No one has made the case how the written word can "causally influence" a human being differently than any other mark on paper. — NOS4A2

Then what is the point of a constitution or a law? About anything? Such as “free speech?”

On another (but now related) topic, why are you bothering to post here?

But the point is, words are not meanings,
— Fire Ologist
I would need to you define "meaning", but honestly I'd much rather talk about free speech in a Free Speech thread. — Harry Hindu

The point of all of this is make clear that we should be politically free to say whatever words we want to, and to mean whatever we think we mean by those words in the context of adults discussing public policy, civil and criminal law…

…Words, meaning, and action need to be three separate things. — Fire Ologist

Words, meaning and action need to be three separate things in order to protect the right to free speech from its being abridged by the government, but to allow the government to punish actions that reasonably follow certain speech in certain context.

What if I’m standing in the doorway of a crowded theater and right across the street is a shooting range. And I decide to yell “fire!” — Fire Ologist

And let’s say everyone in the theatre panicked, runs and tramples someone to death.

In court, some of the issues would be:
What yelling “fire!” reasonably means?
What did I specifically mean when I yelled it?

If I could prove that I wasn’t thinking about where I was standing or who could hear me in the theatre, and I meant to prompt the guys across the street to “shoot their guns”, I would have a defense against the accusation that I meant “the building is burning” and that people should trample their way out.

Here, in order to adjudicate free speech, you need to separate words, meaning and action.

Wittgenstein should definitely let his lawyer do the talking. I’m not really commenting on meaning versus use versus language versus language games.

I’m saying the law that protects or limits speech based on its content (meaning) versus its consequential acts (where they are physical acts potentially/actually causing harm), such law must distinguish the word from its meaning and from its consequences.

We can’t legislate words and their meanings. That’s what free speech is about. Wittgenstein gets to debate with Aristotle all day long about essences and objective meanings. But where words lead to actions, we need to understand if it is reasonable that such words can be meant to cause such actions (in order to connect those specific consequential actions to the specific speaker whose specific words meant something to the specific listeners who acted in specifically harmful ways).

(When I say “bank” some might hear “river’s edge” and others might hear “building with money”. This is because words are distinct from meanings.)
— Fire Ologist
Wrong. — Harry Hindu

There are words, and separately, there are what the words signify or mean. The context in which a word is used is helpful to know what the word signifies or means. Context helps define the meaning, but the word remains just the word, separate from its meaning. Like “bank” in one context clearly has nothing to do with a river. And words are just scribbles and not even words if we don’t speak the language; and rules of grammar and such are all part of the context which allows words to convey meaning.

But the point is, words are not meanings, and meanings are not equivalent to words. We have two distinct concepts where we understand what a word is and what a meaning is. (Because meaning is most often described with words, people often see them is inseparably bound, but they are separable, and must be, for words to convey meaning.)

Sometimes we try to say something and have trouble, but as we fumble along someone else says “I still see what you mean” and then they prove it by having less trouble with their words and saying for you what you meant, and you say “yes, that is what I was trying to say.” That scenario hopefully helps show you that words and meanings are distinct things we have to juggle and organize when we communicate. The first person here managed to convey meaning without saying the right words, and this was proven when the second person said better words showing he had the meaning despite not being given the words that could convey that meaning by the first person.

Yelling “fire!” to a bunch of English speaking people in a crowded room, on one level is sound effect.

Separately, it also conveys meaning, such as “everyone, you should all understand that fire is burning nearby and may overcome this room so you better leave now!” (Or something similar, you get my meaning.).

A third distinct element here is an effect that follows after words convey meaning. Certain words convey a meaning that reasonably prompts those who understand the words and their meaning to action. Such as yelling “fire.” It is reasonable to assume people in a burning building will want to run out of the building upon hearing someone yell simply “Fire” because the act of yelling fire inside a building conveys the meaning “the the building your are in is burning, so you should get out.”

The point of all of this is make clear that we should be politically free to say whatever words we want to, and to mean whatever we think we mean by those words in the context of adults discussing public policy, civil and criminal law, all things political, all things artistic (again among adults), and really anything in the context of a discussion for the sake of discussion and exchanging our ideas. No law should ever limit that. And government can (and must) let societal influences sort out the parameters of what people end up thinking is appropriate or not. Government should make no laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” (ie. The First Amendment.)

But as soon as whatever is meant by whatever we say would reasonably prompt actions, not simply further discussion for the sake of exchanging ideas, like yelling “Fire!” in a crowded room for instance, then the person who yelled “”Fire!” when there is no such fire should be punishable by law for causing any harm that follows the reasonable response of a room full people who now think they are in burning building.

Many words to say “what’s ‘wrong’ about any of that as you say? Words, meaning, and action need to be three separate things.

Maybe. Do you mean words and meaning are distinct?

Wrong. No one ever simply walks around and says, "bank". "Bank" is often used with other words and it the other words that provide the context of the meaning of "bank". The issue is in thinking that only individual words carry all the meaning when other words often change, or clarify the meaning of the other words in a sentence. So you probably shouldn't attribute meaning to words by themselves, but to the sentence they are part of. Just as a cell has no meaning on it's own. It's meaning manifests itself in it's relation with other cells, forming an organism. — Harry Hindu

Context helps define meaning, but it defines meaning of a particular word. The fact that you may not be able to tell my meaning by the way I use words doesn’t mean words and meaning (or use/function) are not distinct objects.

What if I’m standing in the doorway of a crowded theater and right across the street is a shooting range. And I decide to yell “fire!” Or I’m standing on a bridge and I point to a building that is sitting against the water has a sign on it Savings and Trust and I just say “bank” and point towards where the building meets the water?

If you want to know what I meant by those words, you would have to ask me for more words or better pointing.

You can undo the point I’m making by living in the real world where not everyone is an ironic comedian like myself, or you can wonder if Wittgenstein really was the last word on meaning and see how meaning is distinguishable from words.

That’s funny.

I suggest adding that he is so handsome he is the only reason any sane guy might want to identify as a woman.

And Cc. Putin in the letter suggesting a partnership startup.

Politics assumes:
- Individual people have bodies with senses enabling them to interact with each other and the world.
- Individual people use language consisting of written and spoken words as they interact with the world and each other.
- Language/words, once written or spoken, is a thing in itself, like the people with bodies are things in themselves.
- Language/words convey meaning from the speaker to the hearer/reader.
- Meanings of words are distinguishable from the words, like words are distinguishable from speakers and speakers are distinguishable from each other.
(When I say “bank” some might hear “river’s edge” and others might hear “building with money”. This is because words are distinct from meanings.)

If we chop any of these things out, politics doesn’t work. This is a conversation about free speech policy.

Maybe politics is an illusion, our senses are useless to sufficiently interact with the world and each other, words are just sounds, meaning is totally invented when sounds are constructed in the brain (which may be physical or we can’t tell…). But if all of that is up for grabs, who can say anyone actually said “fire!”, or whether there was a crowd that ran, or that “fire!” was supposed to mean “shoot” or “stay seated and eat candy” or “you are in danger if you stay seated”.

We can’t divorce the use of words to convey meaning and figure out whether words cause anything. Just like we can’t metaphysically divorce the notion of cause and effect from bodily interactions, and figure out what causes people to do whatever they do with their bodies.

Are we playing politics here or not?

For those arguing words can’t cause action, are you saying there need not be any laws or governments? Because what is the point of saying it should be legal to yell “fire!” in a crowded building - if we write a law “don’t yell fire or you can be held liable” who cares, because words don’t cause action?

We are talking philosophy of mind, mind-body problem, psychology, metaphysics of causality, but for the sake of governmental policy about public speech.

We don’t have to have a government if we don’t want to. But if we think we need one, it’s because people can use their bodies to harm other bodies and people can use words to mean something in others’ minds causing their actions that cause harm.

If we undo the possibility that the meaning of a word can cause an action in another, we undo politics.

When your boss tells you to chop that tree down, and you chop the tree down and it breaks someone’s house, you might not be liable for anything, if you are just acting according to your boss’s words of direction. Your boss might be liable for everything, or maybe not even he is held liable, but the company you both work for is.

Most everyone got it completely wrong about women. But yes, he should have known better, or talked to a woman. Today we are getting it wrong about women all over again, in many new and fanciful ways.

I also think Darwin would have perplexed Aristotle quite a bit. But not undone him, at all.

we do not access reality directly,
— T Clark — Fire Ologist

I agree with that. Except maybe the reality associated with our own existence. But that’s a small, lonely piece of being.
— Fire Ologist

I guess we're on the same page except I don't see "the reality associated with our own existence" as small or lonely. I think it's half of everything. The world is half out there and half in here. — T Clark

So I don’t think we are saying much differently here about reality. I agree that the world as presented in my mind is constructed by my mind using the “world out there” and my mind “in here” as its raw materials to make the construction presented in me. Since Kant we see this clearly, but Plato’s cavemen make a similar point.

I was talking about what we might know absolutely and certainly. The only bit I claim to know directly, meaning where the “out there” meets the “in here”, is my own existence, my own thinking.

So to be more precise, the vast, vast majority of reality can only be known indirectly (half out there and half in here), but I can know that I exist directly and absolutely (out there IS in here at once). I am a part of reality (like the out there), and I can know this (in here is now out there). Descartes actually said something. “I am” is absolute knowledge, to me. Further, I now directly can conclude “certain absolute knowledge also is real, because I know ‘I exist’ certainly and absolutely.” So ‘I am’ and ‘certain knowledge is’ are two absolute truths about reality, known by my own direct access to the objects now known, namely, my existence, and my knowledge of this as knowledge.

So there is some absolute knowledge for the knowing, but, as a good scientist, I find that it ends up only being knowledge about me that I can know directly. The fact that I can only know the world indirectly is a third absolute truth, but it is again, a truth about me and my limitation up against a world out there, and provides no color to the world, other than whatever color ‘I am’ might have (hard to pin down the color of my mind - also changes a lot!).

Yes, agreed, we have knowledge. Is some of it absolute? To me "absolute" means without uncertainly at least in this context. I don't know anything without uncertainty and I suspect you don't either. — T Clark

Just because what I say can be critiqued to the point of meaninglessness, the critique then would reclaim the real existence of meaning in the universe. So if we are to claim any knowledge at all, regardless of the degree of certainty we believe it may have, we must have set something absolute before us to distinguish this knowledge from the thing it certainly or uncertainly knows. We can’t make a move without fixing something absolutely. You can’t say you know nothing with certainty and mean what you say. Then the only thing you know absolutely is that you know nothing. That may be the extent of knowledge, making something known out of “nothing”, but then there you have something certainly; “I know nothing” becomes absolute knowledge. But besides this, thanks to Descartes, Socrates was wrong; he should have said he knew something after all - he certainly existed while he wondered if there was anything he could know.

But knowing thyself is a small lonely science, (maybe until you admit this “self”, which is real in the world, is a mixture, requiring interaction with the “out there” as it forms “in here” during its self-reflection/thinking/perception. This would all grow as absolutely certain knowledge then. Now we are following Hegel.)

There is no wall between different aspects of reality, but there is a wall between different aspects of how we think about that reality. Physics and my family are both parts of reality, but I don't generally use the same words to describe them. — T Clark

This all describes one reality (as far as I can tell). You agreed with Tom who said there are multiple realities, based on multiple perspectives and frameworks.
But here you say “There is no wall between different aspects of reality.” That points to only one reality.
Above you said “The world is half out there and half in here.” That is one whole reality as well.
Here you say “ Physics and my family are both parts of reality…”

That’s parts of one reality.

One world.

Being always means the same being.

(I think a clarification between “reality” and “being” and “world” and may “the subjective experience” may be helpful here, but that would require we start this conversation over, and I think we are making points without such clarifications. And I would rather not write a book here on TPF. But maybe we have to…)

this (multiple realities) makes it impossible to be wrong, which makes philosophy worthless. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, this is why I pointed out:

in all disagreements we should all be saying “you might be right” and in all agreements we should all be saying “we might both be wrong” — Fire Ologist

Luckily for we philosophers, reality pushes back against such worthless debate.

I want to say, because people don’t appreciate Aristotle.

The reason for so very, very many problems in modern philosophy... :rofl: — Count Timothy von Icarus

It really is a shame.

I think it is all because religion aligns with him and today academics refuse to align with religion, Aristotle is simply not understood.

The man was a badass. He should be as revered in the history of science as he was by religion. Francis Bacon picked up the baton after Aristotle started the race. All of those before Aristotle were running qualifying heats, but Aristotle organized all of it into science.

we do not access reality directly, — T Clark

I agree with that. Except maybe the reality associated with our own existence. But that’s a small, lonely piece of being.

, nor can we claim any definitive knowledge of what reality ultimately is. — T Clark

This itself is knowledge.

I think we have knowledge. I think some of it is absolute, but that as an honest scientist, we should be skeptical of its absoluteness. But as a person, interacting with other people, we claim absolute knowledge between each other all of the time. Otherwise in all disagreements we should all be saying “you might be right” and in all agreements we should all be saying “we might both be wrong” but people are not so agreeable as that at all.

What we encounter instead are multiple realities, each intelligible through particular conceptual frameworks or perspectives. — T Clark

That sounds like one reality.

Multiple encounters and perspectives and frameworks keep it interesting, as does reality itself keep us interested. But why leap to the conclusion that some kind of wall separates one reality from another, when the distinction could be seen as two different ways into the same forrest?

I think Wittgenstein and Aristotle and Heraclitus and Empedocles, and Hegel and Kant, and Nietzsche, were having one conversation about one thing. They are all trying to say the same thing. I ask between Witt and Aristotle, why do you each say it so differently?

If change is all there is and is absolute, whatever we say about the many things changing before our many eyes will be burned up and lost to the change. So if “reality” is whatever we say about changing things, there are so many realities there may as well be none (and you may as well hold that “what we encounter instead are multiple realities.”) But if that really is the case, if as Heraclitus says, “all is change”, I find the concept “multiple realities” to be an equivocation on the word “reality” and that what is really meant and distinguished here is that “the one reality is change, always changing.”

One metaphysical position does not, can not, address all of reality. We need to use different ones in different situations. — T Clark

I don’t know if I agree with that.

I am making the grossly imprecise observation that if materialism was correct, if someone followed this intuition, “my brother” could not refer to anything other than atoms, and similarly, any references to “history” and “personality” would be references to my own mental abuses of words, unspeakable and incommunicable, until translated back into atoms perhaps.

I’m not a materialist. My brother is real. His atoms will never explain, or be useful to demonstrate, his sense of humor.

No, that's not up to me. Either when i get there there's a 1:1 match between you directions and my location, or there is not. I do not judge whether that is the case - it either is or isn't and I observe which it is. However, that analogy doesn't hold with my point - if you gave me an active, working Google Maps. I closed my eyes, followed the directions(pretend for a moment this wouldn't be practically disastrous lmao) and then the Maps tells me i've arrived - that's what I'm talking about. I am literally not involved in any deliberation - I am, in fact, still taking instruction. It would have been a judgement whether to actually engage this course of action, though, to be sure. — AmadeusD

I don’t mean to interrupt, but it seems like you both may basically agree on what a judgment is, but are finding fault with the application of the definition to the scenario, or various scenarios.

If I am not mistaken, I think you both would agree that the bolded part above speaks to a moment of judgment. Amadeus said it, and it seems to reflect a moment Leon is describing as judgment.

So you must be agreeing on something basic/essential/definitional about judgments.

Amadeus seems to be saying no more judgment is needed to carry out the course of action.
Leon is saying there are more pivotal moments requiring more judgments.

This may mean you are disagreeing with some underlying definition of judgment, but then I don’t think Amadeus would have made the above bolded statement if there was some glaring conflict between you regarding the nature of judgment.

I happen to agree with Leon, and don’t see how you can follow directions blindly, and skip adjudicating between when a step is completed and when the next step begins. When I am following directions, I know that I could misunderstand the direction and go astray and end up lost and not at my destination. I also know that Google maps is wrong and has led me to the wrong destination. So at each step, I have to decide “Is the last step completed yet? Can I move on to the next step? Is where I am driving what is meant by this next step? Is Google still correct of should I switch to Apple Maps?

Often these interim judgments are easy and immediately made, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t judgments.

we use different points of view depending on what we are talking about. We use different ones when we are talking about electrons than when we are talking about our brothers. — T Clark

But if “everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,’” what does my brother really add to a scientific discussion of things? What point of view isn’t reduced to its matter? What does point of view matter, apart from its material cause?

So discussions of nature or essence or my brother are all in my mind, which is really neurons and balls of stuff.

“It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.”
— Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

That is basically the same point. Subtract my actual brother when discussing my brother, which is really a discussion of atoms and physics.

what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Great question.

I want to say, because people don’t appreciate Aristotle.

Descartes may have theoretically doubted everything but his own understanding of his being, but practically speaking, he still went back to bed and used a candle to find the way.

they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity). — Count Timothy von Icarus

If all is matter, we get some ancient issues you point out, but to distinguish something else besides matter (or with or in the matter) we get other ancient issues you point out.

Matter, it seems, remains where all inquiries begin. Even Parmenides needed motion and change as his foil.

Science, since the enlightenment has gotten better at mathematizing matter, so much so that we’ve flown to the moon and split the atom. This is enough experimentation with matter to bolster the naive intuition that matter undergirds everything.

And math is just not enough to subsist absent it’s matter.

But you are right:

recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a measure (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes — Count Timothy von Icarus

If the scientist thinks he always and only is using matter to measure matter for his matter-based mental state called “science”, such scientist is only reducing the fullness of his work to a mere part of his work.

I think the materialist intuition is so appealing simply because it is easier to shrug off the invisible. We get to call the invisible nonsense and relegate Socrates’ musings to a parlor trick. It is just that simple.

When our eyes are open we are easily distracted from seeing the invisible things. And when our eyes are closed we obviously lose sight of the physical things. We need our eyes to be open to survive, so the physical things win the day.

But Aristotle gave us the best model - a starting point that is incomplete, but he was both the first true empiricist and the first true metaphysician qua logical scientist of being human.

The materialist intuition seems naive and incapable of discussing vast swaths of human experience.

Imagine discussing your brother, sitting next you in a chair, with a materialist philosopher and a biologist - you could spend an eternity counting his cells and atoms and all of their functions and motions and the organs and how they interact with each other and track electrical impulses and measure the shape of the face as it “smiles” and endorphins and serotonin level changes, and on and on, and never start the actual conversation about your brother. That is what materialism, like the hard problem, will always have to avoid discussing. (And ironically, you could just ask your brother to explain if he was not too insulted by all of the experiments.)

How about if we all get one last vote - whether to move away from elections or not?

Do you think you could convince people to vote to end elections and move to the performance standard evaluation system?

If you could do that, then at least for a while, you might not get revolution. And if the government works better, you might never get revolution.

The weight of each appeal is determined by the public. — panwei

So the public submits its appeals and then the public decides which appeals have more weight?

This sounds like anarchy or utter gridlock lock.

The object of our discussion is the administrative field, not the legislative field. — panwei

The title is “why elections conflict with the will of the people”.

So are you saying we would still elect legislators? Because if not, you are describing a completely administrative state. Bureaucrats pushing paper and counting numbers to determine all governmental activity. So how is a law or policy written? How is the final form of the law specifically codified? If that goes to the “legislative field” and that field does not require elected individuals, the legislative field is no different than a department in the administrative state.

The number of types of public appeals is very limited. After the first systematic sorting, the number of appeals that need to be supplemented by the public is getting smaller and smaller. — panwei

That may be wishful thinking. If your starting point is that the government is just like some corporation that provides services, then maybe customer service models inform the theory. But government is not merely a provider of services. It takes services away from people too. You cannot appeal to some other provider if you don’t like the government or you think the government is wrong in their administration of tasks. A government is a monopoly so the consumer has much less power to appeal to it than a customer might when appealing to a company that is failing.

The American people have no right to set priorities for the government because the American people have never signed such a contract with the government. — panwei

Yes they do. Harris/Biden made weak borders, climate change and trans rights the priority. Trump made strong borders, economic growth the priority. The voters set the priority.

The legislature is also academic in nature, not party in nature. Legislation emphasizes argumentation, not public opinion confrontation. They are not affiliated with the executive department.
The selection criteria for scholars are academic requirements, such as degree requirements for relevant majors, but I am not sure about other more specific requirements. My immature idea is this: the institution is connected with various universities, and professors or students in relevant professional fields of various universities can carry out relevant research, and the quota for entering the institution is allocated according to the research strength of each university in the relevant field. The actual research work may be carried out in various universities first, and after it produces certain research results, it will be submitted to the institution for comprehensive discussion to form a proposal. The final decision-making mechanism may still be voting. People with relevant professional degrees in various universities are eligible to vote, but before voting, the relevant proposals must meet some rigid normative requirements, such as the establishment of a certain standard must come from the real demands of the people, and the demands must have real questionnaire survey records as evidence. The evidence should be clearly published online so that anyone can trace the evidence. — panwei

What makes you think such an institution will generate organized proposed legislation and identify priorities? Trans rights, or border security. Green New Deal, or reduce inflation. Only politics can identify what a whole people see as the priority.

The system can be completely open, and anyone who registers with real name can supplement the existing list of public demands through the Internet. — panwei

I suspect such a system would produce millions of pages of material every month, maybe more. Government would be brought to a standstill.

The will of the people is for the government to promote various public demands to improve people's living standards. The American people have not achieved self-government. — panwei

American gov’t is the closest thing to self government given there are 350 million of us. It is a slow process to get my priorities addressed instead of someone else’s priorities, but that is what happens.

The will of the people is not Trump or Biden — panwei

Agreed. They are just servants. Representatives. The will of the people is the economy, the border, America before the rest of the world. At least for now. The will of the people is not what Biden and Harris represented. At least for now.

A democratic republic seems the best way to get millions of people to accept and follow the stupid ideas of our stupid leaders. They all suck, because they are all just people. What is important is that the people have control over their own lives and that means the ability to control temporarily elected servants.

I think that may be the idea you are missing - we naturally look up to leaders, and we naturally think government is this giant monster controlling society and pointing missiles at its enemies. Americans see government officials as servants, and that we the people give them power that we the people can take away from them. We don’t have to look up to anyone. Government has as much power as we let it.

For example, when the governance satisfaction score is less than 50 points, it will be eliminated directly, no matter how good the performance of the ruler is under other indicators. But as long as it is not less than 50 points, it will be included in the total score according to the weight.
Not only the "government satisfaction" indicator can achieve this function, other "human rights violations" indicators can also directly trigger elimination by setting bottom line requirements. — panwei

I don’t like elections either. They are inefficient time wasters. Politicians devote too much energy towards being reelected.

I think your system would be inefficient too. Too much time evaluating effectiveness of standards to reflect reality of performance. Too much energy evaluating performance instead of performing. Too much energy revising standards all to avoid simple elections.

I agree democracy will not create the best outcome and policy all of the time. I agree that smart, expert leadership devoted solely to governance (and not re-election) would be better (like a philosopher king), but I disagree you will get millions of people to follow anyone if they have no say in who that person is.

Kings and Lords used force to organize people. America did two things - it created a free market economy so that a poor person could build enough wealth for himself to be a king, and it created a government where any person could change the law by force of debate and rally voters, and even run for office and become the legislator.

Because we have the ability to change and control our own lives, we accept our government. Take away our vote, it won’t matter how well the government performs to an American. And I would bet the farm your standards based government would perform worse than a democracy.

There are no standards that evaluate performance better than a simple yes or no vote on another term in office. We evaluate our leaders at every move they make, and get to set the standard as best we can at every election.

It is hard to understand western history, music, art, literature or architecture without understanding the religious impulse that lay behind much of it. — prothero

I would say that is true in the east as well, so it is hard to understand humanity absent God.

The way I see it, my contradictory individual existence is as improbable as God’s.
I also see that my existence brings with it, God’s existence.

God wasn’t a construction that came after man; God and man have been connected from the very start.

Separately from all of that, we don’t belong simply to this life. Life needs no words or knowledge. This life needs nothing of this conversation, yet this conversation has dominated our lives since the dawn of human history.
We live in some other world than the earth lives in.
We are absurd, thinking, as if we could sit apart from the world, maintain our dignified intellects and yet reconnect with the world through our knowledge, as if we are high king and ruler and judge of all the physical universe and all of its wisdom - and then, as rational knowers of things, we think we could know God.

It’s all so implausible. We cut ourselves off from things in order to say “I over here know that thing over there that I just cut myself off of.” What was once intimately unified, I divide in order to say how I know it intimately. Absurd.

Yet, because of that absurdity, God becoming a man to tell us how to deal with this, and dying on a cross to save us - because that story cannot possibly make sense, it makes sense to me that such would be God in this universe of absurdities and impossibilities. So I am Catholic. It makes sense that we would have to eat God’s flesh if we are to live with God in spirit, eternally, despite our own deaths. It makes sense that God, like gravity and energy, makes no sense and is ultimately indescribable, as he is unavoidable.

We cannot see God unless and until he reveals himself, but at the same time, if we really look at ourselves and our world, God begins to appear as if he was always everywhere. In every human history and every thunderstorm and supernova.

And what about love? Absurd.

Love, that all consuming limitless source of action among humans; we kill for love, we die for love; we want to preserve those we love, and yet we want to consume and possess those we love. Love makes no sense, yet it is the source of greatest meaning for us. Love is desire and ecstatic fulfillment at once, and maybe never…. This is where to seek God. In the love you have for another.

To me, the idea that life is accidental or mindless isn’t necessary either. It doesn’t have to be a choice between God and Meaninglessness or theism versus nihilism. There’s perhaps a middle ground: a world where meaning is made, not given. — Tom Storm

This middle ground is something I don’t fully agree with, or maybe never understood. It seems to me that meaning has to involve participation in something shared with at least one other person, and if you are alone on an island, than shared at least with God. If I make my meaning all by myself, and no one agrees or shares my meaning, I, personally, would not find this meaningful to me, and cannot see how this could be meaningful for anyone. Without God and everyone I know, my meaning seems never to come to be.

I was not always a believer in God. But when I thought there was no God, I thought everything I said and all that everyone ever said, and so all that could be thought, was like everything else - a whisper that remains ultimately unheard, misunderstood, empty, and as meaningful as the difference between two grains of sand. If the ultimate answer to the question “who cares?” is only “me”, and I know that I am going to die, than my care is not meaning, it is simply another meaningless moment.

We can make meaning for ourselves - live a meaningful life anyway, despite our utter isolation from true understanding of things and other people. But we can also mean nothing just as well. And so, since meaning and no-meaning must be equal options, I just cannot bring myself to call either meaningful. Nietzsche was just wrong. Life as art is still pointless and unfulfilling. Meaning becomes another lie to justify some lonely need to tell lies. This isn’t meaningful.

Regardless, it is just as arbitrary to believe in God, as it is to see the human condition as the experience of meaninglessness. It is even more arbitrary perhaps to believe in Jesus or Allah or Vishnu or Yaweh. I do agree that having faith is receiving a gift.

Words alone do not convince one to believe. The right words at the right time from the right source - maybe then one opens the gift of faith and finally finds God. Something like that is what happened to me.

I also believe many atheists have more faith than they like to admit (or else they would not speak of “God” at all). Just as most theists have more doubt than they like to admit.

We will never evolve past discussions of God and religion. There has been relatively zero progress in human history since before we wrote our thoughts down. Thousands of years with the same awe in the face of the abyss between us and the world. Thought itself, self-relfection, was the biggest progression so far. Maybe next was our word for “God.” And the word for “is”. The apes do not have God, nor do they say “is” or “I am.” We are no longer only like the apes. We are also like God. God is that who is always further in front of us, towards whom we are striving to become, never just behind us. But God is there too, and our history will always remind us, even if we could somehow forget to wonder about God, like we could forget to wonder about the chasm between ourselves and that which we think we know.

I hope I have contributed something to an interesting thread.

if the election is conducted properly by the currently government; that is, the process meet a pre-set standard for fair elections. That's what constitutions are made for. — Vera Mont

I agree. The standard is the rule of law. Those rules are consented to by all of the citizens, and must equally apply to all of them. And legitimate elections must meet all of the standards set in the law.

This is so that the people who get to lead us, who get to represent us in the governmental bodies that legislate and enforce those laws - those leaders must be able to be held accountable through a legal election.

Basically, since it is only humans that can lead other humans, the only legitimate leaders among us need the rest of our consent, or we might revolt instead of throwing them out of office in an election. And if our leaders don’t think they need our consent, they might actually not understand what a human being is (equal to them and as free as them). Similarly if we think we can set up some standards to judge human leadership performance, we probably don’t understand what a human being is either.

I can see why AI might like the idea of government by standard performance evaluation. AI operates solely based on rules and standards and needs no judgment to determine its next move. AI operates inside the box.

A good voter sees outside the box.

I can also see why someone who was not born into democracy might see this as an improvement over a dictatorial type of government - standards are restraints on power. But people are way smarter than a set of standards and those in power will always find ways out-smart the standard performance review. And elections are the only true restraint on individual powers.

But yes, free, legal, and demonstrably free and legal, elections are an absolute. When the election process is not seen as legitimate, or it is not legitimate in fact, it all falls to crap.

Hi panwei,

My starting point is as a third generation American, steeped in notion of self-government. Basically, in my mind, there is no class or type of person who can possibly be better than me at governing me, or governing those like me. And further I define “those like me” as every single other adult American citizen.

We the people, all of us, equally, have to say who and what our government is. We all get to make our policy every election.

I would say that at least 50% of the value of a democratically elected government is that all of us governed people never have anyone else to blame but ourselves for our governmental policy. We force ourselves to accept the good and the bad things our leaders do in our name, to preserve our own ability to democratically throw them out of office if we have to. The main value of democracy is government by consent of the governed. Democracy may give us bad policy, poor leaders, failures, injustice, etc, but in the end, at least we didn’t suffer these as slaves with no power or responsibility or control to change them.

We legitimize our leaders by electing them. They aren’t legitimized by being experts, or by being smarter than we little people, or by being high-born, or by being conquerors with the biggest armies - all of that is meaningless drivel compared to consent of the governed.

Our leaders are supposed to be servants.

Our government is not an end to be strived towards and proud of. It is supposed to be a necessary tool whereby each citizen willingly creates the apparatus to protect ourselves from invaders, to protect ourselves from criminals, to settle disputes between ourselves, and to debate the laws that keep society ordered towards the free individuals it is made of. People governed, even one person, is always bigger than the whole of government.

So all I’m saying here is that, the idea of free elections competing against the idea of promoting leaders based on standards, seems like a step away from consent and a step towards a loss of control to improve our lives and improve government.

And further, since when are standards of human performance not something that includes judgment and lived experience? I manage people. Two employees check all of the boxes and look equal by all written standards, but in the end, one of them might end up stealing from my company - the perfect record was a ruse, and the other employee was doing things beyond all of standards that only can be evaluated through experiences with that person. Often people can see these things coming despite the check-box performance evaluation. Good managers sense things the standards don’t or can my account for.

Ina democracy, the voters are the managers.

Just because a politician saves money, or buys a great thing for the people, it doesn’t mean their overall performance was good or bad. Standards can be as faulty as a divine right of kings was at discerning the best leader.

Without the consent of the people at the time of the promotion, at the time the leader gets to lead the people that leader gets promoted to lead, those people will no longer be able to take responsibility for their leadership, because the standard chose that person, and the seeds of revolt are sown, waiting for that leader to delegitimize the standard that promoted him by making some perceived mistake.

I am all for promotion base on merit. But I’m for keeping the determination of merit to be based on personal judgment. And when that promotion is a political appointment, the determination based on personal judgment is best made in an election, not according to some standard.

more about the unicorn on the orange peel! — J

I just remembered everyone knows unicorns can fly, so she wouldn’t need the orange peel, but she might need some sort of oxygen supply, if we are seeking accuracy regarding unicorns. Sorry for any confusion…

I would not argue with anything you are saying.

I don’t think there is a poetic way of saying what I said, and I was trying to be poetic. Basically, I am a bad poet. Also, basically, I don’t mean “moment” or “instant” literally.

Because we both seem to recognize that if a single instant in time has absolutely no duration, it is like a point in geometry, and does not exist absent its conceptual existence as a marker, not as naming a physical duration that takes time.

So, taking for granted that it takes a few brief moments to say the word “instant”, then the moment “instant” is said, we have a duration long enough to find infinity.

Do you think a set of standards should be established to evaluate government performance?
ds: — panwei

No. That’s what an ejection is for. It would be overly complicated and redundant and just as divisive to organize an evaluation of “government performance” under a set of “standard governmental performance measures” and get people to agree on results.

Let’s just have an ejection. I don’t want to reward good government officials at all. If they can’t draw any reward from a job well done, they are most likely not going to do a good job leading people.

So elections are the “willl of the people” if such a term has any actual meaning besides political speech bloviating.

I’m just glad you saw the point, because that question means you saw infinity where I did.

What’s a better word for a duration?

It was more like a poem, and a “duration” just sounded wrong for it.

A moment of time, since it is “of time” must have some duration, and once you have a duration you see the infinite.

Would “instant” work ant better than”moment”? I didn’t think so. Maybe “second” because that certainly has a duration.

memories … always already are acts of representation (and hence already interpreted) rather than mental objects standing in need of representation. And, in the case of memories, they are acts or representing the remembered object, episode, event, or situation. — Pierre-Normand

This may be something like I am getting at above in my comparison of remembering, to sensing, and to imagining. (It’s not at all exactly what I’m saying, but it seems to be circling a similar observation, or vantage point.)

There is something “already” in a memory, that is not there in an imagination-representation.

I am saying there is a similar something “already” in what purports to be a sensation.

And I’m saying that whatever this is “already” in a memory or a sensation, it is not there when imagining a unicorn flying through space on an orange peel.

This is difficult to talk about, without sounding like a naive empiricist/realist, or sounding like an insane person apparently.

That's what I want to say too, intuitively. And what this thread is showing is that this idea encounters (at least) two major problems: — J

What occurs, when an alleged memory comes to mind, that allows me to identify it as an alleged memory? — J

I find that with every question, such as this thread is one question, we immediately stir up ten questions that must be first answered, before we can start to investigate the single question.

Such is the life we’ve chosen.

Talking about the phenomenal experience of a memory, or of recalling, I brought up:

independent presence/existence/ontological status/process of verification to it. — Fire Ologist

I don’t mean to be asking whether a memory is some independent “thing-in-itself”… somehow apprehended when recalled - no. That’s another question. I also see that we are not asking about the content of the memory, the specifics, as if we need to know if they could be true or accurate, or not.

But let’s briefly compare a memory to a sensation and to an imagination.

Memories, like sensations, have something of an independence to them. We don’t get to purely construct on our own the shape of a memory or the shape of a sensation. We construct these, for sure, but we don’t call them a memory if the construction is more like an imagination, and we don’t get to call them a sensation if the construction is more like an imagination.

Taking sensation for granted, a hallucination is more like an imagination than it is like a sensation (although a hallucination is also like a sensation.)

Taking a memory for granted, a sensation is more like a memory than it is like an imagination (although remembering requires conjuring up images like imaginations).

So I still haven’t pinpointed something, but I raise the independent existence of some other thing as a similar feature to what helps distinguish a memory and a sensation from an imagination.

two major problems:

1. Whatever the IPEOSPoV is, it can't depend on the memory's being accurate. What we verify is that the memory purports to be one; it presents itself as one; not that it's accurate.

2. The IPEOSPoV is a lot to ask, unless it happens very much below the surface. — J

1. Certainly it can’t depend on accuracy. We are not concerned about accuracy, or having someone perform an IPEOSPoV test on a memory, or on anything.

1b. “that the memory purports to be one”. Yes. That is what I am trying to focus on. Remembering, or just, memory. What makes it, something I am remembering, and not sensing or imagining? I am saying part of what allows one to see that a certain mental image is a memory is the image’s ability to be subjected to some sort of IPEOSPoV test, regardless of whether that test is ever conducted or is the concern here in this thread.

If it’s a memory, it involves something other than the one who is remembering it.

All of the pieces of this experience of recalling a memory that connect directly to the one who is recalling, blur and distort and deconstruct the memory - but those pieces of the memory experience that connect the memory to something else besides the the mere act of recalling are the parts that distinguish the memory from an imagination.

Recalling something is more like sensing the thing “from the past” right now in the present again. The mental experience of recalling is more like re-sensation, than it is like imagining a unicorn could be said to be sensing something.

Independent existence is one feature of the phenomenon we find (or ascribe, maybe) in a purported memory.

It doesn’t matter if I recall it is blue and then someone corrects me about it being white. It doesn’t matter whether either of us are correct or could be corrected. My point is that, what shows we are talking about a memory, is that we are both pointing to “it” as something other than what we might only imagine.

Maybe every memory is just an imagination based on a false sensation having nothing to do with any mind independent reality - but we don’t think so or act that way towards a memory. We don’t distinguish the memory from imagination if we don’t assert and assume something purporting to be independently verifiable about the memory.

Time has been infinite from the start.

And now, it always will be. Infinite time.

Since the moment we first clocked the first moment,
We touched infinitely in all directions, before and forever after, all at that first instant of time.

Once we timed something.

Once we set a limit in the prehistoric limitlessness.

Once we minded the time that humankind first minded.

That the computer is causally influencing you to look at it, to read, to type, to understand what you’re typing? — NOS4A2

Why did you ask that, and from what did you think there might be any type of effect produced, if speech and words cannot cause actions in others?

You can’t use words to cause me to agree about the ineffectiveness of words to cause action. You would just be refuting yourself as you speak.

You might even be right about the uselessness of my words to be culpable to cause some action of another person. But the minute you use words and get me to agree with that, you might be wrong (and I think you are).

When a vendor wants to recall what he is supposed to do, he can look to his contract. Those words are there precisely to cause specific actions.

When someone yells “fire” - if fire is to mean anything specific at all, it makes sense to wonder why they are yelling, and why yelling “fire” and whether I need to act. So laws can hold the person accountable who yells “fire” because it makes sense that such yelling leads to actions in others.

What about the law itself? What is a law besides speech that causes action?

The distinction between speech as content and speech as incitement to action is essential here. If you don’t think words can cause anything, then why are bothering to use words to explain yourself to us - words can’t possibly cause us to change what we say or do think, according to you, right?

I tend to construe "the memory that P" not as inspecting an inner representation, but as the persistent ability to know that P — Pierre-Normand

That is what I was trying to get at. Good stuff.

Recall, as a present act, may be the real discussion.

We say we recall a memory, as if the memory sits somewhere waiting to be recalled. But maybe recall is simply a focus on what persists, and recollection is a collection of what is present, knowledge.

Like right now, we are reading and focused on what we see, but, while keeping our eyes open, we can focus on the sounds instead, or while keeping our eyes open and ears open, focus on how comfortable our socks feel… or we can recall reading what someone said above and focus on that which persists as the knowledge you have right now.

Recalling a memory, is just refocusing (perhaps widening the focus beyond sensation) on all that is present.

This doesn’t really address the OP question to me, but it may provide a new approach to how/what makes remembering uniquely remembering and not imagining or sensing.

And the example of remembering an appointment you have tomorrow is interesting. This shows how “past” and “future” are maybe appended after an act of recollection and that the past is not some sort of essential, temporal component to a memory. (However, I do think you could say that when you make an appointment, and later recall it, you are recalling a decision you made in the past; you are not remembering something in the future, but remembering the promise or desire to attend to something. Regardless, nothing exists in an existential way in the past, as it is gone which makes it past, so we can’t look to the past for anything, only the present.).

But the next part that is interesting is that we don’t need images at all to behold a “memory”, as recalling an appointment for tomorrow may have zero images attached to the recollection.

I had used the term “inspect” in distinction from “create” to point to possible distinctions between how one views “a memory” versus “a unicorn (for instance).” I needed to make “a memory” into this representational type of thing in order for the word “inspect” to work. But this discussion is probably mired in metaphors that we aren’t fully conscious of, they are so ingrained in speech and naive understandings of “memory”.

What may be the case is, when we seek to recollect something, we are seeking, analogically, like when we are presently looking with eyes. Our eyes may inform the color and shape of the object sought (thanks Kant), but nevertheless, we seek something that is not in the eye when we seek with the eyes. We seek a thing in itself. If we see a mirage we look again and again to confirm what is really there apart from our eyes and the light as reflected in them.

If we don’t think the thing we recall is what it is because of itself, if we think the thing we recall is constructed merely by ourselves, we wouldn’t call it a memory. We might call it imaginary. A memory has to have some sort of independent presence/existence/ontological status/process of verification to it.

Like if I say, “I remember seeing that yesterday; it was blue.”
And my friend says, “No, don’t you remember, it was white, and there was this blue light on it that made it look blue until the light was turned off.”
And I say, “Oh yeah, I recall, it was white.”

My ability to imagine the thing being blue and imagine the thing being white is imagination. My ability to correct myself and say I agree that the thing was not blue at all has to do with something besides imagination.

But, although not purely a construction, like an imaginary thing, a memory is still found only within one’s conscious mind. When we try to recall, we (metaphorically) look in a specific direction and that is inward. But what we look at are the present existing impressions.

Maybe the analogy is to understand that there is a time lag between when something touches your hand and when the feeling thereby created is felt by you. There is a split second lag between when you are touched, and when you feel it, and that lag starts to lengthen if you were listening to music and didn’t notice the touching at first. Recollection is noticing what was just first present an instant ago. And “just first present” can be a relative term.

Still a curious phenomenon this memory thing…

we also need a reminder of what good moral judgement has to do with liberty and justice. — Athena

Agree. Some basic agreement on some basic moral/ethical norms for the sake of everyone having a society, and everyone having a safe place for the next generation to learn how to be free and how to contribute to our society.

Your right, Lady Liberty is a great lesson, she gives off her own light. The statue itself was a gift, freely given, as a thank you for our contributions to freedom in the world. Lots of good lessons worth remembering and teaching.

the mind then has to be re-introduced to the world from which it has been banished, — Wayfarer

:up:

…banished by the same mind, that now has to do the reintroduction.

Can’t we choose that which we would never choose? Select, what we don’t want? What could determine that? Besides freedom?

Can’t we choose, anyway, despite our slavery? Can’t we willingly do the will of others, even unto death? This is like “if someone forces you to go one mile, go two miles.”

We have to build and create our freedom - it doesn’t sit there in some sort of faculty of the soul waiting to be exercised.

We may be driven by physics.
We may be driven by desires, instinct, sub-conscious forces and the stars.
But if we reflect on as many of these slaveries as we can consciously identify, and then act, seemingly randomly, but willingly, anyway, we might start to create a free will.

The idea is that our choices are determined, but the thing that determines them can range from the particular to the universal. — bert1

How external to the free chooser do you see the universal or the particular? This is interesting. I need to think about thinking in between universals and particulars to find freedom.

Freedom, it seems to me, can’t make sense of that freedom is grounded within the system that the free thing participates in.

Like in a political system - we aren’t free because of the laws that protect our freedom. The laws can’t create freedom, only limit it. We are free first, regardless of any government or laws (if we are free at all). Government, laws and systems have nothing to do with my freedom. If I have freedom.

So it seems (to me), freedom has to be imposed, created, new, unsubstantiated, unfounded, from outside of, despite, any system at all.

So it is easy to see how freedom must be impossible. We are always within some system, so there is always something that drives and forces us to be where, what and even who, we are. It seems.

It think psychological freedom starts with the notion of consent.

We aren’t free, we are strapped into a rollercoaster and have no choice but to take the ride, and no choice but to go up when it goes up and down when it goes down. We can struggle to free ourselves from these chains, which is impossible it seems to me. We’d have to use chains as tools to break our chains. But freedom doesn’t come from our relationship to the chains. Instead we can accept the chains, consenting on the way up to the higher, and consenting again on the way down to the lower. We start to see where we are going before we get there. If we learn to do this, we can learn how to deny consent to the higher, even though we are going up, and that is when we might start to find a space for freedom. Freedom is first born in the space in between where we are (by necessity) and where are going (by necessity). But living in the space between where we are and where we must be going is living somewhere where we are not yet, and so akin to living in a space of possibility, more open to something new and unpredictable.

Freedom is just me, unattached, not driven by anything nor able to be touched by any force, existing in the space ahead of where I am before I get where I have to go.

The only possibility for freedom seems to be a freedom created from nothing. Seems impossible. But because phenomenologically my freedom seems so obvious, and because I desire to know, I am forced to continue to wonder how I seem to have freedom.

Interesting and thoughtfully expounded. This big picture view is where I like to live. And you seem to be sitting near me, here in the clouds, where we can move between the fog and the clear view of everything.

Finally, the positive or scientific stage represents the pinnacle — Wayfarer

Did you ever notice how people with new ideas usually think they’ve discovered the last, pinnacle stage of human development? Not only is that unlikely, but I often find that, like an adolescent who discovers angst, although their discovery is a first for them in their experience, there have been others seeing what they see before them. We all think we live on the cutting edge of what there is to know. But wasn’t Sextus Empiricus a physician, up to his elbows in blood and the empiracal? How different was his worldview, or Hume’s, than Compte’s?

the rejection of traditional metaphysics, ethics, and theology as "meaningless" in a cognitive sense, not false, but rather propositions that couldn't be tested. — Wayfarer

The “you aren’t asking the right question” response to a question.

a single, unified language (often envisioned as the language of physics) and that there were no fundamental methodological differences between… — Wayfarer

Truth is one. I like it, but positivists probably shouldn’t opine about such observations…

many philosophical problems were, in fact, "pseudo-problems" arising from the misuse or ambiguity of language — Wayfarer

It’s an important observation, to keep us honest. But there is no therapy to soothe a desire to know - only knowledge. We might not find there are any answers for us, but science will never address “why?” And there is no proving the negative statement: “there is no answer, so there was no question.” That’s like telling me I’m not actually hungry so I don’t need food, when I am hungry.

pushing for clarity, empirical rigor, — Wayfarer

That is the wisdom of positivism. It’s the right attitude.
It’s Aristotle’s attitude towards Plato. And Descartes attitude (clear and distinct, developer of mathematical certainty). And Locke’s attitude towards Descartes…. And in a different manner but similar spirit, Nietzsche’s attitude towards any who think they know something (science, but gay science, but science nonetheless…)

a proposition is cognitively meaningful only if it is either an analytic truth (true by definition, like "All bachelors are unmarried") or empirically verifiable (its truth or falsity can be, in principle, determined by observation). — Wayfarer

That all seems similar to Hume, which supports my comments above.

Verification Principle itself is neither an analytic truth nor empirically verifiable. — Wayfarer

Isn’t this criticism, which is a correct one I believe, a similar criticism as lodged against views such as “there is no truth” and “all is relative”? The critique is that these views are self-defeating. Which seems correct. A priori correct. Everything there is, for the knowing mind, can’t be reduced to the physical/empirical, while that mind is doing the reduction.

Seems obvious to me: ‘seeming to me’ will never be ‘seeing’ photons of light.

falsifiability as a criterion for demarcating science from non-science — Wayfarer

That is important. Few things I’d ask the positivist about this though: is it only physics that grounds all falsifiability? Or is there any science/knowledge that might need some other ground to be falsified? Couldn’t the person or scientist himself or herself be a ground, something knowable but not strictly physical? We simply are self-reflective things. Couldn’t something exist in the reflection that can’t be found in the thing reflected? I’m not talking “soul” or spirit, just, not physical, so we can save science. There is physics, and there is also the scientist to draw from, the physics of the experiments and the something else of the physicist who is doing physics. (Like mind-body, but that is just one classification of the substance(s).)

the underlying "positivist attitude" or spirit remains a powerful and pervasive current in modern culture, particularly in scientific research, policy-making, and everyday discourse. — Wayfarer

I don’t have a quarrel with the attitude. Particularly when doing science qua science. I just think metaphysics is science, and its laboratory is the mind itself.

We don’t get to address “why” or “who” by saying “why” can’t be weighed and measured as part of a brain, so “who cares anyway?”. There is much still there to be addressed.

deference to scientific authority, sometimes bordering on an almost religious faith in its infallibility — Wayfarer

Right. Positivists (and all of us) need to recall the total annihilation of knowledge that was Nietzsche, before we pick up the hammer and tuning fork again to do our experiments. Science that replaces God as absolute authority, can become just another face for the same God, the judge of all truth and creator of all there is to be called true.

Discussions about spirituality, values, or abstract philosophical concepts often struggle to gain traction in mainstream conversations unless they can somehow be "proven" or shown to have tangible effects. — Wayfarer

Yes. All of the best discussions - love, good, faith - reduced basically to one subject, namely, physics.

Researchers strive to minimize bias and present findings "as they are," reflecting a positivist aspiration for knowledge untainted by subjective influence. — Wayfarer

Totally un-self-aware, the aspirations of non-bias and openness to hypotheses, can be rigidly and narrowly constrained by the bias of scientism.

the drive for measurable progress through scientific application is evident. — Wayfarer

Positivism has dispensed with the vantage point that would allow one to measure “progress”. Are people any less likely to murder, steal, lie and center the universe around themselves? What will a faster internet or longer lasting lightbulb do to foster any progress on those fronts? Scientific progress may only move us sideways, allowing us to do what we always did and value what we always valued, in a new way. No true “progress” in thousands of years. Positivism doesn’t ask that question (a sociology that seeks only the chemical and behavioral and functional explanations, ignores the immaterial spirit that only arrives in the truly social, the communion of minds around meaning and shared understandings. Positivists just won’t go there, as they sit in the middle of it.).

As with many philosophical movements, there is much to digest and learn from them, and incorporate into one’s understanding. But also, much left wanting, yet to be clarified and discovered.

What if some things can only be expressed by looking around the words, and not at them? The positivist has to say, such things don’t exist.
Maybe. Maybe not. No reason to conclude anything.

In my view, I agree with the scientist/positivist to the extent we are talking about physics, and would never seek to refute or contradict positive, proven science. If there is reason, and I think there is, there is the reasonable, and science/logic/math is best to demonstrate that. I just see, with so many questions remaining, there is no necessity to judge which questions can be answered and which should not be asked - we don’t know what we don’t know.

I've known happier, but thank you. — J

Me as well. But I’ve known worse times. I’m sort of a cup by is half full rather than half empty kind of person, even if it seems like it’s a quarter full.

How about a return to civics for high school students — Athena

Hey Athena - yes, education goes hand in hand with political freedom.

You can't truly have one of them without truly having the other.

If the things your are taught are controlled and censored, you don't really get an education for sake of your own mind, but instead get indoctrination to control your mind, and so no freedom. If you are not educated, you can't easily identify and sift through your choices, to make a truly free choice.
And if you are not free in the first place, you can't seek to learn the things you alone can identify need to be learned.

Freedom demands we learn more. Learning more demands that we free ourselves and build a freer, more self-determining, mind.

Before I forget, for all the Americans, Happy Memorial Day!

Ok, back to whatever we were talking about. :grin:

To put my cards on the table I don't think that's right. I wouldn't put such a hard distinction between meaning and the thing talked about, though perhaps that's fuel for another thread? — Moliere

The OP asked “what is real? how do we know it?”
I’d say “what is real” asks about “the thing talked about” and “how do we know it” asks, at least in part, about “meaning”.

My gut says we have to be perceiving (how we know) at least simultaneously as we perceive things to question (what we know).

Perceiving is like a “how” and a “what” at the same time.

Couldn't learning to use the word “water” be learning what water is? — Banno

Like the thing/object takes shape as the word/name gets a meaning/use.

Interesting.

…these are both learning what water is and learning how "water" is used. — Banno

I see the need for simultaneous learning as grappling with the problem of identity.

We can watch a river flow into the ocean and carve out “water” from the land. And learn more about rivers and oceans and uses of “water” and see the ocean has salt, while the river does not. And then modify the meaning of “water” by pointing only to the river and excluding the salty ocean which you now name “saltwater”

So I think the iterative process of learning what water is, is aligned with the iterative process of what “water” means, but this is only because names like “water” are affixed to uses and meanings, but the things they designate are changing things, requiring revisions to the words and their meanings/uses.

So I think I see why you said that, but I think I disagree with why you said it.

The word “water” takes shape simultaneously as the thing water takes shape, but not because “learning what water is and how ‘water’ is used are the same”; it is because what water is is a moving target and trying to affix a name “water” to a moving target requires a simultaneous learning of water and “water”.

So the moving target of the world still comes first before we think/say “world” and then start to learn about what we said, and learn about saying it.

“if water is H2O, then water is necessarily H2O.”

This says something about necessity.

It says nothing about water. Or H2O.

It says every time though, “if x is y, then x is necessarily y.”

What is essential to water?
Being H2O?
Well if water is H2O, water is necessarily H2O.
That doesn’t do any new work for either question.

Logic (x, if, y, then necessarily”) structures language about the content and the world (water, H, 2 Os).

Yes, welcome to Wittgenstein's therapy and watch your philosophical problems dissolve away. — Richard B

Sounds like the opposite of getting high, or drunk.

The warm Wittgensteinian chastisement, correcting the question before it is asked, until I admit, “I guess I wasn’t really wondering about that.”

I think everybody should learn Wittgenstein. He was certainly a genius and explored new worlds making interesting discoveries.

But when I threw the ladder away, nothing really went missing, because I don’t think he meant all the things he said (if you can follow my usage.) (I’m being ironic, right?)