Comments

  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    ↪I like sushi

    I have no more comment for you.

    But thank you for the effort.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    Husserl cares about the experience of some 'object' as an experience of some 'object'. If I see a table it doesn't matter if it is there or not for the purposes of looking at conscious experience. If I 'experience' a table I cannot deny that I experience a table. The 'existence' of the table is not important other than as an item of cognition. — I like sushi
    I don't think you understand my contention.

    There is no attempt to make any narrative objective because that isn't anything like what Husserl had in mind. — I like sushi
    Please direct this to Josh's post.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    Even if the reductive physicalist could predict every observable phenomenon in the record, down to the next words out of my mouth, would this amount to conclusive disproof of philosophical idealism or theism, or make them any less likely? Would it amount to conclusive proof of philosophical materialism or atheism, or make them any more likely? So far as I reckon, it would only show that someone had gotten hold of an extremely useful scientific model of the universe as it has been observed to date. — Cabbage Farmer
    Good question.

    I don't think the way to argue about phenomenology's idealism is to disprove it. Nor is it reasonable to do so in favor of materialism. You might want to read an essay by Patrick Heelan - Perceived Worlds Are Interpreted Worlds .

    An excerpt:

    Perceiving is a skill; it is not a species of deductive or inductive inference but an interpretative skill. CS Peirce gave it a special name, "abduction". It does not belong to the categories of induction or deduction, nor is it just another term for hypothetico-deductive method. Its goal is not explanation but vision -- or more generally, perception - and it heralds a perceptual revolution. Perception in this sense is historical, cultural, and hermeneutical. Failing to recognize this is a source of many of those recalcitrant problems in the philosophy of science that seem to have no solution within the predominant traditions.

    He defines hermeneutical phenomenology as: "all human understanding - and perception is included in this - is existentially and methodologically interpretative."

    You might disagree with him on some points, but he does provide 3 analytical questions to satisfy the problem of perception:
    - the semantics of a perceptual world
    - the epistemic validity
    - ontology of a perceptual world

    From this, he explains that the individual perceivers, with or without the aid of an instrument, are a "community of skilled interpreters", and provides an explanation of a "paradigmatically scientific inquiry leading into, among other things, neurophysiological networks, instruments, and readable technologies."

    And from it, I'm hoping that we can agree that materialism stays and can be reconciled with phenomenology.
  • How can one remember things?
    Ah! I get it! I think the brain is infinitely superior to a brain, luckily. But thanks for the concern. :smile: — GraveItty

    The very last wonder of the universe!
  • How can one remember things?
    If it's true, then why that's an issue? — GraveItty

    On the off chance that you were suggesting that the brain is inferior to computer memory. So, pre-emptively, I was 'warning' you not to. :chin:
  • How can one remember things?
    Both the program and the data are stored in the memory, although the have different functions. In the brain, there is no such structure. It's us who have the real memory. Our memory doesn't make use of comparison. If I see a face, I don't compare it to a stored memory and (consciously or unconsciously) to the memory of the face I have. — GraveItty
    The (human) memory retrieves information, and also compares. The issue with your post is you right off claimed that it cannot store like a computer does -- which is true. The functionalities are different, but human memory stores, retrieves, and compares.

    Oh yeah, welcome to human awareness.
  • Is Crypto Mining an endeavor worth pursuing?
    What other ideas can you share to minimize cost on energy? — TheQuestion

    Don't forget that food is energy consumption too. And given that it is one of the most expensive things we buy on a daily basis, you can investigate if you could lower your food bill too. You can choose healthy, but inexpensive food, or unhealthy and expensive alternatives.
  • The architecture of thought
    Incidentally, if you've ever talked to a negative person, the associations that you would encounter from that person are often negative words despite the neutral words you bring up.
  • The architecture of thought
    What does it mean for those that struggle to come up with many associations at all? — Benj96
    The situation at the moment might present a difficulty -- stress, tiredness. Or just mental block, which happens to everyone.
  • The architecture of thought
    What are your thoughts on what this game reveals? Are some people more lateralised or objective than others? What does it mean for the quality of thought that we have and how our brains work? What does it mean for those that struggle to come up with many associations at all? — Benj96
    Given only 10 seconds to come up with associations, there's indeed a difference between thinking in terms of "total" and "null". I believe we retrieve from memory differently. I think sorting out happens -- for null, we start rejecting associations that are common and that come to mind fast. I'm pretty sure "plant", "green", "tree" come up very, very fast and we reject those while thinking in terms of null. So, we start associating the 'fast' words with other words that aren't so common -- dirt, pot, growth.
  • What is beauty
    ↪Bartricks

    Okay, thank you. I believe you.

    Clinton cards?
  • What is beauty
    ↪Bartricks
    If you love the flowers in the garden, are you also in love with them? Not sure.
    You are only in love briefly, but you love forever. Hmm, don't know.
  • What is beauty
    if she's unmoved by the mona lisa but is in love with a Mondrian. — Bartricks
    :) funny. To me "in love" isn't the same as "she/he loves". One can love someone or something, but not in love with it. Just my thoughts.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    Did I talk about phenomenology? I'm sorry, but I can't understand the rest of what you said. — Wayfarer

    The idea from your post fits perfectly in what I wanted to say. If you're not talking phenomenology, then I am. And I'm using your idea to illustrate the problem with phenomenology. Also my post wasn't primarily directed at you, but to those who lean towards phenomenology.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    Your continual invocation of 'woo of the gaps' only illustrates that you're not grasping problem at hand. It's a hard problem for physicalism and naturalism because of the axioms they start from, not because there is no solution whatever. Seen from other perspectives, there is no hard problem, it simply dissolves. It's all a matter of perspective. But seen from the perspective of modern scientific naturalism, there is an insuperable problem, because its framework doesn't accomodate the reality of first-person experience, a.k.a. 'being', which is why 'eliminative materialism' must insist that it has no fundamental reality. You're the one obfuscating the problem, because it clashes with naturalism - there's an issue you're refusing to see which is as plain as the nose on your face. — Wayfarer

    [edit: this is directed to those who accept the narrative of phenomenology]

    I'd like to pick up from here.

    The issue I want to talk about is not the scientific mapping, or the lack thereof, of subjective experience.
    Not the measurement either. Those aren't the problems. The issue is that the mind, under phenomenology, is not allowed to have presuppositions -- presuppositions of the cause of the sense impressions. We both know that images reaching our retina can be measured. We also know that quantum entities aren't always perceivable, with or without our senses or an instrument. But in both cases, we aren't allowed to admit those facts in our narrative.

    Tell me, does that sound complete to you when it comes to the subjective experience? It only takes a grain of sand to know the world out there. (Not sure if I'm using this saying correctly from the William Blake poem). Our connection to the outside world requires only a grain of sand. Phenomenology engenders an unsettling feeling in any one contemplating this problem.

    I'd say, do not artificially cut off the narrative about the subjective experience by banning presuppositions of the material world. Let the subjective experience extend to the cause. Let us stabilize our idealization of the world by confirming that the material world exists.

    I'm not satisfied with the "it's all a matter of perspective" statement. There's got to be something more compelling that this.
  • What happens if everyone stops spending?
    How would the economy change. — Benj96
    Could it be your post is about anti-consumerism?

    Possible effects if your scenario happened -- economy would shrink, ownership would decrease, perhaps anxiety and neuroticism would decrease, local cottage industries and barter would increase, pollution of all sorts might decrease, education about maintaining and keeping homestead or land productive would increase -- oh yeah, each family would need land in order to do this.

    We should create a laundry list of what we would have in our possession in order to be self-sustaining members of society.
  • What is beauty
    ↪TheMadFool
    The professor, obviously. The mona lisa is just fine     — Bartricks
    Yeah, I was reading others' posts in response to your post to me "there is clearly something wrong with her". I got your reference point without missing a beat. But then I read the others' responses -- humor jumped on them, I guess.
  • What is beauty
    The work is entitled Méditérannée. She's at the beach. Her body slightly sunken in the sand, she's protecting her eyes from the sun... And yet she looks eternal, almost prehistoric. — Olivier5
    Good caption. Thanks.
  • What is beauty
    Yes, there is clearly something wrong with her. — Bartricks
    Yet she loved Piet Mondrian's Apple Tree in Bloom or Flowering Apple Tree. (I do too)
  • What is beauty
    Some people perceive to be beautiful things that are not, and some fail to perceive the beauty of things that are. — Bartricks
    My former professor in art failed to perceive the beauty of the Mona Lisa painting when she saw it in person. She wasn't impressed.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    You might want to check out some of the recent work on perception in cognitive science(Noe and O’Regan) or the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. You will see that many empirical researchers in perception find the work of Husserl and Merleau-Pontu extremely relevant and valuable to their work. — Joshs
    How ironic!

    But thank you. Will do.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience. — Joshs
    The real object is in fact an idealization, so they say. And I think objectivity in this sense doesn't fit with Husserl's explanation of spatial objects. Because as much as he or any other phenomenologist wants to make his narrative as objective as possible, he inadvertently implicates his own explanation, thereby exposing his own idealization of the phenomenon. They should not have started with the denial of objects in itself and the denial of access to other minds. They should have, for all intents and purposes, admitted that the "kinaesthetics sensation of our voluntary movement" is indeed physical and material, therefore, no matter how much we call it idealization, we are inextricably made of matter.

    But wait, there's the explanation of how our organs act as checkpoints so that we really don't experience the organs themselves, but what's filtered through these checkpoints. But the checkpoints are physical themselves.

    The brakes of phenomenology cannot be disengaged to make it work like Descartes's cogito, I'm afraid. The cogito has a built-in protection against fatal counter-argument because look at what Descartes's "constraint" is-- existence itself. If all else fails in top-heavy realism narrative, there's existence. Once you start doubting your own consciousness or mind--because you are just probably being deceived -- you inextricably admit existence.
  • What is beauty
    ↪Olivier5

    I agree with Gide. That's beholding.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    It sounds like you are reading phenomenology as subjective introspection. That’s a common misperception. — Joshs
    No, it is not misperception, or misunderstanding. If I may borrow the quotes in your post -- please explain introjection and appresentation. They might have coined words ingeniously, but the fact remains that they could not escape a sort of psychoanalysis method of explaining. One has to speak in a vacuum in order to make it at best, a narrative.

    Phenomenology is just as much about objectivity and intersubjectivity and the way they are inextricably bound together with subjectivity such that no science can escape the fact that its grounding and condition of possibility leads empiricism back to phenomenology. — Joshs
    Please explain objectivity in phenomenology. We know what is objectivity in epistemology.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    ↪Tom Storm

    I'm thinking of a good explanation to criticize phenomenology -- trivial, preaching to the choir, stating the obvious, over explaining. Not sure.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    makes it sound like self-involved indulgence. — Tom Storm
    It's okay if it sounds self-involved indulgence. But I was speaking in terms of a philosophical argument.
    Actually, if we're only speaking of Descartes's cogito, there's not much to argue about it. He nailed it. His argument of existence is a passive proof-positive generating statement.

    But phenomenology is another thing. If one wants to speak of experiences and consciousness, I need more than enumeration of subjective descriptions. I want to be able to say, so we have this, what now? Where is the challenge to this? Everyone has it.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    That description doesn't make it sound much more than a self-involved indulgence. — Tom Storm
    And why would you say this?
  • What is beauty
    If you hadn’t guess by now this post is about beauty. What is it? — Benj96
    No it isn't. We tend to think that anything and everything we are 'attracted' to is beauty. So a generic term is beauty, I give you that.

    And if not what then why is there beauty? What is the difference between something that is beautiful only to a few and something that is beautiful to the vast majority? — Benj96
    Often we are conditioned to prefer one thing over another by people around us. We don't, of course, notice it, since it's in our inner being now that we are conscious adults. Beauty is the term we give for just about anything that we are attracted to. Because of this conditioning, no effort on our part to examine why we are drawn to something. We just say cause it's beautiful.

    We should always try to cultivate that eccentricity in us by analyzing deeply why we are attracted to a particular music artist, to a painting, to the color of autumn leaves, etc. And yes, I do. I tell myself the way he, and not the other, sings and plays the guitar is beautiful and mesmerizing because such and such. I disdain superficial attraction. I also give up on a lot of things I call attractive, after much thought.

    Our senses can be in a fooled mode our entire life, not knowing what we truly value. A saying goes 'open' your eyes when you're already wide awake and conscious. This is cause you could actually see things you haven't seen or noticed before.
  • Phenomenology and the Mind Body Question
    But I am unclear how transformative this really is and whether it might not also be a pathway to some additional befuddlement. — Tom Storm
    I just posted in another thread about phenomenology. And as I've already said in my post there, it is not an argument, but a declaration. It doesn't try to connect to any basis of the claim. It's the self and consciousness and the experience. But no effort given to defend it.
  • Inner calm and inner peace in Stoicism.
    I've tended to think that restless men (particularly) who have fragile self-esteem chase after two things - money and gym membership. — Tom Storm
    :sweat:
  • The Decay of Science
    I would like to move this topic along to a more focused discussion of the natural world and metaphysics, which necessarily must talk about the ontology of physics.

    We have touched on causality -- which barely got the attention it deserves. To those classical believers of the natural world, causality is discovered. And if they're not discovered, it is just a matter of time or just our human limitation that prevents us from discovering them. As causality is tied to natural constants -- whatever they are -- it's been said that these constants change overtime, as the universe ages. But this idea is merely speculation. There are no scientific discovery that proves that constants can or have or could change. So, let's leave this idea as simple as this.

    We have touched on physical entities that behave differently as we move from micro to macro sizes. In the quantum sizes, probability is used as a tool to explain the phenomena of these entities. And we don't wonder why for a second why probability is not used as a tool to describe the unpredictability of the macro world, let alone declare the unpredictability of the macro entities. (Because we can't claim that the macro world is unpredictable, without invoking the fault of our own perception).

    Additionally, it's been argued that causality and space (dare I say time also) are mere constraints that we impose on the natural world, and that causality doesn't always hold, and constants do not hold forever.

    Do multi-forces really exist? Do we really need multi-theories to explain the natural world? Or are we just being accommodating of alternative ideas for the sake of scientific imagination?
  • Kurt Gödel & Quantum Physics
    a fact I have seen beautifully illustrated by rotating one of two interfering electron fields once, which resulted in an inversion of the interference pattern. — GraveItty
    So we've settled on waves now? Interference happens when the behavior is waves. Is this right?
  • The Decay of Science
    QM calculate and predict the mechanics of particles. We calculate different characteristics of the smallest packets of energy (quanta/the minimum amount of any physical entity) detectable and measurable through their interactions. — Nickolasgaspar
    What are these mechanics or characteristics?
  • Any high IQ people here?
    .
  • The Decay of Science
    ↪jgill
    Thanks.
  • Alternatives to taxation when addressing inequality
    :razz: — Wheatley
    :smile:
  • Alternatives to taxation when addressing inequality
    What do you think? Are there viable methods for governments to raise money that doesn't involve taxation? — Wheatley
    No.
  • The Decay of Science
    Quantum mechanics are mathematical formulations that allow us to produce accurate Mechanical descriptions for the "behavior" of quantum elements — Nickolasgaspar
    And that behavior is what exactly? What are we measuring? Or are we confined to the descriptions of atomic entities?
  • The Decay of Science
    Some Heavy Math, Dude! — jgill
    What is this suppose to calculate?
  • The Decay of Science
    I hope that we're not just putting together strings of words and make it sound like we're talking QM. I noticed that no one is commenting on the reality of absolute space. Anyone, is this or is this not the ontology of QM?

    . But it seems to be that QM includes theories (or hypotheses that he considers unjustly accepted) that go against things like clearcut causal laws, so this is decay. — Bylaw
    No. The statement goes like this, that QM theories are speculative which poses a danger to scientific activities. You live long enough in speculations, you get the dismantling of scientific evidence. (and by long enough, I mean, it could take ages -- I alluded to length of time in my OP, the very first one on this thread)

    For the following quotes, my intention is to clarify points that are getting lost in the discussion:

    I think the complaint is that qm is ontologically probablisitic, for example. Also that 'things' can be in different potential states at the same time. — Bylaw
    Okay.

    Well probabilities are calculated by thinking agents in their efforts to predict the outcome of a system,so its more of an observer relative term than an intrinsic feature of the ontology of a natural system.
    I can not see any meaning in the statement "qm is ontologically probabilistic". We as observers calculate probabilities in order to make a prediction.     — Nickolasgaspar
    No it isn't. Probabilities are put in place of exact measures -- because if we're not relying on absolute space and causality, then what's left to prove one's point? To say QM is ontologically probabilistic is good to include in this discussion. It needs to be discussed. If you claim that it is just the observer that's doing the probabilistic calculation, then do you or do you not support the classical physics?

    Since classical causation must apply, then at least the conclusions in qm must be wrong. Not the data, but any conclusions and any new ontology. — Bylaw
    No, I don't think there's a definitive answer to the "wrongness" of quantum theories, I think what the critics are saying is, there shouldn't be multi-ontological theory depending on the size of the world we're investigating. There is just one world.
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