosm


    The psychologist George Kelly wrote:

    “I often tell my students that a psychopath is a stimulus- response psychologist who takes it seriously.”
  • Nick Bostrom & Ludwig Wittgenstein

    I read somewhere that the naysayers of philosophy accuse it of being nothing more than literature review. How would you respond?Agent Smith


    I’d respond that that is probably your view as well. It was also mine when I was in college. Took me awhile to realize that it was a product of my own ignorance rather than some fault of philosophy.
  • “Belief” creating reality
    Suppose that belief or faith had the intrinsic property of manifesting into reality whatever is believed. For example if I believe a delicious cheesy, tomato and dough based circle exists then pizza becomes a thing.Benj96

    This is in fact how perception and imagination work. To say we believe something exists is , at the most basic experiential level, simply to have it appear before us either as imagined, remembered, hallucinated , dreamt or perceived. The difference between scientific fact, common sense fact, hallucination, memory, brief perceptual illusion, dream and changing perceptual reality is a matter of the pattern by which our ongoing ‘believing’ , which is to say, actual experience, unfolds. Does the experience of the pizza persist or disappear? If it persists, can I experience it with all my senses, can I touch it and eat it? Can I share it with others and have them experience it? Does everything I conjure by ‘belief’ function this way , and if so, can I control its appearance and disappearance at will? Why can Indo this? If I don’t understand why and how this happens, I can’t depend on it being reliable when I really need to count on it.

    What I’m getting at here is that all we mean when we talk about reality is a certain dependable stability and predictability to what we believe. Science is based on intersubjective consensus of belief. No one ever observes
    the exact same scientific phenomenon as anyone else , so we make our theoretical models general enough to compensate for this ambiguity. The precision of mathematical physics isn’t due to the mathematical exactness of physical reality, but to the models we choose to capture reality. Money as an intersubjectively created concept is different from physical particle in that our belief in money adjusts itself to what we know about its sensitively to economic conditions. We know that its value fluctuates in so many ways and this is part of its reality for us.

    Intersubjective belief in god and belief in scientific evidence aren't as far apart as you might think. Both rely on their own variety of evindence. One believes and continues to believe in one’s god to the extent that that belief allows one to anticipate and make sense of deep aspects of human functioning. The evidence can change in such a way ( the death of one’s child) that one finds it necessary to abandon or revise that faith.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    Free will has to be a determined will.Hillary

    If a free will is determined , does this mean that you reject the concept of evil? From a deterministic perspective , what are the causes of morally wrongful acts?
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."


    All processes are completely determined, no matter how complexHillary

    Life isn't programmed.Hillary

    If life is based on processes that are completely determined then in a sense, yes, they are programmed. In order to understand living and human creativity without needing gods , you have to abandon physical causal determinism. Physics won’t collapse if you do. We can still use it the same old way we have been , but we can be more insightful about its limitations and the ways it will need to change in order to keep up with the social sciences and philosophy. There are more and more physicists today who are ready to abandon determinism.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    As long as we can create the circumstances in which live evolves, we haven't created life. As life itself is part of the circumstances we can't create it, no matter how a programmed version in a computer looks like it.Hillary

    For me the issue isn’t ‘can we create life’, but why would we want to? Would you want to create the big bang, as opposed to understanding it or creating a computer
    model of it ? Would that be useful to you? We don’t , and can’t , recreate the past because we take our past along with us. The past comes already pre-interpreted by our present. That is why our past is always ahead of us.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    Nonsense. That what comes from our hands and minds is not to further evolution. Evolution of life, a freely developing process, is a different process than what we let freely develop in a lab or anything coming out of it.Hillary

    Is that because we have ‘free will’ , and that is somehow split off from, special and unique with respect to previous scales of evolution ? We dont choose to will , we find ourselves willing , and this birthing of the new happens this way with pre-organic matter. No element, particle , process , object remains self-identical from
    moment to moment. A particle is a singularity, a differentiation. For the sake of convenience , physics has assumed the concept of law-governed deterministic objects with persisting properties and attributes , but this is just a useful abstraction
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    We can't create the circumstances to let a DNA molecule appear or a cell or a neuron, or a form of life. To create life you need life in the first place.Hillary

    And to create knowledge you need life , and to have life you first must have an inorganic word. Human creativity is not backward looking. We don’t recapitalw what already happened , and the levels of evolutionary complexity that preceded humans and human knowledge creation.
    Everything we invent is forward-looking, designed to further the complexity we rest upon as living things and as cultural products. Understanding how life evolved
    from pre-living matter would be a further evolution of culture.
  • Nick Bostrom & Ludwig Wittgenstein
    I look from the scientific side. Not the philosophic side.Hillary

    Then you’re not reading the same scientists I am
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    Of course there is no magic involved, but the point is, we can't create life. Life can only evolve naturallyHillary

    Yes, life evolves naturally , and the human capacity for technological invention belongs to that natural
    order of evolution. Our aims and goals further the evolution of the complexity of nature. The entire history of cosmology which leads to the creation of more and more complex inorganic forms, which led to the emergence of living things, which led to the emergence of human cultural evolution, is a process of the interaction of events taking place in more and more interesting ways, which means on a more and more accelerating
    time scale. A the level of human culture we call that the progress of knowledge, but it is continuous with the levels of evolution that preceded it.

    For humans to ‘create’ life , molecules or anything else is not to duplicate an earlier time scale of evolution. On the contrary, all our inventions move us forward to higher levels of complexity, over shorter and shorter time scales(‘knowledge’ that only accrues , and only can be utilized, over millions of years obviously doesn’t have the same usefulness as that same knowledge that is operable over a time scale of minutes. If creating life means a return to much slower and less
    complex time scales , the. that would be akin to killing oneself so that one’s body could decay and the simpler arrangement of molecules that emerges from its decay
    could then be allowed to re-assemble itself into a new living organism. I realize this example is different from creating life de novo, but my point is that we only think the concept of creating life represents some kind of achievement of knowledge because we are confusing the goals of human technology and knowledge with the ‘goals’ of earlier , slower and simpler scales
    of pre-human and pre-living evolution. To create life simply means to wipe us out in order to regress to an older time scale. It is essentially returning to a past in which we didn’t exist yet.
    It isnt life we are interested in creating , it is the further evolution of our own level of knowledge complexity we desire. What we already do every time we innovate is much more interesting therm the original creation of life , because it sits atop of that creative achievement and builds much further from there. We dont need to build from scratch ‘consciousness’ or the creative spark that the gods allegedly provided. Creativity is not the product of an entity , substance , being , organism. It flows through these but is an ontological and metaphysical a priori. Another name for it is time. The gods didn’t create time , time created the gods.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    . Simple organic molecules can be made without detailed knowledge. But a virus, not even a DNA molecule, can't be created in a lab.Hillary

    All we do is place certain elements in proximity to others under certain conditions . We have discovered from trial and error that this leads to the formation of the molecules we desire. But the dynamics necessary to allow these molecules to stick together are akin to the guiding function of a dna strand in conjunction with the cellular environment. We don’t create these dynamics any more than we create dna. In both case , we combine and recombine what has already been created.
  • Nick Bostrom & Ludwig Wittgenstein
    Language doesn't enact realities. It's merely a means of reinforcing and express them. To a minor extent It's involved in shaping realities.Hillary

    Then you and I support different philosophers and psychologists on this subject. Phenomenology , postmodern philosophies , enactivist cognitive approaches and Wittgenstein all argue my view.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    even a single neuron can't be created in a lab. Let alone a hundred billion of them interconnected in erratic ways and living in a living body in a chaotic world. Only such a structure can produce consciousness and creativity. The game of Life (based on a few simple rules) gives very surprising non-predictable results, but I think the real game of life is a bit more complex.Hillary

    Let’s think about why we would want to create a single neuron. You said this would be needed to produce consciousness and creativity. But you also said that even non-living processes are creative in a certain sense. So the question may be why we should claim that our invented devices are entirely lacking in ‘creativity’. If , as we agreed , the computer isn’t a natural object ( which is a creatively evolving process) but an appendage, an interaction that we set up as a certain kind of useful structure, then what is it that we see when look at the historical development of our inventions? So they not aid our own creativity in increasingly effective and accelerating ways? Isn’t it the case that we cannot invent a living cell because we don’t understand enough about how a cell works? Our most advanced computers not only are less complex than a virus, they are less complex than the intricate structure of simple inorganic molecules, given that we don’t know enough about the physical world to invent such molecules.

    If we are not ready to invent a living cell , why should we assume that we are missing anything by not having to us capacity? Would a primitive society benefit from having a computer placed in their midst, given their inability to invent such a device or appreciate its use? Don’t the devices we are capable of inventing reflect our readiness to benefit creatively from what we interact with? As we become smarter, our devices become smarter and our interaction with them becomes more and more creative?
    So isn’t it irrelevant that we can’t ‘create a living cell’? We create only what we are ready to benefit from. The fact we can’t create life is just a reflection of the fact that we wouldn’t know what to do with such an ‘invention’. If an advanced species who could create life for their purposes were to give us some of their creations, it would be wasted on us.

    I would argue that interacting with life is more valuable than ‘creating’ it , and we continue to understand living things , including ourselves, especially at the most complex level of conscious behavior, better and better over time. Our interactions with other animals also become richer and more useful due to this increase in understanding. We used to think animals couldnt cognize, emote, create tools , create and pass on a culture, have language. All that has changed. The evolution of our understanding of behavior is a kind of technology in itself, and is expressed in improvements in the devices we build that imitate behavior.

    So I dont think there is anything magical about ‘creating’ life. What is important and relevant is the ever constant improvements in what we do invent.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    Yes. And life is what these ever more complex processes accumulated into. From lifeless dead matter (with a non-explainable element called charge by physicists, of which they haven't the faintest idea what it actually is; it's a magical divine stuff the gods have charged matter with to make interaction and life possible) living processes, with feet, eyes, ears, bodies, internal simulation devices, etc. developed. I'm one of them and type to you with a laugh on my face, my brainy world constantly simulating the world while my body moves in it. Magic! And I can hear music at the same time, and hear the dog whine. From birth till death we walk through the world, which projects itself into the brain, where it comes alive and is actively shaped. We have no on/off button and to create a life means to create a new big bang and universe, which is the only way to let it develop freely and naturally. It's thus impossible to create live or program it.Hillary

    I’m not one who believes there is a profound qualitative gulf that separates the living from the non-living. With the help of autopoietic self-organizing theories and enactivism we now have a way to connect human cognition and affect with the simplest living systems. Rather than posting some special , unique status associated with human reason and feelings in contrast with the ear of the animal kingdom , we can now trace the basis of affecting and cognition i from single-called organisms. I think we will eventually be able to extend those dynamics to the inorganic realm of evolution as well, so the magic will have been shown to have begun with the simplest physical interactions in an ancient universe. ‘Lifeless and dead’ will no longer be appropriate ascriptions of this inorganic realm.

    Our computers are appendages. We don’t build them for what they do in themselves but for how we can get them to usefully interact with us. We have used animals this way, and Skinner’s behaviorism face us a mechanistic model for interacting with animals as if they were machines. As our neural models change , we will no longer design our thinking appendages as calculating devices , but use wetware to device simple creatures
    which we will interact with in more
    creative ways, because these living systems will not be based on deterministic schematics.

    Even the computerized devices
    we now use never actually behaved deterministically. In their interaction with us they are always capable of surprising us. We call this bugs or errors , but they reflect the fact that even what is supposedly deterministic has no existence prior to its interaction with us interpreting beings, and thus was always in its own way a continually creative appendage.
  • An Alternartive to the Cogito
    But relevance does not always be practice-bounded. The truth of gods has whatsoever zero impact on scientific practice, but at the same time a very deep impact on practice, be it everyday life or experiments at CERN.Hillary

    It is your belief in the truth of gods I have in mind when I talk about pragmatic relevance. To me the idea of something true outside of its relevance as a meaning in your ( or anyone else’s ) life is incoherent. Your belief in gods informs all your actions, even the most trivial, and in that sense has significant impact on your way of thinking about science.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    Computers are not naturally evolving processes. They are a product of these processes. Human products, that is. Naturally occurring processes can't be created. If you want to create creativity, you have to create a new universe with life evolving in it.Hillary

    You are arguing that only living organisms are capable of creativity, because of their self-organization? I think the inorganic evolves also. Hydrogen evolved from
    something simpler , and the higher elements from the lower elements. Organic molecules evolved from
    inorganic. The inorganic components of the computer in front of you are still changing , albeit very slowly.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    Computers and all we create, stem from naturally occurring processes but are themselves not naturally occurring processes, hence they are not creative. A theory of fundamental particles, the spacetime in which they live, is a thought process that corresponds, resonates with a real state of the world. Like all scientific theories and experiments associated. But these are all isolated resonances. They can only thrive in a larger process in which our whole being is involved and which can't be described scientifically itself.Hillary

    Computers are naturally occurring processes in the sense that all of their parts are naturally occurring and behave and age the one would expect of metals, silicon and plastic. A philosopher like Deleuze will argues that, while we are doing one thing with a computer( treating it as a non-natural , non-creative device) , its parts are busy making all kinds of natural, creative changes that we are oblivious to. Delving into the physics and chemistry of the parts of a computer is not enough to reveal its
    creativity, ai. empirical present theories of physics and chemistry are based on dead matter. Eventually our natural sciences will catch up with where philosophy has arrived.

    Do our theories simply ‘resonate’ with real states of the world, or are they designed to produce something absolutely new, that was never there before? Enacting is not just resonance. Knowledge is useful not because it copies pattens in the world but because it changes them. The only way to improve one’s ability to anticipate and predict events in a world is to rearrange the relation between that world and our experience of it. Knowledge is not a mirror or resonance , it is a constantly updated machine we are building.

    You say we can’t describe scientifically the larger process our whole being is involved in. What about Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions? Can we describe a paradigm change, which gets to the essence of scientific ( as well as philosophical and artistic) creativity? Can we describe the basis of a gestalt shift? We can philosophically, and i. theory we should be able to scientifically, once we enrich our sciences.
  • Nick Bostrom & Ludwig Wittgenstein
    What you say is debatable! Wittgenstein was specifically concerned about language in relation to philosophy. He, as far as I can tell, declared, with confidence I might add, that all philosophical issues were, get this, pseudo-problems - they were simply artifacts, so to speak, of language (linguistically-generated illusions)Agent Smith

    Witt wasn’t contrasting philosophy ( or reality) with language, as if language is always at risk of referring inaccurately or in a distorted fashion to real events and things. He didnt think this, because for him language is not a tool for referring to things. Language doesnt refer, it enacts realities, and the danger is that in our interactions with others , we can enact meanings in a way that leads to confusions about what we are doing
  • An Alternartive to the Cogito
    1. Can we shift the house of philosophy from the cogito to the truth A?

    2. In a sense, cogito ergo sum = there are some truths.
    Agent Smith

    I think the notion of truth that deals with what is or is not the case in an objective propositional sense is a profoundly inadequate way to ground a philosophy. Philosophy should be about how events are useful and begin with the question of what is use? Relevance is a more fundamental notion than truth.
  • Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better
    But at the fundamental level, there hides just one basic stuff. And that stuff is addressed by a ToE, and the name is quite misleading, I agree. It's only the lowest level that is addressed. There are infinite, loosely connected higher level laws of physics.Hillary

    If there is a single synthetic, law-governed truth of the universe and its laws, is this truth a description of something that exists independently of our theories about it? If the universe is continually changing , what about it is protected from relativity and contingency? Popper said that our theories are approximations of a reality that we approach asymptotically. This implies a reality independent of our theories. Kuhn, on the other hand , did not accept this idea of a lawful, deterministic reality. Laws are norms , and norms are contingent and relative. An authentic theory of everything would have to be self-reflexive,, a theory that reveals
    its own contingency and relativity.

    A theory of everything would trigger a new toe that transforms the previous There would be an endless stream of toe’s, such that it would be necessary to create a theory of theories of everything, one that no longer strives to nail down a single law-governed
    scheme but instead describes the structure of self-transformation, how we continually changes ourselves and our world.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    As such, creative acts, or life itself, cannot be explained scientifically, and because of that, creativity can't be achieved by computers, nor can computers or AI ever reach the conscious status they have in naturally evolved life.Hillary

    It’s not computers that can’t produce creativity, it’s the moldy models we use to explain what the computers
    are doing that are devoid of creativity.
    I think that the science of enactivism and autopoietic self-organizing systems theory is a good start at explaining creativity scientifically. But that’s becuase they’ve updated their notion of the empirical and the natural. You model of physics is stuck in an older view of what science does.
  • Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better
    Which is to say, it depends on which level you look. At the fundamental level there can only be one truth, the ToE. There can only be one kind of stuff created which can lead to atheuniverse that we observe.Hillary

    You’re no fun. Maybe we don’t just observe it, maybe we co-produce it in a partnership between conceptualization and the constraints and affordances. that the world presents to us. Maybe what we observe is already a newly changed product of our measuring devices and theories. That seems to be the direction that science studies is moving. Science not as neutral observation, representation , simulation, but as production and transformation.
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."
    What do you mean?Hillary

    Words are not identities , they don’t simply refer to concepts. They always produce a new, contextual sense of meaning. It is not just a question of what a word means, but how it means what it means. These aspects of concepts are hidden from view when we do physics , so we assume that. options like causal
    determinism are completely coherent.

    1. What is it? (Ontology)
    2. What happens to it? (Causality)
    3. Does it stay the same or does it become something else? (Change & Identity)
    3. Does it have to be this/that way? Could it have been different? (Necessity & Possibility)
    4. Where is it? When is it? (Space & Time)
    Hillary

    These are great examples of a way of thinking about reality that forgets the most important question. Not what is it but how is it. When one begins by assuming identity and existence prior to change and creativity one is forced to push aside the valuative aspect of meaning. What is needed is reversing the order between identity and change. We must place difference, change , creativity prior to identity. Identity is merely an effect of difference, not the other way around. Creativity is the the effect of a cause, the Will. Difference is prior to Willing. For this reason a god or gods isnt the condition. of possibility of creativity , but rather difference produces gods. They are mere effects.
    This implants also on your notion of time , which also tries to generate change from identity rather than the other way around.

    You know i like to quote , so here is a taste of what I’m talking about, from Gilles Deleuze:


    “The natural sciences think time starting from movement; time is
    understood as that which one has to presuppose in order to think the transition of something in space. Time is thus deduced from movement and movement is understood as the change in position on a spatial grid. This conception does not accord any signifi cant value to movement. After all, the moved thing only differs from the unmoved thing in that it has different numerical coordinates; it has not changed itself; it has not changed fundamentally. This implies that space, and thus also time, do not really infl uence the way in which change occurs; they are reduced to the neutral containers in which change or movement happen. Time and space are the frames within which change occurs.
    The neutrality of time and space is then illustrated by the fact that they are understood as homogeneous entities; time and space are the same at every moment or position. Moments and positions are exchangeable. They only differ as variations on the same theme. This is the reason why Deleuze says that within this conception “all is given”,nothing new can ever happen.
    Deleuze, in contrast, thinks – and he refers explicitly to Bergson here – that time is not the container in which things take place and in which movement occurs, but is movement or change itself. When time elapses, a thing does not only change its spatio-temporal position; it does not only change in a quantitative way, but also in a fundamental or qualitative way. Time is thus not the same at each of its moments.”(Judith Wambacq, Depth and Time in MP and D)
  • I'd like some help with approaching the statement "It is better to live than to never exist."


    Metaphysics is not just about words and their meaning. It's about the truth value of words. It's about what the words stand forHillary

    And not just about the truth value but the value in a more genera sense. In other words, metaphysics isnt just about what is true and false in words but about the conditions of possibility of a sense of meaning. A word does t just convey a truth value- what is or is not the case , but how something is the case.
  • Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better
    That there is one absolute reality. An idea leading to misery and suffering, if taken seriously. There are a lot of these realities though. Yours, mine, the Christian's etc. Trying to impose one onto others, in the conviction yours is the only one, is wrong.Hillary

    So there are lots of realities in terms of what is true in science, right? None is absolutely true, they are just pragmatically useful. Right?
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    Well, the universe needs a reason and a kind of sacredness. A non-scientific reason, since I have a scientific description from beginning to end. I don't see how one can go deeper.Hillary

    Maybe your scientific description from beginning to end needs to be turned on its head.
    Maybe there is a different kind of science, one not based on moldy Enlightenment assumptions about reason and objectivity, a science in its infancy that doesn’t split apart natural facts and their reasons, the makers and the made, the ineffably subjective and the objective? With this science it wouldn’t be necessary to seek a different realm from the scientific to find rhr kinds of answers you say you can’t find in science.