Doctors invented subjectivity when they adopted the idea of mental illness vs physical illness. "Physical" was originally a reference to the human body.

This great idea of mental illness came from letting go of the idea that crazy people are possessed by demons. Again: the mental was original thought of as divine and as concrete as fire, water, air, and earth.

Again, I am not talking about theology. — Jackson

That was their metaphysics.

Descartes exemplifies the Christian metaphysics — Jackson

Nah. Medieval Christians thought hell was underground because of volcanos and they thought heaven was a rigid dome up above us: the firmament.

Of course it is Aristotle. — Jackson

You're ignorant of the facts.

Example? And please don't cite Homer. We are talking philosophy. — Jackson

We're talking about their worldview. That's Homer, not Aristotle.

Ohhh yes.

Why did Aristotle and the ancient Greeks never talk about self-consciousness? Was there some huge leap in evolution where the brain developed self-consciousness? I think not. — Jackson

The stuff we call "inner" they called divine. They thought the universe was alive with lust and arrogance.

We say those things only reside between our ears.

Who knows how our descendants will describe it.

First person, third person. Isomorphic. Back and forth, back and forth. Each concept depends on the other. — Jackson

Up-down, left-right, cold-warm, old-new, big-little, intriguing-boring, violent-peaceful.

AP: Analytical philosophy.

A fair chunk of AP as it relates to truth revolves around Tarski. I didn't refer to any specific article.

But then I don't see much persuasiveness in the argument that mathematical (especially mathematical logic) has its explanatory potency diminished by the fact that it always can be augmented in clear, unambiguous, and rigorous ways. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I didn't say anything about its explanatory potency.

You don't know really anything about the subject of mathematical logic, yet you are persistent to somehow fault it in a quite flimsy way. I wonder why. — TonesInDeepFreeze

You don't appear to know the basics of the philosophy of truth, so we're even. :razz:

And I don't propose any specific changes to the explication of the paradox per mathematical logic. On the other hand, no matter what you propose or do not propose, natural language changes drastically, so if change is your determinant of 'artificiality' then natural language is quite artificial too. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I'm open to being corrected, but I don't think we can imagine changing the rules of natural language the way we can imagine changing a formal system.

I don't propose any argument that it is not paradoxical in ordinary language. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I think we're broadly in agreement.

Again, you're not seeing the point among your unnecessarily split hairs.

Sometimes informally we use 'sentence' and 'statement' synonymously. Whether or not to do that is a matter of choice in definition. We don't need to get bogged down in disputes about such choices. Meanwhile, the distinction you mention is usually made in logic as the difference between a sentence and a proposition. And there it becomes a matter of the particular development of the subject whether we say that sentences bear truth values or whether only propositions bear truth values. — TonesInDeepFreeze

It's not me splitting the hairs. AP gets very specific about what a sentence is when comparing Tarski's project to ordinary language use. If you wander through the SEP articles touching on the issue you'll get up to speed pretty quickly.

In the case of "Provo is in Utah" I mean the ordinary interpretation we share of the city we know of and its location in the state we know of. — TonesInDeepFreeze

You're providing a context for the sentence, so it's more than just the string of words. It's a statement.

Yes, mathematical logic offers the freedom for anyone to present alternative formulations, definitions, methods, and paradigms. That's a good thing. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I'm sure it is good for many purposes. But a solution that's subject to revision is not a strong solution.

In any case, ordinary language and ordinary naive approaches not can be imagined to change but we know that they do change. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I don't propose that they change anything.

said that we can evaluate it by formal methods. I didn't say that we must evaluate it only by formal methods. — TonesInDeepFreeze

And this makes a world of difference. If we can evaluate it by ordinary standards, the paradox stands.

But given some reasonable understanding of given contexts, we do view sufficiently clear sentences as being true or false — TonesInDeepFreeze

A sentence is no more than a string of words that conforms to some linguistic rules. Once you add context you have more than just the sentence. You have a statement. The statement can have the property of truth. The string of words can't, not in ordinary language use.

This is pretty standard stuff.

Sure we do.

"Provo is in Utah" bears truth.

"Provo is not in Utah" bears falsehood. — TonesInDeepFreeze

No, we don't. A sentence has to be contextualized by some form of utterance to qualify as a truthbearer.

Russell's paradox was first presented in context of formal theories. And, at least usually, the interest in Russell's paradox centers around mathematics. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I think you'll need more weight than this offers to show that we can't evaluate Russell's paradox using ordinary English rules.

don't know how you evaluate for "artificiality". However, of course, since the subject of mathematical logic is conveyed courtesy of human intellect, I guess it's "artificial" in the same sense that just about any other area of study presented by humans is "artificial". — TonesInDeepFreeze

It's artifical in the sense that we could change it if we wanted to, at least we can imagine doing so.

Anyway, it's not clear to me that you understand the solution per mathematical logic. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I do.

People with blind-sight don't behave like normal humans. Neither would a p-zombie. — Harry Hindu

P-zombies are specifically stipulated as appearing to be normal people.

the sense you mention a 'truth predicate', we actually say a 'truth function'. On the other hand, as to truth predicates, (Tarksi) for an adequately arithmetic theory, there is no truth predicate definable in the theory.

For a language, per a model for that language, in a meta-theory (not in any object theory in the language) a function is induced that maps sentences to truth values. It's a function, so it maps a statement to only one truth value, and the domain of the function is the set of sentences, so any sentence is mapped to a truth value. — TonesInDeepFreeze

In the real world we don't use sentences as truth bearers. I don't think we need to break from ordinary language use in assessing Russell's paradox. I'm just pointing out that the solution you've been talking about is artificial.

I don't think a p-zombie would claim to be one. She doesn't understand what her deficiency is.

The problem is our situation doesn't give us enough information to make an informed choice. — RolandTyme

Isn't that true in every case?

The Spirit of Utopia:

PDF version

We of our own impetus often cynically snide at hope for the first outcome, both personally and collectively. And this breads hope for the second. Needless to add, this at the detriment of the former. — javra

True. Part of the power of fascism is that it's rooted in myth and it discredits reason. Dry Marxism can't compete. It seems more reasonable to people to expect fascism than to hope for leftism.

Bloch is starting to fascinate me because he dove into religion and fairy tales as part of "practicing utopia."

Nah. We'd likely start all over from bacteria, again moving forward evolutionary through pains and pleasures, only to arrive at the same crossroads we are living in today as a species of sapient beings. Better to aim forward — javra

I was just paraphrasing despair: when the only door to hope is giving up.

So abolish capitalism in miniature -- or even lets say at a certain scale? -- and there's still this past and current history of nations exploiting, externalizing the bottom-labor to other national markets to protect their own. This exploitation will continue to exist, and that's the one I care about. — Moliere

Utopia in miniature is a step toward larger scale change. Focus on the world around you. Engage it with your vision in mind. Allow the bigger world to unfold according to its own inner logic. Know you're making a difference by starting small.

If I can say "I understand X" and can at the same time say "X is incoherent," how does that play out? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Could be from a surrealist play.

Absolutely. The purity of the Utopian Light at times points to genocidal cleansing as the fast track to heaven. An ugliest Marriage of Heaven and Hell. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Maybe that's what happens when all hope for redeeming this world is lost. The only way for the world to be made right is to destroy it all and make it over.

The catastrophe that transports the faithful to a new earth. Apocalypse Now.

Once Russia withdraws, how will Ukraine be different? Will it be more democratic or more authoritarian? Will it keep a standing army?

Why we need to understand Republicans:

I would make the story about an accidental fall into authenticity by way of a catastrophe.

Would you be willing to expand on the notion of utopia-as-engagement? As a generalization, it would likely include, say, a mass murderer plotting his bloodbath. His would be a state of profound engagement. — ZzzoneiroCosm

He was a Marxist, so he was specifically thinking of political engagement. He thought it was a mistake for Marxism to become disengaged like society's useless appendix.

But I'm not an expert on Bloch at all. In fact while reading about him, I ended up down a rabbit hole of Jakob Bohme.

True enough, but then we would come to conclusions like panpsychism which normally isn't considered materialism. — schopenhauer1

The old materialism will fall by the way. A new one will take its place.

Hope is an absurd (imaginary) response to fear — 180 Proof

Bloch would agree, I think. He was addressing a world in which anxiety had turned to fear that was close at hand (post Nazi Germany). Imagination was definitely the tool for dealing with it.

is the absurdist (performative) response to fear. The latter overcomes 'the utopian consolations' (temptations) of the former. — 180 Proof

For Bloch, utopia is a journey, not a place. It means being engaged.

If you want to explain the hard problem to John Doe, just ask him which animals and which plants feel something.

Obviously, it's not a bogus problem because it affects people's behavior, one is an animal rights activist, another is an animal abuser, the next doesn't care. — SolarWind

This puts a moral frame around it. That works.

don't have much to contribute here but I have the book in my library and enjoy picking it up from time to time — ZzzoneiroCosm

You could absorb the ideas through your fingers.

Two takeaways I saw were:

1. Utopia is not a prize at the end of the journey. It's the journey itself.

2. When you have flashes of world that could be, you're witnessing what could be, but is not yet. You're part of the way that vision comes I to being, with everything you do and say.

Paradoxes such as you have mentioned are informal. For purposes of formal classical mathematics we are more careful in formulation so that the paradoxes don't occur — TonesInDeepFreeze

Right. And part of that formality is rules for the use of the truth predicate that are artificial. This is why the value of the solution you point out does not extend to the realm of ordinary language, where if a statement can't be asserted, it can't be true or false.

Don't you love a joke every now and then? — Agent Smith

I think
So

Really, I see the hard problems as a direct critique at Materialism. Materialism proposes that everything is material or abstractions of material. There is no room for "inner aspects" because that itself is not material. — schopenhauer1

It's not opposed to materialism. It's a call for an expansion of what counts as material.

So when presenting someone not familiar with the hard problem, or even has really grasped it (and is not of a mystical bent), they will quickly answer: "Because evolution has created it!" when asked, "Why is it we have sensations, thoughts, feelings associated with physical processes?".

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, — schopenhauer1

The point of the hard problem is to call attention to the fact that the subjective aspect of consciousness needs an explanation.

It may be that it's a result of evolution. We first need to understand how it works, though. After that we can work on how evolution is involved.

But that light side - when its hazards are swept under the rug - can create a ton of darkness. — ZzzoneiroCosm

True. Using psychology to manipulate is a betrayal. It exploits something intimate and innocent.

I see you're a troll.
— Tate

Jackson started the thread. That makes you the troll. — T Clark

Could be. I'm the troll spouting Aristotle. Sorry.